Helldorado

by Peter Brandvold

“Why not?”

  “’Cause my partner has her twin Colts cocked beneath the table, each aimed at one of your oysters.”

  Sparrow slid his skeptical glance to Louisa.

  Bam! Bam!

  The table jumped with each concussion, which sounded like cannon blasts in the close quarters.

  Sparrow leaped back with a yelp. He looked down at his crotch.

  Each of the .45 rounds had torn a small swatch of tobacco-brown tweed from the upper inside of Sparrow’s thighs, about two inches south of soprano country, so that Sparrow’s red longhandles shone through the holes.

  Terror flashed in Sparrow’s eyes as he looked up at Louisa, who re-cocked her Colts under the table with loud, ratcheting clicks. Smoke billowed out from the table’s edge.

  Lower jaw hanging anxiously, Sparrow raised his right hand in supplication above his holstered Remington. With his other hand, he held his rifle far out to his left as he sidestepped around Prophet’s and Louisa’s table as though around an unsprung bear trap and stumbled backward out the saloon’s double doors.

  Thunder crashed.

  “Some other time, you son of a bitch!”

  Sparrow’s boots thumped across the veranda, and he was gone.

  29

  PROPHET SAW NO reason to hurry after the cutthroats.

  It would take Charlie Sparrow’s drunken crew a couple of hours to catch up to Encina’s bunch. And when they did run them down there was bound to be a prolonged lead storm, cutthroat shooting cutthroat in the dark of a rainy Wyoming night.

  Sparrow’s bunch might not even light onto Encina’s until morning. Hell, it could be another twenty-four hours before Prophet and Louisa’s dirty work had been done for them, at least done enough for the bounty hunters to swoop in and finish off whomever was left, if anyone, and to fetch the gold wagon back to Juniper, with relative ease.

  So Prophet and Louisa spent a leisurely evening in Juniper, mingling with the dozen or so hard cases who’d been haunting the nearby hills and flocked to the town like vultures when word had spread that Hell-Bringin’ Hiram was out of commission. Playing poker in one of the saloons around ten o’clock that night, Prophet thought he recognized at least four of the visages around him—playing faro or stud or sparking the doves—from wanted dodgers he’d seen posted outside Wells Fargo offices over the past year.

  Encina’s cutthroats might have pulled their picket pins from Juniper, but the town still had a raggedy-edged, wild air due in no small part to the lawmen who’d been left to molder in the mud of the town’s main drag. Prophet and Louisa were about to risk drawing unwanted attention to themselves by dragging the carcasses over to the undertaker’s when they saw the undertaker himself loading Jose Encina and the deputies into a wagon—after picking their pockets and piling their guns and other valuables under the driver’s seat of his old buckboard.

  Give the town another week or so, Prophet thought as he watched the buckboard head for the sheriff’s office—likely intending to fetch the body of Hell-Bringin’ Hiram himself—and pulling Juniper back out of the jaws of Helldorado would be one hell of a feat. Even the bona fide businessmen who now ventured from their shops and houses and back into the saloons seemed to have acquired a shiny-eyed, devil-may-care air as they laughed a little louder than they might have a few days ago when out on the town. They gambled with a little more daring and acted a little more brash with the painted ladies than the old town tamer, not to mention their wives, would have approved of.

  The storm continued throughout the night, the thunder occasionally drowning out the intermittent bursts of gunfire issuing from the saloons, as well as the shouts and screams of the all-night revelers.

  Just before heading to bed at the Muleskinner’s Inn, Prophet thought of Sivvy. He’d left her bound and gagged at the Golden Slipper. Forget her, he told himself. She’d probably spit the gag out by now, and a night tied to the bed would do her good. He’d throw her sorry hide in Severin’s jail come morning and hire a local odd-job-Joe to toss her feed and water now and then.

  Prophet woke the next morning at dawn with Louisa virtually sprawled on top of him.

  She’d had one of her bad dreams during the night—one of the dreams in which she relived her family’s horrific demise at the hands of the Handsome Dave Duvall gang—and when she had one of those she couldn’t get close enough to Prophet, it seemed.

  He’d soothed her, made slow, gentle love to her, and hummed a little song he remembered from the north Georgia mountains until she’d fallen into a peaceful slumber. But she must have had another bad dream afterward, he thought now as he eased her willowy, warm, naked body onto the bed beside him.

  She groaned and buried a cheek in her pillow.

  Prophet leaned down and kissed the pale half-moon of a tender breast bulging slightly out from her side, then spanked her bare rump through the sheet. “Come on, you oyster-shootin’ pistolera. We gotta fetch us some gold.”

  When he’d finished dressing, she turned onto her back to show him those wonderful breasts, and he had to clamp his jaws against his lust.

  “I’ll meet you at the livery barn in a half hour,” he said, donning his ragged hat and turning away from her with effort.

  Louisa looked around groggily. “Where you going, Lou?”

  “Gonna haul my friend Sivvy over to the hoosegow.”

  He went out and tramped through the soggy, dawn street that was as quiet as a graveyard over to the Golden Slipper. He opened Sivvy’s door, turned to the bed, and cursed. She and the gold bar were gone, leaving a rumpled bed covered with frilly women’s undergarments.

  A voice echoed from downstairs: “Are you looking for Miss O’Shay?”

  Prophet stepped into the hall, peered over the balcony rail and down into the lobby at the pale, mustached face of the gent who ran the place staring up at him. “Where the hell is she?”

  “I turned her loose, of course. What was I supposed to do—leave a naked girl tied to her bed all night, screaming?”

  “I could think of worse ways to spend a rainy evenin’,” Prophet quipped in spite of his frustration. “When you’d turn that little ringtail loose?”

  “Heavens,” the man said. “Early last night. She was screaming so loud I thought she would shatter my chandeliers!”

  Prophet snorted another curse, but it was his own fault. He should have tracked down whoever had been manning the joint yesterday and told him to leave the actress where she was. Or hauled her over to the hoosegow pronto. But it had been hard to decide what to do with her at the time, in the eye of the outlaw storm. Something in him had recoiled against the idea of throwing his old pal Sivvy into a stony, dark cell.

  He could do it now, however, having mulled over all she’d done, her part in so many killings.

  Prophet tramped down to the lobby, his double-bore coach gun swinging from its lanyard against his back. “You know where she went?”

  “I am not her keeper, sir!”

  Prophet growled and went out into the still-quiet street and tramped through the mud and the fresh, cool, post-storm air—the sun hadn’t yet risen over the mountains, but it looked to be a clear day—and over to the livery barn where he and Louisa had stabled their horses.

  Two hours west of Helldorado, Prophet and Louisa found the wagon on the backside of a steep mountain pass.

  It had been ridden off the right side of the trail, into rocks and stubby cedars, and it was turned over on one side. The mules had wrenched free of their hitch, gone.

  The canvas sheeting had been torn off the ash bows; it lay like a blown-down tent in the rocks and brush, and the gold ingots that had apparently been riding free in the box were sprawled across it like jewels spilled from heaven. The lockbox was there, too, still chained and padlocked but hanging precariously over a steep cutbank.

  Prophet and Louisa both saw the body at the same time. It lay just beyond the wagon. At least, it looked like a body.

  As they spurred their horses ahead and held up bes
ide the trail, and Louisa leaped down and dropped her reins and jogged into the brush and rocks, it was clear that the girl Miguel had had sitting on his lap in the bank had reached the end of her trail.

  Prophet remained mounted while Louisa dropped to a knee and turned the girl onto her back. She wore only the sheer wrapper she’d worn before, and a long, men’s denim jacket. She’d been shot in the forehead from point-blank range, likely to get her out of the way when Sivvy’s gang had run the wagon to ground. There were no other bodies around, but there were plenty of hoofprints and spent cartridge casings along the trail.

  Louisa eased the dead girl back against the ground, looked up at Prophet, and hardened her jaws. “Miguel’s mine, Lou.”

  Prophet nodded. Just then a rifle snapped from ahead along the trail that curved across the top of the rocky pass before dropping into another valley farther on. Louisa jerked her head in the direction of the shot.

  Several more sounded, echoing faintly.

  Prophet shucked his own Winchester from its boot, cocked it one-handed, and set it across his saddlebows. “Let’s get after it. We’ll bury the girl later!”

  Louisa leaped onto her mount with the quickness and ease of a wild-assed Indian brave, and they booted their mounts into instant, ground-eating gallops, spraying rocks and sand out behind them. Prophet hunkered low in his saddle and tipped his hat over his eyes.

  They raced down the twisting trail, pines of the lower slopes pushing up around them. The rifle bursts grew louder. Just before they gained the broad valley at the bottom of the pass, Prophet began to hear men yelling above the thuds of Mean and Ugly’s hammering hooves.

  The valley was broad and open, carpeted in tall, green grass, and there were several knolls scattered across the way. It was beyond one such knoll, on the trail’s right side, that the guns were blasting and men were shouting and hollering.

  Louisa read the play the same way Prophet did, and they turned their horses off the trail at the same time, checked them down to skidding stops, leaped out of their saddles, and threw down their reins.

  They ran up the side of the knoll, dropped to hands and knees several feet from the top, and crawled until, doffing their hats, they edged cautious looks over the crest of the low hill.

  A log cabin hunkered about a hundred yards from the base of the knoll and quartering to Prophet’s right. Two bodies were slumped belly down in the grass at various distances from the cabin. Another hung out a side window, arms dangling down the front wall. The dead man’s hat lay in the grass beneath his bald head, and his rifle lay not far from the hat.

  A creek sheathed in wolf willows meandered along to Prophet’s left, about forty yards from the front of the cabin and disappeared in a snaking, lime-green line against the far ridge.

  Smoke puffed amongst the willows. A couple of hats bobbed there as well. Smoke also wafted from the cabin’s two front windows, the shutters of which were thrown back against the wall. Guns blazed bright red in the golden sunshine.

  Bullets fired from the creek hammered the cabin with loud, resolute whaps! Slivers and doggets of wood flew away from the window casings. Return fire from the cabin cracked into the brush along the creek or spanged shrilly off rocks.

  Men from both quarters screamed and yelled, cursing each other like sailors on competing, seagoing vessels.

  “Hey, Miguel!” one man shouted, his resonant voice rising clearly above the din. “I’m gonna blow your right eye out with this next shot. I’m gonna blow your left eye out with the one after that!”

  Someone in the cabin laughed.

  Guns roared. In the willows, a girl shrieked shrilly and followed it up with an even shriller curse.

  Prophet ran a gloved index finger across his lower lip. Sivvy.

  “Miguel!” she bellowed. “I’m gonna kill you, you double-crossing snipe! And then I’m gonna take all your gold and fuck all these men out here over your swollen, bleedin’ carcass!”

  She laughed loudly, maniacally, and the men in the willows laughed then, too, as they triggered one shot after another at the cabin.

  “They could have each other pinned down for days,” Louisa said.

  “Let’s flank the greedy sons o’ bitches, and put an end to this fandango once and for all.”

  “Miguel’s in the cabin.” She favored Prophet with a hard, determined gaze.

  “All right—take the cabin. I’ll sneak up behind Sivvy’s gang, and we’ll all say a little prayer together.” Prophet offered a grim smile. “Louisa?”

  She looked at him, grass brushing against her smooth, tanned cheeks, hazel eyes clear with purpose.

  “Try to take the bastard alive. I know he don’t deserve it, but . . .”

  “I know, I know. You start playing judge and executioner, and everything just goes to hell in a handbasket.”

  Prophet grinned. Louisa crabbed back down the knoll, then stood and ran crouching straight out toward the northern ridge to circle around behind the cabin.

  “Be careful,” Prophet called after her. “There’s a lotta lead buzzin’ around over there!”

  30

  PROPHET WORKED HIS way slowly toward the southern ridge, keeping knolls and brush clumps between him and the two sets of shooters, so he wouldn’t be spotted by either those in the cabin or by Sivvy’s gang holed up along the creek.

  When he got across the creek, nearly losing his boots in the muddy hummocks along the two-foot-wide span of gently flowing water, the willows gave him good cover as, following the creek, he made his way west toward the hammering fusillade.

  When, judging by the pitch and volume of the rifle fire, he figured he was within thirty yards of Sivvy’s shooters, he got down on his hands and knees and crawled, wincing as several errant shots from the cabin thumped into the ground around him, pruning shrubs and throwing up mud.

  He continued crawling, staying as low as he could. The willows parted before him.

  Gradually, four figures showed through the shrub leaves and nimble branches—three men and a woman lying up along the creek’s opposite bank, shooting over the top of the bank toward the cabin. One man lay facedown in the creek, unmoving, blood glistening from bullet holes. Another lay back against the bank, his hat off, lifting his chin and wide-open eyes as if taking some sun on his face. His hands hung limp in his lap, and his Winchester was negligently cradled in one arm.

  Blood dribbled from the bullet hole in the left side of his forehead. The other three men and Sivvy were sending empty cartridge casings rolling down the bank behind them, flinching occasionally when a slug slung from the cabin whistled around their heads. Prophet snaked his Winchester out before him, pressed his cheek against the stock.

  “Hold it there, you privy snipes!”

  He triggered a shot into the bank just left of the hip of the man beyond Sivvy. The hard case jerked and swung his head around so quickly that his hat fell off his head, and Charlie Sparrow looked furious.

  Sivvy turned toward Prophet then, too, and the other two shooters followed suit. Only Sparrow had spotted Prophet in the brush; the others were jerking their heads around, trying to pick him out of the bending willows.

  “All of ya drop those shootin’ irons or get ready to meet Ole Scratch at the smokin’ gates of perdition!”

  Sivvy squinted her eyes as she cast her befuddled gaze somewhere just over Prophet’s right shoulder. “Lou?”

  “You two, Miss O’Shay,” Prophet ordered. “Throw down that carbine and reach for a cloud. You don’t think I’d shoot you, but I will if I have to.”

  Sivvy turned the corners of her mouth down. “Even after Dakota?”

  “Dakota was a long goddamn time ago.”

  “Lou,” she said, her eyes finally finding him in the brush just upstream from her and on the other side of the creek. “Imagine all that gold back there . . . split up five ways. We’d be millionaires—every one of us!”

  “Forget that horseshit!” In the periphery of his vision, Prophet saw Sparrow jerk his ri
fle around. The cutthroat bellowed savagely as he racked a fresh cartridge into his Henry and leveled the barrel at Prophet.

  Prophet triggered twice, showing no mercy for the crazy cutthroat. The first bullet slammed Sparrow’s head back while the second punched through his breastbone with a solid whunk, blowing up dust as it smashed the cutbank behind him.

  Sivvy screamed.

  Leaving her rifle on top of the bank and turning full around toward Prophet, she buried her head in her arms.

  The other three men, on the opposite side of her from Charlie Sparrow, made their moves at the same time guns blasted inside the cabin. Levering and firing his leaping, roaring Winchester, Prophet dispatched all three of Sivvy’s men with only one getting off a shot that cracked through the willows above his head.

  The middle man, wounded in the belly, dropped his rifle and scrambled to his feet, running toward Prophet and clawing a Smith & Wesson from one of his two low-slung holsters. Prophet’s last round left the gent blowing red bubbles facedown in the creek.

  A man’s scream rose from the cabin. Two more shots from inside.

  The bounty hunter climbed wearily to his feet, glancing toward the cabin. The gunfire had died there as it had here. The cabin sat eerily hunched and silent, the one dead man hanging out a side window.

  Prophet looked at Sivvy. He lowered his empty Winchester and slipped his Colt Peacemaker from its holster. “Hold it, Miss O’Shay.” To him, she’d never be Sivvy Hallenbach again.

  She’d slipped a double-bore derringer from a hiding place in the simple, purple dress she was wearing, with a white wool sweater covering her shoulders, and half boots with three-inch heels on her feet. “You might have at least considered the offer, Lou. For old time’s sake, anyways.”

  “Put it down, Sivvy.”

  “Oh, it’s not for you, silly.”

  Prophet’s gut tightened as she gave a funny little mocking smile. He grimaced and closed his eyes when he saw her slip the popper’s barrel into her mouth.

  He turned away as he heard the muffled explosion.