The Devil's Lair (A Lou Prophet Western #6)

by Peter Brandvold

  She flinched as though he’d slapped her. “I’ve told you before, I don’t want to talk about my family.”

  “Louisa, you’re a damn good bounty hunter, but I want you to quit. I want you to cash in your chips and call it a game before someone cashes them in for you.”

  The smile on her cherubic face blossomed. “Are you worried about me?”

  “Yes.”

  She lifted her face to him, as though basking in the sun of his concern. Finally, she said, “I can handle myself. You saw that water cup.”

  He chuffed. “I saw, but that kinda display’s gonna make you a target. It’s gonna get you killed one of these days, Louisa.” He stared at her, pleading. “Won’t you hang ’em up for old Lou?”

  Her smile turned into a frown. “What would I do? Where would I go?”

  “Back to Nebraska.”

  “No one’s there.” Squeezing her eyes closed suddenly, as though overcome by a sudden pain, she shook her head. “No!” She lifted her chin, wrapped her arms around his neck, and pressed her breasts against his chest. “I don’t want to talk about this ... just ... just make love to me, Lou.”

  She brought her lips to his, kissing him hungrily. Not much time had passed since their first coupling, but she clung to him with such desperation that he succumbed to her and to his own reigniting desire.

  Prophet had many weaknesses, Louisa not least among them. Her compact, full-breasted body pushed against him. He held her tightly, kissing her, enjoying her smooth, moist lips against his, her honey-apple mouth opening, her tongue exploring. In a few minutes, they lay entangled on the sagging, brass-framed bed, the springs complaining with the regularity of a speeding metronome.

  Later in the night, he woke with a start and turned to her, curled beside him, her face buried against his ribs. She moaned and sobbed, shaking her head and scissoring her legs.

  “Louisa,” he said, gently shaking her.

  She sobbed again, shook her head, her tangled hair sliding across her face. “No ... please, no!”

  “Louisa, it’s all right.”

  Her voice was small, pinched, pleading. “Oh, God ... Please don’t kill them!”

  He turned onto his side, took her shoulders in his hands, and shook her once, forcefully. He raised his voice. “Louisa, wake up. You’re dreaming.”

  Her eyes snapped open, filled with black horror.

  “Louisa, it’s all right,” he whispered. “It’s me. Lou. You’re safe.” He smoothed her hair back from her face, kissed her flushed, moist cheek reassuringly.

  Slowly, the fear left her eyes, replaced with a relieved recognition. She blinked. Her features softened, and her muscles relaxed. She rested her face against his ribs.

  Just when he thought she’d fallen back asleep, her shoulders jerked. She sobbed. And then she was crying, an all-out storm of emotion. All he could do was hold her, rock her gently as she was forced by the nightmare to peer down that dark corridor into the past and watch as her Nebraska farm was raided and her family butchered by the mindless, renegade horde led by Handsome Dave Duvall.

  Prophet wished he could erase the images from her mind and set her free, but he’d known her long enough to know that all he could do was hold her. He held her close, rocked her gently, caressing her temple with his face, until the storm had passed and she had once again fallen asleep on his shoulder.

  He stared up at the ceiling, Louisa breathing softly against him.

  Her family had been killed three years ago. It had been a sudden, thunderous attack by sadistic outlaws. The Red River Gang had been out mostly to rape and to terrorize— what more could they get from attacking poor farm families like Louisa’s?—and they’d done a good job of it that day on the little Bonaventure farm on Sand Creek, near Roseville in Nebraska Territory.

  Louisa had been out selling eggs to neighbors that morning. When the attack had come, she’d been on her way back home, only a half mile from the farm.

  Seeing the smoke of the burning house, hearing the screams and the gunfire, she’d run toward the buildings through the trees and brush along the creek. Seeing the horde of laughing, savage-faced men on horseback, she stopped suddenly. Terror-stricken, she dropped to her knees and hid in the brush.

  From there, frozen with shock, she watched as her father and brother were shot down in the yard, her mother and two sisters dragged screaming into the brush west of the house, where they were beaten, raped, and shot before the gang got back on its horses and thundered away.

  When Louisa had recovered from the initial shock of the raid, she’d taught herself to shoot and to track, and she’d tracked the Red River Gang into the northern territories, killing it slowly, one man at a time as the opportunities revealed themselves, even appropriating one of its horses, the black Morgan she still rode now. She’d killed a half dozen of the gang when she’d met Prophet in Minnesota, and together they’d stalked and killed the rest.

  The gang was dead now, including their leader, Handsome Dave Duvall. Yet for Louisa Bonaventure, whose family was gone, her life ruined, the war against all the other Dave Duvalls and Red River Gangs continued.

  Prophet turned to her now, breathing quietly against his shoulder—sweet and lovely, with the innocence of a young Nebraska farm girl. Only, her war continued. It would continue, he realized, until she’d either rid the frontier of evil men or died trying. And Prophet’s attempting to stop her was like trying to plug a summer rain in Georgia with a whiskey cork.

  Prophet woke early the next morning with achy feet and his chest chafed raw from the cornhusk tits he’d worn in yesterday’s summer heat.

  He yawned, shoved up on his elbows, and looked to his right. Louisa wasn’t there. The wrinkled covers on that side of the bed were pulled up to the pillow, which still bore the mark of her head.

  Looking around the tiny room lit wanly by pearl light penetrating the single, drawn shade, he saw that her carpetbag and rifle were gone as well, which meant she’d probably left town.

  Disappointment nipped him.

  He’d been hoping she’d stay around long enough for them to have breakfast together, but he wasn’t surprised that she hadn’t stayed till morning. It wasn’t Louisa’s way. She knew she’d get her share of the reward money when she and Prophet ran into each other again, and she cottoned to good-byes no more than paperwork.

  It had always upset him a little that she could slip away without waking him, for a bounty hunter’s longevity correlated directly to the keenness of his senses. Maybe he was just more relaxed when Louisa was around. At least, he hoped that was the case.

  He blinked and smacked his lips, swimming up from his slumber. He pushed up on his elbows and glanced around the sparsely furnished room, half-consciously looking for some sign of her amidst the hard-backed chair by the window, the shabby bureau with its tin washbasin and stone pitcher, and his clothes and weapons hanging from hooks along the wall near the door.

  Nothing—only her faint smell of talcum and cherries tinged with the scent of pine from too many lonely campfires.

  He swung his feet to the floor, planted his elbows on his knees, and lowered his head to his hands. Damn, he thought with a sigh. Why don’t I just marry the girl?

  But he knew the answer to that. She had far too many demons to whip before settling down with anyone, and maybe he did too. She had to get the faces of her butchered family out of her brain, and he had to travel and drink and fornicate until he quit seeing the faces of his friends and cousins lying beaten and bloody on smoky Southern battlefields …

  Those first few hours after he and Louisa had parted were damn lonely, though, he noted as he poured water for a whore’s bath in the cracked porcelain bowl.

  Damn lonely.

  When he’d dressed in his faded denims, buckskin shirt with leather ties, funnel-brimmed Stetson, and blue neckerchief, he stepped into the hall, which smelled of sour runners and stale beer, and turned the key in the lock. He’d leave his possibles, including his shotgun and ri
fle, in his room until after the stage company had wired his reward money.

  He might be here a day or two, waiting for the stage line to cough up the bounty. Prophet was always amazed and frustrated by how quickly express companies offered rewards on owlhoots impeding their business, and how slow they were to pay up when said owlhoots were in custody or wolf bait.

  On his way down the stairs, he rolled a cigarette. Passing the spidery gent mopping the lobby floor, he nodded and dug in his denim’s pocket for a lucifer.

  “Is it true what they said?” the old man asked, eagerly looking up from his work. He was wearing a grimy duck jacket against the morning’s high-country chill. The potbelly stove near the desk roared and cracked, smoke seeping around the door. “Did you and your sister stop the Thorson-Mahoney Gang’s clock?”

  “I reckon you could call it that,” Prophet allowed, touching the match flame to the quirley. The story must’ve made the rounds a few times by now. He hoped his money arrived shortly. There was nothing worse than staying on in a town where everyone knew your occupation. For every five men in awe of your abilities, five others saw you as nothing but trouble, and one or two wanted to cut you down by way of earning reputations of their own.

  “That musta been some shootin’.” The old man shook his head and snapped his dentures. “You a gunslick?”

  “Nope, just a lowly bounty man,” Prophet said lazily, his mind’s eye on a plate of flapjacks and salt pork.

  He was on his way out the door when the geezer said, “I don’t normally let bounty hunters stay in my abode. Takes too long to get the death stench from the sheets.”

  He cackled as Prophet turned to look at him over his shoulder.

  “In your case, though, I’ll make an exception. Pike Thorson—he sure was a thorn in everyone’s side around here. Damn near drove us all out of business more than once!”

  Prophet stepped outside and regarded the morning. The toothy ridges showed pink in the north, while the rimrocks in the east were a dusty green before the swollen, salmon orb of the rising sun. Closer to town, the prairie grass rippled over the swells. A couple roosters crowed competitively, and the squawk of a well pump filled the air.

  Along the meandering main drag lined with old log shacks and newer, whipsawed stores that still smelled of pine resin, proprietors were sweeping the boardwalks or washing windows or shaking out carpet runners.

  One man in a green apron was shoveling horse dung from the street before a small, whitewashed grocery store. He tossed each load into the empty space between his store and the unlabeled shanty beside it—probably a whorehouse. The half-dozen pens flanking the house of ill repute were probably cribs. Weeds had grown up around the place, the chinking between the logs of the main cabin was crumbling, and the windows hadn’t been washed in several dust storms. It all looked like a bad case of the pony drip to Prophet.

  Exhaling smoke, he turned toward the cafe.

  He’d taken only three steps when a shrill scream cut the quiet morning air.

  A half second later, he was bolting across the main drag, his six-shooter in hand, heading in the direction from which the sound had come. As he ran around the west side of the jailhouse, he wondered vaguely why the marshal didn’t come out of his office. The scream had been loud enough to be heard a good mile into the countryside.

  Prophet was halfway down the weedy gap between the jailhouse and a drugstore when the scream sounded again, even more shrill this time. It was a little girl’s scream, and it made Prophet’s heart thud.

  He was thinking some pervert was trying to drag the little girl into the brush along Bitter Creek, when he turned the corner around the jailhouse and froze dead in his tracks, hot blood rushing to his face as he looked into the branches of a sprawling cottonwood.

  Two men hung in the tree, their boots about five feet off the ground—Marshal Whitman and a younger, carrot-topped man. Their necks had been stretched a good six inches beyond their normal lengths, and their tongues protruded from their mouths, purple and swollen to the size of small sunfish.

  The sounds of retching rose on Prophet’s right.

  He turned to see two young girls dressed for school. One of the girls, a wiry blonde about ten years old, was on her hands and knees facing the jailhouse, a couple schoolbooks strewn to her right. Her arms were crossed over her stomach. Her head bobbed as her breakfast leapt from her wide-drawn mouth and into the straggly sage clump before her.

  The other girl—apparently the one who’d screamed— stood behind the blonde, facing the opposite direction. She was a year or two younger than the blonde. Clutching two thin schoolbooks and a black slate to her chest, she wore a purple poke bonnet trimmed with white lace. Her thick, brown hair fell to her shoulders, which jerked as she cried, casting her tearful, mesmerized, horrified gaze into the cottonwood towering above the alley.

  Prophet walked to the girl, pressed her face against his side, and returned his own beleaguered gaze to the tree.

  The tin stars on the dead men’s chests glistened dully in the morning sun.

  Chapter Six

  The two dead lawmen hung from the tree, their glassy, half-open eyes staring dumbly at the scuffed, gouged ground beneath their boots. Their hair fluttered in the breeze.

  The deputy had obviously been shot before he was hung; blood the color of ripe chokecherries stained the shoulder of his light-blue shirt. Both men’s boots turned slowly, this way and that, the ropes squeaking like leather. Whitman’s right boot hung half off his foot, showing how hard he’d kicked before he died.

  Running footsteps sounded from east and west along the alley and from the spaces between the buildings. The footsteps grew in volume as more townsfolk, having heard the screams, approached.

  A woman running around the rear of the drugstore stopped suddenly and clutched her chest. “Oh, my God! Look what they done!”

  “For the love of God ...” a man moaned on Prophet’s right. Wretching sounds followed, and Prophet turned to see the portly, balding man bent over, vomiting.

  The crowd grew until three fourths of the town was standing around the tree, gazing up at the grisly spectacle. Prophet glanced around at the ground, tufted and furrowed where the lawmen had been dragged to the tree.

  Prints of shod hooves made overlapping pocks. It was hard to tell with all the people here now, but he’d say there had been anywhere from five to ten riders in this alley last night.

  Finally, when he saw that the gathered, muttering townsfolk were in too much shock to do much but stand, gawk, and shake their heads, Prophet retrieved a barrel standing in the alley behind the drugstore. He stood it on end beneath the tree and climbed on top of it. With his folding pocketknife, he cut through the ropes. When they saw what he was doing, three men moved forward to help. He lowered the stiffening bodies, one at a time, into their hands, and they grimly gentled the dead lawmen onto the ground.

  Prophet jumped down from the barrel and collapsed his pocketknife as he gazed at the crowd. “Anyone have any idea who’s responsible for this?”

  The crowd fell silent, the people glancing around at each other, their brows ridged with befuddlement. Finally, a lean man with a sharp nose and two-day growth of beard stubble lifted his chin at the back of the crowd, near the jailhouse’s rear wall. His eyes were tentative as he swung his wary gaze from Prophet to his fellow townsmen.

  “Rick Scanlon’s gone from his cell. I just checked.”

  A collective murmur rose again, louder.

  One man barked angrily, “Sam Scanlon!”

  Prophet had just turned to the man when an urgent, female voice rose behind him. “Let me through, let me through!”

  Prophet turned to see the crowd parting for a rather plain-faced young woman in a dark blue gingham dress. She was thin and pale and wore her chestnut hair in a severe bun behind her head. She had the look of a schoolteacher, and Prophet would have bet several silver cartwheels that’s exactly what she was.

  “Dad? Eddie?” she mutte
red, her eyes drawn wide, her cheeks ashen. Her lips quivered as she bolted past Prophet and dropped to her knees. “Oh, my God!” She knelt staring from one body to the other, her hands making nervous gestures over Whitman’s chest.

  Prophet looked away. When he looked down again, the girl was running her hands down her father’s sallow, bearded cheeks and pleading with him to rise.

  “Dad? Dad, please!” she begged. “Get up!”

  Finally, one of the women in the crowd—a big, matronly sort with gray-brown hair wound in two neat coils on either side of her head—moved forward and knelt beside the sobbing girl. She placed an arm around the girl’s shoulders, but the girl jerked away and lifted her swollen, tear-streaked face to Prophet and the other men standing over the bodies.

  Her jaw was tight and her lips curled back from her teeth. Her voice was brittle with anger. “This is Scanlon’s work, isn’t it?”

  No one said anything for several seconds. Then a short, fair man wearing a white apron and sleeve garters said guiltily, “We think so, Miss Fianna. Your pa arrested Rick yesterday in the Mother Lode. He’s gone from his cell.”

  Fianna Whitman stared at the man, her gaze filled with such reproach that the fair man’s own face blanched, and he glanced away.

  As her gaze swept the others, the crowd recoiled from it as though from a sword. “And what are you men going to do about this?”

  Another silence hung heavily as the townsmen shared skeptical, sidelong glances.

  Finally, someone cleared his throat. “Uh ... we’ll wire the county sheriff, Miss Fianna…”

  She trained her squinting glare on the man, who flinched a little. “A lot of good that’ll do,” she said. “It’ll take Dan Ridgely a week to get his old bones out here from Laramie, and by then Scanlon’s trail will be as cold as Dad and poor Eddie.” Her voice broke on the last. She dropped her chin and pressed the front of her wrist to her quivering lips.