Gaelin hurried after him while holding his pistol against his thigh. Gaelin caught up to the older lad but had to jog every fourth step to keep up as Embry’s legs were several inches longer than the boy’s.
“What do you think, Embry? Can we take the son of a bitch?”
“My cousin went down,” Embry said tightly, staring straight ahead, chin down, the brim of his hat hiding his eyes. “I can take—” He jerked a look at the youngster. “What do you mean ‘we’?”
“I wanna help, Leo. I wanna be a famous gunman, just like you. I’ll play your back.”
“Play my... ?” Embry frowned, then sneered. “You mean, back my play.”
“Can I, Leo?”
Embry looked at the youngster critically, enjoying the kid’s admiring, beseeching gaze. He pretended to think about it.
Actually, he’d already made up his mind. He’d never faced a short-trigger man before, and a cold knot of fear tightened just above his belt buckle. He wouldn’t have admitted such a thing in a million years, but he liked the idea of having someone—even a snot-nosed brat with a rusty .38—back his play.
“I reckon you can tag along,” he said finally, nodding dully. “But stay behind me, and for chrissakes, don’t make any noise! I gotta warn you, though, it’s gonna be bloody.”
“Blood don’t bother me, Leo,” the kid said, one hand on his gun grips. “You won’t be sorry, Leo—I promise!”
Embry snorted and said nothing to his young partner, maintaining a hard expression as he and Gaelin approached the cafe.
Embry paused in the yard, scrutinizing the one-and-a-half-story clapboard-and-whitewashed structure with a few geraniums and yucca planted around the foundation, rubbing his jaw thoughtfully.
“What we gonna do? How we gonna play it?”
“Follow me and keep your mouth shut.”
They walked Indian-file around the south side of the building, ducking under two windows. At the cafe’s rear, Embry sidled up to the first sashed window and edged a quick look inside.
Turning to Gaelin standing behind him, back to the shack’s wall, he shook his head. He ducked under the window and, young Gaelin aping his every step and move, edged to the next window, on the other side of a small door.
Embry removed his hat, turned to the building, and edged his left eye across the frame and over the glass. Seeing two figures inside, he jerked his eye back behind the wall, took a deep, calming breath, and stole another look.
Inside the small room behind the foggy window glass, a small iron stove stood against the left wall, topped with a steaming copper kettle. Before the stove, two people sat facing each other in a big, porcelain tub.
Embry couldn’t see clearly because of the moisture, but the two appeared to be relaxing, heads thrown back on their shoulders. Squinting, he saw that one was the big bounty hunter; the other was Frieda Schwartzenberger.
Leo Embry snickered. His loins twitched. He’d always fantasized about rolling the big, sexy German woman, but whenever he’d tried flirting with her, she’d merely laughed and told him to come back when the green was off his horns.
His mouth tightened as jealousy now mixed with anger.
Rolling his glance away from the tub, Embry saw a pistol and cartridge belt hanging from a wall hook, to the left of and above a sawed-off shotgun and a Winchester ’73.
Embry turned to Gaelin, watching him nervously.
“Wait here,” he whispered. “Keep your head down so they don’t see you. When you hear me kick that inside door, you go in through there.” He gestured to the small back door leading into the pantry. “And for godsakes, watch where you aim that old blunderbuss of yours.”
“You got it, Embry.”
The older lad walked around to the front and entered the cafe by the main door. He walked through the tables upon which midday sunlight lay, washing in through the windows Frieda kept clean as crystal.
Pushing through the swinging door, he entered the kitchen, saw the skinned deer carcass hanging in the back, near a six-foot plank table, then stepped past the big black range to a door in the left wall. His nostrils twitched at the heavy smell of onions emanating from a stew pot simmering on the range.
Embry considered the door for a moment, feeling his heart thumping heavily, then quickly, his skin tingling. He took a deep breath and smiled, hearing his name tossed around the saloons that night. Soon, it would make it to Cheyenne and points north and south along the Burlington Northern Line. Everyone from lawmen to line girls would be kissing his butt shortly.
No more brush-popping calves and year-old heifers out at his uncle’s ten-cow spread north of the Buckskin Hills ... No, sir, no more of that bullshit for Leo Embry!
Eventually, high rollers would be calling for him... men who needed other men turned beneath the sod.
Eyes bright, lips pulled back from his teeth, barely able to choke down the gleeful chuckle rising in his chest, Embry lifted one of the tooled boots he was still paying for and kicked the door.
It slammed back against the wall as Embry rushed inside, gun extended. A sudden, inexplicable burning engulfed him.
“Ahhhhhhhhhh!” he screamed. His face, head, and shoulders burned as though he’d been dunked in an acid vat.
Looking down, he saw steaming water washing over the floorboards, soaking his boots. The skin of his scalp felt as though it were punctured by a million sharp pins. He stumbled forward, screaming and firing the Remington blindly, squeezing his eyes closed against the burn.
Naked and still wet from the bath, Lou Prophet watched from a kneeling position beside the stove. He held his cocked .45 in his right hand.
He’d heard the hushed voices outside the bathhouse window and seen the figures through the cracks between the vertical siding planks. Quickly but quietly, he and Frieda had slipped out of the tub. She’d retreated to the kitchen while he’d propped the boiling pot on the narrow shelf above the door, connecting its handle to the doorknob with twine he’d found in his jeans pocket.
Now he winced as his would-be attacker’s face turned the red of a Georgia sunset. The kid dropped his revolver, lifted his chin to the ceiling, and screamed.
Frieda appeared behind him, clad in a checked robe and wielding an iron fry pan. “Take that, you crazy pup!” she cried and swung the pan forward, connecting solidly with the back of the kid’s head.
Prophet winced as the young man fell face-forward on the wet puncheons, out like a blown candle.
The door to Prophet’s right opened suddenly. Prophet turned to see another kid, around sixteen, bolt forward with an old .38 held before him. Seeing his comatose partner on the other side of the tub, the kid froze and stared.
“Leo!” he screamed.
“Hold it right there, kid,” Prophet said, standing and bringing his .45 to bear on the youngster.
The kid turned to see the tall, naked bounty hunter standing before the stove. The kid’s eyes found the .45’s yawning maw.
His hand opened and his .38 dropped to the floorboards. The kid stumbled back, arms spread and eyes wide, as though he’d just stepped on a coiled rattler.
Then he stood there, shivering, face bleaching, staring at Prophet’s .45. Piss dribbled down his leg to puddle around the soles of his frayed brogans.
Prophet had just held up his left hand to calm the kid when the youngster gave another shrill cry, turned, and bolted out the door. Prophet stepped to the door and looked out. The kid was running straight out through the weeds behind the cafe, toward the willows and cottonwoods lining the distant ravine.
The kid ran hard, throwing his arms up high.
“Ja!” said Frieda, throwing her head back and cackling. “Look at him go!”
Chapter Thirteen
Prophet sat in the jailhouse and studied the badge in his hand.
The young man who’d tried to ambush him, whose name Frieda had informed him was Leo Embry, was sleeping in one of the three gloomy cells behind him. He was too unconscious to even snore, but Pr
ophet heard him utter a painful groan now and then.
The local medico, a portly, rheumy-eyed Dr. Beamer, who stank of stale beer and laudanum, had checked the kid out and wrapped a white bandage around Embry’s head, then smacked his lips with the anticipation of an imminent libation and angled across the street to the Mother Lode.
Frieda had tattooed Embry with such force that the doctor thought he’d probably sleep until tomorrow, or wish he’d had. He had a bump on the back of his head the size of a hickory knot. The doctor said he’d probably have a headache as momentous as three military hangovers, and Beamer looked and smelled like a man who knew what he was talking about.
Prophet hadn’t consciously decided to take the marshal’s job until he’d carried the kid halfway to the jailhouse. Drunk or not, he’d already accepted the position, and he couldn’t renege on the agreement.
Also, without Crumb’s two hundred dollars, he’d be flat broke until his reward money came in. He might as well wear a badge than swamp saloons or shovel shit in the livery barn.
Besides, somebody didn’t want him taking the job. And that didn’t sit well with the bounty hunter. He didn’t want the job himself, but he’d like to know who was willing to drill him to keep him from taking it.
Somebody besides Leo Embry. Frieda had told Prophet that Embry was merely a wet-behind-the-ears farm boy who fancied himself the next Billy the Kid. She’d seen the boy shoot in competition at summer picnics, and she doubted he could hit a tomato can if the can was privy-sized and Leo was sitting inside.
Whoever had shot at Prophet from the bank roof knew what he was doing. If Prophet hadn’t turned as the man had fired, his shoulders would be looking mighty funny now, minus their head. He didn’t think Ronnie Williams was responsible. Why save Prophet’s life only to take it later?
There was someone else in town who, for whatever reason, didn’t want Prophet wearing a badge. Someone good with a rifle, or at least someone who’d hired someone good with a rifle. Someone smart enough not to have hired an ineffectual miscreant like Leo Embry to do his dirty work.
Who?
Prophet tossed the tin star in the air, then pinned it just above the left breast pocket of his buckskin tunic.
He had to chuckle as he caught a look at himself in the cracked mirror over the washstand behind the door. He wished Louisa could see him now. He wondered what his two lawman friends, Owen McCreedy and Zeke Mcllroy, would say. They’d both have a good laugh, after all the problems Prophet had had with badge-toters over the years.
Well, he wouldn’t be toting the Bitter Creek marshal’s badge for long. As soon as Henry Crumb got back from his trip and the reward money arrived, he’d stuff a few fresh reward posters into his saddlebags and light a shuck for the owlhoot trail. By then, his bushwhacker would probably have attempted another bushwhack, and he and Prophet would have settled the matter once and for all
He glanced into the far west cell. Leo Embry lay flat on his back, one arm hanging straight off the cot and bobbing as he breathed. The kid’s mouth was twisted painfully. The window over Leo’s head was a barred, rectangular square of brassy, afternoon light, causing the bandage on the kid’s bruised skull to glow as if from the misery within.
Satisfied the kid would be out for several more hours, Prophet grabbed his shotgun, donned his hat, and headed outside to familiarize himself with the town.
He was approaching the stage depot a few minutes later when five horseback riders rode toward him, silhouetted against the west-angling sun.
Prophet stopped and scrutinized the group as it passed the livery barn on the right side of Main and approached the harness shop on the left. They rode slowly on tall, muscular horses coated with trail dust—five hard-faced men wearing dusters, crisp Stetsons, and cowhide boots into which the cuffs of their black trousers were stuffed.
As the riders approached Prophet, several dusters blew back, revealing gold watch chains and well-tended pistols in oiled, hand-tooled holsters. Prophet saw a couple of shoulder rigs in addition to the hip holsters. Winchester rifles protruded from saddle boots jutting up beneath the riders’ thighs.
A vein in Prophet’s right temple twitched. These men looked to be every bit as much trouble as those in the Thorson-Mahoney and Scanlon Gangs. Each had the icy, arrogant look of an accomplished cold-steel artist.
One of riders on the right side of the pack saw Prophet, and looked startled when he saw the badge on the bounty hunter’s chest. He swatted the man beside him and indicated Prophet with a nod.
The other man turned his flinty gaze to the town’s new lawman. Both men curled their lips into smiles and rode on.
As the group set a couple brindle curs to barking, the druggist, Polk, appeared under his store’s wooden awning. The lean, mild-faced druggist regarded the group with interest. Several of the riders turned to him as they passed. The druggist held their gazes, then—was that a nod?
Prophet’s brows furrowed as he watched the riders ride away, wondering at the unspoken communication between them and Polk. If that’s what it had been. What business could they possibly have with the mild-mannered druggist?
Prophet was shuttling his gaze from the five-man group to the druggist when Polk turned toward him. Prophet knew the man had spotted him, but Polk jerked his head down, pretending he hadn’t seen Prophet, and stepped back inside his store.
Prophet glowered eastward along Main, baffled. When the five riders turned into the hitch rack before one of the brothels, he nudged his hat up to scratch the back of his head. He turned and continued walking west.
“Marshal!” a shrill cry rose on his right. His right hand slapped the grips of his .45 and he turned.
But it was only the half-breed whore, Mad Mary, walking toward him between a billiard hall and an old, gray cabin. She drew a tattered, multicolored cape about her shoulders, giving Prophet a glimpse of her slack, brown breasts, permanently extended nipples drooping groundward.
Behind her, a young cowboy—apparently too young and down-at-the-heel to afford one of the town’s more comely doves—was buttoning his baggy jeans. He glanced at Prophet, sheepish, then crouched to retrieve a worn pistol belt.
Wrapping the belt around his lean hips, the young drover turned to the saddled horse standing ground-reined nearby. He swung into the saddle and, tossing one more sheepish glance behind, gigged the mouse-colored dun into a gallop across a hay field, heading north toward the creek and the low hills beyond.
“Miss Mary,” Prophet said greeting the whore. They hadn’t been introduced, but he’d seen her on the street, and during the long posse ride he’d heard several townsmen joking about her.
Walking toward him, she shook an admonishing finger and grinned, showing only two or three discolored teeth around her deeply-lined witch’s face framed with long, coarse hair the color of a soiled gun rag.
“Wendigo here in Bitter Creek. Yes, yes, yes! Wendigo here, and he no like lawmen!”
Shaking her head and cackling, she brushed past him and angled off across the street, holding her ragged skirts above the men’s high-button shoes she’d scavenged from some trash heap. One shoe was missing a heel, and it gave her a limp. A bearded farmer in a buckboard had to pull up to avoid hitting the whore.
“Damnit, Mary, I’m gonna flatten you yet!”
When she’d disappeared between the bank and the feed store on the other side of the street, the farmer cursed, returned his corncob pipe to his teeth, and shook the reins over his sway-backed mule, continuing east along Main.
Wendigo here and he no like lawmen! What had she meant by that? Did Mary know who’d tried to ambush him?
Beyond the livery barn, Prophet angled north, crossed a shallow ravine, and climbed a flat-topped hill of red gravel, sage, and yucca. It wasn’t an overly high hill, but a steep one, and at the top he paused to catch his breath and curse himself for all the whiskey and cigarettes he mindlessly consumed.
He was swinging back to take a slow gander at the town when som
ething caught his eye.
He turned northwest and tugged his hat brim low to shield his eyes from the fiery sun slipping into a notch between two rimrocks. On a mesa a hundred yards away lay a small cemetery in tall bromegrass, shaded by a single cedar. Several mourners stood before a fresh grave and a rough pine coffin, facing a minister holding an open Bible. Nearby were two buggies, a buckboard, and three saddle horses.
Prophet studied the solemn scene from under his Stetson’s funneled brim, recognizing Fianna Whitman standing stiffly before the preacher.
The only other figures he could identify were those of the banker, Ralph Carmody, and Sorley Kitchen, the retired ranch cook who now painted houses and repaired pots and pans for a living.
The funeral had to be that of Marshal Whitman.
Prophet wondered why so few mourners had shown up. He counted less than a dozen people standing with the lawman’s daughter. The preacher bent to scoop a handful of soil from the mound beside the grave. When he’d said a few more words and had traced a cross in the air, the mourners turned and started to walk slowly toward the horses and wagons.
Only a couple of people spoke to Fianna before she lifted her black skirts above her shoes, mounted a canopied buggy, and started along the faint cemetery trace toward the main trail to town. She looked terribly sad and alone, riding singly in that black, yellow-wheeled buggy. It pecked at Prophet for a long time. He turned it over in his head—just one more peculiarity in a town that seemed to grow them like weeds.
Finally, when the mourners had dispersed, he turned back to the task at hand. He wandered his gaze slowly down the town’s main drag with its high false fronts and livery corrals.
He gave the town a slow study, picking out the places a man might use to effect an ambush—the highest buildings, the narrowest alleys, the shadow pools around outside stairwells. A ravine angled behind the jailhouse to intersect with the main trail on the town’s eastern edge. A sharpshooter could lay in there while Prophet was entering or leaving the jailhouse and pick him off cleanly.
The Devil's Lair (A Lou Prophet Western #6) Page 11