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

by Peter Brandvold

  Hearing a loud sob, Prophet turned to see Janice kneeling beside Burt Carr, wrapping the man’s bloody hand with a handkerchief. As she worked, sobbing and sniffing, she seemed oblivious to the fact that she was as naked as the day she was born.

  Carr’s face was ashen and sweat-streaked, his lips stretched painfully back from his teeth. “That’ll get me over to the doc, Janice. You ... you best go on upstairs ... take care of yourself. Take a bottle from behind the bar. On me...”

  With another sob, she nodded, stood, and walked over to the bar, her full breasts jiggling. Her pale nakedness in the room’s smoky ruins lent the room a dreamlike quality.

  As she went behind the bar and removed a bottle from the back shelf, Carr headed for the batwings, squeezing his wounded left hand with his right. Then Janice walked up the stairs, the bottle in her hand, casting an oblique look at Prophet over her naked right shoulder.

  When Janice disappeared through the door at the top of the stairs, Prophet and Sorley Kitchen were the only living men left in the place. Kitchen looked dumbly around for several seconds, slowly shaking his head. “Buckshot shore leaves an oozy corpse.”

  Seeing Prophet staring at him, scowling, he recoiled as if from a gunshot and bolted toward the entrance calling, “I’ll help you over to the doc’s place, Burt!”

  Prophet stepped in front of the man, feet spread, blocking his way. “Old man, you ain’t goin’ nowhere till I get some answers.”

  The stove-up ranch cook was nearly bawling. “What makes ye think I know anything? I don’t know nothin’!”

  The old man was quicker than he looked; before Prophet could grab him, he’d feinted right and bolted left. When Prophet got turned around, all he saw were the two batwing doors shuddering in the oldster’s wake.

  Chapter Eighteen

  His eyes flinty, Prophet turned back to the dead men.

  He walked over to the leader, hunkered down on his haunches, and searched the man’s pockets for identification, finding only playing cards, a derringer, and thirty dollars in silver.

  He was patting down the man’s vest pockets when he glanced at the sightless green eyes and froze.

  There was something familiar about those eyes and soup-strainer mustache, that deep crease low on the left cheek. After a few seconds, a name washed up from the gloom.

  Dean Lovell.

  Regulator from Colorado and New Mexico. Worked for cattlemen mostly, but he wasn’t picky—anyone who had a score they couldn’t settle themselves. Prophet had seen him once before, with the famous cattleman Lou Dempsey in the Kansas House in Trinidad, Colorado.

  Prophet left the silver and other possibles for the undertaker and headed over to Frieda’s place for some answers he knew he wouldn’t get anywhere else. Unless he put a gun to someone’s head. He found the cafe empty. The lovely redhead was cleaning tables.

  She looked up when Prophet walked in, slack with fatigue. “Lou!” Her eyes found the blood on his left arm and she added with quiet concern, “Your arm ...”

  He offered a wan smile. “Just a scratch.” He sat down at one of the clean tables, setting the Richards on the chair to his right, tossing his hat down on top of it.

  “I heard the shooting,” she said, a sponge in her hand. “Vat happened?”

  Prophet told her.

  Silently, she turned, disappeared into the kitchen, and returned a minute later with two steaming coffee cups. When she’d set one cup in front of him and had sat down before the other one, looking distracted, he said, “Tell me what Lovell’s doing here, and so help me, if you get a look like you just swallowed the whole hog—”

  She looked at him hopefully. “You really don’t know, Lou?”

  “If I knew I wouldn’t be askin’ you.”

  “Crumb didn’t tell you?”

  “Didn’t tell me what?”

  “They vork for him. They’re his—how do you say it?” She flexed her arm, until her right bicep bulged.

  “Muscle?”

  “Muscles. That’s it.”

  “Muscle for what?”

  She rose quickly, moved around the room pulling shades over the windows, and retook her seat across from him. Keeping her voice low, she said, “Mr. Crumb owns the town. All of ... us... ”

  Prophet frowned. “What’re you talkin’ about—‘owns’?”

  “He owns all the land Bitter Creek vas built on. He bought it from the railroad for very little money, ven they decided not to run a line through here. But then prospectors discovered gold along the creek. People like my grandparents came here and bought land from him. The mining vas very big and the miners needed supplies and saloons and vomen and home-cooked food and ...”

  “I get the point,” Prophet interrupted. “So they bought land from him and built their businesses. Then what happened?”

  “The gold vent out. Pinched out.”

  “The miners left.”

  “Exactly.”

  Prophet sat heavily back in his chair. “Let me see if I got this right. You all paid mucho dinero for your land, assuming the boom would make you all rich. But the boom went bust, and now you’re all stuck with land and property you can’t pay for?”

  “Veil, ve get traffic to and from the mines to the vest, and vith the business from the ranchers who’ve moved into the valley ...” Her voice trailed off.

  Prophet cocked his head and squinted one eye. “The boom busted, but you’re still making money. What’s the problem?”

  She leaned over the table, her eyes wide, voice hard. “It’s not enough to pay off Mr. Crumb’s loans. Each month he takes half of our incomes to pay only the interest on loans ve couldn’t pay off if ve had twenty lifetimes. ‘Tributes,’ he calls them.”

  “So let him foreclose, and get the hell out of here. You can all make fresh starts elsewhere.”

  “He von’t foreclose. He von’t let anyone who owes him money leave Bitter Creek. He owns the bank, everything ... even several of the larger ranches.”

  “Well, hell,” Prophet said, slamming his thumb down on a spoon, which flipped and rattled back down to the table. “He can’t do that! It’s illegal. Me an’ Jeff Davis lost the war!”

  Quietly, she said, “He has done it, Lou.”

  “With Whitman’s help, I take it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Dean Lovell.”

  “Yes.”

  Prophet thought it over, frowning down at the spoon by his cup. “He paid Whitman a wagon load of money to make sure none of you slaves fled the farm, so to speak. But how did Lovell fit in?”

  “Marshal Vitman vas just one man, and he vas old. Besides, he vas not as evil as Mr. Crumb needed, nor as capable. The Scanlons and the Thorson-Mahoney bunch vere proving too much trouble for him and his young deputy. So Mr. Crumb hired Lovell’s gang to make frequent stops here, to spend a few days, to run off the troublemakers, and beat a few citizens to remind us all vat vould happen if ve didn’t make our payments ... or tried to leave.”

  Prophet chuckled at little Henry Crumb’s enormous balls.

  “It is not funny, Lou. People have died here, innocent people trying to flee. I have seen Mr. Crumb order men and even vomen vipped on Main Street.”

  Prophet stared across the table at her.

  In a taut voice, she added, “Lovell vould spend a few days at a time here. Then he and his men vould leave, and ve could never be sure ven ve vould see them again.” She paused. “But ve always saw them again.”

  Prophet laughed again, his eyes glinting darkly. “Shit.”

  She leaned toward him, a sorry smile pulling at the corners of her full mouth. “And now they are dead? All dead?”

  “Deader’n hell. I’m glad I didn’t know it was Dean Lovell. Mighta made me hesitate ... and get ventilated.”

  Frieda threw her head back and laughed. She clapped her hands together once. “Lou, do you know vat this means?”

  “It means Crumb’s gonna be mad as a hornet when he gets home. ‘Specially after I throw h
is fat ass in his own jail.” A thought hit Prophet as he sipped his coffee. He set the cup back in its saucer. “What’s Polk’s part in this play-pretty?”

  “You know about Mr. Polk?”

  “Had a run-in with him over at Fianna Whitman’s last night. He was in the saloon earlier, and I got the impression he wasn’t too pleased about my airing out Lovell’s hide.”

  Frieda bunched her lips angrily. “He is rat! A ... stoolie bird...”

  “Pigeon?”

  “Yes, pigeon.”

  “How?”

  “The only one who could pay off Crumb’s loan. He comes from a vealthy family. He is ... the vord is ... remittance man. From England. Ven he paid off his loan, he bought in with Crumb … only he doesn’t think anyone else in town knows.”

  Prophet just looked at her, waiting.

  “He is Crumb’s partner and acts as his stoolie pigeon,” Frieda said. “He has job vere he sees many people every day, overhears our conversations. He spends every night in the saloons, eavesdropping on men for hints someone might be thinking about running away. It didn’t take many killings and beatings before ve all got vise to who vas ratting the conspirators out.”

  “Neat.”

  “Ha! Yes, neat!” Frieda exclaimed.

  “And with Crumb running the telegraph and controlling the stage depot, he’d know exactly what messages were going in and out and who sent them.”

  “Lou, do you know vy I am alone here? I am alone because Crumb killed my grandparents. Not directly, but the strain ... and the vorry ...”

  “I’m sorry, Frieda.”

  She looked at him through tear-washed eyes. “And ... and you are not going to help him …”

  “Did you really think I was?”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “But the others ...”

  “That’s why all that silence in the saloon earlier,” Prophet said. “They assumed I was in with Crumb and Polk.”

  Frieda scrubbed tears from her pink cheeks with a corner of her apron, sniffed, and smiled. Reaching across the table, she grabbed his hands in both of hers and said in a husky voice, “Lou, I am going to make love to you tonight ... like no voman has ever made love to you before.”

  “Frieda, I shouldn’t stay. I got a lot on my mind tonight, and I still have someone lookin’ to turn me toe-down…”

  “Nonsense. You have given me my freedom, and I vill stay and I vill reward you vith my body.”

  Before he could respond, she’d bolted onto his lap and was squirming around on him and kissing him. His objections died in his throat.

  A few minutes later, he found himself upstairs, slowly stripping the clothes from her deliciously fleshy body while caressing her breasts, pinching her nipples until she shuddered and gasped as she pushed him onto his back.

  Breathing hard and grunting, she opened his pants, found what she was looking for, and went to work with all the thrilling magic she’d promised.

  Frieda’s ministrations quelled the gunfire in his head so that within an hour after they’d started frolicking in her squeaky bed, he felt as limp as a worn-out fiddle string. When they were finally through, Frieda doctored his arm and fell asleep on his chest.

  He slept deeply, woke refreshed, and lay in bed going over the Bitter Creek situation in his head.

  Finally, he dressed quietly so not to awaken Frieda, scanned the yard through the windows, and went outside. He was walking north along the trail toward Main fifty yards away, when a gun cracked and his hat was ripped from his head.

  Damn. Didn’t this fella ever rest?

  Wheeling eastward, Prophet dropped to his belly and brought the barn-blaster up. A gun sparked fifty yards ahead, the slug kicking up gravel two feet before the bounty hunter’s face. The shooter was too far away for the shotgun. Prophet unslung the lanyard from his shoulder, set the shotgun aside, and palmed his Colt.

  The rifle cracked again.

  Prophet fired two quick rounds at the gun flash on the shadowy prairie, waited, then fired two more. The shooter returned two shots from several yards left of where he’d originally shot from.

  Prophet winced as one slug tore a branch off a shrub just ahead and right. The other slug whipped harmlessly over his head and spanged off a rock behind him.

  Casting another glance along the prairie, he saw the shooter—a slender silhouette from this distance—retreat toward the northeast, running. Prophet muttered an oath, bolted to his feet, and gave chase, leaping over fallen mesquite branches, rabbit brush, and sage tufts.

  When he saw the shadow stop, he leapt to his right, rolling off a shoulder and coming up to see two muzzle flashes. He emptied his own pistol at the purple dot moving against the milky eastern horizon.

  He’d run fifty yards when he lost the dot.

  He continued running, but stopped suddenly when the shooter bounded up from a swale on a piebald horse, making a hard, fast beeline toward Prophet, the hooves pounding, the horse blowing, the rider hunkered low over the animal’s neck and yelling, “Gid-up, goddamn ye. Gid-up now ... go!”

  Prophet brought up his Colt and thumbed back the hammer. Remembering he’d fired his last round, he cursed, dropped the revolver back into its holster, turned toward the oncoming horse, and crouched defensively.

  The rider clawed his own revolver from the holster on his right hip. Prophet dove left as the man fired three errant rounds. When the man was thirty feet away, he again raised the revolver and fired, but the jouncing saddle threw off his aim, and the slugs plunked harmlessly into the turf.

  Prophet flung himself behind a rabbit bush, and the man’s last two shots whistled over his head. The bounty hunter peered over the shrub. The horseman checked down his piebald only ten feet away. Cursing, the man neck-reined into a retreating turn.

  Prophet bolted out from behind the shrub and threw himself against the horse, clawing at the shoulder of the gunman’s long denim coat.

  Doing so, he looked up into the square, fair-skinned face, thin lips twisted into a snarl, the deep-set eyes hooded with exasperation.

  Prophet’s hand slid off the man’s shoulder. The rider jabbed an elbow hard against the bounty hunter’s forehead, igniting sparks behind Prophet’s eyes.

  For a moment, the world dimmed, and then the bounty hunter felt himself rolling over the sagebrush and low rocks as he watched the rider angle away. The gunman spurred the piebald savagely. The horse dug its rear hooves into the prairie, whinnied, and galloped west.

  “I’ll be back, ye son of a bitch!” the fair-faced gunman yelled over his bobbing left shoulder.

  Prophet rose onto his knee. Catching his breath, he gritted his teeth and watched the drygulcher merge with the northern hogbacks.

  “No, you won’t, fella,” Prophet wheezed between breaths. He heaved himself to his feet and took mute inventory of his minor aches and pains. Still staring after the rider, he brushed the dirt from his torn denims. “I’m after you now.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Prophet retrieved his hat and the .45 that had fallen from his holster when he’d jumped at the gunman, and saddled Mean and Ugly. A quarter hour after the attack, he was following the gunman’s trail through the hogbacks north of Bitter Creek, the roofs of which the sun slowly gilded behind him.

  A mile north of town, the drygulcher had followed a small creek, then turned up a steep hill through scattered aspens and pines. Following the sign, Prophet crossed two ridges, rising deeper into the mountains. By the time the sun had climbed halfway up the eastern sky, he reached an obscure canyon where the gunman had picked up an old mining road.

  Ten minutes later, Prophet came to a clearing where a sorry-looking tangle of peeled-log corrals huddled close to a shack fronting a mining portal cut into the high canyon wall. Prophet slipped out of the saddle and tethered Mean in a natural trough. Holding the Richards in his right hand, he crept to the floor of the canyon and hunkered down behind a boulder sheathed in shrubs.

  The sun had found the canyon and was ga
ining strength even at this altitude. Chipmunks prattled from overarching limbs. Prophet scrubbed sweat from his brow and stared across the pinon-studded canyon floor at the cabin.

  Smoke curled from a tin chimney pipe. A piebald and a blue roan milled in the corrals, a saddle draped over the top slat, near the gate.

  Prophet studied the cabin for a long time, watching and listening with his hawk’s eyes and ears. He was wary. The man had to know Prophet could track him here. The son of a bitch could be waiting with a rifle.

  Prophet scrubbed his jaw with his left hand, considering making his way to the cabin’s rear. The front door opened. The man appeared in a blue shirt and long denim coat, cartridge belt and holster buckled around his waist.

  Prophet’s eyes narrowed. A short bulldog with close-cropped sandy hair and long sideburns headed for the gray-board privy off to the right and went inside.

  Prophet hunkered down, watching, feeling the adrenaline spurt. The man was either trying to bait Prophet into a trap, or he was suicidally stupid. Based on the man’s previous ineptness, he was probably stupid.

  Prophet bolted out from behind the boulder and ran across the canyon floor, crouching and weaving between shrubs, keeping an eye peeled on the cabin for other shooters. Nearing the privy, he ran on the balls of his feet, stopped before the door, and raised the Richards.

  A single, explosive blast of double-aught buck blew away the locking nail and put a hole big as a wheel hub where the knob used to be. Prophet stuck his left hand through the hole and gave the door a yank.

  It flew back and Prophet bounded forward, short-barreled barn blaster extended in his right hand.

  “Mother of Christ!” yelled the bulldog, sitting on the privy’s single hole, jeans and summer underwear bunched around his boots. He reached across himself for the Colt Navy to his left.

  “Want the other barrel?” Prophet asked him.

  The man gulped as he stared fearfully down the Richards’s yawning maws.

  “Who are you?” Prophet asked.

  The man didn’t say anything.