He was about to rise and bolt through the gap when he saw the silhouette of a man sitting against the inside of the wall, on the gap’s right side. The guard was hunkered beneath his sombrero, facing the casa. He was sitting on the inside of the wall because the rain was slashing from the opposite side. Obviously, the gang hadn’t suspected they’d been followed down from the border. They’d grown fat, lazy, and careless.
Prophet grinned beneath his dripping hat brim.
He tensed when the guard swung his head toward him. He started to raise the rifle but checked the move. The guard’s lips were moving and Prophet heard him speaking in Spanish. To a man on the other side of the gap and whose back was likely just on the other side of the wall from Prophet.
Again, the bounty hunter grinned. He raised his rifle but before he could click the hammer back, something carved a hot line across the back of his neck before hammering the wall in front of him. Bizarre laughter cackled as though from down a long tunnel, muffled by the rain and thunder.
“Preparese para bailar con El Diablo, Senor Prophet!”
2
“PREPARE TO SHAKE hands with the Devil, Senor Prophet!” echoed in the bounty hunter’s ears as, instead of swinging around toward the trail, which was the direction that the crazy laughter and the warning had come from, Prophet bolted off his heels and ran toward the gap, firing his Winchester.
The guard who’d been hunkered down inside the wall on the gap’s right side had been gaining his feet and bringing up a Spencer carbine when Prophet’s first two rounds hammered through him.
As he flew backward, triggering a shot in the air one-handed, Prophet dove forward to land in the spot where the guard had been slumped. The rifle behind him roared three, four times, slinging mud and gravel every which way, one shot kissing the end of the bounty hunter’s left boot heel. Prophet twisted around, saw the second gate guard hastily gaining his feet and reaching for a pistol holstered on his left hip. He was having trouble getting the pistol up above the flap of his leather duster and, knowing he was about to die, screamed horrifically as Prophet slung two rounds between two large, silver circles sewn into the duster’s front.
The guard flew back against the wall, dropping the pistol in the mud, and then slid down the side of the wall before piling up belly down at its base.
Prophet ejected the last spent cartridge and seated fresh as he pushed up onto his knees and fired at the tall figure running across the trail toward the wall. A rifle flashed twice from the figure’s middle. Both rounds screeched over Prophet’s head.
The bounty hunter fired twice. Through the wafting powder smoke and the slashing rain he watched the running figure jerk and twist as he dove toward the wall.
There was a scream and a squishing, splashing sound as the man hit the ground at the base of the wall and lay still.
Prophet glanced at the dark, slumped figure and said, “I believe you have me at a disadvantage, amigo,” as he thumbed fresh shells through his Winchester’s loading gate, hoping all the rain and mud didn’t foul the action. All he needed was a jammed rifle. He hadn’t recognized the dead man’s voice. Likely someone he’d hunted before. He was always a little surprised by how well known he’d become in the long years since the war, when he’d started hunting men for a living.
Maybe notorious was a better word.
There was still plenty of thunder but not enough, probably, to have covered the recent gunfire. He looked through the dripping, thrashing foliage toward the big house with its windows lit.
That someone inside had heard the fusillade was confirmed when the big paneled door on the first story burst open and a lean man with a long, mustached face and wearing a short charro jacket and string tie burst out, holding a pistol in his right hand. Another, bigger man emerged from the opening behind him, holding a sawed-off shotgun in both hands across his chest.
Then two more came out behind the bigger man, and the smaller man, the man whom Prophet recognized as Hector Foran, a former Federale captain from Sonora who’d been riding with the Lazzaro bunch for several years, shouted orders while he waved his pistol around.
Prophet, still on one knee, pressed his Winchester’s stock against his shoulder, aimed carefully across the fifty-foot distance between him and the casa, and fired once, twice, three, then four times, watching the big man with the shotgun and two other men go down howling on the veranda’s elevated floor.
Hector Foran leaped back, wide-eyed and rattled, then triggered his pistol twice. He probably couldn’t see much due to the light emanating from the house behind him. Prophet triggered one more round, but the bullet merely plowed into the casa’s front wall as Foran bolted back into the house, yelling and leaving the stout oak doors standing wide behind him.
Bringing his own sawed-off ten-gauge around to his front, Prophet ran forward, one hand on the jostling barn blaster, the other holding his rifle. He looked around at the sprawling, dilapidated building before him, hearing shots fired from the second story, and leaped onto the veranda and rushed between the open doors.
He was in a bland, gray hall with a steel-banded oak barrel on his right. Stairs coming up from below lay to his left, and just now he heard the clacks of heels on the steps and saw two hatless heads rising up out of the casa’s bowels. The lead man turned at the top of the stairs, eyes blazing, mouth forming a perfect circle when he saw Prophet bearing down on him with his double-barreled ten-gauge. The brigand lifted a big, pearl-gripped LeMat in his left hand and a Colt Navy in his right.
Prophet tripped the coach gut shredder’s first trigger.
Ka-boooom!
The blast rocked the cracked flagstones beneath his boots. It lifted the two-pistoled hombre two feet off the floor and hurled him straight back over a wooden table, howling and blowing off the pointed toe of his right black boot with the shotgun shell in his pearl-gripped LeMat.
The second man on the stairs had a change of heart when he saw his partner shaking and bleeding his life out on the other side of the table. Wheeling, he ran back down the stairs. Prophet ran to the head of the stairs and aimed down into the dingy well.
“You don’t turn around, you’ll get it in the back, friend.”
The man stopped. He was tall and thick, with red pants and high black boots. He wore an eye patch. When Prophet saw the good eye, he said with a shrug, “Don’t make no difference to me, just thought it might make you feel better.”
The man showed his teeth and yelled as he raised a short-barreled Smith & Wesson. The gut shredder roared again and blew the one-eyed man on down the stairs and into the dingy shadows below.
Quickly, the bounty hunter breeched the smoking gut shredder, plucked out the spent loads, shoved fresh ones into the barrels, and snapped the gun closed. In the ceiling he could hear the thumps of pounding boots and the explosions of wild gunfire amidst shouts and yells of frantic men.
Prophet smiled as he hummed softly, “In Dixie Land where I was born, early on one frosty mornin’ . . .”
He turned to walk on down the hall lit by a tar-soaked torch bracketed to the wall in a steel cage, stopping when boots sounded on the stone stairs straight ahead of him, just beyond a broad kitchen with a large, black cookstove and a long, heavy wooden table littered with tin plates and food scraps and many pots and wooden cups. A couple of pots on the range sputtered and dribbled juices down their sides.
The spicy smells were enticing, but Prophet didn’t have time to think about his empty belly. Three men were descending the stone steps before him. Both barrels of the gut shredder, triggered one after the other, were enough to send all three tumbling and rolling and painting the stones around them dark red. Prophet reloaded the shotgun—“Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie land!”—and continued walking past the stairs, stepping over one of the dead men. He paused at a half-open doorway on his left.
Inside, a lamp burned on a broad mahogany desk covered in cloth-bound ledgers and rolled maps. Prophet nudged the door open slowly with the sho
tgun’s stock. The hinges squawked.
The widening doorway revealed a broad office with more heavy furniture and bookcases, most of them empty. A fire danced in a fieldstone hearth under a gaudy painting of a naked, full-breasted brunette sprawled on a red velvet settee on a veranda trimmed with many potted plants.
There were maps of most of the American southwestern territories and the northern Mexican provinces on the walls, some with flags pinned to them, likely indicating targets the gang had yet to hone in on—probably towns or ranch headquarters with blooded horses or well-stocked bank vaults. Lazzaro was also known for smuggling diamonds across the border, so some of the flags likely indicated diamond caches, as well.
Prophet had just moved away from the door when a gun clicked in his right ear. The hard, cold barrel of the gun was pressed to his head behind his ear.
“Drop the Greener, mi amigo,” said a low, resonate voice. Prophet could smell the man’s leather clothes and the sickly sweet cologne as well as the faint stench of tequila and cigar smoke.
Prophet lifted the shotgun’s lanyard from around his neck and dropped the gun on the floor a few feet in front of him.
“Now the rifle and your sidearm.”
Prophet did as he was told, cold chicken flesh spreading out between his shoulder blades at the low, menacing voice of the gun-wielding hombre behind him. He glanced over his right shoulder to see the dandified Mexican in the short charro jacket sweating, keeping the cocked Colt aimed at Prophet’s head.
“How many more of you are there, Senor Prophet?” asked Hector Foran, beads of sweat running down his cheeks and into his carefully trimmed beard.
Some said that Foran had become the brains of the outfit, setting up their jobs. That would explain the fancy digs complete with territorial maps and books that were probably chock-full of the timetables of enticing train and stage coach targets.
“Hell,” Prophet said, “you’re surround—!”
He wheeled, slashing upward with his right arm. Foran’s Colt roared on the heels of another thunderclap, the bullet thumping into the ceiling. Prophet closed his fingers around the man’s gun hand, wrapped his other hand around the man’s throat, and shoved him hard against the wall.
Boots thumped behind him. There’d been other men in the room, and they were bounding toward him. Prophet felt a stone drop in his belly when he heard a hammer click.
Foran, red-faced and wild-eyed, turned his head to the side and yelled, “Don’t kill him!”
Something hard as a pistol butt slammed against the back of Prophet’s head. It was a glancing blow, his shoulder taking much of it. It still made birds twitter and chirp in Prophet’s head and caused Foran’s red-faced visage to become two bleary pictures as the floor came up to slam against Prophet’s knees.
He stared down at Foran’s high-topped, black, copper-tipped boots, shaking his head to clear it.
“I’m going to ask you once more, Senor Prophet,” Foran said, bending down and glowering at the woozy bounty hunter, “how many more in your party?”
“There’s gotta be several upstairs,” said one of the men behind Prophet. There were two, maybe three other men in the room with Foran.
“Like I said—you’re surrounded. Posse, Rurales, cavalry boys . . .” Best to let them think they were badly outgunned. Nervous men were distracted men, and easier to kill.
Prophet heaved himself up off his knees. He twisted his six-foot-four-inch, two-hundred-and-thirty-pound frame around and lunged at one of the three figures standing behind him, in a semicircle between him and the desk.
He glimpsed a gun held taut in a brown hand and grabbed it as the man shouted. The others lurched back. Prophet slammed his big body into the man whose gun he now had. While he and the man hit the floor, Prophet snaked the pistol up and fired.
He’d been moving and firing at the same time and managed to only clip the ear of the man he’d been aiming at—a Yanqui redhead whose freckled face he recognized as the American outlaw Red Barker. Barker triggered his own pistol as he cursed and showed his teeth and clamped a hand over his bloody ear. He recocked the pistol as he swung it toward Prophet, crouching and extending his gun hand as he continued to curse.
Prophet tried to raise his own gun again but the man he’d fallen on—a fat Mex who smelled like a cantina—swatted Prophet’s wrist just as Prophet squeezed the trigger. The bullet slammed into the door as another gun belched.
Prophet jerked, winced, and cast his horrified gaze at Barker, whose extended arm went suddenly limp. The redhead’s freckled, blue-eyed face acquired a confused expression.
No smoke curled from the barrel of the silver-chased Remington in his hand. Surprisingly, no bullet had hammered into Prophet’s large person—at least, none that he could feel at the moment. Smoke wafted in the doorway behind the now-sagging Barker—pale, weblike fingers gently waving this way and that, dimly illuminated by the several lit candles and lamps in the office and a burning oil pot in the hall.
Foran leaped back toward the desk, cursing in Spanish, and raising his own Colt toward the door in which a dusky figure now appeared, jostling shadows obscuring it, though light from the hall shone briefly on two clear, hazel eyes as the gun in the shooter’s hand lapped flames into the room, roaring between thunderclaps outside.
The man nearest Barker took the second bullet and flew backward into the room’s shadows while the third bullet slammed with a hollow crunching sound into the head of the fat Mex struggling with Prophet. His head hit the floor with a hard thud.
Prophet stared at the figure in the door, saw the pistol leap in the shooter’s hand twice more, throwing Foran across a low table while triggering his pistol into the ceiling. The brains of the outfit hit the floor on the table’s other side, screaming, “Mierda! Spare me—por favor. Oh, god—please spare me!”
The dusky figure clad in deerskins and wearing a red sash around its trim waist stepped fluidly into the room, rocking the silver-chased Colt in and aiming again at Foran cowering against the back wall flanking the desk. “To give you the information you were seeking from my partner, in a none-too-polite way, I’ll tell you that there is only one more assailant, Senor Foran.”
Prophet hauled himself to his feet and looked back at Foran, who was clutching his right, bloody shoulder and staring at the person who’d just entered the smoky, shadowy room. His pointed chin jutted as he dropped his lower jaw, his brown eyes white-ringed with befuddlement. “You, Senorita Batista?”
“The name’s not Leona Batista, amigo. The name’s Bonaventure.” She glanced at Prophet. “I ride with this big, ugly lummox . . . when I’m in the mood for suffering his poor hygiene and bad jokes.”
Foran looked from Prophet to the hazel-eyed blond in the straw sombrero and deerskin charro outfit complete with red bandanna and red sash, and hardened his jaws. “Traidor!” he shouted.
“Si.” The blond’s Colt roared.
The .45 slug blew a quarter-sized hole in the middle of Foran’s forehead, jerking his head back as though he’d been punched in the chin. He gurgled down deep in his throat, and his eyes rolled back in his head, the lids staying open. He sagged back against the wall that was dripping with the man’s own blood and brains and dropped his chin to his chest as though in prayer.
Red Barker made a noise near Louisa’s brown boots, and she casually angled her Colt toward the man and shot him through his right eye, giving the pistoleer a Louisa Bonaventure–style finishing touch.
3
LOUISA HAD BARELY even looked at the redhead before she’d shot him. That’s how cool and confident she was with her own shooting prowess. It was maddening sometimes, Prophet thought—this need of hers to show off.
And some women appreciated his jokes. . . .
Now she twirled her Colt on her finger with a characteristic flourish and dropped the piece in the holster thonged low on her right thigh. Another pearl-gripped Colt jutted from a second holster on her left thigh. Two cartridge belts crisscrossed her
slender waist, beneath the sash. Her leggings were fringed, as were the sleeves of her short, hickory tan charro jacket.
Prophet studied the girl, who was all of twenty-one but whose clear, hard, hazel eyes were a good fifty years older, and gave a wry chuff. “Good Lord, girl—you look like Bill Cody!”
“That’s how they dress down here, Lou. You’d want me to look like one of ’em, wouldn’t you?”
Prophet studied the girl once more. He was more accustomed to seeing her in a simple riding skirt and blouse, maybe with a loose sweater beneath which she concealed her smoke wagons. He had to admit, though, that she wore the stylish Mexican garb right well. The deerskin clung nicely to her five-foot-four-inch and hundred-and-ten-pound frame. The sombrero shaded her face mysteriously. Her silky blond hair fluttered down over her shoulders in loose sausage curls.
A faint flush rose in her cheeks, and she looked down at the outfit before raising her eyes to his once more. Her lips shaped a smile, and her eyes flashed alluringly as she strode over to him, stopped a foot away, and stared up at him. “You like, amigo?”
“Some women think my jokes are right funny.”
“Only the whores you pay to listen.”
Prophet appraised her outfit again and curled his upper lip. “I like what’s under all that a whole lot better than the get-up itself.”
She showed her white teeth as she rose up on the toes of her boots and pressed her lips to his. When she pulled away, he glanced at the dead men around him and then at the open door to the hallway, noting that the big house was silent now except for the thunder creaking its stout ceiling beams and the rain rattling its windows.
“I do appreciate your coming . . . finally.”
“You heard my arrival, I take it?
“You can’t go anywhere without causing a commotion, Lou.”
The Devil’s Laughter: A Lou Prophet Novel Page 2