The Devil’s Laughter: A Lou Prophet Novel

by Peter Brandvold

  The sergeant’s eyes widened. He glanced over his shoulder at Captain Chacin, who smiled with only his mouth, showing those fangs again. “All right, all right—perhaps it is time for us all to calm down and discuss the situation like reasonable men . . . and, uh, women.”

  “I don’t think so,” Prophet said, aiming the Colt at Chacin now. “We got nothin’ to discuss. I’ve gone into business with you for the last time, Jorge. I don’t give a shit how many men you got up here in old Sonory. There’s only five of you now, and me and my partner here got the drop on you. If you don’t take this ragtag bunch and ride out the same way you came in, pronto, we’ll do it her way.”

  Chacin stared back at Prophet for a long time. Save for the blowing and occasional stomping of the horses and the chirping of the morning birds, a tense silence fell over the group. Frieri kept both hands on his crotch, scowling warily over his shoulder at Chacin, knowing that in his defenseless condition, if the lead started flying, he’d surely be first to have his wick trimmed.

  The captain’s chin jutted. His leathery cheeks dimpled above his mustache and goatee, and his face turned a darker red as he neck-reined his Arabian cross around. Without saying anything, he put the steel to the Arab’s flanks and galloped out of the yard. The other Rurales looked from Prophet to Louisa to the dead man on the ground, their faces hard but wary under their sombreros’ wide brims.

  They reined around and followed the stiff-backed captain out of the yard. Frieri muttered something shrilly, then, casting his fearful gaze at Prophet and the Vengeance Queen, gained his feet, wincing, and ran over to the steeldust stallion ground-tied but prancing around behind him. Cursing and grunting, he hauled himself awkwardly into the saddle. Keeping one hand on his bruised oysters, and slouched forward on the steeldust’s back, he trotted out of the yard, swinging left, to follow the others in the direction from which they’d come.

  “We got the bulge on ’em for now,” Prophet said, holstering the Colt. “But it won’t last long. They got us outnumbered, and I know Chacin well enough to know he ain’t gonna be happy till he’s got the loot and we’ve both taken it in the neck.”

  He strode back into the hacienda.

  As he gathered up his gear, Louisa gathered up her bedroll and saddlebags, and they met at the back door before tramping quickly outside and making a beeline for the barn. Prophet saddled his feisty dun while Louisa saddled the brown-and-white pinto she’d never given a name because, knowing the horse could take a bullet meant for her at any time or that she might have to run it into the ground to save her own skin, she didn’t want to get too attached. She knew the risk of attachments.

  They led the horses into the puddle-dimpled yard growing light now as the sun climbed, the humidity rising like pale snakes from the warming earth, and mounted up. They both looked around, Prophet slipping his Colt from its holster and replacing the cartridge he’d capped on the dead corporal.

  “How far you think they rode?” Louisa said, letting her gaze settle on the shadowy eastern plain stippled with Spanish bayonet and sage and rising toward steep ridges silhouetted against the rising sun.

  “Not far,” Prophet said. “Likely, he’ll try to get around us, cut us off, so keep your eyes skinned.”

  He booted Mean west from the barn. Louisa put her pinto up beside him as they angled across the yard to the wagon road that curved along its southern edge.

  “Southwest, you say?”

  “That’s the direction they took when they left here. That doesn’t mean it’s the direction they stuck to.”

  “If they weren’t haulin’ so damn much gold, I’d let ’em go,” Prophet said.

  “You’ve wanted Lazzaro for a long time, Lou. As have I.” Louisa specialized in tracking men who’d killed women and children, and Lazzaro was notorious for taking women and children hostage to help him get out of the towns he’d plundered, usually leaving his hostages dead in the desert when he was sure he’d outrun any posses fogging his back trail. He hadn’t pulled that stunt in Nogales, however. Likely because he knew the law didn’t have the balls to be a threat.

  “I know,” Prophet said. “But we could wait and get him when he heads back north. Chacin’ll never run him down on his own—not with that raggedy-heeled band of muchachos and old men he’s ridin’ with.”

  “I reckon that’s possible,” Louisa said as they kicked their mounts into trots, the hooves making soft thuds on the wet ground and splashing through puddles, “but with that much money we likely won’t see him again for a long, long time. He might even decide to stay down here. In that case, we might never see him and Sugar and the two others again.”

  Prophet glanced at his partner, whose blond hair streamed back behind her shoulders as she rode, the sun-bleached strands glistening in the intensifying, golden morning sunshine. The girl had always owned a strange, oblique edge—an edge that Prophet had only seen in men, particular pistoleers like Clay Allison, Ben Thompson, and John Wesley Hardin, but rarely in women.

  “This blind pistolera,” Prophet said. “This Sugar Delphi . . .”

  Louisa looked at him.

  “What’s she like?”

  Louisa blinked, let a moment pass as they continued riding west. “Just like I told you. She can’t see. Aside from that, she’s just like the others.” Her eyes narrowed slightly. “A cold-blooded killer.”

  At the same time but eight miles southwest, Sugar Delphi jerked back on her cream-dappled black’s reins, shook a thick lock of her rust red hair back from her pale face set with clear blue, blind eyes, and yelled, “Halt!”

  The three male riders, gang leader Antonio Lazzaro, Red Snake Corbin, and Roy Kiljoy all brought their loping mounts to grinding halts on the south side of the flooded arroyo that they’d been following since breaking camp at the first blush of dawn. Lazzaro was carrying the saddlebags stuffed with fifteen thousand dollars of stolen Mexican coins and greenbacks, and he jerked a look behind him now to make sure the bags had not fallen off his horse.

  Satisfied, he turned to Sugar, scowling. “What the hell’s the matter?”

  She sat her blowing, dappled black gelding, swinging her head around as though she could actually see something of this broad desert valley carpeted in little but rocks and the occasional tuft of yucca and greasewood and surrounded by low escarpments of ancient, black volcanic rock. Thin troughs muttered with runoff from the recent deluge, and the air was damn near as humid as the Mexican lowlands surrounding the Gulf.

  Sugar turned to him, looked right through him with those cobalt blues of hers. “Can’t you smell it?”

  “Smell what?”

  “Death.”

  Lazzaro looked around, fighting impatience. He’d ridden with the blind woman for nearly four years and knew that she had the senses—aside from sight, that was—of a wild puma cat. He sniffed the air and continued to scan the low, sandy mounds around him before turning back to her once more, his own deep-set eyes crinkling deeply at the corners.

  “Sugar, all I can smell is the whiskey I’m gonna drink at the Colorado Gulch Station. Death? What’s that mean—death?”

  He looked at the other three men. Red Snake—long and lean and hawk-faced—sat the saddle of his copperbottom dun, looking around cautiously, his brass-cased Henry repeater in his right hand. The two red snakes tattooed on both his exposed, lightly haired forearms coiled downward past his thin wrists, their heads resting against the backs of his hands, forked tongues slithering hungrily across his bulging knuckles and into his two middle fingers.

  He jerked his bright-eyed, incredulous gaze to Lazzaro. He never spoke directly to Sugar, for some reason. Maybe he was repelled by her blindness, or, having been raised in the superstition-stitched hills of West Virginia, he thought her a witch who might put a hex on him if he were to speak to her directly and possibly offend her.

  “Could she be a little more specific?” he asked Lazzaro, trying to keep his impatience out of his slightly high-pitched voice.

  Of co
urse, Lazzaro didn’t need to answer for Sugar, as the woman was only blind, not deaf.

  “Human remains,” she said, staring off the right side of the trail. “One, maybe one and a half days dead. Chewed on by coyotes early this morning, after the rains stopped.” She touched spurs to her black.

  Horse and rider galloped off the trail and into the desert, the dappled black gelding picking its way for the blind woman on her back. The black and Sugar Delphi always rode as one, the horse’s eyes for all intents and purposes becoming the redhead’s eyes.

  Lazzaro scowled after the woman then gigged his own horse after Sugar. Red Snake shared a skeptical glance with the fourth rider in the group—Roy Kiljoy, who, at five feet three inches tall, made up in viciousness and cruelty what he lacked in height. He also made up for it by his breadth, for he was as wide as a door.

  He wore greasy, smoke-stained trail garb with a broad sombrero. His blond mustache drooped down over both sides of his narrow mouth that always hung open a little. His light-blue eyes seemed to have a pale film over them; they were shallow and pitiless and poison mean.

  He did not care for Sugar Delphi, and he had made his views very clear to the other men of the gang, including Lazzaro, who considered Sugar his woman. The gang leader did not hold the sentiment against the short, thick border tough from Missouri—at least not to the point that he’d ever considered cutting him loose or killing him—for everyone who’d ever met Kiljoy accepted his hideous nature as one would accept that of a maverick longhorn or coiled diamondback.

  All that Lazzaro cared about was that Kiljoy lived up to his last name. The stubby brigand indeed seemed to take great pleasure in killing, and such a talent was a great asset for a gang leader like Lazzaro, a sadistic killer in his own right.

  Kiljoy said nothing, just sat scowling after the redhead and Lazzaro, slowly shaking his head obliquely, as though wondering what in hell the ghoulish albeit beautiful woman was up to now. That was Red Snake’s sentiment, as well.

  “I don’t know about you, Roy,” he said to Kiljoy, “but I wanna see what she’s seein’. Or smellin’.”

  “Lots o’ death out here,” said Kiljoy, looking around at the low, rocky hills. “If we don’t keep movin’, we’re likely gonna smell a little whiffy on the lee side ourselves.” He kept sliding his dark gaze around. “Bounty hunters, lawmen, regulators, banditos, Injuns . . . hell, a man who don’t keep movin’ sets his own trap out here.”

  “Yeah, well . . . just the same, I’m gonna kill the cat!” Red Snake whipped his rein ends against his dun’s left hip and galloped off between the hills.

  6

  “DEATH,” SAID SUGAR. “I told you I smelled it.”

  Antonio Lazzaro and Red Snake Corbin rode up beside the woman to stare down at the overturned wagon and the man lying slumped in the rocks beyond it.

  The wagon lay twisted between two boulders and a slender mesquite tree, which it had broken like a matchstick when it had run off the trail. Or been run off the trail. Various foodstuffs and camping supplies as well as rusted picks and shovels were strewn about the wagon and boulders, where they’d tumbled during the crash. Deep gouges in the form of unshod hoofprints scored the ground all around the wagon, rocks, and dead man even in the wake of the previous night’s deluge.

  The man lay spread eagle and staked to the ground. There wasn’t enough left of him after the Mojaves had had their fun with him—likely seeing how loud they could get him to scream—to judge his age, much less his facial features. He’d been cut up badly, and then the coyotes or wildcats had eaten him, burrowing into all orifices. Only a few tufts of curly gray hair remained atop his blood-crusted skull.

  Lazzaro looked at Sugar, who stood staring straight out across the desert beyond the dead man, who’d probably been a prospector seeking color in the local ranges and washes. The blind woman’s lush red hair hung to her shoulders. Some of it was twisted into small braids, and these hung down the sides of her head, trimmed with colored wooden beads.

  “Mojave?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  Red Snake turned to Lazzaro and whispered, “How in the hell can she tell if it’s Mojave as opposed to, say, Chiricowys or Coyotero? All three bands been known to run in these parts.”

  Lazzaro had just started to shrug when Sugar jerked her head toward them as she reined her dappled black around. “I suggest we light a shuck, gentlemen. The Mojaves who did this are still near . . . and they’re hungry for white blood!”

  She ground her spurs into the dappled black’s flanks. The horse whinnied, swept past the dumbly staring Lazzaro and Red Snake Corbin, and galloped back out toward the trail where Roy Kiljoy sat his Appaloosa, gravely glancing around at the starkly forbidding ridges turning more golden now as the sun rose a third of the way toward its zenith.

  A minute later, the three men were back on the trail, galloping twenty yards behind Sugar, who rode with the sun streaking her blowing, copper red hair, her black sombrero dangling by a rawhide thong down her back, over her black-and-red leather jacket stitched with small, silver horses.

  As he rode crouched in his own saddle, Red Snake glanced to the right, then shouted at Lazzaro riding half a length ahead and a little right of him, then tossed his head to indicate the white smoke puffs rising from one of the highest northern ridges. Lazzaro turned his head toward the smoke puffs, then jerked his head toward the left.

  Red Snake followed his gaze past Kiljoy to see another series of charcoal-colored puffs rising from a lower ridge half a mile south of the trail they were following.

  Kiljoy turned his big, unshaven, fair-featured but sunburned face toward Red Snake, his blond mustache blowing in the wind. It was a dark look. Kiljoy shook his head. “I really hate ’Paches, Snake. I hate ’em worse than tooth pullers an’ sky pilots.”

  “You can discuss that with them shortly,” said Sugar, whipping her head around to stare back at the men behind her.

  She lifted her chin. Kiljoy, Red Snake, and Lazzaro glanced over their shoulders. Six or seven dusky-skinned, black-haired riders galloped toward them, angling onto the trail from the north and south, leaning far forward and batting their moccasined heels against the flanks of their lunging mustang ponies painted for war.

  “Ah, shit!” grouched Lazzaro.

  Red Snake expressed the same sentiment.

  Kiljoy whipped his rein ends against his Appy’s right hip and yelled, “Hold on to your topknots and ride like hell, boys!”

  Lazzaro’s mount lunged hard, until it was long-striding beside Sugar’s horse and gradually overtaking her. He did not wonder how the blind woman had known the Mojaves were behind them. He’d stopped wondering long ago how she sensed the things she did and now merely accepted the fact without question. It didn’t even seem all that strange to him anymore. In many ways her inexplicable gift was a blessing, as it had saved his life countless times.

  Hearing the Mojaves howling and yowling behind him, Lazzaro and the others climbed a low rise, and Lazzaro felt the slightest loosening of the knot in his belly. The Colorado Gulch Relay Station opened below him—a sprawl of weather-silvered wooden buildings and holding corrals in a broad horseshoe gouge in the large, black rock escarpment rising like a mess of giant dominos just north of it. To the south and west was nothing but more of the same stark terrain that Lazzaro and the others had just crossed.

  Gunfire crackled amidst the Indians’ eerie howls.

  Lazzaro glanced behind, past the galloping horses of Red Snake and Kiljoy, and showed nearly his entire set of silver upper teeth below his ragged black mustache. The Indians were chewing up the trail and gaining on him.

  Kiljoy had hipped around in his saddle, taking his reins in his teeth, and was just now racking a cartridge into his old-model Winchester rifle’s breech. The gun lapped smoke and flames from its barrel, the smoke instantly torn by the wind, the report sounding like a branch broken over a knee.

  The Mojaves kept coming, none of the six so much as flinching.
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  “Save your lead, Roy, you crazy son of a bitch!” Lazzaro yelled. “You ain’t gonna hit nothin’ from the hurricane deck!”

  The four outlaws were galloping into the stage station yard now.

  “Oh, yeah?” Kiljoy said, glowering at Lazzaro as, reins in his teeth, he racked another shell into his rifle’s breech.

  He hipped around and raised the Winchester to his shoulder. The Mojaves weren’t slowing up a bit as they kept coming from seventy yards away, one rider leading, four riding abreast, another lone rider bringing up the rear.

  Kiljoy’s rifle leaped and belched. The Mojave galloping behind and to the left of the leader jerked as though he’d been punched in the chest. Slowly, releasing his rope reins, he turned slowly in the saddle as his horse kept striding. Just as slowly he sagged down the blanket saddle, hit the ground between him and the Mojave to his left, and rolled wildly.

  The rear rider’s horse stumbled over the wounded Mojave, whinnied shrilly just before it buried its head in the trail, and turned a complete somersault, its dark brown tail waving like a flag, its rider disappearing somewhere beneath the Appaloosa’s massive, crumpling body.

  Kiljoy bellowed as he lowered the carbine, took the reins from his teeth, and hauled back on them, slowing his own Appy. “Now, that’s a boss shot if I ever seen one!”

  “Ah, quit blowin’!” Red Snake said, leaping off his horse in the middle of the station yard, noting guns crackling around him. One man was shooting at the Indians from behind a water barrel on the low-slung station house’s front porch while another gent was triggering a rifle from behind an open barn door on the yard’s opposite side.

  All four outlaws were on the ground now, sliding their rifles from their saddle boots and spanking their horses away. Even Sugar grabbed her carbine out of its sheath, racked a shell, dropped to a knee, and began firing at the Mojaves. The Indians were just now slowing and curveting their mounts while triggering lead toward the outlaws and the two men shooting from the barn and station house porch.