The Devil’s Laughter: A Lou Prophet Novel

by Peter Brandvold

“Why not?”

  Chacin turned his head toward the men crawling up behind him, and spoke in Spanish. One of the men crawled away, grabbed one of the empty pulque bottles, scampered over to where Prophet and Chacin faced each other, and broke the neck of the bottle on the flat rock between them—first on the rock’s left side, then on the rock’s right side. Carefully, using the side of his hand, he piled the jagged shards of broken glass into two neat piles. He sat back on his heels, grinning and blowing out an eager little puff of air.

  Another Rurale, hatless, his black hair rumpled, sat beside the Rurale who brought the bottle, and both watched Chacin and Prophet anxiously. They muttered to each other, placing bets, and Louisa came up from behind Prophet to hover between him and Chacin on the other side of the rock from the two lower-ranking Rurales. The one who’d brought the bottle was young, probably not yet twenty. The other was in his thirties, with a haggard, hound-dog look.

  “All right—I’ll throw in.”

  “I thought you never gambled,” Prophet said, throwing his right arm out to limber it, flexing his thick, callused fingers.

  “You didn’t think I cussed, either.”

  “I hope you’re at least gonna bet on me.”

  Louisa spoke in halting, broken Spanish to the two Rurales. When they agreed on terms, Prophet and Chacin, grinning evilly at each other, set their elbows on the rock and clamped their palms and laced their fingers together.

  “May the lovely senorita set us off?” Prophet asked the captain.

  Chacin hiked a shoulder.

  “Get on with it,” Louisa said, setting back against a rock several feet away, crossing her ankles and folding her arms on her chest.

  Prophet got the upper hand quickly and worked the captain’s own right hand about a third of the way down toward the broken glass. Chacin cursed through his gritted teeth, and Prophet, grinding his own molars, watched his hand move back up and then inch knuckle-down toward the glass piled on his own side of the rock, the shards glittering like diamonds in the moonlight.

  Prophet wasn’t surprised by the Rurale’s strength. He was as tall as Prophet, though not as broad and muscular, but his arms were long and his hands were as large as Prophet’s, his forearms corded from a life—at least, an early life—of the hard work customary amongst the peons of Mexico. And Chacin had very likely been a peon, which made it hard for Prophet to hate the man completely. It was the rich in Mexico he had no truck with. Fortunately, there weren’t that many rich Mexicans—at least not in the places he frequented south of the border.

  Prophet pushed up with his right hand, staring at his scarred, bulging knuckles. Chacin thrust his head forward, face angled down, eyes bulging, lips stretched back from his teeth. He growled like an old dog, staring lustily at the glass shards piled near Prophet’s right elbow. “My, they look sharp—don’t they, Lou?” he rasped. He licked his upper lip. “Don’t fret, mi amigo. Such a wound won’t take all that long to heal in the dry desert air.”

  The two other Rurales, sitting cross-legged to Prophet’s right, leaned forward with their elbows on their knees and snickered.

  Chacin’s growl rose in pitch when Prophet, pressing his right heel harder against the ground, managed to heave the captain’s hand back up to their starting point and then a quarter of the way down toward Chacin’s waiting pile of broken glass.

  The captain’s slender bicep bulged beneath the rolled shirtsleeve, a thick vein rising darkly. Prophet grunted, watched his hand drive Chacin’s to within about four inches of the glass.

  “Damn, them shards look sharp—don’t they, Jorge?” Prophet said, sucking a breath through his own gritted teeth. “Sorta like little, razor-edged knives . . . only glass can really stick in . . .”

  Chacin cursed in Spanish.

  “. . . There . . . !”

  Prophet shoved the man’s hand into the glass. He didn’t want to cut him badly, because there was no reason to inhibit the man’s ability to shoot. But the Mexicans wouldn’t see it that way. If he didn’t make it hurt as much as he could, Chacin and the other Rurales would merely think him a fool.

  The two young Rurales gasped as Prophet mashed his hand down on the captain’s, twisting it both directions, feeling Chacin’s own hand quiver beneath him, hearing the glass grind like sand in a wheel hub, watching the blood darken it.

  Chacin’s hand lay like a dead fish beneath Prophet’s. His rasping breaths quieted. He compressed his lips and looked dully across the rock at his opponent, who lifted his own hand, felt the old tension drop down over the camp once more.

  The two Rurales both grunted and jerked their hands at the same time.

  “No, no.” Louisa’s silver-chased Colt was out and extended in her right fist, aimed between Prophet and Chacin, at the two Rurales, who froze with their guns still in their covered holsters.

  The Rurales stared at Prophet. Prophet stared across the rock at Chacin. Neither man said anything. Even the coyotes had fallen silent.

  Chacin’s expression remained implacable as he lifted his slack hand from the pile of glass and brushed it across his uniform pants. He smiled and glanced at Louisa’s cocked silver Colt.

  “I think I am in love with her, Lou.”

  “You and every other man she’s ever hauled down on,” Prophet said.

  Late in the morning of the next day, Sugar Delphi set one of her black boots down in front of a scorpion. The scorpion stopped suddenly, probed the boot in front of it with its extended stinger, then turned and headed back in the opposite direction.

  Sugar set her other boot down in the creature’s path. The scorpion stopped. Just as it started to probe the second roadblock, Sugar squashed the creature beneath the high, undershot heel of her other boot. She ground the beast to a greasy pulp in the small sharp rocks of the arroyo she and her group had been traveling since dawn.

  She hadn’t looked down at the now-deceased creature. Somehow, she’d just sensed it was there and that it was something that needed killing. Behind her, Red Snake Corbin quietly cleared his throat and shared an oblique glance with Roy Kiljoy. Tony Lazzaro chuckled and leaned forward, crossing his wrists on his saddle horn.

  “What is it, Sugar?” he asked the woman, who sometimes seemed his woman and sometimes no one’s woman at all. “What’s got your drawers in a twist? We ain’t seen Mojave sign all day.”

  “Give me a minute.” Sugar moved forward, probed the side of the wash with the same boot she’d used to squash the scorpion, then began to climb, not looking down but keeping her eyes straight ahead, crouching every now and then to push off the steep slope. Even blind and sort of groping, loosing rocks and sand in her wake, she gained the top of the bank quickly and stood pointing her head toward the east, the direction from which they’d come.

  “Sugar,” Lazzaro said, biting a chunk of tobacco off the braid he carried in the pocket of his black cotton shirt, under a brown cowhide vest. “We’re burnin’ daylight, and you know how Tony don’t like burnin’ daylight.”

  Lazzaro had been born in Mexico but he’d been sent to live with his aunt and uncle in Wyoming when he was only three, so he spoke perfect English, though he was also fluent in Spanish. Both languages served him well, since he ran his outlaw gang back and forth across the border, dealing in anything that earned him money, from simple bank and stagecoach holdups to diamond smuggling and slave trading with the mines in southern Mexico.

  It had once been a much larger gang, but since he and Sugar had decided to retire to Central America, where Lazzaro owned a half interest in a sugar plantation, he’d had no use for the others and had lost no sleep over pulling foot with a choice few men, Sugar, and all the money from their last holdup.

  “Someone’s trailin’ us, Tony,” Sugar said from atop the bank, staring toward the east as though she could see what she was talking about.

  “’Paches?”

  Sugar shook her head, causing the small, beaded braids to dance over her ears. “White men.”

  Lazzaro
turned to gaze back down the wash though he couldn’t see much farther than the next bend about fifty feet away. He turned to the redhead, canting his head to one side and narrowing one eye beneath his low-crowned, gray sombrero adorned with black stitching. “Sugar, dear, you did kill the rubia, like we agreed you would, didn’t you?”

  Sugar shook her head. “I wasn’t sure about her.” She shook her head again, frowning a little as she continued to stare east. “I guess I wanted to be sure.”

  “You wanted to be sure about what?” Lazzaro’s voice was taut with strained patience.

  Sugar started descending the slope the way she’d climbed it, haltingly, testing her footing. “I guess we’ll maybe find that out.”

  Sitting his horse to Lazzaro’s left, Red Snake loosed a caustic chuff. He glanced darkly at the gang leader, then lowered his eyes. Roy Kiljoy kept his own hard, expectant gaze on Lazzaro. Testing, probing.

  The gang leader sighed. He’d given the blind woman about all the slack he could afford to give her. Her sixth and seventh senses had saved his hide more than once, in ways he could never understand, but he had his pride. He swung his right boot over his saddle horn. “Sugar, my sweet, I reckon it’s time for you and me to come to an understandin’.”

  He dropped down to the ground and walked over to where Sugar was walking and sliding down the side of the slope, his eyes flat and mean though she couldn’t see them.

  “Oh, really, Tony?” she said when she stood flat-footed on the floor of the wash, aiming those cool, cobalt blue eyes at him as though they were twin pistol maws. She crossed her arms on her chest. “And what understanding is that?”

  Lazzaro’s right hand shot up, back, and forward so quickly that the two men sitting their horses behind him only saw him jerk. They heard the crack of his hand against Sugar’s face, saw her head whip back and to the side.

  She stumbled back and fell against the slope.

  “That I’m the leader of this pack of curly wolves, small as it suddenly is. Not you! And, yeah, even you follow my orders or pay the price!”

  10

  SUGAR HAD HAD her head turned away, her red hair screening her left cheek but not enough to completely hide the flush caused by the back of Lazzaro’s hand. Now she turned to him, her jaws hard, a forked vein standing out in her forehead.

  “Goddamn you to hell, lover!” she said, her low voice sounding like a hand run across guitar strings discordantly.

  Lazzaro stepped back, a self-satisfied look on his round face with its weak chin and silver teeth showing between his thin lips mantled by a long, pencil-thin mustache.

  “Hang on, now,” Red Snake said as he and Kiljoy watched Sugar slide her .36 Remington from the holster on her right hip.

  Lazzaro threw a waylaying arm out, staring at Sugar, who was now regaining her feet, the Remy in her hand. “Shut up. Both of you stay out of it!” He grinned at the blind woman, who held both of her hands straight down at her sides and stared unseeingly toward Lazzaro, her hair hanging in tangles about her face, nostrils flaring, and her chest rising and falling sharply behind her leather vest.

  “If you’re gonna pull that hogleg on me, Sugar,” Lazzaro said, “you best make sure you kill me with it!”

  She took one stumbling step straight out away from the bank, staring somewhere just over Lazzaro’s right shoulder, and raised the Remington. “Goddamn you to hell, Tony!”

  The Remington barked, stabbing smoke and flames.

  Lazzaro snickered as he stepped to his right, sort of ducking and weaving his head, smirking. The bullet tore a twig from a mesquite somewhere behind him. The horses nickered and pranced.

  “Come on, Sugar,” Lazzaro taunted. “Let’s see you put that sixth sense of yours to good use. Come on—you wanna shoot ole Tony, then shoot him!”

  Knowing she’d draw a bead on his voice, he stepped back in the opposite direction, throwing his arms out and exaggeratedly stepping on the balls of his boots, trying to make as little sound as possible.

  Again, Sugar’s Remy popped, blowing up dirt and stones from the arroyo bank five feet behind where Lazzaro had last been standing. The horses continued to nicker while the men held their reins taut, staring in wary amazement at the blind woman extending the pistol straight out in front of her and raking the hammer back once more.

  “A blind woman,” Lazzaro said, shaking his head and continuing to sneer at Sugar, “no way she should be carryin’ a gun.”

  Pop!

  The bullet blew up several strands of Lazzaro’s long, thin hair. He gave a startled, bemused yelp and jerked back in the other direction, jogging several yards down the arroyo now while Sugar clicked the Remy’s hammer back and tracked him, bunching her lips furiously.

  “I swear, I’ll kill you, Tony!”

  Lazzaro stood crouching beside a wagon-sized boulder in the middle of the arroyo, one hand on it, ready to run behind it if it looked like she was going to come even closer with her next shot. “Really? You gonna kill good ole Tony, who out of the kindness of his heart rescued you from them mean old nuns at the convent?”

  “That was then, you son of a bitch! This is now!”

  The Remy roared. Lazzaro had just started to lurch behind the boulder when her bullet slammed into the face of the rock, spraying shards. He jerked his head with a start and laughed, then very slowly and quietly stepped around behind the boulder to the other side, turning to the other two men who sat their horses behind Sugar now, and pressed two fingers to his grinning lips.

  Then he faced the blind woman, spread his arms, and threw his shoulders and chest back, grinning so broadly that all his full set of upper silver teeth shone beneath the thin line of his mustache. He remained silent as the girl stepped forward, jerking her head and gun around, trying to get a fix on him. A bird chattered in a tree to Lazzaro’s left. She swung the gun toward it and fired.

  Lazzaro snickered.

  She swung the gun toward him and fired again, the slug slamming into the side of another boulder about six feet to his right and behind him.

  He lowered his hands and took off running across the arroyo. “One more, chiquita!”

  Sugar screamed her fury, ran three steps forward, and fired.

  Lazzaro dove behind a tree, the slug kicking up rocks about two feet behind him. He hit the ground and rolled and came up with his own long-barreled Smith & Wesson in his fist.

  Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam-bam!

  His bullets plowed up dirt and gravel in a semicircle about one foot in front of Sugar’s copper-tipped black boots. She gave a cry and stumbled backward, tripping over a rock and dropping onto her butt about ten feet in front of Red Snake Corbin and Roy Kiljoy.

  She lowered her empty gun to her side and stared down at the toes of her boots. Her eyes were wide and glassy, her cheeks flushed behind her hair. She lowered her head farther and her shoulders jerked as she sobbed. Her head dropped still lower until her chin was nearly scraping her vest. Her head and shoulders jerked as she cried.

  Red Snake and Kiljoy glanced at each other, at the sobbing woman, and then at Lazzaro, who heaved himself to his feet now, his smoking Smith & Wesson in his right hand. Slowly, he walked toward Sugar, who raised her knees, set her elbows against them, and pressed her hands to her temples as she cried.

  “There, there, Sugar.” Lazzaro stopped before her and looked down at her with the hard eyes of a parent who’d been forced against his will to punish an unruly child. “No need to cry. I was just tryin’ to take you down a badly needed notch, that’s all.”

  Sugar sniffed and nodded, keeping her chin down. “I know.” She sniffed again. “I know you were, Tony.”

  Kiljoy looked at Lazzaro. “That wasn’t good—all that shootin’. Every Mojave in ten miles prob’ly heard it.”

  Lazzaro said, “Go check. Both of you. Leave mine and Sugar’s horses here.”

  Red Snake dropped the reins of both mounts. Then he and Kiljoy split up, each riding up an opposite bank and out onto the sunburned desert
. Lazzaro slipped his Smith & Wesson into the holster on his right hip, near the second holster angled for the cross draw and containing a short-barreled Russian. He dropped to a knee beside the sobbing woman, ran his hand through his long, stringy hair with restrained affection.

  “I know you like to be independent. Just like a she-coyote. The thing is, girl, you can’t be. Not totally. Even with that special gift you have, you’re still blind. You need ole Tony.”

  Sugar nodded. “I do. I do need you, Tony.”

  “Sometimes you forget that.”

  “I reckon I do.”

  “And what’s more, Sugar girl, you need to remember who’s the head honcho here. Because sometimes I think you forget.”

  “I do forget it.”

  “Just like you musta forgot when I told you—after you told me you suspected that Leona girl wasn’t who she said she was.”

  For the first time, Sugar lifted her head, showing her tear-streaked cheeks and swollen, red-rimmed eyes. “I know, Tony, but you see I didn’t know who she was, and I thought I could—”

  “No, no, no,” Lazzaro said, wagging his finger at her. “That’s where you went wrong. You took matters into your own hands. You left her alive after I told you you had to kill her or leave it to me to kill her.”

  Guiltily, Sugar lowered her head again and sniffed, running the back of her hand across her nose.

  “You felt somethin’ for her, did you?”

  “I reckon I sorta did,” Sugar said.

  “Well, now, let that be a lesson for you. You don’t need to go feelin’ nothin’ for nobody except ole Tony.” Lazzaro placed two gloved fingers under her chin and lifted her face toward his. “Ain’t I the one who sprung you from that monastery your witch of a ma sent you to? Ain’t I the one that took you back home and helped you do away with all them that wronged you. Especially your pa and brother who thought that just cause you was blind they could do what they wanted to you anytime they felt like it?”

  Tears welled in her eyes and dribbled down her cheeks as she remembered. Her face crumpled, and she began sobbing again in earnest. “Oh, Tony,” she cried, throwing her arms around his neck. “I’m so sorry!”