The Devil’s Laughter: A Lou Prophet Novel

by Peter Brandvold

  “You’ll never cross me again, will you, Sugar?”

  “Never!”

  “’Cause you need ole Tony.”

  “I need you, Tony!”

  Lazzaro smiled and patted her back. “There, there. No need to cry about it. Hell, it’s all spilled milk, anyway, and I already done forgot all about it!”

  She pulled away from him, wiped her wet face with both hands. “Thank you, Tony.”

  “Let’s get movin’. We got a long, hot desert to cross.”

  Lazzaro rose to his feet. Sugar grabbed his hand. “Wait, Tony. Don’t you think we oughta camp here in the shade today, travel at night?”

  “Ah, shit.” Lazzaro looked through the mesquites and across the desert toward where the Montanas Muertas humped, stark and gray, in the western distance. “I wanna get across this damn desert, then head south to the Gulf. I don’t got time to sit here and twiddle my thumbs and wait for the sun to go down. Besides, it’s a whole lot easier for you to ride in the dark than it is for me an’ Red Snake and Roy.”

  “But . . . the Mojaves. . . .”

  Lazzaro glared at her. “Now, Sugar. What’d we just get done talkin’ about?”

  “Okay.” Sugar forced a meek smile and rose. “Okay, Tony—you’re right. There I go again, second-guessing you. I’m sorry.”

  Lazzaro’s group followed the wash for another mile. When it angled west, they climbed out of it and headed south along a jog of low mountains, some of which looked like giant mushrooms of hardened lava. The sun was high, blasting its heat onto the desert floor with a molten hammer and a molten chisel.

  Lazzaro knew there was a well at the eastern edge of the Dead Mountains, in an old Mexican village that had been taken over by miners working for an American gold company, but he didn’t want to ride that far west. He wanted to plow straight south toward the sea. He’d heard that San Gezo was cursed, and having holed up there once himself, he believed it. It was hot and dusty and far from anywhere. There was a well between here and Puerto Penasco. A far stretch south of his gang’s current location, but they’d likely reach it in six, seven hours or so.

  The horses slowed, hung their heads.

  Lazzaro led the way toward the uninterrupted southern horizon. To the west and east, the mountains beckoned. He ignored them. South was his direction. South, damnit, to a free life in Central America.

  “I don’t know, Boss,” said Roy Kiljoy, loosening his neckerchief that was mottled white with the salt of his sweat. “Might be a good idea to ride at night. Cooler, you know.”

  “I like to see where I’m goin’.”

  “Yeah, but this way it’s awful hot,” said Red Snake, looking around at the white-hot desert mounded with rocks and stippled with occasional cacti. “And the Mojaves can keep better track of us. Hell, I think I can feel their eyes on us.”

  Lazzaro glanced at Sugar riding off his horse’s right hip. “You three been cahootin’ against me?”

  Sugar said nothing, just stared straight ahead, letting her black clomp along, occasionally kicking a rock.

  Lazzaro opened his mouth to speak but only said, “Gnahh!” as he flew out of his saddle and hit the ground in a heap. A rifle report flatted out across the desert.

  “Hellfire!” Kiljoy said, sawing back on his horse’s reins and staring toward a low, long mound of sand and rocks to the east. “Injuns!”

  “Tony?” Sugar said, hearing the gang leader groaning on the ground somewhere to her left. “Tony? Are you all right, Tony?”

  Her query was answered by several more rifle cracks and the whine of several ricochets. One of the horses whinnied shrilly.

  “Goddamnit!” Lazzaro barked as Red Snake and Kiljoy raised their rifles. “Goddamnit—shoot those goddamn savages!”

  Red Snake swung down from his saddle and, holding his bridle reins, raised his Winchester and pumped three shots into the low mound of sand and rocks rising about fifty yards to the east where he’d seen rifle barrels bristling and smoke puffing. Kiljoy fired once from his saddle, then dismounted and dropped to a knee about ten yards to Red Snake’s right.

  He raised the rifle to his shoulder as Red Snake snapped off his fourth shot, levered another round into his Henry’s breech, then held fire, staring down the barrel toward the mound.

  “Where are they?” Kiljoy said as Lazzaro groaned behind him. Sugar was down on both knees beside the gang leader, who lay propped on an elbow, clutching his hand to his lower right side, just above his cartridge belt.

  “I don’t see nothin’,” Red Snake said, his pulse throbbing in his ears.

  “Kill ’em!” Lazzaro shouted. “Kill every last one of them dry-gulchin’ catamounts!”

  Kiljoy started walking forward, swinging his rifle back and forth in front of him. Red Snake followed him up the low hill, both men stopping suddenly when they saw three Mojaves dashing down the other side of the rise toward three horses being held by a fourth warrior. Kiljoy triggered a shot, but all three running Mojaves were out of accurate rifle range, and the slug merely puffed dust well behind them.

  He and Red Snake looked around, both men breathing hard from anxiety. “You know, Roy,” Red Snake said, squeezing his rifle in his hands so that the snakes tattooed on his thin arms seemed to be trying to wrap themselves around the brass-framed Henry, “I don’t mind tanglin’ with Injuns up on the plains. But down here in the desert, where it’s just so damn hot . . . it just ties my innards in big, tight knots. You don’t think I’m yaller for sayin’ so, do you?”

  Kiljoy stared after the Indians, all four of whom were now mounted and galloping off through the rocks and scrub, heading east. A couple glanced back over their shoulders as their war ponies tore up the desert and loosed demonic, taunting yowls.

  The squat, ugly outlaw spat to one side, wiped chaw from his long, blond mustache, and narrowed an eye at Red Snake. “Yeah. Yeah, that does make me think you’re yaller.” He spat again and started walking in his bull-legged way back toward Lazzaro, Sugar, and the horses. “Pull yourself together, goddamnit, Red Snake.”

  “Well, I’ll be goddamned!” Red Snake said, exasperated. “Don’t tell me you like fightin’ Mojaves any more than I do, Roy!”

  As the two men tramped back through the hot rocks and prickly pear, Sugar was holding her balled-up green neckerchief against the bloody hole in Lazzaro’s side. “You’re gonna have to hold that there, Tony. Can you hold it?”

  Lazzaro was sweating like a butcher in a Tucson grocery shop and breathing hard, stretching his lips back in painful grimaces. With his shaky left hand, he held the neckerchief against the bloody wound and spat a rabid curse.

  “Ten years I been runnin’ loco both north and south of the border, and this is the first time I been shot this bad. The others was only flesh wounds.”

  “Does it hurt bad?”

  “Yeah, it hurts bad, Sugar—for chrissakes!”

  “Don’t die, Tony.” Sugar meant it. She hadn’t been lying about agreeing with all that Lazzaro had told her. She’d still be in that monastery, taking her whippings from the vile nuns, if Lazzaro hadn’t holed up there two winters ago, on the run from Rurales, and taken her with him when he’d left.

  After killing the cruelest of the sadistic nuns . . .

  She indeed had a special sense that gave her an advantage over other blind people—an extra sense that was sometimes almost as good as seeing with her eyes—but she’d be helpless without Lazzaro, who, when all was said and done, had been admirably good and patient with her. What other man would let a blind woman ride with him, share in his spoils with him?

  That special sense often made her cocky, caused her to feel more independent than she actually was, and it took a good tongue lashing from Lazzaro to realize her true and rightful place in this vast, hard world.

  “Please don’t die on me, Tony.”

  “Shut up and help get me back on my horse. Gotta keep movin’. Gotta keep movin’ south.”

  “I don’t know that you can ride,
Tony,” Sugar said, wrapping his left arm around her shoulders and helping the man to his feet.

  Kiljoy and Red Snake had stopped ten feet from them. Kiljoy said, “I don’t believe we’ll be headin’ south, Boss.”

  “Goddamnit, we’re headin’ for the sea!” Lazzaro barked.

  “Take a look.” Kiljoy jerked his chin to indicate south, where a column of smoke rose about two hundred yards away. Another interrupted column of smoke—obviously signal smoke—lifted in the east, the direction from which their bushwhackers had galloped.

  Lazzaro groaned, sighed. “All right, I reckon you two and the Injuns win. We’ll head west. Let’s go, goddamnit. . . .” He’d barely finished that last before his eyes closed and his knees buckled. He was out before he hit the ground.

  “Tony!”

  11

  A VOICE ROSE on the warm, still night.

  Prophet, scouting ahead of Louisa and the five Rurales, drew back on Mean’s reins. He looked around at the dark desert relieved by a vivid wash of lilac blue behind the black, jagged ridges looming in the northwest.

  He could see little but the silhouettes of rocks and shrubs stretching around him in all directions. A vagrant breeze nudged the spindly branches of a creosote shrub. That appeared the only movement. The desert was as silent as an opera house long after the crowd has left.

  The air was still hot but not as hot as before the sun had gone down a little over an hour before, where that lilac wash lingered now. That’s when Prophet and Louisa and the Rurales had broken their day camp in a shaded wash, where they’d waited out the heat and headed straight out across the desert toward the Montanas Muertas.

  They’d lost Lazzaro’s trail on a rocky stretch of rugged terrain, but Prophet had little doubt the gang was headed west toward the Dead Mountains. There was really nowhere else for them to head, as Mojaves appeared to have the other three directions buttoned down tight as a drumhead. Trying to bust through would be running a deadly gauntlet of arrows fletched with hawk feathers and hot lead.

  No telling how many Indians were out here, but their sign said plenty.

  There it was again—the faint keening sound that resembled a human voice. Possibly a bobcat’s whine, but Prophet didn’t think so. There was a human quality in the breathy voice. It seemed to come from the north though Prophet could detect no movement that way. And no campfire. Maybe the desert floor dropped off in that direction, and he just couldn’t see it from here.

  Best check it out.

  Prophet wrapped his right hand around his Winchester’s stock and slid the rifle from his saddle boot. Tilting the barrel up, he swung down from the saddle, the squawk of the dry leather in the quiet desert night making him grit his teeth anxiously. There were no substantial shrubs around to which he could tie his horse, so he ground-tied the mount, knowing that nothing less than a mountain lion or pack of howling Mojaves could tear Mean from the rein anchor. He’d been appropriately named, but he was a loyal bastard. Prophet would give him that.

  He patted the horse’s right whither, then slowly, quietly pumped a cartridge into the Winchester’s breech. Holding the rifle up high, he walked slowly north from the horse that craned his neck to stare after him but knew instinctively to keep quiet.

  Prophet walked slowly out away from the horse for thirty yards, then dropped suddenly to one knee. He’d spied a murky wash of movement ahead and to his left—a flicker of a shadow moving amongst shadows. A hollow thud, like that of a boot clipping a stone, reached his ears from the same direction.

  An Indian war party?

  It would be odd for Mojaves to be out skulking around at night, but not unheard of. Anyone who depended too heavily on anything but his senses out here was a damn fool, and Prophet’s senses were now alerting him to trouble.

  There was someone out there in the darkness. By the sound, they were moving in his general direction.

  He straightened and strode quickly but quietly ahead and right, intending to make a swing around whomever was out here. Stopping again in the shadow of a spindly saguaro, he stared northwest, pricking his ears.

  Someone sighed. And sighed again. It was a raspy sound, someone breathing in and out raggedly and making small, agonized groaning sounds. Again there was the hollow thud as the walker kicked a stone.

  Prophet stepped out from the saguaro’s shadow and stole slowly forward. When he’d walked twenty yards and could see the dark land dropping darkly ahead of him, he aimed the Winchester straight out from his right hip and said in a voice that sounded inordinately loud in the taut silence, “Who’s there?”

  Knowing that a gunman would likely target his voice, he stepped to his right and dropped to a knee.

  Another raspy breath. The slender shadow about thirty yards ahead of him stopped suddenly, jerking a little back and forth. “Joaquin?” a thin, pinched voice said.

  “Nope.” Prophet winced, awaiting a gun flash and the whistle of a bullet hurling toward him, tightening his right index finger on the Winchester’s trigger.

  “Por favor,” said the man in the darkness. “If you have any soul at all, senor, I implore you to help me. My name is Gabriel Bocangel, and I am walking around out here, a desperate hombre, looking for my son.”

  Prophet studied the shadow, waiting for any quick movement that would mark the man a killer. When none came, Prophet said, “Where’s your son?”

  “I am looking for him, senor. Joaquin. I fear he is dead, killed by Mojaves.”

  “You don’t sound too good yourself.”

  “I have been better, senor.”

  “Come on ahead.”

  Prophet watched the slender shadow grow larger until it became a man of about five-four, maybe one hundred and twenty pounds, stumbling toward him. He was hatless and his black hair glistened in the moonlight. He wore patched denims and a red-and-black wool shirt with a red bandanna knotted about his thick neck. He wore a cartridge belt but no gun—at least none that Prophet could see. As he approached the bounty hunter, nearly dragging the toes of his stockmen’s boots, he was holding his right arm.

  He came to within ten feet of Prophet, looked up at the big bounty hunter through pain-racked eyes, and heaved a ragged sigh. He dropped to his knees.

  Prophet lowered the Winchester’s barrel and walked over to the man who knelt with his head down, thick black hair hanging down over his forehead. Blood glistened as it oozed through the hand the Mexican had clamped over his upper right arm. It also glistened on the broken-off arrow that protruded four inches out the back of the man’s arm.

  “Mojaves?”

  “Si.”

  Prophet knelt beside the man. “What were you doin’ out here—you and your son?”

  “Is that important, senor?” Senor Bocangel looked up at Prophet, a raven’s wing of black hair lightly streaked with silver hanging over his right brow. “If not, I would prefer not to say.”

  Prophet met the man’s wry gaze. What an odd response. Prophet lifted the man’s right arm slightly, and Bocangel groaned and sucked a sharp breath through his teeth. “What have we got here?”

  He poked his hat brim off his forehead and lowered his head to get a better look at the man’s arm. About half the flint arrow point was protruding out the front of the man’s arm, angling toward the inside, dark with fresh blood.

  “I tried to pull it out, senor,” Bocangel said in a faintly chagrined tone, “but I stopped when I started to faint. I thought perhaps if I fainted I would bleed to death. Or be found by the Mojaves.”

  “That’s gotta come out. Can you stand?”

  The Mexican sounded immensely tired. “Perhaps.”

  “Let’s get you back to my horse.”

  Prophet wrapped the man’s left arm around his neck and led him over to where Mean and Ugly stood ground-tied and regarding the newcomer with shiny-eyed wariness. He eased Bocangel down on a rock on Mean’s far side.

  “Ay, Cristo!”

  Prophet went over to the horse and poked his hand into a saddleb
ag pouch, looking around warily and listening carefully for the tread of near Mojaves. “How far away did this happen?”

  “A mile,” the Mexican said, hanging his head. “Maybe two. I can’t remember how far I walked.”

  Prophet tramped back over to Senor Bocangel with a whiskey bottle and a handful of torn-up rags he used for bandages. “How’d you lose track of your boy?”

  “Joaquin walked away from our camp to gather firewood. While he was gone, three Mojaves shot arrows into the camp. I took one here. They rode off, howling like the demon dogs they are, in the direction Joaquin had gone. I came out looking for him. I heard one shot. Once I was about to return to our camp but realized I was lost.” He wagged his head sadly. “Everything looks the same out here, senor.”

  “Does at that.” Prophet glanced at the man’s cross-draw holster riding empty on his left hip. “Where’s your gun?”

  “I must have lost it when I fell down a hill. I did not notice until just after dark.” Bocangel groaned, sniffed, swallowed. “I chose a direction and decided to walk in a straight line . . . and then I heard you.”

  Prophet offered the bottle. “Have a swig off that. Have a big pull. You’re gonna need it here in a minute.”

  “Por favor.” Senor Bocangel lifted the bottle to his lips and tipped his head back. His throat worked twice, loudly, and then he lowered his head and the bottle, and gave a raspy sigh. “Ah, wheesky. Eez good.”

  “Want somethin’ to chomp down on?”

  Bocangel gave a wan smile and shook his head.

  Prophet wrapped his thumb and index finger around the bloody shaft. “All right—I’ll try to make this quick, but don’t hold me to it.”

  “Por favor, senor . . . ahhhhh!”

  “There we go. Came out clean.” Prophet held the ten-inch bloody shaft up in front of him. “Must’ve just glanced off the bone.”

  Bocangel was panting wildly, like a dog that had run five miles in the hot sun.

  “The name’s Prophet,” the bounty hunter said, using both hands to rip the Mexican’s sleeve away from his arm, exposing both the exit and entrance wounds. “Lou Prophet. You mighta heard of me.”