The Devil’s Laughter: A Lou Prophet Novel

by Peter Brandvold

  “Now, you just hold on,” Red Snake said, still holding the saddle and keeping his back to the captain. “You still need us, Chacin. In case you forgot, there’s still a whole herd of loco ’Paches down on them flats, and I wouldn’t doubt it a bit if they’ve followed us up here to San Gezo. Prob’ly prowlin’ around outside at this very moment!”

  Kiljoy chuckled, then made a pained expression, gently touching two gloved fingers to the puckered, bloody hole in his right cheek. “Ooh, that hurts,” he said. He chuckled again. “Put that gun down, Chacin, you crazy old coot.”

  Frieri and the two other Rurales were shifting their rifles around nervously, wary of getting caught in a crossfire. A young private with a pronounced overbite stepped to his right and tripped over a pitchfork.

  Chacin showed his teeth beneath his mustache and narrowed his eyes under the brim of his straw sombrero. “Who are you calling crazy, you common coyote?”

  Kiljoy laughed harder.

  “Hold on, Captain,” Prophet said wearily. “You send these two back to the hell they danced out of, and Lazzaro’s gonna get his shorts in a twist.”

  “I do not care if Lazzaro gets his shorts in a twist.”

  “Yeah, but then, you see,” Louisa said, “he won’t tell us where the loot is. And since that’s why we’re all here, I suggest you holster that hogleg.”

  Chacin looked at Prophet, brows furled in question.

  “They buried the money out on the desert somewhere,” the bounty hunter informed him.

  “Not they,” Kiljoy said. “Lazzaro did himself. Oh, I reckon Sugar helped, but she couldn’t lead you back to it, o’ course. And me an’ Red Snake had nothin’ to do with it. No, no, you best holster that hogleg, Chacin. Anything happens to us, you’ll piss-burn Tony good. And, if Tony was to die from that belly wound of his . . .”

  Chacin shuttled his gaze back and forth between Kiljoy and Prophet and Louisa, all three of whom watched the captain expectantly. Prophet knew he was wondering if Prophet and Lazzaro’s men had a double cross on, because that’s what Prophet would have suspected himself had the tables been turned.

  “Like Roy said,” Prophet said, “if you take these two down, Lazzaro’ll never tell us where the loot is.”

  “He won’t, anyway,” said Frieri, standing near Prophet with his ragged, bloody ear lobe, holding a Spencer carbine straight out from his right hip. “You’re a fool, Senor Prophet.”

  “No call to start firin’ off barbs, you scum-suckin’ dog. How’s that ear feel? How ’bout if I come over there and lay my fist against it?”

  “Boys, boys . . .” Louisa admonished the men, rolling her eyes and grabbing a rusty coffee tin off a nail in a support post and heading for the feed bin.

  Prophet switched his glower to Chacin. “Holster it, Jorge. Them two lobos may not be able to lead us to the loot, but we’re gonna need all the guns we got against the Mojaves. Not to mention the folks in this town don’t seem to be takin’ much of a shine to us, either.”

  Chacin’s face reddened. He hardened his jaws, gritted his teeth, and stepped forward, bringing the barrel of his pistol down hard against the back of Red Snake’s head. “Fools! Why would you leave the loot in the desert with twenty or thirty Mojaves running crazy out there?”

  Red Snake screamed as he dropped the saddle and fell on top of it, lowering his head and hooking his arm over it, shielding it from another possible blow. He scowled over his left shoulder at the infuriated Rurale. “You crazy greaser son of a bitch! Roy done told you we didn’t have nothin’ to do with it. It was Tony and Sugar that buried it! You think we like it? Shit, we robbed that loot same as they did, and we deserve our cut of it, but how we gonna get it if Tony dies?”

  “Which he most likely will,” Kiljoy said, as red-faced as Chacin now.

  Prophet looked at Frieri, who was only an inch or so taller than Kiljoy and just as ugly, his shoulder covered in blood from his shredded earlobe. He stared with silver-eyed menace at Prophet, who lunged forward quickly, swept the barrel of the little sergeant’s rifle aside.

  The Spencer roared, the slug drilling into the ceiling over Prophet’s head. Prophet grabbed the barrel with his right hand, jerked it toward him and out of Frieri’s hand. The sergeant lurched forward with a startled yelp, and his flat, round face met Prophet’s balled fist with a resounding smack.

  The sergeant’s head jerked back as though he’d run into a stone wall. His nose exploded like a blood-filled bladder flask. He screamed and stumbled back against Kiljoy’s horse, which sidestepped, sending the howling Frieri to the barn’s straw-strewn earthen floor.

  Another gun roared—a deafening thunderclap in the close quarters. Chacin shrieked and grabbed the wrist of his right hand, the hand now missing the gun that had been in it a moment before. The hand shook as the captain stared down at it in disbelief, his smoking revolver on the floor near his boots.

  Louisa’s own Peacemaker was smoking in her right fist as she turned it toward the other two Rurales, who wanted nothing to do with the notorious, man-hunting gringa. They lurched fearfully backward and lowered their rifles. They probably knew that even if Chacin was to get the stolen Nogales loot, their cuts would be too small to die for.

  “Puta bitch!” Chacin rasped, clenching his bloody hand—it looked as though Louisa’s bullet had carved a notch through the little-finger side of his hand after ripping the gun out of it.

  Louisa clicked the Colt’s hammer back and swung it back toward the indignant captain. “Thought we agreed we weren’t going to keep slinging shit around, Captain.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time he double-crossed me,” Prophet said.

  The barn fell silent. All the players looked around at each other, faces hard and scowling. Then, suddenly, Kiljoy gave a snort and started laughing. He leaned back against a stall, threw his head back sharply, and loosed loud guffaws at the ceiling. Chacin was next to start laughing, and then Prophet started in, as did Red Snake, still rubbing his head.

  The two low-ranking Rurales began laughing uneasily and a little uncomprehendingly, as they didn’t understand English. The barn fairly erupted with laughter, frightening the horses that were already prancing and snorting from the previous violence. Even Louisa, who was normally sober-faced, loosed a few red-faced snorts before brushing a sheepish fist across her face. The only one not laughing was Frieri, who, sitting on his butt, was holding both hands over his profusely bleeding nose. He looked a little dubious, as though feeling that he himself were the butt of the joke.

  It was a hell of a pickle. Such a pickle, in fact, that there was really nothing a man could do but laugh.

  “What do you say?” Chacin said when the laughter had died somewhat, holding his bloody hand to his belly, “that we all go on back to the saloon and have a drink and pull our horns in for now. Isn’t that the expression, Lou? Obviously, we need each other’s help, huh?”

  “Took the words right out of my head,” Prophet said, chuckling and gingerly helping the stone-faced Frieri to his feet. “Sorry about that, Sergeant. Sometimes my drawers get tight, and it gravels me.” He brushed the dust from Frieri’s bloody, gray uniform tunic. “I hope we can still be friends.”

  * * *

  The saloon was a veritable medical tent. A more sedate and less gruesome version of what Prophet had seen during the war, but a hospital tent, just the same.

  Lazzaro was laid out on a table near the bar that ran along the building’s right side. The doctor—a tall, leathery, severe-looking man with a cap of coarse, silver hair sitting close against his skull—had cut the outlaw’s shirt off. While Sugar and Red Snake held Lazzaro down, the doctor, whom Prophet had heard addressed as Shackleford, poked a forceps through the wound that looked like a massive slathering of cherry jelly on the man’s lower right side.

  Lazzaro was biting down on a well-chewed length of razor strop, which the doctor had produced from his black medical kit for just that reason, and was wagging his head from side to side. Purpl
e veins bulged in his forehead, and ropelike cords stuck out in his neck.

  “Hold him, now!” the sawbones said in his deep baritone that boomed like thunder around the cavernous room. “Hold him, now! Hold him or I’m liable to pull out somethin’ that needs to stay!”

  The tall man, who Prophet thought looked more like a preacher than a doctor, loosed a thunderous laugh at his own joke. He had a rolling-voweled, almost songlike southern accent that Prophet, being a southerner himself, identified as Alabama.

  The Rurales were grouped in the back of the dimly lit room, tossing dubious glances at the outlaws as well as at Prophet and Louisa, who sat near the front. Prophet had his back to the side wall off the end of the bar. From this vantage he could keep an eye on the room as well as on the street. Louisa had her back to the room. She didn’t seem to care, knowing that if trouble broke out, Prophet wouldn’t keep it a secret.

  She was turning a shot glass of rye whiskey between her thumb and index finger, staring at the amber liquid. She’d been oddly quiet the whole trip, Prophet was thinking. Something had happened during her time with Lazzaro’s bunch that she didn’t want to talk about.

  Since she didn’t want to talk about it, Prophet didn’t try, knowing that a herd of wild horses couldn’t drag out of Louisa what she didn’t want to share. He sensed it had something to do with Sugar, as he’d seen the two riding together up the canyon, but he had no idea what.

  Maybe she sensed some good in the blind woman. Or, on the other hand, maybe she sensed more evil than she’d at first thought. From what Louisa had told him, in these parts, Sugar Delphi had a wicked reputation for cold-blooded murder, despite her blindness.

  She’d ridden with Lazzaro for nigh on four years, and her pretty face that owned a strange, foxy quality, likely due to the fact she couldn’t see, adorned as many wanted circulars along the border as did Lazzaro’s. Prophet hadn’t been through here in a while, which was likely why he hadn’t heard about her. Louisa obviously had. Sugar couldn’t be a very good shot, but at relatively close range she could smell or hear folks, and that’s all she needed to get a bead on them. She’d told Louisa that she could see shadows—not with her eyes but with her mind.

  A strange sixth sense, she called it.

  Prophet only knew that, from what he’d heard and the number of murders she was said to have committed, Miss Sugar Delphi needed to stretch hemp.

  First, the loot. And how were he and Louisa going to cross that long, flat stretch of open desert again without getting slow-roasted over a hot Mojave fire?

  The black woman, Ivy Miller, who apparently ran the Oasis, was sitting at a table directly in front of the saloon’s double doors, which were closed against the wind. She sat with the liveryman, Dad Conway, who was nursing a beer and glowering at the newcomers, and a plump redhead with one purple and one black feather in her hair. Obviously a whore, the redhead was one of those pale, heavy, rounded women whose age it was hard to figure, but Prophet guessed she was somewhere on the back side of thirty.

  She must have thought that Prophet’s quick appraisal was an invitation, because she’d been giving him smoldering looks since he’d entered the saloon with Louisa. Now, not wanting to encourage her, he tried to keep his eyes off her. While he certainly had nothing against whores—in fact, he preferred whores to almost all other women aside from Louisa—she held no charm for him. Despite the lust in her eyes and her forever quirked, red lips, she looked like a harpy who would give a man little pleasure and no rest.

  Miss Ivy, nursing her own whiskey shot, sat sideways to her table, one ankle hiked on her other knee beneath her tattered, gray dress. She sat staring at her drink, the skin above her brows deeply furrowed, as though she were perplexed. Probably over Prophet’s and the others’ presence. He couldn’t blame her. He supposed he and Louisa looked as raggedy-heeled as Chacin, Lazzaro, and the others, but at the moment the situation couldn’t be helped.

  It wasn’t about to get any better, either, Prophet saw as he stared out the window before him. A man wearing a town marshal’s badge was walking toward the saloon, the tails of his black frock coat blowing in the wind. He paused to shake his leg free of a pesky tumbleweed, then continued toward the veranda.

  He wore three pistols and was holding a long-barreled shotgun on his shoulder. On his mustached, ferret-like face was a grimace that meant he wasn’t just looking for a drink.

  As the marshal started up the veranda steps, a door opened at the back of the saloon, and three more quiet, steely-eyed townsmen came in, armed for bear.

  16

  PROPHET MADE NO sudden movements as he studied the three men at the back of the saloon. They wore pistols and shell belts, and they’d armed themselves with rifles. One he recognized as the townsman called LaBeouf—a burly gent with a wandering eye. The three stood near a door in the middle of the rear wall and to the left of a stairs that angled toward the second story.

  Louisa had followed Prophet’s gaze to the three, craning her neck to look behind her. The only other person in the saloon to have noticed the newcomers was, oddly, Sugar Delphi, who had turned slightly away from holding Lazzaro down to cock an ear at the room’s rear.

  “Got it!” the doctor roared, pulling his bloody forceps out of the hole in Lazzaro’s side.

  Lazzaro screamed, bucking up off the table, then promptly passed out, the leather swatch falling out of his mouth.

  “I didn’t think that stupid gringo was ever going to shut up!” exclaimed Sergeant Frieri, sitting with Chacin and the other Rurales around a single tequila bottle.

  Red Snake turned his head sharply toward the Rurale and opened his mouth but before he could retort, one of the saloon’s two front doors opened, rattling the rusty bell. The town marshal walked in on a gust of wind-blown grit, scrubbed his boots on the hemp rug, and closed the door behind him.

  Prophet kept one eye on the three men at the back of the room and one on the newcomer—a medium-tall, small-boned, potbellied man with curly, dark brown hair puffing out around his tan Stetson. His black frock coat was dusty, and his string tie had been blown back over his shoulder.

  He had dark brown eyes, and they both seemed to twitch as he studied the room, grimacing, shoulders slightly slumped, all in all appearing vexed or negotiating a chronic, generalized pain. Prophet judged him to be in his late thirties, early forties.

  “Well, well, well,” the marshal said in a high-pitched, gravelly voice, and none too happily. “Ain’t this a party?”

  “Come on over and take a load off, Marshal,” Prophet said, raising his shot glass and grinning. “I’ll buy you a drink.”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Lou Prophet. You are . . . ?”

  The lawman swept the room with his twitching, disapproving gaze—his eyes seemed to be blinking out of sync with each other—and raised his gravelly voice. “Bill Hawkins is my name. Town marshal of San Gezo. And I reckon you fellas ain’t got the word, but here it is: strangers are not allowed in San Gezo. Especially obvious outlaws.” He extended his left arm and pointed his index finger at Chacin, narrowing one of his forever-twitching eyes and shouting, “And that goes for you, too, Captain. Anyone can wear the uniform of a Mexican Rurale. Besides, all of us here are citizens of the United States of America, and we do not recognize the government of Mexico.”

  “You don’t think so, uh?” Chacin’s face reddened and he curled his upper lip as he twisted the right upswept end of his mustache. The other Rurales stiffened as they glowered back at Marshal Hawkins.

  Hawkins looked meaningfully at the three men at the back of the room, who slowly spread out to form a semicircle at the room’s rear, hefting their rifles. Two were relatively young but hard-eyed, and they wore their guns and wielded their rifles as though they knew how to use them. LaBeouf scowled at the Rurale captain as though filled with an old hatred. Appearing in his early fifties, his pale skin was pink behind his cinnamon beard. Several warts bristled on his double chins and on his small,
blunt nose. He cocked his Winchester loudly and worked the gob of chew in his mouth.

  The marshal set the butt of his shotgun on his shell belt, aiming the double barrels at the ceiling. “Those three men you might have noticed at the back of the room feel right at home here in Mojaveria. They’re well armed and well schooled in the implementation of said firearms. They are shop owners here in San Gezo and my sworn deputies.

  “They’ve been ordered to defend themselves and the good citizens of this town at all costs, for we are the last inhabitants of San Gezo, and we will not be pushed around by Indians or border bandits.” He slid his owly gaze to Captain Chacin. “Or anyone wearing a gray monkey suit and callin’ themselves a Rurale.”

  Chacin glowered back at the man, grinding his jaws.

  Hawkins looked at the table before him. “Miss Ivy, Miss Tulsa, Dad . . . you all walk back behind the bar and get ready to lower your heads if the situation gets ugly, which it very possibly might. Doc, you, too.”

  The two women quickly climbed to their feet. Huffing and puffing and looking deeply dismayed, the hefty, redheaded whore shuffled toward the bar. The black woman took Dad’s arm and moved less quickly, leading the old man, who continued to glare at Prophet, around behind the bar. The whore popped the cork on a bottle and, her pudgy, pale hand shaking, splashed whiskey into a tumbler.

  Prophet sighed and slacked back in his chair, hooking his thumbs behind his cartridge belt. “Look, Hawkins, you can talk loud as you want since you’re holdin’ that barn burner an’ all. But know you can’t legally kick us out of your town. We ain’t broken any of your laws, and your town is in Mexico, of which I doubt you ain’t even a citizen. Now, why don’t you come on over here and let me buy you a drink, you ole hornswoggler, before this gets a whole lot nastier than it should.”

  The marshal looked at Prophet, one eye wide, the other twitching wildly. He appeared to be puffing up and on the verge of exploding.