The Devil’s Laughter: A Lou Prophet Novel

by Peter Brandvold

  Prophet saw something out the corner of his left eye. At the same time, Ivy, standing behind the bar, gasped, “Oh, my god!”

  Prophet turned his head to see the tall, dark hombre who’d been manning the Gatling gun fall out of the open loft door on the other side of the street. He turned one somersault and hit the ground in front of the barn with a thud. He bounced slightly and lay still on his belly, dust puffing around him.

  An arrow protruded from his back. Prophet lifted his shocked gaze to the open loft door to see the maw of the Gatling gun swinging around slightly and becoming level with the saloon. A dark face beneath a red bandanna smiled wickedly, green eyes flashing in the afternoon light as El Lightning’s fist began turning the gun’s wood-handled crank.

  Prophet shouted, “Everyone down!”

  He threw himself back in his chair, and he and the chair hit the floor with a resounding boom that was almost instantly drowned by the savage hiccups of the blazing Gatling gun and the screams of everyone else in the room.

  Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam!

  The moaning wind only partly covered the gun’s savage cacophony. It did not at all cover the screeching of breaking glass as the bullets hammered the front of the saloon and blasted out the window to send the bullets screaming through the saloon and into tables and chairs and support posts and the bar and the back-bar mirror and shelved bottles and glasses. The bullets shredded the dull red carpet on the stairs at the room’s right rear and blasted the newel from its post.

  Prophet had turned onto his right shoulder and cast a quick look around the room to see everyone on the floor amidst the flying splinters. When the Gatling gun died, its cartridge belt apparently having run out of bullets, Prophet grabbed his rifle off the table, where he’d left it. He pumped a shell into the chamber, rose to his knees, swiping his hat from his head, and edged a look up above the sill of the front window nearest him.

  He could no longer see El Lightning in the barn loft. Only the Gatling gun sat there, its smoking canister tilted upward. Howls and the thuds of galloping horses rose, and Prophet saw Mojaves galloping toward the saloon from both sides of the street while several others appeared in the breaks on either side of the livery barn. One bolted out from the barn’s right side and dove behind a stock trough, a carbine in his hands.

  Prophet rested his Winchester’s barrel on the sill of the blown-out window and triggered two shots at the stock trough, blasting the carbine out of the Indian’s hand with the first shot and drilling the Mojave’s neck with the second. Both his spent cartridges rattled onto the wooden floor behind him as he pumped a fresh shell into the rifle’s breech.

  Two shots for one Injun, he thought with an inward grimace, knowing he had to make every shot count.

  Around him, the other men and women were shouting and shifting themselves into position to cut loose on the Indians now triggering rifles and arrows from horseback as they galloped in both directions past the saloon. The Mojaves were howling angrily but moving too quickly for an accurate shot. As two arrows whistled past his head and a bullet drilled the sill, spitting prickly slivers against his face, Prophet lowered his head and put his shoulder to the wall beneath the window.

  He ran a sleeve across his face and cast a quick glance behind him. Lazzaro was on the floor, and Sugar was crouched over him, her sightless eyes showing gray in the light from the saloon’s front windows. Louisa was on one knee, triggering both her pistols through the front door that had been blown open by the Gatling’s blast.

  Marshal Bill Hawkins was down on his shoulder behind Louisa, holding one arm while sliding himself toward the front window on the far side of the door, holding his big Greener in one gloved hand. His hat was off and his dark curly hair glistened with broken window glass.

  Chacin and the other Rurales and Red Snake and Kiljoy were firing pistols and rifles through the larger front window on the right side of the door. One of the three townsmen who’d entered through the rear door was down and unmoving in a pool of blood while the others, including red-bearded LeBeouf, were hunkered behind overturned tables, looking fearfully toward the front of the room.

  Prophet broke open his barn blaster, made sure he had a wad in each barrel, then, growling through gritted teeth, said, “I’m getting awful tired of these damn redskins!”

  He triggered the left barrel through the window, blowing one Mojave off his horse and causing another behind him to yelp and grab his face. While the first Mojave was still airborne and howling, Prophet triggered the coach gun’s second barrel.

  A Mojave had worked his way over to the saloon and was just bounding up the veranda steps when Prophet’s blast shredded the Indian’s calico blouse, peppered his neck and face, and threw him back down the steps and into the street with a clipped cry.

  There was a window in the side wall off the end of the bar, behind Prophet. While the others continued to throw bullets at the Indians, Prophet reloaded the double-barrel gut shredder and hurled himself through the window. He landed in the alley between the saloon and another adobe-brick building, with a great “Uhfff!” of air ejected from his lungs.

  He rolled over, wincing at the glass pricking under him, and triggered his shotgun at the first Indian he saw, blowing the howling brave off his horse. Heaving himself to his feet, Prophet ran up to the mouth of the alley and blew another Mojave off his horse, as well.

  He started to crouch behind a rain barrel to reload but then he heard only a few rifles popping from the front of the saloon to his right. Looking around, he saw the Indians galloping off in both directions along the street before him, leaving a half-dozen dead in their wake.

  “Hold your fire!” Prophet shouted, squinting against the windblown dust. Beyond him, the broad main street was a dirty, washed-out yellow amidst the curtains of blowing grit and tumbleweeds.

  He whipped around, thinking he’d seen something moving at the other end of the alley. Quickly breeching the shotgun, plucking out the spent loads and thumbing fresh ones in the barrels, he ran down the alley, then sidled up to the rear of the saloon. Thumbing the barn blaster’s rabbit-eared hammers back, he moved slowly around the corner. Two Indians were standing in front of the back door, one nocking an arrow, the other shoving cartridges into the loading tube of his Spencer carbine.

  They saw Prophet at the same time and gave a startled yowl. Prophet raised the coach gun, turned sideways, and—Boom! Boom!—blew both braves up off their feet and sent them flying down the alley in clouds of blood that the wind blew against the saloon’s rear wall.

  The rear door creaked open. Prophet swung toward it, dropping his empty shotgun and bringing up his Colt. Louisa stepped into the open doorway, both her silver-chased Peacemakers in her fists. She raised both barrels and depressed the hammers as Prophet lowered his own weapon.

  She poked her head out to inspect the two dead Indians. Then she looked at Prophet. She pursed her lips and arched a brow. “I hear your Devil friend laughing at us, Lou.”

  “Ah, hell,” the bounty hunter said. “We been in tighter places before this.” He picked up his shotgun, breeched it. Uncertainly, he added, “Or . . . just as tight, anyway.”

  17

  LATER THAT NIGHT, around midnight, Prophet set his rifle and shotgun on a table and glanced at Ivy Miller scrubbing off the counter behind the saloon’s main bar, where she’d prepared a hardy stew. “Mind if I have a cup o’ that mud, Miss Miller?”

  He and she were the only two in the saloon’s main hall. The others, including Louisa, were upstairs or out on the veranda or scattered around the village, watching for the Indians whom they were certain would attack again, though their number had been depleted by eight, their guns and ammunition confiscated. Prophet, with an extra bandolier filled with .44 shells for his rifle and .45 shells for his Colt slung over his neck, had been stationed atop the saloon’s roof until Chacin and Frieri had relieved him a few minutes ago.

  “Of course, Mr. Prophet.” The black woman tossed her sponge into
the sink beside the stove and used a swatch to lift the big, blue pot from a burner and fill two white stone mugs at the bar. “How could I refuse a man who trailed a passel of blood-hungry ’Paches into our fair town?”

  Prophet sat back in a chair, doffed his hat, and ran a hand through his hair. “I do apologize, ma’am.”

  “Oh, stow it. I reckon there wasn’t much else you could do, could you?” She came around from behind the bar and set one of the steaming mugs on the table before him. “Except stay out on the desert where they’d deplete you of ammunition, food, and water.”

  Prophet lifted the mug, blew on it, and sipped. “Much obliged.”

  “You can call me Ivy. You’re the only one, though. The others may call me Miss Miller if they call me anything at all.”

  “You don’t like my friends?”

  She pulled out a chair across the table from him and slumped into it, giving him a pointed look across her steaming coffee mug. She had a very slight scar, like that from a knifepoint, on her otherwise smooth, chocolate-colored right cheek. “Are they really your friends?”

  “Just that blond bundle of blue-eyed dynamite—Miss Bonnyventure.” Prophet canted his head to one side and gave the saloon owner a wry look. “How’d you know?”

  “I been around the frontier once or twice, mister. In my business, you get to be a good judge of character. Don’t get me wrong—your character is far from what I’d call good.” Her clear, dark brown eyes dropped to his chest before flicking back to his face, her cheeks darkening beneath the natural coco of her skin. “I bet you can really stomp when you get the urge. But you shine in comparison to them you rode in with.” The look grew more pointed. “Right?”

  Prophet chuckled, not sure what to make of the gal though he had a feeling she could do some stomping of her own. “Speaking of them I rode in with, you ain’t seen the bandy-legged ole Mescin, have you? Senor—”

  “Bocangel?” the woman finished for him. She’d arched both her brows and put some extra starch in her voice.

  “You know him?”

  “Of course. He’s been holed up here himself, the old desert rat.” She sat sideways to the table, an ankle hiked on a knee beneath her dress. An unladylike pose, but on her it seemed natural and not unalluring. The first three buttons of her silk blouse were open, revealing her deep, dark cleavage between the two full mounds of her breasts.

  She looked up at him, caught the direction of his gaze, and smiled with one side of her mouth. Prophet sipped his coffee, then said over the mug he held to his lips to cover his chagrin, “What do you suppose happened to him? He got caught out on the desert, had a Mojave arrow in his arm.”

  “I reckon that’s his business, ain’t it?”

  Prophet frowned at her curiously. Obviously, she wasn’t on friendly terms with Senor Bocangel.

  “His boy’s dead,” he said, as though that might temper her view of the man.

  She had no reaction to that. After a short, taut silence, she glanced at the ceiling and said, “You and that blond barrel of dynamite . . . ?”

  “We’re partners.”

  “In what?”

  “Bounty hunting.”

  “And just what kind of bounty hunting are you doing here in San Gez . . . ?”

  Ivy let her voice trail off when boots pounded the veranda outside the closed front doors. The adobe building’s blown-out windows were shuttered against another Indian attack. Prophet picked up his barn blaster and thumbed one of the hammers back but lowered the gun when the door opened and Marshal Bill Hawkins walked in. He had his left arm in a sling, and a bandage showed through the ragged hole in the sleeve of his frock coat bored by the Gatling gun.

  Hawkins had been on patrol around the town. The nervous, angry-eyed little man was dust-rimed, as the wind was still blowing half the sand of the Sonoran Desert around in swirling clouds. He closed the door, paused before it, and spat grit from his lips, brushed it from his mustache, and beat his hat against his legs clad in brown wool, the knees silvered from wear.

  “Coffee, Bill?” Ivy asked him.

  “Yeah. Good and black.” As Ivy got up and walked back behind the bar, Hawkins glanced at her round backside, then walked toward Prophet, his nervous, perpetually frustrated eyes twitching. “Prophet, you and your boys . . . and gals . . . got this town in a peck of trouble. Not to mention its good citizens, of which I am one, in serious danger.”

  He pulled out a chair, set his Winchester on the table near Prophet’s own mini-arsenal, and sat in the chair with a grunt. He ran a weary hand through his curly hair poking up all over his head and glowered across the table at Prophet. “I didn’t ask this of Chacin or them others, because I knew I’d get run around the well house. I’m askin’ you ’cause you seem the only one a man could halfways trust.”

  Ivy set a mug of coffee down in front of the marshal. He glanced at her. “Thanks, Ivy.”

  “Don’t mention it, Bill. And don’t let me interrupt.” She smoothed her skirt down against her rump and the backs of her well-turned thighs—at least, Prophet guessed they were well turned in the vague way he’d thought about and appraised her, as men were wont to do—and sat down in her chair.

  Prophet shuttled his gaze from the woman to Marshal Hawkins. “I reckon you deserve to get the whole wheelbarrow-full.” He sipped his coffee, tilted the mug, and rolled the bottom edge of it around on the table. “My partner Miss Bonnyventure and me been trailin’ Lazzaro’s bunch. They hit a bank in Nogales, got away with sixteen thousand dollars in Mexican coin and paper. There’s a reward for the money and for the heads of each of Lazzaro’s bunch.”

  Hawkins said, “The blind woman . . . ?”

  “She’s part of ’em. And while she may be blind, don’t give her your back.”

  “Somehow, I knew that.”

  “Go on, Mr. Prophet,” Ivy urged, wanting to hear it all.

  “Call me Lou.” Prophet gave her a little cockeyed half smile, enjoying the distraction of sort of halfway flirting with the pretty, sexy woman despite the gravity of their situation. She merely pursed her lips and looked down at her coffee before lifting the mug to her mouth.

  The marshal glanced incredulously from Prophet to Ivy then back to Prophet. “Please, do go on, bounty man,” he said with a sarcastic edge.

  Prophet laid it all out for him and Miss Ivy—the loot, the Rurales, the Mojaves, and his stumbling across Bocangel in the dark desert, then finding the man’s son crucified on a cactus earlier that day.

  “So take the loot and git,” Hawkins growled.

  “I’d love to oblige you.” Prophet sipped his coffee. “But Lazzaro and Miss Delphi hid the loot in the desert. Somehow, we’re going to have to get the son of a bitch to tell us or show us where it is.”

  “Pistol-whip him till his teeth fall out. That oughta do it. Hell, I’ll do it for you if you’re squeamish.”

  “Wouldn’t work on Lazzaro. Besides, in his condition, he’d likely die. Where would that leave us?”

  “Hell, he’s probably gonna die, anyway. Doc Shackleford says he’s back and forth—mostly back. Lost too much blood.” The marshal sat back in his chair. “Maybe Miss Delphi can feel her way back to it. They say them sightless folks have another sense.”

  “They say it about Sugar, but her extra sense is mostly reserved for killing, not leading men back to money she’s helped steal.” Prophet picked up his rifle and set the butt on his thigh, opening the breech. “Them Injuns been causin’ a lot of trouble around here, have they?”

  He caught Ivy casting the marshal a furtive glance.

  Hawkins wrinkled his brows and said, “Not till you folks led ’em here. I doubt they had any idea San Gezo even had any folks left in it. Most everybody left with the mining company. There’s the well out there but the Injuns know of other tanks in these mountains that white men don’t.

  “There’s another well out on the other end of the range, and most of the long-lost desert rats and curly wolves use that one. This town, you
see, is cursed. Or so the Mexicans believe. Bad luck is as common here as the wind. We keep our heads kinda low here, so’s not to piss-burn the red men and attract attention. Kinda helps, havin’ the place cursed, you see.”

  “What’re you folks doin’ here?” Prophet said, sliding his curious gaze from the marshal to Ivy and back again. “Got nowhere else to go, do you? Don’t get along well with others?”

  “That’s about the size of it,” Ivy said. “The world has gone to hell in a handbasket. You can have it.” She lifted her cup and threw the last of her coffee back. “Well, then, I reckon I’ll try to catch some shut-eye. There’s a little stew and a few biscuits left.” She canted her head toward the bar. “On the warming rack.”

  “I’m full, Ivy—thanks,” the marshal said, casting another glance at the woman’s enticingly round backside.

  She walked halfway across the room, then stopped and cast an inscrutable look over her right shoulder, her eyes quickly meeting Prophet’s before flicking away. “I’m in room eighteen, top story . . . anyone needs anything.”

  Then she headed on up the stairs.

  Hawkins scowled at Prophet and said angrily, “That’s funny. I been here as long as you, Ivy, and I never until now knew which room you bedded down in up there.”

  Ivy said nothing. She merely turned at the second-story landing and continued on up the stairs. Hawkins snorted without mirth.

  Prophet looked again at the rifle sticking up from his thigh, opened and closed his hand around the neck of the stock.

  Hawkins gave a wolfish grin and raised his dark brown eyes to the hammered tin ceiling. “You steer clear of Miss Ivy, hear?”

  “Maybe you never knew what room she holes up in, because she don’t want you to know, Bill.” Prophet glanced sidelong at the riled marshal. “Ever think of that?”

  Hawkins jerked his chin down with menace. “Just steer clear, bounty man. Wouldn’t wanna catch a stray bullet here in San Gezo—now, would ya?”

  Prophet’s pale blue eyes sparked with mockery. “That’d be a black eye on your fair city, wouldn’t it?”