The Devil’s Laughter: A Lou Prophet Novel

by Peter Brandvold

  Hawkins finished his coffee, stood, and plucked his Winchester off the table. “I’m goin’ to bed.”

  “Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” Prophet said as the man climbed the stairs. Everyone in San Gezo had taken a room in the saloon, it appeared. All except for Senor Bocangel.

  Prophet kicked back in his chair for a time, pondering the situation. Finally, he thought about Hawkins and Ivy and the others here in San Gezo.

  Damn curious they remained here, few as there were. With Bocangel, they numbered less than ten. Prophet could understand folks wanting to keep to themselves. He harbored much the same sentiment. You didn’t have to be around other humans long to get tired of their bullshit. And all men . . . and women, for that matter . . . owned a good dose of bullshit. He had enough of his own to make him want to hack his own head off with a rusty saw. Prophet preferred the company of his horse, mean and ugly as he was. . . .

  The bounty hunter heaved himself to his weary feet, grumbling at the marshal’s admonishment about Miss Ivy, and picked up his guns. He muttered an indignant curse and tramped up the stairs, making no effort to cushion his footsteps. He went on up to the third floor and rapped on the door bearing the tarnished-brass number 18.

  18

  “LOU?”

  Louisa lifted her head from her pillow, looking around, wondering where she was and where Prophet was. It took nearly half a minute for Chacin, Lazzaro, Sugar, the Indians to come back to her. When they did, she turned to see that the side of the double bed in Miss Ivy’s saloon that she’d reserved for Prophet hadn’t been slept in. The covers hadn’t been pulled back.

  The oil lamp on the room’s dresser sputtered in drafts scurrying in around the closed wooden shutters over the sole window. The room was small, its wooden walls papered in red with phony gold palm leaves that had long since faded to pink and peeled off in strips. The air was foul with mouse droppings. A chair with scrolled arms and back upholstered in green brocade sat in a corner. It had once been elegant, but now its seat was nearly worn through, and a chunk was missing from one of the arms. The back was stained with what appeared blood.

  A remnant from San Gezo’s last heyday.

  A washstand stood in front of the window. Awake now and feeling restless and wondering what time it was and what was going on outside—where the hell was Prophet?—Louisa threw the covers back and moved naked to the stand. She used the sliver of soap there and the sponge to give herself a quick sponge bath, then dried herself with a scrap of towel, picked her clothes up off the chair beside the bed, and dressed.

  She pulled her tarnished timepiece out of the pocket of her calico shirt and clicked open the lid in which rested a wedding picture of her mother and father. When the picture had been taken, they’d been younger than Louisa was now, her father boyishly handsome with his slicked-back hair parted in the middle, her mother too severe-looking for the happiness she must have been feeling. Married to the man she loved. About to buy a farm, start a family.

  She wore her thick blond hair elegantly back and parted and gathered in a fist-sized bun at the crown of her head. The thickness of her hair accented the fine, smooth Nordic planes of her face.

  Dead. Louisa’s parents and her brother and sisters. All dead.

  Louisa caressed the slightly water-stained photo with her thumb, and not allowing the remembered screams to enter her head as they did so often and with such persistence that she thought she’d surely go mad, she read the time.

  Three o’clock.

  The large building sounded eerily quiet in the wake of the wind. There was a freshness in the air that told her it must be raining.

  She returned the piece to her pocket. She adjusted her cartridge belt and pistols on her hips, made sure each gun was fully loaded, rolled each cylinder across her forearm, comforted by the smooth, certain sound of the clicks, and left the room.

  As she walked along the second-story hall, she heard snores from behind several scarred doors. Descending the stairs, she saw two Rurales filing through the saloon’s open front door, muttering to each other wearily as they headed for the bar. The room was lit with three or four lamps bracketed to posts or hanging from the ceiling, and in the flickering, buttery light she recognized Sergeant Frieri and one of the Rurale corporals whose name she’d never learned and had no interest in learning.

  “Senorita, what a pleasure,” Frieri said, standing at the bar while the corporal stood behind it, filling two tin cups with coffee from the large, blue pot that had been warming on the range.

  “The pleasure’s all mine, Sergeant,” Louisa responded, in no mood for the man. “What’s happening out there?”

  The sergeant leaned an elbow atop the bar. He was just barely tall enough to do so. He smiled at Louisa, showing the gap where his front teeth had been, and several crooked teeth in his lower jaw rimed with crusted coffee and tobacco. “It’s raining very softly. Perhaps we could take a walk together. The air is fresh.”

  “You need your balls busted again?”

  The sergeant closed his mouth, his long, reptilian eyes darkening. The corporal chuckled but stopped when Frieri fired a glance at him.

  “Pour me one of those,” she ordered the corporal.

  A little nervously, the man did as she’d ordered, and then, silently, he and Frieri took their coffee and filed on out to the veranda, where Louisa could hear them muttering as they sat in wicker chairs. They’d left one of the two doors open, and she could hear the welcome, soft patter of the cool rain that smelled like fresh chili peppers and almond extract. Somehow, the sound took the edge off the night though she knew that the Mojaves wouldn’t be waylaid by a little rain. Their superstitions might keep them from attacking until daylight, but rain wouldn’t stop them.

  Louisa carried her mug over to the table that she and Prophet had been sitting at earlier. Where was he? There were three empty stone mugs on the table. The one on the left side, nearest the sidewall, was turned to the left. Prophet always drank with his left hand, leaving the right one free for his gun.

  No telling whose the other two were. One might possibly have been Miss Ivy’s. Louisa had a keen sense about the attractions between men and women—especially between Prophet and other women. And she’d seen right off—she couldn’t have said how exactly—that there had been an attraction between Prophet and the pretty, cocoa-skinned saloon owner.

  “Getting you a tussle, eh, Lou?”

  Louisa sat down in his chair, curling one leg beneath her. She looked up when she heard someone descending the stairs. Sugar’s red braids and thick red locks bounced around her shoulders. She came down slowly, running her left hand lightly along the rail.

  She stopped at the bottom, stood there for a time, her head forward. “Louisa?”

  Louisa sipped her coffee. “How’d you know?”

  “Your own particular smell,” the blind woman said. “And the smell of coffee. No better pairing in this world.”

  “You want me to pour you a cup?”

  “That’d be nice.” The blind woman came forward slowly, tentatively. “Any chairs in my way?”

  Louisa got up and walked around to fetch the coffee. “Not if you stay close to the bar.”

  Sugar walked along the bar, brushing an arm along it before pulled out a chair from the table at which Louisa had been sitting and slacked into it. Louisa set the fresh cup of coffee down before Sugar, then sat in her own chair, leaning forward with her elbows on the table and lifting her own mug with both hands.

  “Good and hot,” Sugar said, sipping her mug of the brew. “Got chilly with the rain.”

  “Couldn’t sleep?”

  Sugar shook her head. “You?”

  “Nerves are a little jangled, I reckon.”

  “I didn’t think your nerves were ever jangled, Leona. Or . . . it’s Louisa, I guess, isn’t it?”

  Sugar sat back in her chair. She met Louisa’s gaze and it was like she was seeing her. There was a slight tightness in her features, a pensive cast to her
sightless eyes that wasn’t normally there.

  “Lazzaro kick off?”

  Sugar smiled. “You’d best be grateful he hasn’t.”

  “That’s a hard one.”

  Sugar leaned forward, sliding her hand across the table, closing her fingers around Louisa’s left forearm and squeezing. “You and I could go far together, Leona. Do you mind if I call you Leona? It’s hard to call you Louisa. To me, that’s not who you are.”

  “I’d just as soon you didn’t.”

  Sugar squeezed Louisa’s forearm harder. “Answer my question, dear.”

  “I already did.”

  Sugar released Louisa’s arm, lifted her coffee to her red lips, and took a sip. She sucked her upper lip, set her coffee down, and ran her hand down along the side of her head, fingering one of the two small, beaded braids hanging there. She canted her head slightly, and she looked like a young girl thinking out a troubling matter.

  “How many men have you killed, Leona?”

  Louisa hiked a shoulder. “I’d say upward of fifty. And every one deserved it. They all had prices on their heads. Most had killed women and children, just like your bunch.”

  “That makes it all right, does it? The fact that you’ve killed men with prices on their heads—who, as you say, deserved it?”

  Louisa shook her hair back from her face and gave Sugar a tolerant look. “Are you going to recite the Constitution to me now? Or the Bible . . . ?”

  “I’m just sayin—”

  “I know what you’re saying. That I’m a killer same as you. While I don’t deny my vengeful nature that does, indeed, border on vigilantism at times, I’m nothing like you. I kill those who’ve killed innocent folks, and I’m going to keep on with that until I die of old age or lead poisoning. You, sweet Sugar, are going to hang.”

  Sugar laughed, showing her white teeth. “Oh, come on, Leona! How are you going to take me and the boys in? Lazzaro can’t ride, and in case you hadn’t noticed, Chacin has made his own claim on our heads. Let’s not even get started on the Mojaves.”

  She sipped her coffee, swallowed, and laughed again, choking a little on the hot liquid. “None of us will get out of here alive. At least, not as a group. Now, two could take off south across the mountains, head for the Sea of Cortez . . .”

  “What about your beloved Tony?”

  A genuinely vexing expression clouded Sugar’s pretty, oval-shaped face. Tears glazed her eyes. She looked away. “Tony will be dead soon. The doc says he had to go too deep to find the bullet. Infection is likely.”

  She wiped a tear away from her cheek with the back of her hand, staring toward the shuttered window on her right. “I can find the money. If you lead me to the draw, I can find the money, Leona. In the dark, when no one else will track us and the Mojaves will be lying low. Then, just as I said . . .”

  “Stow it.”

  “Think about it?”

  Louisa stared at her, a troubled expression of her own furling the tawny brows over her hazel eyes. A recent memory washed over her. She looked at Sugar’s red lips, her sightless, cobalt eyes, her thick red hair caressing her slender, pale neck, hanging down past her shoulders. Her hands were long and slender, tanned by the sun. She thought of Lou upstairs with Miss Ivy, and a wretched feeling bit into her. A depression like a lead weight on her soul.

  He was not hers. She, not his. No one’s. Her life was a desert, and she was alone in it. Same as Sugar.

  She did not like the way her thoughts were suddenly angling. It made her head feel light, her lungs tight. Suddenly, she couldn’t get a breath.

  “Oh, Christ,” she heard herself mutter as she slid her chair back. She heaved herself out of it. As she moved around the table, she caught her boot on a leg, and stumbled, nudging the table with a noisy bark.

  “I need some air,” she said, moving to the door, striding through it and moving across the veranda and down the steps and into the soggy street.

  Behind her, Sugar ran the tip of her index finger along the rim of her coffee mug. The pensive little-girl expression had returned to her pretty face.

  Louisa strode across the street toward the livery barn. One of the Rurales was sitting between the open loft doors, smoking, dangling his legs with their high, black boots down over the barn front.

  “Ay, chiquita . . .” he muttered.

  Louisa ignored him. She strode down along the left side of the livery barn and past the rear paddock. There were no horses in the paddock; she and the others had stabled their mounts in the barn, where the Mojaves couldn’t so easily get at them.

  Behind the paddock was brush and rocks and small, ancient pueblos grown up with weeds and cactus, some nearly concealed by greasewood and mesquites. Louisa kept walking, angling through the desert. She did not know where she was going. She knew only that, despite the Mojave threat, she needed to walk and to breathe and get the cluttered, ugly thoughts out of her head.

  She moved between two hovels that were low, black shapes in the darkness and stopped. She’d heard the thudding crunch of a boot in gravel somewhere ahead. Her heart leaped, and she closed her hand over the grip of the .45 on her right hip. Before she could slide the gun from its holster, she heard another, louder footstep behind her.

  An arm whipped around her neck. A hand closed over her nose and mouth, jerking her back so suddenly that she released the pistol to break her fall. She hit the ground on her belly, was turned over by a brusque hand. Looking up, she saw the flat, round face of Sergeant Frieri grinning down at her, eyes bright, ambient light glistening off his rotting, wet gums.

  In Spanish, he said to someone behind him, “Hold your pistol on her while I give this Americana the fucking she deserves!”

  Louisa saw a gray-clad figure move up behind Frieri. At the same time, the sergeant slapped her with the back of his hand, and, giggling bizarrely, straddled her, squeezing her left breast with one hand while he began opening his fly with the other.

  Frieri froze. His grin faded. He loosed a little chirp as he grimaced. He shifted his weight slightly.

  “How deep you want me to shove this thing, Sergeant?”

  Louisa had slipped her short but razor-edged stiletto from the sheath sewn into the inside of her short deerskin jacket. Now she poked the tip against the man’s scrotum, steadily increasing the pressure.

  In Spanish, he rasped, “Put your gun away, Corporal, you fool! Help the lovely senorita to her feet! She seems to have fallen!”

  19

  PROPHET HAD A busier night than he’d intended. It seemed that Ivy Miller hadn’t had a good ash hauling in recent months and badly needed to satisfy her natural female desires and also to waylay the anxiety that Prophet’s gang had evoked when they’d led the Mojaves into her quiet little town.

  Prophet had been more than happy to distract her, as she did him, from their recent travails. She woke him around four thirty for one last tussle before she dressed and headed downstairs to begin her morning saloon chores.

  Prophet fell back asleep for a time, feeling he’d just been run over by a whole cavvy of Mojave war ponies. Then, hearing birds chirping outside and seeing that gray morning light was pushing between the cracks in the shutter closed over the window of Ivy’s room, rose up from the rumpled bed with a groan.

  He stumbled naked to the shutter, drew it open, and stared down into the broad main street. The sun was up but hidden behind low, gray clouds. The wind had resumed its harassment of this high bench, groaning under the saloon’s eaves and tossing dust and tumbleweeds along the street. Bad luck was as common as the wind in San Gezo. A couple of Chacin’s men were stationed up and down the trace, and someone—Prophet couldn’t tell who from this distance—was manning the Gatling gun in the barn loft on the street’s other side.

  According to the group’s agreement, five guards would stay on watch all night with orders to shoot twice quickly if anything looked amiss. No shots had been fired. The Indians must have stayed hunkered down out in the desert, but Prophet figure
d they’d attack again soon. He was a little surprised they hadn’t at first light.

  He drank some water from his canteen, then corked the flask and went around the nicely appointed room, gathering his clothes that Ivy had tossed every which way when she’d undressed him. She, however, hadn’t been wearing a stitch when she’d answered his knock on the door, and he’d found her body to be not only lush and ripe but ready.

  Prophet wrapped his shell belt around his waist, made sure his Colt showed brass in all six chambers, then hooked his shotgun over his neck, picked up his rifle, and headed on into the hall, gently closing Ivy’s door behind him.

  Most of the doors up and down the hall were closed. A window on each end of the hall lent a murky, gray light and revealed the dull red carpet runner on the floor. As he strode along the hall toward the stairs, he saw that the last door on the right was open a foot.

  He passed the door, glancing inside, and stopped. He backed up one step and turned to the door, frowning.

  Through the one-foot gap he could see Sergeant Frieri lying on a broad, canopied bed. The ugly little Rurale looked so out of place in the frilly room with the four-poster bed, quilted bed covers, lace-edged canopy and dark blue carpet trimmed with red roses that Prophet almost loosed a chuckle.

  Then his scowl deepened, and he blinked his eyes as if to clear them.

  Frieri’s dark head poked up above the bedcovers. His eyes were open. So, too, was the man’s mouth. His lips were stretched back from his face in a grimace. Beside him, the plump redheaded whore, Tulsa St. James, lay on her side, facing the sergeant, her hands sandwiched together between her right cheek and her silk-covered pillow. The whore was snoring very softly, making her lips flutter.

  Prophet nudged the door open another two feet with his rifle barrel and stepped softly inside, trying to keep his spurs from chinging. On a table beside Frieri’s side of the bed were two empty bottles and two empty shot glasses. Prophet walked over to the bed and stared down at Sergeant Frieri.

  The man’s covers were pulled down to his upper chest, exposing the long, deep gash across his throat and from which thick, dark red blood had oozed out onto his chest, staining the quilts.