The Devil’s Laughter: A Lou Prophet Novel

by Peter Brandvold

  Prophet raked a thumbnail down his beard stubble, adjusted his Colt thonged on his thigh, and tramped back toward the barn. He paused when he saw old Dad Conway standing behind the barn, staring suspiciously at Prophet and Louisa, fingering his grizzled chin whiskers. He had an old carbine hanging down his back by a rope lanyard, and a pistol strapped to his leg.

  “What’re you two doin’ out there?” he asked.

  “Lookin’ around, Dad,” Prophet said, narrowing his own suspicious eye. “That trouble you?”

  The slouch-shouldered old man jerked his head back defensively. “Why should I be troubled if you’re out lookin’ to get yourselves perforated by Mojave arrows?”

  “How you holdin’ up, Dad?” Louisa asked the oldster. “This has been a lot of trouble for the old and feeble.”

  The old man bunched his lips and glared at the blond bounty hunter. “I’ll show you old and feeble, you little—!”

  “What’s that sticking out of your pocket there?” Prophet interrupted him.

  “Pocket where?”

  “That pocket there!” Prophet walked up and shoved his hand toward the bone-handled knife sticking out of the man’s patched duck trousers.

  Dad jerked back, nearly stumbling, as he closed his hand over the pocket containing the knife. “Git away from me, damn ya!”

  “Let me see the knife, Dad.”

  “No!”

  Prophet towered over the pale, wizened oldster with long, coarse gray whiskers hanging from his knobby chin. “You ain’t gonna make me throw you down and hogtie you, now, are you? Ain’t you a little old for such silliness?”

  Dad scowled up at Prophet, his eyes flicking across the bounty hunter’s broad neck and rounded shoulders that drew his shirt taut across his muscular chest. He twitched a nostril and sucked his teeth, then reluctantly reached a gnarled, arthritic hand into the pocket and pulled out the folding barlow knife.

  “So what?” The old man jutted his chin belligerently. “I see you carry a knife. Why can’t I carry a knife?”

  Prophet took the barlow knife out of the old man’s hand and opened it. He inspected the blade, saw no blood even down around where the blade folded into the handle, and closed it. “I’m just wonderin’ if it could have been you who slit the throat of the Rurale corporal manning the Gatling gun . . . oh, say, a half hour to an hour ago. Blood was still comin’ out of him when me and Louisa found him.”

  “I didn’t cut no Rurale’s throat, and I’m hurt that you’d accuse me. Hell, I can’t even climb up the veranda steps without gettin’ all dizzy an’ short of breath! How could I kill a young man?”

  He stuffed the knife back down in his pocket, spat a wad of chew into a cholla clump, and grumbled as he ambled over to the dilapidated privy. He glanced once more at Prophet and Louisa as he jerked the door open. “Me? Cut a man’s throat?”

  He gave a shrill, caustic chuff, then stepped up into the privy with a grunt and pulled the door closed behind him. The locking nail clattered as he pushed it through its hasp.

  “He’s got a point, Lou,” Louisa said.

  “Yeah, I reckon. No blood on the blade, neither.” Prophet turned around to stare south, doffing his hat and scratching the back of his head. “Throat cutters, Injuns, Rurales, curly wolves—I swear, I do believe the Devil’s laughin’ at me. My life ain’t s’posed to be this hard.”

  “Life’s always hard, Lou. You just prefer to ignore it and drink and diddle easy women.”

  Prophet glanced at her. She glanced away from him quickly, tightened her face and narrowed her eyes. “That ain’t none of your business,” he said, piqued.

  “What ain’t?”

  “You know what I’m talkin’ about, Miss Huffy Pants.”

  Prophet swung around and, deeply frustrated over everything that had happened over the past week, strode on back to the barn. He retrieved the Gatling gun as well as his rifle from the loft and hauled the machine gun across the street.

  Several of the other men were standing at different points along both sides of the main street and near the well, dusters or the bell bottoms of their charro slacks blowing in the endless wind. They eyed Prophet with mute interest as he climbed the veranda steps. He hauled the Gatling gun inside the saloon and looked around.

  “What the hell you doing, Prophet?” Chacin said from a table in the room’s shadows. He sat with a tequila bottle and a shot glass on the table beside him.

  “Got more use for this thing over here, where we can keep a close eye on it,” Prophet said, setting the Gatling down against the front wall and spreading the wooden legs of its tripod.

  Chacin sipped from his shot glass and winced, his back wound grieving him. “I had a man keeping an eye on it.”

  “Found your man grinning through his throat. Buried him to keep predators out of the barn.”

  Chacin dipped his chin and glowered suspiciously at the bounty hunter, who turned the Gatling gun toward the blown-out front window right of the doors. Prophet sat down at a table near the gun and glanced at Ivy standing at the bar chopping a wild onion for stew.

  She was looking at him between the wings of her long, curly black hair jostling about her pretty, chocolate-colored face with its lustrous but fateful black eyes.

  “Got any coffee over there?” Prophet asked her.

  She set the knife and onion down on the chopping board and turned to fill a stone mug. She brought it over to Prophet, set it down on the table. Prophet took a whiff of the steam. As Ivy raked her intimate gaze across Prophet once quickly, then turned back to the bar, he said, “I sure would admire to know who’s killin’ the captain’s men.”

  He said it nonchalantly, as though he were merely speaking to himself.

  Chacin turned to the woman and curled his upper lip. “Si.” His voice had a growl in it. “Perhaps an Indian.”

  “An Indian would have used the gun on us, or at least taken the ammo.”

  “How do you know it ain’t the captain himself,” Ivy said, returning to the cutting board. “How do you know it ain’t your blond partner, or Red Snake or Kiljoy?”

  “Well, I know it ain’t Louisa,” Prophet said, sipping his coffee and staring out the blown-out window with ragged bits of glass sticking out of its frame. Louisa herself was standing at the livery barn’s right front corner, holding her carbine and looking around, the wind blowing her hair.

  “She ain’t that messy,” Prophet continued. “As for Red Snake or Kiljoy—hell, I don’t know. I reckon it could have been them. Don’t know why they’d go about it so underhanded, though. Those rannies’re cold-steel artists, not blade men. And I thought we were all gettin’ along so good.”

  “Hawkins.” Chacin threw back the last of his tequila shot, lifted his pistol from the table before him, and spun the cylinder across his forearm.

  “Now, don’t get owly, Captain,” Prophet warned. “As long as them Injuns outnumber us, we’re gonna need every gun we got.”

  “And let Hawkins and the other citizens of San Gezo knock us off one at a time?”

  “Now, hold on!” Ivy said, holding her hands up—one holding the onion, the other the knife. She glanced at the knife, and her face turned darker. “I chop food, not men’s throats. At least, I haven’t had to cut a man’s throat in several years now.”

  She continued chopping the onion, tossing it into a heavy iron stew pot and staring with wry bemusement across the room at Prophet.

  Prophet snorted, sat back in his chair, sipped his coffee, then dug into his shirt pocket for his makings sack. Slowly, thoughtfully, he plucked his cigarette papers out of the sack and began rolling a smoke.

  Who had killed Frieri?

  Who had killed the corporal?

  Why?

  The afternoon drew on. Prophet sat in the chair near the Gatling gun, ready to fire at the first sign of an Indian attack. The others patrolled the streets, visiting the saloon now and then for coffee or a drink of something stiffer, or for the stew of canned meat and tomatoes
that Ivy had bubbling on her range.

  Chacin and Sugar Delphi were the only two who remained in the saloon, Sugar quietly playing a game of solitaire with marked cards. Chacin drank and walked to each window from time to time, holding his long-barreled pistol as he anxiously looked out at the street. The wound in his back made him lean slightly forward and wince.

  The wind sawed and wheezed. It blew sand through the broken windows and moaned under the eaves. It was a hot, dry wind, and by mid-afternoon it had tattered Prophet’s nerves the way lightning frays the limbs of a ponderosa pine.

  He began to side with Louisa. Maybe he and the blond Vengeance Queen should pull foot out of San Gezo, after all. But even if they could bring themselves to abandon the money and the brigands, the Indians had them trapped here. First, they had to neutralize the Indian threat. Then they had to find the stolen loot and take down Red Snake, Kiljoy, and Sugar. And Lazzaro, if he was still alive.

  The wind bounced tumbleweeds along the street and beneath the rotting hitchracks, sounding like the Devil having a tail-wagging good time on a Dodge City Friday night. The deal was that Prophet would have the good times between a modicum of relatively easy work stints, hunting outlaws. Ole Scratch appeared to be reneging on his deal, the bastard. This here job wasn’t easy at all.

  The big bounty hunter’s chance of getting himself and Louisa out of this powder keg was very slim indeed, and he was still relatively young. If he cashed in his chips now, he’d be missing out on years of easy women and good times.

  When Louisa came in for a drink, he said, “Take over here, will you, killer?”

  “What’re you gonna do?”

  “Haven’t seen Lazzaro or Senor Bocangel in a while,” Prophet said, donning his hat and shouldering his rifle. “Gonna go up and see if there’s anything I can do to make ’em more comfortable.”

  Sugar called as Prophet started up the stairs, “Best make sure my honey ain’t grinnin’ with his throat when you leave him, bounty hunter.” She kept peeling cards off the deck in her left hand and arranging them on the table. “I’ll be checking.”

  23

  PROPHET HAD JUST turned off the stairs and started down the second-story hall when he heard a man grunting and cursing farther down the dingy corridor that smelled of rotting wood, coal oil, and sweat. A woman was groaning and also cursing. Bedsprings were squawking raucously, rhythmically.

  Prophet continued along the hall, walking on the balls of his feet. Ahead and on his right, a door stood cracked, showing a vertical line of gray light.

  “Goddamnit!” the man shouted suddenly.

  There was the loud whump! of a heavy body hitting the floor. Prophet felt the floor quake beneath his boots. The woman yelped, “Ah-ohh . . . damn youuuu!”

  “Bitch!”

  “You got no . . . you got no call to—” The woman broke herself off. Prophet stepped up to the crack in the door and peered into the room.

  Just beyond the door, Miss Tulsa was on the floor, naked as a jaybird, her soft, pale back with a heavy roll of flesh around her middle facing Prophet. Her red hair was piled loosely atop her head. Cursing and crying, she crawled on hands and knees to a chair between a washstand and the bed upon which Tony Lazzaro was writhing naked amidst the mess of twisted sheets and a quilt. He was clutching his bloody side with one hand, the blood dribbling from between his fingers and staining the bed.

  “I’ll teach you to treat Miss Tulsa like she was dirt, you limp-dicked son of a bitch!”

  The whore had grabbed an ivory-gripped pistol from Lazzaro’s shell belt. She had it in both hands now, and she cursed again as she ratcheted back the hammer. Lazzaro stared at her fearfully, eyes widening as he rolled back against the wall and raised his hands palm out.

  “I’ll take that,” Prophet said, reaching over the whore’s head and closing his hands around the Smith & Wesson, wedging his left thumb between the gun and the cocked hammer.

  The whore screamed as Prophet pulled the gun out of her hands, and depressed the hammer. She glared angrily up at Prophet. “Damn you—I’m gonna kill that lizard. Miss Tulsa will not be treated this way! I’m tellin’ Ivy!”

  “Fair enough.” Prophet flicked the Smithy’s loading gate open and shook the gun as he rolled the cylinder, the shells clinking and rolling around the floor. “You best go downstairs, Miss Tulsa. Obviously, your services are wasted in here.”

  “She opened my wound!” Lazzaro said, wincing and pressing one of the bed’s two pillows to his side. “Fetch Sugar for me, will you, Proph?”

  Prophet looked at Miss Tulsa stumbling around heavy, naked, and breathless, gathering her clothes from the floor. “Send Sugar when you get downstairs, Tulsa.”

  “Fuck you!” Tulsa screeched at the bloody outlaw as she threw open the door, holding her clothes against her pillowy breasts and glaring over her shoulder at Prophet. “And fuck you, too, bounty hunter!”

  As the whore stomped out of the room and headed down the hall toward her own digs, Prophet said, “Don’t worry, Tony. I’ll send Sugar.” He grinned and winked. “Wanna make sure you’re well taken care of.”

  “You better, damnit!”

  “Feelin’ all right, ain’t ya? I mean besides a little lost blood an’ all?”

  Lazzaro squeezed his eyes closed, panting as he pressed the pillow against his side. “I’m feelin’ just fine.”

  “If you think you’ll be kickin’ off soon,” Prophet said, “you might as well go ahead and tell ole Lou where you had Sugar bury the loot. I mean, why let Red Snake and Kiljoy get it all? They’ll just head on down to Mexico and blow it on cheap whores.”

  Lazzaro scowled at Prophet, hardening his jaws. “Just send Sugar.”

  “All right.”

  Prophet went out and yelled down the stairs, summoning Sugar to Lazzaro’s room, then walked down the second-story hall once more. He knew that Senor Bocangel was in room 8, on the left side of the hall and one door down from where Lazzaro was groaning and making the bedsprings squawk.

  He rapped two knuckles against the door panel. No response. He stared at the scarred panel, feeling a tightening of apprehension.

  Could Senor Bocangel have met the same fate as Frieri and the corporal? Prophet released the keeper thong from over his pistol hammer and rapped on the door once more.

  Still nothing.

  Prophet turned the knob. There being no locks on any of the saloon’s doors, Prophet heard the latch click. He shoved the door wide, standing in the opening with his right hand on his Colt, his Winchester propped on his left shoulder. The door stopped before it would have struck the wall. Bocangel lay on the bed against the far wall, beneath a curtained window that the wind was battering.

  Prophet walked forward.

  Bocangel lay beneath a threadbare white sheet drawn up to his chin. His wool shirt was draped over the back of the room’s sole chair angled near the bed. Bocangel was snoring softly through half-parted lips, eyes squeezed shut. Out cold. On the dresser against the left wall were several bloody cloths and a flat, corked bottle of liquid paregoric that the sawbones had left.

  No wonder the Mexican was out cold. The tension knot in Prophet’s belly eased, replaced with frustration.

  He’d wanted to see if he could learn from Bocangel why’d he’d ambushed Prophet earlier. He had a sneaking suspicion that the cause of the Mexican’s desperate move was also at the heart of the trouble here in San Gezo. At least the trouble that had been here when Prophet and his mismatched party had arrived ahead of the Indians.

  Bocangel hadn’t wanted Prophet to visit the mine. He had a feeling the others in the town didn’t, either.

  Prophet went out and gently closed the door, opening and closing his hand around the neck of the Winchester propped now on his right shoulder. He went over and looked out the window at the end of the hall on his left. The wind-blown grit gave the light an orangish, washed-out appearance. It ticked against the window and tossed the brittle desert shrubs this way and that.


  From this angle, he could see the gap between the hotel and the next, smaller building to the east. He could also see the main street off to his far right. Red Snake Corbin was leaning up against a porch post on the street’s far side, looking around warily for Indians and smoking a quirley, which he shielded with the palm of his hand. His long duster blew about his skinny legs clad in dusty black denim.

  Marshal Bill Hawkins was just now walking up from between two buildings near Red Snake, holding a rifle up high across his chest, his black clawhammer coat blowing out like a giant bat’s wing in the wind. Hawkins and the other townsmen would be sticking close to the saloon, since that seemed to be the Indians’ target. If Prophet was careful, he could make his way out of the town without being seen by anyone.

  Including the Mojaves, he hoped.

  A foolish move, probably. But again he felt a strong pull toward the mine.

  He walked back downstairs and slipped through the saloon’s rear door without being seen. Kiljoy was outside, hunkered on one knee, smoking and looking ridiculous with the bandage around his face but appearing to be keeping a watchful eye out for Mojaves. He couldn’t care less what Prophet was up to. The two glanced at each other coldly.

  “Nice day for a walk,” Kiljoy said.

  “Yeah, ain’t it.”

  Snugging his hat down tight on his head, Prophet made his way east of the hotel, walking along behind the other buildings until the rugged desert opened before him. Staying out of sight from the town, he retraced his earlier steps, cutting up the arroyo in which the Mojave brave had drilled his boot heel.

  He moved carefully, every two or three steps swinging nearly completely around with his rifle aimed out from his hip, watching for bushwhacking braves. He saw nothing but a few spiders, jackrabbits, one coyote, and blowing weeds and dust as he made his way past where Senor Bocangel had tried to drill him.

  Striding along the narrow wash, he moved around the bend, swinging east. Ahead, the canyon walls fell back on both sides, broadening the canyon floor. The walls rose higher.

  The wagon trail leading from the town to the mine was on his left—deeply grooved from the heavy, double-shod wheels of the ore drays. But from his vantage in the brush and rocks along the trail, he could see no fresh tracks. The grooves were partly filled in with dust and sand and bits of weeds. Tumbleweeds littered the trail, and creosote, yucca, and jimsonweed had grown up between the ruts.