The Devil’s Laughter: A Lou Prophet Novel

by Peter Brandvold

  He’d prepared himself, but it still hit him like a loaded lumber dray, burning his throat as it went down and slammed against the bottom of his belly. He thought he heard it gurgle and steam down there. He’d drunk tiswin before and knew that if you drank too much you’d wake up later feeling like you’d been run over by a Baldwin locomotive screeching brakeless down a steep mountain.

  El Lightning stared at him expectantly, the skin above the bridge of his nose wrinkled slightly. So as not to offend that war chief, Prophet took another, deeper pull from the flask.

  He doubted the Indians intended to poison him. One, they hadn’t gotten what they wanted from him yet, and, two, no Mojave would ruin good tiswin. He drew a sharp breath through his teeth, trying to quell the fire smoldering on his tonsils, then corked the flask with the .45 casing and set it back against the girl’s lovely, jutting breasts. The tender nipples of both were outlined behind the deerskin swatch.

  “Nothin’ like tiswin,” Prophet said, giving the girl a wink, which she totally ignored as she got up and went over to kneel before El Lightning.

  “Not bad, huh, Lou? My squaw, I mean. She’s Yuma. Stole her from Chief White Horn before I gutted him for allowing his sons to steal horses from my own band.” El Lightning took a drink, then leaned over and kissed the girl full on the mouth. He set the flask against her breasts, fondled one of them, causing the girl to smile at him smolderingly, then waved her away.

  When she was gone, El Lightning stared at Prophet for a long time. The bounty hunter held the war chief’s gaze. He didn’t have the information the man wanted, and for that he knew he might very soon be saddling a cloud or enduring excruciating torture. He wasn’t sure how he was going to escape this wildcat lair, but he had to find a way or he’d die very slowly, Mojave style, screaming.

  “Now, then,” El Lightning said. “You’ve enjoyed my hospitality. Tell me where the gold is.”

  “How is it you have such a command of English, if you don’t mind my askin’?” Prophet said, trying to buy time. But he was also genuinely curious.

  El Lightning gave an indulgent smile. “I am only half of the blood. My mother was a Mejicana-Irish woman from Sonoita, captured by the Jicarilla and sold to the Mojave. She took me with her when she escaped. I was six. And all Mojave. I ran back when I was ten.” The war chief smiled with satisfaction. “And became the greatest warrior the Mojave people have ever known.”

  “Modest, too.”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind,” Prophet said. “You didn’t care for the reservation, I take it.”

  “I wouldn’t know. I never went. A select few of my people and I—braves who vowed to follow me and to fight the white men to do the death—hid in the Sierra Madre. We will take our land back. It will require time as well as arms and ammunition.” El Lightning bored holes in Prophet with his eyes. “And gold. It will take much gold for all the arms and ammunition we will need for the final revolution.”

  “I doubt Johnson has that much gold. Probably just robbed a bank along the border. They don’t grow banks very big along the border.”

  El Lightning shook his head. “I saw the strongbox through the spyglass I stole from an American cavalry officer I gutted and left to die howling in the desert.”

  He paused, making sure the threat struck home. It did. Prophet felt his intestines sort of coil and uncoil like disturbed snakes.

  “It was a large box and a heavy one, lashed to a big mule. Much gold. I will ask you only once more, my friend Prophet. Where is it? Buried out here? Or hidden in the saloon?”

  Prophet sighed, made a fateful expression. “I don’t suppose it would do any good to tell you I’m not a member of that gang. I’m a bounty hunter. I rode in here with some curly wolves I was tracking. We threw in together on account of you slingin’ lead and arrows at us. Ran into Johnson in San Gezo. Wouldn’t know him from Adam’s off ox. Never even heard of the man. West Coast brigand, it seems.”

  El Lightning merely arched a brow. The story had fallen on deaf ears.

  “Well, shit,” Prophet said, glancing at the three braves behind him, armed with his own guns and staring at him like a pack of hungry wolves. “I’m not sure what to tell you.”

  “Don’t bullshit me, Prophet. Where is the gold? Buried out here? Surely, they don’t have it with them in the saloon!”

  “I do believe that’s where they have it,” Prophet said, not knowing what else to say, merely trying to buy as much time as he could.

  He had no satisfactory answer to El Lightning’s question. All he could do was hem and haw and hope maybe one of the braves moved up close enough that he could go for a gun. If he was going to die, he’d die at some cost to the Mojaves. He also wanted to make it a fast death. Being slow roasted over an Mojave fire wasn’t how he wanted to be sent off to his pal, Ole Scratch.

  “You lie like a coyote, Lou.”

  “Now, hold on, El Light—”

  “They would have hid it or buried it outside where flames could not reach it if we burned the saloon.” The war chief grinned. “Have you ever seen a flaming Mojave arrow, Lou?”

  Prophet let his gaze flick toward the two long-barreled Colts protruding from El Lightning’s sash. “I’m gettin’ damn tired of all this palaver.” He gave a ragged sigh. “All right—here’s the information you’re wantin’. You know that little pink adobe at the far end of town?”

  “Si.”

  “We buried it in there—” Prophet cut the sentence off as he bolted off his heels, dove over the fire, and smashed his head and shoulders into El Lightning’s chest.

  The war chief gave a startled grunt and hit the ground on his back. Prophet wrapped his hands around both Colts’ walnut handles and rammed one of the guns into the war chief’s belly. El Lightning slashed that hand away before Prophet could cock the weapon. On the ground around him, shadows moved.

  Something hard slammed against his head. It felt as though his skull had been cleaved in two.

  The area around the fire pitched and bobbed around him, slowing blurring before turning completely, mercifully black.

  27

  THE FIRES OF hell were finally consuming Lou Prophet. He hadn’t counted on the heat being this intense. He also hadn’t counted on the fact that Ole Scratch would have laid him out on a rough stone slab when he should have been working.

  Where were the planet-sized coal piles?

  Where was the stove?

  Where was his shovel?

  There was only darkness and heat. A fierce, burning heat and the savage smashing of a giant sledgehammer against his exposed brain.

  He tried to squirm his way off the slab but he couldn’t move. His hands and feet were secure. He shook his head from side to side as the flames licked around his face, at times more intense on one area than another. He struggled. He groaned. His mouth was as dry as a swatch of old leather left out in the desert, his tongue so thick he had trouble keeping it in his mouth and out of the flames.

  Something sharp dug into his chest. He felt a warm draft, heard a guttural chortling.

  Finally, to his own surprise, he was able to open his eyes. The light was like razor-edged javelins impaling the orbs. He squeezed them shut, slitted them, the light slithering like burning kerosene under the lids. Inside the light, he saw the bird—a large, bald-headed bird with flat, BB-like eyes and a wretchedly hooked beak.

  The bird’s head suddenly turned red. The body jerked and sort of leaped in the air. A rifle barked somewhere in the distance as the bird flew off Prophet’s chest and landed in the red gravel to his left. Prophet’s head pounded. The back of his neck was stiff and sore. He lay his head back against the ground.

  Shortly, he heard the thuds of an approaching horse. He turned his head to the right, saw Mean and Ugly galloping toward him down a low rise. A small man with a straw sombrero and wearing flannel shirt and ragged denims sat in the saddle, holding a Spencer carbine in his right hand. Mean snorted and blew and for a second Prophet thought
the horse would trample him before coming to a skidding halt, spraying sand and gravel over the bounty hunter’s bare arms and chest.

  “Senor,” a man’s low voice lamented. “Ah, senor . . .”

  Prophet couldn’t see the man’s face against the brassy sky, but he recognized the voice of Senor Bocangel. Through one squinted eye he watched the short, wiry little Mexican swing awkwardly down from Mean’s back, a canteen in his hand. The horse snorted and stomped.

  As Bocangel dropped to one knee beside Prophet, the bounty hunter looked around, trying to get a better fix on his circumstances, his condition.

  Looking down his chest, he saw that he was naked. Not wearing a stitch. The skin across his long, broad body was blistered, brassy and mottled red. His ankles were strapped to stakes buried in the gravely ground. Same with his wrists.

  “Oh, senor,” Bocangel lamented again, popping the cork on the canteen, then cradling and lifting Prophet’s head with his left arm. “Here . . . fresh water from the well. Drink.”

  Prophet let some of the cool liquid dribble into his mouth. It was instantly refreshing. He could have drunk the entire canteen but just a few sips made him feel queasy, so he stopped.

  “How long I been out here?” he asked the Mexican.

  “The Mojaves pulled out day before yesterday. In the morning. They staked you out here just before they left, I think.” Bocangel shook his head. “You are very lucky. They must have seen Johnson pull out with the others and decided to follow them rather than torture you, as only Relampago can torture.”

  “I got all my parts?”

  “As far as I can tell, amigo.”

  “Untie me, will you?”

  “Si.” Bocangel set the canteen aside, slipped a folding knife from his right boot, and began sawing through the leather strap tying Prophet’s left wrist to its corresponding stake.

  When his last limb was free, Prophet rolled onto his side. His head did not hurt as bad as it had sometime over the past day and a half. It was mostly a dull ache in his jaws and behind his eyes. His face and the top half of his body—every inch of it—felt as though someone had raked him hard with coarse sandpaper.

  He looked around, ran the tip of his tongue across his lips. They were cracked and bloody from the burn, tasted like rock salt. The sun blasted down on him and Bocangel, who had stepped away to retrieve Prophet’s hat from where the Indians had scattered his clothes and his boots.

  “Put this on, amigo. Till we get you out of the sun, uh?”

  Prophet looked at the hat. For a second, it didn’t look like his. Nothing seemed right at the moment. He supposed the multiple brainings and being staked out to dry like a buffalo hide in the sun would do that to a fellow. Giving a ragged chuckle, he took the hat and snugged it down tight on his head.

  Mean and Ugly regarded him skeptically, twitching his ears. “Yeah, it’s me, hoss.” Prophet looked at Bocangel, who was limping tenderly around in the sand, his leg and arm wounds wrapped with strips of blood-spotted cloth. “Pull out . . .” Prophet frowned, squinting both eyes. “That what you said? Johnson pulled out?”

  “Si.”

  “And the Injuns?”

  “Si, senor. They followed the desperadoes. I saw them skirting the town a little after Johnson and the others left with the gold.”

  Prophet grabbed the chinstrap of Mean’s bridle and heaved himself to his feet, grunting and groaning and shifting his weight from one sunburned foot to the other. “What about my partner?”

  “La rubia?” Senor Bocangel shrugged. “She rode out, too, Lou. Musta thought you were dead, huh? As did I. I rode out here to hunt rabbits. I just thank God they left me in one piece. I thought they would kill me as I thought they had killed you.”

  Prophet didn’t hear that last. He was leaning against Mean and Ugly’s neck, trying to get his land legs back and working the information Bocangel had imparted through his sluggish brain. Louisa had gone with the outlaws.

  “Where was the gold?” he asked Bocangel.

  “In the cellar of the saloon.”

  “The storeroom . . .” Prophet remembered that he’d been vaguely puzzled that there had been no food stored in the room behind the main saloon hall, as there would have been if ten or so folks had actually been living in San Gezo. They’d have had to store a lot of food, making maybe two or three supply runs to San Diego every year.

  Only gold had been stored in that room. In the cellar beneath the wooden door in the floor.

  The naked bounty hunter turned to Bocangel standing beside him, holding his clothes like an offering. Prophet was badly sunburned, and he knew that raking clothes across his tender, throbbing flesh would aggravate the torment, but he couldn’t go after those killers naked. They had to have forced Louisa to join them. No way she would have gone willingly.

  He grabbed his summer-weight longhandles off the pile in Bocangel’s hands. Leaning back against his horse, he steeled himself, shook the underwear out, and raking air through his gritted teeth, began pulling the garment on. Witches’ fingers tricked out with razor-edged nails raked his tender skin, enflaming the fire.

  “You need some medicine, Lou.”

  “I need a bottle of tanglefoot’s what I need.”

  Grinding his molars, he finished dressing, even wrapped his holster and shell belt around his waist though his Colt was gone, as were his Winchester and gut shredder. First things first, he thought, swinging up onto Mean’s back, his denims feeling like hot irons against the insides of his thighs. Whiskey, guns, and ammunition.

  Then he’d fog Louisa’s trail, try to pull her out of the gang before she got whipsawed between them and El Lightning. He had no idea what was going through her head. It was most often impossible to know. Had they taken her, or had she gone willingly? Was Johnson’s gold too enticing for her?

  No. Prophet was ashamed for thinking it.

  He extended his hand to Bocangel, wincing. The Mexican shook his head and offered a wan smile. “No need, senor.” He led Mean by the horse’s bridle over to a rock. He stepped onto the rock, giving a wince of his own and sort of hoisted himself over Mean’s hindquarters.

  “Thanks,” Prophet said tightly.

  “De nada.”

  Prophet looked around. “Where are we?”

  “Town is that way, amigo.”

  Prophet touched spurs to Mean’s flanks, and the horse trotted southwest along the edge of a shallow, brush-lined wash. Fifteen minutes later, he and Bocangel entered town from its east end. Prophet checked the horse down and sat staring down the broad, main street littered with several dead Indians, twisted where they’d fallen in the battle that had been waging for the past couple of days.

  There was one dead horse. Prophet clucked Mean ahead, reined up near the dead mustang. Bocangel dismounted first and then Prophet swung tenderly down from Mean’s back.

  The butt of a carbine rifle stuck out from beneath the dead horse. Prophet knew that all the Indians’ rifles and pistols had been confiscated earlier by his own party, for the weapons themselves and also for the ammo they carried. He’d seen this carbine before, sticking out from beneath the horse, but he’d been too busy for bothering with a gun pinned beneath four hundred pounds of dead horse.

  He bothered with it now, grabbing the gun by its stock, planting one boot against the horse’s hip, and pulling. The gun slid free. Prophet worked the cocking lever until the gun was empty. He scowled at the five cartridges in the palm of his left hand.

  Bocangel extended his own carbine to the bounty hunter. “You may take my gun, Lou.”

  “No.” Prophet reloaded the Indian’s carbine, the stock of which had been decorated with brass rivets forming a wolf’s head. “I may not be back.”

  He slipped a goatskin water flask from around the horse’s neck, shook the flask to judge how much water was in it, and turned to Bocangel. “What’s your part in all this?”

  Bocangel shrugged. “My son and I guided Johnson and Senorita Knight south of the border. We
lived here in San Gezo, Joaquin and I. We had gone to San Diego for supplies. We prospected these mountains, you see, Lou. In exchange for our help, Johnson’s gang offered us a sackful of gold dust each, and . . . our lives.”

  The old Mexican turned his mouth corners down and stared out over the desert stretching off beyond the mountains. “Joaquin . . . he became greedy and stole a bar of the gold, and set off across the desert. I chased after him, to bring him back before Johnson realized he was gone. The Indians got to him first. They found the bar.”

  “And realized how much gold Johnson’s bunch must have been hauling.” Prophet stepped as lightly as he could to keep his burned skin from screaming.

  He slung the goatskin flask around his neck, slid the rifle into his saddle boot, and led Mean over to the covered stone well standing in the center of the main street. Bocangel walked across the street to the livery barn and disappeared inside. Prophet winched up a bucket of water, filled the goatskin flask as well as his own canteen, hung both from his saddle horn, and swung into the leather.

  Bocangel walked out of the livery barn carrying Prophet’s saddlebags and bedroll. “You will need these.”

  Prophet waited until the Mexican had strapped the bedroll behind his saddle cantle and set the saddlebags over the horse’s rump.

  “Which way’d they head?”

  “West across the mountains. There is a spring there, the last one for a hundred miles.”

  “Will they know where it is?”

  “They will follow the only trail.”

  He cast a backward glance at the Oasis Saloon and Dance Hall. Bocangel stood in the street behind him. Dust licked up around his boots in the rising breeze. A bad-luck wind in a cursed town.

  Prophet said, “Much obliged, senor.”

  “Go with God, Lou.”

  Prophet turned his head forward, put spurs to Mean’s flanks, and trotted for several yards along the street before galloping on out of San Gezo, following the trail snaking west.