The Corazon town marshal, Maxwell Utter, wouldn’t be much help in keeping Blanco behind bars. Utter had been confined to a wheelchair for the past two years, after getting backshot by rustlers late one night on the desert, but he’d been too stubborn to turn in his badge. And, anyway, no one else had wanted the job, so it had remained Utter’s.
Utter was sided by his Mexican deputy, Ivano Rubriz. It was said that Utter and Rubriz had ridden the wrong side of the law down in Mexico twenty years ago and more, and while Rubriz still wore the bark of an old border bandito, he wasn’t much of a lawman. For one thing, he was old. Even older than Utter, who was pushing sixty. For another, he drank the worm off the bottom of a tequila bottle every night on the Mex side of Corazon.
No, Prophet and Louisa would find little help in Corazon after Sam Metalious learned of his son’s capture. Prophet would just as soon skirt the town altogether, but since Blanco had robbed the bank there and killed several of the town’s citizens, that was where he belonged. For official arraignment and so the mothers and widows of his victims could spit on him, anyway. Then Prophet would convince Utter that it would be in his and his town’s own best interest that Blanco be taken to Albuquerque for trial.
Prophet mashed his cigarette stub in the dirt and strolled lazily back along the dark main street to the saloon, a couple of the downstairs windows of which shone with candle and firelight. He’d set his and Louisa’s gear on the porch. Now he hauled it all inside and found Louisa kicked back in one chair, boots crossed on one another, sipping from a tin coffee cup. A black pot chugged on a rock in the fire-place, fronting the flames.
Louisa had Blanco sitting on the floor, his back against a ceiling joist from which a lantern with a blackened mantle flickered. His ankles were cuffed together, the chain of the cuffs in turn cuffed to a table. Blanco sat on his saddle blanket, which was bloody from the nasty hole in the extreme inside of his ass, about two inches shy of Louisa’s target area. He had a bottle of whiskey in one hand, head tipped back against the post, groaning.
The mystery girl remained on the couch, only now she had a sack of cracked corn beneath her head. Louisa had also thrown a blanket over her. The girl’s face was tipped to one side, and she had a slightly pained look on her waifish young face.
“Nothing out of her yet?”
Louisa shook her head and held her smoking cup to her lips. “Just him.” She tossed her head to the groaning, grunting Blanco, who seemed to be staring at the wall above the fieldstone hearth. “I’m fixing to shoot him, put him out of all of our miseries.”
“Tempting,” Prophet admitted. “But the hangman needs to eat, too.”
“I won’t hang.” Blanco tipped his bottle back, jerked it down, and swallowed hard. “You two are the ones gonna hang ... soon as my pa and his boys get wind of what you done to me.”
“I came a good six inches of giving you what you deserve, Blanco.” Louisa’s voice was liquid smooth. “If you hadn’t jerked when Proph shot Santee ...”
Blanco scowled at her, apparently thinking that over. He gave a shudder, as though chilled. “Speakin’ of which, I hate to be a pest an’ all, but I could use some medical attention. My old man’s gonna be doubly piss-burned if you bleed me out.”
As he kicked a chair out and sagged into it, Prophet said dryly, “Louisa, you want the honors?”
“No, no—just forget it!” Blanco said, his odd gray-yellow eyes snapping wide. “I reckon I’ll live till we make it back to town.” He stared drunkenly off, a cunning light entering his gaze. “Question is, will you two?”
Prophet scowled at him. He wondered if Blanco had been intending on meeting up with his old man here in Gold Nugget. Probably not. If Sam “Man-Killin’” Metalious had been in on this scheme, he’d likely have been in on it from the get-go. And, since Sam’s bunch had no fear of the Corazon law, they’d have likely headed for the Metalious Ranch, which, Prophet had learned, was appropriately called the Triple 6, with the sign of the devil blazed into the hindquarters of its beeves. When it had beeves, that was, and the place’s sole purpose wasn’t as an outlaw headquarters.
While the pie-eyed Blanco stared dreamily into the fire, Prophet grabbed one of the two whiskey bottles off the table and filled a shot glass. He threw back the shot, enjoying the burn in his belly and the instant filing of his weary edge, and refilled the glass.
He sat back in his chair, saw the bloodstain on Louisa’s skirt.
“You need ole Doc Prophet to take a look at that?”
She looked tired, depressed, which is how she often looked after a hard day of tracking and killing. It wasn’t the killing that depressed her. It was having it done and over with. She shook her head.
“Come on,” Prophet said, leaning forward and patting her knee. “Let me see.”
Louisa rolled her eyes toward him. Then she glanced at the finally quiet Blanco before shuttling her gaze to the ceiling and lifting her boots from her chair. “Upstairs.”
Prophet looked at the mystery girl. Still sound asleep. Likely would be till morning at the very earliest. Even if she was partnered up with Blanco, she hadn’t feigned that bleeding goose egg on her head. Blanco himself wasn’t going anywhere, and if he tried, Prophet would hear the chair skidding around the worn floor puncheons.
“All right.”
Louisa grabbed her saddlebags. Prophet grabbed his own and those that contained the loot, closed and locked the saloon’s outside doors, and followed her up the broad, splintered stairs at the back of the room.
On the second floor, Prophet struck a match on his holster, and held it out until they found a room that hadn’t been stripped bare. There was only a bed, one leg propped on a Sears & Roebuck catalogue, and a stained mattress. Louisa tossed her bedroll onto the bed. As she sat gingerly down, Prophet set one pouch of the moneybags beneath her head.
“Might as well make use of the loot. Lord knows we ain’t gonna get much else out of it.”
“We don’t need money for every job, Lou.” Louisa eased her right leg onto the bed with a sigh. “Just the satisfaction of retrieving it, and bringing to justice those who stole it, is enough for me.”
“You don’t have gambling debts. I racked up quite a bill, last coupla months we was in Denver.”
“You were in Denver. I lit out—remember?”
“Yeah, I remember. You couldn’t stand the noise. And your delicate stomach couldn’t stand the stench of cow shit wafting up from the stockyards.”
“Fetid place. When a town gets that big, all the people should be run out of it, and it should be burned to the ground. Let the prairie claim it for ten years before anyone’s allowed to return.”
“Now, that’s forward thinkin’.”
Prophet removed a whiskey bottle and a clean, calico bandanna from his saddlebags, which he’d set with his rifle on the floor near his feet, and sat down on the edge of the bed. Outside, the coyotes were yammering much closer to town than they were a few minutes ago. The smell of death had drawn them to Blanco’s friends. Prophet gave a wry snort as he heard them out there, snarling and fighting over the carrion. A couple of the older ones were really giving the what-for to the pups.
Prophet uncorked the bottle, took a long pull, then propped the whiskey between his legs. He grabbed Louisa’s right boot by the toe and heel, jerked it off, and dropped it on the floor. He did the same with the left.
“Take my socks off,” she ordered.
“No. Your feet stink.”
“Not half as bad as yours. If you wanna play doctor with me, Mr. Prophet, you gotta do the dirty work, too.”
When he’d removed her socks, exaggerating the smell by breathing through his bicep, he lifted her right foot and pressed his lips to it. She gazed down at him benevolently, like a princess thoroughly enjoying the ministrations of her servant boy.
Prophet set her tender, white foot back down on the bed and slid the hems of her skirt and petticoat slowly up her slender right leg until he’d exposed the bloody
bandanna she’d wrapped around the wound. The bloody wrap contrasted with the long, clean perfection of her leg that was neither too skinny nor owned a scrap of excess flesh.
A more perfect appendage, Prophet had never seen.
He untied the wrap and lowered his head to scrutinize the wound. It wasn’t exactly a graze, but the bullet had gone all the way through, leaving ragged entrance and exit wounds. It had plowed through about three inches of Louisa’s flesh, and Prophet burned at the thought of a man’s bullet harming this woman-child he’d taken under his wing so long ago and whom he felt protective of, as though she were his woman—but he doubted Louisa would ever belong to any man, least of all him.
Prophet rolled his eyes up to her face. Resting her head back against the money pouch, she was staring at the ceiling as though trying to decipher words written there in a foreign tongue.
“That hurts, don’t it?”
Louisa kept her eyes on the ceiling and hiked a shoulder.
“Well, this is gonna inflame it some.”
“I’m ready.”
“You sure you don’t want a shot first?”
Louisa shook her head.
“All right, then.” Prophet touched the lip of the bottle to the ragged edge of the wound and poured a shot’s worth into the hole.
Louisa sucked a sharp breath and stiffened, pointing her chin at the ceiling, curling her toes and hardening her eyes. Corking the bottle, he picked up the clean calico bandanna and began dabbing gently at the wound with a corner, soaking up the blood that the whiskey had thinned out. He redampened the cloth from the bottle, and touched it to the wound once more. Once more, Louisa sucked a breath and stiffened, keeping her wide eyes at the ceiling, steeling herself against the burn.
When Prophet had cleaned the entrance hole, he had her lift her knee so he could begin cleaning the exit wound, first soaking it with the whiskey-drenched bandanna, then carefully dabbing until the blood was gone and only the ragged hole, about as big around as the tip of his index finger, remained.
“Ain’t gonna stitch it,” Prophet said, lowering his head to inspect both wounds in turn, glad he’d gotten the bleeding stopped. “Best to let it breathe. But we gotta keep it clean, and that means a whiskey bath regular-like.”
“How ’bout twice a day?”
“Three times. Any arguments, we’ll go to four times a day.” Prophet winked at her, then reached under her skirt, grabbed the hem of her cotton petticoat, and ripped off a foot-long strip.
When he’d wrapped the bandage around her leg, knotting it tight enough to keep the wounds closed but not tight enough to cut off her circulation, he kissed her knee.
“Good as new.”
She reached down and fingered the collar of his buckskin shirt. “You learn about doctorin’ in the war?”
“Nope. I didn’t learn about nothin’ in the war except killin’. I learned doctorin’ on the runnin’ scout out here, west of the Miss’ippi, after I went home to Georgia and found there wasn’t nothing there but one-legged cousins and burned fields.”
“Come up here.”
Prophet, who’d propped himself over her bandaged leg, now crabbed up until his head was six inches from hers and his chest was pressed against hers. Her hazel eyes held his. They were varnished hard with concentration, with want, old-fashioned carnal need. Clutching the front of his shirt with her left fist, she removed his hat with her right, held it out away from the bed, and dropped it onto the floor.
She ran both hands brusquely through his hair, staring at him with that stubborn need, pulling his ears, grinding against him, grunting softly. Prophet lowered his head to hers, closed his mouth over her own. He kissed her hard for a long time, urgently, entangling his tongue with hers, reaching under her serape, pulling her calico shirttails up out of her skirt, and caressing her firm breasts until her nipples ridged against his palm.
He lifted the serape and her shirt to her neck, baring both tender, white orbs, and kissed the fully budded nipple of each.
Groaning and squirming around beneath him like a bobcat in season, murmuring hotly in his ears, she continued to run her hands urgently through his hair and across his neck, wrapping her legs tightly around him. After a time, when neither could wait longer, he stood and quickly shucked out of his clothes including his wash-worn balbriggans, dropped down between her spread, quivering knees, and entangled himself in her limbs.
They moved together with a near-savage fulfilling of their physical urges until, exhausted, they lay slumped together breathless, naked, and sweating.
Downstairs, someone screamed.
5
PROPHET WAS OUT of bed like a human lightning bolt, stumbling around in the candlelight to find his hastily discarded balbriggans. From downstairs came the sounds of sobbing and pounding boots, all dwindling until there was a metallic rattle and then the rasp of the door being opened across swollen floorboards.
Louisa dropped her bare feet to the floor too quickly and grabbed her right thigh, gritting her teeth.
Prophet was hopping around on one foot as he poked the other one into a leg of his inside out long underwear bottoms. “You stay here. I’ll find out what’s goin’ on.”
“You think Blanco’s off his leash?”
“Not unless she helped him.”
Prophet crammed his other foot into his underwear bottoms, quickly pulled on his socks, then his boots, and wrapped his cartridge belt and .45 around his waist. He grabbed his sawed-off twelve-gauge from the chair he’d set it across, donned his hat, and glanced at Louisa, who sat on the edge of the bed with her blanket thrown across her lovely nakedness, one of her pearl-gripped Colts in her hands, looking anxious.
“Stay here—I’ll yell if I need you,” Prophet said again and went clomping on out the door and into the hall, spurs ringing raucously in the suddenly too-quiet, ghost-haunted hotel.
He hurried down the dark hall, then descended the stairs two steps at a time. The fire was still popping and snapping in the broad hearth, and the smoky lantern was still flickering a wan tongue-sized flame, outlining Blanco sitting beneath it, his back against the post, leaning slightly forward and shaking his head as if to clear it.
“What in tarnation?” he said as Prophet clomped toward him, shotgun in his hands, its lanyard swinging loose.
The bounty hunter glanced at the couch where the girl had been, then swung his gaze back to Blanco.
“Where is she?”
Blanco snorted wryly, quirking his thin lips to show a fanglike eyetooth. “Stuffed her down my pocket. Turn me loose an’ I’ll pull her out for ya.”
Prophet shoved his gut shredder’s menacing double bores toward Blanco’s head and thumbed both hammers back.
“Hell, I don’t know!” the outlaw cried, jerking sideways, away from the savage-looking popper. “She just gave that coyote yell and lit a shuck on outta here. Couldn’t leave fast enough!”
Prophet looked at Blanco’s ankles. They were still cuffed and secured to a chair leg. He wasn’t going anywhere. He hadn’t gotten his hands on any weapons, either. That settled, the bounty hunter hurried on to the front of the room, out the double doors standing open, and stepped to one side, instinctively avoiding being backlit in case someone was drawing a bead on him.
He looked around.
The moon was behind a large whale-shaped cloud that hung black before it while the sky around it was lilac. The street was dark purple, with buildings limned in indigo. There wasn’t a breath of wind. The coyotes, which he’d heard yammering even while he and Louisa had been coupling like alley cats, had fallen silent.
There was a soft crunch of gravel. Prophet looked toward it, up the street on his right. Just beyond the holding corral where he could see the white streaks on a couple of horse faces, a shadow moved. One of the horses nickered softly.
Prophet rasped, “Girl?” What the hell was her name, for chrissakes?
Getting no response and having lost the shadow against the thicker shadows beyond,
he shoved off the saloon’s front wall, leaped down the steps, and paused in the street, crouched and aiming the cocked double-bore out from his right side, waiting to return possible gunfire. He continued to hear gravel crunch under quick moving feet, the sounds dwindling gradually.
There was a wooden rasp above his head. Rusty hinges squawked. Prophet jerked his head up quickly, swinging around and raising the shotgun slightly. A blond head jutted from a window above the porch roof.
“Fifty yards ahead on the other side of the street,” Louisa said in a low, dull voice.
Prophet headed in that direction, muttering, “Obliged, Miss Busybody.”
“Don’t mention it,” came the quieter response beneath the crunching of Prophet’s own boots in the silent street.
He’d walked on past the holding corral, evoking another soft nicker and a blow from the horses, and was passing an old gray shed sheathed in spindly brush and tumbleweeds when a thin voice said behind him, “Who am I?”
Prophet wheeled. He saw a slender, dark outline against the dark wall of the shed. Keeping his thumb on the shotgun’s left hammer, he squinted into the shadows though it helped him see her no better.
“Say again?”
“I don’t know who I am!” The mystery girl sobbed and lifted her hands to her face.
Prophet lowered the shotgun and, depressing each hammer in turn, walked slowly toward her until he could see her more clearly standing slumped against the shed wall.
She gave a little gasp, and he stopped. She said, a trill of fear in her voice, “Who’re you?”
“Lou Prophet. You got no reason to be afraid of me. I’m a friend. At least, as of a couple hours ago.”
The girl cried. He could see her mostly even white teeth between her fluttering lips.
“Ah, there, now, miss.” Prophet held his ground three feet away from her. She was severely disoriented and trusted no one. “It’ll be all right. You just bumped your head, ain’t quite right from it. Let’s go on back into the hotel and get you warm, maybe get some food in you. You’ll feel better.”
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