Karl’s voice sounded clear and crisp, only a few feet away. “Channing?”
Prophet bolted out from behind the cedar, bringing his Winchester up tight against his shoulder. “Nah, Channing done bought one from the claim jumper.”
Prophet thought the man might freeze when he saw the bounty hunter’s rifle bearing down on him. He did the opposite, raising his own rifle quickly.
Prophet’s rifle leaped and roared, its flash in the dark night for a quarter second casting an eerie red glow over the back-flat body of Channing and over the patch-bearded Karl, who jerked as though he’d been punched in the chest. Karl’s own rifle thundered, blowing up dirt and gravel near his boots, and then Karl twisted around, staggering as he tried to run, tripped over his own feet, and fell in a heap.
Knowing his own rifle shot had betrayed his position, Prophet lurched to his right. A gun flashed from the direction of the cabin, and the shooter’s loud curse reached the bounty hunter with the rifle’s resonating bark.
Prophet was momentarily blinded by the bright flash, but he fired three quick rounds from his hip and heard the heavy thud of a body falling against the bunkhouse.
“Oh,” the man said, wheezing. “Oh, for ... chrissakes ...”
The metallic clatter of a rifle hitting the ground. The softer ching of a spur rowel being dragged across gravel. A man’s hoarse, anguished sob.
“You kilt me, you son of a bitch!”
Prophet racked a fresh shell into his Winchester’s breech, then stepped back to the left, knowing there was another bushwhacker out here somewhere. He jerked the rifle in his hands with a start when he heard the loud wooden thud of a boot heel against a solid wooden door.
The fourth man was busting into the cabin!
Prophet bolted forward, shouting, “Rose!”
He hadn’t taken three steps before he heard the muffled pop of a pistol. He kept running as two more pops sounded from inside the bunkhouse. There was a fourth from the front yard. Prophet ran around the cabin’s front corner and stopped.
A tall man stood about ten feet in front of the bunkhouse’s open front door. Rose’s slender, shadowy figure stood just outside the door, starlight flashing off the gun in her outstretched right hand as well as off the thick powder smoke wafting around her head.
The tall man was teetering back on his heels. He held both arms down by his sides and slightly out from his hips as though to help him maintain his balance. In his own right hand he held a rifle, the barrel aimed at the ground. His hat lay on the ground behind him.
He staggered backward—a quick, heavy step, making his spurs ring. He stepped on his hat, flattening the crown.
Haltingly, in a deep voice, he said, “A girl?”
“What’s that?” Rose said.
“A girl done killed me?”
Rose thumbed the revolver’s hammer back with a loud, ratcheting click.
“You got that right,” she said tonelessly and pulled the trigger.
13
LOUISA TOOK A swig from her root beer soda pop, set the bottle on the table, then plucked a .45 cartridge off the neckerchief she’d spread on the table before her, beside her castaway supper plate, and slipped the cartridge into the wheel of her pearl-gripped Colt.
She spun the cylinder and, holding the gun up to her right ear, enjoyed the smooth, heavy clicking sounds of the recently cleaned and oiled weapon.
“Good Lord, young lady! What in tarnation do you intend to do with that thing?”
Louisa looked up to see the chubby woman who ran the Bear Paw Cafe staring down at her, one pink fist planted on the woman’s broad, apron-clad hip.
“Whatever I have to do, Mrs. Haggelthorpe.” Louisa set the pistol on the table and picked up its twin. “Whatever I have to do.”
She gave the cylinder of that freshly cleaned and loaded revolver a spin. Her hazel eyes acquired a slightly dreamy look as she enjoyed the fluid, snakelike hiss. Her guns had never misfired on her, and as long as she kept them clean and running as smooth as Swiss watches, they never would.
She’d seen for herself what happened to those who did not conscientiously tend the instruments of their trades. They were moldering in shallow graves with Louisa’s own lead in them.
Mrs. Haggelthorpe gave a disapproving chuff. “Why don’t you get shed of that crazy bounty-hunting profession? Not to mention that Prophet devil and his sawed-off shotgun. Him and that consarned trade are gonna get you killed, you pretty young thing!”
Louisa looked up curiously at the round-faced woman.
“Yeah, I know Lou Prophet,” Mrs. Haggelthorpe said. “Back before I married Harry, I, too, was in a less-than-respectable profession. Worked the cow towns for a time. Hays and Dodge City and the like. Omaha and Council Bluffs. Ran into that big crooked-nosed bounty man a time or two—the old sinner. Oh, we never did any business, but I know him to see him.”
She shook her head sadly. “Death dealer, that’s what he is. And everyone knows he sold his soul to the Devil after the war.”
“I prefer to see Lou, as well as myself,” Louisa said, “as justice dealers.”
“Call it what you want. It all means kickin’ men out with cold shovels. And an early death for yourself, Miss Louisa. I tell you what—I could use an extra girl around here. Twenty-five cents a day plus tips. With a figure like yours, you’ll be shovelin’ it from a buckboard wagon into the bank vault!”
Louisa plucked a silver dollar from a pocket of her serape, and flipped it into the air. Mrs. Haggelthorpe gasped with surprise when she saw the coin and reached out to grab it against her bosom with her pink, fleshy fist.
“Obliged for the offer,” Louisa said, rising and holstering her six-shooters. “But I reckon I’ve been summoned by a higher purpose.”
“You’ll be sorry, young lady.”
Louisa grabbed her neckerchief off the table and, knotting it around her neck, headed out the small, nearly deserted cafe’s front door and onto the narrow porch beyond. A slight, stooped male figure was angling toward the cafe from the other side of the street, a badge flashing on the man’s denim jacket. A cigarette smoldered beneath the battered Stetson sitting crooked on Deputy Ivano Rubriz’s gray head. The man’s gray mustache fairly glowed in the starlit darkness.
As the man approached the porch, he looked up to see Louisa and stopped, removing the cigarette from his lips, holding it between his left index and forefinger. In his other hand was a Spencer repeating rifle. On his hip he wore an old Schofield revolver.
“Who’s watching the prisoner?” Louisa asked him.
Rubriz studied Louisa for a moment, flicking ashes from his cornhusk quirley. “Marshal Utter. Who else, senorita?”
“The man’s confined to a wheelchair.”
“Si. But he’s hell with a double-bore!”
Rubriz chuckled, then mounted the steps and walked past Louisa as he stuck his head through the café door. He did not go inside the eaterie but only inquired, “Everything all right in here this evening, Senora Haggelthorpe?”
“As good as can be expected, Ivano,” Mrs. Haggelthorpe called above the clatter of dishes. “Coffee?”
“Later. Buenas noches, senora.”
“You have a good one, too, Ivano. See ya later!”
Louisa stood in the side street the cafe was on, staring toward Brush Street and the marshal’s office and jailhouse, where a dull yellow light shone in both front windows. Rubriz walked down the porch steps to stand beside her, puffing his quirley with one hand while holding his rifle with the other.
“Do not worry, senorita. Even without the use of his legs, Marshal Utter is twice the man of most. He will not allow your prisoner to escape.”
“Are you saying you don’t think I oughta wander over and offer my prisoner-watching services?”
Rubriz puffed the quirley, his shoulders jerking slightly though his chuckles were silent. He turned and moved off along the street with his limping stride, his boot scuffs dwindling gradually in the quiet
night.
Louisa decided to head on over to the hotel. She likely wouldn’t sleep. Why was it she had so much trouble sleeping when Prophet wasn’t around? For some reason, his absence left a vacuum inside her. Not quite a vacuum, but an emptiness populated only by the occasional, faint but persistent cries of her dying family.
“Hey, Utter,” Blanco said. “How ’bout you get us a couple whores in here? I’ll buy.”
Chuckling, Marshal Utter reached into the wood box for a stick of pinyon, and, with his free hand, wheeled himself over to the stove, the hot door of which he opened with a leather swatch, then stuffed the firewood inside.
“Blanco, you done got your rocks off for the last time. No more tail for you, my friend. Unless there’s tail in hell, and I doubt ole Lucifer offers such accommodations as that.”
“You’re the one goin’ to a fuckless hell.” Blanco stared through the bars of his cage in the jailhouse wall’s right rear corner. He took a drag off his cigarette and blew a smoke ring, narrowing his gray eyes with evil glee. “Me, I’ll be back in town here by Saturday night, visiting the girls at Miss Flora’s Corazon House, or them purty putas on Bayonet Wash.”
“You keep dreamin’, Blanco,” Utter said, rolling his wheelchair up to his desk, off of which he grabbed his double-bore barn blaster. “That’s what you’re good at.”
Utter breeched the gun, made sure there was a wad in each barrel, then snapped it back together with a loud click that echoed off the wainscoted, green-painted walls of the wood-frame building.
“If you get me a whore for tonight, give us fifteen minutes alone to do what comes natural, Marshal”—Blanco blew another smoke ring—“I’ll have my pa go easy on ya. Maybe just take the wheels of your chair, leave you howlin’ like a mad lobo out on Brush Street.”
Wheeling himself toward the front door, his shotgun laid across his skinny, useless thighs, Utter glared over his shoulder at the outlaw.
“Hey,” Blanco said, “it’s better than lettin’ him hang ya from your own porch roof. You and that greasy bean eater, Rubriz. Side by side for all eternity.”
Another smoke ring came sailing out between the bars. Blanco lowered his head slightly to stare through the ever-widening and slowly dissipating smoke circle at Marshal Utter, who ground his dentures and dimpled his jaws with fury.
“Like I said, Blanco.” Utter threw open the front door. “You just keep dreamin’.”
“Fetch me a whore, you crippled old bastard!” Blanco shouted as Utter wheeled himself over the threshold and onto the jailhouse’s dark front porch.
Utter threw his arm back into the office, loosing his loud, mocking guffaws at Blanco glaring at him through the cell’s bars, and pulled the office door closed behind him. As he rolled his wheelchair out to the front of the porch, he could hear Blanco cursing him.
Blanco continued to curse him until the outlaw was nearly hoarse, and then the tirade died and there was only the sounds of the distant coyotes, the crickets, an occasional breeze shepherding a tumbleweed across Brush Street, and the quiet, midweek strains of a mariachi band emanating from the south. The charros would be sipping tequila and bacanora to the strains of the fiddle and mandolin while they awaited their turns with Senorita Loretta upstairs, or with the new girl that Hector Domingo claimed to have brought in from New Orleans.
She was a mulatto, some said. Utter couldn’t attest to that, for he hadn’t yet seen the girl. Hector kept his girls close to his smoky little adobe-brick cantina on the bank of Bayonet Wash so they couldn’t be lured away by some gringo cowboy who’d suddenly acquired a sizable stake for himself after an all-night stud game. That had happened to Hector before, and the girl had been found, stumbling around in the foothills of the No-Waters, clothes in tatters, dying of thirst and starvation.
And she hadn’t been worth a dime after that.
Utter gave a rueful chuff at his bored musings. Sometimes, he thought that he and Ivano should have continued to ride the opposite side of the law, steered clear of towns like Corazon, swung wide of so-called civilization. But for some reason—no, he knew the reason: old age and fear—he and Rubriz had decided, well over a decade ago, to try to acquire a little respectability before they saddled a cloud and rode to the great robbers’ roost in the sky. Gun work had been all they’d known, though Utter had once, a long, long time ago, worked as a packer for the army, so they’d sort of naturally drifted into the badge-toting business, hesitating only briefly when Corazon’s town council had offered them the local lawdogging jobs.
They’d been damn good at it, too. Before Rubriz had gotten old and arthritic and Utter had gotten himself backshot by rustlers. He’d outstayed his abilities; he should have heard those long-loopers sneaking up behind him, but his hearing had gone the way of his eyesight and his pecker.
He wasn’t worth a damn anymore. The trouble was neither he nor Ivano had built a stake to retire on. So they either continued in their chosen professions or took to milling around the saloons with their hands out, maybe living with the whores in their falling-down cribs on Bayonet Wash. Or in the dry wash itself, where Utter had stumbled upon more than one useless old-timer who’d gone there to drink himself into eternity.
Used up, he might be ...
Utter scowled out into the night and caressed his old Greener’s hammers with his thumb.
... But he’d be damned on a tall horse if he’d let “Man-Killin’” Sam Metalious break his son out of Utter’s jail. He had a history with that wild-eyed old lobo—it was likely Metalious’s riders who’d shot Utter, though he had no solid proof of that. He wouldn’t let the man get the best of him again. His legs might be as useless as Chinese noodles, but he still had his Greener, and he’d like nothing better than to use it to blast “Man-Killin’” Sam and his son into the next world.
Hoof clomps jerked Utter from his reverie, and he looked to his right where four riders cantered into town from the northwest.
Utter tightened his hand around the neck of his shotgun and leaned forward in his chair a little to get a better look at the newcomers. They passed a saloon on the other side of the street, whose reflector oil lamps dimly illuminated their faces—four riders off Burl Farmington’s ranch only a couple miles from town. Harmless thirty-a-month-and found punchers in billowy neckerchiefs, undershot boots, battered hats, and fringed chaps.
They’d get pie-eyed a few times a year in Corazon, might even break a window or each other’s jaws, but they were harmless enough and brought good business to the Tumbleweed, the favorite watering hole of area drovers at the far south end of Brush Street.
None of them looked at Utter as they passed the jailhouse. They were a quiet, bashful lot, like most punchers, and when they’d disappeared around the dogleg in Brush Street a couple blocks south, Utter sat back in his chair and blew a heavy sigh.
He jerked his gaze back south. The four Farmington riders had disappeared, but three more riders appeared, trotting out of the dogleg and coming on toward the jailhouse. They rode straight-backed in their saddles, and though Utter couldn’t see their faces in the darkness, he could tell that their hat brims were aimed in his direction.
His heart quickened, and he wrapped both hands around the Greener in his lap. Metalious’s men? Awfully soon. Utter had expected Sam to make him and Rubriz sweat awhile. He’d also expected that when the time came for Sam to send men for Blanco, old “Man-Killin’” Sam would be leading the pack himself.
That they were Metalious’s men was obvious, however, when Utter saw the Metalious Triple 6 brands blazed into the withers of the three horses that were checked down in front of the jailhouse and turned toward the porch atop which Utter sat his rickety old chair. Utter frowned, befuddled, wary, and shifted his gaze around to see if others would soon join this first three. Maybe Sam himself would come storming in from the north, eyes afire.
“Evenin’, Marshal,” said the tall, lanky man who sat in the middle of the three-man pack and whom Utter knew to be Dwight Beaudry—Me
talious’s segundo. He had no proof, but a sixth or seventh sense had told him that it was Beaudry’s bullets lying snug as ticks on a dog up close to Utter’s spine.
Raw fury blazed in the marshal.
“Mornin’, Dwight.” Snarling, Utter raised his Greener, making his chair creak beneath his considerable girth. “You come to get your ugly fuckin’ head blowed off, did you?”
14
“TAKE IT EASY with that thing, Utter,” Dwight Beaudry warned, glowering out from beneath the broad, flat brim of his brown Stetson. “Less’n you want me to take it away from you and trigger it up your fat, old, crippled ass.”
The man sitting a dapple gray to Beaudry’s left smiled. The man sitting a grulla to Beaudry’s right kept his hard, chocolate-dark eyes on Utter, maintaining a firm rein on his mount that had suddenly started chewing its bit. Utter knew neither of these two, only Beaudry.
Gunslicks came and went from “Man-Killin’” Sam Metalious’s so-called ranch.
With a loud, ratcheting click, Utter rocked back his barn blaster’s left hammer, then its right. “Why don’t you just climb down off that pinto and try it, Dwight!”
“Don’t talk that way to me, Utter.” Beaudry’s jaws were set, his lips forming a straight slash beneath his thick dragoon mustache. “Your old popper there means nothin’ to me. I could drill you right now before you even got them barrels raised.”
Behind the three Metalious riders, gravel crunched under a stealthy foot. At nearly the same time, a rifle was cocked, the rasp of the lever action echoing suddenly and loudly around that end of Brush Street.
Ivano Rubriz stepped into the light from the shadows on the street’s other side. The drab illumination of the jailhouse lights as well as the near saloon’s oil lamps slid across his leathery cheeks and danced in his trimmed gray mustache, casting deep shadows against the lee side of his long, straight nose.
Rubriz stood there, not saying anything, resting the rifle barrel negligently across his right forearm, his eroded, nut-brown face as expressionless as limestone.
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