The Cost of Dying

by Peter Brandvold

  “Oh, that.” Prophet sat back in his chair and heaved a slow sigh. “Yeah . . . that . . .”

  Chapter 18

  Prophet and Colter were each given their own separate rooms.

  Nice rooms they were, too—large and well-appointed with big, canopied beds and tall glass doors that opened onto a patio that ran along the rear of the casa. There were more fruit trees here, lending their citrus aromas to the chill air of the silent night. The rooms were likely reserved for the don’s most important guests. Prophet didn’t count himself among such venerable lodgers. He had a feeling that he and Colter had been shown to such rooms merely as added incentive for them to accept the don’s offer.

  Prophet had a feeling that the don, in his illness and old age and with no sons to carry on after he was gone, so that Hacienda de la Paz had grown more than a little rough around its edges, no longer commanded the same attention and authority that he had at one time. Such rooms as those which Lou and Colter occupied likely rarely saw a human step through their doors, an opinion to which the pent-up air of Prophet’s quarters had attested before Raoul had opened the large windows to the night’s fresh breeze lightly tanged by the fruit trees.

  The lavish furnishings, including the comfortable bed, didn’t help Prophet fall asleep. When he’d first entered the room on the heels of Raoul, his eyelids had weighed ten pounds apiece, his head had been calling for a deep pillow, his bones crying out for a soft mattress.

  But as soon as his head had hit that pillow, slumber slipped away from him like a shameless coquette who turned out to be nothing but a tease. He tossed and turned, trying to get comfortable. The problem, however, was that his body was comfortable. The culprits responsible for his lack of sleep were the thoughts swirling in his brain. Troubling, restless thoughts that had nothing to do with the don’s offer. He might have told the don he’d sleep on it, but he’d already made up his mind. He suspected Colter had, as well.

  How could either of them come down to Mexico, each chased down here with a posse nipping at his heels, and not help out an old man in dire need? The money wasn’t bad, either. At the very least, it would finance the rest of Prophet’s winter in Mexico.

  Also, Lou Prophet was not a man of leisure. Oh, he enjoyed entangling himself in the limbs of a willing puta for a few nights here and there, but as much as he wanted to believe it about himself, he wasn’t really one to bear up under days of inactivity. He always told himself that he came to Mexico for rest and relaxation, but that was rarely ever true. Every time he’d come down here, he’d gotten entangled in one misadventure or another.

  He was, if he was anything, a man of action.

  And so was Colter Farrow.

  The kid was younger, and he hailed from a different world than Prophet’s beloved prewar South, but they were both cut from the same cloth. They were brothers in many ways. Colter hadn’t told Lou his decision before they’d parted for the night, but Prophet sensed that Colter had decided to go after Alejandra de la Paz and Ciaran Yeats, as well. He’d probably made up his mind as soon as he’d heard about the damsel in distress, as had Lou himself.

  The job had it all. Adventure. A beautiful woman. And gold at the end of the trail.

  No, the decision had been made. That wasn’t what kept Prophet from sleep.

  The thoughts churning through his brain and making his heart thump had a face—the beautiful, beguiling, brown-eyed face of Marisol de la Paz . . .

  What a heartbreaker! It might not have been so bad if it hadn’t been a week since he’d last had his ashes hauled.

  Six days!

  He hadn’t had a dry spell that long since the War of Northern Aggression. Then it was for a good cause. But this here . . . this was just torture. Especially with the beautiful señorita so close. Yet so far away . . .

  Suddenly, before he knew it, his gun was in his hand and he was cocking it and extending it toward the open courtyard doors. As usual, he’d looped his Peacemaker and shell belt over the bed’s right front post, within a fast, easy grab. Now, half sitting up in bed, he extended the cocked revolver toward the gauzy red curtains blowing back away from the doors in a cool breeze.

  There was a large moon tonight, and the milky light had turned the curtains the color of softly glowing embers over there in the darkness of the large room.

  Lou hadn’t realized it until just now, but he’d heard something. The sound must have slipped into his brain before he’d even known it. Now he knew it, though he couldn’t say what that sound had been.

  His heartbeat quickening, he tossed the covers off his long, lean frame clad in only his summer-weight longhandles. He rose from the bed and walked slowly toward the curtains dancing back away from the windows, like ghosts swaying to some music he couldn’t hear.

  He paused, listening. There were no sounds but the faint swishing sound of the breeze and the dry scuttling of dried orange leaves and seeds the breeze was shepherding along the stone walk ringing the patio just outside the doors.

  What had his senses, honed from years of manhunting, picked up?

  Quickly, he stepped between the doors, extending his cocked revolver straight out into the night. He stared into the courtyard, squinting, not seeing much but the silhouettes of trees and leafy branches and the occasional dry fountain and statue, most of which, Prophet assumed, were depictions of saints and deceased members of the de la Paz family. Not that he’d taken much of a gander at the courtyard, for Raoul had led him and Colter here to their side-by-side rooms in the twilight, when there’d been only a little more light than there was now.

  Lou stepped forward, looking around more carefully.

  He jumped when a female voice said softly, intimately, “Can’t sleep, amigo?”

  He recognized Marisol’s voice before he saw her sitting there against the adobe wall to his right. At first, he could see only her vague silhouette, but as his eyes adjusted to the pearl light competing with the courtyard’s shadows, her figure clarified some, so that he could see her hair spilling down her shoulders that were wrapped in a dark brown, striped serape.

  The serape came down to just above her knees. She didn’t appear to be wearing anything below it. Meaning below the poncho her legs were bare, as were her fine feet, which were resting one atop the other and pulled slightly under the wooden bench she was sitting on, her back against the wall.

  Her bare skin glowed like alabaster in the moonlight.

  “I sensed as much,” she said, again in that soft, intimate tone that bit Prophet deep and that seemed to entangle his vocal cords. She lifted her hand. “Drink? It’s pulque. A sleep tonic if there ever was one.”

  She rose gracefully from the bench and moved over to Prophet, lifting the cup to her lips and taking a sip. She lowered the cup, swallowed, and the moonlight flickered in her dark eyes as she stared up at the big bounty hunter standing a full head taller than she. “If you want to know the truth, Papa’s pulque isn’t as good as that goatish dog One-Eye Acuna’s. Shhh!”

  She giggled. “But then, how good can any liquor be that takes only one day to ferment?”

  “It does all right by me,” Lou quipped. “But then I’m not the top-shelf brand of fella.”

  She smiled devilishly and placed a finger to those swollen lips of hers and which Prophet couldn’t take his eyes off. “But it will help you sleep.” She paused, blinked, then arched a brow speculatively. “If sleep is what you want . . .”

  Prophet’s heart bucked in his chest like a .45 revolver.

  He lowered his own .45 to his side, depressing the hammer.

  Slowly, he shook his head. “No,” he said, reaching down and grabbing the serape’s hem. “I don’t want to sleep.”

  Marisol gave a sudden gasp of surprise then raised her arms, including the hand holding the cup, as Prophet brusquely lifted the serape up and over her head. He dropped it to the paving stones at her bare feet. Her hair spilled in a lovely mess across her shoulders.

  Prophet raked his eyes across h
er naked body limned beautifully by the moonlight. Again, his heart bucked.

  He reached down and picked her up in his arms.

  “Careful, pendejo,” she laughed. “You’ll spill the pulque!”

  Prophet swung around and carried her into his room.

  * * *

  Later, they lay sprawled belly down across the bed, at last sharing the pulque she’d brought. The light from a single lantern perched atop the room’s dresser tossed watery, umber light and shadows this way and that. It brought out the rich, earthy tones of the señorita’s smooth cheeks to which several strands of her hair were sweat-pasted, attesting to the fury of their recent frolic.

  “So,” she said, having just taken a sip of the liquor and handing the cup back to Prophet, “did you take mi padre up on his offer?”

  “You knew?”

  “I suspected it was what he wanted to speak to you and Colter about. I haven’t had a chance to talk to him myself yet about Alejandra’s kidnapping. About Yeats laying siege to the hacienda. He told me about it briefly in the letter he sent me asking me—instructing me, rather—to return to Hacienda de la Paz, because he needed me.” She gave a slow nod, pulling her mouth corners down and staring at the pillow she was resting her forearms on. “So . . . finally the old reprobate needs me. But only after Alejandra left . . .”

  “I take it it ain’t exactly smooth sailing for you and the don?”

  “No, it has never been smooth sailing for me and the don.” Marisol gave a sarcastic laugh. “It is no secret around here that Alejandra has always been his favorite. She’s the baby in the family. There was a son ahead of me, but he died in a fall from a horse. The fall didn’t kill him—it was the nest of rattlesnakes he fell into that killed him. He lingered for days, suffering in the most awful way. I can still hear the screams when I close my eyes.

  “I was the middle child. Alejandra had just been born when Salvador, named after our grandfather on our father’s side, died. So all of Papa’s attention went to the baby. It was almost as though he thought she was the second coming of Salvador. Anyway . . .” She shook her head and took the pulque back from Prophet. “Don’t mind me. I am indulging myself.”

  “What were you doing in Mexico City, if I may ask?”

  Marisol took a deep sip of the pulque then rolled onto her back, stretching like a cat and giving Prophet a view that twisted his heart one-quarter turn counterclockwise. They’d gotten so warm they’d kicked the covers down to the foot of the bed. “Señor,” she said, “after what you just did to me, you can ask me anything you want.”

  She chuckled, pushed up on an elbow, and kissed him on the mouth. She brushed her nose against his then rested her head back against the pillow. “Papa sent me there to get me married. I rented an apartment with Tía Aurora, who acted as my chaperone, of course, and arranged for me to meet suitors suitable for a señorita of my class and station. I felt a bit like Papa’s puta, but where else was I going to find a man except out in society? Obviously, not out here. Our only near neighbors were our blood enemies.

  “Oh, I would have married Juan Carlos, anyway, but . . . well, you know all about that. Besides, in hindsight I realize that either my father or Juan Carlos’s father would have had us both murdered.” She gave a flippant sigh and continued with: “So the years passed, and suddenly I was twenty-seven with no prospects—we were getting fewer and fewer visitors way out here at Hacienda de la Paz, as my father’s reputation as a businessman waned—so Papa thought it was time I moved to Mexico City. I’d been there less than a year when Yeats came and took Alejandra. And here I am . . .”

  She rolled onto her side, facing Prophet, moving her hand up from her belly, caressing herself and smiling beguilingly. “So far, so good, if you ask me.”

  Prophet sipped the pulque, studying the earthily charming young woman over the brim of the cup. “You don’t seem all that busted up about your sister being kidnapped. By a madman, no less.”

  “No? Oh well . . . you see, it’s not easy to get busted up, as you say, about the misfortune of one I spent my life in savage competition with. As far as the gold and guns Yeats stole from the hacienda, Papa has been on a slow plummet for years, business-wise. It’s not only his body that is crippled, but his mind is, as well. He has not hired the best men. Now he can rarely find anyone who is willing to work for him, since they never know if they’ll be paid or not. I noticed the compound is practically deserted, and nothing is being kept up properly. There used to be a lot more men around the place. A small army of men who had their wits about them and who knew how to fight. You saw how easily Juan Carlos cut down my guards.” She gave a caustic chuff. Prophet thought she would have spat on one of the dead men, if one were near.

  Marisol looked at him as he lay on his own side, feasting his eyes on her. She smiled under his obviously admiring gaze. He liked how her eyes flickered when she smiled, the outside corners drawing up beautifully. He leaned forward and buried his head in her ripe bosoms for a time. She ran her hand through his hair, groaning as he pleased her.

  Then she said, “You didn’t answer my question, Lou.”

  He kept his head where it was. “I done forgot what it was. Distracted, I reckon.” His voice was muffled.

  “Did you accept Papa’s offer to go after Yeats and Alejandra?”

  “Oh, that.” Prophet pulled his head up. “Not yet but I’m going to.”

  “I figured you would, knowing the man you are.” She grabbed his ears in her hands, gave them a playful tug. “Be careful. The odds are stacked against you.”

  “I will.”

  “And do me a big favor, will you? When you see Alejandra?”

  “Sure, anything.

  Again, Marisol gave his ears a tug only it wasn’t so playful this time. “Don’t you dare fall in love with her, you bastardo!”

  Chapter 19

  Prophet woke up alone, which surprised him. He must have slept so deeply after his and Marisol’s last frolic that he’d slept right through her leaving.

  She’d probably left to avoid anyone finding out that the don’s daughter had spent the night with a guest. Not any guest, either. A burly, unwashed, ex-Confederate bounty hunter from north of the border. Ye gads—the woman’s reputation would have been muddied from hither to yawn!

  Lou didn’t blame her one bit. If he were she, he wouldn’t have wanted anyone to know about him, either. He gave a wry chuckle at the notion while he took a whore’s bath from the porcelain washbasin sitting atop the marble washstand. Lemony morning sunlight angled brightly through the open doors facing the courtyard. The air was cool and winey fresh, and it fairly bubbled with the piping of songbirds. Obviously, Prophet had slept far later than he normally did.

  While he dressed, he reflected on the dreamlike night he’d enjoyed with Marisol de la Paz, and the reflection put him in such a good mood that he found himself whistling softly as he twirled the Peacemaker on his finger before dropping it into the holster thonged on his right thigh and donned his hat.

  He left the room whistling, as well, and saw Colter just then leaving the room to his left. Colter didn’t look nearly as well rested as Prophet felt. The younker’s tattooed face was drawn and pale, and there were pouches under his eyes.

  “Well, I’m glad to hear someone’s happy as a well-tuned fiddle,” the redhead quipped. He paused to gingerly set his snuff brown Stetson on his head after tucking his long, straight red hair back behind his ears.

  “What’s the matter with you, Red? You look like you just tangled with two rabid mountain lions in the back of a Pittsburgh freight wagon.” Prophet smiled in sudden understanding. “Oh . . . one olla too much pulque.”

  “Too much pulque and too much wine. I swear the don’s butler was bound and determined to get me drunk.”

  “It’s tradition down here to never allow a guest’s glass to get empty.”

  “Now you tell me. I was trying to empty my glass so I wouldn’t look like a damn tinhorn, but every time I looked at
the blasted thing, it was filled again!”

  Prophet laughed.

  “All the noise coming from the room next to me didn’t help matters one damn bit,” Colter groused.

  “Huh?”

  “I thought it was you wrestling wildcats in yonder. And—pardon me if the question is indiscreet—but do you always cut loose with a blood-curdling rebel yell?”

  “I did that?”

  “Several times. Not that I was counting. I was trying to drown out the sounds with my pillow.”

  “Jesus, if you heard . . .” Standing just outside his room, Prophet looked around warily, wondering if any of the rooms around them were occupied. He didn’t think so, as this far-flung wing of the casa appeared to be virtually abandoned, but it was a risk he shouldn’t have been taking, not that he’d known he had. The pulque must have turned him into a real animal last night.

  Not that Marisol seemed to have minded . . .

  Colter chuckled then winced and pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead. “Ouch!”

  “Sorry, Red.”

  “Oh well—at least one of us had . . .”

  Colter let his voice trail off when sounds rose from the direction of the main compound. A couple of men were shouting, one farther away than the other. A horse gave a fierce whinny. It was answered by another horse farther away than the first.

  Prophet and Colter shared a dubious glance then swung around and began walking along the stone path beneath the ramada encircling this rear courtyard. The sunlight bathed the courtyard in its harsh morning light, revealing the cracked and crumbling stone statues and dry fountains. Many of the trees back here appeared dead or nearly so.

  Indeed, Hacienda de la Paz had seen better days . . .

  The two trail partners strode to the end of the courtyard, dropped down a short stone staircase, then walked through another outside corridor between two blocks of cracked adobe also comprising the casa before turning and dropping down yet another staircase.

  They soon found themselves in the front courtyard abutting the main compound, maybe a hundred feet from the main entrance. The don was standing outside the arched front doorway, leaning on his crutches, Raoul at his side.