The Cost of Dying

by Peter Brandvold

  At first, he thought he must be lying on the seashore again, as had become his custom of late. Faintly, he could hear the surf and smell the salty tang of the air. Only the sound of the surf was too faint, the tang too light. Also, he couldn’t feel the wind on his skin, only a very soft breeze.

  He lifted his head, opened his eyes. He had no recognition of where he was. It must be a puta’s crib, only it was larger than he’d have expected—a large, cavelike, stone-floored room with a domelike ceiling and two small, arched windows hewn through a thick, masonry wall. A church? Humor touched Prophet. It was tempered by a faint disappointment.

  He’d dreamed that he’d found Alejandra de la Paz on the seashore, late at night. She’d had red hair like her mother’s, and she’d worn a lacy white gown, and the wind had done intoxicating things to her hair and the gown under which it had been quite obvious she’d worn nothing.

  He smiled longingly as he looked around at the strange room, trying to get his bearings. Of course, it had only been a dream.

  Wait.

  He turned his head to his left. His eyes widened.

  She lay belly up beside him, half covered by only a thin white sheet. A red-haired goddess with alabaster skin. Her head was turned to one side, her hair fanned out around the pillow like a red halo. Her face couldn’t have been any more classically sculpted unless a master artist had chipped it out of ivory for the most expensive cameo pin ever made. God himself had crafted this one, smiling devilishly as he’d done so, knowing full well that it was a face to ravage the hearts of mortal men.

  Prophet’s heart hiccupped. No, it hadn’t been a dream. She was real. He had only a vague recollection of what they’d done here in this bed last night, but what he remembered stirred him once again. He felt a dull ache in his right shoulder, and he turned to see a bite mark.

  He smiled at that. They’d had a good time, all right.

  He ran his gaze down her body. The sheet covered only her legs. He couldn’t help lifting it for a peek beneath.

  “My God,” he heard himself whisper.

  She groaned, stirred, opened her eyes. She stared up at him and smiled. Her enchanting brown eyes flashed in the sunlight angling through one of the room’s two arched windows.

  Lou let the sheet drop back down, covering her legs. “Beg your pardon.”

  “It’s all right. I like being appreciated.” Her smile widened. “Most of all, I like being satisfied.” She sat up, brushed her lips across his. She frowned at the tooth marks on his shoulder then kissed them softly, lowering her gaze demurely, a soft flush rising in her creamy cheeks. “Sorry.”

  “The mark of satisfaction.”

  “I don’t remember doing that.”

  “I don’t remember feeling it.”

  “We had a good time. Gracias, amigo.” Alejandra kissed his cheek then lay back down against her pillow, not bothering to draw the sheet up any farther than it already was. She crooked her arms behind her head. “You better go now. You don’t want to be found in here.”

  “I reckon not.”

  Prophet climbed off the bed, wincing against the ravages of a violent hangover, bells clanging in his ears. It took him a while to dress for he was still a little drunk and wobbly on his feet. His clothes were damp but they’d dry out quickly in the desert sun.

  He crouched to pluck his boots off the floor then sat on the edge of the bed to pull them on. There were few other furnishings besides the bed. There was a large armoire, a marble-topped washstand with a bowl and a pitcher, and a single chair. A fine one, upholstered in brocade and with wide, finely scrolled arms, but the only one. It was buried under the mess of a woman’s fine wardrobe likely taken hastily from her bedroom at Hacienda de la Paz.

  There was no glass in the windows. Beyond them, birds flew across the bastion’s yard, and Lou could hear the regular wash of the sea rolling its waves onto the shore. Gulls cried.

  He finished pulling on a boot with a grunt and turned to where Alejandra lay on the bed, watching him with a dreamy smile showing the ends of her fine, white teeth. “I’ll be back.”

  Again, her smile broadened. “Tonight?”

  “When I can get you out of here.”

  She frowned a little with her eyes, leaving the smile on her lips. “What do you mean?”

  “I’ll come back. Later. I have to work out a plan first with the kid. We gotta get you a horse and . . .”

  Lou let his voice trail off. He didn’t like the way she was looking at him now, all traces of her smile gone. Her lovely brows formed a severe ridge.

  “I figured you must’ve realized,” he said, sitting there on the edge of the bed, only one boot on, twisting around to regard her on the bed behind him. “Your father sent me. He hired me to kill Yeats and get you out of this perdition.”

  Slowly, staring at him in shock, Alejandra pulled her hands out from behind her head. “My father sent you?”

  “Yeah. I thought you knew. Since you knew my name.”

  “I overheard the major talking to you. I saw you out in the courtyard, facing his men. I saw what you did . . . and . . . well, it stirred me. You’re a big, strapping man, Señor Prophet. Ciaran . . .” She shook her head slowly. “He can’t . . . he can’t . . . you know . . . hacer el amor. He wants to. He tries. But always he leaves howling and sobbing in frustration, leaving me here in this big room he gave me, sobbing and howling in frustration. I need a man to please me, señor. That man was you. I don’t want to be rescued from this perdition, as you call it. The perdition, Mr. Prophet, is Hacienda de la Paz!”

  Lou stared at her in hang-jawed shock.

  Fury flared in the girl’s eyes. “My father sent you to kill Yeats? What a cowardly old devil. If he wanted me back so badly, the least he could have done was come for me himself. Him and his men. But he and they are all useless. They are old women. I like my life here. I didn’t want to come at first, but the major has given me the life of a queen, complete with all the spice I could ever want.”

  “Ah, Jesus,” Prophet said, rubbing his jaw in astonishment. “You’re all woolly-headed on the stuff. You’re addicted. You want to stay here and . . .”

  “Life is good here. It is paradise!” Alejandra turned her fine chin toward one of the windows and screamed in Spanish, “Rape! Someone help me, this americano is trying to have his way with me. ¡Violación!”

  Chapter 38

  “Violación, my ass!” Prophet bounced up from the bed and stared toward the windows looking out on the bastion’s broad yard. He threw out an arm to Alejandra. “Pipe down, you crazy wench. I’m here to save your loco hide. You don’t wanna stay here and lounge around like some hop-headed queen of Sheba!”

  “¡Violación! ¡Violación! ¡Violación!” the girl screamed at the top of her lungs.

  On the other hand, it appeared she did.

  Prophet’s heart turned painful somersaults in his chest. His head throbbed miserably, nearly blurring his vision. He stood in shock, staring toward the windows, as the señorita de la Paz continued to scream in Spanish for someone to help her, the americano bastardo was raping her!

  How in the hell do I get myself into these situations?

  Lou ran to one of the windows and peered into the yard. Men were shrugging out of their drunken slumbers from various encampments by the near wall, where fire pits were mounded with cold, gray ashes and where small flames leaped in others as a few men, awake now that it must have been nearly midmorning, were preparing coffee.

  Several had already grabbed guns and, staring puzzledly toward the señorita’s windows, were striding clumsily this way. Others, also staring toward the señorita’s room, pulled on boots and strapped cartridge belts around their waists.

  “Ah hell!”

  Lou lifted his gaze toward the wall facing the Sea of Cortez. The Gatling gun swung toward him, a guard hunkered on one knee behind it, aiming down the barrel. Another guard standing on the wall nearly straight out from Prophet was aiming a rifle toward Lou, the guar
d’s head tipped sideways against the rear stock.

  The rifle blossomed smoke and flames. The bullet slammed into the masonry wall to the right of the window, only six or seven inches from Prophet’s head. Lou pulled back behind the casement, gritting his teeth. The hammering concussion of the bullet pummeled his ears and brainpan. He thought for a second he was going to pass out.

  He cussed loudly and turned to the girl sitting up and smiling smugly on the bed at him. “That tears it!”

  “Whatever that means, you stupid gringo, it sure does tear it!” She laughed.

  Half to himself, he said, “Goddess, my ass.”

  “What?”

  “More like a viper hiding inside the thousand-dollar body of a spoiled puta.”

  Alejandra’s eyes drew sharply up at the corners as she glared at him. “How dare you call me that! You better run, run, run the hell out of here, pendejo. Run if you can, but there’s nowhere the major and Lieutenant Rhodes won’t find you. Not after what you’ve done to me.” She smiled again, mockingly. “What a brute you are to force me to do such horrible things!”

  Prophet ran back to the bed, picked up his right boot, and pulled it on. “Throw something on that purty body of yours, Alejandra!”

  “What?”

  “Get dressed. You’re comin’ with me.”

  “Go to hell!”

  Prophet shucked his pistol from its holster, aimed it straight out from his right shoulder at the girl, and clicked the hammer back. “Throw something on and do it now, or I’ll drill a hole through your pretty head.”

  “You wouldn’t!”

  Prophet manufactured a devilish grin. It wasn’t hard to do. Outside, men were shouting and he could hear them running toward Alejandra’s chamber, cocking rifles. He drew his index finger taut against the Peacemaker’s trigger. “By the count of three . . .”

  He couldn’t kill her. He knew that. But she didn’t.

  “One . . . two . . .”

  Giving a frightened cry, she scrambled off the bed and picked up the gown she’d been wearing last night. She shook it out quickly, eyeing Prophet fearfully, glancing at the big .45 bearing down on her. She pulled the gown up over her head and let it tumble bewitchingly down that long, slender, high-busted, creamy body until the still-damp hem settled around her ankles.

  “Let’s go!” Prophet grabbed her arm and half dragged, half led her to the door.

  “Ow—that hurts, you brute!”

  “Not as much as a bullet between the eyes!”

  He opened the door and peered into a stone-floored hallway. It looked as derelict as most of the rest of the bastion though someone had informed him over the past several days of his debauch that parts of it had once been used by the federalistas as a prison, so parts had been somewhat modernized. The hallway was deserted but he could hear the clacks of running boots down the cavernlike hall to his right.

  “Come on!”

  “Help me!” Alejandra screamed in Spanish, in the direction of the oncoming men. “Help me—the brute is trying to kidnap me!”

  Prophet ran down the hall, weaving around gouges in the ancient stone floor as well as masonry fallen out of the walls or the ceiling.

  The footsteps grew louder behind him—several men coming fast. The clattering echoed loudly. “¡Ahí!” There!

  A gun barked.

  Alejandra screamed.

  “Damn fools!” Prophet stopped suddenly, wheeled, extended his Peacemaker, and fired three quick rounds. Two of the running men—it was too dark in the hall for him to see exactly how many there were—fell and rolled, howling. The others stopped and dropped to their knees, extending pistols or rifles.

  One shouted, “Don’t shoot, you fools! If we hit the girl, Yeats will string us up by our cojones!”

  Prophet grabbed Alejandra’s arm and kept running, the girl groaning and trying to pull away, her bare feet slapping on the rough stone floor. Prophet slowed when he approached a T in the hall. Boots clattered down the wing to his right.

  “More are coming!” the girl reveled. “You’ll never get away, you big, stupid—!”

  Prophet wheeled on her, glaring and snugging his revolver’s barrel up taut against her left temple. “You scream out one more time, I’m gonna kill you, señorita. You got that?”

  He pressed the gun barrel even harder against her head, driving the point home.

  Wide-eyed, she nodded once but rasped out wickedly, “Brute!”

  Prophet continued forward, pulling her along behind him with his left hand. He stepped to the wall on the hall’s right side and raked his shoulder against it as he continued to the T. The clatter of running men grew louder.

  Prophet swung his gun hand around the corner and aimed down the hall on his right, saw a handful of men run up into the light offered by a large, ragged-edged hole in the ceiling. The men running ahead of the others widened their eyes in shock and began to open their mouths to shout, but neither got a word out before Prophet shot them both and one more.

  Screams vaulted around the hallway, on the heels of Lou’s loudly echoing gun reports.

  Prophet pulled his gun back into the hall he stood at the corner of. He shoved the girl down to her knees. She gave a clipped, indignant scream. “¡Bastardo!”

  “I told you to shut up.” Lou also fell to a knee, flicked open the smoking revolver’s loading gate, and rotated the cylinder, quickly shaking out the spent cartridges.

  “Yeats will catch you and if he doesn’t kill you he will draw and quarter you and gut you like a pig!”

  Hurriedly thumbing fresh rounds into the Colt’s empty chambers, Prophet glanced down at the girl, who stared up at him from below his left shoulder. Her brown eyes were slitted. They blazed like two nuggets of high-grade gold. Her copper-red hair was a lovely, tangled mess all about her head and slender shoulders. He chuckled, flicked the loading gate closed, and said, “Goddess, my ass . . .”

  She snarled at him, flaring her nostrils again defiantly. “You enjoyed me, though—didn’t you? Admit it!”

  “Oh, I had a grand old time,” Prophet said. “What I can remember of it. Don’t forget”—he patted the shoulder she’d sunk her teeth into—“you did, too, sweetheart.”

  He laughed.

  A flush rose up Alejandra’s fine neck and into her cheeks, and she dropped her eyes in chagrin. Prophet peered down the hall he’d fired into and where one man was sobbing shrilly and asking Saint Peter to forgive him for his earthly sins. “It was Yeats’s fault, San Pedro!” he bellowed. “I was a good man before I fell into bad company!”

  “Likely story.” Lou hurled two more rounds down the hall where he could see several faces peering toward him from the dense shadows. The faces jerked back or dropped toward the floor as the two reports reverberated like cannon fire in the close confines.

  Before the echoes had fallen silent, Prophet leaped to his feet, jerked the girl up, as well, and bounded down the hall opening on his left. “Sure wish I had my barn-blaster,” he complained as he ran, pulling the girl along behind him. “Nothin’ better’n two wads of twelve-gauge buck in close quarters. Hell, I could take out two, three of these bean-eaters at a time.”

  “What are you saying, you gringo pendejo?” the girl asked, breathless.

  “Don’t mind me—I just yak it up when I’m nervous.” Prophet leaped another large, jagged crack in the stone floor. “Watch your step, princess!”

  Prophet laughed.

  “¡Cabrón!”

  They dropped down a crumbling staircase, climbed another.

  Prophet heard men running down an open corridor to his left, so he swung right, climbed another staircase, ran down another open corridor, then hung a right at an intersecting corridor that appeared to be an ancient cellblock, with banded iron doors on either side.

  Men turned a corner ahead of him and ran toward them. They were all wielding pistols.

  They saw him a second after he saw them. Lou was already aiming his Peacemaker.

  T
he big, burly, mustached Mexican running out front of the others stopped suddenly and threw his arms out to his sides, trying to forestall the others behind him. His large, drink-bleary brown eyes found Prophet, and he yelled, “Noooo!”

  There were seven of them, including the big man out front. Prophet emptied his Colt into them, taking out all seven because one of the six madly fired his own pistol into the neck of one of the others as he twisted around, dying and spewing blood and howling like a lobo.

  “Damn, you’re good with that thing!” Alejandra stared up at him, aghast.

  Prophet flicked open the Colt’s loading gate. “If I remember correct, that’s what you said last night.”

  He couldn’t help laughing at his joke as he spun out another batch of spent cartridges. She gave an angry wail and lunged at him, punching him with her tightly clenched fists. Prophet crouched beneath her onslaught as he thumbed a fresh round of six cartridges into the Peacemaker’s cylinder.

  “Ouch, damnit—that one hurt!” he complained as she kneed him very close to where she’d intended to. He flung out his elbow to hold her off. He must have flung it out harder than he’d meant to, because she gave a scream and flew backward, hitting the back of her head with a clang against an iron-banded door.

  Her eyes rolled back in her head, and she sagged to her butt, legs sticking nearly straight out before her. Her head flopped to one side, chin resting against her shoulder.

  Prophet stared down at her, frowning. “Princess?”

  She didn’t move.

  “Princess?” Prophet’s heart lurched. Oh, for Pete’s sake—did you kill her, ya big galoot? he silently berated himself.

  He crouched over her. He could hear her breathing, saw her ample bosom rising and falling slowly behind the gown’s low-cut bodice. He gave a sigh of relief, then, hearing footsteps growing louder behind him, he said, “Quieter this way,” and grabbed her hand and pulled her up over his left shoulder like a hundred-pound sack of potatoes. “Much more pleasant . . .”

  He took off running, wincing under the weight. Not that she was all that heavy, but he was still slightly drunk and hungover and cracked bells were tolling in his ears and badly assaulting the exposed nerve of his brain. When he came to a corner, he swung left. He wanted to get away from the main yard and the damn Gatling gun over there.