Helldorado (6 page)

Swinging her full, lovely hips, she strode off toward the village.

Prophet finished the bottle, smoking, then slept fitfully against his saddle. Near dawn, the sky just beginning to turn lilac, he rose to evacuate his bladder and to study the cave door. It was black, and no sounds issued from behind it.

He dropped down, pulled his blankets up against the high mountain chill, heard Mean and Ugly snort wearily, then tumbled back into restive slumber.

Something prodded his side.

He jerked with a start, lifting his head up. The old woman stood over him, staring down at him. Behind her, the sky was bright blue though dawn shadows lingered amongst the rocks and cactus, and the ridge was purple. The sun was somewhere behind it.

He stared up at the woman who stared down at him, pursing her withered old lips. She shook her head grimly, then slumped back toward the ridge.

Prophet’s blood jetted through his veins, and his temples hammered. He sat up, throwing his blankets back.

“What the hell does that mean?”

The old woman disappeared inside the cave.

“Did she die?” Prophet called, hearing his voice crack.

Quickly, he pulled his boots on and ran to the ridge. He pushed through the grass mat and stopped just inside the door. The old woman stood over Louisa, who lay under the bobcat hides. Her swollen features were pasty and horrifically inert, her cracked lips slightly parted. A small rawhide pouch hung from her neck.

Prophet moved toward her, balling his fists at his sides. His heart turned somersaults in his chest. His voice quaked with anguish and fury as he said tautly, “Did you let her die, you old . . . ?”

A soft voice said, “Lou?”

At first, Prophet thought it had come from the old woman. Then he realized Louisa had said it, though her lips had barely moved. Her right cheek twitched. That was the only movement.

The crone looked up at Prophet, frowning. “You are Lou?”

“She’s not dead,” Prophet breathed to himself, forgetting the harsh smell of the place—the fetor of scorched herbs. He dropped his knees, reached under the bobcat hide, and pulled out Louisa’s right hand, enclosing the tender limb in his own large, sunburned paws.

His voice shook with fragile relief. “She’s not dead.”

He called her name several times, smoothing her hair back from her piping hot forehead. Sweat beaded her skin, glinting brightly in the light from the fifty or so candles the old woman had lit around the cave.

Prophet was still calling to Louisa when the woman touched his shoulder. He turned to see her kneeling beside him, a hide necklace in her hands. The hide was strung with what appeared claws of some kind, and the small, dried skull of what appeared a coyote.

A coyote pup with tiny, sharp teeth. Skinless, it appeared to be snarling.

“What the hell’s this?”

“Put it on.”

“Like hell, you crazy—”

“You can save her. She died once, but she has returned. She has said your name, calling to you from the other side. She wants you to pull her back to you.”

Prophet stared at the crone in disbelief, his mind reeling. He looked at Louisa, who lay with her swollen eyes shut, her smashed lips etched with pain.

“Christ!” Prophet grabbed the necklace, draped it over his head. “How in the hell is this supposed to bring her back?”

The old woman shuffled off to return wielding a big, bone-handled knife in her tiny but strong, brown fist. For a moment, Prophet thought she was about to try carving his heart out. He jerked back a little when she thrust the blade at him, and his brows mantled heavily.

“Hey!”

“Hold up your left hand,” squawked the crone.

“Huh?”

She gestured again with the knife, spittle flying from her lips. “Hold up your hand.” She gestured at the left one.

“Now, hold on.”

“She needs your blood. Hold up your hand. I cut just a bit.”

Prophet had no idea what the old bat was up to. Something told him, however, she meant no harm, only to help. He’d let her try a little more of her sorcery, and if Louisa didn’t come around, he’d haul her out of there and tend her himself, though what that would entail, he had no idea.

He held up his left hand, palm out, and winced as the crone swiped the knife’s razor-edged blade across it. He felt the icy nip, looked at the long, red line running from the base of his index finger to the opposite side of the heel.

The crone set the knife aside, knelt down with a grunt, and peeled the bobcat hide down to Louisa’s waist, exposing the girl’s bare torso. She gestured for Prophet to run his bloody palm from Louisa’s throat to her belly button.

He did so, smearing a long path of the blood down between the girl’s breasts, feeling like a superstitious fool but too frightened and full of dread to care. At this point he’d have danced a jig on his hands around the old bitch’s smelly cave, if it had a chance of bringing Louisa back to health.

He looked at the crone. “What now?”

“Shh!”

She stared down at Louisa, hands on her thighs. Prophet thought she might be praying, but her eyes were open. Finally, the old woman slid the bobcat hide up to Louisa’s neck and sighed. She turned to Prophet, lifted the necklace over his head, snaked it over Louisa’s, letting the coyote skull rest on her chest with the hide pouch, and said, “Now, we see.”

 

Prophet spent a miserable day waiting around the cave door, which the crone kept covered with the grass mat. He paced, smoked, walked around the ridge and the village, accepted another plate from Chela but only picked at the corn tortillas and beans fried with spicy chicken.

His stomach was too knotted up for food.

He curried Mean and Ugly several times, trimming and tending all four hooves, adjusting the horse’s iron shoes, just to keep busy. When the sun fell behind the toothy western ridges again, and he’d heard nothing from the cave, he threw back several shots of tequila and rolled up in his blankets, forcing himself to sleep.

Early the next morning, he woke with a start, jerking his head up and poking his hat back off his forehead. He looked around wildly, his cocked Colt in his hand.

He’d heard something. What?

It came again, rising from inside the cave—a female voice so familiar in its insouciant demand and inherent priggishness that he felt as though the long, fine fingers of angels were caressing the strain from his heart.

SIX WEEKS LATER, Prophet reined Mean and Ugly to a halt at the top of a low bench between craggy ridges in southern Wyoming Territory, a stone’s throw from the Colorado line. He shuttled his glance from a signpost standing bold and straight and backed by a flat-topped boulder along the trail’s right side, to the town sprawled in the shallow valley beyond.

“There it is,” the bounty hunter said, rising high in his stirrups, then easing his 230 muscular pounds back against the cantle. “Juniper. Damn fine-lookin’ place, sittin’ down there along that little stream.”

He glanced at Louisa, who reined her brown-and-white pinto up beside him and stared sullenly down at the saddle through the strands of her blond, wind-tussled hair. “I said—damn fine-lookin’ village in one right purty settin’—wouldn’t you say, Miss Persnickety Bitch?”

They’d argued three-quarters of the trail up from Mexico, over everything from Prophet’s snoring keeping Louisa awake at night to her intolerance of his poor dishwashing abilities. Thus his new pet name for her, which she’d been ignoring to get his goat. As irksome as she was, and intolerant of his unheeled ways, he was as happy as a front-tit calf that she’d regained her health during the two months she’d spent recuperating in Rocas Altas, with the singular Sor Magdalena acting as her own private nursemaid.

“Kind of hard to tell from here,” she said, lifting her canteen from around her saddle horn and plucking the cork from its mouth with her gloved left hand, always leaving the right one free in case she needed to reach for one of her pearl-gripped Colts in a hurry. “You know how you are, Lou. You get something in your mind in a certain way, it’d take the Devil’s own hounds to wrestle it out of your craw.”

Prophet popped the cork on his own canteen and arched a sandy, sun-bleached brow at her. “Huh?”

She hiked a shoulder as she drank from the canteen as gracefully, Prophet absently mused, as a sixty-year-old schoolmarm would drink from a teacup that had been in the family for over a century. Only, the schoolmarm likely couldn’t shoot the eye out of a galloping border bandit at a hundred and fifty yards.

Louisa lowered the canteen, sucking the excess moisture from her rich, lower lip, brushing a gloved hand across her chin, and favoring Prophet with a cool, hazel stare. “If you suddenly got it into that big mule’s head of yours that the Sonora desert at high summer was about to see a boom in the ice trade, it would take your drowning in a melted ocean of it to convince you otherwise.”

“That ain’t true!” Prophet took a quick sip then pulled his canteen down sharply, indignantly. “I just like to look on the bright side of things, and I don’t see nothin’ wrong in doin’ so. You’re too negative—you know that? In fact, if a golden waterfall suddenly appeared right before your persnickety eyes, Miss Bonnyventure, why, you’d . . .”

Prophet let his voice trail off.

He stared at the girl regarding him with cool haughtiness, and the anger leached from his eyes. A more beautiful, albeit snooty, face he had never seen. It was heart-shaped, with a perfect, pug nose and the rich bee-stung mouth of a high-priced china doll . . . and no less pretty for having been abused so badly by Major Montoya back in that infernal Mexican hoosegow.

And seeing the few lingering remnants of the merciless beating Louisa had taken—a little graying around her eyes, a pale white scar on her right cheek, a not-quite-healed scab on her lower lip—Prophet realized that no one had more reason to look at life through shit-colored glasses than his beautiful, young partner, who had endured more than her share of misery in her twenty short years.

A rose of tenderness blossomed just behind his forehead and between his eyes. He sidled Mean and Ugly up as close as he dared to the girl’s pinto, wrapped a big arm around her shoulders, drew her to him, tipped her head back, and closed his mouth over hers, kissing her tenderly.

“Lou, dangit!” she cried when the kiss had continued for nearly a minute, pulling away from him, gasping and clamping a hand over the crown of her tan felt hat before Prophet, in his overzealous affection, knocked it off her head. “Did you save me from the Rurales only to finish me off by sucking all the air out of my lungs, you ape?”

Prophet donned his hat. “I’m just damn glad to have you back, girl. And I’m pleased as the queen’s own punch you agreed to make a fresh start with this old saddle tramp.”

“You’re not a saddle tramp. You’re a bounty hunter.” She reached over to brush a dried seed from the three-day growth of sandy beard on his broad, hard-lined face—a face that some would say was far too big, weathered, and scarred to be called handsome. “As am I,” she added.

“Not anymore. You, Miss Bonnyventure, are about to join the ranks of the good, respectable citizens of Juniper, a town every bit as well-heeled as its name.”

“Juniper, huh?”

Louisa stepped down from her pinto, tossed Prophet her reins, and strode into the rocks and brush beside the trail, her brown wool riding skirt buffeting about her long, well-turned legs and the tops of her undershot leather boots adorned with silver spurs. She scrounged around behind the town sign and the boulder flanking it and held up a gray-weathered plank announcing HELLDORADO in badly faded letters that might have been green at one time.

Louisa smiled cockily. “It appears to me that the good town of Juniper was once known by another name entirely. One bespeaking nothing so much as a hotbed of frivolous behavior and corruption of the lowest kind. Painted women and murderous rogues. Just the kind of town you once favored, Lou. You and your friend the Devil, or Ole Scratch, as you call him.”

She grabbed the reins back from him and swung up into her saddle.

“You’re gonna like it here, damnit,” Prophet stubbornly assured the girl as they set off down the bench, each taking a track of the two-track wagon trail. “Helldorado was what the place was called—right appropriately—back before it was cleaned up by an old buddy of mine, the mossy-horned town tamer, Hiram Severin. Or ‘Hell-Bringin’ Hiram,’ as he’s been called in the illustrated newspapers.”

Prophet chuckled. “I picked Juniper for you an’ me special, ’cause Hell-Bringin’ Hiram assured me it’s as tame as any in the Rockies—tamer than most—and it ain’t likely we’ll be lured back to our crazy, sharp-horned ways here.”

“We’ve tried this before, Lou.”

“Tried what before?”

“Living lives with pianos in them, and picket fences, and a red stable behind a white frame house.”

“No,” Prophet said. “You tried it. Back in Seven Devils. And that was one bad piece of luck, Louisa. As bad a piece as I’ve seen—or had seen till I pulled you out of that Rurale perdition. But I haven’t tried it. You see—that’s the difference. Maybe if we both walk the straight and narrow road, we won’t so easily veer off into the tall and uncut.”

He glanced at the girl riding off his right stirrup. She held her head forward, saying nothing. She hadn’t said anything about what had happened to her back in Montoya’s private quarters, and Prophet hadn’t asked. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know, but if she ever needed to tell him, she would.

One thing he did know—it had been hell. Otherwise, Louisa wouldn’t have let him talk her into giving settling down another try. She hadn’t jumped into the idea with both feet, but she hadn’t slammed the door on it, either.

When Prophet had mentioned it late one night outside Sor Magdalena’s cave and mapped out his plan about heading for Wyoming—about as far from Mexico and all the horrible stuff that had occurred there as one could get and not find himself hip-deep in a Canadian winter—she’d merely hiked a shoulder, nodded, lain back against her saddle, and rolled up in her blankets.