Hell's Angel

STRANGER IN THE NIGHT . . .

Foot thuds sounded, spurs ringing. Gravel crunched beneath leather soles. As if out of a dream, a figure materialized—slender and curvy, long, blond hair tumbling over shoulders clad in a striped brown serape. As the stranger stepped closer to the cave entrance, Prophet blinked, trying to clear his vision.

He looked down at brown boots trimmed with silver spurs and followed the lithe, denim-clad legs up to a cartridge belt and two cross-draw holsters strapped to slim hips, over the serape. A kid-gloved hand still held a cocked, silver-chased, pearl-gripped .45, gray smoke curling from the barrel . . .

Prophet cleared his throat and raked out, “Fancy meetin' you here, Louisa.”

Berkley titles by Peter Brandvold

The Bounty Hunter Lou Prophet Series

HELL'S ANGEL

THE DEVIL'S LAUGHTER

THE DEVIL'S WINCHESTER

HELLDORADO

THE GRAVES AT SEVEN DEVILS

THE DEVIL'S LAIR

STARING DOWN THE DEVIL

THE DEVIL GETS HIS DUE

RIDING WITH THE DEVIL'S MISTRESS

DEALT THE DEVIL'S HAND

THE DEVIL AND LOU PROPHET

The Rusty Spurr Series

THE LAST LAWMAN

The .45-Caliber Series

.45
-CALIBER CROSS FIRE

.45
-CALIBER DESPERADO

.45
-CALIBER FIREBRAND

.45
-CALIBER WIDOW MAKER

.45
-CALIBER DEATHTRAP

.45
-CALIBER MANHUNT

.45
-CALIBER FURY

The Rogue Lawman Series

GALLOWS EXPRESS

BORDER SNAKES

BULLETS OVER BEDLAM

COLD CORPSE, HOT TRAIL

DEADLY PREY

ROGUE LAWMAN

The Sheriff Ben Stillman Series

HELL ON WHEELS

ONCE LATE WITH A
 
.38

ONCE UPON A DEAD MAN

ONCE A RENEGADE

ONCE HELL FREEZES OVER

ONCE A LAWMAN

ONCE MORE WITH A 
.44

ONCE A MARSHAL

HELL'S ANGEL

— A LOU PROPHET NOVEL —

P
ETER
B
RANDVOLD

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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HELL'S ANGEL

A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

Copyright © 2013 by Peter Brandvold.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

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^®
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e Book ISBN: 978-1-101-62339-8

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Berkley mass-market edition / June 2013

Cover illustration by Bruce Emmett.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

For my high school English teacher in North Dakota

—Kerry Jaeger

1

“DIOS MIO!” THE
senorita said through a gasp. “Lou, you must go! My husband is home!”

“Husband?
Ramonna
, you're a
whore
!”

“Not anymore, Lou!”

The senorita gasped when another sound rose from the hotel/saloon's first story, and clamped her hands to Lou Prophet's face. She stared up at him, chocolate eyes wide and bright with terror. She squirmed beneath him. Her full breasts raked warmly against his chest.

“Lou,
vamonos
! He is an angry man! Very jealous! If he sees us together, he will
keeel
you!”

Lou Prophet stopped bucking against the lovely
puta
, Ramonna Oscuro, whom he'd met a couple of years before, here in the little border village of San Simon, when he'd been on the run from the Federales. He stared down at her, incredulous.

It was deep night, but downstairs, in the hotel's little cantina, boots thudded. A contented whistling sounded. It stopped.

The man's burly voice barreled up the stairs in Spanish, echoing off the mud brick walls—“
Hola
, my hot little chili pepper—your husband is home!”

“Shit!” Prophet said, scowling down in disbelief at the frightened
puta
. “That ain't Colonel Campa, is it—commander of the local Rurale outpost?”

“Si,”
Ramonna said, nodding, as boots tapped slowly, heavily on the stone stairs. “He is very jealous man, Lou! He married me to keep me pure, though I have it on good word he still tumbles with any girl he gets heated up for!”

Prophet cursed again and rolled off the bed, climbing to his feet and looking around on the scarred wooden floor for his underwear. “The son of a bitch was dogging me for three days through Chihuahua. Accused me of holdin' up a stage on the old Comanche Trail. Knows damn well I didn't. That was Missouri Charlie Black and Pancho Scudder. Campa just soured on me after I cut his ear off in a fair knife fight in Juarez, two years ago last Christmas.”

“That was you?”

“Didn't mean to. Meant to cut his throat, but I was too drunk to see straight. He said if he ever saw me in Mexico again, he'd see me shot down in front of the nearest adobe wall.”

Prophet stepped into his balbriggans, drew them up his legs, having to squat and wriggle around to get the skintight, threadbare garment up his thick, brawny, six-foot-four-inch frame without ripping out the seams. “Lost him two days ago. Didn't figure on him thinkin' to look for me here—in the same little village he's
headquartered
in!”

The colonel's deep voice, slurred from drink, shouted, “I have brought you a present, my little mountain flower!”

Prophet glanced at Ramonna skeptically as he scooped his denim trousers off a chair back.
“Mountain flower?”

“He's quite a poet, the
bastardo
! I only married him because I was tired of going from man to man, and I was drunk. I'm not as young as I used to be. I'll be twenty next month. The years catch up to us all. Hurry, Lou—he's in the hall!”

Prophet clamped his pants under his arm, then stooped to grab his boots into which he'd stuffed his socks when he and Ramonna had come up to her room after the fandango in the village plaza, to get down to the business of the flesh. He could hear the colonel's boot thuds growing louder in the hall. Campa was whistling and humming, sort of shuffling along, likely three sheets to the wind. But Campa was the sort of man who sobered up fast when riled, and he was known as a good and willing hand with a six-shooter.

Prophet clamped his boots under his arm with his pants. He slung his cartridge belt and holstered Peacemaker over his shoulder, retrieved his sawed-off, ten-gauge, double-barrel coach gun from where he'd hung it by its leather lanyard from a wall spike, and picked up his Winchester '73 repeater that he'd leaned against the wall by the door.

As well armed as he himself was, he could blow Campa into bits the size of a cow's cud, but if he ambushed him here in his own town, he'd have every Rurale in northern Chihuahua after him, and he'd never again be able to hunt bounties south of the border. Mexico was the primest of hunting grounds. Whenever the outlaw herds were holed up tighter than ticks in a cur's ear up north, Prophet knew he could fund at least another year of stomping with his tail up by turning his sights on the other side of the Rio Bravo.

“Ah, my lovely Ramonna, I can't wait to impale you with my razor-edged love dagger!” Campa guffawed, his laughter alternating between deep and raspy, and high and brittle. He'd greatly amused himself.

“Christ, Ramonna—couldn't you have done a little better than
that
?”

“I told you I was drunk!” she hissed, sitting up in the rickety bed, the single sheet falling to her waist and exposing her full, brown breasts. Her rich, dark brown hair was piled high atop her head. “That scar where you cut off his ear did nothing for his looks, either!”

“Hey, you married him!”

The boot thuds stopped just outside the bolted but insubstantial pine-board door. “Who are you talking to,
chiquita
?”

Ramonna hissed and clamped her hands over her mouth, brown eyes appearing about to pop out of their sockets.

Prophet had just opened the wooden shutters over the window. Now he swung around and cast an anxious glance at the door. “Ah, shit,” he whispered. “You gonna be all right, Ramonna, girl? I'd hate like hell for—”

“Lou, go!” the girl hissed again, thrusting her arm toward the window.

“‘Lou'?” came the colonel's soft, mocking voice from the other side of the door. “Lou
who
, my darling Ramonna? You don't have a big, ugly bounty hunter by the name of Lou Prophet in there, do you?” His voice was soft, but Prophet noted the restrained fury in it. The Rurale colonel had switched to Spanish. “The one whose trail I was fogging across half the Chihuahuan Desert?”

“Lou?”
Ramonna called, stretching a brittle smile and ensconcing her voice in sugar. “Lou who,
mi amore
? You know I have eyes for no one but you!”

She kept waving frantically at Prophet, who looked out the window and into the straw-strewn yard at the back of the hotel/saloon. He was about thirty feet above the ground, but there was a rear gallery roof of woven ironwood branches roughly fifteen feet below him and slightly to his right.

Possibly, he could land on that and then leap the rest of the way to the ground without killing himself.

Possibly . . .

Campa was rattling the door latch. “Open the door,
chiquita
,” he said in a singsong, menacing voice. He hammered on it loudly, with such power that the door lurched in its frame. “Open the door right now or I will
blow it open
!”

“Coming, my bull!” Ramonna shot Prophet another tense, frantic glance as she bounded up out of the bed and uncoiled her cool, naked brown body, starting for the door. “Just one second, my wild stud horse!”

Too late.

There was what sounded like the blast of a Napoleon cannon. The rickety door flew open, shedding parts of itself including the locking bolt, as it slammed against the dresser behind it, knocking Ramonna's wooden Our Lady of Guadalupe off the wall above it.

Prophet was crouched atop the windowsill now, but as the burly, shaggy-headed Campa bounded into the room with his two pearl-gripped pistols drawn, the bounty hunter threw himself, his load of clothes, and his small arsenal off the casement, angling toward the brush roof below.

The brush grew until he could see the sides of each branch limned by lilac starlight. He bent his knees slightly to best absorb the impact. But when his feet struck the roof, there was only a slight impact.

The woven branches sagged briefly before breaking apart, and suddenly the big man was falling on through the roof to pile up in a heap on the gallery floor below.

Prophet had dropped his gear and lay writhing, bells tolling in his ears, pale doves flapping before his eyes, his feet and ankles burning. An Apache war lance of pain impaled the left shoulder and hip he'd landed on.

“Yanqui son of a bitch!”
Colonel Campa shouted, and Prophet looked through the ragged hole he'd made in the roof above to see, slightly to one side, the Rurale's round, dark face shrouded by his shaggy hair, glaring down at him, white teeth showing between lips sheathed in long, drooping mustaches. “Die, you bas-
tard
!”

The gun the colonel was extending toward Prophet stabbed red yellow flames as it roared. Prophet rolled to one side, and as the bullet plowed into bits of brush protruding into the hole in the roof, diverting it, he began quickly gathering his gear.

Bam! Bam!
“Die, you son of a bitch!”
Bam
-
bam!

The bullets plowed through the roof. Two thudded into the gallery's worn wooden floor within a foot or two of the bounty hunter's large, pale, bare feet. Another pinged off the casement ledge beneath a lower-story window. Ricocheting, the third slug sliced a burn across Prophet's right shoulder before screeching off into the dark night.

“No!” Ramonna was screaming above the shots' dwindling echoes. “No, Arturo, no! He means nothing to me!”

“Thanks a bunch, Ramonna,” Prophet raked out through gritted teeth as, his hands and arms full of his gear once more, he bolted out from under the gallery roof, heading for the cover of brush and stock pens beyond the saloon. The livery barn in which he'd stabled his horse lay in that direction, north, though a good seventy or so yards away. He hoped like hell he'd be able to find it on so dark a moonless night.

Campa fired both his pistols now as he shouted Spanish epithets. The bullets blew up dust, straw, and chicken shit around Prophet's hammering heels.

Crouching, knees pumping, clutching his gear to his body, his shell belt and holstered .45 flapping against his right side, he traced a serpentine path to make himself as hard a target as possible for the drunken Rurale colonel. Still, several of Campa's bullets came close enough to pelt the bounty hunter with dirt and rocks as well as with chunks from the mud bricks of the chicken coop he skirted, hearing the roused hens squawking and quarreling inside.

He was halfway to the thick brush beyond the chicken coop, Campa's pistols continuing to bark behind him, when Prophet heard an angry snarl. There was the quick pad of four feet.

The low, angry snarling grew louder. Prophet glanced over his left shoulder to see a medium-sized dog tear after him, starlight showing in the beast's shaggy fur and reflecting off its small, angry dark eyes.

“Ah, shit!” the bounty man lamented breathlessly, turning his head and continuing to pump his legs, ignoring the pain of pebbles and cactus thorns biting into the soles of his bare feet. “A goddamn dog—just what I need!”

There was another shot from behind. Then another.

Just as the dog was about to clamp its mouth around one of Prophet's ankles, Campa's last slug tore up dirt within an inch of the pesky devil. It yipped sharply. Deciding it wasn't as angry as it had thought, the mutt veered off course to disappear in the heavy shadows behind the coop.

Prophet kept running until he was sure he was out of range of Campa's pistols. Shouldering up to the rear corner of a small, dark casa, he dropped his gear on the ground, then picked through until he'd found his socks. Breathing hard, looking around cautiously, he pulled the socks on and then reached for his pants.

A shrill cry rose behind Prophet from the direction of the hotel. Campa was shouting in Spanish, the words muffled. He must have been out front of the place now and yelling toward the Rurale headquarters on the south edge of town.

The echoing cries set a couple dogs to barking. From what Prophet could make out, the colonel was ordering his underlings to sound the alarm. The thought had no sooner passed through the bounty hunter's brain than a bell began tolling loudly, wildly, alerting every Rurale in town.

The bounty hunter cursed again sharply and muttered, “Whoever heard of a whore gettin' married? Especially one as talented as Senorita Ramonna . . . !”

Prophet picked up his pants, quickly stepped into them, and then into his boots. When he'd pulled on his buckskin shirt and thumbed his suspenders up over his broad shoulders, he wrapped his shell belt around his waist, buckled it, and tied the thong securing the holster housing his walnut-gripped .45 Peacemaker low on his right thigh. He looped his shotgun over his shoulder, picked up his rifle, and set off running through the brush and scattered casas and stock pens, in the general direction he remembered the livery barn to be.

The bell kept tolling, sounding inordinately loud in the quiet night. Campa quit yelling, but as Prophet ran around the corner of a house and started east, someone else started yelling in the west.

He whipped a look to his left. Two men in dove gray uniforms and straw sombreros were running toward him.

“Stop!” one of them shouted, bringing his Trapdoor Springfield rifle to bear. He had a cigarette or a cigar smoldering between his lips, the coal glowing redly. They'd likely been out on patrol against renegade Comanches or the particularly savage breed of bandit that haunted this border country, when they'd heard the bell and the colonel's indignant shrieks.

Prophet extended his double-barreled coach gun in his left hand. He triggered the left barrel. The explosion sounded like a detonated keg of gunpower. The flash of the heavy flames lapping from the maw showed the nearest Rurale flying two feet up and straight back with a scream, his sombrero tumbling down his chest.

As the other Rurale stopped and, also screaming, jerked his rifle stock to his shoulder, Prophet's sawed-off gut shredder blossomed once more, the flames reflecting off the second Rurale's pale uniform before the fist-sized wad of buckshot tore through the man and hurled him over his partner. He bounced off a stock trough, his back breaking audibly, and landed in the street with a heavy thud, his rifle crashing to the ground beside his quivering corpse.