Hell's Angel (14 page)

“Where were you just now?” he said.

“Moon's Well.”

“Don't call it that,” he said, irritation in his voice, resting his forearm over his eyes. “It's Chisos Springs.”

“Whatever it's called, I've been keeping an eye on it.”

Louisa was slicing salt pork into a skillet into which she'd poured a good portion of soaked beans. She set the pan on a rock amongst the dancing flames, added another mesquite branch to the fire, and sat back against her own saddle, regarding Prophet darkly.

“Trouble there, Lou. The dwarf has been hauling in kidnapped women from New Mexico and Arizona, most of them Apache orphans kidnapped off reservations or monasteries, as sex slaves for his whorehouse. Several Indian agents are in league with him, point out the best girls to take, those who won't be as missed as those with kin. That's what brought me here. I heard about such deviltry in Las Cruces and rode over to see what I could do.”

“Moon's ridin' point on this deviltry?”

She nodded.

“Wouldn't doubt it a bit,” Prophet said with a sigh. He wouldn't put anything past the vile dwarf, after what he'd heard about him from Ruth Rose. “How many does he think he needs, anyway? How many can he house?”

“Quite a few, apparently,” Louisa said, leaning forward to stir the bacon and beans around in the popping, snapping pan. “He keeps each girl for only a couple of months. When he figures his customers have tired of the same ones, he ships them down to Mexico and sells them to a corrupt Rurale colonel, who in turn—”

“Campa?” Prophet interrupted her.

Louisa looked over the crackling pan and the flickering flames at him. “How did you know?”

“Lucky guess.”

“Who, in turn, as I was saying, sells them to brothels down in Chihuahua and northern Sonora. It's a big money-making proposition for them. The Mexicans might not like the wild Apache men much, but they like their young girls just fine.”

Prophet shook his head and lowered his arm over his eyes again, trying to push down the pain behind them. “Forget it, Louisa. It's too big. You're one girl. Not bad with a pair of matched hoglegs—I'll give you that. But I won't be any use for at least a week, and even if I was, we're talking the dwarf's men—he's got a big role—and the old outlaw sheriff, Lee Mortimer.”

Again he shook his head. “That's a job for the Texas Rangers, U.S marshals, the cavalry. . . .”

“There's one more thing, Lou, which might hasten your healing.”

“What's that?”

“Moon has made a slave of Mrs. Rose, now, too.”

Prophet snapped his head up.

Louisa nodded slowly, darkly. “I saw her tonight through a window. Her and the dwarf and that brown-haired girl of his.”

“The
three
of them?”

Louisa nodded again slowly, pursing her lips, her hazel eyes reflecting the umber firelight. “But only two seemed to be having any fun.”

15

THE DWARF CLIMBED
off of her, wheezing, thin strands of hair in his eyes. He grinned down at her, his little pig eyes rheumy and red-rimmed from exertion, as he crawled to the edge of the bed and dropped to the floor with a slapping thump.

Ruth Rose drew her legs together, scrubbed the back of her hand across her mouth with a grimace. Revulsion rippled through her.

“Don't lick my spittle off your lips!” the dwarf said, standing naked by the bed and poking an admonishing finger at her. He was so short that Ruth could only see his large head, bug eyes, and his spindly shoulders. “That's nectar of the gods!”

Laughing, he turned to where Griselda May was dressing near the door of the large, sparsely furnished room—the dwarf's and the crazy girl's own room. “Ain't it, Griselda?”

The girl had stepped into her skirt and dropped her lacy chemise over her head. Her small, cone-shaped breasts poked against the thin garment. She looked at Moon, stuck her tongue out, curled the tip, and ran it slowly, lasciviously across her upper lip.

That got him laughing harder.

His croaky, raspy voice was as revolting as the rest of him, including the heavy, fishy odor of his breath. Ruth could still smell it. It made her stomach clench, and for several seconds, she thought she'd be sick. She drew a deep breath and scrubbed her hand across her mouth once more, when the dwarf's back was turned as he gathered his clothes from the floor.

“Can I go now?” she asked, unable to keep her fury from her tone. “I have to see to my husband.”

The dwarf was hopping around, pulling his pants up over his balbriggans. “Hell, no—you can't go. I done told you, you was a permanent fixture in these parts. When me an' Griselda's done with ya, we're turnin' you over to our payin' customers. When they tire of ya, you're goin' to Mexico with the Apache girls!”

He winked as he straightened, then bent both knees, crouching a little to bring his pants up over his paunch, sucking in his gut and buttoning the child-sized denims.

“Me,” Griselda said, “I'm tired of her, Mordecai. She just lays there. Don't even pretend to be havin' any fun at all.”

The dwarf reached down for his shirt and said with a grunt as he straightened once more, “Maybe she just needs a little more practice. She ain't never whored before, Griselda. Not like some others. . . .” He snickered meaningfully.

Griselda stopped buttoning her cream blouse to swat Moon's shoulder with the back of her hand. “I done told you, Mordecai, I ain't never whored a day in my life! I done told you that! And I don't like bein' called a
whore
!”

The dwarf chuckled in devilish delight as he dodged another swat, sort of sidestepping and dancing around the sharp-faced, brown-haired girl, whose cheeks were red with rage, as they often were, Ruth had noticed. Rage and jealousy.

Ruth had seen it just a few minutes ago, when the dwarf was toiling over Ruth herself, and, bored, Griselda had climbed down off the bed and started washing herself at the porcelain basin.

An odd, funny girl. A dangerous one, too. Even more dangerous than Ruth had once thought.

And whatever fondness she had for Moon was faked.

“Please,” Ruth said, covering herself with a pillow and dropping her legs over the side of the bed. “My husband has been alone for two days. He needs food and water. He needs his
medication
!”

“Ah, keep quiet,” the dwarf said. “Your caterwaulin's growin' right tiresome. And when I get tired of you, you know what that means.” He pointed an admonishing finger at her again.

Before she could respond, the clatter of wagons and the thunder of many hooves rose in the street outside the hotel. The cacophony grew louder amidst the whistling and yells of bullwhackers or muleskinners. Another freight team rolling into Moon's Well, Ruth knew. She'd grown so accustomed to the din that she often no longer even heard it.

“Ah, that'd be Chaz Burdick's train from Amarillo,” the dwarf said. “His crew always comes in thirsty and girl hungry. We're gonna make us a killin' tonight, my dear Griselda.”

Moon ambled toward the window and stopped in front of Ruth. He placed one of his big, horny hands on her cheek, lifting her face to meet his wretched, leering gaze.

“You shouldn't have piss-burned Griselda, Mrs. Rose. For that, I'm gonna turn you over to ole Burdick. He's just rollin' in money, and he's asked about you before.” He winked. “Before you was in my stable.”

“You son of a—!”

“Oh, hush!”

The dwarf removed his hand from her face, hopped up on a chair fronting the window, and looked out. He yelled down a greeting and waved, then said with a big grin over his shoulder, “It's him, all right. Burdick and his half-dozen skinners from the panhandle. They look even thirstier an' hornier than usual!”

Leaping off the chair, he looked at Griselda as he stuffed his shirttails into his pants. “What do you say, honey? Would you like that—me turnin' her over to ole Burdick and his boys! They'd pay a purty penny for her, too. Virgins and
married women
. Nothin' turns a man's wheel faster!”

Griselda was strapping her derringers around her narrow waist. She looked at Ruth still sitting on the edge of the bed and curled her lip evilly. “I'd like that just fine, Mordecai.”

The dwarf ran over to her, wrapped his little arms around her legs, rose up on the balls of his stocking feet, and pooched out his lips. Griselda glanced once more, proprietarily, at Ruth, and then leaned down and pressed her lips to those of the dwarf. She tried hard to appear as though she were enjoying herself.

Moon groaned and cooed. When Griselda pulled her head away from his, he chuckled as she turned and walked toward the door. He stared at her butt until she'd left, leaving the door open behind her. Moon shook his head and sighed, thoroughly smitten by the girl who was every bit as demonic as he himself was, and then turned to Ruth.

“Ain't she somethin', Mrs. Rose? Ain't she just
somethin'
?”

Ruth's heart felt as though it had been torn to ribbons in her chest. She'd been violated with the promise of more violations to come. On top of everything, her husband was likely dying in the most ghastly way back at the Rose Hotel and Saloon.

“Why are you doing this, Moon?” she asked. “What did Frank and I ever do to you?”

The dwarf sat on a footstool to pull one of his little, black boots on. “You didn't pay your taxes, Mrs. Rose. You know that. And you barely even been payin' on your water contract.”

“You don't need our money,” she said, her voice dull with shock and bewilderment as well as the torment and degradation she'd just endured—the wet lips and pawing, clawing hands of both him and that evil girl of his. “You make enough here to satisfy every need you could possibly have.”

“Yeah, I do, don't I?” he said, buckling his shell belt and twisting his rounded hips this way and that, adjusting the holstered Colt.

He smiled so that his pasty, craggy cheeks dimpled and his little eyes narrowed to slits. “I do it 'cause I
can
do it.”

Moon scooped his hat off a chair, frowned at the hole in its crown, and then set it on his head. He walked toward Ruth, stopped about a foot away from her.

He said, “When you
can
do something—a man like me—you
do
it, no matter what it is. No matter how bad. Fuck
good
! To a man livin' in a body like mine, eye level with crotches all my life, raised by folks who'd as soon spit on me as treat me even halfways decent, who kept me locked in a cellar when neighbors came cause they was embarrassed—laughed and called me the
devil in the hole
or
hell's little angel!
—there ain't much good in the world to begin with.

“See how it is? Well, I found out early that my body might be small. But my spirit was big, bad as it was. Big and
bad
! And for one reason or another, small as I was body-wise, I could command men. Get 'em to do just whatever I wanted. Don't ask me how. But I could do it then and I can do it now. And by God, for a man like me, that's
everything
!”

Moon rocked back on his heels and poked the first two fingers of each hand into the wool vest he wore under his black clawhammer coat. He considered her for a time. Ruth stared back at him, through the screen of hair hanging in her eyes. Pity only slightly tempered her loathing for the man. In her mind, she could still hear him grunting on top of her, staring down at her and grinning maliciously, his bug eyes crossing as he toiled.

“I could never win the heart of a woman like you,” he continued, raking his eyes across her, his little chest rising and falling slowly. “No, I could never make a woman like you—purty and upright and well-mannered and sophisticated in a country kind o' way—feel anything but disgust for me. I seen it all my life. But I can put the fear of God into you, can't I?” He grinned broadly, showing his yellow, crooked teeth. “And I have, haven't I?”

Ruth said nothing, only stared at him, knowing that sooner or later, after he'd had his fill of torturing her simply because he could, he'd kill her. Or cause her to want to be dead in the worst way possible.

He winked, turned on a heel, and sauntered to the door. He stopped with one hand on the knob and looked back at her. He frowned as though troubled.

“Tell me somethin' from your woman's point of view, will you, Mrs. Rose? You think Griselda really loves me, or is she just playacting?”

“I think she had far more fun with me than she's ever had with you, Mr. Moon.” The automatic response, spoken with quiet satisfaction, caused a devilish thrill to ripple through Ruth. She felt the ripple again when, for a fleeting half second, she witnessed genuine injury darken the dwarf's eyes like a cloud sweeping the ground on a sunny day.

He covered it with a sigh, smoothed the colorless whiskers dangling off his chin, and turned to the door. “Get yourself ready for Burdick. He'll be up shortly.”

He gave her another menacing wink and went out. She heard the key turn in the lock on the opposite side of the door, locking her in.

16

THERE WAS A
knock on Ruth's door.

The key in the lock clicked. She turned from where she'd been brushing her hair in a standing mirror, to see the door open and a man's hatted head appear between the door and the jamb. The man had a thick mustache with upswept ends and three or four days' worth of beard stubble on his sunburned cheeks.

Ruth flushed. So did Chaz Burdick behind the bright pink on his broad, fleshy cheeks, above the mustache that had a fine coating of trail dust. His eyes were blue beneath dark brown brows. The fetor of mules, the man's own sweat, and wheel grease was an almost visible cloud about him.

From downstairs came the tinny clatter of Moon's four-piece Mexican band, one of the men singing along with a girl. There was clapping and the stomping of feet, yells, and ribald laughter.

Burdick doffed his broad-brimmed Stetson as he came into the room, looking sheepish but also randy, his eyes raking Ruth up and down. She'd cleaned herself at the washbasin and donned the dress the dwarf had given her, likely shipped in from Fort Worth, as was most everything else here, including professional whores who worked for percentages. The dress was red and extremely low cut with very slender shoulder straps. It was the only dress Ruth had, and she wasn't about to receive Burdick naked.

She looked down at the gun belt hanging down his right, denim-clad hip. A walnut-gripped pistol jutted from the worn, brown leather holster. Her heart thudded, and she quickly lifted her gaze to Burdick's flushed, pink face.

“Well, Chaz,” she said, softly. “Fancy meeting you here.”

He came in and closed the door, holding his hat down low by his side. His thick hair was sweat-matted to his head, with an indention line caused by the hat's sweatband. The din from downstairs was loud now. Burdick had the key in his other hand, and now he stuck the key in the lock and turned it until the bolt clicked and left it there.

Burdick turned to her, still wearing that sheepish, eager look of a nasty schoolboy about to do what he'd been dreaming of doing for a long time and finally got his chance.

“Ruth,” he said, dipping his chin politely. “Quite a place here, huh?”

“You don't really expect me to indulge in polite conversation . . . like the
real
percentage girls, do you?”

Burdick chuckled and glanced at the hat in his hands. “Well, the Apache girls mostly just grunt and groan.”

Ruth let the smile turn dark. “Is that who you prefer? The little Apache girls here against their will? Moon's
sex
slaves?”

Burdick let his arms drop to his sides. “Now, Ruth, goddamnit . . . !”

“You know I'm here against my will—don't you, Chaz?”

Burdick swallowed, glanced at her breasts half-revealed by the low-cut dress, and then lowered his gaze to the floor. “Figured.”

“But you still want to do this?”

Now he looked up, angry, and she could see that his dark blue eyes were glassy from drink. “I paid the little man, fer chrissakes, Ruth! And, hell, I got needs! You know how far I come today?”

“You were friends with Frank, Chaz.” Ruth's voice was quiet, vaguely incriminating. All she really wanted was to be able to get out of this room, and she thought she had a chance, but she still couldn't help badgering the man, torturing him a little, seeking a little revenge for the humiliation he would visit on her.

Burdick had stayed at her and Frank's place several times, eaten the food she'd cooked, had always acted pleasant enough. He and Frank had often played cards together. Ruth had always felt his eyes on her backside, but now he'd gone much further than that.

Now he was about to, for all intents and purposes, rape her.

And she couldn't help needling him about it.

She glanced once more at the gun on his thigh and then she set the brush on the dresser by the mirror and stepped back from him, letting him have a good look at her body. Shaming him with his own lust.

“You're married, aren't you, Chaz?”

Burdick's face turned pinker. He curled his thick upper lip and angrily tossed his hat on the brocade-upholstered chair to his right. “Enough talkin', Ruth. I'm sorry about Frank, but you're workin' over here now, and by God I paid two silver cartwheels to that little fucker for only an hour with you. Now, you get outta that dress before I get mad!”

“All right, all right,” she said, feeling an odd pleasure at the power she wielded.

She'd always thought that whores were the only ones victimized by the transaction, but maybe that wasn't entirely true. Maybe the men who used them were also victimized in a way. Victimized by their own ugly vulnerabilities and unrestrained cravings.

Slaves of their own desire.

She unbuttoned the dress. He watched in eagerness and awe as she slid each strap down off a shoulder, slowly lowered the top of the dress to her waist, her breasts springing free.

She wore nothing beneath it. She let the dress drop to the floor and stood before him, naked but not ashamed. Her nakedness shamed him. He felt the embarrassment. She could see it flicker amongst the male lust in his eyes—the lust that overpowered everything.

“Is this what you've been wanting to see?” she asked Burdick. “Am I what you'd imagined I'd be?”

“Holy shit,” he whispered, and then, with a near-manic grin, keeping his eyes on her naked body, kicked out of each boot so quickly that he nearly lost his balance and fell.

She crawled into bed and stared at him coolly while he removed his gun and shell belt, looped the belt over a rear bedpost, and then shucked out of his shirt and trousers and then his socks and his balbriggans. He fairly ran over to the bed, manhood at half-mast, and crawled under the covers, instantly pressing his sweaty, filthy, hairy body to hers, smashing his lips down on her mouth.

He tasted like tobacco and tequila.

“Wait,” she said, feeling his rod press against her belly. “Hold on.”

“You hold on to this!” he said through gritted teeth.

“I'd like to be on top,” she said and smiled up at him.

“Oh. You would, huh?” Burdick said, looking at her slightly askance, vaguely suspicious. Then he grinned. “Well, all right.” He chuckled and rolled off of her.

She rose to her knees and straddled him. He grinned up at her. One of his teeth was grayer than the others, slightly chipped. His doughy, pale chest was matted with thick, dark brown hair.

“All right, then,” he said, bucking beneath her. “Here we go!”

“Close your eyes.”

He frowned up at her again while she sort of hovered above him, reaching down beneath her for his organ. “Why?”

She squeezed it, smiled at him beguilingly. “I'm shy.”

He snorted. “I reckon this is a little strange.” He laughed again and squeezed his eyes closed, keeping his lips parted so that she could see the white line of his teeth between his furred lips.

Downstairs, the singer was singing more loudly. Someone was banging on a kettle with a spoon while many feet pounded the floor of the main drinking hall.

“Come on—hurry up, damnit,” he said, creasing the skin at the bridge of his nose.

She grabbed the free pillow from beside the one his head was resting on. When she had it, she reached back and jerked his revolver from the holster hanging from the rear bedpost to her left. She clicked the hammer back at the same time that she pressed the pillow over Burdick's head, leaned forward, bringing all her weight to bear on the pillow, and pressed the revolver's barrel hard against it.

He'd just started to lift his head and to struggle, grunting, when she pulled the trigger. Against the pillow and beneath the raucousness rising from below, the report sounded little louder than the popping of a dry knot in a wood stove.

Burdick's head jerked.

Ruth's heart fluttered. She wrinkled her nose against the stench of gunpowder and charred goose down. A small round spot of blood shone in the pillow. It grew quickly, soaking the pillow and the cotton case. Ruth recoiled from the blood, drawing the pistol back away from the pillow.

Beneath her thighs, she could feel the convulsions in the dying body. She gasped in horror and revulsion.

She climbed off Burdick so quickly that she got a foot tangled in the bedcovers, fell onto the side of the bed, bounced, and struck the floor with a heavy thud.

“Damn!” she hissed, freezing as she sat naked on her rump, pricking her ears to listen.

The music and the singing and foot stomping continued downstairs as usual. She heard no doors opening and closing around the room she was in, no footsteps in the hall.

Quickly, she rose, wincing at a slight bruise on her left hip, and picked up Burdick's revolver from off the rug it had fallen upon. She set it on the dresser, picked up the red dress, and drew it on over her head.

She looked around for a pair of shoes, but there were none in this part of the two-room suite that the dwarf and Griselda called their own—one that was too large for its sparse, expensive but practical furnishings shipped in from Fort Worth. The walls were of unadorned vertical pine boards still rife with the smell of resin.

It was almost as though the dwarf and Griselda merely camped here and did not really call the place a home despite the money the little man had obviously put into the sprawling building. From what she'd seen, the parts away from the main drinking hall were as bare as caves, though of course the whores' cribs were furnished with beds.

Moon and Griselda had few clothes besides those they wore, it appeared. Certainly no shoes that would fit Ruth. She had no idea what had happened to the ones she'd been wearing when the dwarf's men had removed her from her home.

Going barefoot might be better anyway. Quieter. And she had to flee the dwarf's place quietly, lest she should get caught. She had to get back over to her own place and see about Frank. The poor man must be starving, his bedclothes soaked with urine.

If he was still alive . . .

The thought of him dying so tragically, from neglect, swelled her heart until she felt it rise in her throat, drumming horrifically. Her pulse hammered in her temples.

Ruth glanced once more at Burdick. She could see his pasty belly, both arms, and one bare leg. The bloody pillow covered his face. His hands rested to either side of it, palms up, fingers curled like claws.

He was the first man she'd ever killed. Strange how she felt absolutely no remorse whatever. Only revulsion. It was what she'd had to do to so save herself and Frank.

What she would do once she'd returned to the Rose Hotel and Saloon, aside from tending Frank, she had no idea. The dwarf would find her in such an obvious place, of course, but what else could she do?

She hefted the pistol in her hand. She ran her thumb across the dimpled cylinder, heard a single click as the wheel turned.

She'd kill him. He wouldn't expect her to. That's how she'd get the drop on him. Drill a slug through his ugly heart. Of course, she'd probably die, then, too. And so would Frank. But at least she'd make sure the dwarf never saw the light of another day, either.

Holding the pistol low in her left hand, she walked over to the door, twisted the key, and winced when she heard the bolt click. She drew the door open and looked into the hall.

It was dark as dusk, no candles lit. And vacant. The only light was that issuing up from the saloon. Ruth could hear, beneath the constant din from below, the moaning of a girl behind one of the doors to her right and on the hall's far side. A man was saying something to the whore in a soft, snarling voice.

One of Moon's Apache girls was with a customer.

Behind another door, one of the professional gals was laughing as though at the funniest joke she'd ever heard.

Ruth did not know her way around the sprawling building, but she knew that stairs ran along the outside of the rear wall. Doubtful that there was a way to it on this side of the building. She had to risk crossing the place to the other side.

Quickly but quietly, walking on the balls of her bare feet, she made her way toward the broad wooden stairs that led down to the main drinking hall. She could hear the sounds of lovemaking behind the doors she passed, and the clatter of a man stumbling around drunk while a girl berated him in what Ruth assumed was Apache.

A glass dropped to the floor behind Ruth, and she slapped her free hand to her chest with a startled gasp. A man laughed and said, slurring his words, “Now, did
I
do that?”

Tiptoeing past the top of the stairs, brushing a shoulder along the wall, she glanced down the steps quickly to see tobacco smoke, aglow with lantern light, boiling up toward her. Men and brightly dressed whores were vague, jostling figures inside the billowing smoke plume. If anyone saw Ruth from down there, she doubted they'd recognize her through the fog.

Someone was playing a piano. Ruth recognized the dwarf's croaky, raspy voice singing along while a man in the gambling section of the hall spoke loudly in Spanish above the clattering of a roulette wheel.

Ruth finally found a downward slanting corridor bisecting what appeared several unfinished rooms, to the far back wall. Here, after some frantic searching, she found an outside door, and dropped quickly down the two tiers of steps to the ground.

At the bottom, she stopped and crouched to the left of the stairs. Straight out away from the building were two barns and a maze of corrals in which the hulking shapes of horses and mules milled, one mule braying raucously and causing a horse to whinny. To Ruth's right, she could see the silhouettes of three men as well as the small, red-glowing coals of their cigarettes or cigars.

The men, likely the dwarf's hostlers, were speaking Spanish and laughing. They were also passing a bottle. Ruth could hear the sloshing liquid each time they drank.

Keeping to the building's dense shadow, Ruth sidestepped off to her left and then looked around the corner of the building toward the main street and the well. Lights from the lower-story windows revealed several men standing around on the street fronting the dwarf's saloon. A couple were crouched and playing a traditional Mexican bone-throwing game not far from the well—and not far from Ruth's destination, her own forbiddingly dark hotel.