Hell's Angel (5 page)

5

PROPHET LOWERED THE
Winchester's barrel as the echoes of the rifle's screech chased each other skyward.

Behind him, Mean and Ugly snorted and shifted his weight uncomfortably. The bounty hunter looked to his right, saw a hatted head staring at him from over a rifle barrel. The man was belly down on a low, gravely dike about fifty yards away. The maw of the rifle remained trained on Prophet.

Apparently, he hadn't checked the layout closely enough. He wondered how long the man had been there. Likely, he was the shooter who'd shot the Ranger, which meant that Prophet, having discovered the dead Ranger, was probably next.

He scowled at the rifle, expecting it to blossom at any moment. But then it tilted upward, and the man wielding it stood, holding the rifle on Prophet with one hand, using the other hand to brush the red sand from his dark blue shirt, brown vest, and black denim trousers, the tops of which were stuffed down into high, brown boots.

“Drop the rifle,” the man said. He was young, and a pale Stetson with a braided rawhide band was snugged down atop his head. Sandy hair feathered down over his ears and his collar.

Prophet squeezed the neck of the rifle's stock in frustration, then tossed the gun to the ground, muttering a curse. Nothing graveled a man who hunted for a living like being snuck up on.

“Now, the hogleg,” the kid with the rifle said. “Slow as a winter rain.”

Prophet slid his hand down to the Peacemaker holstered on his right thigh, unsnapped the keeper thong, and tossed the gun down next to the rifle. As the kid began climbing down the front of the dike, keeping the rifle trained on Prophet, the bounty hunter glimpsed a badge peeking out from behind the left flap of his vest.

Another Ranger?

The kid crabbed down the dike, loosing sand and gravel in his wake, and then walked around several tufts of cactus before drawing up within ten feet of the bounty hunter. The kid wore a smug grin, revealing a chipped front tooth.

His eyes were pale blue. A thin caterpillar mustache stretched across his upper lip, and scraggly sideburns dropped down to his jawline. If you didn't look closely, both the mustache and the sideburns could have been mistaken for a thin coating of soot.

The kid was almost as tall as Prophet though not quite as muscular. He was rawboned, with knobby wrists and shoulders.

“Killin' a Texas Ranger's a hangin' offense, you know, mister,” he told Prophet with a sneering solemnity, glancing down at the dead man.

“It sure is.”

“Why'd you do it?”

Prophet curled his upper lip. “I didn't do it, and I gotta feelin' you know that.”

“How would I know?”

“When'd you come along?”

“Just now.”

Prophet toughened his glare. “Then how'd you know he was a Ranger?”

The kid looked down at the dead man and then quirked a half smile as he raised his mocking, arrogant gaze again to Prophet. “I seen the badge when you rolled him over. I seen you headed this way, and then I came down to meet you, but when I got to the shelf yonder, I seen you crouched over a dead man. I think you killed him, and I reckon I'd best kill you right now. You wanna put some fun into it?”

Prophet wrinkled the leathery skin above the bridge of his thrice-broken nose. “Huh?”

“With pistols. We could go at it fair an' even-like.”

Prophet stared at the kid, trying to decide if he was even younger than he looked or soft in his thinker box. “You're challenging me to a draw. . . .”

The kid grinned. A lock of thick, sun-bleached sandy hair licked down to just above his right brow. A mole shone just right of his nose, above his mustache. That, with the feral glitter in his eyes, gave him a wild, crazy look. “Yeah, that's right. I'm challengin' you to a draw. Just like a Friday night in Tularosa.”

“Who the hell are you?” Prophet asked him.

“Me? Why, I'm the Rio Bravo Kid.”

“The Rio Bravo Kid,” Prophet said.

“Is there an echo?” The Kid's arrogant grin faded slightly. “I am the deputy sheriff of Moon's Well over yonder. I heard a Ranger come up missin', and I was sent by my superior, Sheriff Lee Mortimer, to come out here and look around, see if I couldn't scare him up.”

Prophet studied him again, skeptically. The Kid was both young and daft. He had sharp but stupid eyes, the kind of eyes that could kill a man without blinking. “You keep that goddamn rifle aimed at me,” the bounty hunter said, seething, “somethin' bad's gonna happen to you, son.”

The kid laughed. “Yeah, like you gettin' gut-shot and left out here with him.”

Prophet tried a different tactic. “Let's have us that contest.”

The Kid's eyes brightened like it was Christmas and he knew he had a new rifle under the tree. “Yeah? Really?”

“Sure.”

The Kid started to raise the Winchester. Prophet lurched forward with more speed and agility than anyone would have expected in a man his size.

With his left forearm he swept the Kid's rifle aside while hammering his right fist against the underside of the Kid's lower jaw with a solid smack. He jerked the rifle out of the Kid's hand as the younker twisted around and fell facedown in the sand, losing his hat and shaking his head as though a spider were chomping into his chin.

“Son of a
bitch
!” the Kid cried, scrambling to his feet.

As he charged Prophet, head down, the bounty hunter sidestepped, grabbed the Kid's collar, and jerked him in the same direction he'd been headed, only faster now. His forehead smacked a boulder resoundingly, and he crumpled up at the rock's base, wheezing and grunting, working his legs as though trying to regain his feet.

“Ach!” he said. “Oh, shit!”

Catching his breath, Prophet said, “Where I come from, fair warnin's as good as a promise.”

With a shrill sigh, the Rio Bravo Kid sagged against the ground and lay still on his side.

Prophet tossed the Kid's rifle away and then went over and plucked the Kid's silver-chased Colt with gutta-percha grips from the Kid's tied-down holster. He tossed that away, too, and then walked over to Mean and Ugly and fished around in his saddlebags. The horse craned its neck to regard him wistfully with its brown eyes, which owned an orange cast in the sunlight, as though to say, “Out of the frying pan and into the fire. Way to go, champ.”

Mean showed his yellow teeth and shook his head.

* * *

Prophet found the Rio Bravo Kid's black-and-white pinto pony ground-tied on the other side of the dike.

The horse shied a little when the stranger walked toward it but did not run. When Prophet had led the horse back to where the dead Ranger and the Kid lay, the Kid with his hands cuffed behind his back, Lou back-and-bellied both up over the pinto's back, the Kid across his own saddle, the Ranger behind.

The Kid was moving his head a little now, but mostly just wheezing and groaning, and Prophet had to smile at what must have felt like a giant fist wielding a smithy's hammer against the anvil of the Kid's tender brain.

“Serves you right, you purple fool.”

The Kid had only a little water in his canteen, and it was brackish at best. He shared it with Mean but it did little to sate his thirst. He mounted Mean and led the pinto on across the desert across which long shadows were sliding as the sun angled down toward jagged peaks in the west.

As the town came into view, he was vaguely surprised by how much the place had grown since he'd last been through here. The Kid had called it by a different name than the one Prophet remembered, but, hell, things change. He wouldn't doubt if old Chisos La Grange was dead and pushing up century plants out here somewhere, or maybe fertilizing the ponderosas up in the Chisos Mountains, where he'd felt more at home.

Prophet grew more and more amazed as he followed the old Chihuahua Trail north where it broadened into the settlement's powdery, horse apple–littered main drag. A sign was calling the place Moon's Well as opposed to Chisos Springs, as Chisos had dubbed it.

Prophet recognized only a few of the old Mexican shacks that must have been here since the time of the hacendados, before this part of the Southwest was acquired by America. He remembered little else about the settlement. Chisos's old saloon and hotel was gone, another, grander structure taking its place. Moon's House of a Thousand Delights was a garish, wooden sprawl three times larger than Chisos's old, flea-bit flophouse, and three stories high, with a broad front gallery and two upper-floor balconies.

The roofed stone well sat across from it, flanked by a good dozen or so business establishments, including a hotel and saloon that Prophet remembered from his last trip through here. A humble, two-story, mud-brick affair, it had been one of maybe three or four other businesses sheathing the trail with Chisos's hotel at the time, on La Grange's claim around the well.

Prophet saw the sign for a
TOWN SHERIFF
farther on.

He continued on past the well, wanting to get rid of his cargo so Mean could cool down first before they both drank, and so he himself could give the water the attention it deserved. As he passed the sprawling, peacock-colored hotel, trailing the pinto with the two men draped across it, one dead, the other alive but sporting one hell of a headache, he saw two faces in a second-story window.

Closing one eye against the sun, straining his eyes, he saw the face of a tawny-haired girl staring down at him from the window. She was crouching beside a little man with an extraordinarily unappealing face. It must have been the angle of the light, but the man appeared no taller than a small child though his round, pasty face was that of an old, ugly man.

Adding to the oddness of the visage, the girl was holding a sheet to her otherwise naked body, which something told Prophet was fine indeed, while the little man appeared to be clad in only balbriggans. A fat stogie poked out a corner of the haggard, large-nosed face that sprouted a colorless beard from its spade-shaped chin.

The girl turned to the little man and moved her lips, saying something. The little man merely stared obliquely into the street at Prophet, who turned his head forward as he continued toward the office of the lawman that the Rio Bravo Kid had mentioned.

It was on the right side of the street, between a livery barn and a small, adobe-brick building sporting a barber's pole on its stoop. A man who Prophet took to be the barber, a slender gent with even features and pomaded hair parted in the middle, sat on the stoop in a wicker rocking chair, reading a book through round, silver-framed spectacles sagging low on his nose. The barber looked up from his book and
over his dusty spectacles as Prophet passed. He wore a small tattoo in the shape of a cross on his broad, tan left cheek. The tattoo looked completely out of place on the man's otherwise refined features.

“Sheriff in?” Prophet asked.

The barber studied the burdened pinto clomping along behind the stranger. “I don't keep track of Mortimer.”

Prophet reined up in front of the small, whitewashed adobe-brick building on the far side of the barbershop. A wooden shingle over the front door announced simply:
MOON'S WELL SHERIFF
. Just as Prophet began to swing down from Mean's back, the door opened and a straight-backed, broad-shouldered, middle-aged man ducked under the low jam, puffing a meerschaum pipe.

He wore a three-piece suit but no hat, and his eyes were long, dark, and cunning as they swept Prophet quickly and then the pinto and its human cargo. Too quickly and furtively for most men to catch, he used his right thumb to flick the keeper thong off the hammer of the Schofield .44 holstered slightly left of his belly, in a hand-tooled, black leather holster.

He stood on the porch in front of his open office door, scowling at Prophet and smoking his pipe. Despite the black shirt he wore under a black leather vest under a tobacco tweed coat, he somehow didn't look hot. A town sheriff's star glistened on the black vest.

He had more the look of an aging gunman than a lawman.

“Mortimer . . . ?”

Holding Mean's reins in one hand, Prophet stared at the man and riffled through memories the way he'd often riffled through old wanted dodgers, trying to put a name to a face.

“Prophet?” The sheriff of Moon's Well returned the foxily pensive stare. “Lon? No, Lou Prophet. Rebel bounty hunter from Georgia. Sold his soul to the Devil after the war.”

“Lee Mortimer.” Prophet nodded his surprise to see the old gunman after all these years. Funny how when you hadn't seen a noted outlaw in a while you just naturally assumed they'd taken a pill they hadn't been able to digest and were slumbering long and hard on a boot hill somewhere in the frontier outback.

“One and the same.”

“Someone said you was back-shot by George Deushay in Sioux City.”

“Iowa City. Amazing what a good doctor with a sharp scalpel can do nowadays.”

Prophet poked his hat brim off his forehead. “Well, now I seen everything. An old, no-account gunslinger wearing a sheriff's star. How old are you, anyways?”

“Forty-five.”

“Shit.”

“All right! I won't own up to a day past fifty.” Mortimer canted his head to indicate the pinto and narrowed one dark eye with menace. “One of those dead men you're haulin' around like firewood is the Rio Bravo Kid—my deputy.”

“Ah, hell, he ain't dead.” Prophet walked toward the pinto's cargo. “I just ran him against a boulder when he played like he was a farmyard bull and I was a younker too dumb to step out of his way.” He chuckled. “Of course, I might have had a hand in helpin' him to smack the rock so hard, but rest assured, Mortimer, he had it comin'.”

“Don't doubt it a bit,” the Moon's Well sheriff said.

Prophet reached up, tucked his hands behind the Rio Bravo Kid's cartridge belt, and pulled him down off the pinto's back. He propped him against the horse while he dipped a key out of a pocket to unlock the cuffs securing the Kid's wrists.