The Devil’s Laughter: A Lou Prophet Novel (10 page)

“You know what I am talking about, Lou. I am talking about our past business arrangements, all of which you reneged on.”

“That so?”

“
Si.
That is so.” Chacin raised his voice dangerously and dipped his chin, the moonlight flashing like silver daggers in his eyes. “And when were you going to tell me that we had cut the trail of the men and the blind
chiquita
we have been following?”

“When I was goddamn good and ready!”

Silence.

Far off, a coyote gave a mournful howl.

Both men reached for their sidearms at the same time, extending the Colts toward the other's chest and clicking the hammers back in thundering unison.

PROPHET STARED AT
Chacin across the flat rock in the moonlit darkness. All he could see of his eyes were two tiny, stiletto-like glints beneath the man's heavy brow. The moonlight silvered the left curl of the man's handlebar mustache and lay in a thin line atop the barrel of the Colt in the man's right hand, aimed at Prophet's heart.

Prophet slowly took up the slack in his trigger finger as raw fury throbbed in his ears. He thought he could hear Chacin increasing the tension on his own six-shooter, and the throbbing in the bounty hunter's ears grew louder.

“Boys, boys,” Louisa said, “if you can't hold your booze you oughta stick to sarsaparilla.”

Prophet held the Rurale captain's glowering stare for another five seconds. But the girl's calmly cajoling voice had thrust a lance through the tension that had fallen like a hot, wet blanket over the little camp in the rocky arroyo, relieving it. Chacin's lips spread, lifting the curled ends of his mustache and showing his fang-like, yellow eyeteeth. The silver stilettos in his eyes grew faintly smaller. Prophet put some slack in his trigger finger, felt the thudding in his ears slow.

He and Chacin chuckled softly at the same time and raised their pistol barrels. “Perhaps we are indeed acting a little foolish—eh, Lou?”

“Perhaps. Not that I like you any better than I did five minutes ago.”

“Nor that I feel any love for you, amigo,” Chacin said, twirling his Colt on his finger and returning it to the covered, black holster strapped for the cross draw on his left hip. “But perhaps there is another, less resolute way we can resolve our differences.”

“Perhaps there is,” Prophet said, shoving his own Colt into the holster on his right thigh, with a faint snicking of iron on leather. “You wanna fight with knives? First one to get a hand cut off has to keep his mouth shut about their differences for the rest of this blessed trek?”

“How 'bout if you leg or arm wrestle?” Louisa said wearily, still resting her head back against her saddle. “A one-handed man isn't much good out here.”

Prophet glanced at her, then arched a brow at Chacin. “I reckon she's got a point.”

“As sensible as she is lovely.”

Louisa sighed.

Chacin said, “I like the arm-wrestling suggestion. It's the manly solution.” He smiled.

“Rules what I laid out? Loser goes mute for as long as we're doomed to suffer each other's company?”

“That sounds fair,” Chacin said, unbuttoning the cuff of his right shirtsleeve. The two Rurales who'd been sleeping were stirring with interest. “The first one to mention our, uh . . .
differences
again has the right to shoot the other without retribution from the other's men.” Chacin gave an oily smile. “Or women.”

“Fine as frog hair,” Prophet said, rolling up the right sleeve of his own buckskin shirt.

“Shall we up the stakes just a little?” Chacin said, staring down at his arm as he rolled the sleeve up tight against his bulging bicep.

“Why not?”

Chacin turned his head toward the men crawling up behind him, and spoke in Spanish. One of the men crawled away, grabbed one of the empty pulque bottles, scampered over to where Prophet and Chacin faced each other, and broke the neck of the bottle on the flat rock between them—first on the rock's left side, then on the rock's right side. Carefully, using the side of his hand, he piled the jagged shards of broken glass into two neat piles. He sat back on his heels, grinning and blowing out an eager little puff of air.

Another Rurale, hatless, his black hair rumpled, sat beside the Rurale who brought the bottle, and both watched Chacin and Prophet anxiously. They muttered to each other, placing bets, and Louisa came up from behind Prophet to hover between him and Chacin on the other side of the rock from the two lower-ranking Rurales. The one who'd brought the bottle was young, probably not yet twenty. The other was in his thirties, with a haggard, hound-dog look.

“All right—I'll throw in.”

“I thought you never gambled,” Prophet said, throwing his right arm out to limber it, flexing his thick, callused fingers.

“You didn't think I cussed, either.”

“I hope you're at least gonna bet on me.”

Louisa spoke in halting, broken Spanish to the two Rurales. When they agreed on terms, Prophet and Chacin, grinning evilly at each other, set their elbows on the rock and clamped their palms and laced their fingers together.

“May the lovely senorita set us off?” Prophet asked the captain.

Chacin hiked a shoulder.

“Get on with it,” Louisa said, setting back against a rock several feet away, crossing her ankles and folding her arms on her chest.

Prophet got the upper hand quickly and worked the captain's own right hand about a third of the way down toward the broken glass. Chacin cursed through his gritted teeth, and Prophet, grinding his own molars, watched his hand
move back up and then inch knuckle-down toward the glass piled on his own side of the rock, the shards glittering like diamonds in the moonlight.

Prophet wasn't surprised by the Rurale's strength. He was as tall as Prophet, though not as broad and muscular, but his arms were long and his hands were as large as Prophet's, his forearms corded from a life—at least, an early life—of the hard work customary amongst the peons of Mexico. And Chacin had very likely been a peon, which made it hard for Prophet to hate the man completely. It was the rich in Mexico he had no truck with. Fortunately, there weren't that many rich Mexicans—at least not in the places he frequented south of the border.

Prophet pushed up with his right hand, staring at his scarred, bulging knuckles. Chacin thrust his head forward, face angled down, eyes bulging, lips stretched back from his teeth. He growled like an old dog, staring lustily at the glass shards piled near Prophet's right elbow. “My, they look sharp—don't they, Lou?” he rasped. He licked his upper lip. “Don't fret,
mi
amigo. Such a wound won't take all that long to heal in the dry desert air.”

The two other Rurales, sitting cross-legged to Prophet's right, leaned forward with their elbows on their knees and snickered.

Chacin's growl rose in pitch when Prophet, pressing his right heel harder against the ground, managed to heave the captain's hand back up to their starting point and then a quarter of the way down toward Chacin's waiting pile of broken glass.

The captain's slender bicep bulged beneath the rolled shirtsleeve, a thick vein rising darkly. Prophet grunted, watched his hand drive Chacin's to within about four inches of the glass.

“Damn, them shards look sharp—don't they, Jorge?” Prophet said, sucking a breath through his own gritted teeth. “Sorta like little, razor-edged knives . . . only glass can really stick in . . .”

Chacin cursed in Spanish.

“. . . There . . . !”

Prophet shoved the man's hand into the glass. He didn't want to cut him badly, because there was no reason to inhibit the man's ability to shoot. But the Mexicans wouldn't see it that way. If he didn't make it hurt as much as he could, Chacin and the other Rurales would merely think him a fool.

The two young Rurales gasped as Prophet mashed his hand down on the captain's, twisting it both directions, feeling Chacin's own hand quiver beneath him, hearing the glass grind like sand in a wheel hub, watching the blood darken it.

Chacin's hand lay like a dead fish beneath Prophet's. His rasping breaths quieted. He compressed his lips and looked dully across the rock at his opponent, who lifted his own hand, felt the old tension drop down over the camp once more.

The two Rurales both grunted and jerked their hands at the same time.

“No, no.” Louisa's silver-chased Colt was out and extended in her right fist, aimed between Prophet and Chacin, at the two Rurales, who froze with their guns still in their covered holsters.

The Rurales stared at Prophet. Prophet stared across the rock at Chacin. Neither man said anything. Even the coyotes had fallen silent.

Chacin's expression remained implacable as he lifted his slack hand from the pile of glass and brushed it across his uniform pants. He smiled and glanced at Louisa's cocked silver Colt.

“I think I am in love with her, Lou.”

“You and every other man she's ever hauled down on,” Prophet said.

Late in the morning of the next day, Sugar Delphi set one of her black boots down in front of a scorpion. The scorpion
stopped suddenly, probed the boot in front of it with its extended stinger, then turned and headed back in the opposite direction.

Sugar set her other boot down in the creature's path. The scorpion stopped. Just as it started to probe the second roadblock, Sugar squashed the creature beneath the high, undershot heel of her other boot. She ground the beast to a greasy pulp in the small sharp rocks of the arroyo she and her group had been traveling since dawn.

She hadn't looked down at the now-deceased creature. Somehow, she'd just sensed it was there and that it was something that needed killing. Behind her, Red Snake Corbin quietly cleared his throat and shared an oblique glance with Roy Kiljoy. Tony Lazzaro chuckled and leaned forward, crossing his wrists on his saddle horn.

“What is it, Sugar?” he asked the woman, who sometimes seemed his woman and sometimes no one's woman at all. “What's got your drawers in a twist? We ain't seen Mojave sign all day.”

“Give me a minute.” Sugar moved forward, probed the side of the wash with the same boot she'd used to squash the scorpion, then began to climb, not looking down but keeping her eyes straight ahead, crouching every now and then to push off the steep slope. Even blind and sort of groping, loosing rocks and sand in her wake, she gained the top of the bank quickly and stood pointing her head toward the east, the direction from which they'd come.

“Sugar,” Lazzaro said, biting a chunk of tobacco off the braid he carried in the pocket of his black cotton shirt, under a brown cowhide vest. “We're burnin' daylight, and you know how Tony don't like burnin' daylight.”

Lazzaro had been born in Mexico but he'd been sent to live with his aunt and uncle in Wyoming when he was only three, so he spoke perfect English, though he was also fluent in Spanish. Both languages served him well, since he ran his outlaw gang back and forth across the border, dealing in anything that earned him money, from simple bank
and stagecoach holdups to diamond smuggling and slave trading with the mines in southern Mexico.

It had once been a much larger gang, but since he and Sugar had decided to retire to Central America, where Lazzaro owned a half interest in a sugar plantation, he'd had no use for the others and had lost no sleep over pulling foot with a choice few men, Sugar, and all the money from their last holdup.

“Someone's trailin' us, Tony,” Sugar said from atop the bank, staring toward the east as though she could see what she was talking about.

“'Paches?”

Sugar shook her head, causing the small, beaded braids to dance over her ears. “White men.”

Lazzaro turned to gaze back down the wash though he couldn't see much farther than the next bend about fifty feet away. He turned to the redhead, canting his head to one side and narrowing one eye beneath his low-crowned, gray sombrero adorned with black stitching. “Sugar, dear, you did kill the
rubia
, like we agreed you would, didn't you?”

Sugar shook her head. “I wasn't sure about her.” She shook her head again, frowning a little as she continued to stare east. “I guess I wanted to be sure.”

“You wanted to be sure about what?” Lazzaro's voice was taut with strained patience.

Sugar started descending the slope the way she'd climbed it, haltingly, testing her footing. “I guess we'll maybe find that out.”

Sitting his horse to Lazzaro's left, Red Snake loosed a caustic chuff. He glanced darkly at the gang leader, then lowered his eyes. Roy Kiljoy kept his own hard, expectant gaze on Lazzaro. Testing, probing.

The gang leader sighed. He'd given the blind woman about all the slack he could afford to give her. Her sixth and seventh senses had saved his hide more than once, in ways he could never understand, but he had his pride. He swung his right boot over his saddle horn. “Sugar,
my sweet, I reckon it's time for you and me to come to an understandin'.”

He dropped down to the ground and walked over to where Sugar was walking and sliding down the side of the slope, his eyes flat and mean though she couldn't see them.

“Oh, really, Tony?” she said when she stood flat-footed on the floor of the wash, aiming those cool, cobalt blue eyes at him as though they were twin pistol maws. She crossed her arms on her chest. “And what understanding is that?”

Lazzaro's right hand shot up, back, and forward so quickly that the two men sitting their horses behind him only saw him jerk. They heard the crack of his hand against Sugar's face, saw her head whip back and to the side.

She stumbled back and fell against the slope.

“That I'm the leader of this pack of curly wolves, small as it suddenly is. Not you! And, yeah, even you follow my orders or pay the price!”