The Devil’s Laughter: A Lou Prophet Novel (15 page)

All except Chacin and the young corporal who'd taken the arrow, that was. The corporal had died where he lay after considerable thrashing. One of the others had been
wounded in the arm, and Frieri's left earlobe had been blown off. Bocangel sat huddled into himself against the wash's eastern bank, knees raised to his chest. Otherwise, the group was intact and relatively healthy.

“Should have known Lazzaro's bunch'd be the only others fool enough to get caught out here with Mojaves on the jump.” Prophet turned to see Chacin, Lazzaro, the blind woman, and Roy Kiljoy galloping at an angle from the mouth of the wash toward the canyon a quarter mile beyond. The canyon stood like a stockade fort with its gates thrown wide.

Sergeant Frieri had gathered the mounts and stood holding their reins well back from the wash's lip, in the bottleneck where he and the horses were relatively sheltered from the flying lead and arrows.

“If this keeps up,” Prophet said, “I'm gonna be . . .”

He let his voice trail off as he stared out across the desert, at a lone rider sitting a black-and-white pinto pony just out of rifle range. He couldn't make out much of the Mojave except the proud way he sat his saddle, the horse turned sideways, the man's head facing the arroyo. Like a general watching a battle play out.

Prophet couldn't see the green eyes or the lightning tattoo, but he knew he was staring at El Lightning, just the same. There was a haunting, menacing, commanding quality in that dusky figure in red calico sitting so erect atop the rangy mustang. The choker of porcupine quills was a white line across his throat. Something told Prophet he'd be seeing the man again from a lot closer up.

“What's that, Lou?”

Prophet drew his gaze back from El Lightning. “I was sayin' I'm low on ammo. I got a feelin' the Rurales are, too.” He glanced at Frieri standing behind him, the man's shoulder red from blood that had dripped down from his ragged ear. Only about a quarter of the loops on the sergeant's two bandoliers crossed on his chest were filled with brass.

Louisa's Winchester roared. South of the wash, an Indian
gave a keening cry as he fell back from his covering rock, clamping both his hands over his blown-out right eye.

“That there is my last forty-four round,” Louisa said, crouching behind the bank with her smoking rifle. “It's just my forty-fives”—she patted her left pistol holstered for the cross draw on her lean waist—“till our next visit to a gun shop.”

When Lazzaro's bunch had galloped on into the canyon and took up positions around the mouth, throwing lead at the Indians beyond the draw, Prophet's bunch mounted up and wasted no time galloping their wild-eyed horses out of the draw toward the canyon.

Prophet hauled Senor Bocangel up behind him, and the old man sat there, silently atop the bounty hunter's saddlebags, still in shock over his dead son. The canyon's mouth gaped, peppered with powder smoke from the outlaws' and Chacin's blasting rifles.

Again that cold chicken flesh rose across Prophet's sweating back. It was entirely likely that Lazzaro would blow Chacin's guts out and then order his men to turn their pistols on Prophet's bunch. Out here in the open, they'd have little chance.

Prophet sucked a sharp breath as the Indians' bullets and arrows made weird gasping sounds in the air around him and glanced off rocks with eerie wails. The pops and cracks ahead of him grew louder and louder above the thumps of Mean's and the other horses' thudding hooves.

Prophet looked at Lazzaro shooting from one knee on the canyon mouth's left side. The wounded outlaw leader looked pale and yellow, as though he were suffering from jaundice. His cheeks were shrunken inward against his jaws. He was firing toward the Indians, but now Prophet palmed his Colt and clicked the hammer back as Mean drew to within twenty yards of the canyon mouth, and aimed the pistol straight out in front of him.

Red Snake and Kiljoy were firing from the canyon's right side, Red Snake high, Kiljoy low. The squat ugly outlaw's
lower face was a mask of dried blood but he grinned at Prophet as he shouted, “Damn, you make a big target, Lou.”

He aimed his rifle at Prophet and yelled down the barrel, “One bullet, and a whole lotta outlaws'd be buyin' me drinks!”

As Mean lunged through the canyon's gaping jaws, Prophet slid the cocked .45 across his belly, holding it on Kiljoy still grinning down his rifle barrel. Just then a bullet smashed into the rocks near the ugly outlaw's bloody face, and he jerked his head and rifle down, cursing.

It was Prophet's turn to smile as he and the others swept into the canyon. “That's what you get for waggin' that rifle around like your pecker, you plug-ugly bastard!”

“I WAS RIGHT
about you, after all,” Sugar said as she rode along beside Louisa, in the middle of the pack of Rurales, outlaws, and bounty hunters making its way up the canyon. “I should have killed you instead of drugged you. Cut your throat while you slept.”

“Why didn't you?”

Sugar stared straight ahead but now, as before, when Louisa had infiltrated the gang and ridden as one of them for nearly two weeks, she felt as though the woman were staring straight into her soul. Sugar lifted her hat and ran a hand through her thick red hair, jostling the several beaded braids. “Not quite sure. I guess I was sentimental, thought maybe I saw something of myself in you. Felt as though we were sisters, or something crazy like that.”

“We're probably more alike than I'd like to believe,” Louisa said, hearing Lazzaro groan atop his horse that Sugar was trailing by its bridle reins. The outlaw leader was hunkered low and swilling whiskey with one hand while keeping a hand over the wound that had opened up during the Indian attack and was bleeding down over his double cartridge
belts, thigh, and stirrup fender. “But you're the one with a price on her head. And I'm gonna collect on it.”

Sugar turned toward her and gazed at Louisa's forehead, arching a thin, red brow. “You think so?”

“Yep.”

“It's not too late, you know.”

“What's not too late?”

Sugar lifted her chin slightly as though listening, gauging how close the others were riding around her. Prophet and Chacin rode point, with Senor Bocangel riding double with Prophet, because the old Mexican was in no condition to ride alone. Then there was Kiljoy and Red Snake riding about ten yards behind them. The three Rurales, including Frieri with his bloody ear, walked their horses about fifteen yards ahead of Louisa and Sugar, while Lazzaro brought up the rear, grunting and groaning and taking occasional, loud pulls from his tequila bottle.

As though deeming her and Louisa's conversation private and keeping her voice down, Sugar quirked the corners of her wide, bold but feminine mouth. “You, me, Tony . . . a nice vacation along the shore of the Sea of Cortez before taking a boat down to South America. You ever been there?” Sugar shook her head. “Tony tells me it's Heaven.”

Louisa chuffed. “How would he know anything about Heaven?” She glanced again at Lazzaro then frowned at Sugar. “Where's the loot?”

“Safe.”

“You buried it back in the wash, didn't you?”

Sugar smiled and nodded. “Sure. With Tony's eyes. Since he's the only one who saw exactly
where
it's buried, we'd all best hope he doesn't expire.”

Louisa glanced at Lazzaro riding hunched and bleeding in his saddle and sighed.

Prophet, riding at the head of the pack with Chacin, glanced over his shoulder, inspecting each of the men behind him. They'd agreed before riding up from the canyon mouth that
no one would touch a gun unless the Indians were spotted on their back trail. So far, so good on both counts, he saw now as he lifted his gaze over Lazzaro's head and along the meandering course of the canyon.

A hot, dry wind had come up, shuffling dust and blowing the horse's tails, but through the grit he could see no sign of the Indians. They'd likely follow at a distance, with the intention of waiting for reinforcements then attacking later. They obviously wanted to rid the area of all white men, and Prophet doubted they had anything better to do. This was their land, so they certainly had nowhere else to go.

They rode up the canyon, which widened as the walls fell away, and Prophet found himself on a broad, flat, rocky bench, the wind swirling the dust and caking his eyes with sharp grit. He tugged his hat down lower on his head and turned his attention to his own unlikely group.

The way he saw it, there were three factions—him and Louisa, Chacin and the other Rurales, and the desperadoes. Of course, there was Senor Bocangel, who was riding behind him in shocked, pensive silence, but the old Mexican had no dog in this fight. Prophet and Chacin were after the desperadoes and the stolen loot, which shouldn't be too hard to confiscate once they'd gotten clear of the Indians and could arrest or kill Lazzaro and the others, including Sugar Delphi, without getting themselves shot to hell.

Once Prophet and Louisa and the Rurales had the money, however, there would still be one more battle. Prophet had no intention of turning over even part of the loot to Chacin, whose intentions concerning the money were far less than noble. The money had been stolen from the Bank of Nogales, and that's where he aimed to take it in return for a hefty reward on both the money and on the bandits who'd stolen it.

Not that the stolen money didn't have its allure to the big, Confederate bounty hunter whose sole aim in life was to have as many tail-stomping good times as he could find. But he'd long ago promised himself that he'd go about said stomping on the right side of the straight and narrow. Never
let it be said that the son of Ma and Pa Prophet of Ringgold, Georgia, had raised a boy who strayed.

The wind blew a gust of sandpaper-like grit against Prophet's face, and he lowered his head and narrowed his eyes against it. He turned a little to one side. When he opened his eyes, he saw that Chacin had his own head lowered. The captain's eyes met Prophet's and, as though he were reading the bounty hunter's mind, he gave a grimly devilish half smile.

Prophet returned the look in kind, then blinked the grit from his lashes and peered straight ahead over Mean's indignantly twitching ears. Prophet blinked again and just as he began to hear the squawks of what sounded like a rusty chain he saw several crude corrals and buildings rise up out of the desert. The wood and weathered adobe bricks were the same color as the tan rocks, and they appeared to be a natural part of this stark, barren land.

But they were not, Prophet saw as Mean continued to clomp along, kicking stones, a couple of dilapidated stock pens appearing on both sides of the trail. The buildings were part of a town that stretched across the bench at an angle from Prophet's left to right. Higher up on the bench stretched a mantle of solid rock, like a massive eyebrow. It paralleled the town's scattered, falling-down buildings before breaking off abruptly on the town's far side.

Prophet and the others were following a worn wagon trail into the town, the trail widening and becoming the town's main street, which was a good fifty or even sixty yards wide. The buildings and pens on both sides were truly dilapidated, with windows gaping and shutters hanging and boards and bricks missing from the false façades. Porches hung askew.

Behind the buildings of the business district, the village's original Mexican adobes hunched in the weeds and rocks, looking like large stones in a long-abandoned graveyard. The wind whistled between them and the stone ovens and through the shacks' gaping windows.

The squawking, Prophet realized now, was from a shingle
flopping in the wind beneath a gallery running the length of a broad, two-story building about halfway down on the left side of the street. Large, green, sun-faded letters identified the place as
G.W. TODD GENERAL MERCHANDISE DRY GOODS
. There was no door on the other side of the gallery, which was missing much of its floor. Obviously Todd's was as defunct as the rest of the town.

Only it wasn't completely defunct, or at least not completely abandoned, Prophet saw a minute later when he and the others reined up before a large, two-story adobe brick building that also boasted a gallery. A sign hanging down beneath the gallery's front eave announced
THE OASIS SALOON AND DANCE HALL
.

Prophet gave a grim smile. The place didn't look like much of an oasis these days. But he remembered the place from a previous visit, when the town was hopping with ore wagons and drunken miners. Then, a man could find an adequate if overpriced shot of rye in the Oasis. He wondered if he still could.

The town's well stood in the middle of the street and a little to one side of the saloon—its sides built up with mortared stones and covered with a shake-shingled roof. It had a winch and a bucket. Prophet glanced over the coping and into the gaping, black hole to see the dark silvery sheen of water, and relief washed over him.

On the saloon's gallery someone was sweeping the dust and tumbleweeds that the wind continued to blow around on it, causing the two wicker rockers on the gallery to rock wildly, as though agitated ghosts were sitting in them.

The sweeper was a woman with a slender, comely shape. She turned to the newcomers now, holding the broom in front of her and sweeping her thick, curly black hair away from her eyes as she studied the gang warily.

She was a black woman in her mid- to late twenties. She wore what appeared a once fine silk blouse, the sleeves rolled up her arms, the tails sticking out over the pleated, gray skirt that blew about her long, slender legs. The silk
blouse looked worn, tattered and frayed at the elbows and collar.

“Ma'am, can you direct us to a sawbones?” Prophet called above the howling wind and the banging of a nearby shutter. “We got a couple of wounded men in our party.”

The black woman, whose face was strong and fine, with lustrous black eyes, shook her head slowly. Her expression was deeply vexed. “No,” she said, her voice barely audible above the wind. “You can't be here. No strangers welcome in San Gezo!”