The Devil’s Laughter: A Lou Prophet Novel (20 page)

“That's a hard one.”

Sugar leaned forward, sliding her hand across the table, closing her fingers around Louisa's left forearm and squeezing. “You and I could go far together, Leona. Do you mind if I call you Leona? It's hard to call you Louisa. To me, that's not who you are.”

“I'd just as soon you didn't.”

Sugar squeezed Louisa's forearm harder. “Answer my question, dear.”

“I already did.”

Sugar released Louisa's arm, lifted her coffee to her red lips, and took a sip. She sucked her upper lip, set her coffee down, and ran her hand down along the side of her head, fingering one of the two small, beaded braids hanging there. She canted her head slightly, and she looked like a young girl thinking out a troubling matter.

“How many men have you killed, Leona?”

Louisa hiked a shoulder. “I'd say upward of fifty. And every one deserved it. They all had prices on their heads. Most had killed women and children, just like your bunch.”

“That makes it all right, does it? The fact that you've killed men with prices on their heads—who, as
you
say, deserved it?”

Louisa shook her hair back from her face and gave Sugar a tolerant look. “Are you going to recite the Constitution to me now? Or the Bible . . . ?”

“I'm just sayin—”

“I know what you're saying. That I'm a killer same as you. While I don't deny my vengeful nature that does, indeed, border on vigilantism at times, I'm nothing like you. I kill those who've killed innocent folks, and I'm going to keep on with that until I die of old age or lead poisoning. You, sweet Sugar, are going to hang.”

Sugar laughed, showing her white teeth. “Oh, come on, Leona! How are you going to take me and the boys in? Lazzaro can't ride, and in case you hadn't noticed, Chacin has made his own claim on our heads. Let's not even get started on the Mojaves.”

She sipped her coffee, swallowed, and laughed again, choking a little on the hot liquid. “None of us will get out of here alive. At least, not as a group. Now, two could take off south across the mountains, head for the Sea of Cortez . . .”

“What about your beloved Tony?”

A genuinely vexing expression clouded Sugar's pretty, oval-shaped face. Tears glazed her eyes. She looked away. “Tony will be dead soon. The doc says he had to go too deep to find the bullet. Infection is likely.”

She wiped a tear away from her cheek with the back of her hand, staring toward the shuttered window on her right. “I can find the money. If you lead me to the draw, I can find the money, Leona. In the dark, when no one else will track us and the Mojaves will be lying low. Then, just as I said . . .”

“Stow it.”

“Think about it?”

Louisa stared at her, a troubled expression of her own furling the tawny brows over her hazel eyes. A recent memory washed over her. She looked at Sugar's red lips, her sightless, cobalt eyes, her thick red hair caressing her slender, pale neck, hanging down past her shoulders. Her hands were long and slender, tanned by the sun. She thought of Lou upstairs with Miss Ivy, and a wretched feeling bit into her. A depression like a lead weight on her soul.

He was not hers. She, not his. No one's. Her life was a desert, and she was alone in it. Same as Sugar.

She did not like the way her thoughts were suddenly angling. It made her head feel light, her lungs tight. Suddenly, she couldn't get a breath.

“Oh, Christ,” she heard herself mutter as she slid her chair back. She heaved herself out of it. As she moved
around the table, she caught her boot on a leg, and stumbled, nudging the table with a noisy bark.

“I need some air,” she said, moving to the door, striding through it and moving across the veranda and down the steps and into the soggy street.

Behind her, Sugar ran the tip of her index finger along the rim of her coffee mug. The pensive little-girl expression had returned to her pretty face.

Louisa strode across the street toward the livery barn. One of the Rurales was sitting between the open loft doors, smoking, dangling his legs with their high, black boots down over the barn front.

“
Ay, chiquita . . .”
he muttered.

Louisa ignored him. She strode down along the left side of the livery barn and past the rear paddock. There were no horses in the paddock; she and the others had stabled their mounts in the barn, where the Mojaves couldn't so easily get at them.

Behind the paddock was brush and rocks and small, ancient pueblos grown up with weeds and cactus, some nearly concealed by greasewood and mesquites. Louisa kept walking, angling through the desert. She did not know where she was going. She knew only that, despite the Mojave threat, she needed to walk and to breathe and get the cluttered, ugly thoughts out of her head.

She moved between two hovels that were low, black shapes in the darkness and stopped. She'd heard the thudding crunch of a boot in gravel somewhere ahead. Her heart leaped, and she closed her hand over the grip of the .45 on her right hip. Before she could slide the gun from its holster, she heard another, louder footstep behind her.

An arm whipped around her neck. A hand closed over her nose and mouth, jerking her back so suddenly that she released the pistol to break her fall. She hit the ground on her belly, was turned over by a brusque hand. Looking up, she saw the flat, round face of Sergeant Frieri grinning
down at her, eyes bright, ambient light glistening off his rotting, wet gums.

In Spanish, he said to someone behind him, “Hold your pistol on her while I give this Americana the fucking she deserves!”

Louisa saw a gray-clad figure move up behind Frieri. At the same time, the sergeant slapped her with the back of his hand, and, giggling bizarrely, straddled her, squeezing her left breast with one hand while he began opening his fly with the other.

Frieri froze. His grin faded. He loosed a little chirp as he grimaced. He shifted his weight slightly.

“How deep you want me to shove this thing, Sergeant?”

Louisa had slipped her short but razor-edged stiletto from the sheath sewn into the inside of her short deerskin jacket. Now she poked the tip against the man's scrotum, steadily increasing the pressure.

In Spanish, he rasped, “Put your gun away, Corporal, you fool! Help the lovely senorita to her feet! She seems to have fallen!”

PROPHET HAD A
busier night than he'd intended. It seemed that Ivy Miller hadn't had a good ash hauling in recent months and badly needed to satisfy her natural female desires and also to waylay the anxiety that Prophet's gang had evoked when they'd led the Mojaves into her quiet little town.

Prophet had been more than happy to distract her, as she did him, from their recent travails. She woke him around four thirty for one last tussle before she dressed and headed downstairs to begin her morning saloon chores.

Prophet fell back asleep for a time, feeling he'd just been run over by a whole cavvy of Mojave war ponies. Then, hearing birds chirping outside and seeing that gray morning light was pushing between the cracks in the shutter closed over the window of Ivy's room, rose up from the rumpled bed with a groan.

He stumbled naked to the shutter, drew it open, and stared down into the broad main street. The sun was up but hidden behind low, gray clouds. The wind had resumed its harassment of this high bench, groaning under the saloon's eaves and tossing dust and tumbleweeds along the street.
Bad luck was as common as the wind in San Gezo
. A couple of Chacin's men were stationed up and down the trace, and someone—Prophet couldn't tell who from this distance—was manning the Gatling gun in the barn loft on the street's other side.

According to the group's agreement, five guards would stay on watch all night with orders to shoot twice quickly if anything looked amiss. No shots had been fired. The Indians must have stayed hunkered down out in the desert, but Prophet figured they'd attack again soon. He was a little surprised they hadn't at first light.

He drank some water from his canteen, then corked the flask and went around the nicely appointed room, gathering his clothes that Ivy had tossed every which way when she'd undressed him. She, however, hadn't been wearing a stitch when she'd answered his knock on the door, and he'd found her body to be not only lush and ripe but ready.

Prophet wrapped his shell belt around his waist, made sure his Colt showed brass in all six chambers, then hooked his shotgun over his neck, picked up his rifle, and headed on into the hall, gently closing Ivy's door behind him.

Most of the doors up and down the hall were closed. A window on each end of the hall lent a murky, gray light and revealed the dull red carpet runner on the floor. As he strode along the hall toward the stairs, he saw that the last door on the right was open a foot.

He passed the door, glancing inside, and stopped. He backed up one step and turned to the door, frowning.

Through the one-foot gap he could see Sergeant Frieri lying on a broad, canopied bed. The ugly little Rurale looked so out of place in the frilly room with the four-poster bed, quilted bed covers, lace-edged canopy and dark blue carpet trimmed with red roses that Prophet almost loosed a chuckle.

Then his scowl deepened, and he blinked his eyes as if to clear them.

Frieri's dark head poked up above the bedcovers. His
eyes were open. So, too, was the man's mouth. His lips were stretched back from his face in a grimace. Beside him, the plump redheaded whore, Tulsa St. James, lay on her side, facing the sergeant, her hands sandwiched together between her right cheek and her silk-covered pillow. The whore was snoring very softly, making her lips flutter.

Prophet nudged the door open another two feet with his rifle barrel and stepped softly inside, trying to keep his spurs from chinging. On a table beside Frieri's side of the bed were two empty bottles and two empty shot glasses. Prophet walked over to the bed and stared down at Sergeant Frieri.

The man's covers were pulled down to his upper chest, exposing the long, deep gash across his throat and from which thick, dark red blood had oozed out onto his chest, staining the quilts.

The man stared sightlessly up at Prophet, his wide eyes shining dully in the light emanating through the cracks in the window shutter on the other side of the whore. She stirred now, groaning and blinking and lifting her head slightly.

“What?” she muttered, blinking up at Prophet as she raised her head from her pillow. She'd taken her hair down and it lay in a tangled mess about her head and bare shoulders. “Well . . . hello there, big feller. I'd be happy to oblige you, but I ain't much good till noon. Run along, now, and we'll talk late—” She cut herself off when her eyes found Frieri lying beside her.

Her mouth opened and her eyes nearly popped from their sockets.

“Now, don't start caterwaulin', for chrissakes!” Prophet said, keeping his own voice down.

She clapped a hand to her mouth and bit down on it, moaning and scuttling away from the dead Rurale. She backed too far away and gave a startled shriek as she dropped over the side of the bed and hit the floor with a boom.

“Shit.”

Prophet looked around the room, making sure the killer
wasn't still present though judging by the thick texture of the blood, the sergeant had been killed at least a couple of hours ago. He doubted Miss St. James was capable of such a grisly act. Hearing boot thuds on the stairs and the rumble of surprised voices rising from the first two stories, Prophet walked around the far side of the bed and dropped to a knee beside the whore.

Holding a quilt over her breasts, she scuttled against the wall below the window, saying “Oh, god! Oh, god! Oh, god!” Then she raised her terror-stricken eyes to Prophet. “Why'd you have to kill him in my bed, ya fuckin'
savage
?”

“I didn't kill him,” Prophet said, trying to keep his own voice calm in an effort to calm the whore. “I take it you don't know who did.”

The whore just shuttled her gaze to her last customer and covered her mouth with a pudgy hand, muffling another gasp. Meanwhile, the boot thuds grew louder until Prophet turned to see Red Snake Corbin and Roy Kiljoy walk into the room.

Kiljoy had a white bandage wrapped vertically around his head and knotted beneath his chin, covering the two holes in his cheeks. Blood showed where the holes were. While the wounds had to be sore as hell, Kiljoy looked no worse for the wear. Judging by the rheuminess of his eyes, he wasn't sparing the painkiller.

“Well, well, well,” Red Snake said, lowering the pistol in his hand as he and Kiljoy inspected the dead Rurale.

Kiljoy looked from the whore to Prophet and back again, his eyes questioning. More boot thuds grew louder until Captain Chacin appeared, flanked by one of his corporals.

The man looked as though he'd just gotten up, his tunic unbuttoned to show a greasy undershirt. He wasn't wearing his shell belt and holster, but he had his Colt Navy in his hand. As he turned his head and dropped his gaze to the bed, his brows furrowed and his jaws hardened.

He turned to Prophet, slowly raising the pistol in his clenched fist. The bounty hunter straightened, stepping back away from the whore and raising his Winchester to his
shoulder, loudly racking a shell into the chamber. “Think about it, Chacin.”

That's all he said as he aimed down the Winchester's barrel at the Rurale captain. It appeared all he needed to say. Chacin lowered his pistol. He knew that Prophet wouldn't have cut a man's throat in cold blood. Not even one of Chacin's Rurales. Whoever had done the grisly deed would have been covered in blood, for it had sprayed all the way down to the sergeant's feet poking up from beneath the quilts.

To Prophet, Chacin said, “Mojaves?” He looked at Red Snake and Kiljoy, who could not conceal their pleasure at seeing Frieri lying with his throat laid open, his eyes etched with the horror he must have felt when he'd awakened from his tequila-induced slumber to see his blood geysering from the severed arteries in his neck. “Or one of these bastards?”