The Devil’s Laughter: A Lou Prophet Novel (21 page)

“Hell, I had better reason.” Louisa had just stepped through the door to stand beside Chacin, regarding Frieri with her implacable gaze. She hiked a shoulder. “In fact, last night I almost saved the butcher from this messy job.”

“Senorita, your clarity does not match your beauty.”

“Frieri and one of your corporals insisted upon showing me the finer points of lovemaking out behind the livery barn . . . until I let the pig feel the fine point of my stiletto.” Louisa crossed her arms on her chest. “Forgive me if I don't grieve.”

Chacin turned his angry gaze on Prophet. “We had a deal, Lou. A deal!”

“You're preachin' to the choir, Captain.” Prophet walked out from behind the bed, fingering his beard stubble pensively. He glanced at the sobbing whore, then turned to Red Snake and Kiljoy. “You two haul him outside. He don't exactly match Miss Tulsa's décor.”

“Why the hell should we do it?” Red Snake balked.

Prophet raised his Winchester, aiming it out from his hip at Red Snake's belly. “Because I got the drop on you.”

Grumbling, the two outlaws went over to the bed, pulled Frieri out from under the bloody, soggy covers, and dropped
him on the floor. They rolled him up in a bloody quilt, then, making disgusted faces and each taking an end, carried the dead Rurale on out of the room and into the hall.

Prophet walked out after them. Chacin and Louisa flanked him, Chacin looking indignant. “This is very nasty business, Lou. Very nasty. If someone was going to kill my sergeant, they could have at least done it out in the open instead of skulking around like a damn coward!”

“I can't say as I'm going to lose any more sleep over Frieri than my purty partner will,” Prophet said as they started down the stairs. “But it does make me right uneasy—this underhanded killin'. Makes me sorta wonder who's next.”

“Any way a Mojave could have slipped in last night?” Louisa asked as the three turned at the second-floor landing and continued on down the stairs behind the cursing, grunting Red Snake and Kiljoy.

Ivy stood at the bottom of the stairs, both fists on her hips. A cooking spatula stuck out of her right fist while she regarded the bloody bundle with disgust in her chocolate brown eyes. “Your handiwork, Lou?”

Prophet grinned as he came down the stairs, keeping his voice intimately low as he pinched his hat brim and grinned. “Hell, you didn't leave me with that much energy.”

Behind him, Louisa gave a caustic snort.

“If you boys are gonna start killin' each other, I'd ask that you did it outside,” Ivy said as Red Snake and Kiljoy hauled Frieri toward the saloon's open front doors. “That's a mighty expensive death shroud. Damn near as expensive as my windows!”

Marshal Hawkins sat at a table near the front of the room with Doc Shackleford and two other townsmen—two of the three who'd snuck through the saloon's back door yesterday afternoon, just before El Lightning went to work with the Gatling gun.

One was the red-bearded George LeBeouf. The other man, who wore his long, gray-streaked blond hair in a ponytail and was dressed in a gaudy green suit with checked
trousers, was Casey Blackwell. His long, angular face was clean-shaven and pink with sunburn though beneath the burn he appeared almost sickly pale. He had watery gray eyes and a straight, four-inch, slash-like scar under the right one.

The four men sat over breakfast plates. The doctor was the only one still eating. Coffee mugs steamed on the table before them as they cast their grim gazes toward the bloody bundle that Red Snake and Kiljoy were just now hauling out the doors.

“Well, what do you say, boys?” Marshal Hawkins said. “One down—how many left?”

The four townsmen laughed.

PROPHET HAD A
cup of coffee to get awake. Ivy did not talk to him. She was too busy cooking and serving breakfast.

Louisa didn't talk to him, either. She merely sat cleaning her pistols at the same table as him but without looking at him. She could be like that, especially if she knew he'd made time with another woman. Or maybe something else was bothering her entirely.

The fickle moods of his blond partner were the least of Prophet's worries. It was true he did not lament the demise of Sergeant Frieri, but the fact that the man had been murdered here in the hotel made Prophet uneasy. He had a feeling the killer was one of the townsmen. Hawkins, maybe, or one of the other men sitting with him. Each likely had other clothes they could have changed into after accomplishing their bloody task.

But why had the killer singled out Frieri to kill?

The question was sharp badger teeth nibbling at the edges of Prophet's mind. When he finished his coffee, he left Louisa to her guns and went outside, closing the door behind him on the wind that had picked up, blowing with
nearly as much fury as it had the previous day. It was a hot, dusty, nerve-jangling wind. Its moaning and groaning and loud gusts could cover the approach of a galloping horde of Mojaves, so that neither he nor the others would know they were under attack until the Indians were already flinging lead or ash-shafted arrows.

If anything had cursed this town, the wind had.

He looked across the street to see a Rurale corporal sitting in the barn loft beside the Gatling gun, his knees drawn up as he smoked. He regarded Prophet dully through the screen of blown desert sand.

Looking up and down the street at the well and the mostly abandoned and dilapidated buildings, he saw no one else. There was no movement except sand and weeds and shingles blowing on their chains and lifting a bizarre squawking. A cat slinked along the front of a low-slung blacksmith shop, tail down, ears back, and disappeared through a knot-sized hole in the bottom of one of the two closed doors.

His shotgun hanging down his back and holding his Winchester on his shoulder, Prophet stepped down off the saloon veranda and tramped left along the street. There were a total of six buildings at this end of the near-abandoned town, three to Prophet's right, four to his left. He'd had only a vague idea where he was heading, but now he realized he was tramping out to take a look at the old mine.

The folks here in San Gezo were more private than most. There had to be a reason for that. They had to be protecting something valuable, and the only thing of any value here had been the mine.

Of course, the mining company had pulled out, so the chance of the mine still being worth anything was slim, but Prophet could think of no other reason—aside from mere reclusiveness—that the townsfolk could be wanting to keep any possible visitors moving along.

The street narrowed, became an old wagon trail. Along both sides of the trail, the ancient adobe or stone hovels of the original village shone in the greasewood, ironwood
shrubs, and clay-colored rocks and boulders. There was a grove of dead pecan trees on the right side of the trail. Far to the left, two ridges humped up, craggy and uneven ridges forming a canyon between them.

Prophet stopped, narrowed his eyes. A shadow had flickered in an arroyo mouth just ahead.

He'd just started pulling his rifle down from his shoulder when a Mojave wearing a cap of hawk feathers, his broad, tan face striped with ochre war paint over the nose, bounded out of the arroyo mouth, drawing an arrow back from a bow. Prophet threw himself left as the arrow shot toward him, making a
zip!
as it passed six inches past his right cheek.

Prophet hit the ground and, seeing the Indian bound toward him while nocking another arrow, he bounded off his heels, throwing himself into a tangle of greasewood and flood-deposited rocks and driftwood. Something slammed into the side of his boot, whipping his leg sideways.

Prophet ignored it, rose to his knees, pumped a shell into the Winchester's chamber.

A figure dashed past him down the arroyo, just beyond a screen of catclaw and spindly willows. Prophet fired once, twice, three times. The Indian lowered his head and raised his arms and kept running as Prophet's slugs blew branches off the shrubs on the other side of the arroyo. He dashed out of sight beyond a thumb of rock to Prophet's left.

Cursing, stumbling, Prophet dashed out into the arroyo, snapping branches under his boots. He dropped to a knee and swung his rifle up the narrow, meandering ravine and held fire. The Indian was gone. Dust sifted in the wind behind him. Prophet tried to stand but his right boot got hung up on something. He looked at it. A Mojave arrow stuck out of his heel, the flint point half buried.

He reached back, pulled the arrow out of his boot, and tossed it away. “Bastard,” he said through a growl. “Gonna need a new heel . . . son of a bitch.”

He stood, tested the heel. Seemed sound enough though
it squeaked a little. He ejected the spent cartridge from his Winchester, heard it ping off a rock as he seated a fresh one in the chamber and started walking forward. He pivoted on his hips, swinging the rifle around, expecting similarly war-painted Mojaves to bound toward him from both sides of the arroyo at any second.

None showed by the time he came to the end of the arroyo as it curved into the canyon dug into the valley between the two ridges. None showed when he had made his way carefully up out of the arroyo and stole along the canyon bottom, crouching behind boulders and perusing the rocky ridges nearly surrounding him. Here, a wagon trail angled into the canyon from the direction of San Gezo. Prophet had never visited the Sweet Hereafter Mine, but he figured the road led to the mine. Not much else out here. This certainly wasn't ranching or farming country.

He did not walk along the trail but kept to the brush and boulders to the left of it, near the base of a steep ridge on his left. Ahead, the trail wound deeper into the canyon, turning around a hill on the left and likely jogging into the steeper canyon beyond, where the mine probably was.

Prophet knew it was crazy for him to be out here alone. There were probably twenty Mojaves lurking around in these rocks and cuts. But the Sweet Hereafter gave him a strong tug. Continuing to look around him carefully and angling between boulders and brush clumps, he kept walking.

Dust puffed from a boulder ahead and to his right, a quarter second before the screech of the ricocheting bullet filled Prophet's ears. Instantly, he saw the shooter halfway up the ridge on his right and about sixty yards beyond him.

Prophet wasted no time triggering two quick shots from his shoulder, saw the shooter tumbling out from behind his covering boulder, dropping to his belly, and sliding several feet down the hill. The shooter had dropped his rifle, and it slid down the hill beside him.

Prophet pumped a fresh round and scowled at the shooter. Not an Indian. A white man. Prophet looked around
in case other ambushers were near, then strode quickly over to the base of the hill, giving his gaze once more to the shooter who was struggling to haul himself to his knees.

He was an elderly Mexican in a green plaid shirt and faded denims with patched knees and lace-up boots. His battered Stetson had rolled to the base of the hill near Prophet's feet.

“Bocangel?”

The man groaned as he sat back on his heels, pressing both hands against his left thigh. Prophet glanced around once more, then climbed the slope at an angle, loosing stones in his wake. “Why the hell you're tryin' to perforate my hide, old man?” he asked, reaching down and scooping the oldster's Springfield carbine out of the gravel.

“I didn't know it was you, Lou!”

“Who'd you think I was?”

“One of . . .” Bocangel gasped, gritting his teeth. “. . . Them . . .” He flopped back, twisting around on his side as he passed out.

“One of who?” Prophet snarled, scowling down at the man.

Bocangel lay twisted back on his side at an awkward angle. A wing of his thick, black, silver-streaked hair covered one eye. Prophet tossed the man's rifle down the slope, then stooped to grab his arms and haul him up and over his left shoulder. Grunting and cursing and looking around warily for Mojaves, he headed on down the slope and made his way back the way he'd come. Bocangel was not a heavy load, but Prophet stopped twice on his way back to the saloon to look around, making sure he wasn't being shadowed.

The wind blew a furnace-like heat, peppering his face with grit. The moisture that had fallen last night was gone without a trace. Sweat slithered down Prophet's cheeks, pasted his buckskin shirt against his back.

Prophet made it back to the main street and continued over to the saloon, where Chacin and his two remaining Rurales and Marshal Hawkins and the townsmen LeBeouf
and Blackwell were sitting on chairs they'd hauled out of the saloon, nursing beers and holding rifles.

“Well, I'll be damned,” said Casey Blackwell, his watery gray eyes even more watery now from the beer. “I was wonderin' where that old coot was hiding out.”

Prophet stopped on the veranda. “Why was he hiding out?”

“Who shot him?” Hawkins jumped in before Blackwell could reply.

“I did. He shot at me first.”

The burly LeBeouf chuckled. “Didn't know the old goat had it in him.”

“What were you doin' out there, anyways?” Hawkins asked, both eyes twitching as they bored into Prophet.

“Figured it was a nice day for a stroll.” Prophet carried Senor Bocangel into the saloon, blinking as his eyes adjusted to the near darkness.

“Don't appreciate that, Prophet!” Hawkins walked in after the bounty hunter. “You and your people are restricted to the main street of this town and no farther!”

Prophet lay Bocangel down on a table just inside the door as Ivy came around from behind the bar with a bottle and a kitchen rag. “What happened to him?”

“I shot him.” Prophet looked at Doc Shackleford, who was scowling back at him from over a plate of ham and eggs at the back of the room. The doctor had a Sharps carbine and a box of shells on the table near his plate, close to hand if the Mojaves came. “More business here, Doc.”