The Devil’s Laughter: A Lou Prophet Novel (24 page)

When Louisa came in for a drink, he said, “Take over here, will you, killer?”

“What're you gonna do?”

“Haven't seen Lazzaro or Senor Bocangel in a while,” Prophet said, donning his hat and shouldering his rifle. “Gonna go up and see if there's anything I can do to make 'em more comfortable.”

Sugar called as Prophet started up the stairs, “Best make sure my honey ain't grinnin' with his throat when you leave him, bounty hunter.” She kept peeling cards off the deck in her left hand and arranging them on the table. “I'll be checking.”

PROPHET HAD JUST
turned off the stairs and started down the second-story hall when he heard a man grunting and cursing farther down the dingy corridor that smelled of rotting wood, coal oil, and sweat. A woman was groaning and also cursing. Bedsprings were squawking raucously, rhythmically.

Prophet continued along the hall, walking on the balls of his feet. Ahead and on his right, a door stood cracked, showing a vertical line of gray light.

“Goddamnit!” the man shouted suddenly.

There was the loud
whump!
of a heavy body hitting the floor. Prophet felt the floor quake beneath his boots. The woman yelped,
“Ah-ohh . . . damn youuuu!”

“Bitch!”

“You got no . . . you got no call to—” The woman broke herself off. Prophet stepped up to the crack in the door and peered into the room.

Just beyond the door, Miss Tulsa was on the floor, naked as a jaybird, her soft, pale back with a heavy roll of flesh around her middle facing Prophet. Her red hair was piled loosely atop her head. Cursing and crying, she crawled on
hands and knees to a chair between a washstand and the bed upon which Tony Lazzaro was writhing naked amidst the mess of twisted sheets and a quilt. He was clutching his bloody side with one hand, the blood dribbling from between his fingers and staining the bed.

“I'll teach you to treat Miss Tulsa like she was dirt, you limp-dicked son of a bitch!”

The whore had grabbed an ivory-gripped pistol from Lazzaro's shell belt. She had it in both hands now, and she cursed again as she ratcheted back the hammer. Lazzaro stared at her fearfully, eyes widening as he rolled back against the wall and raised his hands palm out.

“I'll take that,” Prophet said, reaching over the whore's head and closing his hands around the Smith & Wesson, wedging his left thumb between the gun and the cocked hammer.

The whore screamed as Prophet pulled the gun out of her hands, and depressed the hammer. She glared angrily up at Prophet. “Damn you—I'm gonna kill that lizard. Miss Tulsa will
not
be treated this way! I'm tellin' Ivy!”

“Fair enough.” Prophet flicked the Smithy's loading gate open and shook the gun as he rolled the cylinder, the shells clinking and rolling around the floor. “You best go downstairs, Miss Tulsa. Obviously, your services are wasted in here.”

“She opened my wound!” Lazzaro said, wincing and pressing one of the bed's two pillows to his side. “Fetch Sugar for me, will you, Proph?”

Prophet looked at Miss Tulsa stumbling around heavy, naked, and breathless, gathering her clothes from the floor. “Send Sugar when you get downstairs, Tulsa.”

“Fuck you!” Tulsa screeched at the bloody outlaw as she threw open the door, holding her clothes against her pillowy breasts and glaring over her shoulder at Prophet. “And
fuck you, too, bounty hunter
!”

As the whore stomped out of the room and headed down the hall toward her own digs, Prophet said, “Don't worry,
Tony. I'll send Sugar.” He grinned and winked. “Wanna make sure you're well taken care of.”

“You better, damnit!”

“Feelin' all right, ain't ya? I mean besides a little lost blood an' all?”

Lazzaro squeezed his eyes closed, panting as he pressed the pillow against his side. “I'm feelin' just fine.”

“If you think you'll be kickin' off soon,” Prophet said, “you might as well go ahead and tell ole Lou where you had Sugar bury the loot. I mean, why let Red Snake and Kiljoy get it all? They'll just head on down to Mexico and blow it on cheap whores.”

Lazzaro scowled at Prophet, hardening his jaws. “Just send Sugar.”

“All right.”

Prophet went out and yelled down the stairs, summoning Sugar to Lazzaro's room, then walked down the second-story hall once more. He knew that Senor Bocangel was in room 8, on the left side of the hall and one door down from where Lazzaro was groaning and making the bedsprings squawk.

He rapped two knuckles against the door panel. No response. He stared at the scarred panel, feeling a tightening of apprehension.

Could Senor Bocangel have met the same fate as Frieri and the corporal? Prophet released the keeper thong from over his pistol hammer and rapped on the door once more.

Still nothing.

Prophet turned the knob. There being no locks on any of the saloon's doors, Prophet heard the latch click. He shoved the door wide, standing in the opening with his right hand on his Colt, his Winchester propped on his left shoulder. The door stopped before it would have struck the wall. Bocangel lay on the bed against the far wall, beneath a curtained window that the wind was battering.

Prophet walked forward.

Bocangel lay beneath a threadbare white sheet drawn up
to his chin. His wool shirt was draped over the back of the room's sole chair angled near the bed. Bocangel was snoring softly through half-parted lips, eyes squeezed shut. Out cold. On the dresser against the left wall were several bloody cloths and a flat, corked bottle of liquid paregoric that the sawbones had left.

No wonder the Mexican was out cold. The tension knot in Prophet's belly eased, replaced with frustration.

He'd wanted to see if he could learn from Bocangel why'd he'd ambushed Prophet earlier. He had a sneaking suspicion that the cause of the Mexican's desperate move was also at the heart of the trouble here in San Gezo. At least the trouble that had been here when Prophet and his mismatched party had arrived ahead of the Indians.

Bocangel hadn't wanted Prophet to visit the mine. He had a feeling the others in the town didn't, either.

Prophet went out and gently closed the door, opening and closing his hand around the neck of the Winchester propped now on his right shoulder. He went over and looked out the window at the end of the hall on his left. The wind-blown grit gave the light an orangish, washed-out appearance. It ticked against the window and tossed the brittle desert shrubs this way and that.

From this angle, he could see the gap between the hotel and the next, smaller building to the east. He could also see the main street off to his far right. Red Snake Corbin was leaning up against a porch post on the street's far side, looking around warily for Indians and smoking a quirley, which he shielded with the palm of his hand. His long duster blew about his skinny legs clad in dusty black denim.

Marshal Bill Hawkins was just now walking up from between two buildings near Red Snake, holding a rifle up high across his chest, his black clawhammer coat blowing out like a giant bat's wing in the wind. Hawkins and the other townsmen would be sticking close to the saloon, since that seemed to be the Indians' target. If Prophet was careful, he could make his way out of the town without being seen by anyone.

Including the Mojaves, he hoped.

A foolish move, probably. But again he felt a strong pull toward the mine.

He walked back downstairs and slipped through the saloon's rear door without being seen. Kiljoy was outside, hunkered on one knee, smoking and looking ridiculous with the bandage around his face but appearing to be keeping a watchful eye out for Mojaves. He couldn't care less what Prophet was up to. The two glanced at each other coldly.

“Nice day for a walk,” Kiljoy said.

“Yeah, ain't it.”

Snugging his hat down tight on his head, Prophet made his way east of the hotel, walking along behind the other buildings until the rugged desert opened before him. Staying out of sight from the town, he retraced his earlier steps, cutting up the arroyo in which the Mojave brave had drilled his boot heel.

He moved carefully, every two or three steps swinging nearly completely around with his rifle aimed out from his hip, watching for bushwhacking braves. He saw nothing but a few spiders, jackrabbits, one coyote, and blowing weeds and dust as he made his way past where Senor Bocangel had tried to drill him.

Striding along the narrow wash, he moved around the bend, swinging east. Ahead, the canyon walls fell back on both sides, broadening the canyon floor. The walls rose higher.

The wagon trail leading from the town to the mine was on his left—deeply grooved from the heavy, double-shod wheels of the ore drays. But from his vantage in the brush and rocks along the trail, he could see no fresh tracks. The grooves were partly filled in with dust and sand and bits of weeds. Tumbleweeds littered the trail, and creosote, yucca, and jimsonweed had grown up between the ruts.

If the mine had been used recently, it hadn't been reached via the old road from San Gezo.

The wind moaned between the canyon's high walls. It
was like a saw working on Prophet's nerves. He gritted his teeth and slitted his eyes against it, paused to look around carefully between the wind-buffeting witches' fingers of cholla stalks, then kept walking.

The mine lay two hundred yards inside the canyon, about a third of the way up the slope on his right. The trail wound up to it along a graded bed. There wasn't much to see of the mine but a portal that had obviously been caved in at the back of a small shelf carved out of the mountain.

Below the shelf lay a massive tailings pile and a jumble of iron and gray-weathered wood that was likely all that remained of the stamping mill, tipple, and tramway that had been used to crudely process the ore before it had been loaded onto drays and hauled across the desert to San Diego. Around the rubble were also the bleached white bones doubtlessly belonging to mules that had pulled the drays and that often dropped dead due to exhaustion or poor tending.

Prophet had been to many mines, and they were hard, merciless places for man and beast. This one, however, hadn't been worked in at least five years. He didn't have to climb the slope to see that. Not even a shod hoofprint marked the soft sand anywhere around the base of the tailings slope.

Hooves thudded behind Prophet. He whipped around. Three Indians on spotted ponies galloped around the bend in the canyon floor.

Prophet mumbled a curse and looked around for cover. There was nothing near that could conceal him.

Up the slope about fifteen yards was a wagon-sized boulder that angled out away from the ridge. He scrambled up the slope, breathing hard, hearing the hoof thuds growing louder, the Indians howling. Rifles cracked. Bullets spanged off rocks around Prophet's feet.

He threw himself behind the boulder.

Only, behind the boulder there was nothing but a ragged hole in the ground.

Prophet fell through it, knowing in the back of his mind
he'd just thrown himself down an exploratory mine shaft. The shaft didn't plunge straight down. He bounced and rolled, losing his rifle and feeling rocks hammering him about the ribs, head, and shoulders. The angle was steep enough that he couldn't stop his momentum.

He hit the bottom of the shaft with a loud explosion of air from his hammered lungs.

He lay on his back, breathing hard, hearing spring robins chirping in his ears. His head spun. Fireworks flared behind his squeezed-shut eyelids.

When he finally opened his eyes and began to hear the chirping receding but feeling that every rib in his body was poking through his chest, he saw something angling up beside him. A root?

No.

Prophet grimaced, silently cursed, when he realized that what he was staring at was a human hand. The fingers formed a hideous, pale claw that was reaching for him.

“WHAT THE
HELL
!”

Prophet got his heels and hands beneath him and scuttled a few feet away from the large, pale hand hovering over him, until the back of his head and his right shoulder smacked the hole's stone side wall. His right elbow pushed against something yielding, and he turned to see what appeared to be a tan wool vest.

The stench in the hole was nearly suffocating, and Prophet felt his eyes watering as he realized that the tan vest was worn by a dead man. The vest was blood-matted, and it was swollen over the bloated belly it covered.

Prophet looked to his left, saw the hand he'd seen before. It had a gold ring set with a square, brown stone. It protruded from a white shirt cuff. It belonged to another dead man who lay sideways against a rock, the arm and the clawlike hand sort of propped against it. The hand was no longer moving, and Prophet realized that he had made the hand move because his legs had been resting across the dead man's.

The sickly sweet stench of human decay made him suck a shallow breath and make a face as he rose onto his elbows,
wincing against the burning aches in his ribs and hips and the back of his neck. He saw his rifle lying against the wall several feet away, beyond the legs of the body to his right.

His aching head swirled, unable yet to fully fathom his grim discovery. Dead men . . . here . . . ?

Had the mine collapsed, trapping miners?

The thought was snuffed by a sound from above. He looked toward the opening of the hole at the top of the steeply slanted shaft. He couldn't see the entire opening from his vantage, because of a lip of rock above him. He could make out about half of it, and the silhouette of a head staring down at him from the hole's lip, long hair hanging around the Indian's shoulders.

“Hey, white man!” a deep voice shouted. “Hey, you down there—you thieving bastard! You dead?”

The voice was so unlike what Prophet had expected from a Mojave that for a half a second he thought that someone other than the Indian staring down at him must have spoken. It was the voice of a white man with a slight Spanish accent.