The Devil’s Laughter: A Lou Prophet Novel (5 page)

“Don't get fresh, Miss Bonnyventure.”

Prophet winked at her and strode over to the door. He'd like nothing better than to get out of his wet clothes, but they weren't as wet as before, and he'd hung his rain slicker to dry. Besides, he didn't feel much like sitting around in his birthday suit in a known outlaw lair, even if all the outlaws were dead. There were plenty of outlaws in Mexico to grieve him plenty, and he'd as soon be dressed for more trouble that might visit him this night.

“It's Bonaventure,” Louisa corrected him, still sitting at the table, sliding her uneaten food around on her plate. It was all part of their routine exchange—something they did to kill the boredom of long rides after curly wolves. “There's no
y
in it. Never has been.”

The old joke made Prophet feel better.

He walked out onto the broad veranda, stepping over a couple of dead men. He lit the cheroot and stood smoking as he stared out at the storm that had relented considerably though the night was as black as before. After a time, he spied a long wicker divan abutting the casa's front wall and slacked into it with a tired groan. He lay down, resting his head against the arm farthest from the door, and leisurely smoked the cigar.

He heard the clack of boot heels and then he saw Louisa standing in the doorway, staring out across the veranda and into the deep night, past the water still dripping over the edge of the tiled roof. The drops glittered like diamonds in the less frequent and far less violent lightning flashes. It lit up the whites of the girl's eyes.

Her strangely pensive eyes. More pensive, more brooding than usual, Prophet thought. Something had happened here that had stirred her somehow. He drew deep on the cigar, blew the smoke out in the fragrant, humid night, obscuring Louisa's blond silhouette half-concealed by the doorway.

Probably something about the blind woman's history aligning somewhat with her own. Some kind of madness had likely gotten into Sugar Delphi, a killer blind woman, in the same way a certain, lesser madness had climbed over the otherwise cool, stalwart barricades of Miss Louisa Bonaventure. After she'd witnessed her family slaughtered by the Handsome Dave Duvall gang. And after she'd taught herself to ride and shoot and kill hungrily and then had ridden the gang down, with Prophet's help, to send them all howling back to the merciless hell they'd hailed from.

That was probably it, Prophet thought, studying the pale oval of her face in profile. She'd learned of the misery lurking inside Miss Delphi, and it had recalled her own, maybe reminded her how different her life would have been had Handsome Dave Duvall not come riding into her family's farmyard along the shores of Sand Creek, Nebraska, that fateful afternoon nearly five long years ago.

He brought the cigar to his lips once more but held it there, at the edge of his mouth, as Louisa came out onto the veranda and walked over to him.

“Get out of those clothes or you're going to catch your death of cold.”

He drew on the cigar and blew the smoke out across the veranda. “You first.”

She stepped back and kicked out of her boots, one after
another, kicking them both under the wicker divan. She unbuttoned the jacket, shucked out of it. Then the shirt and camisole.

Pert breasts jostling, she peeled off her deerskin trousers and socks and pink lace panties, and stood before him, thrusting her shoulders back, arms straight down at her sides. He couldn't see her face well in the night's murky shadows, but she appeared to have a grave, almost anxious expression. Her naked breasts, swathed in chicken flesh, rose and fell deeply as she breathed.

Prophet sat up, flicked the cigar into the wet yard where it landed with a sizzle. Staring up at the pretty, naked, wild, crazy-assed blond before him, feeling his loins warm and hot blood churn through his veins—no one could arouse him like Louisa could though he made no bones of tying himself to a single woman—he unbuttoned his shirt, jerked it down off his shoulders, and tossed it on the floor.

Louisa knelt to help him with the rest—cartridge belt, pants, and then his longhandles, rolling the underwear down his long, muscular legs until his erect member jutted toward her. She closed her hand around it. Prophet groaned and sank back against the divan. She lowered her head, and he sighed again, groaned, ground his heels into the veranda's scarred wooden floor.

They made love twice, the second time as wild and frantic as the first, Louisa squirming and grunting around on top of him as well as under him, mewling and clutching with arms and legs, like an enraged wildcat. He'd gotten used to the uninhibited, desperate way the girl always made love with him, as if it were the first and last time she'd ever enjoy the act, so it didn't startle him as it had the first time up in Dakota Territory, when they'd been on the trail of Handsome Dave Duvall.

He made light of it now, not wanting to attract attention to the bizarreness, however it thrilled him, of her way of coupling, as though she were fighting to keep her head above a storm-tossed sea. “Damn, you did miss ole Lou,”
he said, sliding her hair away from her face with the back of his big, brown hand.

“I missed you, Lou.” She sandwiched his face in her hands, kissed him hard, tugging on his bottom lip with her teeth until it almost hurt, then rose and gathered up their clothes.

“Where you goin'?”

“I'm going to throw your wet duds over chairs in the kitchen, near the stove. Then I'm gonna find us a blanket.”

She trotted off, and he turned his head to admire her taut, round bottom before she scampered through the hacienda's open door.

She returned a while later with his blanket roll and saddle. She set the saddle at the head of the divan for a pillow, then lay down beside him and drew the wool blankets of the bedroll over them both. She curled her cool, smooth, willowy body against him, hooking a leg over his, and went to sleep.

He stared out at the night for a time, the coolness of the mist angling in on him occasionally and feeling good after the heat of their coupling. Then he followed her into sleep for what must have been an hour before he felt her stir and heard her dress and stride quietly into the casa, where it was warm. The night had turned cool. Prophet fell back asleep for another couple of hours before a cool breeze woke him.

He dressed in his now-dry duds, gathered his weapons, and strolled around the hacienda, eyes and ears alert. The mist had lifted, and a few stars shone above high, thin, pancake clouds. When he'd checked on the horses, finding them all resting peacefully, he returned to the divan onto which he slumped once more, fully dressed, only kicking off his boots, and slept again until something woke him.

He opened his eyes to a clear blue, milky dawn and reached for the Winchester leaning against the veranda rail two feet away. Cocking the rifle, he swung his feet to the floor and looked around. The yard fronting the hacienda was revealed by the pearl light washing through the untended
trees and shrubs, showing a cracked flagstone walk angling toward the gate where the two guards lay sprawled in the bloody mud.

He heard the soft thuds of oncoming riders punctuated with frequent splashes of hooves in puddles. Over the wall left of the gate, bobbing heads appeared—heads donning straw sombreros with an insignia of some kind in the crown.

From his vantage he could see the bobbing shoulders of several riders all clad in gray, and he cursed. The insignia in the hat crowns was doubtless the eagle emblem of the Mexican Rurales.

Prophet rose, stomped quietly into his boots, set the rifle down, and wrapped his shell belt and Colt around his waist. As he did, he cast his gaze toward the open gate in the adobe wall and saw the Rurales stop just outside the gap while the leader, a lean man with a mustache and spade beard, looked down at the dead men sprawled around him.

The lead Rurale lifted his head to peer toward Prophet, then clucked to his horse, a roan Arab cross, and came on inside the gate, followed by a shaggy string of five other Rurales, all swinging their heads around to inspect the carnage.

Boots thudded inside the hacienda's open door. “Company?” Louisa asked, stopping in the doorway and holding her Winchester carbine across her chest.

“I reckon you best put the coffee on, Ma,” Prophet dryly quipped as he donned his hat and, setting the Winchester on his shoulder, stood atop the veranda steps to stare at the men clomping toward him. “I'll scrounge us up some eggs from the chicken coop.”

The lead rider wore captain's bars on his sun-faded, mud-flecked gray tunic. His long, angular face with pointed chin and broad, heavy mouth was dark and leathery, with several short, knotted white scars. Fresh mud caked his horse's cannons and belly. The mud had splashed up over the captain's dark blue, yellow-striped uniform slacks.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” Prophet growled, yawning
and raking a hand down his face bristling with three-day-old beard stubble.

“Cat?” The captain feigned a puzzled expression, glancing around. “I see no cat. I see plenty of dead men, though, Lou. You know, the old saying is true—the trail of the evil dead leads to hell.”

“Mere superstition.” Prophet glowered. “Didn't figure you were this far north, Chacin.”

“I am everywhere, Prophet. Where I am not, I have men watching and listening on my behalf. Back in Tres Leones, I heard that a big gringo with a devilish little cannon purchased food and supplies, and had—how do you say?—
cooled his heels
for a day while his horse rested before heading out on the same trail that the Lazzaro gang took when they came storming down from the border.” The captain grinned, showing fang-like yellow eyeteeth. “You enjoyed a couple of the senoritas, I hear.”

Louisa drawled, “So worried about me that you had to distract yourself, eh, Lou?”

Prophet shrugged.

Chacin looked at the two dead men on the porch. “Did you kill them all, Lou? You and the gringa?” Chacin's eyes burned a little when they found Louisa standing in the broad, open doorway, in front of the two dead banditos.

“No, but a goodly portion. How nice you rode in just in time to offer assistance.”

“I was certain that you and the Vengeance Queen—
si
, I know you by reputation,
chiquita
, and I am delighted to see that you are every bit as lovely as your legend claims—I was certain that you,
mi
amigo Prophet, could handle yourselves even against twenty of the vilest desperadoes to haunt northern Mexico for the past five years, somehow managing to stay one step ahead of me.”

“Two steps, more like,” Louisa said. Her reputation had stretched far and wide, and so had Prophet's. Even Ned Buntline had written about her and the ex-Confederate man hunter who, after all the horrors he'd witnessed from the
Wilderness to Chickamauga, had sold his soul to the Devil in return for all the hoof-stomping, hog-killing good times he could wring from the years he had left, funded by the bounties on the heads of badmen.

Ignoring Louisa's comment, Chacin sat back in his saddle and studied the hacienda. “Damned impressive hideout. I figured they were holed up in the mountains farther south. Maybe the Sierra Madre.” He sighed fatefully, making a dramatic show of it, inflating then deflating his chest and rounding his broad shoulders. “Oh, well . . . gone but not forgotten. Now, if you will just hand over the loot they stole from the Nogales bank, my men and I will be on our way.”

“How do you know this Sonoran lizard, Lou?” Louisa asked, strolling out onto the veranda and pulling up on his left, spreading her boots a little more than shoulder-width apart.

“Now, now,” Prophet said, grinning at Chacin scowling at Louisa. “Me and Jorge go way back . . . to about five, six years ago now. Run into each other from time to time, when business calls me down here south of the border.”

Chacin said through a nostril-flared sneer, “This lizard, as you so rudely call me, senorita, once had a deal with Senor Prophet. We would split any bounty money he acquires down here in my beloved Mejico fifty-fifty. Half for me, half for him.”

“Now, you know that wasn't the agreement, Jorge.”

“But it was the agreement, Lou.”

Prophet shook his head. “The agreement was eighty-twenty in my favor if I run 'em down and you don't get your hands dirty. That's the toll charge for crossin' back over the border with my bounty in the form of the entire person or just his head, you see.”

He glanced at Louisa, sneering now himself, his own nostrils flaring and the cords standing out in his stout, sun-leathered neck. “Only the lizard here, as you so aptly called
mi
amigo Captain Chacin of the illustrious Rurales, reneged on the deal. Tried to whipsaw me between two contingents of these gray-bellied bastards and force me to take only
twenty percent . . . though his hands were as clean as the day the bastard was born, and I'd damn near popped all my caps!”

“That was a long time ago, Lou.” Chacin waved a gauntlet-gloved hand in front of his nose as though brushing away a fly. “I forget the details.”

“Quit beatin' the Devil around the stump and admit you're a double-crossin' son of a bitch.”

Chacin dipped his chin and blinked his cold, gray brown eyes once. “The last few times you have been down here, Lou, you failed to look up your partner, Chacin, and turn over to the Rurales our fifty percent cut of your dinero. You see, I have many pairs of eyes and ears, and those eyes and ears are always on the lookout for the big man with the crooked nose who rides an ugly, angry lineback dun who
deserves a bullet in his head as much as his rider does
!”

Prophet leaned forward at the waist, veins bulging in his brick red forehead. “Don't you dare insult my hoss, you son of a bitch. Backwater!”

“Boys, boys,” Louisa said, dropping down the veranda steps, holding her hands up, palms out. “I sense there's some bad blood between you, as there often is between even the most honorable businessmen. But I'm sure, since you both are honorable as well as sensible—I mean, no one wants a lead swap here, right?—I'm quite confident we can come to some sort of agreement.”