The Devil’s Laughter: A Lou Prophet Novel (7 page)

He wore greasy, smoke-stained trail garb with a broad sombrero. His blond mustache drooped down over both sides of his narrow mouth that always hung open a little. His light-blue eyes seemed to have a pale film over them; they were shallow and pitiless and poison mean.

He did not care for Sugar Delphi, and he had made his views very clear to the other men of the gang, including Lazzaro, who considered Sugar his woman. The gang leader did not hold the sentiment against the short, thick border tough from Missouri—at least not to the point that he'd ever considered cutting him loose or killing him—for everyone who'd ever met Kiljoy accepted his hideous nature as one would accept that of a maverick longhorn or coiled diamondback.

All that Lazzaro cared about was that Kiljoy lived up to his last name. The stubby brigand indeed seemed to take great pleasure in killing, and such a talent was a great asset for a gang leader like Lazzaro, a sadistic killer in his own right.

Kiljoy said nothing, just sat scowling after the redhead and Lazzaro, slowly shaking his head obliquely, as though wondering what in hell the ghoulish albeit beautiful woman was up to now. That was Red Snake's sentiment, as well.

“I don't know about you, Roy,” he said to Kiljoy, “but I wanna see what she's seein'. Or smellin'.”

“Lots o' death out here,” said Kiljoy, looking around at the low, rocky hills. “If we don't keep movin', we're likely gonna smell a little whiffy on the lee side ourselves.” He kept sliding his dark gaze around. “Bounty hunters, lawmen, regulators, banditos, Injuns . . . hell, a man who don't keep movin' sets his own trap out here.”

“Yeah, well . . . just the same, I'm gonna kill the cat!” Red Snake whipped his rein ends against his dun's left hip and galloped off between the hills.

“DEATH,” SAID SUGAR
. “I told you I smelled it.”

Antonio Lazzaro and Red Snake Corbin rode up beside the woman to stare down at the overturned wagon and the man lying slumped in the rocks beyond it.

The wagon lay twisted between two boulders and a slender mesquite tree, which it had broken like a matchstick when it had run off the trail. Or been run off the trail. Various foodstuffs and camping supplies as well as rusted picks and shovels were strewn about the wagon and boulders, where they'd tumbled during the crash. Deep gouges in the form of unshod hoofprints scored the ground all around the wagon, rocks, and dead man even in the wake of the previous night's deluge.

The man lay spread eagle and staked to the ground. There wasn't enough left of him after the Mojaves had had their fun with him—likely seeing how loud they could get him to scream—to judge his age, much less his facial features. He'd been cut up badly, and then the coyotes or wildcats had eaten him, burrowing into all orifices. Only a few tufts of curly gray hair remained atop his blood-crusted skull.

Lazzaro looked at Sugar, who stood staring straight out
across the desert beyond the dead man, who'd probably been a prospector seeking color in the local ranges and washes. The blind woman's lush red hair hung to her shoulders. Some of it was twisted into small braids, and these hung down the sides of her head, trimmed with colored wooden beads.

“Mojave?” he asked.

She nodded.

Red Snake turned to Lazzaro and whispered, “How in the hell can she tell if it's Mojave as opposed to, say, Chiricowys or Coyotero? All three bands been known to run in these parts.”

Lazzaro had just started to shrug when Sugar jerked her head toward them as she reined her dappled black around. “I suggest we light a shuck, gentlemen. The Mojaves who did this are still near . . . and they're hungry for white blood!”

She ground her spurs into the dappled black's flanks. The horse whinnied, swept past the dumbly staring Lazzaro and Red Snake Corbin, and galloped back out toward the trail where Roy Kiljoy sat his Appaloosa, gravely glancing around at the starkly forbidding ridges turning more golden now as the sun rose a third of the way toward its zenith.

A minute later, the three men were back on the trail, galloping twenty yards behind Sugar, who rode with the sun streaking her blowing, copper red hair, her black sombrero dangling by a rawhide thong down her back, over her black-and-red leather jacket stitched with small, silver horses.

As he rode crouched in his own saddle, Red Snake glanced to the right, then shouted at Lazzaro riding half a length ahead and a little right of him, then tossed his head to indicate the white smoke puffs rising from one of the highest northern ridges. Lazzaro turned his head toward the smoke puffs, then jerked his head toward the left.

Red Snake followed his gaze past Kiljoy to see another series of charcoal-colored puffs rising from a lower ridge half a mile south of the trail they were following.

Kiljoy turned his big, unshaven, fair-featured but sunburned
face toward Red Snake, his blond mustache blowing in the wind. It was a dark look. Kiljoy shook his head. “I really hate 'Paches, Snake. I hate 'em worse than tooth pullers an' sky pilots.”

“You can discuss that with them shortly,” said Sugar, whipping her head around to stare back at the men behind her.

She lifted her chin. Kiljoy, Red Snake, and Lazzaro glanced over their shoulders. Six or seven dusky-skinned, black-haired riders galloped toward them, angling onto the trail from the north and south, leaning far forward and batting their moccasined heels against the flanks of their lunging mustang ponies painted for war.

“Ah, shit!” grouched Lazzaro.

Red Snake expressed the same sentiment.

Kiljoy whipped his rein ends against his Appy's right hip and yelled, “Hold on to your topknots and ride like hell, boys!”

Lazzaro's mount lunged hard, until it was long-striding beside Sugar's horse and gradually overtaking her. He did not wonder how the blind woman had known the Mojaves were behind them. He'd stopped wondering long ago how she sensed the things she did and now merely accepted the fact without question. It didn't even seem all that strange to him anymore. In many ways her inexplicable gift was a blessing, as it had saved his life countless times.

Hearing the Mojaves howling and yowling behind him, Lazzaro and the others climbed a low rise, and Lazzaro felt the slightest loosening of the knot in his belly. The Colorado Gulch Relay Station opened below him—a sprawl of weather-silvered wooden buildings and holding corrals in a broad horseshoe gouge in the large, black rock escarpment rising like a mess of giant dominos just north of it. To the south and west was nothing but more of the same stark terrain that Lazzaro and the others had just crossed.

Gunfire crackled amidst the Indians' eerie howls.

Lazzaro glanced behind, past the galloping horses of Red Snake and Kiljoy, and showed nearly his entire set of
silver upper teeth below his ragged black mustache. The Indians were chewing up the trail and gaining on him.

Kiljoy had hipped around in his saddle, taking his reins in his teeth, and was just now racking a cartridge into his old-model Winchester rifle's breech. The gun lapped smoke and flames from its barrel, the smoke instantly torn by the wind, the report sounding like a branch broken over a knee.

The Mojaves kept coming, none of the six so much as flinching.

“Save your lead, Roy, you crazy son of a bitch!” Lazzaro yelled. “You ain't gonna hit nothin' from the hurricane deck!”

The four outlaws were galloping into the stage station yard now.

“Oh, yeah?” Kiljoy said, glowering at Lazzaro as, reins in his teeth, he racked another shell into his rifle's breech.

He hipped around and raised the Winchester to his shoulder. The Mojaves weren't slowing up a bit as they kept coming from seventy yards away, one rider leading, four riding abreast, another lone rider bringing up the rear.

Kiljoy's rifle leaped and belched. The Mojave galloping behind and to the left of the leader jerked as though he'd been punched in the chest. Slowly, releasing his rope reins, he turned slowly in the saddle as his horse kept striding. Just as slowly he sagged down the blanket saddle, hit the ground between him and the Mojave to his left, and rolled wildly.

The rear rider's horse stumbled over the wounded Mojave, whinnied shrilly just before it buried its head in the trail, and turned a complete somersault, its dark brown tail waving like a flag, its rider disappearing somewhere beneath the Appaloosa's massive, crumpling body.

Kiljoy bellowed as he lowered the carbine, took the reins from his teeth, and hauled back on them, slowing his own Appy. “Now, that's a boss shot if I ever seen one!”

“Ah, quit blowin'!” Red Snake said, leaping off his horse in the middle of the station yard, noting guns crackling around him. One man was shooting at the Indians from
behind a water barrel on the low-slung station house's front porch while another gent was triggering a rifle from behind an open barn door on the yard's opposite side.

All four outlaws were on the ground now, sliding their rifles from their saddle boots and spanking their horses away. Even Sugar grabbed her carbine out of its sheath, racked a shell, dropped to a knee, and began firing at the Mojaves. The Indians were just now slowing and curveting their mounts while triggering lead toward the outlaws and the two men shooting from the barn and station house porch.

Kiljoy blew one of the savages off his horse and, ejecting the spent brass from his Winchester's breech, glanced at Sugar. She was triggering her own rifle as fast as she could, keeping her pale right cheek pressed taut against the stock.

“For Christ's sakes, woman!” Kiljoy snarled. “Get on inside the station before them redskins perforate your purty hide!”

All of her shots flew wild. Red Snake was half relieved to see that. A half-blind woman who could shoot a man off a galloping horse would be enough to cause him to lie awake nights. Two bullets blew up the still-damp dust in front of her, and she lowered the rifle, casting those eerie blue eyes at the short, ugly brigand.

“A rare piece of good advice from you, Roy,” she said. “I believe I'll take it!”

With that, staying low and holding her carbine in her right hand, she ran up onto the porch, tripped the cabin's latch, and pushed inside, slamming the stout, halved-log, Z-frame door behind her.

Inside, Sugar dropped to her butt and pressed her back to the door. “Hello?” she called, hearing someone triggering a pistol from ahead of her and right. “I'm friendly if you are!” she yelled.

The agent of the Colorado Gulch Relay Station turned his thick-bearded face from the eastern window he was
triggering a Colt Army out of. “I'm as friendly as an unweaned pup, miss. To anyone that ain't tryin' to lift my hair, that is.”

“I don't believe Mojaves normally take scalps, mister . . .”

“Hannady!” the station agent shouted above the roar of the Colt he triggered. “Fletcher Hannady. You can call me Fletch. All my friends do. And . . .” He paused to trigger another shot out the window. “What you say about the Mojaves ain't always true. Since scalp hunters been ridin' free and easy around here, they've sort of adopted the habit. Been more than one Mojave around with white men's scalps dangling from his sash!”

Hannady pulled his smoking pistol out of the window and dropped his fat bulk clad in a plaid wool shirt, suspenders, and duck trousers down against the wall. His bib beard scraped against his bulging belly.

“I'm Sugar!” the blind outlaw woman called from the door, keeping her voice raised against the din of gunfire continuing outside.

“Sugar,” Hannady said, as he plucked fresh cartridges from an open shell box on the floor behind him and slipped them through the Colt's open loading gate, slowly rolling the barrel between his thumb and index finger. “You must be sweet.”

He gave her a leering look, winked, then flipped the loading gate closed. He frowned and looked around the room, then slowly turned his head toward the open window above him, the open shutter of which was nudged by a vagrant breeze. The rusty hinges squawked softly.

“The shooting stopped,” Sugar said, still sitting in front of the door and staring wide-eyed but with her customary lack of expression straight down the length of the earthen-floored station house.

With a grunt, Hannady heaved himself up off the floor and edged a look out the window. “I'll be damned,” he said softly. “They're hightailin' it. Two of 'em, anyways. I see three dead.”

“Six followed us here.”

“Yeah, well, there been a whole lot more than them six ridin' loco around the station. Ranches been burned, a whole gold town sacked up on the California border. There's a good twenty or so Mojaves jumped the reservation a while back. Joined up with some broncos been holin' up in the Sierra Madre, and they're all runnin' loco together, killin' every white man, woman, and child in sight.” He shook his head. “That five likely peeled off from a larger war party when they seen you.”

Hannady looked out the window again, still extending his pistol out in front of him. “I been alone here since my two hostlers and cook was killed two weeks ago when they were out cuttin' wood. Mojaves. Fortunately, them two boys outside are U.S. marshals. They was just stoppin' for breakfast when we heard you four comin' hard, like the devil's hounds were nippin' at your heels.”

Sugar had just started to rise but let her slender back fall against the door again. Slowly, she turned her fine, blind head toward Hannady, fine lines drawing taut above the bridge of her long, slender nose. “Did you say U.S. marshals, Fletch?”

“U.S. marshals—that's right. They don't wear their badges cause the Mojaves find 'em right handy targets. But they're marshals, just the same. Holmes and Butler been around the ole Mojave merry-go-round a few times. Nice to have gun-handy men around.” Slowly, staring down at Sugar, Hannady walked toward her, stopped only a few feet away. His thick, suety chest rose and fell heavily behind his dirty work shirt. “Say, you're right purty.”