The Graves at Seven Devils (23 page)

“Hey, somethin' over here!”

Louisa lifted her head. The shout had come from the darkening trees about thirty yards away. Boots thumped and spurs chinged—heavy footsteps moving toward her.

Louisa tried to quell her coughing, but her lungs refused to stop purging themselves of water. Coughing, holding the cottonwood trunk with one hand, she snatched a slippery .45 from its holster with the other and thumbed back the hammer.

The waterlogged pistol made a muffled, feeble sound, and she could feel that the action was soggy. The wet cartridges probably wouldn't detonate.

Still, her chest spasming as more water and mud burst from her throat, she raised the revolver over the log. A shadow slid in front of her—a boot arcing up from ahead and right, slamming into the underside of her wrist. She grunted as the gun flew up out of her hand, thumping into the brush and rocks to her left.

“Goddamnit, girl—don't you
ever
draw a pistol on me!” The man leaped over the log and, crouching, wrapped a hand around Louisa's throat, driving her back against the sand and grass. “You hear me?”

The man shook her by the neck, staring down at her, stretching his thin, red-mustached lips away from his teeth, deep-set eyes flashing angrily. He wore a blue, threadbare cavalry jacket with tarnished silver captain's bars on each shoulder, two revolvers positioned for the cross-draw on his thighs. Another shoulder holster poked out from behind the jacket, and a tarnished steel saber hung down his right leg. He smelled like sweat and whiskey.

Louisa's misery was enhanced by the man's powerful hand wrapped around her throat, preventing her from either drawing air or expelling more water. Rage seared her, and she wrapped her hands around the man's wrist, trying to wrench his hand free.

As she fought to free herself, more footsteps sounded from the trees. In the corner of her eye, she saw shadows move against the tree trunks.

And she heard a woman's high, authoritative voice. “What is it, Sykes?”

The man stared down at Louisa, chuckling as she struggled against his grip. “Why, it's a girl. Purty one, too!”

Louisa wrenched the man's right thumb back across his hand.

“Ouch!” Sykes bunched his lips as he drew his hand away, eyes pinched with fury. “Little
bitch
!”

As the man drew his right hand back behind his left shoulder, preparing to loose a savage slap, Louisa palmed her other Colt.

“Hold it, Captain!” the woman ordered as she and several men approached, crunching gravel and brush beneath their boots.

Sykes did as ordered, his enraged gaze still riveted on Louisa. Louisa left her revolver in the cross-draw holster on her right hip, as she let her own gaze wander across the woman—a tall, big-boned girl with muscular legs and broad shoulders. She didn't appear much older than Louisa. Her long, copper-red hair was relieved by thin green streaks all around her head—streaks the same green as her flashing eyes. Three of the tall, long-haired men with hawkish features, each dressed like deranged actors from the stage of some gaudy burlesque show, were near-identical copies of each other.

Triplets.

Louisa's pulse hammered in both temples as she realized, remembering how Big Hans had described the gang that had murdered her cousin, that the flooded arroyo had swallowed her up only to spit her out . . . right smack-dab in the middle of the Three of a Kind Gang.

“Well, whadoya know. . . .” muttered the triplet wearing rose-colored glasses and a shabby black opera hat. He curled a corner of his black-mustached mouth and cut his slitted eyes at the crazy-eyed redhead. “A
girl
.”

“A pretty,
young
girl,” said the look-alike in a green-checked suit and straw sombrero, and puffing a fat cigar. He held a Colt Navy in his free hand, down near a savage-looking Arkansas toothpick jutting from a beaded sheath trimmed in gold. He, too, cut his eyes insinuatingly at the redhead.

“An
armed
girl,” Sykes growled, reaching down and nudging Louisa's hand away from her holster. She looked down at the man's hand as he grabbed her Colt's pearl grips. Quickly, she tried to decide whether she should let him take the gun.

But even if all the cartridges had remained dry in the flooded arroyo, she wouldn't be able to trim the wick of more than two of these butchers before they turned her into a human sieve. There was no way they could know she was after them. To them, she was just a girl spit out by the arroyo.

She'd bide her time, concoct a plan for how she—all alone, with Prophet and Big Hans probably several miles behind her, on the other side of a blocked canyon—was going to send this kill-crazy crew howling off into eternity.

Sykes slid her Colt from her holster, hefted it in his hand. It was the redhead who asked with a faintly skeptical but soothing tone as she hunkered down on her heels and frowned at Louisa, “Who are you, miss? What the hell you doin' out here, anyways?”

She removed her glove and reached slowly forward to slide a lock of Louisa's wet hair away from her left eye. “How'd you end up almost drownin' to death in that arroyo? Can you tell Cora? Can you?”

Louisa dropped her head to cough, her chest and belly spasming. When she was able to suck a full breath without choking, she looked at Cora—a pretty, oval-faced redhead with the craziest green eyes Louisa had ever seen—and manufactured the most vulnerable expression she could.

“I was tryin' to get back to Uncle Lou's diggin's,” she said, making her voice thin and quaking and peaches-and-cream backwoods-wholesome. “But before we could get there, the pinto got scared of the lightning and then, all of a sudden, the ground just sort of disappeared, and me and him were swimmin' for our
lives
!”

PROPHET DUCKED BEHIND a boulder and, doffing his hat and curving his finger through his Winchester's trigger guard, he peered around the edge of the rock.

The adobe-brick cabin squatted at the base of the rocky ridge, about fifty yards away. Smoke from its chimney curled against the twilit sky clean-scoured by the recent thunder-storm. The mass of purple clouds flashed intermittently in the far northeastern distance.

Shadows moved in the lantern-lit windows. Men's voices rose. A woman's voice sounded, too—angry, indignant. There was a light, muffled slapping sound. The woman cursed tightly.

Her voice rose slightly louder. “You are
pig
!”

A man chuckled. “If I'm pig, what are you, senorita? You were the one makin' eyes at me in Nogales!”

“I thought you were
gentleman
!”

Several guffaws rose, and the light slaps continued, with the woman cursing tightly, her speech slurred from drink.

“Sure do hate to break up a party.” Prophet sighed as he moved out from behind the boulder. He jogged across the open space fronting it, meandering around mud puddles. “Especially when everybody seems to be having so much
fun
!”

He shouldered up to the shack, between the left front window and the weathered plank door that sagged on rusty hinges, lantern light showing through the cracks. He reached back for the double-barreled, ten-gauge sawed-off hanging down his back, then decided to stay with the Winchester. With the woman in there, he'd use the barn blaster only as a backup.

He stepped up in front of the door, hearing the voices from inside, the clink of a bottle against a tin cup, the intermittent slaps, and the woman's angry curses. Backing up, Prophet lifted his right leg and thrust his foot forward, slamming the boot flat against the door, just right of the leather latch.

The door burst open, the latch and slivers from the frame flying into the room. As the door smashed against the wall, Prophet bounded inside and stopped the door's recoil with his left boot, raising the Winchester to his right shoulder and scowling down the barrel.

There were five men in the low-ceilinged room in which a couple of dusty lanterns shunted deep shadows to and fro. The place had several bunks and cots. At the back was a table around which three of the men sat, playing cards and drinking whiskey from tin cups.

They were a hard-eyed, shaggy, unshaven lot, each with a pistol or rifle near. When the door had burst open, they jumped as one, reaching for weapons but turning still as stone when Prophet bellowed, “Hold it right there, you mangy sons o' bitches, or I'll blow you outta your spurs. The name's Prophet. Bounty hunter! Any one of you so much as twitches, I'll buck you out in a hail of hot lead! Turn ya deader'n a goddamn fence post!”

Truth was, Prophet had no intention of wasting his time on these gents. He had bigger fish to fry. But Prophet was no cold-blooded killer, so he'd let this hard-eyed lot of fetid, human blowflies make the first move.

Frozen in various positions, all five men regarded him with red-rimmed eyes hard as marbles—three from the table at the back of the room, one crouched in front of the woodstove and clad only in longhandles, the other on a cot against the right wall, about ten feet from Prophet.

The gent on the cot—a half-breed with one eye—lay atop a black-haired, round-faced woman. The man wore only a grimy undershirt while the woman was as naked as the day she was born, naked knees spread wide.

The half-breed's brown ass dimpled as he glared at Prophet, molasses-colored eyes flashing furiously. A Remington revolver jutted from a black leather holster coiled with a shell belt on the floor, within easy reach of the man's left hand.

“Lou Prophet,” one of the men growled, making a face like he'd just bitten into a lemon. He was bald, clean-shaven, and even-featured. He would have been handsome if the tip of his nose wasn't missing, giving him a piggish look.

He wore a sheepskin vest over a blue denim shirt. In one hand he held playing cards; the other hand, trimmed with a giant ruby ring, lay over the silver-plated Schofield on the table before him, near a black cheroot sending pale smoke ribboning into the cloud already filling the cabin.

“Mark Diamond,” Prophet growled back. “I shoulda known if Lyle Hawk was around, you wouldn't be far. There's a mangy cur ghostin' every gut wagon.”

Diamond lifted a mouth corner. “You don't really think you're gonna bring us all in, do ya?”

“Not really. No.”

Prophet had taken down enough owlhoots to know which of a group would move first. That's why he was ready, after having read the eyes of each of these five, for the man in the longhandles by the snapping sheet-iron stove to drop the wood he had in his left hand and to grab the Henry repeater standing against a wood box with his right.

Prophet shot him before he'd lifted the Henry a foot above the floor, the Winchester's explosion filling the entire room and causing the whore to scream,
“Maria madre de la Jesus!”

As the man in the longhandles screamed, flying back against the woodstove, then screaming even louder, Mark Diamond snapped up his silver-plated Schofield and leaped to his feet, throwing his chair straight out behind him.

Racking a fresh shell into the Winchester breech, Prophet drew a bead on Diamond's chest, squeezed the trigger, and watched through the wafting gun smoke as the bullet drilled a quarter-sized hole through Diamond's blue denim shirt, rocking the man back on his heels and sending his triggered slug into the ceiling above the table.

Two more quick shots dispatched the other two men at the table. Aware of the man on the cot to his right, Prophet had no sooner fired his fourth round before he dove forward into the room.

The man on the cot had reached down and grabbed his Remy from its holster. The Remy roared. The slug sliced across Prophet's back and into the adobe wall to his left as he rolled off a shoulder.

The man on the cot drilled another round across Prophet's left cheek.

Rising onto his knees, the bounty hunter snapped the rifle to his shoulder once more and drilled two quick shots through the half-breed's chest and one more through his left cheek.

The man screamed and slammed against the wall behind him, triggering a slug into the ceiling, eyes snapping wide with pain and horror. Flopping around on the cot beneath him, the woman screamed and covered her head with her arms.

Prophet racked another round and swung toward the rear of the room, his cartridge casings clattering onto the earthen floor behind him. Squinting through the powder, wood, and tobacco smoke, Prophet saw that all four men at the rear of the room were down and still.

Spying movement to his right, he jerked around toward the cot. The half-breed dropped down from the wall against which Prophet's slugs had pinned him and collapsed like an oversized puppet, his hairy, naked legs slapping together, his shaggy head lolling to one side, blood welling up in a corner of his thin-lipped mouth.

His black eyes rolled toward Prophet and widened slightly just before they glazed over in death.

A long sigh rumbled up from his chest. His legs twitched before gradually falling still.

“Mierda!”
the woman screamed, cowering against the wall, drawing her naked legs toward her chest. Her huge, brownnippled breasts swayed as she raised her arms to her head as though to shield herself, and she turned her hands toward Prophet, palms out. “
Por favor!
Please, mister, don't
shoot
!”

“Pipe down.” Prophet lowered the Winchester and kicked the half-breed's Remy under the cot. “I've never shot a woman without damn good cause.”

Keeping his Winchester aimed from his hip, he stomped back into the cabin's shadows, and inspected each of the bodies. Deeming them dead, including the child killer and notorious Utah bank robber Mark Diamond, he grabbed the log that the man in the longhandles had dropped on the floor and chunked it into the stove.