Helldorado

Table of Contents

 

 

Louisa emptied her Colts into the men until they’d both been punched out the door, leaving only lazily drifting gun smoke and spilled blood. Water gurgled from the several bullet holes pumped into the washtub, turning the carpet around it dark and soggy.

Tossing away the empty Colts, Louisa sprang to her bare feet and grabbed her Winchester carbine off the bed. She strode into the hall, seeing nothing but more wafting powder smoke. Blood was smeared across the balcony’s scrolled rail.

Louisa racked a cartridge into the carbine’s breech and, holding the rifle up high across her jostling breasts, peered over the rail and into the lobby below.

She saw the desk clerk standing about ten feet away from her bushwhackers, in front of a potted palm, looking down at them while holding his hands in the air as though in beseeching to a higher power.

His lips moved as he tried to speak, but he could only make incomprehensible sounds that were soon drowned by the thumps of boots on the boardwalk in front of the hotel. When Louisa saw several men with badges, including Sheriff Hiram Severin, bolt into the lobby with their pistols drawn, Louisa remembered she was standing there in nothing but her birthday suit.

“The furnishings are right splendid,” she told the desk clerk, who was staring up at her in awe. She held the rifle across her soapy breasts. “But the clientele leaves much to be desired.”

“Takes off like a shot, never giving the reader a chance to set the book down.”

—Douglas Hirt

 

HELLDORADO
THE GRAVES AT SEVEN DEVILS
THE DEVIL’S LAIR
STARING DOWN THE DEVIL
THE DEVIL GETS HIS DUE
RIDING WITH THE DEVIL’S MISTRESS
DEALT THE DEVIL’S HAND
THE DEVIL AND LOU PROPHET

 

BORDER SNAKES
BULLETS OVER BEDLAM
COLD CORPSE, HOT TRAIL
DEADLY PREY
ROGUE LAWMAN

 

HELL ON WHEELS
ONCE LATE WITH A .38
ONCE UPON A DEAD MAN
ONCE A RENEGADE
ONCE HELL FREEZES OVER
ONCE A LAWMAN
ONCE MORE WITH A .44
ONCE A MARSHAL

 

.45-CALIBER FIREBRAND
.45-CALIBER WIDOW MAKER
.45-CALIBER DEATHTRAP
.45-CALIBER MANHUNT
.45-CALIBER FURY
.45-CALIBER REVENGE

 

BLOOD MOUNTAIN

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

 

HELLDORADO

 

A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

 

PRINTING HISTORY

Berkley edition / August 2010

Copyright © 2010 by Peter Brandvold.

 

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eISBN : 978-1-101-18903-0

 

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“LOOKS LIKE WE have a visitor heading to our humble casa,” said Rurale Sergeant Rafael Santangelo, pointing across the sunblasted rocks and cactus toward a boulder-strewn ridge. “A tall hombre on a sway-backed mule.”

Corporal Hermano Alvarez squinted his good eye while holding a hand over the one that a Nogales whore had ruined with a razor-edged stiletto. “
Si, si!
Should I shoot him off his mule?”

“Shoot him? From here?” Sergeant Santangelo gave a mocking laugh. “You can’t even see him from here, you one-eyed, whore-mongering idiot! How do you expect to shoot him?”

“I can see him fine,” insisted Alvarez, who stood half a head shorter than the tall, gangly, and mustached Santangelo. Closing the ruined eye through which he could see only a perpetual blizzard even in the bowels of a hot Mexican summer, the corporal raised his Springfield Trapdoor rifle to his shoulder and aimed it out from the guard tower where both he and Santangelo had been posted since sunrise.

He racked a live round into the rifle’s breech and grinned. “Watch this, Rafael, and prepare to kiss my ass.”

Santangelo, who had been made a sergeant less than a month before and who kept his dove gray, gold-buttoned tunic well laundered and freshly brushed even here in the dusty Mexican desert, angrily doffed his leather-brimmed hat and swiped it three times against Alvarez’s head and shoulder, knocking the corporal’s straw sombrero down his back. “I told you, pig of a bastard peon, to never call me by my first name again! I am ‘Sergeant Santangelo’ or simply ‘Sergeant,’ but never again shall I be addressed by you as Rafael! Do I make myself clear, you half-blind cur of a two-peso
puta
?”

“
Si, si!
I apologize, Raf . . . I mean, Sergeant Santangelo!”

“Besides, if you could see farther than your ugly hawk’s beak of a nose, you would see that the big bastard on the mule is a man of the cloth, you fool.”

Alvarez squinted into the distance. “Really?”

“If you shot God’s servant there, the Devil would reach up and tickle your toes.”

“I am not afraid of the Devil.”

“Oh?” Santangelo smiled cunningly. “Go ahead, then. See if you can shoot the padre’s hat from his head. Let’s see what you can do, eagle eye.”

Alvarez looked up at the taller man and gave a devilish chuckle. Licking his chapped lips, he drew a deep breath, raised the Springfield to his shoulder, and sighted down the barrel.

The rider was about a hundred and fifty yards out from the Rurale fort, which had once been a mission school before being taken over and used for a prison by a northern Sonora contingent of the Mexican rural police force. The sprawling adobe structure, surrounded by a stone stockade bristling with a brush-roofed wooden guard tower at each corner, had been built on a rolling bench between two craggy sierras. The man moving toward the fort now had one ridge behind him, and his long, chocolate-brown robes were clearly defined against the ridge’s sunbaked, adobe-colored wall.

A large, straw sombrero shaded the padre’s face, and his rope-soled sandals jostled down beneath the mule’s ribs. He rode lazily on the mule’s bare back, swaying easily, keeping his chin dipped low against the merciless Sonoran sun that winked off the silver crucifix hanging from his neck on a braided rawhide thong.

Alvarez brushed a buzzing fly away from his nose, then pressed the Springfield’s stock tight against his cheek, lining up the rifle’s sights on the padre’s high sombrero crown. He chuckled to himself, then frowned, getting serious, and squeezed his bad eye closed. Keeping the sights steady on the bobbing sombrero that was a hundred yards out and closing, he held his breath and took the slack out of his trigger finger.

The rifle leaped and roared.

The echoes flatted out between the ridges.

The slug blew up a dogget of sand and gravel just right of the mule’s right rear hoof, causing the beast to hump its back and leap, braying, as high as any mustang stallion with its tail on fire.

The padre’s head snapped up, tossing his sombrero down his back, and his free hand flew high as the mule reached the apex of its leap, dropped, and hit the ground on all four hooves. The padre threw himself forward, clinging for dear life to the animal’s bridle reins and its shaggy mane as the frightened, angry beast took its God-fearing benefactor on a wild, crow-hopping, sunfishing ride around the bench fronting the fort.

Santangelo, Alvarez, and the two guards in the other west-facing tower whooped and hollered uproariously, thoroughly enjoying the mule-and-padre rodeo.

As the mule headed toward the fort in the most roundabout way possible, several times the brown-robed gent was nearly tossed from the squealing, braying mount’s hurricane deck only to save himself at the last second by grabbing the flying reins or buffeting mane. He slipped down the mule’s right side, then its left side, half-dragged across the sand and cactus. Then he was hugging the beast’s neck before another violent buck and lurch would have sent him flying ass-over-teakettle off the hysterical mount’s pitching ass if not for his last-second grab of the reins.

Santangelo roared, forgetting his rank and slapping his thighs like a drunken peon.

“A hundred centavos in gold dust he doesn’t make it to the gate!” shouted one of the guards from the other tower, his white teeth flashing in the sunlight.