Hell's Angel (13 page)

14

OUTSIDE THE CAVE,
a horse whinnied. The Mex with the cocked pistol jerked his head toward the dark night gaping on Prophet's left. The other man, who'd been crouched over the fire to add another log, straightened and turned his head in the same direction.

Prophet had been wrong about him. He wasn't a Mexican but an Anglo dressed in the bright colors and leather of the Mexican border bandito. He slid his Schofield from its holster angled across his belly and clicked the hammer back.

The horse whinnied again. Another one nickered. Hooves clomped as the horses shifted around nervously.

“Someone's out there,” said the Anglo in a deep, raspy voice, working his nose like an animal aware it's being stalked.

“Si!”
said the Mex, who turned his molasses-dark eyes on Prophet. “Who's out there?”

Prophet wondered if he was dreaming. As in a dream, he tried to speak but he had no voice.

A gun barked loudly. Prophet saw the flash to his left. The Mexican gasped and staggered backward, triggering his pistol into the floor of the cave about a foot left of Prophet. The impact on Prophet's ears was like two open-handed slaps. There were two more quick flashes.

The shots outside sounded like heavy branches broken across rock.

The Anglo flew back into the cave's shadows and lay still. The Mexican lay groaning and shifting his feet, raking his spurs against the cave's stone floor. Prophet's ears rang. The ringing started that rapping in his head again, though mercifully less violently than before.

In front of him, between him and the fire, powder smoke wafted, smelling like eggs left too long in the sun. The Mexican continued to groan and rake his spurs. Outside, the horses shifted nervously though Prophet could not see them, as his night vision was compromised by the fire and his brain-addled state.

Foot thuds sounded, spurs ringing. Gravel crunched beneath leather soles. As if out of a dream, a figure materialized—slender and curvy, long, blond hair tumbling over shoulders clad in a striped brown serape. As the stranger stepped closer to the cave entrance, Prophet blinked, trying to clear his vision.

He looked down at brown boots trimmed with silver spurs and followed the slender, denim-clad legs up to a cartridge belt and two cross-draw holsters strapped to slim hips, over the serape. A kid-gloved hand still held a smoking, silver-chased, pearl-gripped .45, gray smoke curling from the barrel.

Prophet looked up past the gun to the serape swollen with a pair of full, round breasts, to a long, slender neck that was tanned to the color of fresh-whipped, buttery cream. He took in the sharp chin, the long, fine nose, and a pair of oblique hazel eyes set atop tapering cheeks and peering out from beneath the brim of the man's tan Stetson.

Prophet cleared his throat and raked out, “Fancy meetin' you here, Louisa.”

The blond twirled the pistol on her finger and held it low by her denim-clad right thigh. “Friends of yours, Lou?”

Prophet looked at the two dead men lying on the far side of the fire in pools of their own blood. Gun smoke still wafted in the air around him, mingling with that of the snapping fire. “Mere acquaintances. We were just startin' to get friendly when you came along.”

As the young woman stepped into the cave, raking her flinty hazel eyes from one bandit to the other, she said, “Sorry to intrude.”

“Ah, well.”

The Mexican was still alive, blinking up at the ceiling in shock, his chest rising and falling sharply.

Prophet had risen onto his elbows, pain raking him from head to toe. He was too confused and in too much pain to try to wrap his mind around any of what had just happened. He cleared his throat several times before he managed to say, “They . . . didn't . . . introduce themselves . . . but I reckon they was banditos.”

“Banditos.” She'd said it slowly, letting each syllable roll of her tongue.

Louisa Bonaventure, the blond bounty hunter and Prophet's sometime partner, had become notorious in her own right for hunting down and killing the men who'd murdered her family on their small Nebraska farm and then gone on to hunter other child – and women-killing men of their ilk across the western frontier.

Over the past several years, her harrowing exploits had become known nationwide, and somewhere along her bloody trail some pulp writer had tagged Louisa with the handle of “Vengeance Queen.” Prophet had once seen a subtitle in a
Police Gazette
story about her that read, “The Hazel-Eyed Queen of Vengeance Rides Again!” Beneath it, in slightly smaller print: “As Beautiful as She Is Deadly!”

The prose might have been a tad on the purple side, but for once the writer hadn't been gilding the lily. Louisa was about as comely a pistol-wielding vixen as a man could find, and when she rode, it was usually in an all-out effort to serve a nice plate of cold revenge or just deserts.

Louisa walked over and gave the Mexican's boot a kick. The Mexican groaned more loudly. “You a bandito, amigo?” she asked him, staring down at him, aiming her pistol at his head.

He didn't say anything, just stared up at her, breathing hard.

“Best say a prayer, if you've a mind,” she warned him.

Louisa walked around the fire to inspect the unmoving Anglo and then walked over to the Mexican again, who beseeched her in Spanish to spare him. She spread her feet and aimed the silver-plated Colt at an angle. Prophet winced and covered his ears as she drilled a bullet through the Mexican's head.

The head bounced, turned to one side, and lay still.

“There you go,” the girl said. “That's what you get for trying to kill my old pal Lou.”

Lowering the smoking pistol, she turned to Prophet, her eyes oddly uncertain, maybe even a little haunted. “We are still pals, aren't we, Lou?”

He rested his head back against his saddle. “Why wouldn't we be?”

Louisa stepped over Prophet's legs as she walked back to the cave door and pressed her back to the side of it, hard to Prophet's left. She stood staring out, her pistol in her right fist. She stood silently for a long time, staring into the darkness and listening for possible friends of the men she'd killed.

Finally, apparently deciding there'd been only two intruders, she holstered her pistol and stole out away from the cave, disappearing into the darkness. When she returned, she was a little breathless, as though from a medium-hard hike.

“Nothin' but two good horses out there, each stocked with a carbine.” She went over and picked up a mesquite log from the small stack beside the fire and added it to the flames. “They laid a nice fire, anyway. We're all good for somethin', I reckon. Eh, Lou?”

Prophet nodded. He knew what haunted her but he didn't want to talk about it just now. Later, when the man with the hammer in his head took another smoke break.

She swung around to Prophet, her slender, curvy figure in the poncho and denims silhouetted against the fire that was shooting a column of sparks toward the cave ceiling, which was about seven feet above the floor. The firelight reflected off a crenellated rear wall about ten feet away from Louisa and the two dead men.

“How you feelin'?” the girl asked, both pistols in their holsters, her gloved fists on her hips.

“Like I had a Dutch ride over sharp rocks.”

“You look like you did.”

Prophet scowled at her, wincing against the hammering in his head that wasn't so much like an ax handle anymore, but just your average pine branch. He still wished the demon wielding it would go away, though. Even worse was the agony of his bladder that appeared ready to explode if he didn't drain it straightaway.

She must have read the look on his face. “Coffee can to your right.”

He glanced at the empty coffee tin, suppressed the warmth of embarrassment creeping into his cheeks. Again, she must have read his thoughts.

“It wasn't the first time I saw it, you know, Lou.” Louisa gave a provocative grin. “Need help?”

“I can manage.”

As he worked his way to his knees, he realized he didn't have a stitch on. He looked at her again. She stood in the cave entrance with a lopsided, faintly jeering grin on her pretty, lightly tanned face that still owned the smooth flawlessness of a girl. And a deceptive innocence.

Those pretty, peaches-and-cream features had been the downfall of many a bad man who'd died hard, staring at them.

Prophet sniffed, raked a thumb across his thigh, lifted it to his eyes. Greasy.

“Arnica,” she said. “Got a fresh tin from the dry goods store in Moon's Well. Put it on all your cuts and bruises, which means it about covers every inch of you.”

Prophet groaned as he knelt there on his blanket roll, trying to keep his balance against the cave floor's pitch and roll. “What a sorry state for this old Georgia reb.” He held the coffee tin in front of his crotch and looked up at Louisa, who continued to smirk down at him.

“A lady would avert her eyes.”

She turned toward the night, and he lifted the door on the dam inside him. The coffee tin rattled as his bladder emptied. As he continued the evacuation, he glanced at the night beyond Louisa.

An escarpment or something rose about six feet beyond the cave, but to the left of it he could see a few stars twinkling between dark, jagged-edged peaks. All he knew was that he wasn't in Chisos Springs, and he wasn't out on the plain, either.

He grunted blissfully as he continued filling the can. “Where the hell are we?”

“My camp in the Chisos range.”

As the piss stream dwindled, he gave another grunt, but before he could ask his next question, she answered it for him. “I've been keeping an eye on the town. Was looking it over this morning when I saw some big, dumb-looking hombre getting his proverbial hat handed to him out by Mr. Moon's well.”

She clucked and shook her head. “What'd you do to make those men so angry, Lou? Cheat at cards or diddle the wrong whore?”

“Here.” Prophet held the filled container up in both hands. “Don't spill.”

Louisa turned the corners of her lovely mouth down as she took the nearly full can between her gloved hands, and tossed its contents into the night. She tossed the empty vessel down beside Prophet, who drew his blanket back up over his battered, naked body.

“Or maybe you're trying to cut in on my dance,” the girl said, leaning against the side of the cave, arms crossed on her breasts. “You might have asked . . . like a
civilized
bounty hunter.”

“Dance?” Prophet leaned back against his saddle. “I don't know what you're talkin' about. You got any whiskey?”

“With all the lumps on your head, how can you think of tangleleg?”

“I always think of tangleleg. Besides, painkiller . . .”

She walked out to where Prophet could now see her brown-and-white pinto and Mean and Ugly hobbled about twenty feet down the slope from the cave. He saw her shadow move around her horse, heard straps whipping free, the squawk of leather, and saw her walk back up the incline toward the cave with her saddle on one shoulder, saddlebags over the other.

She dropped the saddle on the other side of the fire from Prophet, then reached into a saddlebag pouch and pulled out a flat, corked, smoky blue bottle.

“Go easy,” she said, tossing the busthead to him. “It's all I have.”

Prophet scowled at the bottle, shook it. Only half full. “Why, hell, there ain't much more than a thimbleful in there! What's the point in carryin' any whiskey at all if you ain't gonna carry any more than
this
?”

“Don't look a gift horse under the tail, Lou.”

She said it wryly, for it was Prophet's own line. “I carry it for medicinal purposes only,” she added.

Prophet popped the cork on the bottle, and took a conservative sip. “How long I been here?”

“This is your third night.”

“Christ!” He took another sip. “Where'd you find me?”

“I caught up to you after they stripped you naked and tied you over your horse. They tossed your clothes out in the brush behind the dwarf's pleasure parlor. They're not exactly clean, but they're behind you, if you ever feel like donning them again.”

“Oh, I'll don them again,” Prophet said and tipped the bottle back once more. It was good forty-rod, not the usual snake venom he carried. There wasn't much of it, but it oozed sweetly over his tonsils and made him yearn for more.

That was like Louisa—nothing but the best no matter what it was, be it guns, ammo, horses, hair pins, or forty-rod, though he remembered a time when she'd indulged in nothing more potent than sarsaparilla, albeit
good
sarsaparilla. That was before their last adventure together, in Mexico, when they'd taken on a gang of killers led by Tony Lazarro and his beautiful, blind sidekick, Sugar Delphi, and ended up in one hell of a dustup in a desert mountain town called San Gezo.

Prophet and Louisa had separated after that. In the hardest of ways. Without saying anything about it. Just forking trails.

Prophet hadn't thought he'd ever see her again. He hadn't been sure he'd wanted to see her again, after what she'd pulled on him in Mexico.

Hard to deny a girl who'd saved your life, he thought now, studying her, wondering what it had been—just blind luck?—that had brought them together again. Lucky for him, anyway.

Sometimes he wondered if it wasn't just meant to be. Him and her. Together. On the other hand, being who they were, staying together as anything more than trail partners would have been impossible. They were just too much alike in all the wrong ways, and too different in all the right ones.

“You're thinking about Mexico, aren't you?” she said, hauling her cooking gear from her war bag, not looking at him.

He didn't want to talk about Mexico. Not yet. His head ached too badly for him to think straight, and thinking about Mexico only made it pound harder.