Staring Down the Devil (A Lou Prophet Western #5) (4 page)
Read Staring Down the Devil (A Lou Prophet Western #5) Online
Authors: Peter Brandvold
Tags: #pulp fiction, #wild west, #cowboys, #old west, #outlaws, #western frontier, #peter brandvold, #frontier fiction, #piccadilly publishing, #lou prophet
“Don’t
tell me it’s no life for a girl, Lou. I don’t want to talk about
that. I just want you to hold me real tight, okay?” She stared into
his eyes, her own eyes wide and moist with ancient
loneliness.
He placed his
hands on her shoulders and pulled her to him. She scooted down on
her blanket, curling her knees under her and snugging her cheek
against his chest, holding him tightly around the ribs.
“Nightmares again?” he asked, remembering she’d been racked by
them — searing images of death and destruction following her
family’s slaughter.
“Sometimes.”
“Should ride with me for a while.”
“I
can’t.”
“Why
not?”
“ ‘
Cause you’re a loner, Lou. And so am I. You know it’s true.
Besides, if we started depending on each other, we’d likely come to
harm. You told me that yourself.”
Prophet shrugged. “Bounty hunting’s no life for a
girl.”
She lay against
him, breathing softly, and he thought she was asleep. But after a
while she lifted her head and gazed up at him.
“Can
we do it?”
“I
thought you didn’t want to.”
“I
didn’t say I didn’t want to. I just said the good Lord frowns on it
when you’re not married.”
“Then
why do you want to do it?”
“I
figure with you it’s different. We pret’ near are married —
wouldn’t you say?”
Prophet smiled. “I reckon we are at that, Miss
Bonnyvenrure.”
“It’s
Bonaventure — without the y,” she said. “You’ll never get it
straight.”
“Nope.”
She
lifted his head and stared into his eyes, her own eyes wide hazel
orbs in the flickering light of the lantern. “You always make me
feel so good, Lou.”
He
reached up and smoothed her honey-blond hair back from her cheek.
“Honey-girl,” he said, “the way I make you feel ain’t nothin’ like
you make this old Georgia Rebel feel.”
He
smiled and sat back, unbuttoning his shirt. She stood and removed
her clothes. When they were both naked, she knelt beside him, her
hands over her breasts, a shy expression on her face — an
expression he had seen when they’d made love before. It was a
bashful, coy look — a look that said, “Here I am; I’m just a girl.
I’ll do my best, but I hope you don’t expect too much.” It was such
an innocent look that his heart twisted a good three inches
counterclockwise, and his desire burned.
He took her face
gently in his hands and kissed her, barely touching his lips to
hers. Then he held her away, drew her hands away from her breasts,
lowered his head, and kissed each delicate pink nipple in turn. She
sighed softly as he worked his tongue over her pert young breasts.
He lifted his head and kissed her more hungrily this time, but with
a gentleness he reserved just for her, this Nebraska cherub turned
bounty-hunting vengeance queen.
A moment later he
laid her gently on his blanket and parted her knees with his legs,
lowering himself gently between them and closing his mouth over
hers. She folded her arms around his back, lifted her knees, and
groaned with passion as he began moving very slowly, very gently. .
. .
When
he finally rolled onto his back, drawing her against him with a
sigh, she crooked a leg over his and nuzzled his side, her hair
fanned across his chest.
“Oh,
Lou, I love you so much. I wish we could be together
always.”
“Well,
we could be,” he said, though he knew it wasn’t true. He could
never promise himself to one woman, though if he could it would be
to Louisa.
“Shh,”
she admonished. “Let’s don’t talk.” She ground her face into his
side, smelling him like some frisky animal. She ran her fingers
lightly across his genitals and fell quickly asleep in his
arms.
When
he woke in the morning, she was gone. Sitting up, he saw she’d
taken all her gear and vanished. The soft dawn light knifing
through the cracks between the wall boards revealed several
greenbacks on his saddle. Angrily he reached for them.
Fifty
dollars.
“Goddamnit, Louisa!” he complained.
He
felt like a damn whore. Didn’t she know a woman didn’t leave money
with a man? Didn’t she know what such a thing did to his
pride?
No,
she didn’t, he decided as he sat naked in the hay and scratched his
bristly jaw. She’d known he was broke and was simply doing him a
favor, lending him enough to stake him through to his next
bounty.
Damn,
but his self-respect had been abused lately!
Remembering the thousand dollars the countess had dropped
before him on the table, as an advance for honest work, he leaned
back in the hay and rolled a smoke. When his clothes were delivered
to the livery barn a half hour later, by a blond boy in knickers
whom Prophet tipped with a nickel he borrowed from the Mexican
hostler, he dressed quickly and stuffed Louisa’s fifty dollars in
his shirt pocket with an annoyed chuff.
He needed a job
and he needed it fast, and as soon as he saw Louisa again, he was
going to return her damn fifty dollars!
“Sorry
to wake you,” he said after he’d pounded on the countess’s door in
the Denver House.
She’d
answered holding a silver-plated derringer and wearing a black silk
wrapper that molded to her body, which was shapely and amply
bosomed, he was a little surprised to discover. She’d removed her
chestnut hair from its bun, and it hung straight down her
shoulders. When she wasn’t all starched and fastened and trussed-up
like an undertaker’s wife, she looked damn sexy.
She blinked at
him groggily and gave a start as he thrust the suit into her
arms.
“I’ve
decided to take the job.”
She just stared
at him through sleep-glazed eyes.
Prophet heard someone breathing behind him. Turning, he saw
Sergei Andreyevich standing in the doorway wearing a striped
sleeping gown and nightcap, an English-styled .45 revolver in his
big right hand, aimed at Prophet’s head.
“Serg,” the bounty hunter said, pinching his hat
brim.
“How
are you this mornin’?”
The next day Ed
Champion sat in the Slap & Tickle Saloon, staring grimly out
the window while he stewed over his recent poker loss.
He’d
walked in three hours ago with fifty dollars left from a bank heist
he and the boys had pulled in Julesburg several weeks back. But
that fifty dollars was gone now, forty of it padding the snakeskin
wallet of a sober-faced cardsharp from Abilene and the last ten
having gone to the house when his craps dice turned up snake
eyes.
Champion cursed and glowered at the beer the bartender had
bought him. He thought the man felt sorry for him, but really the
barman had wanted to avoid a temper tantrum. Champion was known in
half the saloons in Colorado for busting chairs and jaws after
losing at poker.
He was
known to tear up a place pretty bad, and it wasn’t hard for him,
standing six-feet-four as he did, and broad as a barn door, with
arms and fists like mallets. He’d once skinned mules and placer
mined for a living, and both occupations had banded the muscles on
him like scales on a fish.
When the door
opened, he looked up to see two compatriots swagger in, shit-eating
grins on their hard, unshaven faces.
“What
the hell you two grinning about?” Champion growled as the men
approached.
“We
just got laid,” Earl Cary said, kicking a chair out from the table
and collapsing into it. He was skinny, about five-ten, with little
round eyes under the floppy brim of his filthy bowler hat. “What’s
eating you?”
“I
just lost my poke.”
“All
of it?” asked Bobby St. John, a lanky river rat from Tennessee. He
had a patch over the eye socket a Cherokee whore had emptied with
her fingernails in a Tennessee riverboat saloon.
“Yeah,
all of it,” Champion grunted. “I got fleeced by a damn sharpy that
had the good sense to light out after the game, before I had time
to think it over.”
“Don’t
worry about it, Ed,” Earl Cary said. “I’ll treat you to that pretty
little whore I just did the mattress dance with. She’s only
three-fifty, and man, can she buck! Helluva time!”
“I
just poked a bean-eater,” St. John said. He waved to the barman and
ordered a rye. “She was the best I had since we got to
Denver.”
Cary
was about to say something else when Champion stopped him with,
“Shut up.” Champion was staring out the window.
“What
is it?” Cary said, frowning and following his leader’s gaze through
the dirty
plate-glass window, on which
“Slap & Tickle
Saloon” had been
stenciled in gold-leaf lettering.
Champion’s attention had been snatched by the stagecoach
sitting before the Denver House Hotel. He’d thought it odd that a
stage would be stopped so long before the hotel, when the stage
station was just around the corner. But now he’d finally figured
out why.
It
wasn’t really a stage. Or, to be more exact, the auburn Concord
coach no longer served a stage line. It appeared to be privately
owned. That much Champion had figured out because the only people
gathered around it were a young woman in a cream traveling dress
and a stocky, dark-featured gent with a black goatee. The man wore
odd clothes — strangely cut twill trousers with large pockets
running down both legs, a cream flannel shirt with the sleeves
rolled up his hairy arms, a string tie, buckskin vest, and
moccasins. He also wore a beaver hat. He was stowing steamer trunks
and carpetbags atop the carriage and in the rear boot. The woman
supervised from the boardwalk.
Nearby
a rangy hombre in a buckskin shirt and flat-crowned Stetson sat a
hammer-headed dun. The man was rubbing his jaw and eyeing the
Concord like he’d never seen one before.
“That’s those Russians,” St. John said.
“Russians?” Champion asked.
“Sure.
They been staying at the Denver House, waitin’ on some bounty man
named Prophet. They were askin’ around town for him about every two
days. Looks like he showed. That’s him there — the big bastard on
the mean-eyed dun.”
“So
that’s Prophet,” Champion said, absently fingering an old scar on
his cheek. He’d heard of the Confederate-turned-bounty-hunter, the
exploits of whom — regarding women as well as men with bounties on
their heads — were gaining fame and legend throughout the
West.
“Yeah,
that’s him,” St. John said, sipping his rye. “I for one would like
to put about two rounds in his hide. He’s trouble for men like us.
Always has been, always will be, till someone beefs
him.”
“What’s he doin’ with those two furriners out there?” Champion
asked.
“You
got me,” Cary said, shrugging.
St.
John threw back his rye, slammed the shot glass on the table, and
motioned for the barman to bring him another. “They’re lookin’ for
the woman’s sister down south somewhere. That’s what the
dark-haired gent told me one day I ran into him right here, after
he asked if I’d seen Prophet in town.”
Champion was still staring out the window, his horseshoe jaw
hanging. The foreign gent was moving a trunk from the boot to the
coach’s roof. The woman was talking and pointing, fully in charge.
Prophet just sat on his horse grinning and shaking his
head.
“She’s
sassy,” Champion said, staring at the woman. “A damn polecat. Look
at her.” He chuffed an admiring laugh.
Cary
shook his head. “She orders the gent around like a Mississippi
slave.”
Champion’s broad nostrils flared and his massive chest heaved,
straining the buttons of his blue plaid shirt. “She’s cute. I like
‘em perky.”
“Cute
and perky?” St. John said. “Nah, she’s stiffer’n a damn church
pew.”
“That’s how I like ‘em,” Champion grumbled lustily. “Kinda
fun, makin’ ‘em do what I say — after they’re done screamin’, I
mean.”
Cary
laughed. “That’s sick, Ed!”
“Yeah,
it is,” Champion agreed, nodding dully. “Why they lookin’ for the
girl?”
“I
don’t know,” St. John said. “That’s all the man would tell
me.”
“Looks
like they have money,” Champion said.
“Well,” Cary said, “they did stay pret’ near a month in the
Denver House. And look at that private coach. They have to have
money!”
Champion and the
other two men stared quietly out the window for several minutes.
Finally the stage pulled away, the stocky gent driving. Prophet
following along behind. St. John looked at Champion. He offered a
rare, knowing grin.
“Are
you thinkin’ what I think you’re thinkin’, Ed?”
Champion followed the stage and Prophet with his eyes, till
they were both out of sight. Champion’s nostrils flared as he
snorted and ran a paw over his head, bald and pale as an
egg.
“Get
the other boys,” he said absently, still staring out the window
where carriages, phaetons, and rockaways hustled.
But he
was still seeing the coach with all its steamer trunks and the
curvy little foreign woman who’d climbed on board and primly closed
the door behind her. He imagined how it would be, having her kowtow
to him under threat of death, pouring his coffee and rubbing his
back and shedding her clothes when he told her to ...
“Get
‘em now,” he told St. John and Cary, his voice rising
urgently.
As St.
John and Cary headed swiftly for the door, Champion called, “Have
them ready to ride in twenty minutes, you hear? Twenty
minutes!”