The Devil and Lou Prophet (4 page)

“
Twenty-two, and I’m
Katie.” She stretched a tolerant smile. “Sally was two nights ago.
Sally and Jen, I believe. It was me and Cassandra last
night.”

Prophet pushed himself onto an elbow.
His arm was in a sling that Doc Barnhardt had furnished when
Prophet dropped off the bodies. The doctor had also offered to
furnish laudanum for the pain, but Prophet had declined. He hadn’t
thought he’d need it, with all the whiskey he’d intended to drink.
And he’d been right.

“
You mean, I been here two
days already?”

Katie was looking around the floor, in
the mess of her clothes and his, for some article of her own
attire. “That’s right, lover.” She giggled. “Boy, you do like to
have a good time, don’t you?”

“
I reckon,” Prophet sighed,
glancing at the washstand, on which two empty whiskey bottles and
several beer bottles stood. He was sure there were several more
bottles scattered here and there about the floor. “I didn’t get
into any trouble, did I?”

His heart quickened a little, and he
felt a touch of dread. He knew he couldn’t have gotten into
anything too deep, because he wasn’t in jail, an occurrence that
was happening less and less as he matured. He was grateful for
that, but it was only last year he’d bet a thousand dollars he
hadn’t had in a poker game, and had gotten into a brawl with a
half-breed bean-eater named Oscar Sanchez who’d cracked six of his
ribs and chipped two of his teeth. Tracking fugitives to pay off
the thousand-dollar debt, when you had to ride hard with six broken
ribs, had taught him a healthy fear of his own excess.

Katie had found her camisole and
pantaloons and was sitting down in a chair against the wall. She
shook the camisole out before her and dropped it over her head,
covering those lovely breasts. “Well, that depends on what you call
trouble. You drank about six bottles of rye in the last two days,
and about twenty bottles of beer, lost about three hundred dollars
playing poker with Crazy Jack Thompson, and diddled four whores ...
on credit.”

“
Well, if that’s all,”
Prophet said, falling back with a relieved sigh, “I’m makin’
progress!”

Katie ceased dressing to frown at a
broken nail. “You been like this all your life, Lou?”

“
How’s that?”

She shrugged. “Livin’ for fun and
money.”

He pursed his lips and gazed at the
drawn shade, behind which flies buzzed against the fly-flecked
window. “I was in the war, Katie. Wore butternut gray. I saw
Chattanooga and Utoy Creek, among others.” He paused, remembering
it against his will—the human viscera, the smell of exposed bowels
and blood mixed with burnt powder, grass and trees, the gleam of
bone and dead eyes in the bright sun, the buzz of the flies, the
pink water of the Tennessee.

Suppressing it, he turned to the girl,
forcing a grim smile. “No ... after that I made a pact with the
Devil. I told him that if he showed me one hell of a good time for
the rest of the life I had left, I’d shovel all the coal he wanted
down below.”

She was staring at him, her brown eyes
serious, chiding. “That’s an awful thing, Lou Prophet ... makin’ a
pact like that with the Devil.”

“
Oh, it ain’t that awful,”
Prophet said, wanting to lighten his own mood as well as hers.
“Besides, like I said, I been makin’ progress.” He grinned
big.

She returned it and resumed dressing.
“Well ... don’t forget, Mr. Progress, that you owe Cassandra,
Sally, Jen, and me each twenty-five dollars.” She slipped into the
pantaloons and turned to him quickly, remembering something else.
“Oh—you owe Jen for a shoe, too.”

“
A shoe?”

“
You broke the heel on one
o’ hers.”

“
How’d I do
that?”

Katie shrugged. She picked up her
remaining clothes, approached the bed, leaned down, and kissed him
on the lips. “Don’t ask me, lover.” She patted his face. “Lordy,
you’re a handsome devil ... in a crazy sort o’ way.”

“
What’s that
mean?”

“
Means you’re the kinda man I
married ... twice. So don’t you think you can charm me with those
big green eyes of yours, neither, or that big stick you got between
your legs, ’cause you can’t.” She walked to the door, and turned
around with a coquettish flair. “But I’ll be glad to haul your
ashes whenever you’re in town, Lou.” She blew him a kiss, opened
the door and left.

He listened to her feet padding down
the hall, then down the stairs toward her own room. Quiet followed,
with the soft snores of a drunk sleeping off a hangover somewhere
down the hall, and ungreased wagon wheels screeching outside, a dog
barking, a man calling to another and laughing. Prophet listened
hard, trying to suppress the screams of the dying that were always
there, like a low inner hum, just beneath his
consciousness.

He sighed, reached for his watch, and
opened the old turnip. Eleven-thirty. Jesus Christ, had he slept!
But then, he supposed he hadn’t gotten to sleep until five or six
... not with the poker game he was beginning to remember, and the
two lovely whores riding his bones.

Thinking of the whores made him think
of the showgirl. What was her name again? Diamond. Lola
Diamond.

“
Sounds right falutin’.” He
smiled in spite of his aching, foggy head— a remnant of all the
booze.

He considered getting up and going
downstairs for a bath, then decided he’d lie here a few more
minutes and figure out how he was going to approach this woman ...
this Lola Diamond. What would he do if she got nasty? What would he
do if this Lola Diamond refused to accompany him down to Johnson
City?

Well, by god, he had a job to do and a
favor to return. And he’d been paid to boot. He’d throw the cuffs
on her. The shackles, too, if he had to.

Prophet reached over to the night
table, opened a drawer, and retrieved the show poster he’d placed
there, after swiping it off the wall at Dave’s Place. It was a
circular advertising Big Dan Walthrop’s Traveling Dolls and
Roadhouse Show, giving the names of the four “dolls” and telling
where they were going to be and when. Typical roadhouse fair.
Prophet had learned from Dave himself that the troupe master stood
at least six-five and weighed a good two-fifty.

“
That’s all right,” Prophet
told himself. “Guys like him’s what the Peacemaker was invented
for.”

Reluctant to start a day of business
when it seemed he’d only just started having fun, he tossed the
covers back, crawled out of bed, and started gathering his clothes.
Dressed, he went downstairs to the dining room and ordered a
steak-and-egg breakfast complete with a tall glass of milk and a
cup of hot, black coffee with a medicinal jigger of rye
whiskey.

When he’d finished his food, he drank
two more cups of laced coffee, lingering over a cigarette, then
paid his bill and went out. Stepping onto the boardwalk, he watched
two whiskey drummers cross the street in front of Dave’s Place,
holding their crisp bowlers on their heads. Both men wore
broadcloth suits and vests, gold watch chains bouncing at their
sides.

The civilized attire of the two men made
Prophet conscious of his own shabby dress—worn, undershot boots,
faded denims with threadbare knees, a calico shirt that reeked of
stale smoke and sour whiskey, and a ratty Stetson beaten by hail,
wind and snow, and sweat-stained the color of old burlap.
Half-consciously seeing himself through the eyes of Miss Diamond,
he wrinkled his nose.

“
I look like
hell.”

He turned and made a beeline for
Sandoval’s Dry-goods. The bell jingled as he pushed through the
door.

A short, stout Mexican with a wispy
black mustache and wearing a white apron looked up from dusting a
display of women’s soaps.

Prophet stopped in the shadows just
inside the door. “Paco,” he called, “can you set me up in a new
suit for thirty bucks?”

Paco frowned. “Thirty
bucks?”

“
That’s all I got. I’ll be
needin’ boots, as well.”

The frown still in place, Paco said,
“What you want a suit for, Lou—you’re a bounty hunter.” The man’s
frown was instantly replaced by a grin, his small, white teeth
gleaming in the light angling through the windows on his
right.

Unable to see the humor in his
request, Prophet snapped, “Can you do it or do I take my business
elsewhere?”

The man shrugged exaggeratedly. “Okay,
okay. I feex you up, Lou.”

He beckoned Prophet to a back wall,
where men’s clothes were displayed on wood shelves and hanging from
racks. Hemming and hawing aloud, he measured Prophet with his gaze,
then produced a pair of whipcord trousers from one of the shelves,
and a wool vest and frock coat from a rack. Placing it all on a
straight-backed chair before a floor mirror, he retrieved a neatly
folded and pinned shirt from a wire bin.

“
That the best you can do?”
Prophet said, gazing critically at the shirt.

“
For thirty bucks?” Paco
asked, incredulous.

“
What about that one?”
Prophet said, pointing at another shirt hanging from a display rack
behind the coats and vests.

“
That’s linen.”

“
How much?”

“
Twelve-feefty.”

Prophet aimed a sharp look at the
proprietor. “My credit’s good here, ain’t it?”

Paco was incensed. “For
twelve-feefty!”

“
Come on, Paco, throw it
in. Remember how I covered for you with Estelle when she thought
you were diddling that whore back in the pens ... and she was
right? Huh? You remember that?”

Paco whipped his head around, red growing
beneath the almond of his cheeks. “Shhh! She’s in the back
room—”

“
Throw it in.”

“
Okay—it’s in, it’s
in.”

Another dickering war broke out when
it came to the calfskin boots, which were fifty dollars and ran
Prophet’s bill up to an even hundred. The war ended quickly,
however, when Estelle walked out of the back room to wait on two
other ladies looking for muslin.

“
Okay, okay,” Paco said,
quickly lowering his voice, “I throw in the boots! Calfskin ...
madre Maria ...”

An hour later, Prophet walked out of
Haugen’s Tonsorial Parlor, looking just like what he was—a big,
sunburned, freshly shaved and bathed bounty hunter stuffed into a
suit complete with a brown felt bowler that would have been the
envy of any whiskey drummer in Montana Territory, and a pair of
calfskin boots so soft they felt like moccasins.

The new duds gave him confidence,
however. They made him feel downright civilized and the most
respectable thing to hit the West since the railroad. He’d always
wondered what wearing a suit would feel like, and now he knew. It
made you feel like sticking your nose up and your chest out and not
being quite so friendly to folks.

He thought he suddenly understood all
the businessmen he’d known and disliked.

Now all he needed was a badge to pin to
his vest. It would lend him an official air, and he thought it
necessary to approach Miss Diamond looking official. It wasn’t that
he wanted to impress her. Well, that wasn’t his sole purpose,
anyway. The badge would lend him a bureaucratic respectability,
making it a hell of a lot easier for him to get her on the stage.
Yessir, the badge and the pickup order would make a package not
even a jaded showgirl could refuse. Once he got her to Johnson
City, he’d tell her he wasn’t a lawman.

Well, the only place to find a badge
was a sheriff’s office. With a fateful sigh, he stepped off the
boardwalk and headed across the dusty street, his new boots
squawking like a baby duck on his heels. Midway, he met a gent who
looked a lot like him—big and sunburned and hard-looking—but
without the friendly glitter in Prophet’s eyes. Besides that, the
man had an enormous nose—a nose so large it made Prophet’s look
small.

Prophet tipped his head to the man.
The man tipped back. They passed with no further ado. But when the
other man came to the boardwalk Prophet had just left, he turned to
watch Prophet approach the sheriff’s office and knock on the
splintery door. The man swept the folds of his claw-hammer coal
back from a brace of well-oiled forty-fours, and watched with
faintly smirking interest as Prophet stepped inside the jail and
closed the door behind him.

The man watched the closed door
thoughtfully, rubbing his tongue over his teeth. Then a knowing
light entered his gaze, and he headed out in search of a whiskey
and a cool place to wait.

Margaret Jane Olson, a.k.a. Lola
Diamond, sat in the driver’s box of the wagon
upon whose cover the words “BIG
DAN WALTHROP’S TRAVELING DOLLS AND ROADHOUSE SHOW” had been written
in large block letters. She wore a floppy-brimmed straw hat and the
clinging, low-cut green dress of cheap material she always wore
traveling between show stops. But in an effort to look as nice as
she could without sacrificing expensive cloth to the ravages of the
sun, wind, and dust of the trail, she wore about her slender neck a
choker with a single pearl, and tiny pearl earrings. You never knew
who you might meet on this godforsaken prairie; she’d once met a
Russian prince, of all people, in Dakota, of all places. He had
been amazed at her hair, which he had described as red as a Western
sunset, which it was, she was proud to admit. It contrasted the sky
blue of her eyes and the porcelain cream of her skin to bewitching
effect. Her full lips, which she painted the same shade of red as
her hair, made an exquisite, pouting O beneath her delicate
nose.