The Devil's Lair (A Lou Prophet Western #6) (9 page)

Prophet dug in his saddlebags
until he found his moccasins—a ratty but comfortable old pair for
which he
’d
traded an old Ute war chief a deck of cards showing naked saloon
girls. He sat on a grassy hummock, tossed the moccasins down beside
him, and began kicking off his boots.

“
It’s what
we’re
gonna do—you, me, and Ronnie,” the
bounty hunter said. “We’re gonna sneak around the north side of
this hill, hunker down on that shelf yonder, and see if our decoy
attracts any game. If so, the boys here will have them in their
rifle sights from the east, and we’ll have them from higher ground
in the north.”

“
You ready?” Prophet asked Polk
and the young man named Ronnie Williams—a sullen but earnest young
man, banker Carmody’s grandson—who did odd jobs around town,
including stringing chicken wire and digging privy
holes.

He had longish, strawberry-blond hair under
a brown derby hat, a spade-shaped beard, scraggly mustache, and
thin lips that rarely smiled. His old Spencer rifle had seen better
days, the cracked stock held together with wire and twine, but the
others said Ronnie was the best deer and pronghorn hunter in town.
Prophet figured a sharpshooter would come in handy atop the ledge
he was heading for.

The kid nodded solemnly, eyes wide.

Polk licked his lips and
squeezed his well-oiled Winchester.
“Lead the way.”

“
Don’t make any moves until I
do,” Prophet told the others. “Any questions?”

“
Just one thing,” Sorley Kitchen
said—a wiry man, pushing fifty, dressed in faded denims and a
blue-checked shirt, who walked with a pronounced limp.

A former camp cook
who
’d fallen
from his own wagon during a stampede, Kitchen repaired pots and
pans and painted houses on occasion, when someone in town could
afford paint.

“
Could we actually brew coffee
over the fire? I sure could go for a cup of joe!” He smacked his
lips.

Prophet chuffed.
“Sure—why not?” he
muttered as he turned and headed north along the base of the
western hill.

Somewhere above, in the
faultless blue sky, a hawk shrieked. He hoped it
wasn
’t a bad
omen. He wanted to nail the killers, but he also wanted to get
these tinhorns back to Bitter Creek alive. And himself.

Prophet led Polk and Ronnie Williams about
fifty yards north of the other posse members then west another
fifty yards and up a steep rise. It was a moderately hard climb,
with the layered, chalky shale giving way beneath their boots so
that several times each man slipped and had to grab junipers and
sage shrubs for purchase.

Once, young Ronnie grabbed a
dwarf chokecherry under which a diamondback was napping. The snake
woke and struck, nipping the kid
’s shirtsleeve before Ronnie jerked his
hand back. He slid several feet back down the slope on his butt.
But the excitement gave him an adrenaline burst, and ten seconds
later he was sitting on the shelf’s crest beside Prophet and
Polk.

He was breathing hard and he
looked flushed, but when Polk asked him if he was all right, he
just grinned and gave a nervous chuckle, wiping the sweat from his
forehead with the shirt sleeve in which two tiny round holes
showed, a half inch from the cuff
’s bone button.

The three crawled to the
southern lip of the shelf and hunkered behind boulders shaped like
squashed mushrooms. Prophet peered through a notch in the rock,
casting his gaze out and down at the flat, scrub-tufted ground
between the hill behind which the rest of the posse lay hidden, and
the flat-topped butte where he
’d seen the sun flashes.

From behind the low hill to his
left, a shaggy mare
’s tail of smoke rose. Just about the right size, Prophet
thought. The kind of fire the members of a tinhorn posse might
start if they got a little sloppy about the wood they used for a
cook fire.

Prophet looked at the flat directly beneath
the shelf.

If there were indeed men on the
butte—and he was going to feel like a fool if there
weren
’t—they’d have to traverse that stretch of sage and rabbit
brush to investigate the smoke wafting from the posse’s coffee
fire.

If there were indeed men on the butte
...

After fifteen minutes, he was
wondering if the reflections he
’d seen had only been that of the afternoon sun
off mica shards or water from a spring. If so, he was wasting
precious time while the killers hightailed deep into the
Laramies.

Gazing through the notch,
Prophet was about to spit a curse through pinched lips when he
ducked suddenly and felt adrenaline spurt in his veins. On the
flat, he
’d
spied movement behind a frowzy cottonwood stand and a tangled patch
of wild plums.

To his right, Polk had seen his
reaction.
“What is it?” the druggist asked.

Prophet didn
’t say anything. Casting another
careful glance through the notch, he again saw movement—a shoulder
and part of a hat moving through the rabbit brush on the other side
of the trees.

“
Gentlemen, I think we have a
barn dance,” Prophet whispered to Polk and Ronnie, who were lying
tensely on their elbows, holding their rifles with iron grips. “In
about a minute, we should know for sure.”

He peered through the notch again, saw
three... four ... five men moving through the brush along the base
of the shelf. The men walked abreast, about ten to fifteen feet
apart. They held rifles across their chests as they traced
serpentine courses through the high desert foliage, staring
straight ahead at the ridge before them and at the shaggy white
smoke billowing and tearing against the sky.

Prophet bit the inside of his
cheek and felt the blood coursing slowly but purposefully through
his veins. Too impatient to wait where they
’d been, the owlhoots had taken the
bait.

He turned to Polk and
Ronnie.
“You
boys stay here. When I start shootin’, pick a man out of the group
and shoot from the top of these rocks. I’m gonna go down and storm
’em, try to take ’em by surprise.”

He looked at the two men
sidelong and added wryly,
“Just don’t shoot me in the back.”

Polk gulped and adjusted his
derby.
“You
got it, Mr. Prophet.”

Prophet had grabbed his
Winchester and risen to his feet. He turned back to Polk.
“Folks who call me
‘mister’ make me nervous.”

With that he jumped onto the
mushroom-shaped rocks at the edge of the shelf. Quickly scouting
the slope below, he scrambled from one rock to another, swiftly
making his way down the shelf
’s gently sloping, rock-strewn wall, keeping his
eyes on the men below.

He
’d get in as close as he could before
cutting loose with the Winchester…

He
’d just leapt a low shrub, landing on a
flat boulder about halfway down the slope, when one of the men
turned and saw him. He was the third man out from the slope,
wearing black jeans, black vest, and a wide-brimmed black
hat.

“
Hey!” he called to the others.
Wheeling, he dropped to a knee and raised his rifle to his
shoulder.

Before the man could fire,
Prophet snapped his own rifle to his shoulder and squeezed the
trigger. The whip crack of the rifle echoed off the buttes and
hills. The killer
’s rifle popped as he flew backward off his feet, the slug
sailing skyward.

The others had turned to Prophet now. They
all fired at once as he leapt onto another rock to his right,
crouched, and fired again. The man closest to him whipped his head
back with the force of the .44 blow to his temple, did several
dancelike pirouettes before tripping over a log.

One of the others cursed loudly
and ran back for the cover of the cottonwoods. The others dropped
where
they’d
been when they’d first spotted Prophet and began kicking up a
furious fusillade. Their faces bunched with frustration as Prophet
avoided their bullets by hopping like an Indian from rock to rock,
zigzagging down the mountain, pausing on rocks only to raise the
Winchester to his shoulder and trigger shots before leaping
onward.

The killers
’ bullets plunked into the rocks
and shrubs around him, twanging and clanging with the
ricochets.

Meanwhile, as Prophet hopped and
fired, hopped and fired, his fellow posse members from the ridge to
his left began triggering their own rifles, as did Polk and Ronnie
on the ridge behind and above him. From what he could tell as he
skipped around the buzzing bullets and took hasty aim from his
shoulder, only Ronnie actually hit any of the outlaws. He put one
bullet through a man
’s right eye, dropping him like a tin can from a fence
post.

As the man fell into the arroyo
at the base of the
cottonwoods, Ronnie gave a victorious whoop, his jubilant
cries echoing above the intermittent cracks of the rifle
fire.

“
Don’t get cocky, kid,” Prophet
muttered as he hurdled a shrub at the base of the slope. He ran
twenty yards, leapt over one of the dead killers, saw another
owlhoot dart out from behind a stunt pine and run toward a
boulder.

Prophet stopped and fired two quick shots
from the hip. The killer, a man with red hair hanging to his
shoulders and clad in a tattered deer-hide vest and battered hat,
dropped to a knee, clutching his left side.

He tried bringing up his big
Yellowboy repeater. Guessing he
’d fired all the rounds in his Winchester, Prophet
took the rifle in his left hand, grabbed his Colt .45, and shot the
man through the forehead.

He went over with a groan,
dropping the Yellowboy and flopping around on his back for ten
seconds before he wound down like a child
’s toy and died.

Crouching, pistol extended before him,
Prophet made several slow circles, looking around for the next
onslaught.

No more men ran toward him
shooting, however. Several lay dead and bleeding, one hanging over
a hawthorn shrub, blood pouring from the bullet wound in his chest
and from the many small puncture wounds made by the
shrub
’s
stiletto-like thorns.

Someone was groaning and cursing just south
of him. He walked that way, threading around the shrubs and cedars,
until he saw the man. He was dark-haired, with an unshaven,
handsome face, tall and lean, wearing black denims and a white
pinstriped shirt and suspenders. He wore two holsters on his hips,
positioned for the cross-draw, but only one still held a gun—a
pearl-gripped Remington.

Rolling on his back, he clutched
his wounded right knee and turned his dimpled chin to Prophet,
screaming,
“My knee! Oh, Christ, my knee! Jesus, it hurts!”

“
I reckon it would,” Prophet
said, glancing around to see if any more killers lurked
nearby.

The brush was quiet. The bounty
hunter walked over to the wounded youngster and stared down without
mercy. He leaned down, grabbed the Remington from the
kid
’s
holster, used its barrel to poke his hat back on his head, and
clucked his tongue. “Yeah, I bet that hurts like hell.”

Hearing footsteps from both the west and the
north, he swept his gaze that way. His fellow posse men were
jogging this way, holding their rifles up defensively, gazing
around at the killers lying twisted and dead over rocks and shrubs,
attracting flies.

“
Well, well, well,” the banker,
Carmody, exclaimed as he approached, glaring down at the knee-shot
youngster. “Young Rick sure don’t look very dangerous now, does
he?”

“
I’ll say he don’t!” the
lumberman, Milt Emory, said with a nervous chuckle. “None o’ these
boys do!”

“
Goddamnit!” Rick Scanlon
exclaimed through gritted teeth, clutching his bloody knee. “For
the love o’ Christ—
help me!”

“
Yeah, we’ll help you, all
right,” Carmody said. “We’ll
help you the same way you and your old man helped
Marshal Whitman and young Eddie last night.” He looked at the other
men. “Someone get a rope!”

“
No ,” Prophet said. “There ain’t
gonna be no hangin’.”

Carmody and the others looked
incredulous.

“
What on earth are you talking
about?” the banker exclaimed. “There’s absolutely no doubt him and
these others played cat’s cradle with Whitman and young Eddie’s
necks! I don’t much care about Whitman, but Eddie—”

One of the other posse members
coughed loudly, cutting the banker off. Curious, Prophet frowned
and turned to the man, who averted his gaze and feigned a yawn.
Prophet wondered what Carmody hadn
’t liked about Whitman, but there was no
time to pursue the matter.

Prophet returned his gaze to the
banker and shook his head.
“No Judge Lynch. That ain’t the way I
work.”

He might have skirted around the
edges of the law at times, but there were certain lines he did not
cross. In his line of work, the area between good and evil was just
too gray. If you didn
’t want to become as bad as the men you hunted, you had to
follow a strict set of rules—including the one that said you never
killed except in self-defense. Even when an outlaw was wanted dead
or alive, or was as vile as Rick Scanlon.