The Graves at Seven Devils (24 page)

He strode back to where the whore sat on the cot, one leg dangling over the edge, the other knee raised. She held her hands to her neck, half hiding her amazing, pointed breasts between her elbows, and gave Prophet a brash up-and-down, swishing a light brown foot against the floor.

Prophet looked at her. She wasn't bad-looking for a whore in this neck of the woods, but she'd known some tough years. They were written in the deep lines around her mouth and eyes, one of which was lightly bruised. She had a small, glistening cut on her chin. Her cinnamon hair curled, thick and rich, to her shoulders, giving a glimpse of two silver hoop rings dangling from her ears.

“You with this bunch by choice?” Prophet asked her.

She looked down at the half-breed bleeding onto the floor and wrinkled her nose. “They
took
me out of Nogales. Said I would entertain them out here, while they planned their next job.” She spat a wad of spit onto the half-breed's ruddy cheek, then plucked a brown bottle off a nearby shelf and threw back a drink. “I'm
glad
you killed them. Now I can go back to Nogales and feed my dogs.”

“Where's their horses?”

She jerked her head toward the back of the cabin. “Stable out back in the brush. If you are taking their horses, leave me one.” She rolled her brown eyes up to give him a lascivious look. “ 'Less you want take me with
you
, uh?”

Prophet snorted and headed for the door. “Be right back.”

He ducked out of the cabin and retraced his steps back to where Big Hans sat on his claybank near Mean and Ugly. The kid was groaning and sort of whimpering in his sleep, his head thrown back on his shoulders. If not for the rope securing him to the saddle, he'd have rolled straight back off the clay's ass.

Prophet led both horses back to the cabin and tethered them to the hitchrack out front. He gently maneuvered the kid out of the saddle, but couldn't help, because of the younker's two-hundred-plus bulky pounds, a semi-rough landing. Big Hans sagged toward the clay and lifted his head, groaning.

“Wh . . . where . . . ?”

“Easy, kid,” Prophet said, snaking Hans's good arm around his neck and leading him toward the open door. “Have you bedded down in no time.”

“Wh . . . where the hell . . . Jesus God, my arm hurts!”

“Leave it be, boy, or . . .”

Prophet let his voice trail off. He and Hans had stopped just in front of the hovel's open door. The woman was on one naked knee at the back of the room, a blanket draped so carelessly about her shoulders that it hardly covered a thing.

She had Mark Diamond's left hand draped over her thigh and was cursing softly in Spanish as she tugged on the dead man's large ruby ring, her voluminous breasts slanting out from her chest and pillowing out over the dead, pale fingers.

Sensing Prophet's stare from across the room, the woman looked up. Her thick brows wrinkled, and her eyes grew peeved. “They paid me for only one night in Nogales. For none of the half dozen nights they have held me here like a rabid bitch in this maggot patch of a vermin-infested casa!”

Prophet continued guiding Big Hans toward the cot where the woman and the half-breed had been frolicking. “Reckon it ain't stealin' if you're stealin' from a thief . . . and a dead one, far as that goes.”

He chuckled as he ruminated absently on the breed of humanity he'd discovered so far in the Seven Devils Range. He sobered quickly, however, when he considered that his estimation of humanity, based fairly or unfairly on what he'd discovered here, was only bound to worsen.

When he'd gotten Hans lying down on the cot, the kid still grumbling and holding tight to the wrist of his broken arm, Prophet reached down and started dragging the half-breed out the cabin door by his ankles.

When he'd gotten the half-breed outside and about forty yards north along a narrowing, winding canyon and partially concealed in rocks, he went back for the others.

Ten minutes later, he returned to the cabin, breathing hard from his labors, to find the whore sitting on the edge of the cot beside Hans. She was sponging the boy's broad, sweaty forehead with a damp cloth. A basin of water rested on her near-naked thighs, and a corked canteen lay at her bare feet, beside the brown bottle from which she'd been drinking.

She turned as Prophet walked in. “What happened to your young friend?”

“Boulder rolled down a ridge, damn near took his head off.” Prophet stood gazing down at the whore. Tiring of having his gaze attracted to her amazing bosoms, he drew the blanket across her chest with a sigh. “Can you tend him for an hour or two? I done lost another friend in the storm. I'm gonna ride back a ways, see if I can track her.”

“I am not going anywhere until morning.”

Prophet hunkered beside the kid, placed his hand on the boy's heavy shoulder. “Hans, if you can hear me, I'm gonna leave for a while. This nice lady's gonna stay with you.” Prophet glanced at the woman. “What's your name?”

“Loretta.”

Prophet glanced at the woman. “This is Big Hans.”

The kid's eyes fluttered, and he turned his head from side to side, the very picture of misery. His skin was pasty, his blond hair sweat-matted and mud-flecked. Perspiration beaded his forehead and streamed down his cheeks. “I . . . I reckon I'll be here, Lou.”

“Loretta's got some whiskey, and I reckon she'd share if you asked her real—”

Prophet stopped when the woman, who had just twisted around to stare wide-eyed toward the door, screamed,
“Mierda! Look out!”

The bounty hunter wheeled around, swinging the sawed-off ten-gauge out from behind his back. In the doorway, the half-breed stood, stooped and pale and bloody, regarding Prophet with bloodshot, heavy-lidded eyes as he raised a .36-caliber Remington that he must have produced from a boot well. As Prophet threw his back against the cot, he raised the ten-gauge one-handed, thumbing back both rabbit-eared hammers.

The resurrected half-breed was blown straight back out the door in a spray of blood and viscera, as though he'd been pulled out from behind by a log chain attached to a six-mule hitch with their tails on fire.

“THERE'S MY HORSE!” Louisa said, still down on her butt behind the log with the bizarre Three of a Kind Gang standing in a half circle around her in the quickly fading light. The men regarded her suspiciously, hands on their gun butts while the young woman, Cora, was a little more fawning than Louisa felt comfortable with.

Louisa stretched her gaze around the group while a burly black man with a red sash led the pinto through the trees. The man's skin was as black as his frock coat, four-in-hand tie, black hat, and canvas breeches. At times only his white shirt and red sash could be seen against the ink-black cottonwood trunks that he and the horse were passing through.

The pinto snorted and coughed as the man led him by his reins and bridle bit, the horse's saddle and Louisa's bedroll hanging down its left side, so that her two rifle sheaths flapped around up near the horse's back. Both sheaths were empty. Her saddlebags were gone.

As the black man approached, she saw that he was carrying her Winchester in the same hand as the one in which he held the reins. No sign of her Sharps.

“Oh, joy—you found him!” Louisa exclaimed, keeping up her routine of lost little babe in the desert, and hoping that the men would pull their horns in, thus making it easier for her in due time to blow their hearts out their spines in a vapor of blood and bone.

“We heard the whinnies down arroyo,” Cora said.

“Well, well, well,” the black man said, stopping the horse on the other side of the log and staring down at what the arroyo had washed in. “What in the pure-devil, ever-lovin' hell we got here?”

“It's a girl,” said Captain Sykes, chuckling. “What's it look like, Heinz?”

Her lungs still feeling boggy, Louisa began to scramble to her feet, then did her best playacting as she dropped to her knees suddenly and convulsed in more lung spasms that were not so much feigned as exaggerated. “Thank you, sir,” she croaked between coughs, lifting her head toward the black man called Heinz, twisting her face with feigned misery. “Without my horse . . . I'd truly . . . be lost out here.”

Cora dropped down beside her and placed a hand on her lurching back. “Actually, I was the one who found your horse, Miss . . .”

“Louisa,” Louisa croaked.

“I was the one who found your horse, Miss Louisa. But don't tell me you're thinking of getting back on him tonight!”

“Gettin' back on him and ridin'
where
—that's what I wanna know,” Heinz said.

“Will you quit, Rosco?” Cora scowled up at the big black man. “She's been through a terrible ordeal. Why, she nearly drowned in the arroyo while trying to make her way back to her uncle's mine diggin's.”

“Diggin's!”

This from the look-alike in the Lincoln-style top hat. He, like the others, had a singsong Southern accent even more pronounced than Prophet's. Louisa had never visited the South, but even to her ears his accent called up mossy oaks sprawled across rolling, emerald-green hills and pillared mansions adorned with Southern belles and straight-backed gentleman in impeccable beards and black, clawhammer coats.

The look-alike in the Abe Lincoln hat rolled his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. “Who the hell's diggin' out here? The whole damn range is taken over by outlaws and'Paches!”

“Shit, I ain't seen a prospector—at least not a
live
one—in a month of Sundays,” said the look-alike in the green-checked suit. He stood out against the gathering darkness like a green spring meadow.

“You haven't seen my Uncle Lou,” Louisa sniffed. “Now, if you'll excuse me . . .” She gained her knees and swooned. While she wasn't in love with the idea of taking the gang on herself, now that she was here she saw no reason to leave. But looking like she
wanted
to stay would make the gang suspicious. “I reckon I'll be back . . . on my . . . way. . . .”

She made her eyelids flutter and sagged to one side, as though about to pass out.

“Oh, no, you won't, dearie,” Cora said, letting Louisa fall against her and wrapping her arm around Louisa's waist. “You're not going anywhere—not in your condition. Rafe, carry her up to my shack.”

“I'll do it,” the man called Sykes said, stepping forward and stretching out his hands toward Louisa.

“I want Rafe to do it,” Cora said.

Sykes furled his bushy red brows. “Huh?”

Cora turned to Rafe standing with his hawk-faced, long-haired brothers—the three standing around like actors all garbed up with no lines to perform. She smiled mockingly and said with a sneer, “Because the Flute boys ain't so
willing
.”

The Flute in the top hat tossed his cigar onto the ground and bolted forward angrily, spitting out in his petal-soft, anger-edged accent, “Now, lookee here, Cora. My brothers and I are the leaders of the troupe, and we're goddamn tired of putting up with your insults against our manhood.”

Rafe said, “And don't forget who's ramroddin' this group, girl! We're the ones who threw it together, and we're damn certain sure the ones who . . .”

“The ones who'd have gotten us all thrown into Yuma pen six months ago if I hadn't joined up and taught you boys the proper way to rob a bank and take down a payroll shipment!”

Cora straightened and placed a hand on the grips of one of her revolvers, leaning forward at the waist. Sagging against the young woman's thigh, as if only half conscious, Louisa stared at the men through slitted lids, feeling Cora's mad, defiant fury flutter up from deep down in her heels.

“Without me, you goddamn tinhorned sons of the Rebel South would be wobblin' and reelin' around like schoolboys drunk on their first warm beer. And you'd best take your hand away from your pistol there, Billy Earl, 'less you want a lead swap, though I doubt there'd be much of a
swap
!”

Cora lowered her voice with menace, twisting and turning her out-thrust face as she continued her tirade, her green-streaked red hair dancing about her shoulders. “You boys fancy yourselves fast, but you know as well as I do that there ain't one of ya
faster
. . . or more
willin'
. . . than good ole Cora. Now, get your hand away from that .45, ya damn peckerwood, or fill it, and fill it
now
. This is the last damn argument I'm ever gonna have with you.”

Billy Earl stood, hand still draped over the butt of his .45, staring through the semidarkness at Cora. It was too dark to see his face clearly, but Louisa saw that his eyes were as white-ringed as those of an enraged bronc, and his long, slender legs were quivering. His skinny chest rose and fell heavily beneath the ruffled white shirt he wore under a burgundy vest trimmed with silver piping. His cavernous cheeks dimpled, and Louisa thought she could even hear his molars grinding.

The others had fallen silent and as still as stone statues.

Cora's leg against Louisa's cheek did not shake or flutter in the least. Her blood ran calmly through her veins as she waited for Billy Earl to make the first move. This girl, Louisa thought with a vague apprehensive air while waiting for lead to fly, might even be nervier than she, Louisa, was.

“Oh, for Christ's sakes,” muttered the look-alike in the brown-checked suit, bulling up between Billy Earl and Sykes. “Lower your tails, both of you. I'll give the damn girl a tow.”

He chuffed as he leaned down toward Louisa. She let herself go limp as the man snaked his arms beneath her, straightened, and started to carry her through the group still standing around the log, toward the rustling cottonwoods. Fires glowed ahead through the trees, and Louisa could see several ancient stone huts huddled amongst rocks and cactus along the base of a steep slope rising into shadows toward a ridge over which stars were kindling.