The Graves at Seven Devils (26 page)

“Sooo purty.” Cora swallowed, her pale cheeks flushing slightly, as she followed the blade's trail with her eyes. “Such soft skin.”

As she slid the blade down between Louisa's breasts, which her wet shirt conformed to like a second skin, Cora lowered her head and pressed her lips to Louisa's left cheek.

“Gotta tell me,” she said in a strange singsong. “ 'Cause, ya see, I don't believe that story about you and your old, prospectin' Uncle Lou. Uh-huh. Not in the least bit.” She stopped the stiletto halfway down Louisa's chest and pressed the tip against Louisa's left breast. It barely pierced the surface, feeling about like a mosquito bite.

Louisa didn't wince. She gazed coldly into the crazy, murdering woman's face.

Holding the blade still against Louisa's breast, keeping a firm pressure, Cora pressed her lips to Louisa's other cheek—a warm, lingering, diabolical kiss. “No siree, girl. When I first saw your eyes, you know what I saw?”

She drew her lips back from her teeth, the spittle crackling softly as she opened her mouth slightly, lifting her chin to stare down both sides of her nose. “I saw myself.”

For a half second, Louisa felt as though the stiletto blade had slipped through her skin to pierce her heart. Though she kept a level stare, the young woman seemed to sense her reaction. Cora lifted her chin slightly and pursed her lips. “Now,” she said, “you gonna tell me what you're doin' in the Seven Devils?”

Louisa let a stretched second pass. Then she nodded once and, clicking back the hammer of the double-barreled, silver-chased derringer that she'd slipped out of her boot when Custer had laid her on the bed, she said, “I'm here to blow your vile brains all over that wall over there, see?” She hardened her jaws as she angled the popper's upper and lower barrels toward Cora's left temple. “Because you killed my cousin and her son and husband, and then you burnt her town. Remember?”

Cora's eyes grew glassy with shock and caution as they slid toward the derringer in Louisa's fist.

Louisa's voice grew taut as she said softly, “I rather figured you would.”

Louisa's fury was a wild mustang inside of her. There was no taming it, no reining it in despite her knowing that the shot would alert the other gang members and no doubt get her killed.

Still, her index finger tightened against the trigger. As it did, Cora jerked her left elbow up and twisted her head sideways, lifting her chin and snarling like a bobcat.

Louisa's derringer popped loudly. Cora squealed as the bullet carved a bloody gash across the nub of her right cheek and a bloody notch across the top of her right ear. As she flew sideways off the bed and hit the floor with a loud, tearing shriek of pain and fury, Louisa dropped her legs to the floor and lowered the derringer toward Cora scrambling on all fours toward the little shack's opposite wall.

Louisa had vaguely heard, beneath the hammering fury in her ears, the thud of loudening footsteps as men approached the cabin. Now a sharp exclamation rose from outside. As the door burst open and the handsome gent, Squires, bolted into the room clawing a revolver from a low-thonged holster, Louisa rose to her feet and, hair flying about her head, teeth gritted, swung the peashooter toward the door.

The derringer popped.

At the same time, Squires threw himself sideways, tripping over his own boots and piling up at the base of the far wall with a pained grunt and a curse. Louisa's .32-caliber slug had slammed into the chest of the tall, skinny gent rushing in behind Squires.

He groaned and, throwing his arms up and wincing as dust puffed from the hole in his soiled duck shirt and dusty, sun-faded vest, stumbled back out the cabin's open doorway.

Cora was kneeling at the base of the far wall, in front of Squires. The handsome blond outlaw, bunching his lips and slitting his eyes, raised his revolver toward Louisa, who bolted to her left.

The revolver roared, the slug slamming into the stone wall above the bed.

Louisa took two long, running strides and dove through one of the room's two windows, hearing the bark of Squires's six-shooter once more and feeling a bullet nip her boot heel as it cleared the window ledge.

“Get that little bitch!” Cora squealed.

Squires fired two more quick, hammering shots as Louisa hit the ground outside—a violent landing on the stony, prickly ground still wet from the rain—then rolled down a slight grade to the base of a gnarled cedar.

Back inside the shack, Squires shouted, “I'm not shooting at rats, my heart!”

There was the rake of soft leather heels as Squires scrambled to his feet inside the shack. Outside, heart hammering, Louisa gained her own feet.

Clawing at the ground with her hands and digging her heels into the sand and gravel, she bolted out from under the cedar and headed up the grade toward cover in the form of rocks, shrubs, and boulders rising blackly against the starlit sky.

“Get back here, little one!”

Squires's mocking, echoing shout was drowned by two more loud revolver barks. The slugs plunked into the gravel just inches off Louisa's pounding, raking heels as she half crawled and half ran up the rocky slope toward the towering northern ridge a good two hundred yards away.

When the echoes of Squires's last two shots had dwindled, he shouted, “Got us a crazed polecat, fellas! Better come hither and pronto. I mean,
vamoose
!”

The voice, muffled by the growing distance Louisa was putting between herself and the cabin, echoed ominously in the silent, clean, pine-scented night. She hadn't run far amongst the ruined shacks cropping up out of the chaparral, looking as though they'd been here as long as the rocks, when she realized the flooded arroyo had taken more out of her than she'd thought.

Her feet and legs grew heavy, her breath short. Her lungs felt little larger than prunes. Her chest ached.

Behind her, the outlaws were calling back and forth. A couple whooped and yowled like wolves on the blood scent. Cora continued screaming so shrilly that Louisa couldn't make out her words, though she was sure the crazed she-bitch was demanding Louisa's head.

Boots thumped, gravel crunched, and spurs rang. Louisa could hear labored breaths raking in and out of her pursuers' lungs as they stormed up the grade behind her and fanned out across the slope, stalking her. She could sense their bloodlust, the thrill of the chase, the fevered anticipation of what they'd do once they caught her.

If
they caught her, she knew what they'd do. And without her weapons and ammunition for the derringer, there'd be nothing she could do about it.

WHEN LOUISA HAD run a good hundred yards up the slope from Cora's cabin, she stopped near what appeared to be an old mine yawning blackly in the slope before her, surrounded with cracked rocks, weathered lumber, and a rusted, overturned wheelbarrow overgrown with buckbrush and junipers.

She dropped to a knee, breathing hard.

Down the slope behind her, the killers were flitting shadows amongst the rocks and cactus. Upslope, another two or three hundred yards away—it was hard to judge in the darkness—the sheer northern ridge loomed. One of the devil-shaped spires giving the range its name rose from the ridge's mantel-like crest, climbing another three or four hundred feet skyward from the rest of the ridge.

Looking around the broad, deep canyon in which the ancient village nestled, Louisa saw that the other surrounding ridges were capped with similarly shaped devil-like spires complete with tails and eroded horn-shaped stones protruding from their elongated tips. A couple even wielded what looked like pitchforks.

The devil-like formations surrounding her didn't so much heighten her fear as make her wish the big, Georgian saddle tramp who'd sold his soul to the Devil, Lou Prophet, were here. Armed with his mean and ugly horse and his sawed-off, double-barreled barn blaster, he'd find a way to save her in his clumsy, awkward way and blow out the lamps of the howling demons moving in on her now.

But Prophet was no doubt somewhere on the other side of the devil-capped, star-shrouded northern ridge, miles away in the darkness, and wondering where she was but too far away to save her.

Downslope, something flashed, and then the gun's roar reached Louisa's ears. There was a shrill, animal shriek and the muffled thrashing of trampled brush.

“You git her?” one of the men yelled about fifty yards downslope and right.

“Javelina,” called another, a wry pitch to his voice.

Louisa quickly considered her options and decided that she couldn't continue moving. Unable to outdistance the gang, and without the means to fight them, she'd be overtaken in minutes. She had to hide.

Remaining crouched, she swiveled her head, looking around. On the other side of the gaping mine hole, three low stone walls rose from the scrub. Part of the old brush roof remained, partly attached to one of the vine-covered walls.

Louisa scrambled over to what remained of the shack, circled, and stepped over the remaining wall, quietly shoving aside the slender, sun-bleached ironwood poles composing the roof.

Stooping, she climbed beneath the low-slung poles and, hoping she'd run into no rattlesnakes or black widow spiders, scuttled in beneath the sagging roof and pressed her back to the cool, stone wall as far from view from the outside as possible.

She hunkered down, drew her knees to her chest, and listened as her pursuers continued shouting back and forth across the slope on both sides and below her.

“Goddamnit!” Cora screamed like a wounded she-grizzly, somewhere above Louisa now, stumbling around in the brush. “I
want
that little bitch.
Find her!
”

“We are, Cora,” one of the men said placatingly, barely loudly enough for Louisa to hear. “It's dark out here. . . .”

Cora said something else but she must have turned her back to Louisa, for Louisa couldn't make it out above the thumps of boots moving toward her from below and left.

Louisa pressed her back harder against the stone wall as the footsteps and spur chings grew louder, with the occasional rattle of a kicked stone or the crunch of cactus spines. She could hear a man breathing hard. To her right, through a small gap between the fallen roof and the crumbling wall, a shadow moved. Louisa opened her mouth to breathe more quietly as the man stopped beside the hovel. He was probably only about six or seven feet away from her. Probably scrutinizing the fallen roof.

Louisa's heart beat with hard, measured strokes. The man stood frozen beside her. She could tell he was looking around, shifting his weight; gravel ground dully beneath his boots.

“Hey, Little Bitch, you in there?”

It was the voice of the black man, Heinz. In the night's heavy silence, his voice was almost bizarrely clear, as though he'd spoken from only inches away.

Silence.

Heinz's breath raked evenly in and out of his lungs. Suddenly, there was the low groan of boot leather. The man grunted softly. Louisa jumped as something struck the branches over her head with a loud, wooden thump. A stone slipped through a crack between the branches and plopped into the dust just inches in front of her boots.

Louisa opened her mouth wider, drawing a deep, silent breath. Her heart thumped painfully against her ribs.

The black man's bulky shadow moved toward her, and Louisa steeled herself, prepared to fight. If he found her, she would jump him, claw his eyes out, and try to wrestle a gun away. . . .

An owl screamed from up the slope—an eerie, rasping cry shattering the night's dense quiet. There was a windy flapping of wings. Heinz stopped and turned to stare upslope.

Louisa waited, listening to the owl's distressed cry as it faded off toward the ridge.

Heinz muttered something, turned away, and began striding up the slope, his shadow disappearing amongst the pinyons and boulders. When she could no longer hear his footsteps, Louisa let her head sag back against the wall and let out a long, slow, relieved breath.

She'd wait here until they gave up looking for her. They'd no doubt quit soon, go back to their fires and their liquor bottles. Besides, that wound her bullet had sliced across Cora's cheek and ear needed tending. Louisa had to bide her time. She'd never been much for patience, bulling headlong into bailiwicks with her horns out, but if she tried to make a run for it too soon, before the entire gang had slinked back down into the canyon, she wouldn't make it.

Patience, Prophet had told her more times than she could count, was the key to a bounty hunter not pushing up sage from a wooden overcoat before his time.

Snickering in spite of herself at the remembered advice, Louisa settled back against the wall and hugged her knees, shivering as the night's chill penetrated her wet, muddy clothes. What she wouldn't give for a warm blanket and a hot fire, maybe even a rare nip from Prophet's bottle. . . .

She waited for what must have been about two hours, watching the stars through the slats of the weathered ironwood logs and listening as the sounds of the searching gang ebbed and flowed around her. Several times the angry, inquiring voices and the thumping footsteps and crashing brush died, and Louisa thought they were retreating. But then more scuffling rose maybe thirty or forty yards away, upslope or down, and she settled back against the cold wall, shivering, waiting. . . .

It went on like that all night.

Louisa would find herself almost in a doze, sliding down against the wall. Then some bird or animal sound would rouse her, and she'd lift her head to listen. Just when she thought the slope was clear and she began moving her stiff limbs to crawl out from under the roof, she'd hear a voice or the unmistakable sound of a kicked stone or someone clearing his throat.