Blood at Sundown

by Peter Brandvold

  “That’s where you’re headed, all right.” Louisa curled her ripe upper lip as her right-hand Colt bucked a quarter second before the one in her left hand bucked, both rounds thumping into the screaming man’s chest and punching him straight back through the window out of which he’d been flinging lead at Lou.

  A pistol cracked behind Louisa. The bullet was like a hot andiron laid against the right side of her neck, just above the collar of her wool coat. She flinched and swung around, raising both her fancy Colts to see a man standing on the second-floor balcony stretching across the saloon’s far wall.

  Louisa had started to squeeze both triggers, but now she eased the tension in her trigger fingers. The man—a big man with a black beard cleaved by a long, thick scar running crookedly down his left cheek—held a young girl clad in only pantaloons, a thin shift, and a string of colored feathers and faux pearls, one purple and one bright red ribbon poking up from the mess of light red hair wound and secured into several buns atop her head.

  The girl was very young, Louisa judged. Maybe sixteen, maybe younger. She was missing an eyetooth. Louisa could see that because the girl’s lips were stretched back from her lips in terror and agony, for the big man standing behind her had one beefy arm, clad in red calico, hooked around her neck, drawing her head back taut against his broad, lumpy chest.

  He held a cocked, stag-butted Colt Lightning taut against her right temple. The fleshy hand gripping the gun was covered in small, light brown freckles. “Drop them Colts, woman!” the man bellowed through his beard, narrowing his dark brown eyes beneath the brim of a black, bullet-crowned hat to the front of which the moon-and-star badge of a deputy U.S. marshal was pinned.

  That told Louisa which gang member he was—N. B. Stone. He’d killed a federal lawman several years ago in Montana, after murdering two doxies and a deputy sheriff in a whorehouse in Bannack. His way of thumbing his nose at anyone who would come after him for such crimes had been to pin the dead lawman’s badge to his hat.

  A badge of honor, so to speak.

  “Hello, Mr. Stone,” Louisa said, gazing up across the barrels of her aimed Colts at the man.

  “Drop ’em, Bonaventure! Drop ’em now! I’ll kill this girl—drill a hot one right through her purty little head. You know me, so you know I’ll do it!”

  Louisa swallowed down a tight knot of apprehension in her throat. As she moved forward across the room toward a second stairway ahead of her, sitting parallel to the saloon floor and angling up toward the second-story balcony, running parallel to the saloon, she kept the anxiety out of her voice as she said, “You’ll do it even if I set down my guns.”

  “Stop there!” Stone bellowed, hardening his jaws inside his thick, black beard. “Stop there, or I’ll shoot her!”

  “No, you won’t. You’re not suicidal, are you, Norman?” Louisa kept moving toward the rickety-looking, unpainted plank board stairs ahead of her, kicking chairs out of her way. “You look like a man who enjoys life far too much to see it all end right here in this lonely saloon out here in the middle of nowhere.”

  Louisa put her right boot on the first step and, keeping her eyes on Stone and the girl above her, near the top of the stairs, she said, “You have too much life left.” She gritted her teeth but kept her voice calm, even. “Too much thieving . . . and raping . . . and killing to do . . .”

  “That does it—I’m gonna shoot her!”

  “No!” the girl cried, struggling against the man’s chest.

  Stone held her fast with his thick left arm, pressing his pistol firmly against her temple. “Please! Please, don’t kill me!” Through tear-glazed eyes, she gazed beseechingly at Louisa moving slowly up the stairs. “Please . . . don’t let him kill me! I . . . don’t wanna . . . die!”

  “He’s not going to kill you,” Louisa assured the girl, though she herself wasn’t sure at all. “He’s not going to kill you, because Mr. Norman Brian Stone doesn’t want to die.” Louisa gained the top of the stairs, stepped onto the second-story balcony, on the same plane now with Stone and the horrified girl, and kept walking ever so slowly, menacingly, toward them.

  She shook her head. “You don’t want to die here, Norman. Not now. Not like this . . . killed by a woman.”

  Louisa smiled coldly, jeeringly over the barrels of her nickel-washed pistols six-guns aimed straight out in front of her. “Do you, Norman? You don’t want to be just another notch on the Vengeance Queen’s belt, do you?”

  Stone’s cheeks turned red behind and above his beard at the notion of being killed by the notorious female bounty hunter.

  “I’m gonna warn you for the last time!” Stone yelled, stepping back and jerking the bawling girl along with him, keeping her pulled taut against him, drawing her back through an open door, her bare feet entangling with his boots. “You put them hoglegs down, or I’m gonna blow her head off!”

  “You do that,” Louisa said, slowly following the man and the girl into the room, “and I’ll blow yours off right after.” She passed through the doorway and into the small bedroom crudely furnished with a dilapidated chest of drawers, a zinc-topped washstand, and a brass bed. The room smelled like man sweat and sex and tobacco smoke. A single lamp burned on the chest of drawers. “Think about it, Norman. Death. Annihilation. No past, no future. Worm food.”

  Louisa stopped just inside the doorway.

  Stone stopped then, as well, near the foot of the bed, a window directly behind him. He held the girl as before, his beefy arm hooked around her neck, drawing her head back. Her face was red and soaked with tears that flowed steadily down from her horrified eyes.

  “Please,” she kept begging through her tears. “Please, please, please . . .”

  “Think about it, Norman,” Louisa said again. “You got your whole life ahead of you. What are you—thirty-five? Forty? You have thirty, forty years left. You don’t want it all to end here today. All you’ve been. All you are. All you’ll ever be. Killed in a remote Dakota watering hole”—Louisa curled her upper lip—“by a woman!”

  Stone stared at her for a full ten seconds, thoughtful. He looked down at the girl writhing against him. He cursed as he turned back to Louisa. “If I turn her loose, you’ll set your guns aside?”

  “If you holster your pistol and turn her loose, I’ll let you walk out of here. You can fetch your horse and ride clear. I’ll inform Lou of our arrangement.”

  Stone turned his head sideways. His right eye twitched. “You’re bluffin’!”

  “My word is bond, Norman.”

  “Bullcrap—you’re a kill-crazy bounty hunter! Everybody knows about you!”

  “I’m that rare bounty hunter with honor, Norman. Empty your pistol, turn the girl loose, and live to eat another meal, to drink another glass of whiskey . . .” She glanced at the doxie’s right, discolored eye and drew a deep, calming breath. “To beat another defenseless girl in some remote roadhouse . . .”

  Stone’s eye twitched again, skeptically. “You lower yours first. Shove it into your holster and secure the thong over the hammer.”

  “Not a chance. You’re going to have to trust me. You holster that pistol and turn the girl free. I lower my Colts, and you walk out of here. I keep my guns. More importantly, you keep your life. Or . . .” Louisa hiked her right shoulder. “Kill her and die here today. Let this be your last day on earth.” Louisa smiled. “The wolves will be dining well this evening.”

  “You’re plum loco! I heard tell about you. Now I know it’s true. You’re crazier’n an owl in a lightin’ storm!”

  “Be that as it may . . .”

  Stone’s gaze was darkly pensive. Sweat dribbled down his cheeks and into his beard. He looked at the twin maws of Louisa’s Colts aimed at his head. He shifted his gaze to her eyes. “All right. I’m gonna trust you. I’m gonna believe you’re an honorable woman . . . despite all the men you’ve killed.”

  “Despite all the bad men I’ve killed.”

  “Let’s not split hairs here. I’m gonna holste
r this pistol. Then I’m gonna turn her free. Then you’re—”

  “Then I’m going to step back out of your way and wish you a good rest of the day, Norman. Who knows—maybe we’ll meet again someday.”

  Stone flared his nostrils and shook his head. “You better hope not.”

  Louisa smiled.

  “All right,” said Stone. “I’m gonna holster this hogleg.”

  “Get on with it,” Louisa said. “Can’t you see how frightened the poor girl is?”

  “You’re an honorable woman. Remember that.”

  “I’ll remember.”

  “All right.” Stone swallowed, lowered the pistol from the girl’s head. He slid it into its holster, fastened the keeper thong over the hammer. Slowly, tentatively, he removed his left arm from around the girl’s neck.

  The girl gave a relieved cry and ran toward Louisa.

  “Get behind me,” the Vengeance Queen ordered.

  The girl stepped behind Louisa.

  Stone stared at her, anger sparking in his eyes. “Lower them Colts! Step aside!”

  Louisa stretched her lips slightly back from her teeth in a shrewd, mocking smile.

  The fear in Stone’s eyes brightened. He jerked his arm up and pointed an accusing finger at Louisa. “You made a promise—you remember that! I held up my end of the bargain, you bitch!”

  “Unlike my friend Prophet, Norman,” Louisa said, sliding her lips farther back from her perfect white teeth, “I do not bargain with the devil.”

  Stone replaced his pointing finger with his palm turned outward. “Wait, now—hold on!”

  Louisa’s pistols bucked and roared. The girl behind her screamed as the bullets cut through Stone’s chest and hurled him straight out the window behind him.

  Chapter 4

  Prophet shouted, “Louisa!” as he crossed the stoop and ran through the roadhouse’s rear door.

  He stopped ten feet inside the place and looked around. The two windows to his right were broken out, and a chill breeze blew through them, sawing against the few shards of glass remaining in the frames. A fire popped and snapped in the big stone hearth between the windows, lending welcoming warmth and tempering the rotten-egg smell of burnt powder with the perfume of pine.

  A man lay on the stairs, limbs akimbo, blood oozing out of the twin holes in his chest and another in his forehead, pooling on the steps beneath him. A Spencer repeating rifle lay on the saloon floor at the base of the stairs.

  No sign of Louisa.

  Again, Prophet called her name, heard his own voice echo around the shadowy, cavernlike room. He also heard a girl’s sobbing coming from somewhere behind the crude pine bar to his left. He moved slowly into the room, quickly emptying his Colt, spinning the wheel and letting the spent cartridges clatter onto the worn puncheons beneath his boots. He winced when he saw a girl with distinctly Indian features lying across a table before him, eyes staring upward in death.

  Her face was badly bruised. Beaten. Blood oozed from a broad gash across her neck.

  As Prophet slid fresh ammo from his cartridge belt and thumbed them into the Peacemaker’s chambers, through the open loading gate, he turned his head to his left and saw Louisa standing on a second-floor balcony.

  The Vengeance Queen held a sobbing girl in her arms—a young redhead several inches shorter than Louisa and clad in only a thin shift, pantaloons, and a necklace of some kind. Colored feathers hung askew in the tangle of her thick, mussed hair. Rocking the girl gently, holding the girl’s head against her chest, Louisa turned to gaze down over the balcony rail at Prophet.

  Lou stopped, loosed a relieved sigh at seeing his partner still standing.

  The girl in her arms slowly lifted her head to gaze up at Louisa. Through her sobs, she said, “Why are men so mean? Cruel? Why . . . why . . . do they have to be so . . . poison mean?”

  “They don’t have to be,” Louisa said, tonelessly. “Some just choose to be. Maybe even most. There are a few”—she turned to stare over the balcony rail again at Prophet—“who don’t. But even they have their faults.”

  Prophet turned his mouth corners down.

  Louisa blinked as she turned back to the girl. “There’s no point in not facing facts.” She pulled away from the girl, glanced over the rail again, her eyes finding the dead Indian girl sprawled across the table near Prophet. Turning back to the redhead, she said, “You’d best go back to your room for a while. We’ll try to get it cleaned up a little down there.”

  The redhead turned to gaze down into the saloon. She looked at the dead Indian girl, her eyes glazing with fresh tears. She turned to Prophet, and the skin above the bridge of her nose wrinkled with a vague incredulity, maybe even revulsion. Prophet thought he saw it, understandably, in her eyes.

  She turned away and retreated through an open door, clicking the door closed behind her.

  Louisa turned to Prophet.

  “You all right?” Prophet asked her.

  Louisa dug a lilac-colored hanky from her coat pocket, brushed it across the side of her neck, under her long hair, and looked at it. She winced.

  “Bad?”

  She looked at him. “No.”

  Prophet chuckled. It never ceased to amuse him that while Louisa had drained out maybe a hundred gallons of blood from well-deserving men throughout the West, the sight of her own blood made her queasy. Once upon a time, it had made her pass out. Over the years, she’d gotten more used to seeing it. Now it made her only pale up for a time, like a cloudy day.

  She stuffed the hanky back into her coat pocket and began reloading her Colts.

  Prophet twirled his own walnut-gripped Colt on his finger, dropped the pistol into its holster, beneath his coat. He secured the keeper thong over the hammer then walked around behind the bar. Two more men lay dead back there. The first one, sitting on the floor and leaning against the back bar, was an older, scrawny gent with long, grizzled gray hair.

  His chin was tipped to one shoulder. Prophet might have thought him merely sleeping if it hadn’t been for the bullet hole in the man’s forehead. He wore a green apron, which marked him as the man—or one of the men—who likely ran the place. He’d apparently gotten crossways with the killers, most likely when the gang had first ridden up to the place last night. The apron-clad man was cold and pale and he was already stiff. The bullet wound in his forehead was crusted with dried blood.

  He’d been dead nearly a full day.

  Maybe he’d balked at pouring the gang free drinks, offering his doxies up for free, or at how the gang was treating the girls. Whatever the reason, he was dead. It never took much of a reason for Gritch Hatchley’s men to kill. Judging by the amount of killing they’d done in the past, they enjoyed it.

  The second dead man—a tall, fat, bearded man in a checked shirt and beaded, fringed elk hide vest—had been killed recently. Louisa must have killed him. He lay slumped to one side amidst the shards of broken bottles and spilled whiskey, blood oozing from the many glass cuts pocking his big, fleshy body.

  Prophet crouched over him, pulled the man’s head up by his hair. He recognized the round, crudely featured face from a wanted circular Prophet had out in his saddlebags. Brett Chaney, a killer from Utah who’d busted out of the Utah Territorial Pen some years ago and had somehow eluded being dragged back. His joining up with Gritch Hatchley and Hatchley’s second cousin, Weed Brougham, who formed the leadership of the bunch, had made Chaney and the rest of the gang hard to run down.

  Hatchley’s bunch was a nasty pack of bloodthirsty wolves. They’d been running off their collective leash for a good three years, since they’d all thrown in together to rob banks, trains, and stagecoaches and generally rape, pillage, and plunder to the content of their black hearts, bouncing from one territory to the next, mostly northern territories, staying two steps ahead of the law, evading capture.

  Until today, Prophet thought, letting Chaney’s head flop back down against the floor littered with broken glass. He pulled an unbroken bottle of rye
whiskey off a shelf beneath the bar, set it on the scarred oak, and grabbed a shot glass off a near pyramid.

  “Drinks are on the house, I reckon,” he said, casting a dubious glance at the dead, apron-clad gent. “Likely forever more.”

  The bounty hunter pried the cork out of the bottle with his teeth, spat it onto the floor, and splashed whiskey into the glass. He held the glass up in salute to the dead man and threw back the entire shot.

  He smacked his lips then turned sadly to the dead apron. “Sorry, partner. Truly I am. You’ll never again know the joy of a stiff shot of rotgut whiskey. Even cheap rye is bracing on a cold day that’s gonna get even colder.” He shook his head then glanced at the two broken-out windows flanking the big hearth in which the fire was dying. “It don’t help we lost two windows.” He turned to his partner, who was dropping slowly down the stairs, running one bare hand along the banister, staring at the dead Indian girl. “Hey, Vengeance Queen, was you born in a barn?”

  Chuckling to himself, Prophet refilled his shot glass. He left it on the bar without drinking it. A vague apprehension touched him. He wasn’t sure of its source.

  Frowning, pensive, he walked out from behind the bar and tramped over to the hearth. Beside the fireplace was an ancient wooden feed bin filled with old newspapers, dry branches, and split pine and post oak. He fed several of the smaller branches to the fire, building it up gradually.

  When the flames were dancing again, exhaling more pine tang into the room, he added a couple of split pine logs and then an oak knot that, if tended well, should burn half the night, holding at bay some of the chill pouring in on the breeze raking through the broken windows.

  When he had the knot arranged to his satisfaction atop the grate, he swung away from the fire, eyes widening and lower jaw sagging as he realized what had been troubling him.

  He turned to Louisa, who was striding slowly out from the bottom of the stairs. “Hey—we’re a few owlhoots short!”

  Louisa gave him one of her incredulous, impatient looks from inside the tangle of honey-blond hair framing her cameo-perfect face with bee-stung lips. She wasn’t wearing her hat, and her cream muffler hung from her shoulders. “What are you caterwauling about?”