Blood at Sundown

by Peter Brandvold

  He dragged the other dead men from around the roadhouse into the barn, as well. In the morning, he’d tie them over their horses’ backs. He and Louisa would split them up and each take half to Indian Butte and Sundown, respectively.

  When he had all the dead killers lined up in the barn, where the wild animals couldn’t get at them overnight, he carried the dead girl in the buffalo robe into the roadhouse and laid her out in a bed upstairs where Louisa had laid the Indian girl. He went back downstairs and fetched the body of the man who’d owned the place, Burton Jiggs, and laid him out on the floor beside the two dead girls. There was room on the bed for Jiggs, but it didn’t seem right, somehow.

  Prophet intended to send a sheriff for the bodies later. He’d summon one from Indian Butte. He thought the county seat was Devil’s Lake. The roadhouse would be in the sheriff’s jurisdiction. The county badge-toter could decide what to do with them, identify them, maybe wire any family they might have in the area.

  Prophet had just gotten Jiggs arranged beside the whores, when he heard light footsteps behind him. He turned to see the third girl—the sole survivor of the Hatchley gang’s depredations—walk into the room. She was small and pale and her thick red hair was like a tumbleweed around her delicate head. It hung in tangles down her back and over her shoulders.

  She held a thick quilt around her small body, drawing it closed beneath her chin, which bore one small, dark mole. Her right eye was swollen, and there were a couple of nasty cuts on her lips, but they’d scabbed up all right.

  She stood staring at the two girls on the bed. She didn’t say anything. She just stared. A single tear gathered in the corner of her right eye and dribbled down her cheek.

  Prophet sighed, pulled the bed covers up over the two dead young women. He pulled another sheet from over a chair and used it to shroud Jiggs. He walked over and placed his hands on the redhead’s shoulders, drew her to him. She succumbed to the hug stiffly at first, likely repelled by his maleness, as was understandable, but finally she leaned forward and pressed her cheek to his chest.

  “What’s your name, darlin’?” Prophet asked her, holding her.

  She took a moment to respond. It was almost as though she had to think about it.

  “Antoinette Morganson,” she said, finally. “Toni Morganson.”

  “I’m Lou Prophet, Toni. My lady friend is Louisa Bonaventure.”

  “I know,” Toni said softly. He felt her nod her head against his chest. “I’ve read about you two before . . . in the newspapers.” She paused. “They call her . . . the Vengeance Queen.”

  “They sure do.”

  Toni lifted her head and glanced up at him, her eyes vaguely ironic. “You sold your soul to the devil.”

  “Yeah, well, he was the only taker,” Prophet said with a sigh, nudging the girl’s chin with his thumb, playfully. “Come on, Toni. Let’s get you back into bed. Gonna be a cold night. You got a fire in your room?”

  Toni shook her head.

  “Show me,” Prophet said. “I’ll build one.”

  Toni turned slowly away from the two lumps of the dead girls on the bed, and Prophet followed her out of the room and down the hall to an open door. Toni walked into a small room with walls papered in dark red with gilt wheat heads standing out in relief. The furniture was typically shabby. Snow ticked against the single, small window.

  While the girl removed the quilt from her shoulders, appearing mindless of the fact that she wore nothing except frayed pantaloons and the thin shift, she crawled into the small bed.

  Prophet got a fire going in the small, sheet-iron stove in the near corner.

  “You hungry?” Prophet asked her, closing the stove door, the stove now creaking and wheezing to life as the fire grew. He turned to the girl who lay on the bed, staring up at the ceiling.

  “I don’t know,” Toni said, frowning, as though that, too, had been a difficult question.

  “I’ll see what ole Diggs had downstairs for vittles, and I’ll bring you somethin’ up, just in case you are.”

  Toni slid her gaze to him. Her eyes appeared cloudy with consternation, but gradually they cleared. She quirked her mouth corners slightly, a feeble attempt at a smile. “Thank you, Lou.”

  Prophet tossed her a wink then headed out into the hall and drew the door closed behind him.

  Chapter 6

  Prophet dropped back down the stairs to the main saloon hall.

  Louisa stood at the bar. Several sets of saddlebags lay atop the bar around her, as well as several stacks of greenbacks and burlap sacks of coins. While Prophet had been sorting out the bodies, Louisa had been going through the dead gang members’ gear, looking for the money they’d stolen out of a bank in Wyoming.

  They’d gotten away with almost forty thousand dollars and there was a 3 percent safe return fee in addition to individual bounties, which meant more bounty money for the bounty hunters.

  “Well, we’ve gotten quite a bit of it back,” Louisa said as Prophet walked around behind the bar. “They split it up but didn’t have much time to spend it. Let’s hope Hatchley and the others don’t, as well.”

  “Not much to spend it on around here,” Prophet said, “this far off the beaten path.” He splashed whiskey from his bottle into a shot glass. “I reckon ole Wind River Bob didn’t care to share any of it with Jiggs or his girls. You’re tighter’n a heifer’s ass in fly season, Bob!” he yelled over the bar at the outlaw lounging on the sofa, his injured leg drawn up, the other one on the floor.

  “Why buy the cow when you can have the milk for free?” Bob threw his head back and howled with delighted laughter, slapping the sofa back. He laughed for a long time, eyes squeezed shut.

  Finally, his guffaws dwindled to hiccups and chuckles.

  “I tell you what, you Confederate devil,” he said, brushing tears from his cheeks, “I’ll pay you full price for a bottle of that liquor you’re makin’ sure I know how much you’re enjoying over there.”

  Prophet threw back the rye. He smacked his lips and shook his head. “Mmmm-Mmmmm! That there is nectar of the gods. Makes me feel sooo good! Why, it take all the soreness out of my joints—you know, the ones you tried to pulverize with that Appy?”

  “Spare a bottle—damnit, Prophet!” Bob punched the sofa back.

  “I tell you what, Bob,” Prophet said. “I’m gonna do just that.” He pulled a bottle down from a back bar shelf. Walking around from behind the bar, he said, “Maybe this will silence your infernal caterwaulin’. It ain’t a labeled bottle, you understand. It’s probably tarantula juice old Jiggs brewed out in a stock tank in his barn, complete with strychnine and rattlesnake venom, maybe a dead lizard for seasoning. I see no reason to waste good liquor on a raping, thieving killer like you, Bob.”

  “Keepin’ the good stuff for yourself—eh, Lou?” Bob accepted the brown, unlabeled bottle. He pulled the cork out with his teeth and spit it toward the leaping flames of the fire.

  “An’ why shouldn’t I?” Prophet tramped back over to the bar.

  He stopped near where Louisa stood, still counting money and penciling figures onto an open notepad, and turned his head to see Toni coming down the stairs on the room’s opposite side. The young doxie held the same quilt as before around her slender shoulders, drawing the corners up tight beneath her chin.

  “Sorry, honey,” Prophet said. “I said I was gonna bring you some vittles. I reckon I got sidetracked.”

  “That’s all right.” Toni moved from the bottom of the steps toward the bar. “I ain’t hungry, after all. Couldn’t sleep, either. I keep seein’ . . .” She shook her head as though to nudge troubling thoughts away.

  She moved up to the bar near Louisa.

  “I reckon I didn’t feel like bein’ alone up there,” the girl said in a thin, faraway voice.

  “We’re all alone,” Louisa said, absently, scribbling figures on the pad. “Either up there or down here.”

  Prophet nudged her left boot with his right one. When she turned to
him, brows arched, he gave her an admonishing look. Louisa hiked a shoulder and returned to her figures.

  “Ha-ha!” Bob laughed. “Ain’t that just like the Vengeance Queen? As philosophical as she is purty.”

  Toni turned toward the sofa. “That him?” she asked. “That the last one?”

  Prophet splashed more whiskey into his shot glass. “Pretty close to the last one. Four more are still running off their leashes but not for long.”

  Toni pushed away from the bar and, holding the quilt taut beneath her chin, walked over to the end of the sofa. She stopped and faced Bob, standing near his left boot resting on the hemp rug on the floor before the snapping hearth. She shook the thick ribbons of her red hair back from her eyes.

  Bob looked her blanket-wrapped body up and down, slowly, leeringly.

  “Hello, sweet thing,” the outlaw grunted. He quirked half of his mouth in a mocking grin. “You miss ole Bob?”

  The girl stared at him dully, shook her head slowly.

  “No, I haven’t been missing you, Bob. I’ll likely smell your stench, just like Hatchley’s, till the day I die.”

  Bob chuckled.

  “I’ll tell you who’s calling for you, Bob.”

  “Oh?” Bob said, arching one brow. “Who’s that?”

  “The devil.” Toni opened her hands, releasing the quilt. It dropped to her bare feet. In her right hand was a .38 caliber, elaborately engraved, Merwin & Hulbert revolver. “You should go see him, maybe.”

  “Whoa now!” Bob said, sitting straight up and holding both his hands toward the girl, palms out. “Stop! Stop! Sto—”

  The pop of the little pocket pistol cut off Bob’s last plea.

  Bob howled and snapped his right hand down, falling back against the sofa arm behind him. He held his hand up in front of his face, mouth wide in astonishment. The bullet had drilled a bloody hole through his palm. It had drilled a second one into his chest from which blood was now beginning to ooze.

  “Stop her!” Bob wailed, looking down in horror at the blood bubbling out of his chest. “Stop her! For chrissakes, stop the crazy little polecat!”

  Holding the pocket pistol in both her small hands, Toni fired again, again, and again. She blinked with every shot, gritting her teeth.

  With each shot, Bob jerked violently back against the arm of the sofa. As he rolled to his left and fell off the sofa to the floor with a heavy thud, Toni fired twice more. She would have fired one more time, but the pistol’s hammer pinged benignly against the firing pin.

  Lou and Louisa stared in shock from the bar.

  Toni stared down at Bob. Smoke from the Merwin & Hulbert wafted around her.

  “There,” she said, finally, reaching down and pulling the quilt up around her shoulders again. “I think I’ll sleep better now.”

  She padded barefoot across the room toward the balcony stairs.

  Prophet turned slowly to Louisa, his lower jaw hanging.

  Louisa raised her brows and dipped her chin in appreciation. “She’ll do.”

  * * *

  Prophet dragged Wind River Bob outside and added him to the carnage in the barn.

  He also hazed the horses into the barn from the corral, for the wind was really howling now, and more snow was coming down. It was damn cold and would likely get colder. Horses needed shelter from such weather as much as people did.

  Prophet knew from previous experience how cold it could get here. And how much snow could fall, choking the ravines. This wasn’t the first time he’d gotten caught in Dakota Territory this late in the year, when he should have been close enough to the Mexican border that he could smell the tequila and pulque, the carnitas enchiladas, the salt tang of the Sea of Cortez, and the beguilingly gamy aromas of the dusky-skinned señoritas who plied their artful trade in those balmy climes.

  When he’d gotten the dozen or so horses into their stalls, he heard Mean and Ugly kicking his own stable door and whickering darkly, customarily spoiling for a fight. Most of the other horses just glanced sidelong at him over their stall partitions, their eyes glistening in the darkness, skeptically pricking their ears.

  “Look how well behaved these killers’ horses are, Mean,” Prophet admonished his ewe-necked hammerhead. “Ain’t you ashamed?”

  With that, he closed the barn doors and ran to the roadhouse, holding his hat on his head with one hand and watching his footing. It was true dark now and about all he could see before him was murky darkness stitched with swirling snow.

  Once back in the roadhouse, he ate some of the beans Louisa had cooked from a tripod over the fire, then brought a bowl up to Toni. The doxie was sound asleep in her bed, snoring softly. Prophet smiled at that. He vaguely wondered if Toni and Louisa weren’t somehow related, for nothing made the Vengeance Queen sleep so well as killing men who needed killing.

  He left the beans on the doxie’s chest of drawers, banked her fire against the cold night, then went back downstairs and polished off the whiskey in his labeled bottle. He was too exhausted to talk. Louisa appeared that way, as well.

  She sat staring into the fire, sipping her coffee. They both had a good long ride ahead of them tomorrow, possibly in several feet of snow, so Prophet shrugged out of his coat and hat, kicked out of his boots, and plopped down on the same sofa on which Wind River Bob had met his well-deserved, bloody end. He drew his blanket roll up over him, against the chill wind howling through the broken windows.

  Louisa sat up for a while, staring into the fire.

  Finally, she banked the fire in the hearth, nudged Prophet as far back against the sofa as he could get his tall, brawny frame, and then stretched her slender, willowy body down against his, facing away from him. He wrapped his arms around her, sniffed her hair, nuzzled her neck, and kissed her left ear.

  “Thanks for breaking out those windows,” he growled, shivering against the unabated breeze.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  She put his right hand on her left breast, snuggled back against him, groaning luxuriously. She ground her round rump against him then glanced over her shoulder at him, frowning.

  “Take your gun off.”

  “I did.”

  Louisa’s frown became an exasperated scowl. “After this long day and a whole bottle of whiskey?” Louisa lay her head back down with a sigh. “Men!”

  Chapter 7

  A low growling nudged Prophet from the depths of sleep.

  The growling stopped. Prophet didn’t know how much time passed, for he was falling back into sweet slumber once more, before the growling came again—longer, sharper, more angry.

  The sound pulled him out of his slumber again, all the way out this time. He lifted his head from the sofa and slitted one eye to see a large, round, shaggy head with a long black snout and two mud-black eyes, ears angling back and quivering. Leathery, whisker-bristling lips rose from the beast’s mouth, showing bone-white, peglike teeth framed by long, curved fangs.

  The dark eyes, flat with wild savagery, glared at Prophet from three feet away. Lou could smell the sweet, dead-meat fetor of the beast’s breath.

  The bounty hunter jerked his head farther up with a start and an involuntary, clipped yell.

  The wolf wheeled with a frightened yelp, ran toward the saloon’s far wall flanking the stone hearth, and leaped up and through the broken-out window in which granular snowflakes swirled. The beast was a mottled gray and blue blur in the dingy shadows. There was a soft thump as the four feet hit the snowy ground outside the roadhouse, and then soft, frantic thuds faded as the wolf ran away, breath rasping.

  “What is it?” Louisa said, lifting her head and looking around, her hair in her eyes. “What’s the matter, Lou?”

  “You sure sleep sound for a bounty hunter!” Prophet exclaimed, his heart still pounding. “There was a wolf in here!”

  “I always sleep sound when I’m with you, because I know you don’t. What are you talking about? A wolf? Inside?”

  “Sure as hell!”

 
“You were dreaming. Go back to sleep.” Louisa stared toward the window, touched with the grays and blues of the early dawn. “Sun’s not up yet. And it’s cold and snowy. I need another hour. Build up the fire, will you?”

  “Hell, I can’t go back to sleep after that.” Prophet crawled over his slender partner and rose, staring at the window through which the wolf had disappeared and through which snow swirled, dusting the floor several feet in front of it, around the now-cold hearth. “We was wolf bait. That beast likely smelled the carrion in the barn. Couldn’t get in the barn but he could get in here through them windows. I should’ve boarded ’em up.”

  “What’s that horrible smell?” Louisa said, curled in a ball beneath Prophet’s bedroll, eyes closed but frowning as she sniffed the air. “First thing you should do when you get to Indian Butte, Lou, is take a bath.”

  “That’s the wolf stench!”

  “Hush.” Louisa turned over with a groan, giving her back to him. “I need another hour. Occupy yourself, please, Lou. Quietly.”

  “‘Occupy yourself, Lou,’” Prophet mimicked, sitting in a chair and pulling on a fur-lined moccasin. “‘Quietly.’ Miss Uppity Britches.”

  Louisa snored softly into the back of the sofa, sound asleep.

  Prophet pulled on his other moccasin. “Wolf bait is what we was. Here, I survived the War of Northern Aggression and a dozen years on the wild and woolly frontier, hunting the baddest men for the highest bounties, and I was damn near ate by a damned wolf while sleeping in a backwater Dakota watering hole!”

  He moved to the cold hearth, muttering, “‘Occupy yourself, please, Lou. Quietly. Take a bath when you get to Indian Butte, Lou!’”

  He took an iron poker and poked at the remnants of last night’s fire until a flame licked up from a bit of burned log. He added paper and bark to the flame, growing it, then added twigs and branches and finally a couple of stout, split logs. Soon, a fire was once again licking up through the chimney, panting like a baby dragon and putting up a fight against the bone-splintering chill in the room.