Hell's Angel

by Peter Brandvold

  “Sheriff in?” Prophet asked.

  The barber studied the burdened pinto clomping along behind the stranger. “I don’t keep track of Mortimer.”

  Prophet reined up in front of the small, whitewashed adobe-brick building on the far side of the barbershop. A wooden shingle over the front door announced simply: MOON’S WELL SHERIFF. Just as Prophet began to swing down from Mean’s back, the door opened and a straight-backed, broad-shouldered, middle-aged man ducked under the low jam, puffing a meerschaum pipe.

  He wore a three-piece suit but no hat, and his eyes were long, dark, and cunning as they swept Prophet quickly and then the pinto and its human cargo. Too quickly and furtively for most men to catch, he used his right thumb to flick the keeper thong off the hammer of the Schofield .44 holstered slightly left of his belly, in a hand-tooled, black leather holster.

  He stood on the porch in front of his open office door, scowling at Prophet and smoking his pipe. Despite the black shirt he wore under a black leather vest under a tobacco tweed coat, he somehow didn’t look hot. A town sheriff’s star glistened on the black vest.

  He had more the look of an aging gunman than a lawman.

  “Mortimer . . . ?”

  Holding Mean’s reins in one hand, Prophet stared at the man and riffled through memories the way he’d often riffled through old wanted dodgers, trying to put a name to a face.

  “Prophet?” The sheriff of Moon’s Well returned the foxily pensive stare. “Lon? No, Lou Prophet. Rebel bounty hunter from Georgia. Sold his soul to the Devil after the war.”

  “Lee Mortimer.” Prophet nodded his surprise to see the old gunman after all these years. Funny how when you hadn’t seen a noted outlaw in a while you just naturally assumed they’d taken a pill they hadn’t been able to digest and were slumbering long and hard on a boot hill somewhere in the frontier outback.

  “One and the same.”

  “Someone said you was back-shot by George Deushay in Sioux City.”

  “Iowa City. Amazing what a good doctor with a sharp scalpel can do nowadays.”

  Prophet poked his hat brim off his forehead. “Well, now I seen everything. An old, no-account gunslinger wearing a sheriff’s star. How old are you, anyways?”

  “Forty-five.”

  “Shit.”

  “All right! I won’t own up to a day past fifty.” Mortimer canted his head to indicate the pinto and narrowed one dark eye with menace. “One of those dead men you’re haulin’ around like firewood is the Rio Bravo Kid—my deputy.”

  “Ah, hell, he ain’t dead.” Prophet walked toward the pinto’s cargo. “I just ran him against a boulder when he played like he was a farmyard bull and I was a younker too dumb to step out of his way.” He chuckled. “Of course, I might have had a hand in helpin’ him to smack the rock so hard, but rest assured, Mortimer, he had it comin’.”

  “Don’t doubt it a bit,” the Moon’s Well sheriff said.

  Prophet reached up, tucked his hands behind the Rio Bravo Kid’s cartridge belt, and pulled him down off the pinto’s back. He propped him against the horse while he dipped a key out of a pocket to unlock the cuffs securing the Kid’s wrists.

  The Kid grunted and blinked. His eyes were hard but vacant, like he wasn’t sure who he was or what had happened to him yet.

  Prophet turned to Mortimer, who’d walked around the front of the pinto to regard his deputy with grim despair, continuing to puff the stately-looking meerschaum. “What’s his real name?” Prophet asked.

  “Vernon Cartwright.”

  “And he grew up along the Rio Bravo, did he?”

  “Nah.” Mortimer shook his head. “Somewhere up in Nebraska. He just liked the sound of the name.”

  “It does have a ring to it, but couldn’t you have found a better deputy?”

  “I didn’t find him. My boss did.”

  “Boss?”

  Mortimer dipped his chin toward the big hotel up the street on the right.

  Prophet looked at the Rio Bravo Kid. “You best keep a shorter leash on him. He might run into some jake who doesn’t have a heart as big as mine and drills a bullet through his.”

  Mortimer was staring at his deputy, who was leaning back against the pinto, glaring at Prophet between hard, quick blinks of his pain-racked eyes. He had a lump the size of a horseshoe high on his forehead. It was gunmetal blue and there was a small, dried cut in the middle of it. “Rio, go on inside. Have a drink. The bull teams will be here soon, and we’re both gonna need to be on our toes.”

  The Rio Bravo Kid bunched his fists at his sides as he leaned forward and said through gritted teeth, “This bastard rammed me into the side of a rock!”

  “Get on inside!”

  “I want my gun back!” Rio held out his hand.

  Prophet pulled the Kid’s nickel-plated Colt out from behind his own cartridge belt, flicked open the loading gate, and turned the wheel until all six cartridges were lying in the dust at his boots. A rising breeze, chill with the coming night, brushed a few grains of sand over them.

  Prophet set the gun in the Kid’s hand. The Kid stared down at the six brass bullets in the street, as though he were looking at his own manhood down there, and then shoved the pistol down hard in his holster.

  “This ain’t over by a long stretch,” he told Prophet and stomped off toward the jailhouse.

  Prophet looked at the man still draped over the pinto’s back. “Now that fella there is dead,” he said. “And if I killed him, I’d have killed your deputy there, too, instead of wrappin’ him up like a damn Christmas present and settin’ him on your doorstep. Just so we understand each other. I’ve had my fill of runnin’ down in Mexico. I’d just as soon take it easy for a while.”

  He smiled, but the corners of his mouth were tight, and he kept an edge in his gaze as he waited for Mortimer’s response.

  The man didn’t look at the dead Ranger. He knocked his pipe against his hand until the dottle dropped into the tan dust around the Kid’s cartridges. “You look like you could use a drink and a bath, Prophet,” he said in a leisurely way. “May I recommend the dwarf’s place?”

  “Moon’s House of a Thousand Delights?”

  “It’s second to none, which is good, since there’s none even remotely like it within two hundred miles in any direction. He has some of the best women in Texas.” Mortimer lowered his voice and glanced along the street toward the big, purple saloon, as though he was afraid someone might hear. “It’s not bad.”

  “I saw it.” Prophet stepped into Mean’s saddle. “I do believe me and my horse could a use a drink of water first, though.”

  6

  LEE MORTIMER WATCHED the big, broad-shouldered bounty hunter lead his horse back in the direction of the well. Prophet had left the Rio Bravo Kid’s horse behind, the dead Ranger still strapped behind the saddle. Unease gripped the sheriff of Moon’s Well, causing snakes to writhe beneath the buckle of his cartridge belt.

  He took one last drag off his cheroot, tossed the three-quarter-smoked cigar into the deep, floury dust of the street beyond the worn wooden stoop, and then swung around and walked into the jailhouse.

  There were two, cage-like iron cells at the back of the shack, which had been a Mexican casa at one time, long before Chisos La Grange had bought the Spanish land grant certificate from some old Spaniard who’d inherited the certificate but wanted nothing more than to be rid of the oozing boil on the devil’s ass. That was before La Grange had dug the well, of course, and made the land around it worth something again.

  Before that, in wetter, more prosperous times, there’d been a spring about a quarter mile out of town, in the direction of the Chisos Mountains. The precious water had had to be hauled into the settlement daily by the Mexican inhabitants who’d served the local patron, whose ruin of a hacienda sat west of town, in the Chisos Mountain foothills. There had also
been several springs near the old rancho, but when they had gone dry, as the one near the village had gone dry after a prolonged and devastating drought, the ranch had failed and been abandoned by the grandees who’d inhabited it—descendants of an old Spanish family who had dwelled here for over two hundred years.

  Now the grandees were gone, and Chisos La Grange was gone. But the dwarf was here, having bought the land grant for a measly two hundred and fifty dollars. And Mordecai Moon’s girl, Griselda May, was here, of course, as well.

  Who could forget her?

  Moon and Miss May had hired Lee Mortimer to oversee the place. He wore a badge that Moon himself had cut from a peach tin lid and had pinned to the sheriff’s vest with somber seriousness. Just as seriously, Mortimer was to enforce the dwarf’s laws governing the well and the sprawling grant that the grandees had abandoned a hundred years ago, though most of the permanent residents were a handful of Mexicans and the ten or so businessmen who operated the shops.

  The rest of the grant was populated mostly by rattlesnakes, Gila monsters, wild pigs, roadrunners, and the occasional old Kiowa warrior who, abandoned by his tribe, returned to his ancestral homeland to die in some cave up in the mountains. Mortimer rarely needed to leave town. The dwarf and Miss May had, only two months ago, directed him to hire the Rio Bravo Kid as his sole deputy, who lay now on a cot in one of the two cells at the back of the shack that served as a sheriff’s office and jail here in Moon’s Well.

  The Kid had been Griselda’s whimsical idea, apparently for no more reason than she liked the sound of the Kid’s name, though the Kid’s actual handle was Vernon Cartwright. Only lately had Mortimer begun to suspect there were other reasons that Miss May had wanted a peach tin lid pinned to the Rio Bravo Kid’s pinto vest.

  Mortimer didn’t want to think about that. He’d come here nine months ago, on the dodge from several federal arrest warrants, seeking only peace and quiet. He’d accepted the sheriff’s job because the dwarf had offered to pay him well, and up till now, at least, there hadn’t been much to it.

  And the weather out here was good for his girl, Wanda Copper, who was hacking her consumptive lungs up out in the shack they shared behind the sheriff’s office.

  “Why the hell didn’t you shoot that man?” Mortimer’s booming voice thundered around the cave-like adobe casa. He stood between his rolltop desk and the Kid’s cell, pointing a finger in the general direction of the well to which Lou Prophet had headed. “When you had the chance out in the desert? Why didn’t you take it?”

  The Kid had been lying belly down on the cot. Groaning now, he rolled over and sat up, clamping his fingers to his temples. “You gotta yell so consarned loud?”

  “Rio, you’re sneakier’n a damn cat,” Mortimer said, not lowering his voice an octave. “You had the drop on that bounty hunter. Why didn’t you kill him and bury him out there with the Ranger?”

  Mortimer had sent the Kid out to make sure the Ranger was dead, and to bury him. Now, not only did Mortimer have the Ranger’s body to contend with here in town, where anyone might see it and get the word out to the Rangers what had happened, but he had a bounty hunter sniffing around.

  Prophet would likely die in a few minutes, if he didn’t pay for his water, that was—and he didn’t look like a man who would—but that wasn’t such a good thing, either. If the dwarf kept killing men who didn’t pay the outlandish price for his water, the powder keg that was Moon’s Well would surely explode before Mortimer was ready. Before he’d made enough money to pull his picket pin and drift for Mexico, and before his woman, and the mother of his deceased son, was well enough to travel.

  Mortimer was in a tight spot. As tight a bind as he’d ever been in, even when he’d had posses hot on his heels.

  “Rio, goddamnit, why didn’t you kill Prophet?”

  “I heard you the first time, Sheriff!” the Kid cried, dropping his boots to the floor and holding his head like a tender, oversized egg in his hands. “I don’t know, I tell you. I reckon . . . you know . . . I thought I’d gun him fair. You know—not just shoot him with my long gun when he didn’t even have his pistol drawn.”

  “That’s exactly what you should have done, you simple fool!” Mortimer scowled into the cell at the Rio Bravo Kid, who leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, lightly massaging his temples with his fingers. “Look what happened to you! You think the dwarf didn’t see you being hauled into town belly down across your horse? You think he didn’t see the dead Ranger, too? Prophet sure as hell saw him, and he’ll probably put it together who shot him. And who else might have saw? In an hour or so, the bull trains are gonna come stormin’ in here. If the wrong person sees a dead Ranger and they get word to the Rangers up at Alpine . . .”

  “Ah, hell, Mr. Moon ain’t afraid of no Rangers,” the Kid said. He chuckled. “You seen what he did to them two this afternoon.”

  “That was madness. He won’t get by with any more of that or we’ll get ten, fifteen Rangers ridin’ in. Possibly with that many territorial marshals backin’ ’em.”

  “You tell him.” Rio stretched a faintly jeering smile at Mortimer. “Go on—I dare ya, Sheriff. Tell Mr. Moon to stop shootin’ Rangers and anyone else who won’t pay for his water.”

  Rage boiled in Mortimer. He had a mind to haul his old Remington out and gut-shoot the Kid. But that would only lead to more trouble. He was stuck with the Kid whether he liked it or not.

  He extended a long, tan finger at the Kid in the cell and narrowed a glinting brown eye. “Get out there and bury that Ranger in the desert with the other one. Bury him deep—don’t just scratch out a hole. I don’t want the coyotes draggin’ the bloody parts around. And then get over to the well and see if you can rein in whatever’s goin’ on over there.”

  He’d heard voices raised in anger, and it had caused the snakes in his belly to coil up tighter than hang-rope knots.

  “My head hurts!” Rio groaned.

  “You heard me, Rio!”

  Mortimer wanted nothing more to do with the dwarf today. He stomped, spurs chinging loudly on the hard-packed earthen floor, past the Kid’s cell to the office’s back door. He pushed out into the dwindling sunlight. He walked out past a small privy and into the brush flanking it, down a slight hill, across a narrow, gravelly wash where little birds flitted amongst the mesquite branches, and into the yard of the shack that he shared with Wanda Copper.

  It was a crumbling, pink adobe—two rooms downstairs, a small loft in the upper story for sleeping. Home to mainly spiders before Mortimer had moved in, Wanda had made it a home crudely but pleasantly outfitted with whatever mismatched furniture and eating utensils she’d managed to scavenge on days she felt up to it.

  The chubby Mexican woman, Bienvenida, who raised chickens a ways off in the desert and whose husband supplied the dwarf’s massive saloon with firewood in exchange for free water, looked up from her needlework as Mortimer walked into the stone-floored casa. He closed the door quietly behind him, hung his hat on a wall spike. Inwardly, he recoiled at the cloying, copper smell of blood, the musk of human sickness, and the boiled-mushroom smell of medicinal herbs and roots hanging from the rafters to dry.

  Bienvenida sat in the shack’s living area, at the foot of the bed on which Wanda lay in her rumpled nightgown, a single sheet covering her. Wanda’s red hair spilled across her pillow. Blood flecked the pillow as well as the white handkerchief she held in her hand in front of her mouth. Her pale blue, red-rimmed eyes were open, and they had that strained, wild look they acquired on days when her affliction was especially acute.

  “Bad?” asked Mortimer.

  She smiled weakly. “Better now. Are you home to stay?”

  Mortimer half turned his head toward the door, listening for sounds from the street despite his wanting to know nothing of what was occurring by the well. Dread pressed its cold hand to the small of his back. He had to get himself and Wanda
out of here soon, before the dwarf took Mortimer and Wanda—not to mention everyone else in the town he’d named after himself—down with him.

  The sheriff glanced at Bienvenida and dipped his chin, his signal that he’d take over Wanda’s tending now. The woman, clad in a sack dress and sandals, her long, coarse, black hair flowing back over her heavy shoulders, rose from the hide-bottom rocker and shoved her needlework into a small burlap pouch.

  Bienvenida, who had cared for Wanda since Mortimer and the ex–saloon girl had come to Moon’s Well, claimed that she was a descendant of the rancho’s original patron, her great-grandmother being the love child of his with a half-wild Kiowa girl.

  Now the stubby Mexican woman, whose stomach and heavy, sagging bosom bowed out the front of her shabby dress that was adorned with ancient talismans, glanced at the little monkey stove in the corner, on which a steaming kettle sat, and told Mortimer in Spanish to administer the tea in a couple of hours. It would fight the demon in the girl’s lungs and help her sleep.

  Bienvenida held up a stubby, admonishing finger, glanced at a bottle on the shelf above the stove, and wagged her jowly head. “No busthead,” she said in English. “No busthead! Good for the demon, bad for Wanda!”

  Mortimer held up his hands in capitulation. “No busthead, Bienvenida.”

  The Mexican woman leaned over Wanda and pressed her lips to the ex–saloon girl’s forehead, muttered some quick Spanish, and then waddled over to the door and headed out to her own little shack, her irrigated gardens, and her husband and three young grandchildren, all awaiting supper.