Staring Down the Devil (A Lou Prophet Western #5)

by Peter Brandvold

  “I am very happy for you,” she said tonelessly. She’d never hated anyone as she hated him. She’d never feared anyone as she feared him.

  “I brought you something,” he said cheerfully, as though he were speaking to a woman there of her own accord, one who would not slit his throat if given the chance.

  She stared at him.

  “Another dress.”

  Her indifference must have registered in her hazel eyes, for he smiled ruefully and said, “My women do not go around in jeans like you were wearing when we first met — jeans and a ratty old shirt and hat.” He chuckled. “No, no, no. My women wear only the finest dresses in the land.”

  She said nothing to this. She did not like dresses. But then, she didn’t like anything about this situation she found herself in, being held prisoner by this madman in his mountaintop adobe house above the village of Broken Knee — his village.

  “Don’t worry, Marya,” he cooed in her ear, blowing her hair back from her neck. “You’ll get used to the dresses, as you’ll get used to me . . . when you finally realize you have no choice in the matter.”

  His breath smelled like something dead. She wrinkled her nose and fought back a gag.

  She didn’t say anything. She wished he would just go ahead and mount her and get it over with.

  He stroked her hair again and kissed her. “Have you decided, my pretty, to tell me your little secret?”

  She smiled coyly. “What secret?”

  He nuzzled her neck. “You know the one.”

  “Oh, that one.” It was hard to speak without the rage and revulsion she felt toward this man who had imprisoned her here and pretended they were more than what they were — captor and captive.

  “Yes, that secret.” He lifted his head and smiled into her face. His cold eyes sent a shiver up her spine.

  It was not only his eyes that made her shiver. She’d seen firsthand the horror he was capable of when he’d killed her old friend, Bert Moriarty. Bert had teamed up with her to look for gold in the Pinaleno Mountains. Only, Bert hadn’t realized he’d been leading her off to the prison of Leamon Gay’s stony, mountain house, an old hacienda once occupied by a Mexican rancher and situated high to discourage attacks by marauding Apaches.

  How could Bert have known?

  How could he have known such an evil man existed on earth, much less in the mountains where Bert and Marya were looking for a cache of lost Spanish treasure? How could he have known he’d meet up with such a man who would kill him in the crudest way possible and imprison young Marya in the hacienda — at the veritable and literal edge of the rocky, sun-seared earth?

  Poor Bert . . .

  “Yes, that secret,” Leamon Gay repeated now. He nipped her neck gently. It hurt only a little, but she recoiled inside. She knew the pain he was capable of inflicting.

  “No, I’m not ready to give up that one yet,” she said. “A girl can’t give up all her secrets, you know.”

  She blinked to clear her vision. Still, she saw Gay thrust his knife into Bert’s belly. She saw the blood flow over the hilt, heard Bert scream. . . .

  Gay chuckled. “Oh, you are a little demon, aren’t you?” He crawled between her legs, which she opened for him. She wanted him to get on with his ravenous coupling so she could follow through with her plan to avenge Bert’s death and to escape this madman once and for all.

  Gay kissed her hungrily, nipped her lip as he pulled away. Rising up on his arms, he stared down into her face, only a faint smile now tugging at his thin, sunburned lips. His eyes were at once sharp and merry. “You do know that if you weren’t such a lovely little thing you’d be dead by now, don’t you?”

  She pursed her lips, staring back at him, not saying anything.

  Bert’s eyes found her, filled with terror and pleading. And then they dimmed and rolled back into his head. . . .

  Gay lifted a hand to her right shoulder, slid the strap of her nightgown down her arm, revealing her small, firm breast. He gazed at it wolfishly, his tongue slightly protruding the knife slash of his mouth. His long white hair caressed her skin, which pimpled with revulsion. “I’d have tortured the truth from you and then let you die as our good friend Bert died.”

  He removed the other strap, laying bare the other breast. He kissed it, tongued the nipple.

  Bert’s eyes closed as he stumbled back, clutching at the knife in his belly. Held by two of Gay’s men, a knife at her throat, Marya watched her old friend fall to the ground and die.

  “You do know that, don’t you?”

  She nodded, swallowed, trying to get a rein on her fear, on her revulsion. “Yes.” Her voice was a whisper.

  “Good.”

  While he grunted on top of her, bunching his ugly face as though in pain, she casually dropped her left hand over the side of the bed. She felt around for the knife she’d smuggled out of the kitchen and hid beneath the mattress. She probed at the mattress with her fingers, moving them up and down and up again, her movements growing frantic. Her heart pounded.

  The knife wasn’t there!

  But it had to be there. She’d put it there just last night, in anticipation of his return from town. . . .

  Suddenly he stopped. “What’s the matter?”

  She snapped her gaze at him, trying to arrange an innocent expression. “What do you mean?”

  “What are you looking for?” His voice and eyes were dull.

  She shook her head slowly. “I was not looking . . . nothing.”

  “Is this” — his right hand grabbed something from the rumpled quilts beside him, and he thrust it toward her face so quickly it was all a blur — “what you’re looking for?”

  She screamed and whipped her head sideways. Missing her face by inches, the knife plunged into her pillow with a popping and tearing sound. Feathers flew. When Marya opened her eyes again, she saw him staring down at her savagely, his face turkey red, the dangling white hair contrasting it sharply.

  “Is that what you’re looking for?” he raged. Then he laughed madly. “Silly girl — you think I don’t know how much you despise me?” He laughed again.

  She lay still, her head down, waiting for the final blow, knowing there was nothing she could do to stop him. He was a powerful man. She was only a girl, barely eighteen years old, barely over a hundred pounds.

  “No!” she cried, fear overcoming her. “No, please! Don’t kill me!”

  “No, please, don’t keel me!” he mocked her accent. He grabbed her chin brusquely, turned her head to face him. “Don’t worry, my sweet little Russian queen. I’m not going to kill you just yet.”

  He pulled the knife from the pillow, tossed it on the floor in a cloud of feathers. He went to work on her again, and when he was done, he climbed hastily off.

  Staring down at her, he said, “But if you haven’t told me where the treasure is in forty-eight hours, I will turn you over to my Mexican miners. And when they’re done with you, if there’s anything left, they’ll sell you to the Apaches. Those red savages will know just how to get the utmost pleasure from a little polecat like you.”

  Leamon Gay turned, picked up the knife, and padded barefoot out of the room.

  Behind him, Marya Roskov drew her arms tight across her breasts, raised her knees, and turned onto her side, sobbing.

  The coach squawked and clattered into the little mountain town of Broken Knee later that same day. Sergei was back in the driver’s box, and Prophet was back atop Mean and Ugly.

  He’d led the way up the trail that wound through the barren, rocky mountains under the scorching desert sun and leveled out finally between two rows of false-fronted buildings so new that the smell of pine still tanged the air. Those buildings constructed from adobe still looked wet. Even the sign standing along the road, proudly announcing BROKEN KNEE, appeared as though it had been painted and erected only yesterday by an optimistic booster. The sun hadn’t faded it yet, as it did most things in this neck of the woods.

  Prophet felt a bit faded
himself, as desert trailing was wont to do to a man. He gazed around at the hustling little town, wondering where he and the Russians would find the countess’s sister amidst all these coverall-clad miners and dusty mules and sun-bleached ore wagons and no-account drifters squinting out from under the awnings before saloons, whiskies and warm beers clenched in their hands.

  It was loud for such a tiny, haphazard-looking berg nestled between enormous mountains strewn with orange boulders and saguaro cactus. Tin-panny music clattered from several saloons. Whores laughed, men guffawed and whooped, mules brayed, steel-rimmed wheels churned the dusty, packed street, and chickens squawked nearly everywhere. Crows cawed from atop the wood facades.

  Above it all rose the raucous thunder of the stamping mill that stood about a hundred yards beyond the other end of town and another hundred yards up the mountain. That’s where all the ore wagons appeared to be heading as they trailed in from the west. The empty ones clattered back down Main Street, curving through a narrow pass in the western ridge, into the desert and, presumably, to the mine that had lured this sweaty, dusty humanity and din to these wretched mountains.

  Prophet grinned up at a scantily clad whore flaunting her wares from a flophouse balcony as he halted Mean and Ugly, the coach pulling up behind.

  “Need some lovin’, cowboy?” the whore asked.

  She was a hefty blonde with purple feathers in her hair.

  “Maybe later,” Prophet said. “In the meantime, what’s the fanciest hotel in town?”

  The whore shrugged and sucked on the wooden tip of her cigarette. “There ain’t nothin’ fancy in Broken Knee, sugarplum. But the best place is the Gay Inn over yonder. The bedbugs are under ten pounds and the spiders don’t charge ye for the stings.”

  “Why’s it called the Gay Inn? They have a lot of fun over there?”

  The whore laughed as though it was the funniest thing she’d heard all morning. “Leamon Gay owns it, like everything else in this town.”

  Prophet considered the information, remembering what Riley Fergus had told him about Leamon Gay. “Much obliged,” he told the whore, raising his hat.

  “No problem, honey,” the woman said. “Come see me sometime. You and your friend.”

  “We’ll do that,” Prophet said. He turned to Sergei, who regarded the whore appreciatively. “Why don’t we head over there first and make the countess comfortable? I’ll take the coach and horses over to the livery barn.”

  “Do you think it is appropriate for a lady?” Sergei asked, scrutinizing the hotel about forty yards up and across the street.

  It was a three-story, unpainted building with a wide veranda. THE GAY INN had been painted above the awning in bright red letters. There was a patio of sorts, covered with gravel and from which a single saguaro jutted, its right arm twisted around behind itself.

  “Doubt it,” Prophet said.

  Sergei nodded grimly, obviously not approving of the town. He waited for a thundering ore wagon to pass, then shook the reins over the bays’ backs and headed for the hotel.

  When the countess and Sergei had gone into the Gay Inn behind the two young men hefting their luggage, Prophet led the bays to the livery barn and dismounted before the two wide doors that seemed to beckon him into the cool shadows within.

  He’d never been so tired of the sun in his life. He secured a couple stalls from the hostler and parked the coach out back, where the hostler assured him it would be safe from the criminal element Prophet knew to be part and parcel of any booming berg like Broken Knee.

  “Tell me,” Prophet said as he left Mean and Ugly’s stall, where he’d watched to make sure the hostler fed the horse plenty of oats and cool well water. “You ever seen this girl?”

  Deciding there was no time like the present to get started looking for the countess’s sister — the sooner he found her the sooner he could get out of this hellhole — he’d fished Marya Roskov’s picture from his shirt pocket. The countess had provided him with the picture of the young blonde with a delicate, fine-featured face and expressive eyes.

  “No, never seen that one,” the hostler said. His name was Jorge Assante, he’d told Prophet — a barrel-chested Mexican with a round, unshaven face and a floppy straw hat. “I see plenty like her, though. Maybe not that pretty, but cheap. Try the Opera Hat Tavern or, better yet, try the —”

  “No,” Prophet said, shaking his head. “This girl isn’t a whore. She might be looking for gold.”

  “A girl? Looking for gold, senor?” The Mexican was incredulous. “Not around here. Muy dangerous! Muchos bandidos and Apaches! Besides, Senor Gay — he doesn’t like anyone sniffing around his mountains. Unless they work for him, I mean. No prospectors.” Assante shook his head. Eyes wide with gravity, he ran his index finger across his throat.

  “That a fact?” Prophet asked, remembering that one of the Miller twins had made the same gesture when speaking of Gay.

  Shaking his head slowly, the hostler walked back into the shadows to retrieve the fork he’d been using to muck out the stalls when Prophet had ridden up.

  To his back, Prophet said, “So this guy is a pretty big hombre around here, eh?” He was fishing for information — anything at all.

  The Mexican didn’t say anything. He took up his fork and walked into a stall.

  Prophet persisted. “Just how powerful is this Gay fella, anyway?” If Gay didn’t like prospectors intruding on what he considered to be his mining rights, he might have been responsible for Marya’s disappearance. It was worth looking into, anyway.

  The hostler stopped. “Take my advice, senor,” he said softly, just loudly enough for Prophet to hear. “Go and enjoy the town. Spend some money. The liquor is good, for a mining town. And the women are not bad. You will have a good time ... as long as you do not ask about Senor Gay.”

  Prophet studied the man thoughtfully. Jorge Assante returned to his work, the sunlight angling between the upright boards of the barn’s outer walls bisecting him in angles, revealing his dirty denim shirt and snakeskin galluses, the sweat runneling the hay-flecked dust on his face.

  Prophet grabbed his saddlebags, Richards ten-gauge, and Winchester, and left the barn. As he turned right, heading for the Gay Inn, he heard a soft whistle. He stopped and turned.

  A man was sitting in the alley between the livery barn and a general store. His back was propped against the barn, between two crates. Prophet could see only a few inches of pin-striped trousers, expensive black boots, and the man’s face peering over the barrel between him and Prophet.

  Or what was left of the man’s face. It had been beaten to a bloody pulp.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Couldn’t help overhearing you in there,” the man said, jerking his head to indicate the barn behind him, “askin’ about Leamon Gay.”

  “So?”

  The man chuckled. Then he frowned and gave a pained grunt. “Ah ... it hurts to laugh.”

  “What the hell happened to you?” Prophet asked, wandering over to get a better look at the man.

  He wore an expensively cut broadcloth suit with a fawn-colored vest and paisley tie. His brown hair was longish and wavy but badly mussed and streaked with dirt. He was a handsome young man, Prophet could tell through the bruising and swelling of his face.

  “Gay’s boys,” he said, wincing, revealing a silver eyetooth. “You don’t want to play the tables here. They’re all rigged. I found that out and beat one of the dealers at his own game, you might say. Gay’s lieutenants didn’t appreciate it — especially when I won back not only every penny of the five hundred I’d lost but tripled it.”

  Prophet stared down at the young man, frowning at what looked like one hell of an aching noggin. A goose egg had sprouted on his left temple, the color of a Texas thundercloud.

  “Let me guess,” Prophet said. “After you left the saloon, they jumped you in an alley.”

  The man shook his head. “They jumped me out in front of the Gay Inn, beat the hell out of me, and stole every d
ollar I had in my wallet. Even took my watch. It was gold. Bought it in St. Joe after a streak of luck on the gambling boats up from New Orleans.”

  “Your luck done run out, I’d say.”

  “You got that right.”

  “What are you doin’ here in the alley?”

  “Well, I had a room at the Inn, but found out I wasn’t wanted after the little incident in the street. The manager tossed my bag at me.” The gambler patted the modest carpetbag beside him, chuckling ruefully. “Went to get my horse so I could get the hell out of town, like I’d been ordered, but didn’t have any money to pay the livery bill. That Mex in there don’t believe in credit. So I stumbled out here and been here ever since, sleepin’ mostly and waitin’ for the cobwebs to clear. I been seein’ two of everything, but I must be gettin’ better. There’s only one and a half of you.”

  “Well, I reckon that’s enough of me,” Prophet said. “This Leamon Gay — he sounds like a real prince. Any idea where I might be able to find him?”

  The gambler chuckled again. He winced at the pain shooting through his head and face. “Yep. But take my word for it. You don’t want to find him. And you sure as hell don’t want him findin’ you.”

  Prophet squatted down beside the beaten gambler. “How much is your livery bill?”

  “Ten dollars.”

  Prophet raised a brow.

  “I been here near two weeks,” the gambler said. “Name’s Clive Daws.”

  Prophet shook Daws’s extended hand. “Lou Prophet. I reckon if you been here two weeks, Mr. Daws, you probably know quite a bit about this town and our friend, Leamon Gay.”

  “More than I wanna know, I’ll tell you that.”

  “If I pay your feed bill and buy you a steak and a couple of stiff drinks, you think you could tell me some more?”

  Daws gave Prophet the twice over and squinted one swollen eye. “You don’t look like a lawman.”

  “I ain’t.”

  “What are you, then?”

  “Never look a gift horse in the mouth, Air. Daws.” Prophet stood and extended his hand. “Come on. Let’s go dip our heads in a trough. My belly could use a fine paddin’, and it looks like you could use a bite your ownself.”