Helldorado

by Peter Brandvold

  His slug hit its mark, plunking through his shadower’s right shoulder. The man screamed and dropped his rifle. The bay, not as well trained as Mean and Ugly, pitched and whinnied, and the shadower lunged for the saddle horn and missed. He fell back off the bucking horse’s left hip, then gave another scream as his left boot got caught in its stirrup and his head and shoulders bounced off the brushy turf.

  The man grunted and groaned and tried desperately to kick himself free, but his boot toe was wedged tight. And then the horse was galloping full-out, angling through the trees.

  “Shit!” Prophet groused, sliding his Winchester into its saddle boot.

  He gigged Mean into a lope after the runaway bay and its rider flopping and bouncing along the ground behind it, flattening brush and throwing up small branches in his wake. His yells rose above the snapping sounds and the thuds of the bay’s hooves.

  Prophet bulled through the trees, raising a shielding arm and ducking his head. When he came out of the trees, he reined Mean to a sudden halt at the water’s edge.

  The bay stood ahead a ways, several yards out from shore but facing back toward it, its reins caught around a rock. Its left side faced Prophet, and the bounty hunter could see the bay’s rider flopping around in the water beside the horse like a fish on a hook, desperately trying to reach up and free his boot from its stirrup. As he flopped, throwing his hands toward the stirrup, then falling back in the knee-deep water, Prophet saw the red blood in the water washing off the man’s left shoulder.

  Prophet stepped down from his saddle and waded into the stream, taking long steps and throwing his arms out to keep his balance in the fast current. He walked up to the horse and lifted the stirrup so that it angled toward the stream. The rider’s boot toe slipped free, and his leg splashed down in the water.

  As the horse nickered and sidestepped away from the men, Prophet grabbed the wounded, half-drowned man by the back of his shirt and coat and dragged him through the current and onto the rocky shore, the man flapping his arms and loudly hacking up water all the way.

  The man coughed and choked and threw himself onto his belly, violently heaving the stream from his lungs. Prophet glared down at him.

  “Who are you, you son of a bitch?”

  The man convulsed violently as he coughed up more water.

  “Wait a minute.”

  Prophet reached down and turned the man over onto his back and stared into his flat, fair-skinned face that was covered with a neatly trimmed, wheat-colored beard. He’d only glanced at the manager of the Holy Ghost Mine, but he’d be damned if this gent wasn’t him.

  The man convulsed once more, water dribbling down over his chin. His eyes were fear-wild, panicked. The blood gushing from the hole in his chest was frothy, which meant Prophet had nicked a lung. More blood from a good-sized gash on the side of the man’s head dribbled down over his ear.

  He coughed, cleared his throat and said between deep, ragged breaths, “I figured you was after me. You an’ her . . .”

  “Why?”

  The man stared at him, a pained befuddlement adding to the misery already there. His pain-racked face acquired a fleeting, forlorn look, and then he raised his arms and let them fall. “Ah, hell. You wasn’t after me, after all. I’ll . . . be goddamned. . . .”

  “Why would I be after you, hoss?”

  “The bank in Joplin?”

  When Prophet only frowned down at him, he said, “Figured . . . when I seen ya today . . . ole Lou Prophet was out for me, sure enough. But . . . but I was wrong, wasn’t I?” He gave a wet sigh. “Damn.”

  He laughed and coughed up more water. Then his breathing shallowed. He winced, and his eyes gradually lost their light as his head sank back against the ground and he turned his face slightly away from Prophet. A gurgle sounded from deep in the man’s chest, and he became very still.

  “Well, shit.”

  Prophet straightened and looked around, his mantled eyes dark and haunted. He grabbed his folding shovel off his saddle, dug a shallow grave, and rolled the outlaw-turned-mine manager inside and covered him up quickly, covering the eyes first because they wouldn’t stay closed and they seemed to stare accusingly at the bounty hunter from all angles.

  Prophet scowled down at the mounded grave. Even if he’d known about Joplin, he wouldn’t have bothered the gent. The man had an honest job, was walking the straight and narrow.

  “Ah, shit,” Prophet said.

  It was one of those times he hated his job.

  He returned the shovel to Mean’s back, mounted up, grabbed the bay’s reins, and, trailing the dead man’s horse, headed off after the gold wagon.

  He rode up to the prospector’s cabin at twilight. Smoke curled from the squat, gray shack’s tin chimney pipe. The wagon sat near the shack’s open front door from which emanated the sound of men’s voices. The male guards were playing poker.

  Louisa was leaning against the corral in which the horses and mules milled, some still with feed sacks draped over their ears. She held a smoking cup in her hand.

  “What happened?” she asked Prophet.

  He stepped down from his saddle and tossed the reins of the bay to her.

  “The Holy Ghost gave up its manager.”

  “Kind of late for a lady to be goin’ for a horseback ride, ain’t it, Miss O’Shay?” asked Llewellyn Pickwick, holding the reins of a copper-bottom mare behind the opera house.

  Miss Gleneanne O’Shay grabbed the reins out of the Englishman’s hand then adjusted her split riding skirt and held her other hand out for assistance. “You know how wound up I get after a performance, Llewellyn. Taking a good long ride is what the doctor ordered.”

  “I knew you to ride in the mornings and afternoons, but not this late. Why, it’s pret’ near dark in this canyon!” Frowning, Pickwick helped Miss O’Shay, as Sivvy Hallenback preferred to think of herself these days, into the saddle.

  “Llewellyn?” The actress stared down at him. She’d taken off her wig but had left her face paint on and donned a frilly-fronted white blouse, short leather jacket, and the spruce-green riding skirt.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “No one likes an assistant stage manager who can’t keep his nose out of other’s people’s business.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Pickwick said, the corners of his mouth drooping with chagrin.

  Miss O’Shay reined the copper-bottom mare around tightly and said over her shoulder, “I’ll be back in a couple hours. Wait for me so you can tend the horse!”

  “You know how Sheriff Severin don’t like folks loitering about the streets and back alleys, Miss O’Shay!”

  “Tell the sheriff to go diddle himself!”

  Gleneanne O’Shay ground her bootheels into the mare’s flanks, and as the horse lunged off its rear legs, spraying dirt and manure over Pickwick’s brogans, the assistant stage manager gave a grumbling curse and said, “Easy for you to say!” There was no danger of the actress hearing above the mare’s thudding hooves.

  Muttering to himself in disgust, Pickwick stared after the actress’s retreating back as she and the horse headed south past the Muleskinner’s Inn and then into the thickening darkness at the outskirts of town.

  “Damn easy for you to say, and a prime bitch is what you are . . . !”

  Pickwick sat down on a stack of lumber used for stage construction, plucked a small, leather-covered flask from the breast pocket of his checked, clawhammer coat, and took a long, stress-relieving pull.

  Meanwhile, Gleneanne urged the mare over a rise at the southern end of town and then turned onto an old, switch-backing mine trail, heading southeast along the canyon’s southern ridge. She came to a canyon a few minutes later and, after following the twisting crevice deep into the stony ridge, crossed a spring-fed creek and put the mare into the mouth of another box canyon.

  The bright stars lit the trail, but Gleneanne had followed the trail so many times in the past that she could have followed the thin trace, likely carved by prospectors
following color, in total darkness. She halted the horse near the box canyon’s dark back wall, saw a small pinprick of orange light, smelled the cigarette smoke, and heeled the mare ahead slowly.

  Off in the shadows beneath fluttering aspens, a horse whinnied sharply. The copper-bottom mare replied in kind.

  “Be quiet, ’Pache,” a man said.

  The cigarette coal glowed again. Gray smoke wafted in the darkness.

  Gleneanne stopped the mare in front of the silhouetted figure in a bowler hat and foulard tie.

  “I told you, Gleneanne—we can’t meet like this anymore.”

  “Goddamnit, Miguel,” the actress said, sliding lithely out of the saddle and walking up to the young banker, who stood smoking against a large, pale boulder. “I had to see you, and since you won’t see me in town—”

  “I told you that’s nothin’ personal, honey,” Miguel Encina said, his voice taut with admonishing. “I just don’t want to blow this thing sky high. And you sending a note to the bank is just the way to undo two miserable years of careful planning.”

  “The girl I sent to the bank handles our costumes. If anyone saw her delivering a note, they’d probably think the poor girl had eyes for you.” Gleneanne grabbed Miguel’s wrist and squeezed, looking up into his cold, brown eyes that appeared all the colder for the icy starlight reflected in them. “Miguel, let’s light a shuck out of this place! Let’s leave together. Tomorrow morning. Oh, please, Miguel—tell me you will!”

  He shook his head and opened his mouth to speak, but before he could get a word out, Gleneanne leaned toward him, pressing her breasts against his chest and throwing her arms around his neck. “Oh, please, honey! Won’t you please consider it! This whole thing is wrong, and it’s going to be the end of both of us. It’s a downright dastardly thing, and it’s not only crazy—I’ve never heard of anything so crazy in my life!—but it’s impossible! It’ll never work!”

  Miguel peeled her hands from around his neck and lowered them to her sides, squeezing them firmly in his own.

  The cigarette bobbed in a corner of his mouth as he said evenly, in a voice pitched low with menace, “It would have had a better chance if you’d done your job last night, Gleneanne. I mean, you had that bounty hunter in your bed, and you so easily could have slipped a stiletto between his ribs.” He paused. “Why didn’t you do it? Perhaps you were enjoying yourself a little more than you thought you would?”

  Gleneanne shook her head. “It wasn’t like that, damnit. I—”

  “How do I know, Gleneanne? Maybe you like them kind of big and rough, with broken noses. Did you have fun in your well-appointed room with that bounty hunter grunting around between your legs like some—?”

  Crack!

  Gleneanne dropped her hand back down to her side. “You got no right to talk to me like that, Miguel.”

  Miguel’s own hand made a chopping motion in the darkness. The smack of it against Gleneanne’s right cheek was louder than hers had been against his, and she gave a shriek as it whipped her head to one side, causing her red hair to tumble over a shoulder. She placed her hand on her burning jaw and looked up at him, hardening her face and pinching her eyes with anger.

  “I’m just trying to talk sense!”

  “Bullshit! You had a job to do last night and you didn’t do it. We won’t linger over the question of why. You’re a tramp. You were a tramp when I found you in that little mining dump in the San Juans, singing at night and letting yourself be bent over rain barrels when the suds shops closed. That little urchin you birthed running around and squealing his damn head off . . . You’ve always been a tramp and you’ll always be a tramp.”

  “Goddamn you to hell!” Gleneanne clenched both hands at her sides, gritting her teeth. “I’m no worse than you! Why, you’re nothing but a goddamn penny-ante stage and saloon robber. Why, when I found you, you were rolling drunks in alleys because your father had cut you off from your monthly allowance!”

  She jutted her chin like a hammer. “And I won’t have you talk about my boy that way! If you talk about him again, Miguel—if you ever mention Sam again, so help me God you’ll regret it. The men I know are bigger and meaner and tougher than the ones you know!”

  Miguel drew deep on his quirley and blew the smoke toward the stars, laughing. “Well, I guess we’re about to find that out, aren’t we?”

  Gleneanne glared up at him. Slowly, her eyes softened, and she opened her hands. “Please, Miguel. Don’t you see, honey, this can never work. We’re gonna get ourselves killed. If not killed, then hunted till the end of our days.”

  “It would have helped if you’d killed one of the two hunters that came to town.”

  “It would have helped if you’d convinced your father not to hire them.”

  “I had no say in that, just as I have no say in anything around the bank in spite of the fact I’m supposed to be the president of the goddamn thing! The old man didn’t consult me on the topic—neither Severin nor my father did!—and I only found out about it when they mentioned it among themselves in passing. . . .”

  “Okay, we’ve covered that,” Gleneanne said, reaching up again and placing her hands on his jaws. “The fact is they’re here. The ambush didn’t work and I made a mistake. I hesitated, didn’t do my job. But truth to tell, it wouldn’t have mattered, anyway. Because even with Lou and that girl out of the way, this plan is just rotten to the core. If we continue, we’ll get nothing out of it but blood. Our own blood spilled in the streets of Juniper!”

  Miguel laughed again. “You’re sounding like you do on stage!”

  Gleneanne chuffed and folded her arms across her breasts. Now he’d offended her work. She knew that, in spite of all the work she’d put into learning how to act on stage, she was no Lillie Langtry. But he didn’t have to throw that up in her face as well. First her fallen ways, then her bastard son—a son who had Prophet’s features, which was why she’d had so much trouble sliding that stiletto into the bounty hunter’s heart the previous night—and now her thespian aspirations.

  Aspirations that, like her son, she’d given up on. The son she’d adopted out.

  Her aspirations had turned to dust inside her while she’d stacked all her chips, every one, on this handsome, evil jasper before her. This handsome, evil man who had a father and a sheriff to wreak vengeance on . . . and likely get her and himself killed in the bargain.

  Miguel gave a sheepish sigh and placed his hands on Gleneanne’s shoulders. “Ah, I was just joshin’, honey. I’m a little nervous, I reckon, with what we got comin’ tomorrow.”

  “That’s what I’m sayin’, Miguel,” Gleneanne said, biting back her anger. “I’m nervous, too. Let’s forget this thing. It’s too big, too crazy. Let’s leave here tomorrow, first thing!”

  If she was going to get out of here, and away from this ghastly thing they’d been planning together for the past two years, getting all their men and themselves in place in Juniper, she’d have to leave with him. He had money. She had only the few dollars she was paid each week by the theater company she traveled with.

  That didn’t mean, however, she wouldn’t get shed of the revenge-happy firebrand as quickly as she could, once she had a sizeable grubstake and could make another go of it somewhere else on her own. If there was one thing Gleneanne O’Shay knew how to do, that was how to make the best of a bad situation.

  “That’s out of the question.” Miguel’s voice turned hard once more. He squeezed her shoulders and looked down at her seriously. “We’re going through with this, and when we’re richer than you’ve ever dreamed and sitting pretty in San Francisco, you’ll be glad you didn’t pull out on me.”

  “It’s not gonna work, Miguel. I got a bad feelin’.”

  “Because of Prophet?” Miguel scowled down at her. “He and Miss Bonaventure will be taken out of the equation soon. Before the last gold shipment pulls into town. We’ve seen the last of them.”

  Gleneanne’s stomach turned to ice, thinking about Prophet bein
g gunned down like a rabid dog. The father of the boy she’d never see again. But if her and Miguel’s plan had any chance of working at all, Lou had to be taken down.

  She didn’t like it. She didn’t like it at all. Prophet was a much better man than Miguel Encina could ever hope of becoming. The best man she’d ever known. But it was too late to change that part of the plan. It was all set. It was a dog-eat-dog world, and Poor Lou would have to be sacrificed.

  Gleneanne realized now that she could beg Miguel until sunrise tomorrow, but there was no changing their part in it, either. Seeing something in the young banker’s eyes, she narrowed one of her own and canted her head slightly as a pang of jealousy nipped at her consciousness.

  “What’s the matter? You sorta wishin’ things were different with that blond-headed pistoleer?”

  Miguel dropped his hands from Gleneanne’s shoulders.

  A chill rippled through the former Sivvy Hallenback. Was Miguel considering double-crossing her, as she was considering doing to him?

  She stepped back as she said tightly, “You sorta wishin’ you hadn’t given the order to gun them both? Maybe just Lou? Spare the blond . . . maybe let her take my place in your crazy plan?”

  It was so dark that she didn’t see the hand snapping toward her until it was too late. A more vicious blow than before, it spun her around and sent her sprawling in the pine needles and gravel, her head reeling.

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Miguel said, standing over her and balling his fists at his sides. “You best remember whose plan it is and who has the power to change it. In the light of that, you might want to take care how you talk to me in the future, Miss Gleneanne O’Shay.”

  With that he flicked his cigarette stub at her, spun, and walked away in the darkness.

  Pushing up on her hands and knees, Gleneanne shook her head to clear the cobwebs. She heard the squawk of tack as Miguel mounted his horse. Thuds sounded as he cantered past her, heading back toward town.