Helldorado

by Peter Brandvold

  She was too busy with a heavy pair of men’s dungarees to notice Prophet. Likely she was trying to take advantage of a break in the weather to get some work in, but the way the clouds looked, low and brooding, her clothes were about to get a second soak.

  Prophet pulled Mean back to his feet and continued along the draw, then followed a well-tramped cleft up out of it. He was taking a chance at being spotted here; he just hoped he wouldn’t be spotted by anyone not happy to see him.

  Fifteen minutes later, having been seen by no one, because no one had been out and about but a few chickens and a free-roaming, claybank colt, he tied Mean to an old freight wagon grown up with sage and bromegrass between a small, silent, white-frame house and a lumberyard. The lumberyard was just as quiet as the house, which was strange for it being a weekday. You’d think someone would be backed up to the loading dock, buying boards or nails or roofing shingles.

  Hell-Bringin’ Hiram’s office sat just beyond the lumberyard. Patting Mean’s butt, slinging the ten-gauge out in front of him, and taking a slow, cautious gander around this southern side street, Prophet stepped out of the alley mouth and, staying close to the lumberyard and keeping his hat brim low, began striding for the jailhouse.

  There was a side shed attached to the lumberyard—an adobe-brick shack with a corrugated tin roof and a tin chimney pipe from which smoke lifted. The door of the shack opened as Prophet walked past.

  He stopped, turned to see a stoop-shouldered old man in torn coveralls, red stocking cap, and with a pipe clamped in his teeth step outside. He lifted his head, and his eyes found Prophet.

  He gave a startled grunt, gray eyes snapping wide, and, pulling the pipe from his teeth, stepped back inside the shack.

  “Wait a minute,” Prophet rasped.

  The plank door closed, the flour-sack curtains jostling in the rough-cut window that had a diagonal crack across it.

  “What in holy hell is goin’ on around here?” Prophet grumbled, continuing forward, holding the barn blaster in his left hand and keeping his right hand clamped over the walnut grips of his low-slung Peacemaker.

  He stepped down off a boardwalk, started across a narrow side street that was not much more than a wheelbarrow path, and stopped. He looked straight ahead, at the jailhouse on the corner about twenty feet in front of him. The old stone, shake-shingled office building had a front gallery, and on the gallery, a ragged figure slumped against the office’s front door.

  A drunk.

  Prophet started across the gap.

  He stopped again when he saw the dark red blood and clothes hanging in swatches from the man’s twisted, battered limbs. He moved forward once more, leaping up onto the gallery and dropping to a knee over the man slumped back against the jailhouse door.

  The gent was so beaten up, cut up, bruised, and bleeding, that it probably would have taken Prophet a while to figure out who he was if it hadn’t been for the six-pointed sheriff’s star dangling from Hell-Bringin’ Hiram Severin’s torn coat lapel.

  “Good Christ, man,” Prophet said, lowering his head to stare into the man’s slack, downcast face. “What the hell happened to you?”

  The swollen eyes remained shut. The lips were cracked and bleeding. There wasn’t a square inch of Severin’s rugged, mustached face that wasn’t gouged or scratched. Sand and cactus thorns clung to the dried blood.

  That he’d been dragged belly down behind a horse was also evident by the fact of his brutally torn clothes, so that Prophet could see as much of the man’s torn longhandles and skin as his twenty-dollar suit.

  Severin’s thin, sandy-gray hair hung like a screen over his forehead, obscuring his eyes.

  Prophet placed a hand on the man’s chest. If there was a heartbeat, Prophet couldn’t detect it. Keeping his hand on the man’s chest, he leaned down to listen for a breath.

  Suddenly, the body writhed, and an icy hand closed around Prophet’s wrist.

  Prophet jerked with a start, pulling his head back and looking into Severin’s brown eyes set deep in purple sockets. The crazed eyes glared at Prophet with a killing fury, a rage that set the man’s entire near-dead body to quivering.

  “Miguel!” he rasped, just loudly for Prophet to hear.

  Prophet frowned.

  Severin squeezed Prophet’s wrist tighter. It was like a death grip. The sheriff leaned up away from the door slightly, winced as a wave of agony swept through him, and swallowed.

  “Kill him!”

  “Miguel did this to you?”

  “The whole town’s . . . gone back . . . to the hell . . . it came from!”

  Prophet saw that the killing fire was fast leaving the sheriff’s eyes. He was dying. Prophet pulled his wrist free of the old law bringer’s dwindling grip and gripped Severin’s own. “Where, Hiram? Where will I find Miguel?”

  Severin’s eyes closed. His chest fell still once more.

  Prophet thought the man was truly dead now, but then his bloody lips moved, and a whisper sounded little louder than the flutter of a small bird’s wing. “Find . . . that actress. You’ll find him with her.” Severin nodded slightly, took a deep breath, and his eyelids fluttered though he didn’t seem able to open them.

  Still, Prophet sensed the killing fury in the man’s words when he said even more softly, “Send him to hell, Proph. No . . . no questions asked. . . .”

  All the muscles in his body slackened, and his head tipped to one side. His chin rolled off his shoulder, and then his shoulder slid sideways to the spur-scarred gallery floor.

  Prophet stared down at the old law bringer’s slumped corpse. He rubbed the twelve-gauge and looked around at the empty side street on which the jailhouse sat. A fine mist slanted from a gunmetal sky, cloaking the pines on the steep southern ridge.

  Faintly, Prophet heard wild laughter emanating from the main drag northeast of the sheriff’s office. The gunfire he’d heard from the ridge had died, but now there were two quick gunshots fired as though in anger.

  A man screamed a ripping curse. More laughter. A final shot.

  Someone clapped and shouted something Prophet couldn’t make out.

  He was only half listening. His mind was elsehwere.

  He stood slowly, caressing his shotgun and muttering, “Sivvy . . . ?”

  26

  PROPHET HUNKERED DOWN behind a rain barrel at the corner of the side street and Main. Diagonally right across from him was the opera house. It stood dark and silent, tombstone gray under the low clouds and in the slanting drizzle.

  Up the main drag to Prophet’s sharp right were several saloons and cantinas from which emanated men’s laughter, occasional gunfire, and the screech of shattering glass. Occasionally, a girl gave a shrill scream.

  There were many men on the boardwalks, spilling into the street. All were drinking. Most were smoking. They were having a good, rowdy time. The hitchracks were stirrup to stirrup with saddle horses.

  The town was as open as Dodge City before Wyatt Earp had moved in. Wide open.

  Prophet rubbed his jaw as he appraised the setup. He hoped all those men were not Miguel’s. He didn’t know what Miguel had going, but he certainly hadn’t needed many cutthroats to hornswaggle Prophet and Louisa and abscond with the gold. Four had worked just fine. The wagon that had carried the gold now sat in front of the bank, which Prophet could only glimpse from this angle, with the opera house obscuring his view.

  He could see a couple of figures humped in the street. Dead men. Maybe Severin’s deputies. If there were more, they were obscured by the men milling off the boardwalks.

  Prophet glanced at the birds circling in the gauzy sky a couple of hundred feet above the bank. Doubtless, the birds were waiting for night to fall, so they could come down under cover of darkness and finish what they’d started—clearing the street of carrion—a couple of days ago. They’d probably started smelling death here just after the gold wagon had pulled into town and Miguel had pulled his double cross.

  If Severin was right about Mig
uel, that was.

  It was hard for Prophet to work his mind around what he was seeing here. He’d thought he’d seen it all in the burned-out town of Seven Devils last year. That had been a nasty piece of business, but this right here—whatever it was—rivaled it for depravity.

  Prophet rose from behind the rain barrel, strode half a block back the way he’d come, then tramped through an alley, making his way west, away from the brunt of the hubbub just east of the opera house and the bank. He circled back north and jogged across Main Street, unseen as far as he could tell by the bawdy revelers, and continued heading for the Golden Slipper.

  That’s where he’d likely find Sivvy. If Severin had been right and not just addled by the severe beating and dragging, he’d also find Miguel there. Thinking about that, fury set Prophet’s blood to sizzling like acid. He could see letting himself get buffaloed by the banker’s son. Deep down inside himself, and despite his hope that Miguel and Louisa would end up together, he’d never fully trusted the lad anyway. Like Louisa had said, there was something too good about him.

  But Sivvy?

  He just couldn’t wrap his mind around such a sweet soul being part of whatever in hell was happening here. Somehow, Miguel had to have coerced her, though he couldn’t see the earthy, bawdy Sivvy falling for someone who wore expensive suits and bowler hats and shoes that cost as much as Prophet spent on ammunition over any given year.

  There were no more people out and about on the north side of town than there’d been on the south. The shops and shacks were silent, windows shuttered. There were people in some of the frame houses and in the older hovels that hailed from the days of Helldorado, because smoke threaded from chimneys. But as far as Prophet could tell, the citizens of Juniper were staying inside.

  The town had the air of a town under siege. Likely, everyone here who fondly remembered the hell-roaring days of Helldorado had joined Miguel’s gang east of the opera house. The newer, more civilized folks—those with families—were staying inside until the storm passed and, hopefully, another town tamer was brought in to restore Juniper to civility.

  Working his way over to the Golden Slipper rising like a colorful bird beyond the gray and stately opera house, Prophet saw five horses tethered to the hitchrack out front of the gaudy place. Windows were lit against the day’s dingy light and the looming night, but mostly only the large, curtained windows of the downstairs saloon and restaurant had lights in them. If any law-abiders remained in the hotel—traveling stock buyers and sellers and drummers—they were likely hunkered down, quiet as church mice. Most had probably cleared out to wait for better days.

  Prophet made his way around to the hotel’s backside, found a set of unlocked double doors that opened on a store room that smelled of flour and molasses and cured meat, and fumbled his way through the shadows to another door that opened onto a carpeted hall beneath the stairs at the back of the hotel’s saloon.

  Prophet slipped into the hall and, hearing men’s voices and the clink of glasses and bottles and the chink of poker chips, found a narrow back stairway probably used by housekeepers, then climbed to the third story.

  All the rooms opened onto a balcony that opened over the saloon hall, so he stayed close to the wall on his left, away from the rail and the possible discovery of the men downstairs, who were laughing and sending tobacco smoke toward the enormous crystal chandelier hanging to Prophet’s right.

  He spied Sivvy’s door and headed for it. He was ten feet away when the latch clicked and he slipped into a recessed doorway two doors down from Sivvy’s room. Pressing his back against the door, Prophet heard the actress’s door squawk open, its bottom whispering across the deep pile carpet, and a man’s voice say, “I’ll see you later on. Gotta go keep an eye on things. Wouldn’t want any of your boys runnin’ away with the gold!”

  “My boys are loyal as the king’s navy!” Prophet heard Sivvy laugh, her voice more distant than the one he recognized as Miguel Encina’s.

  Miguel chuckled as he stepped into the hall. There was the smack of a kiss. “Don’t you do anything naughty to that ingot, now, Miss O’Shay. Wait for me!”

  He laughed. The door raked closed, then clicked as the latch caught.

  Prophet tipped his head forward just enough that he could see Miguel don his crisp brown bowler hat as he turned and started off in the opposite direction along the hall, striding toward the stairs, the tails of his clawhammer coat swishing out behind him. The flaps of the brown coat were drawn back behind two pistols positioned for the cross draw high on his lean hips.

  He turned and started down the stairs, his footsteps muffled by the carpet.

  “Ah, there’s the mayor of Helldorado now!” whooped one of the men in the saloon. “Didn’t think you was ever gonna come back. Havin’ too damn much fun up there, was ya, Mr. Mayor?”

  “What can I say, fellas?” Miguel said above the soft thuds of his boots and the slight squawk of the stairs. “Them showgirls can really distract a fella!”

  He and the others laughed. The conversation quieted as Miguel approached the men’s table. Finally, Miguel’s voice rose again as he told the men to keep the cards warm and that he’d be back after he’d checked on a few things around town.

  When he left, the other men continued their card game, one saying with a sarcastic snort, “The work of the mayor is just never done, is it, boys?”

  They all snickered. Cards were shuffled and coins and chips clinked softly on a baize-covered table.

  Prophet strode out from the recessed doorway and, brushing his left shoulder against the wall, stole down the hall to Sivvy’s room. He set his hand on the knob and prayed it wasn’t locked. It wasn’t. The latch clicked softly, and Prophet pushed the door open quickly, stepped inside, and closed the door behind him.

  Sivvy didn’t see him at first. She had her back to him, rummaging around in a dresser against the opposite wall, between the two tall windows. When she turned from the dresser with her hands full of frilly lace underwear and started toward the canopied bed, she stopped suddenly and gasped, dropping the underwear and pressing both hands against her chest.

  She just stood there, staring at him, her eyes wide and glassy. Slowly, tears drew over them like a filmy, glittering curtain.

  “What’s the matter, Sivvy?” Prophet growled. “You see a ghost?”

  “Oh, Lou!” She ran across the room to him, threw her arms around his neck, and buried her face in his chest.

  He stood with his hands at his sides, looking grimly down at her. She pushed away from him, threw her red hair back over her head, and looked up at him, beseeching in her red-rimmed, sorrowful eyes as she threw an arm out toward the bed.

  “Lou, it’s gold!”

  Prophet looked at the bed. There was a gold ingot on it. It lay amongst the gowns and blouses and silk wraps and underwear she’d tossed there and which she was obviously intending to pack into the steamer trunk that lay open on the floor. There amongst all that silk and lace the ingot resembled a pretty gold doll in swaddling clothes.

  “Why, Sivvy? You were such a dear, sweet thing back in Dakota.”

  “Back in Dakota I thought I had a future.” She pressed her hands flat against Prophet’s bulging pectoral muscles and stared up at him, her eyes now enraged with self-righteousness, self-pity. “You know what that future was? It was trying to be an actress in front of pretty halls teeming with drunken men yelling catcalls and jeering and demanding I take my clothes off!”

  Prophet felt sick to his stomach. He reached up and removed the girl’s hands from his chest, and she gave another sob, went to the bed and sat down on the edge of it, knees together, feet out, hands hanging limp in her lap. Her head hung, red hair cascading down around her shoulders and hiding her face.

  Prophet sagged down in a brocade-upholstered chair whose arms were carved in the shapes of fiddles, beside a round oak table in the room’s middle. “How’d you hook up with Miguel?”

  Prophet dug his makings sack out of his
shirt pocket and tossed it onto the table. Sivvy reached up with one hand and carelessly threw her hair back from her face. “In the dining room here. He’s a handsome devil, Lou—you gotta admit that.”

  “Yeah, he’s a devil, all right. I seen what he did to Severin. You see that?”

  Sivvy stared at him. She looked a good ten years older than she had when he’d last seen her, and she looked as though she hadn’t slept in a week. The frilly wrap she wore billowed out from her chest, half exposing her pale breasts and the pearl necklace that was wrapped around them.

  When she didn’t answer his question, Prophet pulled rolling papers from the hide pouch on the table. “Where’s his father? Dead, probably?”

  Sivvy dropped her eyes and pursed her lips. She nodded weakly. Tears dribbled down her cheeks, and she sniffed. “I didn’t buy chips in that game, Lou. I provided six men I knew from the mining camps I’d performed in. But I didn’t buy chips in the high-stakes game this turned out to be.”

  “I reckon the men you provided weren’t church deacons. What kinda game did you expect?”

  “I thought we were just going to rob a gold shipment with his men and my men and the guards he bought—Hitt and the others—and we’d hightail it for Frisco!”

  “A nice, clean getaway.”

  “He never told me about killin’ Severin and his father until just the other day.” Sivvy shook her head and pressed her hands to her temples, mashing one pale, bare foot down atop the other on the floor. “Jesus . . . I never seen such a thing.”

  “How many wolves you two turn loose on the town?”

  “I brought in six men. Boys who owed me a favor. Miguel had six more from an old gang of his, plus the other four gold guards. They’re all workin’ for a share of the gold. We’re gonna split it all up in the mornin’ and fork our trails.”