Helldorado

by Peter Brandvold

  They disappeared past the opera house, angling south toward the main street.

  When the rifles fell silent, a couple of the guards—Prophet assumed it was the guards, for he and Louisa were both down on their haunches, pressing their backs against the bank—were still screaming. Two more quick shots and then one more as if an afterthought silenced the screams, so that now there was only the sound of the storm and the nickering of the riflemen’s frightened mounts.

  Behind the bank, Miguel said, “Where’s Abrams and Ned and Sivvy’s other pals?”

  “At the Spade Bit cantina,” one of the riflemen shouted. “Upstairs with the whores. They think we’re pullin’ out in the morning, but by then, knowin’ them, they’ll be too drunk to stir until noon!”

  Prophet glanced at Louisa hunkered to his left, resting both her guns on her upraised knees. “Well, we lost four but gained six,” he said just loudly enough that only she could hear him above the rain.

  Louisa lifted a shoulder. “Not bad odds, considering we’ll be surprising them.”

  Prophet nodded. He started to rise, then settled back down on his bootheels as one of the men behind the bank said, “What the hell you bringin’ a girl for?”

  Miguel’s voice said, “Don’t worry—you can have her when I’m finished.”

  Louisa must have heard, too, because when Prophet looked at her, she was grinding her jaws. “Now what are we going to do?”

  Behind the bank, hooves clomped and there was the clank of the wagon’s brake being released. Prophet jerked his head, and he and Louisa both rose and jogged along the side of the bank to the front, where the veranda’s roof gave them shelter from the storm.

  Prophet glanced back along the side of the building, ran his sleeve across his dripping nose. They couldn’t bear down on Miguel’s gang now without risking the hop-headed whore’s life, for whatever it was worth.

  The wagon bolted out from behind the bank, and Prophet pushed Louisa back against the bank’s front wall, out of sight. He doffed his hat and peered around the front corner to watch the wagon, driven by Miguel and flanked by the six rifle-wielding cutthroats in yellow slickers, disappear behind the opera house, taking the same course as the runaway horses.

  When the wagon and the men were gone, heading west out of town, Louisa doffed her wet hat and slapped it against her thigh. Her blond hair hung limp across her shoulders, and the rain streaked her tanned face. Her hazel eyes were sharp.

  “We’ll just have to run ’em down—that’s all!” She started off the veranda. “Let’s fetch our horses.”

  Prophet grabbed her arm. “Wait a minute, Miss Bonnyventure.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you, you big idiot—there’s no ‘y’!”

  “Why do all the work ourselves?”

  Louisa just stared at him, wide-eyed with incredulity, holding her hat down by her side.

  “I mean—shit,” Prophet said, tossing his head toward the saloons and cantinas and whorehouses on the east side of town. “There’s six more been double-crossed, ain’t there?”

  Louisa narrowed one eye as though his meaning was still as cloudy as one of the growing puddles around them.

  Prophet waited for thunder to finish clapping, then yelled, grinning devilishly, “I bet them six ain’t gonna like it one bit when they find out Miguel and the other six just rode out of here with about a million dollars in gold!”

  28

  THE CHINAMAN PERCHED on a stool behind the counter of the Spade Bit cantina puffed a brass pipe trimmed with jade.

  He blinked slowly, catlike, as he stared through the sweet smoke hovering around him at the two sopping strangers. Only, his eyes were molasses black and shiny. The smoke had a bitter tang that caught in Prophet’s throat like pepper.

  There probably hadn’t been many opium dens in town when Hell-Bringin’ Hiram was running things. Likely, the Chinaman had kept it upstairs for his girls—sporting girls were always more sporting when in the grips of the Eastern spices—and started smoking freely again himself when Hiram and his deputies had been so unceremoniously unseated from their positions.

  Pouring the rain from his hat onto the worn wooden floor and tramping wearily, boots squeaking wetly, toward the bar, Prophet knew where Miguel’s comely whore had acquired such a glazed and peaceful look even stark naked on a cold, rainy day.

  The Chinaman wore a black silk cap and a purple kimono. There was no backbar behind him but a large oil painting of an Indian chief dressed in full regalia, though Prophet had never seen any Indians dressed that way except in oil paintings.

  On the other side of the narrow room, there was a trophy head of an albino buffalo and a small chalkboard with the Chinaman’s five working girls priced out according to age. Nothing else adorned the shabby, smoky place’s walls except cracked plaster and bullet holes.

  Prophet and Louisa were the only two besides the Chinaman in the saloon’s dingy main hall, if you could call it a hall, but Prophet heard grumbling and hushed voices from the ceiling above his head.

  Prophet dropped his wet hat on the bar and pointed at the ceiling. “You got business upstairs?”

  “Upstairs?” the Chinaman said in a heavy accent, showing a cracked front tooth as a perfect smoke doughnut rolled out of his mouth. “Girls upstairs. Busy now. Come back later.”

  Prophet glanced at Louisa then said to the Chinaman, “How many men upstairs?” He held up six fingers. “Six?”

  “Five girls,” the Chinaman said, pointing at the chalkboard on the other side of the room, beneath the white buffalo head. “Five girls—all busy now. Come back later. Or stay and have whiskey.” He hauled a bottle from a shelf below him and grabbed a cloudy glass off a pyramid in front of him.

  “Sure, sure.” Prophet unknotted his soaked neckerchief and wrung it out on the floor. “Set me up, partner. Sarsaparilla for the girl.”

  The Chinaman froze with the whiskey bottle tipped over Prophet’s glass, frowning curiously.

  “Never mind. Two whiskeys.”

  “You know I don’t imbibe,” Louisa told him, leaning forward and wringing out her wet, blond hair around her boots.

  “Might do you some good. Warm you up. Besides, I’ll drink what you don’t. Set ’em up, partner.” Prophet showed the Chinaman two fingers. “Two whiskeys. Best diamondback venom in the territory, no doubt—yes?”

  “Yes!” The Chinaman poured out two drinks. “Oh, yes. Ver good wheeskey! Fifty cenz unless you wan girl. Yes? Girl? You both wan girl?”

  “No. We’ll just settle for the whiskey and a warm place over here by your stove.”

  Prophet glanced at Louisa. “Pay the man.”

  As she rolled her eyes at him, Prophet took both drinks over to the stove that creaked in the room’s middle and around which feather sticks and sawdust lay around an empty peach crate lined with yellow newspapers. He plopped down in the chair and shivered when the stove heat hit him.

  He was soaked from head to toe. It would sure be nice to crawl into a big, soft bed and sleep for a day or two. But he doubted he’d sleep well again until Miguel Encina’s neck was stretched and his rancid carcass was swinging from a cottonwood limb. He and Louisa would retrieve the gold and get it back in the bank where it belonged, until Jose Encina’s investors seated another president.

  Louisa winced as she eased her lithe frame into her own chair to Prophet’s left, the damp clothes tightening across her body. She set her hat on the table, and Prophet, sipping his own whiskey, set hers in front of her.

  “Not bad,” he said, smacking his lips.

  The voices from above grew louder, and the timbers creaked as men moved around, boots hammering. Jingle-bobs clattered like loose coins in a pocket. Louisa glanced at the ceiling, then turned to Prophet, strands of her wet blond hair plastered to her cheeks.

  “How we gonna play this one?”

  Prophet threw back the rest of his shot and sighed as the strong brew seared his tonsils. “Some things are best not so much played
as winged.”

  He set his shot glass down and picked up Louisa’s glass.

  “You’re gonna wing it drunk?”

  “I wing it best drunk.”

  “Why do you suppose Miguel left the six upstairs alive? If there are six upstairs, that is.”

  Prophet shrugged as he eased back in his chair, feeling the whiskey soften and warm his aging joints. “Maybe they’re better shooters, even drunk, than the other six. I don’t know. I stopped trying to crawl into the minds of folks like Miguel—and Miss Gleneanne O’Shay—a long goddamn time ago.”

  Louisa reached over and picked up her glass from which Prophet had not yet sipped. She lifted it to her nose, made a face, then closed her lips over the rim, tipping the glass back slightly.

  “Hmmm.” She set the glass back down in front of Prophet. She’d probably taken a half a teaspoon of it. “Not bad.”

  Prophet chuffed, lifted the glass, then set it back down half empty.

  “Who was this actress to you, Lou?” Louisa wanted to know.

  Prophet remembered those long winter nights back in Dakota, nights that he and Sivvy Hallenbach had warmed considerably for hours on end, and gave another wry chuff, slanting his mouth devilishly. “That, Miss Bonnyventure, is a story for another time and another place.”

  “You’re pathetic.”

  “I’ve risen a notch, then.”

  Louisa reached over for the shot glass and took another miniscule sip before boots sounded at the top of the stairs, and a man laughed and a girl gave a little fearful squeal.

  Making another face as she swallowed, Louisa set the glass down and stretched her gaze to the plank-board stairs rising into the second-story shadows at the room’s smoky rear. Prophet looked in the same direction and reached down and freed the keeper thong over the hammer of his .45.

  “Shit.”

  Louisa slid her eyes to him, but he said nothing as he watched the man descend the stairs, wobbling as though his feet were rubber holding a small, black-haired girl on his shoulders. The girl squealed and laughed, clinging to the man’s shirt, tugging at his collar, as she ground her bare heels into his triceps.

  The man said, “Ouch! That hurts!” without passion and then, by turns holding the girl’s legs and the rickety rails on either side of the groaning, sagging, swaying stairs, clomped down toward the saloon.

  When the man and the girl—Prophet had recognized the face when the man had lifted his head a few minutes ago—were halfway down, the Chinaman scrambled out from behind his bar and shook a finger at the man. “No-no! You treat nice! She ver young! Young Chinee girl! Very hard to come by!”

  “I’m treatin’ her right,” the obviously drunk cutthroat said, his voice pitched high with jovial indignance. “Shit, I’m givin’ her a fuckin’ ride down the stairs, ain’t I?”

  He laughed, and just then he leaned to one side, releasing the girl’s right leg to grab the rail with a gasp. The girl screamed as she sagged dangerously in the same direction, and then the cutthroat over-compensated in the other direction, and the girl screamed again as the man spun, stumbled down the quaking stairs, and did a little, graceless pirouette as he came to a stop before the Chinaman haranguing him in Chinese.

  “Holy shit!” the man intoned, visibly shaken and letting the Chinaman help the girl down from his shoulders. “That was close. Little Irene, I don’t give a shit how cute you are—next time I’m gonna let you walk down that death trap of a goddamn stairway!”

  Prophet regarded the man with a sneer on his lips as the cutthroat lifted his black hat, ran a hand through his uncombed, coal-black hair, then dragged heels to a near table. “For that, bring me a whiskey, Irene. Bring the whole damn bottle. Looks like we got a long, rainy . . .”

  He had turned to the front of the room, and he let his voice trail off when he saw Prophet and Louisa. His eyes had hooked on Louisa as most male eyes did, and then they brightened. But when they slid to Prophet, they only just started to slide away before sliding back quickly. The light left the man’s gaze, and his cheeks hardened.

  “Well, well,” he said, kicking a chair out of his way and sauntering toward Prophet’s table. “Look what the old bobcat dragged in outta the storm!”

  As the cutthroat moved between tables, kicking more chairs out of his way, his right hand dropped to subtly free the keeper thong from the heavy Remington jutting from the holster tied low on his right thigh. He swept a hand across his long nose and stopped three feet in front of Prophet, hooking his thumbs behind his cartridge belt.

  “Well, if it ain’t my ole friend Charlie Sparrow,” Prophet said with false friendliness, glancing at Louisa who glowered across the table at the man.

  “I don’t know what you’re here for, Prophet, but if it’s me, you can go take a running jump down a privy hole.”

  “I thought you was doin’ time in New Mexico.”

  “Pshaw! I did two weeks in the Jicarilla pen you took me to, and when they was sendin’ me to the federal pen for killin’ them two circuit judges—the ones that hanged my brothers—I broke out of their damn jail wagon. After killin’ the guards, I mean.”

  He smiled, and his eyes became as slanted as those of the little Chinese girl scampering over from the bar with a bottle and a shot glass and sliding apprehensive looks between Prophet and the killer Charlie Sparrow. “That was two years ago. I hear there’s a reward on my head. But I tell you, Lou, whatever it is, it ain’t enough.”

  He leaned forward, planting his big, brown fists on the table and glancing down at the barn blaster lying in front of Prophet’s empty shot glass.

  Prophet entwined his hands behind his head, and smiled. “If there’s a reward on your worthless carcass, Charlie, I’ll likely collect it one of these days. For now, though, you’re no more interestin’ to me than that pile of dog plop on the porch step out yonder. I’m here for your boss, Miss Gleneanne O’Shay and her double-crossing cohort, Miguel Encina. I got the actress all bound up in her room over at the Golden Slipper, but it appears Miguel’s lit off for sundry points west and south.”

  Charlie Sparrow chuckled as he picked up his bottle and shot glass. The girl, seeing that she wasn’t wanted at the moment, straddled a near chair backward and watched the three with vague fascination, her chin resting atop her chair back.

  “What the hell’re you talkin’ about, Proph? We got it all sewed up here. More gold than . . .” Sparrow frowned as Prophet’s words started sinking in. He filled his glass only halfway, then let the bottle hang down at his side.

  “What you mean you got Miss Gleneanne bound up in . . . ?” The lines above the killer’s nose cut deep as stab wounds. “Double cross?” Sparrow’s face turned red as sandstone bricks at sunset, and his eyes got darker. “What’re you talkin’ about, you bounty-huntin’ scalawag? What kind a trick you tryin’ to pull?”

  “Encina’s the one pullin’ the trick. Or was that part of the plan—him and his six pards gunnin’ down Hitt and the other gold guards in the bank, then lightin’ out in this crazy weather with the gold?”

  When Sparrow just stared at them, eyes mantled by his bushy black brows, Louisa said, “I think they mentioned Mexico and South America—didn’t they, Lou?”

  “I believe you’re right, Miss Bonnyventure—they did mention Old Mejico and South America. Prob’ly real hard to track ’em down there. Since you and your own pards, Charlie, would be gettin’ such a late start and all. And with all this rain. Hell, them wagon tracks’ll be done washed away in another ten, fifteen minutes. If they ain’t already.”

  Slowly, Sparrow raised his arm, pointing an accusing finger at Prophet. “If this is a trick . . .”

  “Oh, it’s a trick, all right,” Louisa said. “But we ain’t the ones pulling it.”

  Still extending his arm at Prophet, Sparrow backed up to the foot of the stairs, then wheeled, clomping up to the second story three steps at a time, the risers leaping beneath his hammering boots. Upstairs, he started pounding on doors and yelling. Gi
rls started screaming. Prophet and Louisa sat back in their chairs in quiet contentment, listening to Sparrow’s cohorts arguing as they stumbled around, dressing.

  Meanwhile, the rain streaked the Spade Bit’s front windows, and thunder rumbled angrily, shaking the hanging coal oil lamps, sharp lightning flashing.

  The little Chinese whore—who couldn’t have been much over twelve, if that—glanced at the Chinaman who’d retaken his place behind the bar, repacking his pipe from a small, delicately carved box.

  The girl glanced at the ceiling. The Chinaman shrugged and told her something in their strange tongue, and then she slid off the chair, grabbed a hide coat hanging off a peg near the bottom of the stairs, and disappeared through a curtained doorway.

  The din above their heads became concentrated at the top of the stairs—men shouting and clomping and doors slamming—and then they started bounding down the stairs. They came so fast and with so much fury, some still dressing or wrapping shell belts around their waists, that the rickety stairs looked like a swaying and jostling rope bridge over a wide canyon.

  Prophet was sure it would give way, but he was wrong. They all made it, a blond at the top of the stairs yelling, “You said you was gonna give me an extra cartwheel for them French lessons, Rigsby, you bastard!”

  Five cutthroats hustled out into the storm.

  The sixth, Charlie Sparrow, stopped suddenly halfway across the room and turned to Prophet. “Why didn’t you go after that gold your own self?”

  “Why should I?” Prophet said. “When I got someone around as capable as you to run it down for me?”

  Spreading his feet, Sparrow switched his Henry rifle to his left hand and held his right hand over his Remy’s grips, curling his upper lip with menace.

  “I oughta kill you now, you son of a bitch.”

  Prophet was lounging back in his chair, enjoying the show, a boot hiked on a knee. “You best not try it, Charlie.”