He didn’t know how much time had passed before he awoke. Opening his eyes and blinking against intense, golden light sending razor like javelins careening through his brain, he found himself lying face down on a soft bed, one foot on the floor as if to keep the world from spinning.
He blinked again, lifted his head, and turned from the light. Two girls lay beside him, one practically on top of the other, one wedged so tightly against him their skin stuck as if glued. He saw that, under the fan of blond hair in her face, the one closest to him was Janice. The other was a sandy-blonde, shorter and plumper than Janice, lying face down, her head on Janice’s right shoulder, facing the opposite direction.
Tracy, her name was. Or was it Stacey? Possibly Lacey ...
All that Prophet could remember about the girl was that she had one blue eye, one brown eye, and a bawdy laugh. He also had some vague, half-remembered images of Janice and Tracy getting nearly as friendly with each other as they had with him.
Prophet groaned and put the brunt of his weight on his left foot clamped tight against the floor. Janice stirred and muttered sleepily, “Mornin’, Marshal.”
Prophet frowned down at her as he pushed himself to a sitting position, planting both feet on the floor.
Marshal?
She must have had as much to drink last night as he, and was imagining she’d spent the night with Whitman. Hard to imagine Prophet being mistaken for the older Whitman, though.
And a little insulting ...
He stood and was pleased to note the room no longer spun, but only wobbled a little. He and the girls had slept without covers, but the room owned a morning chill in spite of the sun slanting through the windows, so he covered them both with a quilt. As he did so, Janice yawned luxuriously, stretched her arms over her head, catlike, then turned onto her side, muttering, “Oh ... I feel so safe…”
Prophet grunted, chuckling, and reached for his underwear. Pulling on the threadbare underclothes, he smacked his lips, noting the taste of whiskey as well as beer and tequila. It made his stomach roll, tempering his desire for a cigarette.
When he had his jeans on, he reached for the buckskin shirt lying over a chair back. Something clattered against the chair. Something solid and tinny.
He held up the shirt with one hand and scowled. He blinked again, only vaguely aware of the ball-peen hammers smacking both temples in unison. Pulling the shirt closer to his face, he studied it as if some dog had shit on it.
But that wasn’t a dog stain up there over the right pocket sewn with cow gut. It was a five-pointed star on which the words BITTER CREEK MARSHAL had been engraved.
Suddenly, he was as sober as a Baptist sky pilot. “What the hell is this all about?”
He turned to the two sleeping beauties in his bed, elongated lumps under the rose-trimmed white quilt. “What the hell is this all about?” He held out the shirt in his right fist.
Tracy sighed and rolled over. Janice moved her right foot and mumbled into her pillow, “Not now, Lou, please. We really need our sleep.” And then she was again breathing deeply through parted lips.
With mute exasperation, Prophet plucked the star from the shirt, jammed it into his jeans pocket, and quickly donned the shirt. No longer trying to be quiet and ignoring his throbbing, hungover brain, he stomped into his boots, grabbed his gunbelt off a bedpost, and wrapped it around his waist.
Looking around, he saw with relief that someone had brought his rifle and shotgun up from downstairs. Grabbing both, he stalked out of the room, closing the door behind him and donning his hat.
“Mornin’, Marshal,” greeted the barman, sweeping up last night’s liquor- and tobacco-stained sawdust at the bottom of the stairs. The tall balding man smiled up at Prophet ingratiatingly. “Did you have a good time last night?”
“I must have had such a good, heel-stompin’ ole time that someone pinned this here badge on my chest.” Prophet dug the star out of his shirt pocket and flipped it in his hand. “You don’t know nothin’ about that, do you?” He couldn’t remember the man’s name, if he’d been told.
The man stopped sweeping and held the broom’s handle in both his callous-gnarled hands. “Why, sure. Don’t you remember? Henry Crumb—that’s our mayor and the depot agent—talked ye into takin’ the marshal’s job ... at least until your reward money for the Thorson-Mahoney bunch gets wired to the bank anyways. We sure do appreciate that, Mr. Proph—I mean, Marshal!”
The barman grinned, showing big, chipped, tobacco-stained teeth and red-rimmed eyes. No doubt, he’d joined in last night’s celebration.
“Crumb, eh?” Prophet grumbled thoughtfully, giving the star another flip. “Much obliged—uh, what was your name again?”
“Burt Carr’s my handle, Marshal. I hope my girls pleased you well enough. Anytime you want another roll in the proverbial hay—”
Prophet kicked an empty bottle and headed for the saloon’s front doors, his pulse throbbing angrily.
Outside, he got his bearings and headed for the telegraph office, nearly getting run down by a battered yellow farm wagon in the process.
“Sorry about that, Marshal!” yelled the grizzled old-timer on the driver’s seat, yanking back on the reins of his beefy dun.
Prophet snarled and continued across the street, mounting the opposite boardwalk.
He was frowning at the shades drawn over the stage station’s two front windows and at the placard tacked to the door: out of town on business until next Tuesday.
“Next Tuesday!”
An unseen projectile sliced the air about two inches in front of his nose and shattered the window behind him. He heard the rifle’s crack a half second later as, recoiling from the bullet’s close passage, he stumbled sideways. Tripping on his own feet, he hit the boardwalk.
He cursed and jerked a look across the street. A rifle barrel flashed sunlight as a gunman ducked behind the false facade jutting above the bank’s shake roof.
Leaving his shotgun on the depot’s boardwalk, Prophet grabbed his fallen rifle, sprinted across the street, and ran along the east side of the bank. He bolted around the bank’s rear corner and dropped to a knee, snapping his rifle to his shoulder and gazing into the alley over the rifle’s front sight.
Shipping crates lay scattered along the building’s rear wall. Hearing hoofbeats to his left, Prophet jerked his gaze that way in time to see the blur of a horse and rider galloping around a log shack, heading south.
Prophet straightened and looked around quickly.
Down the alley behind him, a saddled gray mare was tethered to an iron wagon wheel. Prophet ran to the horse, quickly untied it, leapt into the saddle, and spurred it hard down the alley, turning south around a stable, angling around the shack, and looking around. His heart thudded with rage as he urged the horse southwest.
Fifty yards ahead, the gunman dropped below a ridge. Prophet took the ridge at a gallop. At the crest, he peered down the other side to see the man galloping into a draw sheathed in scattered cottonwoods, heading southwest.
Prophet spurred the horse and bent low over the gelding’s neck, urging the horse down the ridge, then reining it into the draw. The horse was heavy and old, not made for speed, and Prophet cursed as he caught brief glimpses of the fleeing gunman through the trees and brush littering the shallow cut.
The man was steadily outdistancing him.
Prophet gritted his teeth as he stared around the lumbering gray’s lowered head. “Get back here, you cowardly son of a bitch!”
Nothing he hated worse than a bushwhacker.
His adopted horse didn’t have much speed, but it did have bottom, he discovered. Slowly but resolutely, he and the gray followed the gunman’s trail into a low jog of hills about three miles southwest of Bitter Creek. Prophet knew the odds of catching the man were against him, but there was a slim chance the man’s horse was built more for speed than distance. That meant, if Prophet kept after him, he might eventually catch up to him.
He had little doubt about what he’d do the
n. First, he’d find out why the man had tried to perforate his hide, then he’d kill him. On the frontier, bushwhackers were never allowed to bushwhack again.
That thought was foremost in his mind as he followed a coulee along the base of a high, grassy bench. When he saw where the bushwhacker had suddenly left the coulee and climbed the bench, Prophet ducked and reined the horse sharply left. It was an instinctive dodge in case the man, having climbed to higher ground, had stopped to place Prophet in his sights again.
He had.
The sound of the shot rang out just after the bullet had sizzled over Prophet’s right shoulder, where his neck had been only a half second before.
The old horse whinnied and lunged forward. Prophet rolled out of the saddle, hit the ground on his shoulder, and rolled back right along the base of the rise. Startled by the first shot and then by a second bullet tearing up sod to Prophet’s left, the horse lunged forward, nickering and loping away.
Taking his Winchester in both hands, Prophet jacked a shell in the chamber and slid a look up the grassy, sage-tufted rise. A granite spine rose from the bench’s peak. To the left of the spine, smoke puffed.
Prophet jerked his head down as the slug tore into the slope a foot above, blowing up a sage tuft and rolling it across his shoulders.
“Bastard,” Prophet raked out.
He jerked upright, extended the rifle, and fired. His bullet ricocheted off the rocks at the bench’s peak with a shrill whine. He rolled back off his left hip and crawled back along the base of the slope. When he’d crawled ten yards, he rose again and squeezed off two more rounds at the spot from which the shooter had fired.
His chances of hitting the gunman were slim, but he thought he could possibly pin him down behind the rocks, then sneak around the base of the slope, possibly flanking the son of a bitch.
Ducking low, Prophet waited for return fire. Nothing.
High above the hill’s crest, a hawk screeched. Along the slope a gopher chittered angrily.
Keeping his head low, Prophet crawled back along the slope’s base for about fifty yards, rocks and shrubs clawing at his shirt cuffs and denims. Turning left, he ran up the slope, crouching behind rocks and shrubs to glance at the rocky spine looming over him. The slope was steep and his lungs were raw, his thighs screaming by the time he crested out and walked slowly toward the spot from which the gunman had shot at him.
The man was gone, leaving boot prints in the thin layer of sand and gravel around the rocks and a wind-twisted cedar. Prophet hunkered down to inspect the oval print where the man had knelt on one knee, no doubt propping his rifle’s barrel on the rocks before him.
Prophet looked around, seeing no sign of the gunman along the slope tapering in the northwest to a deep draw thick with brambles. Beyond were more hills and brushy draws. Prophet scowled and cursed. Impossible to track the man through that. Even if he could, he’d have to find his own horse first, and by then the shooter would be miles away.
Who was the bastard? Why had he been so determined to bed Prophet down with snakes?
A half hour later, Prophet was wandering the prairie on the south side of the bench, looking for the gray horse. On a knoll to his right, a horse whinnied.
He wheeled and raised the Winchester toward the rifle-wielding rider silhouetted against the western sky.
Chapter Eleven
“Proph, that you?”
The voice belonged to Ronnie Williams. Prophet lowered the rifle slightly. The kid gigged his horse down the hill. When the hill instead of the sky was behind him, Prophet saw the kid’s shabby hat, his pale face with the anemic beard, long hair blowing out behind him in the wind.
Ronnie held a rifle across his saddlebows. The chest and withers of his chestnut gelding were lather-foamed, as though the horse had been ridden hard.
“What’s all the shootin’ about?” Ronnie asked.
Prophet regarded the kid suspiciously. The kid was known to be a good marksman, and several of those slugs had come close to hitting their target.
“How long you been out here, boy?”
The kid’s blue eyes flickered. He shrugged. “I reckon I got out here about dawn. I’m huntin’ deer for Miss Frieda over to the cafe. Her special tomorrow is deer stew.” He glanced around. “Where’s your horse?”
Prophet’s glance fell on the .56-caliber Sharps set across the bows of Ronnie’s saddle while he kept his own Winchester raised, held in both hands across his chest. Ronnie lacked a killer’s rough edges and cunning eyes. In fact, he was the last person in Bitter Creek whom Prophet would suspect of cold-blooded murder.
Hadn’t the kid saved Prophet’s life a couple days ago?
Still, Prophet had been targeted by someone wielding a large-caliber rifle, and here the kid sat with his Sharps ... on a sweat-soaked horse.
“You fired that rifle recently?” Prophet asked. He strode to the chestnut, grabbed the rifle from the kid’s gloved hands, and sniffed the barrel.
“Why, sure I have,” Ronnie said with mild indignation as Prophet’s nose detected the bitter smell of burnt powder. “I just shot at a deer back over that ridge.”
Prophet sent a glance behind the cantle of the kid’s saddle, where a deer would have been draped if there’d been one. There wasn’t. He had a feeling Ronnie didn’t miss many shots.
“Where’s the deer?”
“I gut-shot a buck. A wind gust took my bullet. Last I seen, he was headed that way.” Ronnie nodded and flicked a finger to indicate a hillock rising in the southeast, just beyond a thin line of cottonwoods. “I was trackin’ him when I heard the shootin’.”
Prophet gave Ronnie back his rifle. Taking his own Winchester in his right hand, he grabbed the kid’s deer-hide vest for purchase and swung up onto the chestnut’s rump.
“Let’s go find him,” Prophet growled, his voice betraying his skepticism. “Maybe we’ll find my horse in the process.”
Ronnie spurred the chestnut into a swale and around the knoll’s base. A half mile beyond the knoll, they came upon a six-point buck lying dead, one hind leg extended, amongst dock and cattails spiking a seep. The mule deer’s snout and chest were blood-flecked. A large-caliber slug had torn a hole through its charcoal-colored belly.
“There he is,” Ronnie said, reining the horse to a halt. “I was afraid I’d lose him in the river bed yonder.”
Prophet nibbled his cheek. He doubted Ronnie could have shot at him and downed a deer in the space of a half hour. As Ronnie deftly and quickly dressed the buck, Prophet looked around at the rolling prairie dotted with wind-jostled sage and rabbit brush.
The shooter was probably long gone, but Prophet couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t return to try and finish the job. When the bounty hunter turned south and peered along the base of a low bench, he saw the gray mare casually cropping grass, about a hundred yards away.
Prophet jogged out to retrieve the horse. Twenty minutes later, he and Ronnie walked their mounts back toward Bitter Creek, riding abreast. Prophet told the kid about the shooting.
“You s’pose someone don’t want you becomin’ marshal of Bitter Creek?” the boy asked.
Prophet’s neck tightened. “You know about that?”
“Mr. Kitchen told me this mornin’, when I was buyin’ eggs at the mercantile. Heck, everybody knows.”
Prophet snorted. “Whole town probably knew before I did.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind.” Prophet saw no reason to go into the particulars of last night’s debauch. Truth was, he deserved what he’d gotten. He was probably damn lucky he’d only been tagged with a badge. In Prophet’s business, getting soused was a good way to get yourself greased by someone holding a grudge.
As he rode, he went over the faces he’d come to know in Bitter Creek—wondering which one wanted him dead. Anger tensed his jaw. He was trapped here now, tricked into taking a job he didn’t want, shot at by someone who wouldn’t show his face.
When he and the kid got back to Bitter Creek
, Ronnie headed to the cafe with his deer. Prophet watered the gray horse at a stock tank, then returned the mount to the alley behind the bank.
When he’d tied the horse to the iron wagon wheel, he took a gander around the alley, peering amidst the trash for any clue as to the gunman’s identity. Seeing nothing the man might have dropped when he’d leapt from the roof to the shipping crates, Prophet decided to check out the roof itself.
When he’d piled the crates, climbed them, and hoisted himself onto the roof, he crept along the shakes, sliding his glance this way and that. Just behind the false facade jutting six feet above the roof, he crouched to get a better look at the shakes, hoping the man might have left a shell casing in the cracks between the shingles—anything offering some clue as to the bastard’s identity.
Nothing.
He’d started to rise when something caught his eye. A rusty nail jutted from the side of the wooden facade. Wrapped around the nail head were several blue threads streaming out in the breeze.
Prophet removed the threads from the nail and inspected them between thumb and index finger. They’d been torn from faded blue cloth. They hadn’t been wrapped very tightly around the nail, which meant they hadn’t clung to the nail for more than a couple of hours, else the wind would have blown them away.
He’d have bet silver cartwheels against a carpetbagger’s honor that the gunman had torn his shirt on the nail when he was levering shots at Prophet.
Pocketing the strands, the bounty hunter straightened and walked carefully back toward the rear of the bank, lowered himself to the crates, and leapt to the ground.
A woman’s voice shot at him from his left. “Cousin Sarah! There you are!”
Prophet turned to see a diminutive old lady clad in faded gingham approaching the gray mare. She turned her prune face, seared by at least seventy years of outdoor labor, to Prophet. “I was visiting Emma, and when I came out, Cousin Sarah was gone! I’ve been looking all over!”
“There she is,” Prophet said, sheepish.
The woman ran her hand along the horse’s sweaty coat and turned to Prophet, narrowing her eyes accusingly. “Why, she’s been ridden!”
The Devil's Lair (A Lou Prophet Western #6) Page 9
