The Devil's Lair (A Lou Prophet Western #6)

by Peter Brandvold

  “Sure looks that way,” Prophet said. “You’ll wanna take her nice and slow on the way home.”

  He took the lady’s arm and gently lifted her into the saddle, then wheeled and strode back to Main Street. He waited for a couple of burly miners to pass in a heavy ore wagon, a cream-colored bulldog barking in the box, before crossing the street and retrieving his shotgun from the boardwalk before the stage station. He was a little surprised to see the shotgun still lying where he’d left it, in a town with Bitter Creek’s reputation for outlawry.

  He stood on the boardwalk before the closed station house, gazing at the sparse wagon traffic passing before him—one-horse spring wagons and a few buggies driven by ranch women no doubt heading for one of Bitter Creek’s two grocery stores.

  A few horses were tied to the hitch racks before the two saloons—the American and the Mother Lode. A big Studebaker was parked before the feed store, and several men dressed in range clothes were loading fifty-pound oat sacks.

  Prophet’s brain registered little of it. He was too busy trying to figure out who wanted him dead. Not that it was all that bizarre. Bounty hunters made plenty of enemies. But something in his gut told him that this attempt on his hide had nothing to do with bounty hunting.

  His stomach rumbled, and he suddenly realized he hadn’t had breakfast.

  Deciding to ponder his problems later—including what to do about the marshal’s star he could still feel in his denim’s pocket—he headed east up the street. He’d just stepped off the boardwalk fronting Polk’s Health Tonic and Drug Emporium when a man spoke on his left.

  “What was all the shootin’ about earlier, Mr. Prophet?”

  Prophet turned to see the mild-faced Wallace Polk standing on his store’s front step. The weather had warmed, and the door was propped open to the breeze. Polk wore a white smock and bowler hat. His fair cheeks were still red from the sunburn he’d incurred on the Scanlons’ trail.

  “You tell me, Mr. Polk.”

  Polk’s cheeks flushed behind the tan. He wrinkled his eyes.

  “Forget it,” Prophet said. “I’m just owly ’cause someone took a shot at me and ran like a yellow-bellied dung beetle. I’ll feel better once I get some food in my gut.”

  Polk looked concerned. “Took a shot at you? And you have no idea who it was?”

  “Man in a blue shirt’s all I know.” Prophet looked around. Half the men going in and out of the stores and the land office wore blue shirts. Glancing back at Polk, Prophet grunted and continued angling across the street.

  He turned the corner at the blacksmith shop and headed south to Gertrude’s Good Food—a white frame house with a shabby barn out back. He opened the screen door and heard Ronnie Williams and a woman talking in the kitchen. They were discussing the deer. The woman had a German accent.

  Gertrude, no doubt. He’d seen her before but had never learned her name.

  It was late morning, so Prophet had his choice of the dozen or so tables covered with red and white oilcloth, several still bearing dirty breakfast dishes. When he’d doffed his hat and sat down, a full-hipped woman with an attractive, oval face and thick red hair stepped into the room.

  “Ah, the new marshal!” she said in her German accent. “No?”

  “No.”

  “No? I thought...”

  “Ma’am, I’m so hungry my stomach thinks my throat’s been cut, but I don’t have a plug nickel to my name. If you’d—”

  “You are Mr. Prophet, no?”

  He sighed. “I’m Prophet.”

  She reached back inside the kitchen, produced a small brown envelope, and walked to Prophet’s table, her swinging hips snapping the stained apron about her thighs. She was large but graceful, and her face and neck were flushed from serving the morning breakfast crowd.

  Her white blouse was open at the neck, and her full breasts strained against the cloth. She exuded a raw sensuality as she smiled and set the envelope on the oilcloth, her voice a little breathless.

  “Mr. Crumb left this.”

  Prophet picked up the envelope, upon which his name had been penciled. Inside was a note and a small sheaf of greenbacks. Prophet opened the note:

  Mr. Prophet, I am deeply indebted to you for accepting the marshal’s job on a temporary basis. By the time you read this, I’ll have ridden out to talk to a man about taking the job permanently. With luck, I should have a full-time marshal in place in a couple of weeks. Enclosed find two hundred dollars. Your reward money for the Thorson-Mahoney Gang as well as the Scanlon Gang should be wired here soon. I intend to be back to Bitter Creek in a few days. Again, your help in this trying time is very much appreciated.

  Gratefully and humbly yours, Henry Crumb, Bitter Creek Mayor

  P.S. I hope the hangover is not overly severe, ha.

  Prophet threw the note and the money on the table. “Damn it all!”

  The woman’s brown eyes snapped wide, and her jaw dropped. “What is wrong—you don’t like?”

  Just then, Ronnie Williams stuck his head through the kitchen door. “Proph? I thought I heard your voice. What’s wrong?”

  Prophet’s eyes narrowed. Adding to his quagmire of problems, the kid was indeed wearing a shirt of the same faded blue as the threads he’d found on the nail.

  Chapter Twelve

  It was not to Lou Prophet’s credit that when faced with a surfeit of perplexing problems he often turned to whiskey and women.

  The predicament of the ambush and of the marshal’s job he seemed to have been hornswoggled into accepting were certainly not going to be decided on their own. But after he’d finished breakfast, he told the German woman who ran the restaurant, by way of small talk, that he was heading over to the bathhouse for a hot dip.

  She responded by inviting him to take a dip with her in the pantry she’d turned into a bathroom complete with big porcelain tub and a small stove with a copper boiler.

  Her devilish smile set off fireworks in the large, brown eyes flicking across his wide chest. Cheeks flushed and damp, with wisps of cherry-red hair sticking to them, she said in stilted English, “I am closing until four this afternoon, and vy vaste vater, no?”

  Never a man to argue with a woman’s good sense, Prophet followed the girl, whose name he learned was Frieda, granddaughter of the late Gertrude, into the pantry.

  Waiting for the water to boil, they stripped and made love on their clothes, Prophet grunting bearlike between the girl’s spread knees, her ankles crossed on his back, her hands pulling at his hair.

  When they finished, Frieda donned Prophet’s hat with a joyous trill, then poured a steaming bath tempered with cold water from the kitchen pump.

  She tested the water with a toe, took Prophet’s hand, and in a minute they both stood in the tub. Prophet soaped Frieda from behind, massaging her large, pendulous breasts with slow strokes of the perfumed soap, gradually working his way down to her soft, slightly swollen belly, to her thighs ... and then the insides of the thighs to the silky nap between her legs.

  She swooned back against him, so that he practically had to hold her up with one hand while he bathed her with the other, covering every inch of her big, smooth, hot body with the soap.

  She reached above her head, moaning and caressing his jaws and clutching his shoulders as though clinging to a life raft in a raging, boiling sea.

  “Goot enough for now. Now, my turn,” she said throatily, twisting around to him, taking the soap as she kissed him.

  She opened her mouth, stuck her warm tongue between his lips, and lapped his teeth as she scrubbed his broad shoulder blades, hard as a smithy’s anvil. She kneaded the muscles with her knuckles and thumbs, pushing and grunting, her hands owning a bread baker’s strength.

  Her pinching, probing, soothing hands worked down his back, then came around to his belly. She briefly stuck a finger into his belly button and tittered.

  Then both hands were again caressing, moving higher to the stone like slabs of his chest. She pinched at the nipples
and pressed the heels of her hands against the muscle tapering into the sloping, hub like shoulders.

  Suddenly, she fell against him, nibbling his neck while her hands closed around his jutting tool, exploring like a blind person learning a hammer by touch. She worked him into a delirious, near-catatonic state, and when the last few rational cells in his brain realized they’d better sit before they fell, he drew her down with him into the water.

  Quickly, she straddled him, or tried to. The tub was bigger than any he’d seen beyond San Francisco and St. Louis, but there wasn’t straddling room. She sat atop him, leaned back, and draped her feet over the sides. He grabbed her fleshy butt cheeks in both hands and drew her onto him. She made a noise that anyone passing the window might have misconstrued as a guttural cry of shock and horror as he plunged deep within her liquid, satin depths.

  He pistoned her back and forth, up and down, between his raised knees. When they were finished, there was barely two gallons of water left in the tub.

  “We made one hell of a mess on your floor there, Frieda,” he said when he’d caught his breath.

  She was leaning back, as he was, against her end of the tub. Glancing at the floor, she said, “It vas vorth every drop!”

  “It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

  “Over two years.”

  While they lounged, legs entwined, Prophet learned that Frieda was only twenty-four, but she’d been married twice, once before she’d come out West with her grandparents, and once after. The first husband, twenty years her senior, had killed himself during the stock market troubles of the early ’70s.

  She’d met her second husband in Bitter Creek. A young farmer from north of town, he and Frieda had been married two months when he’d gotten drunk in the Mother Lode and gotten his throat cut by the shirttail cousin of a prominent Cheyenne businessman he’d played poker with.

  Her grandparents had died of pneumonia last year, within two weeks of each other, leaving her alone to tend the restaurant.

  “Lonely place for a pretty, needful young woman,” Prophet said wistfully. She was nibbling his ankle like a ham bone. “Ever thought of packin’ it in?”

  She looked at him. “Pack it in?”

  “You know—hightail it for higher ground? Leave?”

  “I can’t leave,” she said as if he’d just suggested she turn cartwheels down Main Street. “My grandparents left me vith too many debts.”

  Prophet shrugged. “Sell out. Let the buyer assume your debts.”

  She looked at him slack-faced, as if wondering if he was being serious. “You don’t know much about Bitter Creek—do you, Lou?”

  “I reckon not. And though I have a feelin’ it won’t be good for me, I got a bad itch to know.”

  “If you vear that badge, take Mr. Crumb’s two hundred dollars, you vill know soon enough.”

  He was about to ask her what she meant by that when hushed voices rose beyond the room’s single window, followed by the unmistakable rasp of a revolver being cocked.

  Fifteen minutes ago, two riders rode into Bitter Creek from the south, wending their way between shanties and piles of split cordwood, scattering chickens and setting several dogs to barking.

  One of the riders, Leo Embry, was tall and thin, in his early twenties, with a hard-jawed, expressionless face. A new, wide-brimmed, cream Stetson sat at a rakish angle atop his head.

  Embry wore a yellow-and-red checked shirt and a silver-plated Remington low on his right hip, the holster thonged just above his thigh. The shirt, gun, and holster were new as well. Embry had bought the works in the Bitter Creek mercantile three months ago, when he’d decided to become a gunslick, like his first cousin, Pike Thorson.

  The other rider was a kid in his mid-teens named Gaelin Murphy, an orphan who swamped out saloons and mucked out livery stalls for spare pocket jingle, meals, and an occasional place in which to throw down his army blanket.

  He wore torn denims and a faded undershirt beneath a vest sewn from elk hide. A wool watch cap sat low on his freckled forehead, his corn-yellow hair poking out from underneath the cap, soft as goose down. Fine yellow whiskers ran down from his sideburns, thinning to nothing along his jaw. A sparse yellow mustache rode atop his mouth, barely visible until the sun hit it right, causing individual strands to glisten.

  He wore a battered .38 in a soft leather holster flapping loose against his thigh. He kicked the ribs of his old nag, trying to keep up with the fine, broad-chested paint of his steely-eyed companion who rode taut-backed in his saddle, his right hand caressing the grips of his glistening .44.

  Young Gaelin had ridden out to the little ten-cow ranch where Leo Embry worked with his uncles when he wasn’t practicing his fast draw against trash heap rats and vegetable tins. Gaelin had relayed to Embry the news of the Thorson-Mahoney Gang’s demise at the hand of a Rebel bounty hunter named Prophet.

  Embry had been young Gaelin’s hero since the time, a few months back, when he’d watched Embry pistol-whip a braggy gambler behind the Mother Lode Saloon before sending the man, tied belly-down across his saddle, galloping out of town.

  Now the two riders ducked under a clothesline, trotted through the wind-buffeting trash of a vacant lot, and reined to a halt on Main Street. The older of the two swung his hard expression up and down the street, squinting and rolling his eyes around in their sockets.

  “He’d be in a saloon, no doubt,” the younger man said, keeping his voice low and serious, trying to sound as tough as his older companion looked.

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Embry muttered self-importantly after a moment, raking his squinting gaze along the boardwalks.

  It was midday, and farm and ranch wagons clattered along the wide, rutted Main Street, which was only three blocks long and intersected by two side streets. Horse-backers rode in twos and threes—drifters mostly, with a few ranch hands here and there, heading for the harness shop, feed store, or mercantile, on errands for their employers.

  It was quiet by Bitter Creek’s night standards, but several sporting girls plied their scantily clad wares from saloon balconies. One—a toothless half-breed—stood on a street corner, flashing her bare breasts at passing riders, a few of whom hooted and yelled obscenities while others simply ignored her. “Mad Mary” had been working the same corner so long that she’d become invisible to all but strangers.

  Young Gaelin Murphy stared at her, revulsion spoking his eyes and curling his thin upper lip.

  Leo Embry reached out to swat his shoulder. “You get you a good eyeful, Gaelin, my boy,” he said with mocking humor. “You and her’ll be playin’ slap ’n’ tickle next month.”

  The younger lad’s lip twitched as he stared. “I don’t want nothin’ to do with that buggy half-breed. Why, she’d curl the tail of a gut-wagon cur.”

  “No?”

  The older lad’s steely stare was fastened on the creature performing a macabre, half-clad two-step with an awning post. Opening her hide dress with one hand, she extended her other arm to two passing riders, hooking her fingers and cackling like a Halloween ghoul.

  Strands of long, gray-black hair framed her wide, flat face and the breasts that hung to her belly, like water flasks, the nipples tilted toward her feet.

  “I’ll admit she ain’t no Lillie Langtry, but limber your pecker up, boy,” Embry continued. “Every kid in the county has to give her a poke when he turns seventeen. Those are the rules. Course I threw my guts up afterwards and was pickin’ bugs from my crotch for the next two months, but by God, I did it!”

  Somehow, he chuckled without smiling, only jerking his shoulders slightly and making soft snorting sounds. He reined his horse left up Main Street, around a two-seater buggy parked before the gunsmith shop.

  Inwardly recoiling at the prospect of coupling with Mad Mary, but figuring if Embry did it, then by God he’d do it too, Gaelin gigged his nag after the handsome paint, tracing a path through the buckboards and mining drays. The riders shuttled their gazes from one side of the street to the
other, then reined up before Hobbs’ Livery Stables and Feed Barn.

  Embry turned to Gaelin, his expression grim. “No sign of the son of a bitch, eh?”

  Gaelin shook his head. “Prob’ly in one of the whorehouses.”

  “I’ll find him,” Embry said, leading his horse up the long ramp, through the barn’s gaping doors, and into the cool, dusky interior rife with animal smells.

  Embry called into the shadows, down the central alley lined with three leather-topped buggies and several buckboards, tongues drooping to the hay-strewn, dung-littered floor. A figure stepped out of the shadows wielding a pitchfork—a fat youngster with freckles, deep-sunk eyes, and a shaved scalp. He wore tattered overalls over his fish-belly-white torso that boasted breasts the size of a chubby girl in her teens.

  “Hey, Leo,” he said, running his admiring gaze up and down the young gunslick’s natty duds, letting his eyes linger on the Remington in Embry’s holster. He swallowed with emotion. “You gonna ... you gonna ... ?”

  “You know what I’m here for, Fats,” Embry said coolly. “You seen the son of a bitch lately?”

  Fats nodded. “’Bout an hour ago, I seen him headin’ for Gert’s. I told Richy Searls to give a coyote yell if he seen him leave, and I ain’t heard nothin’ so far…”

  His expression all business, Embry dug in his pocket and flipped a nickel at Fats, who snapped it expertly out of the air and grinned.

  “Unsaddle our horses and curry ’em good. Give ’em plenty of water and oats. I’ll be back in an hour.”

  “Uh ... what about Mr. Crumb?”

  Embry knew the mayor was out of town, but he said snidely, “Fuck Mr. Crumb.”

  He turned, glanced at Gaelin meaningfully, then sauntered down the ramp, his thumbs hooked inside his cartridge belt.

  “Be careful, Leo,” Fats called, holding the reins of Embry’s paint with one hand and tossing the nickel in the air with the other. “I mean, you heard what he did to the gang ... him and that girl...”

  “Yeah, I heard what he done,” Embry grumbled, turning at the end of the ramp and heading down Main Street.