PREPARE TO SHAKE HANDS
WITH THE DEVIL, SENOR PROPHET!
He was about to rise and bolt through the gap when he saw the silhouette of a man sitting against the inside of the wall, on the gap’s right side. The guard was hunkered beneath his sombrero, facing the casa. He was sitting on the inside of the wall because the rain was slashing from the opposite side. Obviously, the gang hadn’t suspected they’d been followed down from the border. They’d grown fat, lazy, and careless.
Prophet grinned beneath his dripping hat brim.
He tensed when the guard swung his head toward him. He started to raise the rifle but checked the move. The guard’s lips were moving and Prophet heard him speaking in Spanish. To a man on the other side of the gap and whose back was likely just on the other side of the wall from Prophet.
Again, the bounty hunter grinned. He raised his rifle but before he could click the hammer back, something carved a hot line across the back of his neck before hammering the wall in front of him. Bizarre laughter cackled as though from down a long tunnel, muffled by the rain and thunder.
“Preparese para bailar con El Diablo, Senor Prophet!”
Berkley titles by Peter Brandvold
The Bounty Hunter Lou Prophet Series
THE DEVIL’S LAUGHTER
THE DEVIL’S WINCHESTER
HELLDORADO
THE GRAVES AT SEVEN DEVILS
THE DEVIL’S LAIR
STARING DOWN THE DEVIL
THE DEVIL GETS HIS DUE
RIDING WITH THE DEVIL’S MISTRESS
DEALT THE DEVIL’S HAND
THE DEVIL AND LOU PROPHET
The .45-Caliber Series
.45-CALIBER CROSS FIRE
.45-CALIBER DESPERADO
.45-CALIBER FIREBRAND
.45-CALIBER WIDOW MAKER
.45-CALIBER DEATHTRAP
.45-CALIBER MANHUNT
.45-CALIBER FURY
The Rogue Lawman Series
GALLOWS EXPRESS
BORDER SNAKES
BULLETS OVER BEDLAM
COLD CORPSE, HOT TRAIL
DEADLY PREY
ROGUE LAWMAN
The Sheriff Ben Stillman Series
HELL ON WHEELS
ONCE LATE WITH A .38
ONCE UPON A DEAD MAN
ONCE A RENEGADE
ONCE HELL FREEZES OVER
ONCE A LAWMAN
ONCE MORE WITH A .44
ONCE A MARSHAL
Other titles
BLOOD MOUNTAIN
THE DEVIL’S
LAUGHTER
— A LOU PROPHET NOVEL —
PETER BRANDVOLD
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) • Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
THE DEVIL’S LAUGHTER
A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Berkley edition / May 2012
Copyright © 2012 by Peter Brandvold.
Cover illustration by Bruce Emmett.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
ISBN: 978-1-101-58516-0
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If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON
For all the other wanderers
of the American wastelands.
Adelante?
Table of Contents
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1
THE MEXICAN GODS had their necks in a hump.
Rain slashed nearly straight down from the night-black sky. Flooded arroyos surged. Thunder boomed like giant boulders crashing down the highest mountains in Sonora.
The wind knocked branches off the nut trees and mesquites in this broad, ridge-sheathed canyon and sent them careening toward the soaked, sandy earth. A couple bounced off the big bounty hunter’s shoulders, nearly knocking off his hat, as if the gods of Mexico didn’t want him here. As if they didn’t want anybody here but wanted only to scour the Earth, once and for all, of all humanity.
The big dun, aptly named Mean and Ugly, didn’t like the weather a bit and didn’t hesitate to let his rider know he’d rather be in a warm barn with plenty of oats and a mare or two to brush noses with.
“Me, too, feller,” Lou Prophet said as he and the ugly dun moved through the storm-tossed night, the collar of his yellow rain slicker raised to his unshaven jaws. “Me, too. . . .”
Lightning flashed, lighting up the heavens from one horizon to the other. Prophet put Mean and Ugly up a low hill amongst thrashing, dripping walnut trees, the rain sluicing off his funnel-brimmed Stetson. Lightning flashed again. It was like someone raising and lowering a lamp wick quickly in Heaven. Prophet jerked back on the horse’s reins with one hand and lowered his Winchester with the other.
For a wink of time during that last flash, he’d seen a silhouette
d figure standing amongst the walnuts and mesquites just ahead and to his right. A big man in a low-crowned sombrero and an ankle-length coat buffeted by the wind.
A small orange flame licked at Prophet from the rainy darkness. Something nudged his hat. As the gun’s belch reached his ears, he drew his Winchester’s hammer back with his gloved thumb and fired. He cocked the gun quickly, keeping the stock clamped against his right thigh over which the tail of his yellow rain slicker hung, and fired three more times.
During another brief lightning flash he glimpsed his assailant falling backward, tossing his own rifle away. He did not see the man hit the ground before silver-stitched darkness closed down again. There might have been a scream, but the wailing storm drowned it the same way it seemed intent on drowning everything else on this harsh night way too far south of the Mexican border.
Holding Mean and Ugly’s reins taut in one hand, racking a fresh cartridge in his rifle with the other, Prophet looked around, slitting his eyes against the rain reaching under his hat to pepper his eyes. When no more bullets screeched toward him, he stepped down from Mean’s back and looped the reins over a low branch of a bending pecan tree. He grabbed his sawed-off, double-barrel ten-gauge off his saddle horn and slung the leather lanyard over his neck and shoulder, letting the handy gut shredder, invaluable for close-up work, hang down his back.
“In Dixie Land where I was born in,” he sang softly to ease his nerves drawn taut as coiled snakes between his broad shoulders, tramping over the wet ground to where the dead man lay—a black mound in the darkness. “Early on one frosty mornin’—Look away! Look away!”
He looked around carefully, then returned his slitted gaze to the dead man. Lightning flashed. It glittered along the dead man’s black leather coat and breeches and shone in his white teeth revealed by stretched-back, mustache-mantled lips. His hat had tumbled down his back when he’d fallen. The top of his head was bald as a baby’s ass, but long black hair curled down both sides of it to dangle in wet tangles in the mud around his shoulders.
“Look away! Dixie Land!” Prophet sang, lifting his head to peer into the rain-slashed darkness before him, through the jostling trees.
Weaving amongst the trees, he strode forward, thumbing fresh cartridges from his shell belt and sliding them through his Winchester’s loading gate. He continued forward until he came to an arroyo through which muddy water eddied, running from his right to his left.
Looking around for a way across the arroyo, he spied movement in the corner of his right eye and turned to see a man and horse lunge up out of the wash. Lightning flashed, showing the water glistening off the man’s duster and dripping off the brim of his low-crowned straw sombrero.
As the horse set its feet atop the bank and set itself to shake off the muddy water, the man swung his head toward Prophet. He was merely a silhouette now, ambient light winking off his horse’s bit and his saddle trimmings as well as the rifle in his hands. Prophet crouched, raised the Winchester, and drew the off-cocked hammer back until it clicked.
Lightning flashed.
Thunder clapped, causing the Earth to leap.
At the same time, Prophet triggered his rifle and saw the flash of the rider’s own carbine. The reports of both guns were drowned by the thunderclap, but Prophet heard the thud of the other man’s bullet striking a tree behind him. In the darkness following the lightning flash, he saw the dark shadow of the man’s big steeldust lunge toward him and then veer away, its saddle empty, stirrups flapping against its sides.
Something moved in the flooded arroyo. Prophet stepped closer to see a large oblong object, which another lightning flash revealed to be the man he’d just shot floating on his back, arms and legs akimbo. Bobbing and turning, he was carried past Prophet and out of sight downstream.
Prophet dropped to one knee and looked around, quietly singing, “Old Missus married Will the Weaver; Will was a gay deceiver, Look away . . . !” Deciding no other threats were near, he rose and walked along the edge of the arroyo, finding a freshly downed tree sprawled across it. “Look away! Look away! Dixie Land!” he sang, tightroping the tree and throwing his arms out for balance so he wouldn’t fall in the flashing stream.
He strode through the rocky, wet desert, swinging his head from right to left and back again, holding his rifle up high across chest in both hands. While the rain continued to slash at him, running like an open irrigation pipe from the funneled trough of his hat so that it was like looking through a mini waterfall, he climbed a low ridge and dropped to a knee, resting his rifle on his shoulder.
On another, higher slope that climbed to a velvet black mountain wall, several vertical and horizontal rectangles of yellow light shone. Lightning flashes revealed the dim image of a sprawling hacienda beneath a peaked roof tiled in red sandstone.
The casa sat behind a pale adobe wall. Between the wall and the house was a gap of fifty or sixty yards and what appeared to be a veritable jungle of storm-lashed shrubs and trees. Large verandas with broad archways on both the first and second floors fronted the building. Beyond the casa, the ridge wall loomed tall and formidable, several hundred feet above the valley floor. The ridge and the stormy night fairly swallowed the structure clinging to it like a small jewel hidden in the folds of a large, black sofa.
Cigarette smoke touched Prophet’s nostrils.
Instinctively, he pulled the rifle off his shoulder and crouched low, looking around. Below on his left, about halfway down the other side of the low ridge he was on, stood a gnarled tree. A lean-to had been erected in front of the tree, slanting downslope from it. Lightning revealed the wind- and rain-buffeted tarpaulin lashed to the ground with ropes and wooden spikes. Beneath the tarpaulin, a man crouched, facing downslope and toward the casa sprawled on the next rise.
In front of the crouched figure, a pinprick of orange light glowed dully, then faded. The man’s right arm came down, and during another flash of lightning Prophet saw the ghostly cloud of cigarette smoke blown out into the storm. Prophet began to lift his Winchester’s stock toward his shoulder, then checked the motion.
No point in wasting a bullet. No telling how many he was going to need here. Besides, the shot might be heard between thunderclaps up at the casa. He had to shoot sparingly, carefully from here on in.
He moved down the slope a ways and leaned the rifle against a boulder. Inside the lean-to, the Mexican brought his cigarette to his lips once more. He froze with the end of the quirley barely touching his lower lip and frowned. Something hovered a couple of feet in front of his face. He’d just recognized the large, gloved hand and had opened his mouth to scream when the hand smashed over his nose and mouth, brutally drawing his head back and up, exposing his bearded neck above the knotted blue bandanna.
He screamed into the hand, kicked as he felt the cold slash of the big knife across his throat. He convulsed as the hot blood spurted from the severed arteries.
Prophet held the man’s head back taut until the blood gradually stopped geysering. Then he removed his hand, let the Mexican flop back against the gnarled tree, dead but still jerking, and tramped back to retrieve his rifle. He held the gun in one hand as he carefully made his way down the slope, weaving amongst the rocks and hunkering behind shrubs or boulders when lightning flashed, afraid he’d be silhouetted against the slope.
He made his gradual way toward a black gap in the adobe wall over which vines grew like slithering black snakes. Tree branches hung low over the wall, some scraping against it. Nothing around had been taken care of in a while. Likely, the hacienda had been abandoned by its hacendado for whatever reason—perhaps Mojaves had pushed him out—and was now the regular hideout of the gang of thieves and cold-blooded killers lead by Antonio Lazzaro and Red Snake Corbin. All had been wanted for several years in nearly every western territory north of the border, and their hideout had been a well-kept secret.
Until Prophet had uncovered its location by tracking the gang here after they’d robbed a bank in Nogales and hightail
ed it across the border like a pack of calf-killing wolves. He’d been summoned to Nogales from where he’d been holed up in San Antonio, with a telegraph in the customarily cryptic language of his sometimes partner and lover, Louisa Bonaventure:
BE IN NOGALES BY AUGUST 15TH.
He’d ridden hard, but he’d reached Nogales a day late. The Lazzaro gang had hit the bank the day before.
Apparently, Louisa had infiltrated the gang, though Prophet had not known this beforehand. She could be damn secretive at times, Louisa could. She’d likely thought she could take them all down herself, but this bunch must have been too much for even the Vengeance Queen, as Louisa was known far and wide across the frontier. She hadn’t been able to stop them from leaving seven dead in the street outside the Bank of Nogales, including two peasant boys who’d been playing around the bank with stick guns.
That must have been damn hard on her, Prophet thought. Louisa could not abide the killing of innocents, especially innocent women and children. She must have realized too late that she’d had the tiger by the tail, and she’d needed Prophet’s help. He just hoped he’d gotten here in time. He’d lost the trail several days ago and had taken several more days in picking it up again.
Because of the gang’s especially cold-blooded reputation, the Nogales lawman had been unable to form a posse. The lawman and his two deputies had gotten discouraged by a hail of lead flung their way by a couple of Lazzaro’s rear trail riders and had turned back to Nogales twenty miles south of the border.
Prophet had tracked the lawmen, keeping his distance, as bounty hunters were treated like chicken-killing dogs by most badge toters. When the Mexican lawmen had headed back north, Prophet had drifted onto the killers’ trail and began dusting it slowly, with the casual expertise and caution of a stalking puma. Still, Lazzaro was a sneaky son of a bitch. He’d covered his trail well and had taken several detours to throw off shadowers, and such tactics had worked even on Prophet.
Now a wagon trail angled out from the rocky desert to curve through a gap in the adobe wall before him. Both ruts were virtual rain-pelted streams. The wings of a wooden gate were thrown back against the wall, both hanging from rotting posts. Prophet ran crouching across the trail and dropped to a knee about two feet from the wall, on the left side of the gap.
The Devil’s Laughter: A Lou Prophet Novel Page 1
