The Devil’s Laughter: A Lou Prophet Novel

by Peter Brandvold

  “Goddamnit!” Shackleford angrily cut into a thick slice of ham. “That bean-eatin’ son of a bitch can wait. Next thing you know, you’re gonna bring me his son and ask me to fix his worthless hide, as well!”

  Bocangel was semiconscious and groaning, wagging his head back and forth atop the table.

  “Come on, Doc,” Ivy said, pouring some whiskey into the cloth and pressing the cloth to the bloody wound in the old Mexican’s skinny left thigh. “He’s liable to bleed to death. I know you pill rollers take an oath of some sort or another. Haul your ass over here.”

  She looked at the bloody bandage wrapped around the man’s right arm and glanced at Prophet, “Once wasn’t good enough?”

  “Mojave did his arm for him yesterday. He disappeared as soon as we came into town.” Prophet looked at Hawkins and the other two townsmen who’d walked in behind the marshal. “What the hell you folks have against this man?”

  “Look here, Prophet!” Hawkins pointed an admonishing finger at Prophet, his eyes furious. “You just stay out of this town’s business! As long as you’re here, you will remain right here in this saloon, and keep your questions to yourself. There ain’t nothing about this town that’s any of your damn business, you hear?”

  Ivy’s cajoling had worked. Shackleford had tossed his napkin down, took a last slug of coffee, and was ambling toward Bocangel’s table, growling.

  “Maybe they oughta hightail it right now,” the doctor suggested with a snarl at Prophet. “That killer upstairs is likely gonna cash in his chips if he ain’t already. I got Miss Tulsa watchin’ him, but she likely nodded off. Her nerves are shot, and she said she was kept up half the night by that sergeant who had his tonsils removed the hard way.”

  Despite his rage, the doctor couldn’t help chuckling at his joke. He brushed a fist against his nose as he crouched over Bocangel’s wounded leg. “If you’d aimed a little more to the right, Mr. Prophet, you’d likely have severed the artery and saved me from eating a cold breakfast. As it is, looks like I’m going to have to clean this hole . . . looks like the bullet went all the way through, indeed . . . and sew the gentleman up.”

  “Hey, gringo.” This from Captain Chacin standing in the open doorway behind Prophet and glaring at the sawbones. “What you got against Mexicans, uh?”

  “Now, hold on, there, amigo,” Hawkins said, flaring his nostrils at the Rurale and closing his hands over the grips of his holstered revolver. “If you’re askin for trouble, you just keep usin’ that tone.”

  “You are in Mejico—our country,” Chacin yelled, poking his thumb against his chest. “You will show us respect or it is you and your gringo friends we will run out of town, and take everything here for our own!” He glanced at Ivy standing near the doctor and Bocangel and curled his lip.

  Then he grunted, his seedy expression replaced by a sudden shocked glower. He stumbled forward suddenly, head jerking back, lower jaw dropping. He fell forward into Prophet’s arms, a Mojave arrow sticking out of his back.

  21

  PROPHET EASED THE quivering Chacin to the floor, then grabbed his rifle off the table beside Bocangel. Everyone in the room had jerked to attention, grabbing their weapons. Louisa had slammed her chair down and run to the front window, her own carbine in her hands.

  Prophet racked a shell, pressed a shoulder to the side of the front doorframe, looking across the street to see a skinny brave in a white bandanna just then drawing back behind a small adobe-brick building with a barber pole right of the livery barn. Prophet fired, his slug blowing adobe shards from the side of the barbershop a full half second after the Mojave had disappeared.

  Prophet’s spent casing clattered onto the wooden floor behind him. Chacin groaned and cursed in Spanish. Kiljoy and Red Snake were crouched before the broken-out front window right of the door, breathing hard. Marshal Hawkins was crouched between them, turning his head sharply back and forth, long-barreled pistol extended out the window.

  LeBeouf and Blackwell were out on the porch, both on one knee, swinging their extended guns up and down the street and then up toward the rooftops of the buildings on the street’s other side.

  “Where the hell are they?” Red Snake shouted, his voice pitched with anxious rage. “Where the hell are they? I’m so mad I’m pissin’ lead!”

  “Don’t get up on your ear,” Prophet told the tattooed brigand. “That’s just what they want us to do. Piss away our ammo supply.”

  If the Indians remained persistent, he and the others might need more caps again soon.

  Prophet and the others stared out the window, casting their gazes up and down the street, at the roofed well and into every nook and cranny in which a Mojave might be lurking. After a tense half a minute, LeBeouf and Blackwell scrambled nervously through the door, brushing past Prophet, and hunkering down behind the saloon’s front wall.

  The doctor was down behind Bocangel’s table, leaving his half-conscious patient clearly exposed. Ivy knelt behind a chair, both hands on the back, her chocolate eyes rolling nervously. She looked at Prophet. “The back door,” she said tonelessly.

  Prophet pushed off the front doorframe and ran down the length of the saloon and through the door at the back. The door entered into a storeroom of dusty barrels and crates and a wooden door in the floor that likely indicated a root cellar.

  Prophet continued through the musty darkness relieved only by a sashed window in each side wall and paused a foot before the saloon’s rear door. It was a heavy, Z-frame door fixed to its frame with a nail and hasp. Light pushed between the cracks in the door’s slightly warped boards and through the one-inch gap between the door and the floor.

  Prophet waited, listening. He could hear only the wind scurrying around in the lot behind the saloon and the scratching sounds of the brush blowing up against the saloon’s rear wall. The vague smell of flour and cured meat and old potatoes filled his nostrils, though he saw no sign of any food stores. The smells had likely remained in this pent-up place from when San Gezo was bustling. Stronger was the ammoniac smell of the privy that stood a hundred feet behind the saloon.

  Prophet nudged the nail from the hasp with his rifle. He wrapped his hand around the door’s iron handle, and pulled.

  He had to jerk the door out of its shrunken frame. It vibrated a little when it came loose, its heavy hinges squawking. The gap opened. Prophet, standing a foot behind the threshold, stared out at the empty lot with the two-hole privy beyond and a pile of rotting lumber and two larger piles of split mesquite and pinyon pine.

  An Indian stepped out from behind the wall on Prophet’s left and into the open doorway. He was so close that Prophet could smell the rancid odor of the young savage, who had a round, fat face with blue and ochre war stripes painted across his nose.

  He smiled, showing two chipped front teeth as he extended a saddle-ring carbine with a leather lanyard straight out from his waist. The gun exploded into the door that Prophet had just thrust closed. The slug tore through the door, flinging splinters and passing an inch to the left of Prophet’s side.

  Prophet opened the door again, fired his own Winchester from his waist, hammering a round at point-blank range through the Mojave’s bared belly button. The brave screamed, dropped his carbine, and grabbed his belly with both hands as he leaped bizarrely off the ground, screaming. He landed awkwardly as he twisted around and dropped to his knees with his back to Prophet.

  He slowly lowered his head as if in prayer, mewling as he died. Prophet spied movement behind the privy and stepped to one side of the door. Another Mojave was running away through a gap in the eroded, brush-stippled hills beyond the outhouse. Prophet held fire as the Indian disappeared.

  Quick footsteps sounded to Prophet’s right. He stepped out behind the saloon but lowered his Winchester when Louisa came around the corner, her own Winchester aimed out from her right shoulder. She lowered the gun, looked around, and dropped her eyes to the Mojave whom Prophet’s slug had gutted.

  “Too bad for him.”


  “There was another one. Probably more. Not showing themselves.”

  As he looked around at the privy and the woodpiles and the rocky hills rising behind the privy, he knew a creeping feeling in his bowels. He felt like a kid whose imagination was haunted by ghosts. Only the ghosts out here in this semi–ghost town were real. And they were Mojaves, the very worst kind of ghost a man could be haunted by.

  And these ghosts seemed to be having a grand old time haunting him and the others holed up at Miss Ivy’s.

  “Any more up front?” Prophet asked Louisa.

  “None showing themselves.”

  “We’d best check the livery barn. If they get the horses . . .”

  Prophet walked back through the storage room and into the saloon’s main hall, Louisa on his heels. Chacin was sitting up against the front wall holding a tequila bottle, one of the Rurale corporals standing nearby with a bloody rag in his hand, chuckling nervously.

  “Figured you’d gone to your reward, Cap,” Prophet said, genuinely surprised to see the man alive.

  Chacin held up the arrow with its bloody tip. “Only went in a couple of inches. My bandolier broke its force.” He took a long pull from the tequila bottle. “Still hurts like hell, though.” He shook his head. His face was beaded with sweat, his mustache bright with it.

  The captain and the corporal were the only two in the place. As Prophet stepped outside, he saw Sugar standing on the veranda, cradling a carbine in her arms. The others were scattered up and down the street, peering into breaks between buildings and into the buildings themselves.

  “They’re close,” Sugar said. “I can smell ’em.” She turned to Prophet. “How many were behind the saloon, bounty hunter?”

  “Two.” Prophet didn’t bother asking her how she knew it was him standing beside her. She likely knew his smell and the sound of his tread.

  She glanced across him to where Louisa stood to his left. Louisa didn’t look at her, and Sugar didn’t say anything. She turned her head forward and worked her nostrils like a cat, running the tip of her tongue along the underside of her upper lip.

  “That hooligan still kickin’?” Prophet asked her, meaning Lazzaro.

  Sugar smiled as she stared straight ahead. “Yes.” She chuckled softly.

  “Best haul your ass inside,” Prophet said as he stepped off the veranda and into the street, Louisa following him. “Wouldn’t wanna get your pretty head shot off.”

  Sugar told him to do something physically impossible to himself.

  As Prophet crossed to the barn, the young Rurale standing near the Gatling’s maw and peering apprehensively out the loft’s open double doors, Prophet said, “I see where you acquired your farm talk.”

  Louisa said nothing as Prophet went into the barn. The hoof-churned dust was soft and noiseless under his boots, though occasionally a piece of straw crackled quietly. The barn was long and narrow with here and there a ceiling support post behung with moldy tack covered in dust and cobwebs. The double rows of stalls on either side of the narrow alley were filled.

  The horses snorted and stamped and nudged the stall partitions. Mean and Ugly, his eyes ringed with white, nodded at Prophet. The horse was tired of the close quarters and wanted to be on his way.

  “Soon, Mean,” Prophet said, running a hand down the horse’s lumpy snout with its long, irregular white blaze. “At least, I hope soon.”

  Louisa leaned against the stall housing her nameless pinto. She held her carbine slanted down over her right arm, her right hand around the neck, index finger curved through the trigger guard. “Let’s go now.”

  Prophet glanced at her. “What’s that?”

  “Let’s pull foot, Lou. I’m tired of this town.”

  Prophet studied her, frowning. He wanted to ask her what was eating her, but something told him he didn’t need to know. He knew it wasn’t the Mojaves she wanted to run from. “Can’t say as I admire it all that much myself. But I ain’t leavin’ without the money. If not the money, then at least them outlaws tied up good and tight and strung out behind Mean and Ugly’s ugly ass.”

  She didn’t say anything but just stood there, shoulder pressed against the stall door, an oblique look on her pretty face, hazel eyes shaded by her hat brim. Finally, she pushed away to retrieve grain and water, as Prophet did himself, and said, “Where’d you go earlier?”

  “I walked out to inspect the mine north of town.”

  “What about it?”

  “I don’t know.” Prophet poured a small bucket full of oats into Mean’s trough, the horse rudely nudging him aside to get at the breakfast. “I thought maybe it would tell me why Hawkins doesn’t want us here.”

  “Didn’t the company pull out?”

  “Yup.”

  “But you think there might still be gold in the mine.”

  Prophet hiked a shoulder. “Wouldn’t be the first time a mine company pulled out, leaving a rich vein behind ’em. Not that it’s any of my business. Curiosity killed the cat.”

  Louisa filled a wooden bucket from the water barrel near the barn’s open front doors. “Yeah, you best get that gold out of your brain. Hawkins ain’t gonna like you snoopin’ around.”

  “So he told me.”

  “Now don’t go getting’ ornery and try to spite him. Stay away from that mine.” Louisa splashed water into her pinto’s water trough, then grabbed the front of Prophet’s grimy buckskin shirt. “I mean it, Lou. We got enough troubles with the Mojaves. Let’s stick to the plan and pull foot just as soon as we can get that loot and head for the border.”

  “I’ll dally that.” Prophet took the bucket from her and used it to water Mean. When he returned the bucket to the rain barrel, he said, “I reckon our main point of business for now best be to get all them Injuns off our trail.” He picked up his rifle, which he’d leaned against Mean’s stall door. “And you know what that means.”

  “Kill ’em all?”

  “Kill or be killed, Miss Bonnyventure.”

  “It’s Bonavent—” Louisa stopped and took a step back, scowling at the rafters over her head.

  “What is it?” Prophet asked her.

  Louisa doffed her hat, showed him the fresh blooding staining the brim. They both looked up once more. Blood dribbled out between two ceiling boards. It looked like molasses and it sort of webbed down from the ceiling before forming a single drop that dripped to the soft earthen floor, puffing dust.

  Prophet and Louisa exchanged a meaningful glance. Then Prophet walked over to the wooden rungs running up the far wall. He climbed the rungs into the hayloft with its mounded hay and straw and steeply pitched roof. The Gatling gun sat a few feet back from the open doors, a chair from the saloon behind it.

  The Rurale corporal—the oldest of Chacin’s remaining men—who’d last been manning the gun lay belly down in the straw beside it. His rifle lay beside him. His head was turned onto one cheek, arms hanging straight down against his sides. His leather-billed forage cap lay on the other side of the gun. His black hair was parted in the middle, the part showing the man’s pale scalp.

  Flies buzzed around him.

  Louisa walked up to Prophet just as the bounty hunter kicked the body over, revealing the deep, grisly gash across the corporal’s neck.

  “Well, lookee there,” Prophet said without mirth. “Another sloppy tonsillectomy.”

  Louisa sighed. “I don’t recollect hearing the poor man even complaining about a sore throat.”

  22

  “HELP ME HERE,” Prophet said, crouching and snaking his arms under those of the dead Rurale.

  “What’re we going to do with him?”

  “Haul him out in the desert. We leave him here, he’ll attract coyotes or mountains lions.”

  Awkwardly, they carried the dead corporal over to the three-by-three-foot hole in the loft floor and dropped the body through. They climbed down the wooden rungs, got another hold on the body, and, with the horses nickering their disdain for the smell of fresh bloo
d, hauled the Rurale out the back door, past a wood pile and dilapidated privy and into the desert beyond.

  Keeping an eye out for Mojaves, the bounty hunters carried the bloody Rurale’s sagging carcass a good hundred yards from the barn. At the edge of a dry wash, they lay the body down.

  Prophet stripped off the man’s cartridge belt, which contained .44-40 shells for the Winchester carbine the man had carried, and looped the belt over his own shoulder. He hooked a boot over the dead man’s bloody shoulder and rolled the man over the edge of the bank. The Rurale rolled, arms flopping, down the side of the bank to pile up at its base. Prophet stomped the overhanging earthen lip of the draw onto the body, then kicked a few rocks down, as well.

  “That how you bury folks where you come from?” Louisa asked him, setting both hands on her pearl-gripped Colts as she looked around.

  “If you wanna say a few words, go ahead.” Prophet turned and had started back toward the barn.

  Louisa touched his arm. “Hold on.”

  Prophet stopped and followed her gaze to the southwest. A lone, red-skinned rider sat an apron-sloped pedestal of red clay on the far side of another wash about a hundred yards away. Prophet couldn’t see any details except the red flannel bandanna, quill choker, and the skewbald paint the big man was straddling. The Indian sat slightly forward on his blanket saddle, staring toward Prophet and Louisa. Slowly, he lifted the reins, turned the mount, and jogged down the far side of the knoll and out of sight.

  “El Lightning?” Louisa said.

  “Who else?”

  “Menacing bastard, ain’t he? What do you think he wants?”

  Prophet studied on that for a time as he stared toward the clay pedestal where the Indian had sat his mustang. He looked around. Nothing out here but rocks and cactus and the occasional paloverde and mesquite clump. Good question. What did the Indian want here? Was it just white men’s blood? Or something else?