The Devil’s Laughter: A Lou Prophet Novel

by Peter Brandvold

  28

  ONE DAY EARLIER, the outlaw gang comprised of Hawk Johnson’s gang, Lazzaro’s gang, Captain Chacin and his one surviving Rurale, and Louisa Bonaventure reined up at the base of the Montanas Muertas, where the canyon spilled into the waterless desert.

  Louisa reined her pinto up beside Sugar’s black and looked around the dozen riders through the dust kicked up by their horses and the mule that the black woman led and which had a Wells Fargo strongbox strapped to the stout pack frame on its back.

  Lazzaro was riding lead with Hawk Johnson, the man with the constantly nervously twitching eyes who’d pretended to be the San Gezo town marshal. Lazzaro looked around, grinning to cover his wariness.

  “Well, you gonna sit there all day, grinnin’?” said Johnson. “Or you gonna get your loot. We got ours, don’t we? Intend to share it with you, don’t we?” He gave an oblique smile. “As long as we all make it across the desert to Puerto Penasco together.”

  One corner of his mouth rose with faint menace.

  “That’s right,” Lazzaro said. “That was the deal. I reckon we gotta trust each other, don’t we?”

  Lazzaro glowered at his unlikely accomplice. His face was gaunt, pale, and hollow-cheeked. He rode with one hand clamped over his wounded side. A while ago, as they’d ridden down the canyon from San Gezo, Louisa had spied blood leaking from the wound behind the gang leader’s long cream duster.

  Lazzaro glanced at Kiljoy sitting his roan beside him. Both men rode out away from the canyon mouth and into the desert beyond. As Louisa watched, sitting beside Sugar, the two riders grew small behind their rising tan dust tails. They disappeared into the ravine about a half a mile away, reappearing a half hour later.

  Lazzaro had ridden into the ravine with one set of saddlebags on his horse. As he galloped back to the group, Louisa saw that he had a second set of saddlebags—the ones containing the stolen Nogales bank money—flapping over the first set.

  “How much you got?” asked Doc Shackleford, sitting a rangy strawberry mare near the black woman, Thelma Knight, and the mule hauling the strongbox. Tulsa St. James sat a big cream to Shackleford’s left, wearing a long duster, stylish black gloves, and a white silk scarf on her coifed red head. She had a surly, impatient expression on her pudgy, brown-eyed face. The whore carried a sawed-off shotgun in each of the two sheaths she wore on her saddle, one on each side of her mount.

  “Sixteen thousand,” Lazzaro said a tad defensively.

  “Not much compared to what we got,” said George LaBeouf, pulling his horse’s head up away from a clump of jimsonweed. “But I reckon it’ll buy us a few putas in Monterrey.” He and several of the other men chuckled before the burly outlaw glanced at Louisa, Ivy, and Sugar, and drawled, “Pardon, ladies.”

  “We got the money,” Sugar said, pulling her horse up to where Lazzaro, Kiljoy, and Johnson sat clumped at the head of the pack. The blind woman slid her pistol from the holster on her right thigh and shot Lazzaro through his forehead.

  The shot spooked the horses and evoked two indignant brays from the mule.

  Guns came up with loud snicks of iron against leather. All eyes swung to the blind woman, who, stony-faced, holstered her own smoking pistol as Lazzaro rolled down the side of his pitching horse to hit the ground with a thud. Sugar swung her left arm out a couple of times before grabbing Lazzaro’s reins.

  She turned to Johnson, who stared skeptically, both eyes twitching, over the long barrel of his own Colt leveled at the blind woman’s belly. “He was my man,” she said, staring straight ahead. “And he’d come to the end of his trail. I wasn’t going to give you the satisfaction of doing it yourself, Johnson. Now, let’s ride before those savages catch up to us.”

  Louisa had also palmed one of her Colts. Now she couldn’t help curling her upper lip approvingly, suppressing the Colt’s hammer, and returning the gun to its holster. The others in the group laughed nervously as they regarded the blind woman. Even Roy Kiljoy and Red Snake laughed, though with a little less genuine humor as the others, staring down at their dead leader, who lay on his back, both eyes open, blood dribbling from the gaping hole in his forehead, just above the bridge of his nose.

  Johnson, Thelma Knight, and the others moved out. Louisa stayed back with Sugar, who turned to her as the hoof thuds of the others dwindled into the distance.

  “You’re still here,” Sugar said. She turned her head toward Lazzaro and stared off over the outlaw leader’s body. “I’m glad. I need you now, Leona.”

  “Maybe we need each other, Sugar.”

  Sugar turned toward Louisa. “Why do you need me?”

  “I don’t know.” Louisa turned to stare back up the canyon in the direction of San Gezo, where she’d left so much—not the least of which was her lover and partner, Lou Prophet—behind. “Maybe to show me another way.”

  What way was that? she wondered all that day as they rode a winding trail through the heart of the Montanas Muertas, at the tail end of the outlaw pack.

  What way was that?

  Maybe the way she’d always been looking for to leave her grief behind. If killing thieves and killers hadn’t done it, maybe joining them, becoming them, would.

  Lou was likely dead. The night before, she’d scoured the town and the desert for him, but the wind had blown all his sign away and he hadn’t answered her calls. Killed by the Mojaves, most likely, though it was impossible for her to imagine the big, rugged man dead. The idea was incomprehensible to her. It left her feeling hollow and numb.

  With him gone, what else did she have left but to try to make life sufferable?

  It was a long, hard ride without water except that which they had filled their canteens with before leaving San Gezo. Louisa looked around carefully as she followed the winding trail but saw no sign that the Indians were following them. But they had to be. Johnson had confessed to her and the others that El Lightning wanted the gold. With as much gold as Louisa suspected was in the strongbox—enough to arm every Mojave in the Southwest and Mexico, no doubt—the Mojaves would chase the desperadoes to the ends of the Earth.

  They came to the barranca’s southern edge just after dark. Hawk Johnson and Red Snake had scouted ahead and found the spring. The group set up a dry camp in a broad niche in the rocks along the side of a steep ridge. The spring lay in a stone bowl just below the camp, only forty yards away.

  There was little cover around the spring, so the group decided to remain in the niche for the night, keeping an eye on the rock tank and scouting the area under cover of darkness. They were all wily enough to know that the Mojaves could have the tank covered and be waiting to pick the gang off one by one when they went down for water.

  The horses were picketed together at the edge of the camp, where they could be easily watched. Louisa spread her bedroll near Sugar’s, under mesquite branches overhanging the bank. The group was silent, the rocks and brush around the camp dark with purple starlight mottling the open areas.

  No one smoked. The stars hung down. There was no breeze to speak of, and coyotes howling a mile away sounded near enough to throw a stone at.

  Kiljoy, Johnson, and Thelma Knight stole off to scout around the group’s bivouac in search of stalking Indians. Doc Shackleford took the first watch on the shelf overlooking the spring.

  There was nothing to do but eat jerky and biscuits, drink water, and doze. Louisa couldn’t sleep, however. Razor-edged thoughts raced through her skull. She did not feel so much sad about Prophet. Or she didn’t think it was sadness that made her chest feel as though she’d been impaled with a war lance. She felt only numb, as though she’d awakened after a long sleep and couldn’t get her bearings.

  Her closest ally now was Sugar. How odd that she’d find herself so tied to a blind outlaw woman. But then, nothing ever made sense.

  “Why’d you do it?” she said sometime after midnight, when she’d taken a turn scouting the water tank.

  Louisa leaned back against the bank under the arching branches. Suga
r lay back with her hat down over her eyes, but Louisa sensed the redhead was awake. Her shoulders were rigid under her leather jacket, as though her senses were in full play.

  Sugar poked her hat brim back off her forehead. “Because he thought I couldn’t live without him, and I was beginning to believe it myself.”

  “What changed?”

  Sugar lifted a shoulder. “I realized I had to live without him.” She turned to Louisa, looking past her in Sugar’s mysterious way. “You’re my eyes now, when I can’t see for myself.”

  “How can you see for yourself? I don’t understand that.”

  “I can’t see much, just shifting shadows. They have more definition when they’re dangerous. And I can smell things, hear things you can’t hear, sense danger in places you’d never dream.”

  “Do you sense it here?”

  Sugar chuckled under her breath and settled her head back against the bank. “The Mojaves are all over. We’ll be ambushed tomorrow, probably after first light.”

  Louisa looked around at the dark bank rising on the other side of a long strip of purple light marking the floor of the wash. She pricked her ears, hearing little but a soft, ticking silence, the low snores of one of the men on her left.

  Turning to Sugar, who had her hands laced together on her belly, she said, “Shouldn’t we tell the others?”

  “Why would we want to do that?” The outlaw woman’s lips stretched wide, showing the ends of her white teeth. “When the bullets and arrows start flying, I’m thinking me and you and the mule and Tony’s saddlebags’ll just slip off together.”

  Louisa considered this as she shuttled her gaze to her left, where the others were gathered on both sides of the niche, most of them sleeping. “That’s quite a plan, Sugar. Likely won’t work, you know.”

  “No.” Sugar dropped her voice an octave. Her hands rose and fell slowly atop her belly. “But is there really anything here you’re gonna miss all that much, Leona? Besides him, I mean.”

  Louisa rested her head back against the bank and tugged her hat down over her eyes. “Nope.”

  The gang rose at dawn and quietly saddled their horses. They drew straws to decide who would carry the canteens down to the spring, fill them, and bring them back to the group.

  With all the canteens filled, the group would then meander down the ridge through thick cover and out onto the open desert and on the trail that would, after a three-day ride, bring them to the Sea of Cortez and much reveling in Puerto Penasco.

  Red Snake Corbin drew the short straw. Cursing under his breath and checking the loads in his pistols, he let the others hang their canteens over his saddle horn. Tulsa gave him a mocking kiss, and Thelma Knight told him to “go with God.”

  “Thanks very much. That means a lot, comin’ from you, bitch.”

  “I love it when you call me names, amigo.”

  “Fuck you, Ivy. Or whoever the hell you are.”

  “It would have to be really late and I really drunk.”

  The black woman and the others chuckled.

  Keeping a cocked Remington in his right hand while holding his horse’s reins in the other, Red Snake led the mount up and over the shelf and down the other side.

  Slowly, he moved amongst the rocks, swinging his head from left to right, watching for flying arrows. The canteens clattered softly against each other as they hung down both sides of his horse. The horse sensed Red Snake’s tension and jerked his head high, so that Red Snake had to keep jerking down on the reins.

  The spring lay ahead in a broad open area in which green tufts of grass grew. Someone had mortared stone around it, and roofed it, so that it looked like any well. There was no cover for fifteen yards around it.

  Slowly, his heart thudding, his hand sweating against the gun handle, he led the horse up to within six feet of the coping. A bucket sat on the edge of the stonework, a rope attached to it. Red Snake looked around once more, then grabbed two canteens off his saddle horn.

  He depressed the Schofield’s hammer, holstered the pistol, and with both canteens slung over his shoulder, walked over to the well. He set the canteens down at the base of the stonework, grabbed the wooden bucket, and glanced into the gaping hole. His eyes widened and his lower jaw dropped when he saw the Indian staring up at him from just below the lip of the well.

  The brave’s short, stocky body was wedged across the opening about four feet down from the top, his feet grinding into one side of the stonework, his shoulders into the other.

  He had an arrow nocked to his bow. The Mojave’s presence had just started to register in Red Snake’s brain before the outlaw’s heart stopped beating. The stroke alone would have killed him had the Indian not loosed the arrow with a sharp twang that echoed inside the well and sent the wooden missile slamming into Red Snake’s skull through his left eye with a liquid thunk.

  29

  MEAN AND UGLY snorted.

  Prophet, who’d been dozing against the side of a boulder, jerked his head and rifle up.

  The rifle was already cocked. He saw the hatchet turning end over end toward his head, and he twisted sideways, hearing the hatchet whistle past his right ear and slam into the boulder behind him. The hatchet tumbled onto his shoulder as Prophet squeezed the Winchester’s trigger.

  The Indian standing crouched and wide-eyed a few feet up a rocky grade before him flew straight up and backward as Prophet’s .44 round blew his throat out the back of his neck before leaving him thrashing on the uneven ground, bleeding over both hands clamped to his neck.

  Prophet grabbed Mean’s reins as the horse curveted and whinnied his disdain for the Indian’s sudden appearance. Hearing guns begin popping in the distance, Prophet heaved himself to his feet, his denims mercilessly raking him, and swung into the leather. He did not wait to see if any other Mojaves were stalking him, but crouched forward over Mean’s neck and rammed his spurs against the gelding’s flanks.

  Horse and rider leaped the still-spasming Mojave and headed on down a meandering wild-horse trail and up a grade toward a low saddle. He spied movement on his right, saw a brave with a carbine scrambling amongst the rocks. The brave was caught off guard by the galloping rider and managed to snap off only one wild round before Mean gained the saddle and lunged down the other side.

  The sun was not yet up, and the terrain was mostly shadows, but Prophet could see smoke rising from amongst the rocks and brush a hundred yards beyond. He could see the shooters scrambling around on the lip of a rise, shooting away from Prophet and into a depression beyond, in which other shooters scrambled around, returning fire.

  Beyond both sets of shooters the mountain tapered down toward open desert stretching off toward the Sea of Cortez unseen in the south.

  Prophet sawed back on Mean’s reins and looked around quickly. An escarpment jutted from a sandy, aproned hill on his right. He reined Mean around, booted him up the rise and around to the backside of the scarp, dismounted, and tied Mean to a spindly mesquite.

  Shucking the Indian rifle from his saddle boot, he cocked it one-handed and ran into a notch in the scarp, suppressing the pain in his sunburned hide as he climbed up the notch. He found a niche amongst the rocks near the top of the scarp and found a comfortable perch.

  “Four rounds,” he told himself.

  From his vantage, he could see several Mojaves shooting into the broad, shallow gully beyond. He couldn’t see much of them because of the brush and jumbled rocks, but he could see enough to place a couple of well-aimed shots. He didn’t think that any of the Mojaves before him had seen him, and he hoped they wouldn’t until he could get his hands on more ammo.

  Smoke puffed from the brush and rocks about sixty yards in front of him. It also puffed from about a hundred yards beyond the Indians, the crackle of reports rising and flatting hollowly around the mountain. Bullets fired by the desperadoes blew up dust and gravel and rock shards around the Mojaves, who were not shooting from stationary positions but scrambling around the rocks, moving in on their p
rey.

  Prophet took aim, fired.

  The Indian had moved as he’d pulled the trigger, and the bounty hunter’s bullet blew a branch off a pipe-stem cactus to the right of the brave.

  The brave whipped around, wide eyed with anger and surprise, and Prophet’s second shot made the brave jerk back against a boulder. The brave dropped his rifle as he fell to his knees and, clutching his belly with both hands, fell forward on his face.

  Prophet ducked down behind the rocks, waited a few seconds, then edged another look toward the Mojaves, shuttling his gaze from left to right along their flank. None, it appeared, had realized the shot that had killed the brave had come from behind them. The Indian closest to the dead brave was fifteen yards away and flinging arrows at the outlaws as he darted amongst the rocks.

  “Two shots,” Prophet muttered, pulling his head back down. “Not bad. Not half bad at all.”

  He climbed tenderly down the scarp the way he’d climbed it, stole around from behind the rocky thumb, and ran crouching in the direction of the dead brave, weaving amongst the dry shrubs and boulders. He’d just run out from behind one such boulder when an arrow snicked nap from his right pant leg.

  Wheeling, he saw that he hadn’t been as covert as he’d thought he’d been. A brave was running toward him, wildly leaping rocks while he nocked another arrow. Prophet threw himself to his left as the Indian sent another shaft missiling toward him.

  Prophet fired from his backside too quickly. The brave yowled as Prophet’s bullet drilled his left knee.

  Cursing at the wasted bullet, Prophet fired again, aiming more carefully and punching a slug through the middle of the brave’s calico shirt. The brave flew back over a rock, one leg hanging up on the rock, his foot bobbing as he died.

  Like several of the other braves, including the first one he’d shot, this brave was wearing a single bandolier on his chest. Prophet looked around—no other Indians, or desperadoes for that matter, were bearing down on him—then ran over and pulled the bandolier from the brave’s chest and slung it over his own head and shoulder. He stepped behind a barrel cactus and slipped .44 rounds from the belt and thumbed them into the Winchester’s breech.