“Well, thank you for that information, Miss Bonnyventure,” Prophet said ironically. “I’ll pass it along to the first person who asks. What time would you like to head out tomorrow after Charlie Butters? Do you think you can tear yourself away from your new beau as early as, say, first light?”
“No promises,” Louisa said snootily. “If not, you go ahead and start without me. I’ll just follow your stench and catch up to you before noon, I’m sure.”
“You still mad about that whore in Witchita?”
Louisa jerked her head back. “What whore in . . . Oh, the little redhead who couldn’t have been much over fifteen years old? I’d completely forgotten!” She laughed a little too shrilly.
“Good,” Prophet said as he watched his comely partner drop down the veranda steps and pull her horse’s reins off the hitchrack. “I’ll be seein’ you tonight in the Rio Grande, then.”
“Whatever.”
Louisa swung up onto the pinto’s back and rode east toward the hotel. Prophet watched her go, regretting the whore.
But, then, he’d never hidden the fact from Louisa that he often lay with whores when times were good and he felt like stomping with his tail up. Meaning, when he’d taken down a sizable bounty, as he and Louisa had just done when they’d taken down the ex–riverboat pilot and serial kidnapper and rapist, Walt “the Sturgeon” Maloney, on the outskirts of Wichita.
An old friend of Prophet’s had told him and the Vengeance Queen that he’d seen the wanted pervert whoring and gambling in several seedy dens near the warehouses along the Arkansas River. A whore had been murdered in that district, and Prophet’s informant had believed the Sturgeon was the culprit.
Despite the Sturgeon’s reputation for slipperiness as well as savagery, the two bounty hunters had taken him down without firing a single shot, as Maloney had been drunk as three Irish sailors on a Saturday night in Honolulu. That had been the easiest twelve hundred dollars Prophet had ever pulled down.
Why shouldn’t he live it up?
When he and Louisa had split their winnings and parted ways, he’d tracked down a green-eyed, redheaded whore he’d been told about, and he’d paid ahead for three days. After the third day, he’d decided to take the girl, whose name was Camille, out and buy her a steak as a token of his appreciation. He’d tussled with prettier and more talented doxies in his time, but Camille had been sweet, and genuinely sweet whores—as opposed to the disingenuously sweet ones—were hard to find.
When Prophet and Camille had come up for a breather to play two-handed poker naked, legs crossed Indian-style on the love-mussed bed, she’d confessed that her heart had been crushed by a young man who’d promised to marry her. The young man from a good family had broken his and Camille’s engagement because his parents hadn’t approved of Camille’s lowly upbringing on the wrong side of the Wichita tracks, despite Camille’s intentions of using the money she’d saved working in a greasy café/butcher shop to attend a bookkeeping college in Kansas City.
When the boy had taken Camille’s ring back, she resigned from the café and headed for Market Street, where it didn’t take her long to find less taxing work that paid better. Pretty in the face and well proportioned, all Camille had had to do to secure the job was raise her blouse. Her madam had hired her on the spot.
So Prophet had felt a kinship with the girl. They were both lost souls, and they’d gotten along well for three whole days. Lou never got along with anyone, including Louisa, for that long! So he’d taken Camille out for a steak. Unbeknownst to Prophet, Louisa had been in the restaurant, a fact he had been made all too well aware of when she’d risen from her table, walked over to his and Camille’s table, picked up Prophet’s beer, and poured it over his head.
Then, without a word, she’d walked out, mounted up, and rode away.
Yep, she was mad about the whore, all right.
She had no right to be, but there it was. They were not married or even promised to each other. In fact, they didn’t even get along that well!
Prophet figured that what had gotten the Vengeance Queen’s bloomers twisted was that he’d hunted down Camille so soon after he and Louisa had spent a sublimely memorable night in each other’s arms around a lonely fire on the Kansas prairie, whispering long-kept secrets and sweet nothings and such. For that long, sleepless and enchanting night, it had been as though they were the last man and woman on earth, and there were no more men to hunt or trails to follow.
They’d had everything they’d needed right there around that fire and in each other’s eyes.
They’d enjoyed such nights in the past, just the two of them, their horses cropping grass a distance away, a coffeepot gurgling over the fire. Coyotes yammering in the surrounding hills.
But those nights never lasted. And they were growing fewer and farther between.
That’s the way it always was with everything, Prophet thought now, watching Louisa lead her horse into the livery and feed barn that sat on the far side of the Rio Grande Hotel.
Nothing lasts. Everything changes. The good times grow fewer and farther between . . .
What’s wrong with spending three days with a sweet whore now and then?
Chapter 5
Prophet sat on the veranda steps and rolled a smoke, smoking the quirley until Louisa walked out of the livery barn and into the hotel beside it.
Then he flipped the half-smoked cigarette into the street, mashed it out with his boot toe, mounted up, and rode Mean over to the livery barn. He had nothing more he wanted to say to her just now. Sometimes she was just too damn much . . .
He’d intended to hunt down a bathhouse before he’d even ridden into Carson’s Wash. Louisa’s jeers had made him reconsider. He hated being prodded. It usually made him do the opposite of what he’d been prodded to do, but in this case, after two hard days on the trail, his clothes sticking to him with an inch or so of adobe comprised of trail dust and his own sweat, he opted for the bath.
He would have settled for a whore’s bath in his hotel room, splashing himself down with water from a pitcher. But since he was having dinner with the persnickety Vengeance Queen and her trimmed and tailored beau, he decided to let himself be goaded into a bona fide wallow in hot, soapy water. In contrast to the dimple-cheeked Jonas Ford, he looked rough enough even without wearing ten pounds of West Texas dirt.
So when he’d turned Mean and Ugly over to the livery barn’s hostler, a towheaded, bashful, but good-natured kid named Charlie, he burdened himself with his shotgun, his rifle and scabbard, and his bedroll and saddlebags, and tramped around behind the hotel to SYLVUS TAYLOR’S BATHHOUSE & TONSORIAL PARLOR, as the humble adobe hut was proclaimed by a sign over its front door.
Another, smaller sign read—HAIR TRIMMING 10 SENTS.
Yet another offered TOOTH EXTRAKSHUNS AND MINER BONE REPLASEMENTS (whatever the hell that meant).
A fourth, tacked to the bathhouse’s halfway-open front door, warned FULL-BLOOD INJUNS AND JIPPSIES NOT ALOWED ON THE PREMISSES.
“You Sylvus?” Prophet asked the small-framed old man sitting in a ratty, brocade-upholstered parlor chair abutting the cabin’s front wall. The chair looked half-disintegrated, likely having been left out in the sun and wind and rain.
The old man, wearing a shabby bowler, woke with a jolt, snapping his eyes wide and giving a startled grunt.
“Mercy sakes alive!” he yowled.
“Sorry about that, partner. I didn’t know how else to wake you.”
“Christalmighty, you like to give me a heart stroke! Probably shaved a good three years off my earthly allowance!”
“Life ain’t so good after you hit thirty, anyways,” Prophet said, still in the bad mood that had come over him when he’d reflected on his three days with Camille and Louisa’s grudge against same. He shifted the saddle and bedroll riding his left shoulder. “I ain’t in no hurry to start shoveling coal into the devil’s furnace, but Ole Scratch can pluck me from this swampy mire anytime he wants.”
“Scratch, huh?” the old man said, rising.
He appeared to be a humpback, the hump rising from the base of the back of his neck and shoving his head slightly forward, chin down. He had a lean, sallow face. Almost skeletal, with sunken cheeks and colorless beard bristles. His eyes owned an ironic, humorous gleam, however.
The hump made him appear to be in a perpetual shrug. He wore overalls over a red-and-black-checked flannel shirt, and his cloying stench made Prophet opine that in comparison he himself didn’t smell all that bad.
“You one o’ them devil worshippers, are ya?” he asked. “I hear some Injuns in Mexico do that—worship Ole Scratch.”
“Nah, I just made him a deal, is all. My note’s gonna be called in one of these days, likely sooner rather than later.”
“Christ, you’re a gloomy cus, ain’t ya?”
“Ignore me, Mr. Taylor. I just had a long ride in the hot sun, almost had my head blown off, shot the man who almost blew my head off, and been mocked by an uppity blonde.”
“Was the blonde pretty?”
“Oh yeah.”
“That makes it worse.”
“Tell me about it.”
“You sound like a hard-luck character. Me—I’m superstitious. I’m not sure I want you on the premises.”
“Well, I’m neither Injun or Gypsy. Just sour luck and a bleak mood, but I reckon I’ll feel a little better after I scrub some of your proud state off my person.” He looked around for a sign concerning baths but not seeing one, asked, “How much for a hot soak?”
“Six bits includes a bucket each of cold and hot water. Each bucket after that is three more bits.”
“Why so steep?”
Taylor glanced at the mud-and-wood-frame hut to the right of the one proclaiming to be a bathhouse and tonsorial parlor. A thin tendril of gray smoke issued from a rusty chimney pipe. All manner of trash lay around the place. “I keep the stove goin’ all day and you’ve likely seen the dearth of trees in these parts.”
“Give me your standard bath.”
“What about your duds?”
“What about ’em?”
“For another fifty cents I can take ’em over to the Chinaman who runs a laundry on the other side of the wash, and he’ll scrub ’em for ya.”
Prophet thought about it. He didn’t want to wait that long. It was late in the day, and he wanted a couple more belts of whiskey before he met Ford and Louisa, to help stem his ill humor. “I’ll just soak my longhandles in the tub. Would you hang them over a branch? Shouldn’t take them long to dry in this West Texas furnace.”
“I can do that.” Taylor nodded.
“Could you hang the rest of my duds somewhere and beat ’em with a stick? I’ll pay you an extra fifty cents.”
“Does a man in my pathetic state look capable of that maneuver?” Taylor snarled, canting his head back as though to indicate the hump. “I’m liable to hurt myself, you insensitive lout!”
Prophet snorted. “Would you risk injury for an extra dollar?”
Taylor grinned. “Yep!”
Prophet gave another snort then reached into his pocket and tossed the man the coins.
While Sylvus Taylor ambled into his shack for the water, Prophet dropped his gear at the base of the bathhouse’s front wall then walked into the hut’s steamy shadows. There were two big, corrugated tin tubs inside. They were long and narrow, with headrests at the wider ends. They looked vaguely like coffins. A few tomato crates standing against the shack’s walls served as shelves.
One of the tubs was occupied. Its occupant had his bare arms resting on the sides of the tub. His head was thrown back and to the right against the headrest, and his eyes were closed, lower jaw hanging.
Dead asleep and softly snoring.
His wet, dark brown hair was pasted to his broad skull. His arms were pale while his face was darkly tanned and etched with deep lines around his eyes and mouth. He wore a mustache that drooped down both sides of his chin.
It was hard to tell much about a sleeping, wet, naked man—you needed the eyes, Prophet vaguely realized, to complete the picture—but he thought he might be Mexican. That opinion was bolstered by the brightly colored clothes piled atop the chair beside the tub, on the man’s right side. Also by the high-crowned, wide-brimmed, black felt hat hanging from the chair and the high-heeled, fancily stitched boots planted beneath it.
The man’s tub was near full of sludgy, dark water, gray-streaked with used soap. He’d obviously shaved, because beard stubble like metal filings formed an oily slick atop the water, with here and there a creamy dollop of stubble-peppered shaving soap. Floating amidst the sludge was a quirley stub that had probably slipped from the man’s slack mouth.
Prophet had undressed around enough men not to feel overly self-conscious. Besides, this one was asleep.
So he set his guns, including his shotgun and rifle, atop the ladder-back chair near his own tub then kicked out of his boots and skinned languidly, stiffly out of his filthy duds. He was still peeling out of his longhandles when Taylor returned with two buckets of water.
As Taylor poured the water into the tub, Prophet indicated the sleeping soaker and asked, “Who’s that?”
Taylor shrugged—or at least bowed his head, which Prophet took for a shrug, given the man’s impairment. “I don’t know. Some tequila drunk. If he drowns in there, I’m charging him extra.”
He chuckled.
Taylor waited until Prophet had washed his longhandles out in the water, then the bathman took the wet longhandles and dry, dirty clothes outside. Prophet found a cake of lye soap in a crate between his tub and that of the sleeping gent’s, as well as a stiff brush, and went to work scouring his rugged, filthy, stinky hide.
He’d barely gone to work when his water turned black as ink. Oh well. He’d bathed in stock troughs before. This couldn’t be any worse. A little stink might linger after the bath, but a man should smell like a man, by God, and not a French perfume factory.
Despite the dirty water he was lying in, his skin tingled with the feeling of clean.
He glanced at his bath partner. The man was still asleep, in the same position as before, face turned away from Prophet. His mouth hung wide, and he softly snored. His cigarette stub bobbed on the water, disturbed with each of the man’s heavy breaths.
“Not a bad idea,” Prophet muttered.
He sat back against the headrest of his own tub and closed his eyes. When he opened them again only a few seconds later, his bath partner was sitting up in his own tub, twisted around to face Prophet, his eyes and mouth wide in an expression of murderous lunacy.
In his right hand he held a razor-edged hatchet back behind his right shoulder.
“Time to shovel coal, amigo!”
Prophet snapped up his Colt Peacemaker, which he’d been holding down under the water and snugged up against his right thigh. His assailant saw the gun, and his eyes darkened. He gave a bellowing yell as he jerked the hatchet forward.
Praying that the metallic .45 cartridge residing beneath the Colt’s hammer hadn’t gotten wet, Prophet aimed quickly at the man’s chest, and fired twice. The man grunted as he jerked back, sawing straight down with the hatchet and flinging it against the right-top edge of Prophet’s tub.
There was a dull metallic thud as the hatchet ricocheted off the tub before clattering onto the floor.
As Prophet’s assailant sagged back against the far side of his own tub, blood geysering from the twin holes in his chest, the quick thuds of running footsteps sounded outside the half-open front door. Prophet sat back in his tub, cocked the Colt again, and fired a third round as another man kicked the door wide and leveled a double-barreled shotgun.
As Prophet’s slug tore into the man’s throat, Lou dropped into his dirty water, hearing the dull, reverberating roar of his second assailant’s shotgun being detonated. Wincing, waiting for the bite of buckshot and happy when it didn’t come, Prophet lifted his head up out of the water to see the second assailant rolli
ng around on the ground outside the wide-open door, thrashing wildly and clutching his bloody throat.
Both barrels of his barn-blaster had chewed into the ceiling. Wood slivers, dirt, and weeds were still raining down.
More footsteps rose from behind the bounty hunter.
Prophet turned as yet a third gunman kicked open the hut’s back door. Prophet caught a glimpse of a black hat and a red shirt and of a Winchester bearing down at him a half second before his Colt roared two more times, bucking in his hand and stabbing red flames and gray smoke toward the third assailant, who screamed and stumbled back through the door.
The man triggered his rifle into the front of Prophet’s tub, the bullet clanging shrilly.
And then he was gone.
But Prophet could hear him out there behind the bathhouse, cursing sharply. He was stumbling around, wounded. He stumbled into Prophet’s view again, crouched forward and dragging his boot toes and trying to raise a revolver in his right hand.
Standing naked in his tub now, Prophet aimed carefully and shot the third assailant through the man’s right temple. The man’s head jerked back sharply. Prophet heard his neck snap. The man plopped onto his ass and then onto his back and lay jerking near a dusty mesquite.
Prophet stood in the tub, dripping.
His own powder smoke wafted around him.
He looked around, gun still raised, listening for more assailants.
Footsteps rose beyond the front of the cabin. Turning around in the tub, Prophet exchanged his empty Colt for his twelve-gauge Richards coach gun and clicked both hammers back as he squared his shoulders at the front door.
Someone was approaching, walking now.
The footsteps stopped. Louisa edged a look around the door’s right side, peering into the bathhouse. She held a pretty, silver-chased Colt up high near her shoulder, hammer cocked.
Stagecoach to Purgatory Page 19
