Stagecoach to Purgatory

by Peter Brandvold

  He chuckled again as old Emmett Lowry remained bent forward, both arms pressed against his balls.

  Prophet’s delight was short-lived.

  As Butters and the others gathered around old Lowry, a couple exchanging grinning glances, Prophet saw through the spyglass Emmett straighten and pull both his pistols from their holsters.

  “Ah, shit,” Lou said, holding the spyglass taut against his right eye.

  Emmett aimed both revolvers at Louisa’s head. Lowry was shouting. Prophet could hear the enraged pitch of the yells but not the words. He could see the quick, angry jerks of Lowry’s head as he aimed the pistols threateningly at Louisa.

  Prophet’s heart lurched into his throat. He braced himself, then reached for the Winchester.

  “Don’t do it, you son of a bitch,” Prophet gritted out. “Don’t . . . even . . . think . . . about it!”

  He crawled a little higher on the slope, raised the Winchester, pressed the stock against his right shoulder, and pumped a cartridge into the action. He peered through the spyglass once more. Lowry was still aiming both pistols at Louisa’s head. His whole body was jerking, enraged.

  Louisa smiled challengingly up at him. Through the glass, Prophet could see her bat her lashes at him, as though daring him to blow her pretty head off.

  As though egging him on to do it . . .

  “Damnit, Louisa, you cork-headed fool! He’s gonna do it now whether he wants to or not! Now he’s gotta do it!”

  Prophet tossed the spyglass aside.

  “Lou, what is it?” Phoebe asked, crawling up behind him.

  Prophet snugged his cheek up against the Winchester’s stock.

  Emmett Lowry was only about the size of Prophet’s thumbnail from this distance. But Prophet had made a similar shot before with the same rifle. It had been a while, but he’d made it.

  Almost two hundred yards.

  It might not have even been a lucky hit . . .

  Prophet lined up the sights on Lowry’s slightly humped back. Then, allowing for the distance, he raised the forward bead and slid it into the V atop the rifle’s breech, placing both on the brim of the man’s hat. He held his breath, took up the slack in his trigger finger.

  Crack!

  “Lou!” Phoebe said with a gasp.

  Prophet lowered the rifle, grabbed the spyglass, raised it to his right eye.

  Lowry jutted both pistols at Louisa. She was still smiling up at him. He clicked both hammers back, thrust the cocked revolvers straight forward and down.

  And then he tensed.

  Louisa’s smiling face suddenly turned red.

  He did it! Prophet thought, his heart a cold stone dropping into his belly.

  The sonofabitch killed her . . .

  He was about to slam the spyglass to the ground, but then he saw old Lowry stumble forward, lowering his pistols, firing both into the ground near his boots. Louisa threw herself to one side as Lowry fell forward against the boulder she’d been leaning back against.

  Butters and the other Lowrys whipped around, grabbing pistols from holsters. The report of Prophet’s rifle had probably reached their ears a second or so after they’d seen the bullet blow the old man’s heart out his chest and onto the rock he was leaning against, like a drunk pissing against a tree. Prophet rose quickly, racking another round into the Winchester’s breech, said, “Stay here, Phoebe!” and started running toward the horses.

  “Lou!” she cried.

  “Stay here!”

  Prophet gained the crease between the hillocks, grabbed Mean’s reins, and leaped into the saddle.

  “Come on, partner!”

  He didn’t need his spurs. Mean knew the stakes.

  The horse wheeled, jogged out of the crease and onto the trail. He swung right and lunged into a ground-eating gallop away from the rise and into the bowl. Prophet took the reins in his teeth and raised the Winchester in both hands, ready to start flinging lead before Butters or the other Lowrys could drill Louisa.

  He no more than got the long gun pressed against his shoulder, however, before he lowered it.

  Louisa must have grabbed both of Emmett Lowry’s pistols. Two pistols were in her hands, and, leaning back against the boulder beside Lowry, who remained leaning forward against the boulder like that pissing drunk, she was going to work with both poppers, calmly, methodically shooting one at a time the men dancing around her.

  Butters and the Lowrys had apparently been distracted enough by Prophet’s assassination of Emmett that by the time they’d remembered Louisa, she’d already had Emmett’s guns.

  Two Lowrys were down. One of the two was down and writhing. The other was down and still.

  Two others were exchanging lead with Louisa.

  Despite her wounded leg, Louisa had the steadier hands. One of the last two Lowrys stumbled backward, twisting around and firing his pistol into the air before dropping to his knees and falling forward against the ground. The last man standing fired his own pistol then screamed and grabbed his left knee.

  As he did, Louisa extended one of her pistols at him again and fired. The man’s head snapped back with such violence that Prophet, who was within fifty yards now and closing fast, could hear the pistol-like pop of his neck breaking. Lowry crumpled, dead before he kissed the sand.

  Prophet galloped up to within ten yards of Louisa, who was sliding back down against the boulder, beside Emmett Lowry. He looked around, frowning, then turned to his partner.

  “Where’s Butters?”

  Louisa hooked a thumb over her left shoulder.

  Prophet looked behind her. A horseback rider was just then pounding to the crest of a low, steep butte maybe two hundred yards away. Butters rode low in the saddle, hatless, his right arm tucked against his chest. He glanced behind him a half a second before his horse gained the crest of the butte. Then the horse plunged down the opposite side, and horse and rider were gone.

  “I wounded that dog,” Louisa said, curling one half of her plump upper lip. “Shot him in the cheek.”

  Prophet looked at her. “How bad you hit?”

  “You’ve hurt yourself worse falling out of bed drunk,” she grunted, leaning forward and tightening the bandanna wrapped around her leg. She glanced sidelong at Prophet, worry in her eyes. “Is Jonas . . . ?”

  “Dead.”

  Louisa glanced over her shoulder again toward where Butters had fled. She turned her hard gaze on Prophet and flared a nostril. “Run him down and kill him, Lou.”

  Prophet heard hoof thuds behind him and turned to see Phoebe approaching on her cream. He was glad she was here. He wouldn’t have left Louisa alone otherwise.

  “I’ll be back,” he said, and nudged Mean with his spurs.

  Horse and rider vaulted into an instant, rocking lope.

  They flew around the mesquites, across the open flat, and then up and over the butte, following Butters’s trail. Prophet didn’t need to keep an eye on the man’s hoof prints. He knew where he was headed.

  The Lowry ranch was just over the next dyke rising like a toothy dinosaur jaw dead ahead and straight south.

  Prophet crested the dyke fifteen minutes later and dropped down the other side and into the broad flat in which the shabby ranch slumbered. Ahead, Butters was just then galloping into the ranch yard, lifting a fine plume of tan dust behind him. He sagged, head hanging miserably, in his saddle.

  A blond-headed, feminine figure stood in the cabin’s open doorway, holding the door half-open. Prophet saw Jackie’s plump belly behind a pale apron, her eyes drawn wide with concern.

  Butters halted his horse, slid gingerly out of the saddle. He was holding his left hand against his bloody cheek. He ran shamble-footed to the porch, mounted the steps, pushed the girl inside with his body, and drew the door closed behind them.

  Prophet urged Mean into a faster gallop. The horse snorted, lowered its head, and stretched its stride.

  As the horse approached Butters’s mount standing wearily in the yard before the cabi
n, Prophet leaped off Mean’s back and, leaving his rifle in its scabbard, ran up the porch steps. He knew Butters would have barred the door, so he drew his Colt and threw himself through the window left of it.

  The cacophony of breaking glass was followed by a girl’s scream.

  Prophet hit the floor at the end left of the eating table, between the kitchen and the parlor part of the cabin. He rolled as two shots barked loudly. Bullets chewed slivers from the table edge.

  Lou rose onto his left shoulder and hip, window glass still tumbling off his hat and his shoulders, and aimed his cocked Colt up at Butters. Jackie screamed as the killer grabbed her and pulled her in front of him. He stood behind the eating table, near the range. He held his cocked pistol against the girl’s jaw.

  His left cheek looked like hamburger. Blood dripped down from the ragged hole, trickling over his jaw, coating the little braid hanging wormlike from his scraggly goatee, and into his shirt.

  “Drop the Peacemaker, Lou,” Butters shouted, spitting blood, sounding as though he had rocks in his mouth, “or I’ll blow her fool head off !”

  “Charlie!” Jackie screamed.

  “She’s carrying your child, fer chrissakes!”

  “Charlie!” Jackie screamed again.

  Butters rammed the barrel of his pistol up hard again the girl’s jaw, tipping her head up and back. She screeched in pain. “Lose the Colt, Lou, or I’ll paint the ceiling with this pregnant bitch’s brains!”

  “All right, Charlie.” Prophet depressed his Colt’s hammer and leaned forward to set the gun on the table. “All right, Charlie . . . there you go.”

  Prophet grinned.

  “You think this is funny?” Butters barked.

  “Yeah, Charlie,” Prophet said. “I do.”

  Just then the blind old woman, who’d been stealing up behind Butters, raised her arthritic right fist and sunk a knitting needle into the back of Charlie’s neck.

  “Trash!” the old woman cawed like a dying crow. “Butters barn trash!”

  That last was nearly drowned by Charlie’s agonized wail.

  He dropped his right hand and stumbled backward, reaching up with his left hand for the needle sticking out of his neck. Jackie dropped to her knees, sobbing.

  Charlie yowled again, and then realizing he wasn’t going to be able to dislodge the needle, he pivoted back around and extended his pistol at Prophet.

  Lou had already swiped his Colt off the table.

  The Peacemaker roared.

  The bullet punched a quarter-sized hole through Butters’s forehead, a little right of center. Still, a good shot, though. It did the trick.

  Charlie’s head snapped back sharply. He dropped his pistol with a thud to the floor.

  The killer’s ugly, bloody head wobbled, Charlie’s eyes losing their focus and rolling back in their sockets. The head sagged back again and the rest of Charlie followed it to the floor.

  The old woman stood over him, snarling and rasping and shaking her head.

  Prophet strode around the table and helped the sobbing Jackie to her feet. She stared down in horror at the dead father of her baby.

  Prophet held her close against him. “That, Miss Jackie,” he said with a fateful sigh, “was Charlie Butters.”

  Epilogue

  Two weeks later, Prophet held his hat down against his belly as he watched Louisa set a spray of wildflowers over the freshly mounded dirt and rocks that was Jonas Ford’s grave.

  The heat had broken finally, portending the cool breezes of autumn. Blackbirds cawed in the cottonwoods and mesquites that lined the cemetery that lay across the side of a low hill southwest of Carson’s Wash. Mean and Ugly and Louisa’s nameless pinto were tied to the shabby picket fence that surrounded the boneyard.

  Louisa remained on one knee for a time, staring down at Jonas’s grave. Prophet wondered if she was praying. The girl she’d once been would have said a prayer. The woman she’d become, however, likely wouldn’t. The woman she’d become would have vowed revenge if Ford’s killer hadn’t already gotten his due.

  Someone else would pay, though. Some other deserving killer would get the bullet she herself had wanted to punch through Charlie Butters’s brisket.

  Louisa straightened with a wince against the pain in her left thigh.

  She should still be in bed or at least be on crutches, as the sawbones had advised. Neither was Louisa’s way. She sure as hell shouldn’t be riding yet, but that’s what she intended to do though she’d promised Prophet she’d stop often and early and change the bandages frequently.

  Prophet doubted she’d do either one.

  Just wasn’t the Vengeance Queen’s way. There were men out there . . . and some women . . . who needed to die for their sins. That was more important than Louisa’s health. At least, in her eyes.

  She turned to Lou. The cool, fresh breeze buffeted the blond hair tumbling to her shoulders.

  “He was a good man,” she said.

  “He was a good man,” Prophet said. “I’m sorry, Louisa.”

  “It wasn’t meant to be.” She’d turned her head to pensively study the grave once more. “Just wasn’t meant to be.”

  “You’ll find another man. You’ll get another chance at a normal life.”

  “The question is,” Louisa said, “is that what I want?” She looked at Prophet. “A normal life?”

  “Yeah,” Prophet said with a sigh, setting his funnel-brimmed hat on his head.

  He turned and started walking slowly toward the horses. “Well, I’ll be seeing you down along the trail somewheres, Vengeance Queen. You keep your hooves clean and your tail free of cockleburs, you hear? And avoid them sidewinders. They make for venomous sleepin’ companions.”

  Prophet chuckled to himself as he strode between the graves.

  “Where you headed?” Louisa called after him.

  Prophet stopped, half turned, narrowed one eye in question.

  Louisa hiked a shoulder, crooked a half smile. “You want company? Down in Mexico?”

  Prophet pointed an admonishing finger at her. “You’re too bossy for Mexico. And you’ll scare off the señoritas.”

  Louisa pursed her lips, nodded. “Right.”

  “We might make it halfway, though. Before one of us piss-burns the other an’ we fork trails again.” Prophet spread his arms, smiling. “You never know what we’ll do.”

  “No, you don’t.” Louisa walked toward him. She allowed herself to limp only a little. She flicked his hat brim back off his forehead, rose onto her toes, and pecked his lips. “That’s the thing about us—isn’t it, Lou?”

  “That’s the thing about us.” He continued walking toward the horses. “Come on—I’ll buy you a beer and a shot for the trail.”

  “Make mine a sarsaparilla,” Louisa said.

  Keep reading for a special excerpt of the next

  LOU PROPHET, BOUNTY HUNTER novel.

  BLOOD AT SUNDOWN

  by Peter Brandvold

  On sale in January 2019, from Pinnacle Books

  “Gonna get yourself killed, Prophet, you no-good crazy Rebel!” Lou railed at himself, his words whipped and torn by the wind.

  With a determined grunt, he scrambled on hands and knees, keeping his head down against the headwind, to the second train car’s front end. He stopped a few inches from the edge and peered at the passenger coach from which young Fair weather had fired at Little Fawn.

  “All right, you devil!”

  Prophet scrambled down the ladder running up the front of the stock car and dropped to the vestibule at the rear of the passenger coach. He bent his knees, letting his feet and hips take the brunt of the landing.

  Rising, he grabbed the knob of the door facing him. It turned. He threw the door open and lunged inside. He was a bull barreling through a chute, his heart thudding, the fire of his rage fighting back the cold that had so mercilessly assaulted him.

  “Lou!” the countess screamed, rising from a chair somewhere to his left.

 
; Prophet didn’t look at her. He didn’t look at anyone except the senator’s son, whom he’d picked out of the crowd sitting or standing in the posh parlor car, warmed by a small, ornate iron stove, the second he’d entered the coach.

  Several Russians leaped from their over-stuffed leather armchairs, exclaiming their astonishment at seeing the big, red-faced bounty hunter so unceremoniously entering their private domain.

  “Good lord, man!” Senator Fair weather exclaimed, frowning at the intruder. He sat smoking a fat cigar with the old count.

  Rawdney Fair weather was leaning over the rifle stretched across a table before him, on an open, fleece-lined scabbard, lovingly running a cloth down the polished stock while holding court with several men standing around him, some still chuckling or laughing over Rawdney’s kill shot. Rawdney’s face was still flushed from his own boastful laughter. A smile still played across his thick-lipped mouth as he turned to see Prophet striding toward him.

  Prophet stopped three feet away from the murderous young dandy, yelled, “Kill-crazy fool!”

  As he raised his fist, Rawdney screamed,“Help!”

  He started to duck but couldn’t avoid Prophet’s large, clenched fist, which smashed into his left temple, knocking him back against the table.

  “Help!” Rawdney screamed again. “Help m—!”

  Prophet slammed his fist against the kid’s mouth and instantly felt the wash of warm blood as Rawdney’s lips exploded like ripe tomatoes. Lou slammed his fist against the kid’s mouth two more times—powerful, savage blows laying waste to the kid’s mouth and shattering both of his front teeth—before two or three Russians grabbed him from behind.

  Prophet turned, head-butted one and punched another, shrugging out of the grip of the third, who tripped over one of his fallen comrades. Prophet turned back to his quarry, who lay back atop the table, his hands over his face, screaming. Rage a living, breathing beast inside him, Prophet commenced throwing one blow after another at the dandy’s face, driving the mewling urchin to the floor.

  Prophet followed Rawdney to the carpet, both fists like pistons.

  Wam!

  Wam!

  Wam!

  Wam-Wam!