Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CAUGHT WITH HIS PANTS DOWN
Boom!
In his haste, Prophet had punched his Winchester round a hair south of Santee’s heart.
For a quarter second he wasn’t sure if he’d hit the man at all. But then, as the other men jerked their heads toward Prophet, Santee gave a little shiver and stepped back, impulsively triggering his Colt into the ground beside him, blowing up dust and rocks. Dropping his chin, he looked down at his chest where a patch of something dark and wet shone, though it was hard to see against the cutthroat’s brown wool vest and in the wedge of barn shadow the man had stepped into.
There was a moment of crystal silence.
Prophet ejected the spent brass from his Winchester’s breech, and the empty casing clinked to the ground behind him as he levered a fresh round in the chamber. Dusty Willis and the other two cutthroats stared fierce-eyed toward Prophet, but, taken aback by the sudden, unexpected rifle bark, they held as still as stone statues.
A scream broke the silence, and Prophet wasn’t sure where it was coming from until Blanco Metalious jerked his head up, hang-jawed, and staggered bare-assed away from Louisa while thrusting a hand at his crotch.
PRAISE FOR PETER BRANDVOLD
“Takes off like a shot, never giving the reader a chance to set the book down.”—Douglas Hirt
Berkley titles by Peter Brandvold
The Bounty Hunter Lou Prophet Series
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 Rogue Lawman Series
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
The .45-Caliber Series
.45-CALIBER FIREBRAND
.45-CALIBER WIDOW MAKER
.45-CALIBER DEATHTRAP
.45-CALIBER MANHUNT
.45-CALIBER FURY
.45-CALIBER REVENGE
Other titles
BLOOD MOUNTAIN
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
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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 WINCHESTER
A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author
PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley edition / January 2011
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eISBN : 978-1-101-47686-4
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In memory of my aunt Ellen,
who always enjoyed a good, racy yarn.
1
WITH TWO LONG, furry black legs, the tarantula probed the eye that was still stretched wide in horror and disbelief at the owner’s premature demise.
The spider drew back as though in distaste at what it found in the eye socket, then scuttled around the edge of the bloody bullet wound in the bone-white forehead and crawled down the length of the dead man’s sunburned nose to his brushy brown mustache. Clinging to the mustache, the spider bent all eight of its black legs slightly and lowered its beadlike head atop its conelike thorax as if to investigate the man’s mouth, back from which the man’s lips were spread in a grisly death grin.
The yellow teeth were crooked, with bits of dried food and tobacco caked between them. The right eyetooth had been broken off during a fight in the Venus Saloon in Julesburg, Colorado. It was the jagged edge of this tooth, to which remnants of the man’s recent breakfast still clung, that the spider seemed to probe with interest before freezing suddenly at the sound or possibly the vibration of oncoming riders.
As the thuds grew louder, the tarantula scrambled down over the dead man’s chin and spade beard and across his right shoulder before leaping to the ground and hiding inside the collar of his calico shirt. Meanwhile, fifty yards down the trail, Lou Prophet checked down his ugly, hammered-head dun which he appropriately called Mean and Ugly, and reached down to slide his Winchester ’73 from the cracked leather saddle scabbard jutting up from under his right thigh.
The big, sun-seared, broken-nosed bounty hunter cocked the rifle one-handed as his blond partner, Louisa Bonaventure, reined her brown-and-white pin
to pony to a halt beside him. Prophet stared out from beneath the dusty, funneled brim of his battered Stetson at the dead man lying in the brush left of the trail, about ten yards from a scraggly mesquite shrub.
Spying the dead man as well, Louisa unsheathed her own Winchester carbine and looked around cautiously, squinting her hazel eyes beneath the flat brim of her brown felt hat with its braided leather band. The hem of her dusty wool riding skirt brushed her tall stockmen’s boots, the spurs of which glinted in the late afternoon sun.
When Prophet had scrutinized the scrub around him and spied no bushwhackers skulking behind the rocks and cedar trees that stippled the sandy apron hills of western New Mexico’s No-Water Mountains, he grunted, “Back me,” and swung down from his saddle with a grace unexpected in a man of Prophet’s size—his brawny, frontier-seasoned frame weighed 230 pounds desert-dry, and he stood well over six feet tall in his stocking feet.
Louisa levered a cartridge into her Winchester’s breech. Remaining atop the pinto, she looked around cautiously. Strands of her honey blond hair were blown by a light, cool breeze around her smooth cheeks that, despite the sun and wind of the hundred trails she’d been dusting since being orphaned by a gang of cutthroats in Nebraska Territory three years ago, still owned the texture of fresh-whipped cream. Her lips were full and rich—what some might call bee-stung—though her hazel eyes were tough and practical if a little on the snooty side.
She wore two pearl-gripped Colts around her slender waist, her striped serape pushed up to expose their handles. Though she looked as though she belonged in the piano room of a middle-class midwestern house with four or five gables and gingerbread latticework under the eaves, she knew how to use those guns. In fact, a good many men had been planted heel-down in Boot Hills all across the frontier by those fancy shooting irons, as well as by her carbine.
Lou Prophet stooped over the dead man lying belly up in the scrub and gravel, blood still oozing from the fresh wound in the stiff’s forehead. Another, older wound in the man’s high right side—the wound he had received a day earlier, after he and his gang of six cutthroats from the surrounding hills had robbed the bank in nearby Corazon—was blood-matted and fly-blown. Prophet and Louisa had by chance ridden into the town a couple hours after the robbery and quickly booted their horses onto the outlaws’ trail though only the leader, Blanco Metalious, had a bounty on his head—a mere $250 one at that.
“Junior Pope,” Prophet said.
“The one the druggist wounded.”
“Yep.” Prophet kicked Junior Pope onto his belly to expose the entrance wound in Pope’s left shoulder blade and spied the tarantula scuttling away from the carcass and under a rock. “Too bad for Pope.” The big bounty hunter allowed himself a dry chuckle. “The druggist said he’d been aiming for Metalious. Now Pope’s lyin’ out here with the black widows and the tarantulas, likely gonna be wolf supper later.”
“Looks like one of his own drilled that nasty hole in his worthless head.”
Prophet nodded. “Appears one of his amigos decided Pope had suddenly become more trouble than he was worth, likely slowin’ ’em all down. So they—probably Metalious his own nasty self—drilled one through Pope’s noggin.”
“One less to share the loot with.”
“Uh-huh.”
Louisa said behind Prophet, “If you’re gonna say a few words over him, Lou, say ’em and let’s shake a leg. It’d be nice to catch up to the other five before they’re on the other side of the No-Waters and headed for Texas.”
“Nah, I see no reason to waste words on the likes of Junior Pope.” Prophet turned sideways to shoot his blond partner an incredulous glance. “You know, I do believe the man’s been an outlaw since he was old enough to heft a shootin’ iron, and I’ve never heard of a single bounty on his head. Now, that there is the very definition of a wasted life.”
Louisa canted her head to one side. “Do you think we could discuss the tragedy of Junior Pope after we’ve run down the rest of his gang?”
“Don’t you worry your purty head,” Prophet said, resting his Winchester on his right shoulder and strolling back to his horse. “They’re likely holed up snug as spiders in rocks at Nugget Town up yonder.”
As Prophet swung up into his saddle, Louisa frowned into the distance, toward the steepening slopes of the No-Waters. “Nugget Town?”
“Little boomtown that went bust about two years ago. Sittin’ up against the base of that ridge.” Prophet pointed with his rifle. “It’s the end of the trail. I was through there when the town was boomin’, just before the bust. Plenty of owlhoots hole up there, on the run from posses, and tank up on water before they cross the mountains. They’ll rest up there a day or two. No point in us hurryin’, now that I’m sure that’s where they’re headed.”
“If there’s a reason to drag your feet, you’ll find it.”
“You got a point there, Miss Bonnyventure,” Prophet allowed with a chuckle, nudging Mean and Ugly slowly ahead.
“It’s Bonaventure, you Southern reprobate,” Louisa said, pooching out her lips and furling her blond brows. “There never has been any y in it.”
Prophet chuckled again as Louisa came up beside him and they rode up and down the rocky hills, rising gradually toward the base of the bald crags looming before them. The clay-colored range, moderately high, was eroded, boulder-strewn, and nearly treeless, with a deep crevice here and there filling with shade now as the sun sank. The peaks were as sharp and as evenly spaced as the teeth on a whip-saw blade.
“Whoa,” Prophet said, drawing back on Mean’s reins when they’d ridden another half hour.
Prophet sniffed the breeze, staring straight ahead toward the mountain ridge that glowed copper now as the sun sank lower. “Smell that?”
Louisa lifted her chin, drawing a breath. “I was wondering when you were going to smell the smoke. Cottonwood. Maybe a little pinyon pine.”
Prophet scowled at his comely partner, who turned to him with challenge in her clear, hazel gaze. “You’re wrong about the pine. That’s mesquite.”
He gave a caustic chuff, then booted the dun into a shallow ravine off the trail’s right side. He stepped out of his saddle, looped Mean’s reins over the branch of a small ironwood, and grabbed his sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun that had been secured to his saddle horn. He looped the leather lanyard over his head and right shoulder, then slid the weapon—none the less savage-looking for being so short—behind his back so that the double-bores peeked up above his shoulder.
As he grabbed his rifle and ran his fingers along his cartridge belt, making sure all the loops were filled with brass, Louisa stood beside her pinto, checking the loads in each of her pearl-gripped Colts, narrowing an eye to inspect each oiled cylinder in turn.
When she’d twirled the second gun on her finger with customary flourish, then dropped it into her holster, Prophet said, “Show-off.”
He started following a game path up the northwest side of the wash. Behind him, Louisa said, “Remind me, and I’ll show you how to do that sometime.”
“Don’t wanna know,” Prophet grumbled. “Don’t need to know less’n you’re plannin’ on throwin in with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show.”
Hearing Louisa give a snort as she slipped a cartridge through her carbine’s loading gate and softly seated a shell in the chamber, Prophet tramped along the faint game trail, holding his Winchester in one hand and keeping his head low as he stared toward the base of the high ridge.
He and Louisa followed the trail well wide of the horse trail they’d been following, amidst large boulders that had fallen from the ridge above and that offered good cover. When Nugget Town rose before them on a slight plateau at the base of the No-Waters and fronted by a deep, brush-choked ravine, Prophet dropped to a knee behind a boulder.
Louisa dropped down behind the boulder’s far end, staring out across two shallow arroyos at the town comprised of a half dozen sun-silvered, false-fronted business buildings flanked by squ
at log hovels and stock pens. A large wooden water tower stood between Prophet and Louisa and the town proper. Sluice boxes on high wooden pilings ran down from the tower, disappearing into a ravine about fifty yards away from it.
The tower would offer good cover, Prophet thought, for him and Louisa approaching the town straight out from where they were now.
He shifted his gaze just beyond the tower to the opposite side of the street from the business buildings. There, a large corral abutted a broad wooden livery barn topped with a rooster weather vane that, while penny colored with rust, brightly reflected the golden rays of the falling sun. Five horses stood statue-still in the corral while a sixth rolled on its back, kicking up dust that the light touched with pink and salmon. The air was so still that Prophet could hear the horse’s satisfied snorts and grunts, the scrapes of its hooves against the ground.
Directly across the street from the corral was a broad, three-story structure that Prophet remembered as the Gold Nugget Saloon. It had a broad front porch around three sides. Although the porch was vacant, the inside of the saloon was not. Gray smoke unfurled from a broad, brick chimney that ran up the building’s near side.
The ghosts that had mostly populated the town over the past several years, since the gold disappeared, didn’t need fires to stand off the imminent high-country chill. And they’d have no use for the horses in the corral yonder, neither.
Louisa said, “Okay, you’re right.”
Prophet glanced at her. Her pretty brows furled.
“I think it is mesquite they’ve mixed with the cottonwood,” she said.
“Told ya.”
Prophet narrowed an eye at the saloon that lay a good hundred yards away from his and Louisa’s position. “When we get down to the water tower, we’ll split up. You move to the front corner. I’m gonna work around the corral, try to draw ’em all out into the street.”
“You think they have a lookout posted?”
The Devil's Winchester Page 1
