“Sorry about Rubriz,” Prophet said. “He was a good man.”
“He was a damn fool, lettin’ himself get caught out like that.” Utter ground his jaws, his brown eyes angry but also bereaved. “I had the undertaker set the bodies out in plain view for Metalious. He’ll likely be sendin’ more men.”
“Might be sendin’ ’em now.”
Prophet had shifted his gaze east along Brush Street, where riders had appeared, coming around the dogleg and flanking a buckboard wagon that was bouncing through the wheel ruts of the deserted trail. There were a dozen or so men riding about thirty yards behind the wagon.
“Miss Bonaventure, I’d be obliged if you tossed me my barn blaster,” Utter said, caressing the two pistols holstered to his wheelchair arms and keeping his eyes on the oncoming wagon and riders.
Louisa rose from her chair, strode into the jailhouse where Prophet could hear Blanco speaking to her though he couldn’t make out the words above the thunder of the wagon’s wheels and the thudding hooves. Louisa said nothing. She came out of the jailhouse and tossed the gut shredder over the rail at the end of the porch.
Utter caught it and breeched it to peer into its barrels. The tall, gray-haired gent remained behind Utter, hands on the chair back, as if using the marshal to shield him from the badmen.
“Henry,” Utter said. “You best run along, lessen you wanna pin Ivano’s badge on your suit coat.”
The mayor looked relieved. He released the handles of Utter’s chair as he stared toward the oncoming riders. “Yes ... uh, yes ... I reckon I better go find Alma. Make sure she’s off the street.”
He turned and long strode back the way he and Utter had come. Meanwhile, Prophet slid his Winchester from his saddle boot, loudly racked a shell in the chamber, and slapped Mean and Ugly’s rear. “Make yourself scarce, jackass!”
The dun gave an angry whinny and galloped north along the street, fiddle-footed and glancing behind him to see what his rider was up to.
When Prophet turned back east, the burly man driving the wagon was hauling back on the reins of the two horses hitched to the singletree. “Whooo-aaaaawwww!” he bellowed as the horses stopped on the other side of the street, in front of the three boxed-up cadavers.
He wore a long, ratty alpaca coat, a long-barreled pistol holstered on his right thigh. The coat was open, and his huge belly bulged out between its ratty, dusty, seed-flecked flaps.
The man’s hair was dark and shaggy, with streaks of gray in it. Gray streaked his thick mustache and chin whiskers, too. His eyes, set deep in sun-cured sockets, were small and belligerent, his short red lips arrogant and cruel.
When he had the wagon stopped and the dozen riders had halted their horses in the middle of the street thirty yards behind him, he sat there on the wagon’s seat, looking dully toward Prophet, Utter, and Louisa, who stood atop the porch steps, her poncho lifted above her pearl-gripped Colts.
Tan dust rose up and around the big man in the wagon and the riders behind him, obscuring them all. Even through the dust, however, it was plain to see that each of the newcomers was armed for bear.
Prophet spread his feet, planted his rifle butt on his right hip, and waited for hell to pop. Only it didn’t pop. Not there, anyway. Not yet.
The big man in the wagon yelled defiantly, “I bury my own dead on Triple 6 ground!”
He climbed down off the wagon, huffing and puffing with the effort, and walked over to the dead body of Dwight Beaudry. One of the men from the rough-hewn group behind him—as sweaty, as dirty, and as mismatched a bunch of cold-steel artists as Prophet had ever seen—yelled, “You want help, Mr. Metalious?”
“Stay there!” the big man snarled.
He reached into Beaudry’s coffin, grabbed Beaudry’s stiffening right arm, and crouched as he hefted the body over his shoulder. With a grunt, he turned to the back of the wagon—the end gate was already down—and tossed the body inside like it was a chunk of heavy lumber.
Beaudry hit the wagon bed with a hollow thud.
Blanco’s muffled voice emanated from the open jailhouse door: “Pa? That you out there?”
Metalious glanced at the jailhouse, and his face crumpled with anger. “Shut up!”
Metalious walked over to the man whom Louisa had drilled through the forehead and tossed him into the wagon with Beaudry.
“Come on, Pa,” Blanco urged from inside the jailhouse. “Drop them tinhorns and git me outta here!”
Matalious swung his heavy, whiskered chin toward the jailhouse like a steel wedge. “I told you to shut up, Blanco. I’ll get you out when I’m good and ready!”
A minute later, all three dead men lay in a tangled heap in the back of the buckboard. Metalious dusted himself off then walked over to the side of the wagon, hitched his canvas trousers up his broad thighs, and climbed back up into the driver’s box. He grabbed the reins from the brake handle, released the break, and whipped the team around until the wagon sat in front of the jailhouse, pointed in the direction he’d come from.
The outlaw rancher looked at Prophet, Utter, and Louisa, his tongue thoughtfully probing a back tooth.
“Whose work is this?” Metalious canted his head toward the dead men behind him.
Louisa said, “Mine.”
Metalious stitched his grizzled brows together, sizing her up. He narrowed one eye at Prophet, the other at Utter. Then he returned his attention to Louisa, giving her the cool up-and-down, noting the pearl-gripped pistols on her hips and the cool way she stood atop the porch steps, seeming to not only be waiting for something to happen but yearning for it.
Finally, Metalious said, “You’ll die screamin’, little girl.”
He shook the reins over the horses’ backs, and as the wagon lurched forward, the wedge of gun-heavy riders parted like the Red Sea to let him pass. When he had, they swung their horses around and spurred them into lopes, the entire group fading around the dogleg in Brush Street, though Metalious’s yells at his horses and the rattle of the wagon and the thunderlike rataplan of his riders dwindled slowly.
Silence fell with the sifting dust. Louisa was staring after the group.
Mildly, she said, “When hell freezes over and the Devil has icicles in his beard.”
17
THE HOSTLER OF the Acme Livery Stables was a tall, bald, cantankerous, one-eyed gent named E. E. Spalding. When Prophet had brought his and Rose’s horses down the barn’s main alley, Spalding had come out of his backroom office smelling like stale sweat and fresh liquor.
When Prophet had stripped his tack off Mean and Ugly’s back, he paid the man in advance for three days’ stabling. “Give him plenty of oats in the morning, just hay at night. Give him his fill. He don’t look like much, but he’s bright enough to know when he’s had enough. Curry him every morning but don’t turn your back on him or he’ll take a chunk out of your shoulder.”
“Look at him,” Spalding said as Prophet led the snorting, angrily high-stepping lineback dun into a stall. “He looks pure snake-venom mean.”
“Oh, he’s a peck meaner than that.”
“Why do you keep such a beast?”
“He’s damn good ridin’. Never did know a horse with Mean’s bottom. Besides, you want a horse with spirit less’n you’re an old widow lady just lookin’ for a nag to hitch to your hack of a Sunday morn.”
“Spirit, yes,” drawled Spalding, standing away from the stable as Prophet quickly closed and latched the door on the lineback dun that stomped and snorted angrily, incensed at the sudden confinement in spite of the barn’s rich feed smells. “But that there’s a snake in horsehide. You can see it in his eyes.”
“Like I said, don’t turn your back on him.” Prophet set his saddle on a stall partition and draped his saddlebags over a shoulder. “And I’d go easy on the coffin varnish, too. Tanglefoot’ll make you careless, and he’ll take a bite out of you, for sure. You don’t smoke in your barn, do you, Spalding?”
Spalding glared at the bounty hunter through hi
s one eye, indignant.
“Day drinkers sometimes get careless,” Prophet explained. “And I want my horse taken good care of. For what you charge, he oughta have him a stall twice that size, and thrice-a-day groomings as well as a bath now and then.”
“You sure got some gall, mister!”
Prophet started for the door with his rifle and saddlebags.
“Why don’t you just come on back and tend him yourself if he’s so damn much trouble and you’re so damn proud?”
“You can handle him.”
“If he tears my clothes, you’ll be payin’ extra!”
Prophet threw up an arm in farewell and stepped out the open barn doors and into the dusty side street that intersected Brush Street one block east. He went over and draped his gear over the splintery rails of the barn’s holding corral, poked his hat back off his forehead, and dug his makings sack from his shirt pocket.
Slowly building a smoke, he looked around at the shabby side street lined with old adobe shacks and stock pens, with an ancient Spanish-style church off where the street became a trail meandering away into the juniper-and cedar-stippled hills. The church was grown up with weeds, and it looked abandoned, but it would be a good place for desperadoes to hole up while they were awaiting a chance, say, to break their boss’s son out of jail.
Prophet twisted the quirley closed and licked it. He’d check the church later. He was about to fire a match on his shell belt but stopped. Two coyotes ran, one after the other, over a low hill just beyond the church. The first one was glancing over its shoulder as it disappeared down the hill’s other side.
Spooked by something.
Prophet stuffed the match and quirley into his shirt pocket.
He picked up his Winchester from where he’d leaned it against a corral post and racked a shell in the chamber. Setting the hammer to half cock, he rested the rifle’s barrel on his shoulder and began strolling down the middle of the shabby side street that burned under a high, penny-colored sun. Most of the shacks looked abandoned, though a thick-set Mexican woman with long, blue-gray hair was hanging colorful, wet clothes on a line behind one cracked adobe hovel, a bantam rooster pecking the ground at her leather sandals and clucking.
Prophet walked up close to the church and peered over a half-ruined wall. Inside was only rubble and a few remaining benches with plenty of twisted, grainy coyote dung amongst tumbleweeds and buckbrush growing up through cracks in the fieldstone floor. He continued into the country beyond the church, roughly following the coyotes’ course. When he’d crossed the same knoll they’d crossed a few minutes ago, distant horse thuds rose on his left.
He turned quickly, lifting his rifle from his shoulder. A horse and rider were galloping over the crest of another knoll a hundred yards away—merely a blur of movement so quick that Prophet could make out no distinguishing characteristics aside from the horse’s dapple-gray hindquarters and the man’s dark green hat. Gray-brown hair gathered into a ponytail bounced down his back. Dust rose from the other side of the hill, dwindling quickly.
Prophet walked that way over several hills between him and the one over which the rider had disappeared. He came to a sandy, shallow wash bottom and stopped. Two cigarette butts lay in the eroded sand, one half smoked, the other smoked to a nub. Prophet crouched and picked up each butt in turn.
Still warm.
Behind him there was the scratch of a branch on cloth, and he wheeled, automatically rocking the Winchester’s hammer back before squeezing the trigger.
The Winchester hiccupped loudly.
The man who’d just stepped out from a hackberry snag shielding a slight notch in the wash gave a grunt and jerked straight backward, triggering his own rifle into the air. The man tried to set his feet and swing the Winchester down once more, but Prophet cocked and fired two more rounds from his hip.
The would-be backshooter jerked back and sideways. He tripped over a rock and piled up at the base of the wash’s curving northwestern bank where he lay moaning softly and grinding one spurred boot desperately into the wash’s gravelly floor. It was a death spasm; the man didn’t have enough life left in him to keep him dangerous.
Prophet ejected his last spent cartridge and jacked fresh as he dropped to one knee, looking around quickly, awaiting another shooter to step out of a near brush snag or another mouth of the forking wash. When no one showed, and the silence persisted, Prophet rose and walked over to the dead man—a short, broad-shouldered hombre with a sharp chin.
He lay on his side against the wash’s sloping bank, his legs crossed. A good four or five days’ worth of beard stubbled his cheeks. His mustache was thick and brushy, and it caught the blood dribbling out of both nostrils. He wore a Colt .45 in a black leather holster, and a shoulder gun only half concealed by his filthy spruce duster.
The man’s eyelids fluttered, his chest rose once, and then the life left him suddenly. His chest and shoulders fell.
Prophet had seen the man in the group flanking Metalious earlier. The other rider who’d vamoosed east was doubtless part of that bunch, too.
Prophet looked around.
Nothing moved but the breeze. The only sound was the squawking of an oil-desperate wheel somewhere east of town, growing steadily louder as the wagon headed for a mercantile. Finally, backtracking the man he’d killed, Prophet found a saddled horse off where the forking ravine opened up in a bowl in the hills. There was no brand on the mount, which wasn’t surprising. Shootists often rode their own trusted mounts, no matter who they were riding for.
Prophet untied the rangy roan from a cedar shrub, looped the reins around the horn, and slapped its rump. The horse lurched off its rear hooves and galloped up out of the wash and turned a slow arc to the east, heading back toward its last remembered meal at the Triple 6 headquarters.
Prophet shouldered his rifle and tramped back past the crumbling church to where he’d left his saddlebags draped over the Acme’s holding corral. E. E. Spalding stood between the barn’s open doors, one thumb hooked behind a shoulder strap of his striped coveralls, a quirley smoldering in his other hand.
“What the hell was that all about?”
“Some poor hombre won’t be eatin’ any more chocolate cake.” Longarm stuck the quirley he’d rolled earlier between his lips, plucked the liveryman’s quirley from the man’s grimy fingers, and used it to light his own.
Puffing fresh smoke, he gave the coffin nail back to Spalding, who narrowed his lone eye at him skeptically but said nothing.
“If you see anyone skulking around over here with a long gun, you let Utter or me know—will you?”
“You got any other orders for me?”
“That should about do it.”
Prophet tossed his saddlebags over his left shoulder, hefted his Winchester in his right hand, and headed up toward Brush Street, staying in the middle of the trail cleaving the sun-blistered buildings, wary of more ambushers who might try to pop a shot at him from one side of the street or the other.
When he got to the jailhouse, Utter was sitting at the bottom of his ramp. Louisa was again kicked back in the hide-bottom chair atop the porch, her thumbs hooked behind her cartridge belt. Her empty sarsaparilla bottle stood on the porch floor beside her chair. She and Utter were both staring expectantly at Prophet.
He stopped in front of Utter and poked his hat back off his forehead. “Well, thanks all to shit for the help.”
“We were just now discussing if it was old man Playa shootin’ coyotes around his chicken coop or you gettin’ dry-gulched,” Utter said, worrying his shotgun’s hammers with his thumb.
“If it was you getting bushwhacked,” Louisa offered from behind and above the sheriff, “it was too late to give you a hand. We might as well both stay here and make sure Blanco stayed put.”
“It was me gettin’ bushwhacked. You can send your undertaker out for another stiff, in the wash beyond the old church.”
Utter said, “So Metalious left a man behind, eh?”
&nb
sp; “Two. The other flushed like a prairie chicken. No tellin’ how many more are skulkin’ around the washes and alleys.” Prophet frowned at Louisa, who was now sporting a deputy sheriff’s star pinned to her poncho. It had been hidden until now by a porch post. “What the hell’s that?”
“What’s it look like?” she said snootily.
“I gave her Ivano’s job,” Utter crowed. “She deserves it. You on the other hand are little more than a pain in the ass.”
“This pain in the ass just took down a bushwhacker and scared another one off.”
“Oh, stop your caterwaulin’,” the marshal barked. “I’d give you one, too, but I only got the one. Consider yourself deputized.”
“What if I don’t want to be your deputy?”
“If you’re gonna hang around here makin’ sure Blanco don’t eat his leg out of the trap, you’ll be deputized.” Utter leaned forward in his chair, jutting his chin at Prophet. “Which means you’re takin’ orders from me whether you like it or not.”
“Ah, Christ,” Prophet grunted. “I can’t believe this.” He looked at Louisa. “Where you holin’ up?”
“Over at the French House.” She curled her lip as she said it, as though it were the only place in town that suited such an upper-class little debutante.
“I’m headin’ that way for a nap and a whore’s bath.”
“You go on over to Cora’s Rooms,” Utter called as Prophet strode westward along the street. “That’s more fitting for an old bobcat like yourself!”
The sheriff laughed, delighted at his humor but betraying his nerves, as well. They were in a tight spot—all three of them. Metalious had about as mangy a pack of blood-thirsty wolves on his roll as Prophet had ever seen, and they wouldn’t come at the jailhouse straight on. No, these were wash squatters and alley shooters. They’d likely try to pick Louisa, Utter, and Prophet off one by one.
Probably after dark.
Too late to get Blanco out of town now even if the stubborn marshal of Corazon would allow it. Lead would fly like shit in a Texas twister.
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