Prophet didn’t say anything as he continued eating the short ribs with his hands and taking an occasional forkful of the gravy-drenched potatoes. He didn’t need to say anything. His silence spoke for itself.
The marshal’s chair creaked. Softly, he grumbled, “Maybe it wouldn’t hurt for you to ride on over to Socorro tomorrow—intercept ’em an’ warn ’em.”
Prophet split a bone in two and sucked the marrow out of one end of it. “What about them three gun wolves that just rode in?”
“Don’t you worry about me.”
Prophet was chewing the last bit of meat off his last short rib. “I ain’t worried about you. I’m worried about them taking Metalious out of the lockup while I’m gone. I sure would hate to have to ride out to the Triple 6 and snatch him back from his pa, especially when he has such a small reward on his worthless head.”
Utter raised his voice. “You don’t think I can guard my own goddamn jail?”
Prophet only hiked a shoulder and continued eating.
“You’re impertinent.”
“If you want me to understand what you’re sayin’,” Prophet said, licking the last bit of gravy from his plate, “you’re gonna have to bend your talk a little lower.” He set his empty plate on the step beside him, leaned back, and stretched his long legs out in front of him. “When you’re through, I’ll take your plate back to the hotel and fetch my rifle. Then why don’t you get a little shut-eye? When you’re rested, I’ll make the rounds, make sure we’re only dealin’ with three of them Triple 6 shooters tonight.”
Behind Prophet, Utter stirred in his chair, making it creak again. Then the man continued eating, tentatively.
“Prophet?” he asked after a time, smacking his lips. “What’s your stake in this?”
“Like I said, I sure would hate to—”
“Tell me straight up, damn you!”
Prophet rested back on his elbows, looking out over the darkening town. The music from the direction of Bayonet Wash was getting louder and occasional whoops and bursts of laughter sounded.
Yes, why? There was little money in this venture. He’d probably make a whole lot more if he lit a shuck out of Corazon and continued up into the White Mountains, where the men with the real money on their heads were laying up. The truth was, Utter was a broken man. While the marshal wouldn’t admit that to himself—couldn’t admit that to himself and maintain his dignity and self-respect—it was true.
He needed a hand. And Blanco needed hanging.
“Ah, hell, I reckon I’m just like a ragged-eared old mustang,” Prophet said at last. “Don’t got sense enough to gallop away from a bad fight.”
Utter grunted as he chewed, apparently satisfied by the answer.
19
CARRYING THREE PLATES of short ribs, the girl who was now seeing herself as Rose Tawlin, though she had little idea who Rose Tawlin even was, pushed through the swing door of the kitchen at the rear of the French Hotel’s saloon and restaurant and stopped suddenly as she faced the room of eating, drinking, and gambling men before her.
There were only about two dozen men here, but half were regarding her darkly through webbing clouds of tobacco smoke, as though she herself were something to eat. Obviously, she’d never waited tables before, because such a job seemed as foreign to her as would getting up on a table and trying to sing.
But it was a job, and she needed a job to survive. The owner of the place, Mr. Green, had told her that after the kitchen closed she was welcome to join his other “girl”—the one named Yvette who wandered the room fluttering her false eyelashes—if she wanted to earn some “quick, easy cash.” Rose had watched Yvette work, sitting on laps and flirting with the men before finally leading an occasional one out into the lobby and up the carpeted stairs. That looked less strenuous than hustling plates and drinks to the impatient horde before her now, but she doubted she could spread her legs for a living with any more ease than slinging food or singing.
If her feet continued to ache as badly as they were aching now, she’d keep it in mind, however.
Taking a breath and steeling herself for another onslaught of orders for both drinks and food, she strode past the bar on her right, trying not to slip on the puncheon floor covered with tanbark shavings. She hauled the plates over to a table at which five men in shabby suits sat playing cards and drinking and, judging by the three glancing peevishly at her, waiting for their food. She’d thought that one of the men in the saloon tonight might have known her family and thus recognized her and given her one more piece of evidence as to her identity, but that hadn’t happened yet. And as thoroughly as all the men in the room had appraised her in their typically goatish male way, if any knew who she was, they certainly hadn’t mentioned it.
Either Rose Tawlin hadn’t visited Corazon very often when she was home, or she’d been away from home long enough to have been forgotten by anyone in town who might have known her.
She set the third plate down on the table, in front of a man with round-rimmed spectacles and a waterfall mustache but an otherwise clean-shaven face. “Will that be all?”
She’d no sooner gotten the question out of her mouth than she felt a hand on the back of her thigh, sliding upward with lascivious slowness. She could feel the hardness of a ring on one of the man’s fingers.
She gave a startled jerk and looked down to see the man with the spectacles gazing up at her, his glasses reflecting the light of the lamp hanging over the table, masking his eyes though not his lips that were pulling away from his teeth.
“Can we talk about this later?” he asked in a syrupy voice she could just barely hear above the din of conversation echoing around the room.
Rose swatted the man’s hand away and stepped back, scowling angrily. “Later you can go fuck yourself, you son of a bitch!” She knew she’d said enough, but the words were out before she could get a leash on them. “Does your wife know what you do with your paws when you’re out with your pards?”
The men around the table laughed—except for the one she’d just scolded. His face turned red, and he quickly drew away from her, dropping his eyes to his plate. Someone grabbed Rose’s left elbow, and a man’s near voice said, “Jane?”
Rose wheeled to see a short, thickly built man in a floppy-brimmed, bullet-crowned hat staring at her incredulously. He wore double cartridge belts, a pistol in a shoulder rig under a thigh-length rat-hair coat and another in the cross-draw position on his left hip. He had thick, unattractive red lips, and they spread now beneath his tobacco-stained mustache as he continued staring at her, giving her the slow up-and-down over and over again.
“Who?” Rose said.
“I’m Gopher,” the man said. Then his brown eyebrows stitched together. “Remember? North of Deadwood?”
“North of Deadwood?” Rose mumbled to herself, casting her thoughts like a fishing line into her past, frustrated at only hooking images from a couple of days ago, back at Nugget Town. “Are you sure you know me, mister?”
The man released Rose’s elbow, and his brown eyes acquired a cautious cast. “Nah ...” He started to turn away. “Maybe not.”
“No, wait,” she said, reaching for his arm.
Another man’s voice rose louder behind her, “Rose!”
She snapped her head around. Mr. Green stood just inside the batwing doors separating the hotel lobby from the saloon/dining room, showing his teeth like an angry cur and canting his head toward a table near the doors to his left. Three more men had just sat down and were leaning forward on their arms, twiddling their thumbs, one spinning his cream Stetson on an upraised finger, obviously waiting for their orders to be taken. The bartender was busy hauling out trays of whiskey shots and beer to the gamblers on the room’s far side.
Rose lurched forward, heading for the newcomers. She had to slow down before she got to the table, because a sudden, inexplicable pain suddenly shot through her stomach. It was followed by a wave of nausea so powerful that for a moment she thought she was go
ing to vomit right there in the middle of the saloon, in front of her boss and everyone.
Continuing ahead slowly and trying to fight off the wretched feeling, praying she could keep down what little food she had in her stomach—she’d only eaten a few bites of jerky since breakfast—she stopped at the newcomers’ table. Fishing her notepad out of her apron pocket, she said weakly, “What’ll it be, fellas?”
“One of you and the short ribs!” said the man on her left, guffawing as though he’d come up with the most original line since humans started walking upright.
When she’d finally gotten their order and was heading back to the kitchen, another wave of nausea washed over her, and she had to fight to keep from dropping to her knees and retching. She pushed through the swing door, set the order ticket on the dry sink for the Chinese cook who was toiling at the big iron range against the front wall, smoking while he seasoned another rack of short ribs, and headed straight across the kitchen to a short hall. She pushed into the hall, past a small storeroom, and through another door and into the alley behind the hotel.
Her guts danced in her belly as, holding one arm across her waist, she headed for the two-hole privy that stood under a cottonwood beside a large pile of unsplit firewood, some of which was covered with a tarp. A cat me-owed somewhere near as Rose pulled open the privy’s right door, happy to see in the darkness that the smelly place was unoccupied. She lifted the lid, bent her head over the gaping hole, and released the dam holding back the sparse contents of her stomach.
She hadn’t eaten much, but she vomited plenty, groaning into the cavernous hole beneath her.
Running the hem of her apron across her mouth, she opened the privy door and stepped out into the night. A raspy breath sounded to her left, and then a man’s hand was painfully squeezing her left arm. A hot, sweaty body pressed against her, pushing her savagely back against the privy door with a thud.
She could smell whiskey on the man’s breath as he thrust his face close to hers. “Just what in the dung-dippin’ hell is your game now, Jane?”
“Hold on,” Prophet said.
Ten feet to his right, Louisa stopped in the shadows of the buildings on the south side of Brush Street. “What is it?”
“I think I saw somethin’ move in that window there in the stable. Somethin’ shiny.”
“Like a rifle?”
“Yeah.”
Holding his Winchester up high across his chest and thumbing the hammer back to full cock, Prophet strode slowly out from the middle of the street toward the crumbling adobe stable on the street’s north side. This was a dark stretch of Brush Street, a dilapidated part of the business district that was given over to shabby stables and ruins of the town’s first businesses, long defunct. No lights here, only shadows that were deepened by the lamps and flares mounted on saloons farther east or west.
This was a no-man’s-land, a good place for an ambush.
Prophet sort of sidestepped toward the stable, keeping one eye on the stable itself while shuttling his cautious gaze toward both ends, ready for sudden movement and the hiccup of triggered rifles fired from ambush.
Prophet’s boots crunched gravel. He’d removed his spurs to lessen the noise of his footsteps. His breath raked slowly in and out of his lungs as he squeezed the rifle in both his big, gloved hands. Behind him, Louisa stood frozen, feet spread, her own carbine extended from her right hip, her hat hanging down her back by her chin thong.
Prophet pressed his shoulder up against the stable wall, three feet north of the window from which one remaining shutter hung askew. He looked behind him, then ahead past the window. He cat-footed forward, eyes on the window now as he neared it, the darkness within growing.
Starlight suddenly reflected off an object within. Warning bells tolled in Prophet’s head, and he stopped suddenly, snapping his rifle up.
Too late.
There was an ear-splitting sound, only to Prophet’s surprise as he stayed the pressure on his trigger finger, it wasn’t the roar of a rifle. Nor was there the accompanying flash.
It was a raucous bellowing squeal that issued from the window, rattling Prophet’s eardrums and sending hot blood jetting through his veins. The mules’ eyes appeared just back of the broad, blunt snout that protruded from the window, bobbing, the nostrils contracting and expanding furiously and also faintly reflecting starlight.
Prophet stepped back and released a held breath, letting his rifle fall slack in front of him. The smell of mule, hay, and dung was heavy in his nose now. He should have realized, damn fool ...
“Sorry, fella,” he said between the animal’s frightened, angry squeals.
He looked at Louisa. Even in the dark he could read the disapproving expression on her face as she shouldered her carbine and cocked a hip.
“All right,” he said. “I reckon I’m gettin’ a little nervous. I been bushwhacked from stable windows before, though, and I can tell you it ain’t any fun!”
“You wanna go back, let me continue the rounds alone?”
“Don’t get sassy.”
As they started forward along the street, a sudden gunshot stopped them. The same gun barked again, and then a third time. The shots were muffled, as though the gun had been fired inside a building. A man’s ensuing scream was also muffled. He screamed again, only this time the scream was louder, sharper, and then there were two more gun blasts.
These, too, were louder and sharper, as though the man and the gun were now outside.
A woman screamed, a horse whinnied. Another man laughed.
Silence.
“That came from Bayonet Wash,” Louisa said, looking beyond the hunched, crumbling buildings ahead and right of her, toward the southwest corner of Corazon.
“Surprise, surprise,” Prophet said.
He started forward.
“Probably just a couple of border toughs mixing it up,” Louisa said as they moved slowly but purposefully together along Brush Street.
“Maybe.” Prophet shouldered his Winchester, wrapping his right hand tightly around the neck of the stock. “Then, again, we might just have been summoned.”
“Yeah, but then again, you’re acting like an old woman tonight.”
Prophet curled his upper lip. “You just keep your finger on your trigger and an eye on your back trail, Miss Smarty Mouth.”
20
THE FLESHPOTS AND cantinas of Bayonet Wash shone dully in the darkness of the desert a ways outside the town’s southwestern edge.
At the very edge of town was an old, abandoned ranch shack of mud and straw, with a collapsed brush roof and an adjoining pole corral. Beyond the ranch was the dry creek bed sheathed in scrub brush, cactus, and willows, and just beyond the creek were the lights of this forbidden part of Corazon.
Prophet and Louisa paused on the wash’s left bank, concealed by brush and a spindly cottonwood, and stared toward the lights from where a man’s agonized groans sounded—rising and falling and then rising again amongst painful pants and sighs.
Whoever had bought a bullet, which was one of the many things that came cheap on the eastern side of Bayonet Wash, was dying slow.
Prophet pushed through the brush and crossed the creek via a teetering wooden bridge whose boards slumped dangerously beneath his boots. Louisa followed, her black skirt swishing about her legs. On the other side of the creek, Prophet slowed. He and his partner spread out as they made their way toward the tapers and torches that glowed and sparked in the quiet night, cloaking the pale adobe buildings lining the rutted two-track trail in menacing shadows.
Prophet had just seen the figure slumped beneath a hitchrack on the right side of the street, fronting one of the few clapboard hovels mixed amongst the adobe ones. Two torches were bracketed to poles fronting the cantina from which the strumming of a mandolin sounded beneath the wounded man’s groans. That it was a cantina was obvious by the several saddled horses tied out front and from the large amount of light emanating from the two front windows behind which shadow
s slid to and fro.
The slumped figure had one arm negligently wrapped over the hitching post’s crossbar, as though trying to pull himself to his feet. His other arm was clamped over his belly, and his legs were curled beneath him. A steeple-crowned sombrero hung down his back. He was cursing angrily now in Spanish and sobbing.
There was the creak of hinges and the thud of boots on a boardwalk. Prophet shifted his gaze left to see a man step out of the cantina and stand there for a moment, holding both batwing doors open as he stared straight out in front of him.
Prophet glanced at Louisa, who arched a blond brow curiously.
The man slowly stepped out away from the cantina doors, letting them rattle behind him as he dropped casually off the boardwalk. He disappeared amongst the horses tied there, only his legs showing beneath the horses’ bellies in the light from the cantina windows.
He reappeared a moment later. Stopping about ten feet behind the tied mounts, he stared across the street at the wounded man, who gave another ripping curse in Spanish, then dropped his arm down from the hitchrack with a phlegmy sigh.
“Murdering bastarrrrrd!” he shouted, lifting his head again suddenly.
The man standing behind the horses laughed.
Then he lurched with a start, and a gun flashed in his outstretched right hand. The three shots seemed to overlap as the sharp echoes chased each other around the buildings like high-pitched thunder. The wounded Mexican was punched straight back to the ground, arms thrown out from his shoulders, one leg curled beneath the other.
He lay still.
The horses had leaped suddenly when the shots had been fired, and they were still skitter-hopping now, pulling against their reins, as the shooter twirled his smoking pistol, then dropped it with a flourish into the cross-draw holster on his left hip.
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