The Cost of Dying

by Peter Brandvold

  He walked up to Prophet, rose onto the toes of his desert moccasins, and placed his gnarled hands, the left one showing the middle finger hacked off at the middle knuckle, on Prophet’s cheeks. He wagged the big bounty hunter’s big head with affection, making Lou’s lips pooch, and cried, “¡Por todos los santos en el cielo, es una alegría rara verte de nuevo, mi viejo amigo! ”

  (“By all the saints in heaven, what a rare joy it is to see you again, my old friend!”)

  Prophet placed his gloved hands on the old man’s shoulders; they appeared nearly as large as the man’s head. “The pleasure is all mine, One-Eye. How you been, you old raptor?”

  One-Eye lowered his head and looked up from beneath a thin, dark brow mantling his wizened eye socket. “Mean as a snake!” He grinned, wheezing out another laugh. “Who is your friend, Lou? The rojo. Your son, maybe, huh? I didn’t know you had any, but I’m not surprised, the way you throw your seed around, uh?” He laughed until the laughter became a racking cough.

  “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised myself,” Prophet said. “But the younker ain’t mine. Leastways, not that I know about.” He winked at the redhead. “This here is my new pard, Colter Farrow.”

  One-Eye cast his one-eyed gaze over the batwings into the yard, frowning. “Where is the gringa? The rubia with . . .” He held his hands up to his chest as though hefting a couple of heavy melons, grinning lewdly. “She is the one I want to see!”

  He laughed again until he hacked.

  “The persnickety, teetotaling Vengeance Queen and I parted trails a ways back. I wouldn’t doubt if she’s holed up in a snake den in West Texas. Them sand rattlers can have her. She might stack up nice, but she’s a harpy, just like all of . . .”

  Prophet frowned. The old mestizo, apparently distracted, had walked up to Colter and now rose onto the toes of his moccasins again, placing his knobby, nearly black hands on the younker’s face. With the index finger of his right hand he traced the S branded into young Farrow’s left cheek.

  Colter looked incredulously down at the old man. He shifted his uneasy look to Prophet then returned it to One-Eye, who sucked a sharp breath through his teeth, squeezing his lone eye closed, dropping his chin, and saying, “Pain, El Rojo.” He placed his right hand on Colter’s chest, over his heart. “So, so much pain, you have endured—am I right?”

  He opened his eye and looked up at Colter, probing the young man with his single, milky black eye, keeping one hand on his face, the other on his chest.

  “What—you don’t like it?” Colter asked.

  One-Eye grinned. He cut his one-eyed gaze to Prophet. “¡Fuerte! They are tough when they are young—are they not, Lou?”

  “Some of ’em have to be tougher than others.”

  “I know just what you need to take the pain away. Both of you. The pain of the long ride across the desierto solitario . . . if for no other reason.” One-Eye winked his lone eye at Colter then turned toward the bar.

  “The Brand of Sapinero is what that is,” said a man’s voice on Prophet and Colter’s right. Louder, edgier, the man said, “Or, as some call it, the Mark of Satan . . .”

  Prophet saw the speaker rise from a chair over there and flick the keeper thong free of a pistol hammer.

  Ah hell.

  Chapter 9

  Peering into the shadows on the room’s east side, Prophet saw the three men sitting at a table.

  They were a ragged but well-armed trio in dusty trail garb. They were two gringos and a thick-set half-breed Apache with blue eyes. The man who’d spoken was sitting with his back against the adobe wall to which three translucent bark scorpions clung, twitching their tails, light from a dusty front window making them glow eerily against the sooty bricks.

  The man who’d spoken held his gaze on Colter as he heaved himself up from his chair. He had long, lusterless blond hair and an angular, horsey face. Pistols resided in shoulder holsters beneath his long duster—top-break Smith & Wesson .38s, the barrels extending down past the open toes of their holsters.

  “Yessir,” he said, slurring his words slightly, his faded, gray-blue eyes pinned to Colter, “the Brand of Sapinero. A skinny redhead. Southpaw. Wanted by the federals north of the border for the murder of Bill Rondo and two U.S. marshals.”

  “Two-thousand-dollar bounty.” This from the stocky half-breed, who’d been sitting with his back to the room but who now rose slowly from his chair, the chair creaking, the breed turning, showing two Colt pistols holstered on his thighs clad in deerskin chaparajos, and another wedged behind his cartridge belt, over his belly. A long, obsidian-handled stiletto jutted from his left boot adorned with large silver Sonora rowels. A single, bushy black brow mantled his odd blue eyes, above a broad, crooked nose and a pencil-thin mustache.

  He kicked the chair aside and put his back to the table, facing Colter and Prophet, menace brewing in his gaze.

  “You got the bounty all wrong, friend,” Colter said.

  Prophet arched a brow at him.

  “It’s four thousand now.” Colter grinned.

  “Uh, kid . . .” Prophet choked out.

  Now the third man rose from his chair on the room’s east side. He was the tallest of the bunch, and he wore a full beard and a chilly smile, his hazel eyes glinting in the same light that had set the scorpions glowing. The scorpions held still now against the wall, as though sensing trouble and waiting with silent eagerness to see how it all played out.

  “Kid,” said a man on the opposite side of the room from the three gringos, “did you say four thousand dollars?” He’d spoken with a southern Sonoran accent.

  Prophet glanced over his shoulder. The man who’d spoken was the hombre who’d killed the card cheat. He and his own two amigos sat against the building’s west wall, cards in their hands, gold and silver coins, stone mugs, and the remains of a meal littering their table.

  They were all brightly, ostentatiously dressed in the manner of the Mexican grandee, or those with aspirations of same. In fact, they were most likely stage robbers or cattle rustlers waiting for their trails to cool either north of the border or across the Sea of Cortez, in Sonora.

  “You got it, amigo,” Colter said, his pale sunburned cheeks dimpling with a winning grin. “Four thousand dollars.”

  “Dead . . . or alive?” asked the first man who’d spoken, the horse-faced blond.

  “Either,” Colter said.

  “Kid . . .” Prophet’s heart was thumping.

  The redhead looked as pleased as a birthday boy.

  The three Mexicans gained their feet, one shoving the table aside and knocking over a stone cup, making the coins jingle. Their chairs creaked beneath their shifting weight. Then they were all standing, facing Prophet and Colter as well as the men on the other side of the room.

  The Mexican who’d killed the cheat lifted his chin to call to the three gringos, “What do you say, señores—we split the bounty six ways?”

  “Let’s see,” said the blond, lifting his eyes to the ceiling and counting on his fingers. “That’d be . . .”

  Still grinning like a groom with a comely bride, Colter said slowly, enunciating each word precisely, “Six . . . six . . . six.” He lowered his chin, eyes glinting devilishly. “Six hundred and sixty-six dollars.”

  Prophet glanced at him skeptically and quietly asked, “Did you figure that in your head just now?”

  Colter shrugged.

  “What do you say, amigos?” the half-breed asked his gringo amigos.

  The gringos glanced at each other quickly, shoving their coattails behind their holsters and flexing their hands over their pistol butts.

  “We say it’s fine as frog hair split six ways!” said the blond through gritted teeth, jerking his hands toward his Smith & Wessons.

  Prophet’s heart leaped in his throat. “Hit the deck, Red!”

  He and Colter dropped to the floor at the same time that the gringos and the half-breed and the Mexicans jerked up their pistols. The six-guns blasted and blazed
on opposite sides of the room. The bullets caromed through the air where the bounty hunter and the redhead had just been standing, the lead of the gringos and the half-breed smashing into the flesh of the Mexicans at nearly the same moment that the bullets flung by the Mexicans tore the flesh of the gringos and the half-breed.

  Keeping his head down and gritting his teeth against the deafening din, Prophet had slid his own Colt from its holster. He saw that Colter, lying belly down three feet away from him, also had his Remington in his hand, cocked and ready to go.

  It didn’t look like Prophet and Colter were going to need their weapons, however. The Mexican and gringo bounty hunters were doing a fine job of killing one another without Lou and Colter’s help. On both sides of the room, the men screamed and jerked and danced around their tables. They howled enraged epithets, realizing they’d been tricked at the last second but so angered by the lead tearing into them that they couldn’t stop shooting their killers.

  Until they were all dead.

  Until five were dead, anyway, lying in bloody piles on the floor around their respective tables.

  The Mexican who’d killed the card cheat had fallen and rolled and now he lay writhing on his back, screaming in agony as well as rage. He rolled onto his belly, pushed himself onto his hands and knees. He spat a gob of dark red blood onto the earthen floor then lifted his big, silver-chased Colt and fired one more shot into the blond gringo who lay dead across the table on that side of the room.

  The gringo jerked then slid off the table to land on the floor with a heavy thud.

  The Mexican dropped his Colt. He rose onto his knees, stared toward the batwings as though they were the gates of heaven, and bellowed, “Por el amor de la Madre María, ¡soy un hombre muerto!” (“For the love of Mother Mary, I am a dead man!”)

  He dropped straight forward to hit the floor on his face. He quivered slightly then lay still. A blood pool grew beneath him.

  Prophet sat up, looking around. Colter did, too. “I’ll be damned,” the kid said, giving a low whistle. “That’s the first time I ever killed six men without firing a single shot!”

  Prophet looked at him. “Kid, you remind me of someone.”

  “You?”

  “No. The Vengeance Queen, her cuckoo self. She taunts death the way you just did.”

  Colter gained his feet with far more swiftness than what remained in Prophet’s weary bones, the bounty hunter being Colter’s senior by a good fifteen years. Colter extended his hand, helped the big man to his feet.

  Prophet reached down for his hat, brushed it off, and set it on his head. Looking around for the lone-eyed proprietor, whom he couldn’t see for all the smoke, Prophet said, “Sorry about the mess there, One-Eye, but we . . .”

  Then he saw the wizened little man crouching over the body of one of the Mexicans, the one sprawled nearest the bar. One-Eye was inspecting the ring on the man’s left middle finger, holding it up and bending it to catch the light. It appeared jade set in gold. The old mestizo raised his lone brow, impressed. He gave a grunt as he tried to pull the bobble from the man’s finger, and winced.

  No dice.

  He picked up the cleaver lying on the floor beside him. He spread the dead man’s hand out on the floor, palm down, and raised the cleaver. Grimacing, he thrust the blade down. Thump! He held up the bloody finger from which the ring dropped into One-Eye’s open hand. The old mestizo held it up to the light and spread a satisfied grin.

  He pocketed the ring and then ambled over to the next dead Mexican.

  “A perk of the trade,” Prophet told Colter.

  He turned his attention to the batwings, for he’d heard a low rumbling that grew quickly louder.

  “Ain’t I gonna get to enjoy a single bowl of One-Eye’s stew in peace?” Prophet plaintively asked.

  He and Colter walked to the front of the room to stand staring over the batwings into the yard. Lou recognized the rumbling as horses coming fast and hard. A clattering sound accompanied the hoof thuds—the rattle of a wagon also approaching hard and fast.

  Staring toward the brush delineating the arroyo’s curve just beyond the cantina, Prophet saw the first riders lunge up out of the brush on fine, tall, dusty horses with sharply arched necks bespeaking purebred Arabians. As the two riders galloped toward One-Eye’s place, a four-horse team of horses lunged up out of the arroyo behind them. Hitched to the team was a natty-looking leather-and-wood carriage, fully enclosed, with fine brass fittings and high, red wheels.

  As the sporty contraption turned along the trail, Prophet could see it was a custom-made rig, enclosed with glass. Red velveteen curtains jostling in the windows. A driver sat in the boot high atop the carriage. Another man sat beside him—a shotgun messenger. Leastways, he was carrying a shotgun though Prophet doubted he was a messenger. Just a guard for whatever precious cargo rode in the carriage.

  The rig didn’t look like any stagecoach Prophet had ever seen. But, then, leave it to a Mexican to fancy-up a simple Concord. Why not? Wasn’t every day a celebration down here?

  The bounty hunter chuckled at the notion then sobered as he studied the three other riders galloping up out of the wash behind the carriage, also on fine Arabians. Counting the man in the boot, that was seven guards total.

  The guards as well as the driver were all dressed in the gaudy attire of the frontier vaquero, complete with short, fancily stitched waistcoats called chaquetas, bull-hide chaparajos, and pantalones buttoned down the sides of their legs with silver conchos. The pants were stuffed into high, black boots with large, silver espuelas, or Spanish spurs. Their beards or handlebar mustaches or goatees were impeccably trimmed, and outlandish steeple-crowned sombreros were thonged securely beneath their chins. They each sat erect on a deep-seated saddle, the dinner-plate horns also trimmed in silver.

  Nah, this wasn’t no stagecoach. Even in Old Mexico where they shoot off fireworks on Easter, they don’t natty up a stagecoach like this contraption here, and they don’t guard it as well, neither.

  “We getting a visit from Spanish royalty, Lou?” Colter said, standing to Prophet’s right.

  “If they’d sent word ahead, I’d have cleaned up a little.”

  The lead riders rode into the yard, followed by the carriage and the three drag-riding guards. Mean and Ugly and Colter’s coyote dun, Northwest, whinnied and ran around, excited by the commotion, their manes buffeting. The horseback riders and the carriage stopped between the cantina and the windmill and stock tank just beyond it, dragging their dust into the yard around them. It wafted so thickly that for a time Prophet could see only vague shadows inside it.

  As the dust thinned, Prophet watched the guards swing down from their mounts and loosen the Arabians’ latigo straps. The coach driver and the shotgun guard, both appearing older than the horseback-mounted guards, having liberal strands of gray in their thick beards, climbed stiffly down off the coach, unharnessed the team, and led it over to the stock tank for water.

  The air continued to clear around the coach now sitting alone in the yard fronting the cantina, its tongue drooping forward into the dirt and sand. Prophet stared at it, wondering what was so precious inside that seven men had been given the duty of guarding it. He couldn’t see through the window because of the red drapes, and not being able to see inside the contraption intensified his curiosity.

  Suddenly, as though in response to his silent question, a slender, beringed, feminine hand slid the curtain aside. A round face appeared in the window, staring out. No, not really a round face. The impression of roundness was given by the way the woman’s hair was pulled up into small buns around her regal head and covered with a white silk mantilla that hung down past her shoulders. The woman’s dark brown hair was secured in the tightly coiled buns by small, ornamental gold pins.

  The eyes staring toward the cantina were large and brown, almost chocolate.

  Those eyes met Prophet’s. The woman studied him passively for several unnerving seconds, her eyes holding his gaze wit
h a frank one of her own. One of her brows arched. The young woman pulled her head back and let the curtain fall back into place over the window.

  “Mercy,” Prophet grunted to Colter. “Did you see . . . ?”

  He let his voice trail off when the coach lurched slightly to one side, and the scrolled gold handle of the near-side door dropped. The door opened outward, and the young woman who’d been peering through the curtains a second before, stepped out, showing small, incredibly decorated velvet slippers and white knit stockings below the hem of her equally incredibly decorated gown of glittering brocade.

  The voice of an old woman inside the carriage said something in Spanish behind the young one. The old woman prattled out the Spanish too quickly for Prophet to comprehend. Whatever she had said, in a protesting tone, it did not deter the younger woman from dropping both her slippered feet into the yard, stepping forward, and closing the coach’s door behind her.

  Her gown was breathtaking even for a middle-aged scoundrel like Prophet, who usually saw a woman’s clothes only as an obstacle between him and the feminine body beneath. There seemed to be multiple layers and materials, though the main color was a deep chestnut brown richly embroidered in flower patterns over a frilly white camisa almost entirely concealed except on the woman’s upper torso and shoulders. The upper torso was something to behold, however, given its roundness and the depth of the cleavage that showed there, the mouth of the deep valley exposed just above where the brown, gold, and green brocade of the main cloth started.

  A raving beauty, this one. And Colter might very well have been right when he’d mentioned royalty, because the woman now striding gracefully toward Prophet and his branded partner owned the majestic hauteur and imperial carriage of a Spanish queen.

  “I’ll be damned if she ain’t, Lou,” Colter said.

  Prophet watched, mesmerized. “Watch your language, Red.”

  Chapter 10

  Prophet couldn’t take his eyes off the Mexican beauty moving toward him, so bewitching were the eyes and the overall package. She seemed of another, heavenly world beyond the clouds, entirely separate from this lowly, scorpion-infested, bloody plain on which seven men had just died hard, the smoke smelling of rotten eggs still drifting around them.