The Cost of Dying

by Peter Brandvold

  She lifted the pleated skirts of her elaborate embroidered gown above her ankles, showing the soft shoes again, and the knit white stockings, and stepped onto the low stone walk running beneath the ramada. She stepped up before the batwings, so close to Prophet and his branded partner that the bounty hunter could smell the rosewater and sandalwood aroma wafting off her, tinged with the light musk of female perspiration.

  It had to have been damn hot in that closed-up carriage, but Prophet didn’t think he saw a bead of sweat on her smooth almond forehead above thin, arched, dark brown brows that arched higher as the eyes probed his, vaguely incredulous.

  Colter cleared his throat.

  Prophet glanced at him. Colter jerked his chin slightly. Prophet had been held so rapt by the woman’s charms and general exotic bewitchery that he hadn’t realized until now that he was blocking the entrance through which she apparently wanted to walk.

  “Ah hell.” Prophet clumsily removed his hat. “I do apologize, uh, señorita . . . señora . . .” He couldn’t tell how old she was. She was no Spanish sprite. Not with a bodice filled as well as hers was, or eyes as large and round and frank, but he didn’t think she was all that deep into her thirties yet, either. If she was married, where was her husband? “I didn’t realize . . .”

  He pulled back away from the batwings, tripping over his spurs. Colter had already stepped back against the wall on the other side of the doors. He, too, was holding his hat as he crooked a wry grin at his big trail partner. Prophet scowled back at the younker then froze when he saw that the woman had stepped through the batwings, stopped just inside the cantina, and was gazing up at him.

  Prophet became chillingly aware of all the dead men piled behind him. He fingered the frayed brim of his sweaty, salty Stetson, and averted his gaze, feeling as guilty as a schoolboy who’d just been caught tossing a snake into the girls’ privy.

  The woman kept staring up at Prophet. He wanted to flinch at the burn of her gaze but managed to maintain a bland expression as he stared at the toes of his boots. In the periphery of his vision, he saw her eyes wander slowly over him, across his chest and shoulders, down to his scuffed and worn boots and back up again. He could feel her disdain, as though she were regarding an ape that had just wandered into her own private boudoir.

  He was glad when the woman finally pulled her scrutiny from his big ugly mug, his cheeks bristling with nearly a week’s worth of trail stubble, to glance at Colter standing on the other side of the door.

  Colter jerked his head back a little, as though he thought the pretty Mex was going to slap him. Then he flushed and smiled and cleared his throat, and said, “Ma’am . . .”

  The woman turned her head forward, glanced around the room, turning her head slowly left then right then back again, scrutinizing the cadavers lying in twisted heaps and bloody pools of their own spilled blood. She glanced once more at Prophet, the skin above the bridge of her nose stitched with a subtle reproof, and pulled her mouth corners down.

  “Is this your doing, amigo?” she asked in a low, husky voice that might have sounded intimate if not overflowing with her barely restrained hostility.

  Prophet smiled, wagged his head. “No, ma’am, it purely is not.” He was happy to be able to speak the truth, seeing no point in adding that the kerfuffle might have been caused by him and his friend with the Mark of Sapinero on his cheek. The dead men were certainly not his doing, however. He hadn’t fired a single shot.

  As the Mexican beauty stepped forward, Prophet realized that One-Eye had been standing with him and Colter, slightly behind them, peering out the batwings. Now the old man stood before the woman, a half a head shorter than she, backing away from her in his bandy-legged, stiff-kneed fashion, smiling unctuously up at her, his lone black eye glinting sharply.

  “Señorita de la Paz . . .” the old man wheezed out through a toothy grin, as though the words he’d just spoken were some forbidden sacred rite rarely uttered by human lips. He gave a courtly bow, albeit a stiff one, wincing slightly at the pain it caused him, then beamed up at her again, adding in Spanish, “I am most grateful for the saints to have blessed me with a visit from one so beautiful. My heart breaks and my soul weeps.”

  He dipped his chin as though waiting to have his head anointed.

  “Shut up, you one-eyed dog,” the woman shot back at him in English, presumably for Prophet’s and Colter’s benefit. “I came in for a sip or two of that rancid tarantula excrement you call pulque. ¡Rápido! My father’s sister, Señora Aurora Navarro, waits in the carriage, and you know how that dried-up old crone disapproves of this perdition you have here.”

  “¡Sí, sí, señorita! ¡Sí, sí!”

  “¡Rápido!”

  “¡Sí, rápido!”

  As One-Eye hustled back behind his bar, Prophet and Colter shared a dubious look. Prophet returned his gaze to the visual feast of the woman who was strolling toward the bar, her back and round behind facing Prophet as she stepped around dead men and avoided blood pools.

  He glanced at Colter again and shook his head in appreciation. The redhead arched his brows in agreement with Prophet’s assessment.

  As One-Eye ladled his milky liquor from a clay olla on a shelf behind the bar, Prophet moseyed over to stand beside the woman, leaning forward across the bar planks. “I’ll take one of those, too, One-Eye.”

  One-Eye glanced at him, flared a nostril in annoyance. The old man had his hands full pleasing the uppity Señorita de La Paz, who had apparently made him more than a little nervous. He was sweating, and his hands were shaking as he slowly poured the milky white liquor, fermented from the sap of the maguey plant, into the stone cup.

  Prophet turned to the woman, shifting his weight to his right elbow. “Come here often?”

  She blinked slowly as she turned her head to him. She regarded him blandly, maybe a little puzzledly, as though she hadn’t heard what he’d said. Apparently, she was of no mind to answer a query proffered by one of the unwashed masses.

  Prophet wiped his right hand on his pants and then extended it toward the woman. “Prophet’s my handle. Call me Lou. I’m from up north.”

  “You don’t say.” She looked at his big open hand hovering a few inches from her belly but made no effort to shake it. She just stared at it as though it were something unappetizing that had crawled up off the floor.

  “You’re, uh . . . Señorita de La Paz . . . ?”

  She lifted her eyes to his with a tolerant sigh then turned to One-Eye. “Hurry up with that foul milk of yours, old man. Your clientele is ogling me.” She looked up at Prophet, her eyes snaking across his chest and shoulders once more before climbing his thick neck to his face. “This one is big and filthy, and he smells bad. Very bad. Besides,” she added, wrinkling her nostrils and narrowing her lustrous brown eyes, “he is americano.”

  Prophet heard Colter give a sardonic snort.

  Prophet flushed and turned his mouth corners down. He’d been handed his hat by a woman or two, but this one had given it to him only after smashing it pancake flat. A real piece of work, this haughty beauty. Why did such beauties always attract him—the haughtier the better?

  This one reminded him of another particularly arrogant beauty—Louisa Bonaventure, the Vengeance Queen her own persnickety self. This was the Mexican version of Louisa, sure enough.

  One-Eye set the half-filled cup atop the bar. The señorita lifted it to her lips, sniffed, wrinkled her nose again as though with disdain, then tipped the cup to her mouth, sliding her rich, red upper lip over the brim.

  Prophet couldn’t help staring at the woman’s lip as she drank the pulque, her throat working as the sour substance, which tasted a little like sweetened grapefruit juice, flowed down inside that long, pretty neck of hers. So long and pale and smooth, fairly screaming for a man to press his lips to it . . .

  She didn’t lower the cup until she’d swallowed every drop. Prophet stared at her, his lower jaw hanging. Even he couldn’t handle more than a couple of
sips of the potent liquor at a time, and even then it lifted a flush to his cheeks. He didn’t know for sure, of course, but he had a feeling the stuff was well over a hundred proof. He’d tasted moonshine that, by comparison, affected him no worse than lemonade. After a single cup, the world tended to swirl for a while . . .

  He thought for sure the woman’s eyes would roll back into her head, and she’d pass out. He shifted into position to catch her when she fell. But . . . she didn’t fall.

  Calmly, coolly, and quite steadily, Señorita de la Paz set the cup on the bar, licked her lips, ran the back of her hand across her mouth, and stared stonily at One-Eye. “Foul stuff, but it cuts the trail dust well enough.”

  One-Eye’s subservient smile broadened.

  “Well, I’ll be,” Prophet said under his breath, staring wide-eyed at the woman before him. “Lady, you can throw back the scorpion venom!”

  He fished some coins out of his pants, tossed a gold one onto the bar. “That one’s on me. What say we grab another, have a seat, and swap big windies?”

  He chuckled. The woman had gotten to him, all right. She was as intoxicating as the liquor she’d taken down without once coming up for air. Prophet loved Mexican women, but haughty Mexican women most of all. His loins were heavy and warm with the prospect of what this dusky-eyed viper might do behind closed doors . . .

  He was so enchanted that he had only vaguely heard scuffling and light spur-ringing behind him. The quiet of the still-smoky, shadowy saloon was blown wide open by a fierce caterwauling, like that of an angry mountain lion—one that spoke fluent Spanish and was spewing it out faster than Prophet could follow beyond recognizing a few choice words, knowing the haranguing was stitched with more than a few nasty epithets.

  He whipped his head toward the batwings.

  A little bird of a woman clad all in black stood just inside the doors, flanked by three of the colorfully garbed vaquero guards in their steeple-crowned sombreros, their expressions grave, a little fearful, their gaudy duds caked with dust. The little bird of a woman, the female version of One-Eye though considerably more smartly attired, poked her beak-nosed, crowlike face out from the folds of the black rebozo hooding her head, and squinted her long eyes devilishly, raising one arm and pointing a withered, crooked finger at Señorita de la Paz.

  When the tirade ended, the old woman doddered around, lifting a hand to gesture impatiently to the men behind her. All three hurried to make their exit ahead of the salty-tongued little crone. They stumbled into each other as they held open the batwings for her.

  “Mierda,” said Señorita de la Paz, having taken the withering dressing-down with the coolness of a silver-spooned debutante awaiting a hansom cab. “I have been informed we are leaving. Too bad.”

  She glanced up at Prophet, and for the first time a glint of ironic humor entered her brown eyes as once again her gaze roamed across his chest, this time without quite as much disdain as before. “I was just starting to have fun. Thanks for the drink, amigo.”

  “Maybe see you around some time, señorita.”

  She’d turned toward the batwings but now she stopped and glanced back over her shoulder at him. “I am sorry, gringo, but I have a feeling we don’t run in the same herd.” She snorted a dry laugh then not so much walked as floated back across the saloon, passing Colter standing halfway between the bar and the front wall, and out through the batwings.

  Like a hind-tit calf, Prophet followed her to the batwings then stood watching as one of the vaquero guards helped her back into the carriage. The vaquero closed and latched the door, mounted his sleek Arabian, and glanced behind him at Prophet. The man curled a nostril, one cur warning another cur to stick to his own pack.

  The driver bellowed to his team, cracked a blacksnake over the horses’ backs, and the procession was off, heading straight east through the yard. Beyond the yard, they moved off through the chaparral, tan dust rising behind them. They climbed the shoulder of a low, rocky butte then disappeared around the butte’s far side.

  “Damn,” Prophet said to Colter, who’d walked up to stand beside him, staring over the batwings. “That there was a woman!”

  “One who’d turn you inside out, stomp your heart in the dirt, and leave you howlin’, Lou.”

  “It ain’t that I don’t believe you, Red.” Prophet chuckled, shook his head. “But I’d just as soon see for myself.”

  Prophet turned and walked back toward the bar. One-Eye stood behind it, refilling the woman’s cup while slowly shaking his head with the air of a man who had just cheated death. “Tell me about that sexy catamount, old man.”

  Chapter 11

  “The less you know about Marisol de la Paz the better. Take it from me, Lou.” One-Eye took a sip from the woman’s cup. Pulling the cup back down, he smacked his lips, wiped a hand across his mouth, and added, “The de la Paz family are as crazy as owls in a lightning storm, and wild as wolves. Muy peligroso. Very dangerous. See this?”

  He gestured toward the patch over his empty eye socket.

  “Yeah, I see it,” Prophet said, stepping up to the bar. “What about it?”

  “Marisol’s padre, Don Augustin Frederico de la Paz, is the bastardo who gouged out my eye. With a Spanish stiletto. While his men held me down, the don crouched over me, placed his boot on my head, and”—he flicked his wrist in the air—“plucked it out like he was impaling the yoke of a hard-boiled egg!”

  Colter walked up to stand beside Lou at the bar. “Why’d he do that, old-timer?”

  One-Eye shrugged as he took another long drink from the woman’s glass. When he pulled the cup down again, leaving a milky mustache on his upper lip, he said, “I had been rustling his cows for years and selling them across the border in California!” He slapped his thigh and had a good laugh at that. “He thought it was banditos from Sonora. All along it was me!” More cackling laughter. “I was younger then, you understand. This was thirty years ago or more.”

  The old man’s wheezing cackles died quickly when the thud of more hooves sounded from the desert beyond the cantina yard. Mean and Ugly whinnied. Prophet could see his horse and Colter’s coyote dun once more running circles around the windmill and stock tank.

  “You’re right popular,” Prophet told One-Eye.

  “Sí. I attribute it to my pulque and to my serpiente de cascabel en escabeche.” The barman gestured toward the pickled rattlesnakes. “Supposedly, they enhance a man’s virility though I myself am a poor example,” the old man added with a sigh.

  Prophet and Colter returned to the batwings as eight men galloped into the yard. At first, Prophet thought they were the vaqueros guarding the señorita’s carriage, but no. These men had come from the same direction the carriage had. They were dressed in similar, gaudily colorful fashion.

  The man in the lead stopped his cream Arabian stallion in front of the cantina and leaped out of his saddle, the conchos running up and down the legs of his buckskin chivarras flashing in the afternoon sunshine, silver spur rowels spinning.

  He was tall and razor thin, with a pale face beneath a black and gray sombrero embroidered in gold. He wore a coal black handlebar mustache and a goatee that came to a sharp spade point just beneath his chin. His face looked especially pale set against the black facial fur.

  He was all business as he leaped across the veranda. Prophet and Colter stepped back, making way for the tall Mex as he burst through the batwings and looked around quickly. He frowned slightly as he took in the dead men. The curious frown further ridged his brow as he turned to Prophet and then to Colter.

  Then he saw One-Eye Acuna standing behind the bar at the rear of the room, and the dead men must have dispersed like morning fog from his mind. “Was she here, you old leper? Was that her carriage that pulled through here?”

  “Leper, eh?” One-Eye leaned forward against his bar and glared at the rangy newcomer.

  “Out with it, old man or I’ll cut out your other eye! Was that the carriage of Marisol de la Paz?”

&
nbsp; They were speaking Spanish, of course, but speaking it slowly enough that Prophet could follow though not without taxing his limited vocabulary.

  “Sí, sí—it was her, all right,” One-Eye said through a growl, flaring his nostrils at the rangy young man with the spade beard who also wore two ivory-gripped Bisley pistols high on his narrow hips. “She is looking well, too, after her time in Mexico City.” He held his hand up to his chest, making a lewd gesture.

  The tall Mexican called One-Eye an amorous old dog in need of gelding then asked how long ago the carriage had left.

  “I don’t know.” One Eye glanced at Prophet, raising his brow in speculation. “Five, ten minutes,” he said in English. “About the gelding, however,” he told the vaquero, “it would be a waste of time.”

  The tall Mexican gave an ironic snort then wheeled quickly and ran back out to his horse. In seconds, he’d hurled himself back into the deep saddle with the dinner-plate horn, and all eight riders thundered off through the chaparral, following the trail the señorita’s carriage had taken into the chaparral and around the butte.

  Prophet turned back to One-Eye, frowning. “What was that all about?”

  “Juan Carlos.”

  “Huh?” Prophet made his way back to the bar again, a curious scowl cutting deep lines across his forehead.

  “That was Juan Carlos. Don’t ask me about him. The whole matter depresses me with its danger. I shouldn’t be living out here alone anymore—a crippled old man for whom not even the baby rattlesnakes can awaken his machismo.” He gave a sad, ragged sigh, slopped pulque into a fresh gourd cup, and set it onto the bar. “Have a drink with me, Lou. A cup of the good stuff. Come on, El Rojo. One-Eye is buying, for I am sad now!”

  Colter winced a little at the other cup the old man set on the bar, filled with the milky pulque. “I don’t know . . . looks mighty strong.”