Hell's Angel (15 page)

She could see the dark window behind which poor Frank very likely lay slowly dying.

Ruth groaned in frustration. Then she took off running straight west of the hotel, paralleling the main street but crouching behind brush, rocks, and cacti. She winced as her bare feet came down on cactus thorns and sharp rocks, but she kept running. She had to get to Frank.

Finally, she'd traced a semicircle around the main part of the town and approached the Rose Hotel and Saloon from the rear. She entered via the back door.

“Frank,” she heard herself mutter, her voice strained with apprehension. What condition would she find him in?

She moved through a storage room and entered the lobby. In the darkness, she saw the front desk. The stairs angled down from the second story on her left. As she made for the bottom of the staircase, something brushed the top of her head.

Instinctively, she cowered from the cold touch, stepped to one side, and turned. She looked up to see something long and pale hanging suspended in the air beneath the second-story balcony. Nearly level with her eyes, two bare feet turned slowly in midair about five and a half feet above the floor.

She heard a creak. Like the complaint of a straining rope.

Frowning, vaguely feeling her lower jaw dropping, she stared up past the bare feet to two, floury white, skinny legs ridged with fine, light blue veins. Then she saw the rest of the hanging body and stumbled back against the wall. As her own eyes met the heavy-lidded, death-glazed eyes of her husband, and saw the rope coiled around his neck, the tongue protruding from between Frank's thin lips, a scream began to burst from Ruth's throat.

An arm wrapped around her from behind. A hand clamped back hard across her mouth, rendering the scream stillborn on her tongue.

17

RUTH GRUNTED AGAINST
the hand across her mouth and, panicking, struggled against it. The hand wouldn't budge. She was surprised when she heard a female voice say very calmly into her left ear, “I am friend, not foe. I'll remove my hand if you promise not to scream.”

Ruth slid her eyes to the left. A pretty female face stared at her from beneath the brim of a tan Stetson. Blond hair hung down both sides of the girl's heart-shaped face to spill across her shoulders.

Ruth frowned, incredulous, and nodded.

The girl took her hand away.

Ruth drew a sharp breath, her heart still hammering. “Who are you?”

“Not the person who did that.” The girl lifted her chin toward the naked body of Frank Rose hanging from the balcony rail above the lobby. He'd turned to one side and now hung slack and still in pale death. “I can promise you that.”

“Oh, Frank!” Ruth knees buckled, and she fell to the floor.

She sobbed as she stared up in horror and heartbreak, pulling at the skirt lying snug across her thighs. She cried softly for a time and then crossed her arms on her breasts, lowered her chin, squeezed her eyes closed, and shook her head. “How could he?”

“Rather easily, I would think . . . from what I've learned of Mr. Moon so far.” The girl's voice was soft and oddly emotionless. Looking down at Ruth, she said, “I'm a friend of Lou Prophet's.”

Ruth looked up at her through tear-soaked eyes, curiosity only slightly tempering her grief. “Lou? He's . . . ?”

“The old boy's still kicking. No thanks to his own damn foolishness. He keeps pulling stunts like that, I expect he'll be giving up his devilish old ghost soon.”

“Who are you?”

“I'm Louisa.”

“You're a friend of Lou's . . . ?”

“That's right. Trail pards, he'd say.”

Even through her grief and terror, Ruth knew an instant's pang of jealousy. The girl before her, though crudely garbed in rough trail clothes, was young and evenly, attractively featured. A man would say sexy, even erotic in her man's clothes and her pistols. Ruth had come to know Lou Prophet well enough to know that if any young woman as lovely as this one called herself Lou's friend, she'd been much more than that.

The girl called Louisa hooked her thumbs behind her cartridge belt and said, “I've got him tucked away in a cave up in the Chisos Mountains. It'll take him a couple days to get back on his feet. I came down here to see what Mr. Moon was up to, figured I could do that from your place. Just found this man, who I assume is your husband, a few minutes before you came.”

She paused. Ruth heard her exhale with what seemed genuine regret and sympathy. “I am sorry, Mrs. Rose.”

Ruth looked up at Frank once more. His feet looked so vulnerable and exposed. So pale, with light blue veins showing through the papery skin. She imagined what had happened, the dwarf's men coming in here, dragging him out of his bed, tying that noose around his neck. . . .

“He was utterly defenseless,” Ruth said, her voice shrill. She tightened her jaws with a raw fury that burned up from deep inside her, remembering hearing only a few minutes ago the dwarf singing at the tops of his wretched lungs over at his House of a Thousand Delights. Singing and cavorting with his whores and that vile Miss May, with poor Frank hanging here alone in this dark hotel.

Ruth rose slowly and stared up at Frank but what she saw in her mind's eye was the grinning face of the dwarf.

“I'll get him down.” Louisa swung around and began climbing the stairs, sliding a knife out of a sheath on her left side, behind a holstered revolver.

At the same time, with fury searing a hole through her heart, Ruth picked Burdick's gun up off the floor where she'd dropped it when Louisa had grabbed her.

“Hey, there,” Louisa said from the balcony's dense shadows, over Frank's hanging body, “where you going with that, Mrs. Rose?”

Ruth strode tensely out from behind the desk, hefting Burdick's gun in her hand. “I'm going to see about killing a dwarf,” she heard herself say in a weird, strained, faraway voice as she made for the hotel/saloon's front door.

Behind her, Louisa said, “Uh . . . I don't think I'd do that, if I were you!”

Ruth didn't hear that last because she'd just then walked on out the front door and was crossing the front veranda. She dropped down the steps and angled across the dark main street toward the dwarf's hotel that was lit up like a Missouri River gambling boat against the velvet desert night.

Ruth held the pistol down low against her right side.

Ahead of her, several men conversing in groups turned to look at the woman in the red dress striding toward them from across the street. She was barefoot and they probably saw that she was carrying something but they probably couldn't see what. Gradually, all of the men around her stopped talking to cast her incredulous, amused looks, their drink-sharp eyes raking her up and down.

She pushed between two men who did nothing to stop her, and mounted the big hotel's broad front gallery steps. There were several more men on the gallery, as well as several Apache and Mexican whores doing their best to look as though they were enjoying themselves, decked out as they were in their corsets and bustiers or spangled dresses.

One Apache girl stood in front of two bearded Mexicans. The men had slid the straps of the girl's dress down her slender, brown arms. One of the men was cupping a pointy breast in his hands and laughing with the other man though now both men as well as the Apache girl turned to watch the woman in the red dress stride purposefully across the gallery.

Ruth walked through the two front doors that had been propped open to the fresh night air, and into the saloon-brothel's main drinking hall. She stopped just inside the bustling tangle of men, looking around the vast hall that was the size of three of her own saloons together. It was crudely furnished though it boasted a giant, horseshoe-shaped bar curving out from the room's left side, manned by two burly bartenders. Girls in black or wine red corsets and with matching feathers in their hair ran drink trays to the men sitting or standing about the room.

There were all types here. Outlaws from both sides of the border. Freighters, mule skinners, bullwhackers, drovers in shotgun chaps, and several bearded men who appeared to be prospectors. There were Anglos, Mexicans, Indians, half-breeds, and blacks. The dwarf did not discriminate. He'd take a man's money whatever his skin color, size, or what language he spoke.

Roulette wheels clicked. Craps dice rattled. Cards were shuffled, and coins and poker chips clattered.

The band was still playing. Men and whores danced.

The dwarf was resting, however.

Ruth picked him out of the crowd, sitting about halfway down the long, deep room on a large brocaded couch with his little boots propped on a long, low table before him, a skimpily dressed whore to each side of him. The girls appeared giants in contrast to his wizened, diminutive frame.

One of the whores, a big-bosomed Mexican girl, was wearing his hat and laughing while he spoke loudly, gesturing with the fat cigar he held in his gnarled hand. The other girl, who appeared a half-breed Apache, balanced what was probably his half-filled water glass on her thigh. She, too, was feigning to enjoy the dwarf's monologue, for the more adaptable of the man's whores learned to loosen up and at least pretend to enjoy themselves lest Moon should tire of them more quickly and ship them off to Mexico faster, where their lives would be even worse.

Both girls' lips were set in too-bright smiles.

Ruth pushed through the crowd, heading for the dwarf.

He'd just turned to the girl holding his drink and patted her thigh, and she was lifting the glass in both hands to his lips, when Ruth stopped about four feet away from the wretched little man. He looked at her over the glass that the whore had lifted to his lips.

His brows pinched. His eyes widened.

Ruth raised the Colt conversion .44 in both hands, raking the hammer back with both her thumbs, one atop the other. The click was drowned by the cacophony echoing off the room's walls and high ceiling.

Moon's eyes widened more, grew bright with horror.

He raised a pudgy hand as though to shield his face. He loosed a reedy scream a half second before the Colt roared, smoke and flames lapping toward the little man sandwiched between the two whores on the couch. The bullet punched through the dwarf's palm and into his forehead, slamming his head back against the couch.

As the whore to each side of him screamed and scrambled away from him, Moon's lower jaw slackened. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he sort of slumped down on the couch, his paunch swelling behind his shabby vest, his little black boots dropping toward the floor.

He slumped still lower, convulsing, his tongue poking out the corner of his mouth, and his head sort of wobbled on his shoulders. He gurgled as he died.

* * *

Louisa had sheathed her knife and run down the stairs of the Rose Hotel and Saloon as soon as Mrs. Rose had strode with such eerie purpose out the front door. Louisa ran down the steps to the front door, saw that the woman was already halfway to the dwarf's rollicking, brightly lit gambling parlor and whorehouse.

She was about to call out to the woman again but nixed the idea. Her yell would only attract attention.

Louisa uttered a rare epithet as she dropped down off the Rose's veranda steps and hurried after the woman who disappeared amongst several silhouetted clumps of men on that side of the street, directly across from the well. Ruth Rose reappeared a moment later atop the dwarf's broad front gallery, making a beeline for the open front doors.

“Ah, hell,” Louisa said, pausing about halfway across the street.

What should she do?

There wasn't much she could do, she thought as she slid her matched Colts from their holsters, clicking the hammers back. Except die tonight.

18

LOUISA RESUMED WALKING
forward.

She stepped up her pace, wended between two clumps of smelly men who eyed her with glassy lasciviousness typical of their breed, and mounted the gallery steps. She'd just stepped through the two front doors when she heard a hoarse cry above the din of the Mexican band and the conversation and gambling, and what sounded like a branch being broken over a knee.

More, shriller screams followed.

Oh, crap
, Louisa silently exclaimed to herself.
She did
it!

A thrill rippled through her, pinching her wind, as did a vague admiration for the woman's pluck. She'd die now, of course, but Louisa wasn't about to just stand by and watch it happen.

She couldn't see much because of all the men milling between her and the source of the gun's report and the screams. She hurried forward, both her Colts in her fists, and elbowed men aside until she could see, about two-thirds of the way down the room, the dwarf slumped on a long couch from which two dark-haired girls were scrambling.

The band had just stopped playing and men had just started yelling. Two or three men appeared to be wrestling with someone in red. Louisa knew that the men were taking Ruth to the floor, and just then she saw the gun come up in Ruth's hand around which one of the men's hands was wrapped.

The gun roared, spat smoke and flames toward the ceiling. Ruth screamed. One of the men ripped the gun out of her hand while two more drove her to the floor while several others—the dwarf's own men, probably—raced toward the commotion.

Louisa gave a wild rebel yell, which she'd adopted after learning how well it worked for Lou in momentarily paralyzing and befuddling his opponents. She ran forward, leaped onto a table heaped with bottles, glasses, coins, and playing cards, and triggered one of her pistols into the ceiling.

“Get away from her, you apes!” she screamed.

Louisa leaped onto the next table toward the rear of the room and kept on leaping tables until smashing the barrel of one of her Colts against the side of one of the men who'd wrestled Ruth to the floor. Still atop a table near the couch on which the dwarf slumped and before which the three men were crouched over Ruth on the floor, Louisa saw one of the dwarf's men aim a pistol at her.

Louisa shot the man through the dead center of his chest. He yelped as he triggered his own revolver at the ceiling and flew back into a table behind him, causing the men seated there to scurry. One of the men there had fallen to the floor on his ass, and now he scrambled away on all fours, losing his sombrero in the process.

Now the room erupted in earnest, though with such a large crowd it was hard to tell from which quarter Louisa and Ruth's next threat would come. They were two women against an entire roomful of men, all armed, many in the dwarf's employ.

She heard a woman shrieking,
“Get her! Get her!”
and saw Griselda May running toward her from the dance floor, where she'd been dancing with a big, buckskin-clad freighter with a beard hanging to nearly the buckle on his cartridge belt.

Louisa triggered a shot at the girl. Griselda was moving too quickly and erratically for an accurate shot, and Louisa's slug shattered a bottle well beyond Miss May. Louisa reached down between the men, grabbed Ruth's arm, and jerked her to her feet.

“Let's go!” she shouted.

At the same time, several pistols popped around Louisa, shattering bottles and glasses on her left and right and causing Ruth to grab her arm and yowl and fall hard against her rescuer. Louisa pushed off a table and triggered a shot at one of the dwarf's men closing on her, crouching and shooting. She hit one but missed another one, though a pistol popping somewhere behind her drilled a bullet through the shoulder of the man she'd missed, and he fell forward over a chair, cursing.

She vaguely wondered if that bullet had been an errant shot fired by one of the dwarf's other men, as she reached down to grab Ruth's unwounded arm, dragging the woman to her feet.

“Let's go!” Louisa yelled.

But as Ruth gained her feet, clutching her bloody upper left arm, Louisa froze. She'd holstered one of her pistols when she'd grabbed Ruth. Holding the other one in her right hand, she looked around, breathing hard, her heart drumming in her ears.

Every man and woman in the room had frozen in various positions. At least a dozen had their guns drawn, and they were aiming said guns at Louisa and Ruth. Some were the dwarf's men. Some were obvious border toughs—Anglos as well as half-breeds and Mexicans. Most of them likely had no idea what all this was about, but they knew that the ugly little man who provided them whiskey and women had been shot by a feisty brunette in a red dress, and that a feisty, hazel-eyed blond had come to her rescue, triggering lead in every direction.

These men were like coiled rattlers, ready to strike.

Louisa swept her gaze at the hard-eyed faces set above maliciously grinning mouths. One Anglo was aiming a Remington revolver at her and smoothing his long, yellow mustache with dirty, brown fingers, fairly licking his chops at the prospect of the two women before him.

The only question on these men's minds was how to keep the two women alive long enough to gain some physical satisfaction from them.

An eerie silence had fallen over the room. Powder smoke wafted. One of the wounded men grunted and rolled on the far side of a table to Louisa's right. Griselda May stood ten feet toward the rear of the room, aiming two derringers at Louisa and grinding her jaws together, dimpling her cheeks and hardening her eyes.

She held fire as though she, like the men, wanted to savor the killing.

Someone grunted on the far side of the room from Louisa, in the direction of the horseshoe-shaped bar. She glanced that way to see one of the burly bartenders sag to one side before dropping out of sight. A thin young man with long, red hair and what appeared a nasty scar on his face climbed up onto the bar. He wore brush-scarred chaps over blue denims, a calico shirt, and suspenders. He was holding a pistol in one hand, a Winchester in the other.

“Now this whole thing has done got
way
out of hand!” he said, his voice sounding loud in the heavy silence.

Most of the customers wielding guns had their backs to the redheaded kid atop the bar. The kid stood at a crouch, rifle in one hand, pistol in the other, narrowing one menacing eye as he slowly tracked each gun across the room.

“First one to trigger another shot gets one through the brisket,” the kid said. He looked a little ridiculous, gangly as he was, freckle-faced, big ears showing through the copper-red hair hanging straight to his shoulders. He even sounded ridiculous, as his voice had not yet reached the pitch of a full-grown man's.

There was something commanding, though, in the easy, assured way he held that carbine and revolver, Louisa absently thought. Something even halfway reassuring, though she was also quite certain that the redhead would die right along with her and Ruth Rose tonight.

A man sitting with five others at a table near the redhead said in a raspy monotone, “Why, I recognize you. You're that kid with the mark of Satan on his face. You got two thousand dollars on your head, boy!”

On the opposite side of the table from the speaker, another man jerked back in his chair and thrust up a gun in his right hand. The kid slid his Winchester toward the man with the gun, and the Winchester's roar sounded like a keg of detonated dynamite in the cave-like room.

The man dropped his gun and stumbled backward, kicking his chair backward, as well, until he fell over the chair to the floor. He gasped like a landed fish until his breathing suddenly stopped at the end of a raspy sigh.

“Anyone else wanna buy two thousand dollars' worth of lead?” the kid asked loudly enough that he could be heard throughout the room.

Smoke wafted around the redhead's battered tan Stetson. Louisa could see now that the scar on his face was shaped like an
S
under his right eye, angled slightly. It looked very much like a cattle brand. No one said anything.

He turned to Louisa, who found herself regarding the kid incredulously. “If you ladies would like to make your way to the front door, I'll make sure none o' these fine gentlemen tries to back-shoot you.”

Louisa said, “You sure you want a piece of this, kid?”

“No, I reckon I don't. Ma always said I tended to act first and think later, and I guess that's just what I done here, doggone it.”

“Gotcha.”

Louisa wrapped an arm around Ruth's waist, turned her, and began leading her through the tables and the men standing around with their hands in the air, toward the front door. Ruth shuddered a little from the pain of her wounded arm, and she held the wounded appendage across her belly, walking at a slight crouch. She looked around warily, as did Louisa, expecting more gunfire to break out at any moment.

When the two approached the front doors, Louisa looked at the scar-faced redhead again. He stood as before atop the bar, rifle in one hand, revolver in the other, sliding both guns slowly from right to left and back again.

The men in the place were still as statues. Most of the whores had gone to the floor. A few were looking up warily over the tops of tables.

Griselda May held her own pistol straight down by her side as she flared her nostrils at the redhead atop the bar. Her brown eyes were glassy with rage.

Louisa continued on out the open front doors, extending her Colt straight out in front of her in case any of the men outside tried to make a play for her. She led Ruth across the gallery and down the steps, pivoting on her hips to keep all the men clumped around her at bay. None of these appeared to be part of the dwarf's cutthroat gang. They were mostly Mexicans—probably freighters, judging by their dusty buckskins and billowy neckerchiefs, as well as their seeming reluctance to make any moves toward a sidearm.

They watched Louisa and Ruth stonily.

When the women were out in the middle of the street, right of the well and nearly in front of the Rose Hotel and Saloon, Louisa glanced back to see the redhead walking backward out of the dwarf's sprawling place, the Winchester and revolver extended before him. He turned suddenly and leaped down the steps to the street, hurried over to a coyote dun tied to one of the hitchracks fronting the place, and slid his rifle into the boot strapped to the saddle. He mounted up and, keeping his pistol in his hand, backed the horse away from the hotel.

Louisa headed down a break between the hotel and another, smaller adobe-brick building, toward where she'd tied her pinto. The kid turned his horse and trotted up behind her as she continued leading Ruth through the dark gap toward the rear of the Roses' hotel.

“I gotta warn you, Kid-with-a-Price-on-Your-Head,” Louisa said, “I'm a bounty hunter.”

“I'll take my chances, Miss Bonaventure.”

Louisa looked at him riding up beside her and Ruth. “You know my name?”

“Sure, you're the Vengeance Queen who rides with Lou Prophet—the bounty hunter who done sold his soul to the Devil after the War of Northern Aggression.”

“I'll be hanged,” Louisa said, using another of Prophet's expressions. “We're just getting too famous for our own good, me an' Lou.”

Louisa could hear voices and a general commotion rising from the direction of Moon's saloon. Apprehension raking her, knowing she'd be hunted soon, she led Ruth toward the pinto ground-tied behind the woodshed flanking the hotel and helped the woman onto the horse behind the saddle.

“Which way you headed?” the kid asked Louisa.

She looked at him again, suspicious, as she climbed up onto the pinto's back. “West,” she said, her voice pitched with a cagey reluctance.

“If you'll ride south with me a ways, you two can branch off a mile or so out of town, and I'll keep heading toward the Rio Grande. We'll maybe fool 'em for a little while.”

“Yeah, a little while.” Louisa glanced at Ruth perched behind her. “Hold on tight, Mrs. Rose. We're gonna ride like the Devil's hounds are on our heels.”

When Ruth had wrapped her arms around Louisa's waist, Louisa batted her heels against the pinto's flanks. They took off, trotting past the rear of the Rose Hotel and Saloon and up the far side. They turned onto the main street and then continued south along the main trail, heading in the direction of the Rio Grande.

They galloped hard along the trail that was a pale ribbon stretching out across the starlit night. But it wasn't long before they heard the thunder of many hooves chewing up the desert behind them.