Hell's Angel (18 page)

23

UPON SEEING MORDECAI
Moon climb up out of his grave with his bullet-torn hat in his hand, most of the Mexican women and even a few of the men fainted straight away.

A shocked roar sounded as the entire crowd stumbled back away from the grave with a horrified start.

Griselda May staggered two steps back, as well, her lower jaw sagging and her mouth forming a near-perfect
O
with shock, disbelief, and more than a little dismay. Her heart thudded. Her knees threatened to buckle.

Standing beside the grave, covered in dirt, the entire middle of his pasty forehead the deep purple of summer storm clouds, Moon scowled angrily at Griselda. Quickly, realizing that what she was seeing was not some nightmare figment of her imagination, she manufactured a look of unbridled jubilation and tearful relief.

“Mordecai, you're alive!”
Griselda screamed, throwing herself at the dwarf's feet as though in prayer and wrapping her arms around his waist. She even surprised herself with how authentic-sounding her cries were, how violently she managed to make herself convulse against the dwarf's small, muscular, paunchy little body. “You're alive, you're alive! Oh, God, you're
alive
!”

She looked up at him scowling down at her. “What?” she said, shaking her head in genuine amazement and befuddlement. “How? I . . . I don't
understand . . .
 !”

She forced a giddy laugh and was again amazed at how authentic it sounded, at least to her own ears. But then, she really was amazed!

Moon looked around, his own eyes befuddled, as though he'd suddenly found himself walking in his sleep. Griselda turned to look at the others standing around them, shock still showing on the faces of even the most hardened of Moon's hardened criminal gang.

Some of the Mexican men were crouched over the women who'd fainted. Babies were crying. A dog was barking as it backed down the hill with a haunted look.

The two gravediggers had backed several feet away from Moon and Griselda and the grave, and the boy stood with his chin sagging nearly to his chest. His father was crossing himself over and over again, looking at the sky with shiny, silver eyes, as though he were seeing the face of Madre Maria up there against that brassy blue vault.

Suddenly, one of the other Mexican men shouted in Spanish, “Senor Moon is back from the dead—it must mean he is a saint!”

More shocked gasps. A loud, perplexed hum of conversation rose from the onlookers as they turned to each other to confer, their voices pitched with amazement.

“Santo Senor Moon!”
cried the Mexican—a wizened old man with thin hair and a tangled, gray beard—who had deemed the dwarf a saint.
“Santo Senor Moon!”

The other Mexicans, including the well-armed border toughs in their leather leggings and drooping mustaches, picked up the chant, pumping their fists in the air.
“Santo Senor Moon! Santo Senor Moon!”

The dwarf looked around at them, stitching his brows. He placed his hands on his temples and muttered, “Crazy damn bean eaters are causin' a nasty bell to toll in my head.” He staggered to one side, away from Griselda, and would have tumbled back into the grave if the girl hadn't grabbed him by both lapels.

“Hold on there, lover! You just came from there!” She looked at the Rio Bravo Kid and Mortimer, who both stood staring in shock at the resurrected dwarf. “Don't just stand there!” Griselda cried. “One of you come over here, pick up Mr. Moon, and carry him back upstairs to our room!”

The Rio Bravo Kid looked a little frightened, tentative, as he stared down at Moon. The Kid couldn't seem to work his mind around what he was seeing, or wasn't yet sure that he wasn't seeing a ghost.

Mortimer knelt down beside the dwarf. “You all right, Mr. Moon?”

“Feelin' kinda peaked,” Moon said, kneading his temples. He cradled his bullet-torn, bandage-wrapped hand in both arms. “And this here paw o' mine purely hurts like
the blazes
!”

“Didn't you hear me?” Griselda yelled above the chanting around them. “Take him back over to the hotel!”

Mortimer crouched and easily picked the dwarf up in his arms. As he did, Moon tipped his head toward the badge on Mortimer's vest, partly concealed by his frock coat.

“Say, why's you wearin' that deputy's badge, Mortimer?” the dwarf asked as the demoted sheriff began carrying him down the hill, Griselda taking long strides beside them to keep up.

“A few changes been made after your demise, Mr. Moon,” Mortimer said, casting a devilish look at Griselda practically running along beside him. The Rio Bravo Kid was walking behind, still wearing that boyishly sulky, incredulous expression.

The Mexicans and all the other mourners were following behind the Rio Bravo Kid, chanting and singing, some of the women dancing.

“Oh, there were changes, were there?” Moon cast a hard look at Griselda. “So soon after . . . my . . . uh . . .
expiration
?”

Griselda kept walking as she wrinkled her nose at Mortimer. She glanced behind her at the Rio Bravo Kid, who merely threw his shoulders up in a show of exasperated bewilderment while the Mexicans sang and chanted along behind him.

Several of the dwarf's main men—Steele, Toma, and Kinch Brautigan—came running up around Mortimer. “Hey, Boss, you all right?” asked Brautigan through his pewter-colored beard still flecked with foam from the beer he'd been drinking in the dwarf's honor a few minutes ago.

“I don't know,” the dwarf said, jostling in Mortimer's arms. “I think so. Hell, my hand musta slowed that bullet and the bullet bounced right off my old wooden noggin!” He laughed at that, flopping his arms against Mortimer's, but then he sucked a sharp breath and squeezed his eyes closed as he cradled his bandaged hand against his belly once more.

“Damn glad to see you still kickin', Boss,” Tobias Steele chimed in, patting one of Moon's little black boots. “We was afeared your dyin' would be the end of the whole gang. You know how none of us got nothin' but mush between our ears. Can't lead worth shit! At least, not the way you do. O' course, Miss Griselda, she was gonna take over, but seein' as how she's just a girl, and—”

“Ah, shut up, Steele!” Griselda intoned. “Before this girl blows your head off your shoulders, you hairy-necked ape.”

Steele scowled, indignant, and fell back in line with the others, as did Toma and Brautigan. Griselda and Mortimer and the dwarf were moving up along the House's left side, tramping through a swatch of purple shade and kicking empty bottles, cans, and tumbleweeds. Griselda ran ahead, turned the front corner, mounted the gallery, and threw both doors wide.

She stepped aside as Mortimer and the dwarf passed through the doors and started down the long, relatively cool main drinking hall. A couple of Apache girls were cleaning up the place, as none of the slave whores were allowed to leave the premises save for hanging wash on the outside line. When they saw the dwarf being carried into the building—alive!—by Mortimer, one screamed while the other sidestepped quickly out of the way and broke out in some kind of Apache hoodoo chant.

The faces of both skimpily dressed, brown-skinned girls turned pale as death.

The mourners remained outside on the street, still raising their joyful ruckus.
“Santo Senor Moon! Santo Senor Moon!”
One of the old, brightly dressed Mexican women stood near the well, thrust both her long-fingered brown hands into the air above her head, and sang a prayer loudly in Spanish.

“Upstairs,” Griselda said, trying to sound more concerned than troubled, trying to figure out how she was going to explain her forcing Mortimer to exchange badges with the Rio Bravo Kid.

She ran ahead, mounted the stairs, and soon she was opening the door of her and the dwarf's private room. “In here. Get him on the bed. Hurry up, Mortimer, for chrissakes! The poor man's in
pain
!”

Griselda peeled the covers back from the bed, made a face at the blood that had soaked up through the mattress to lightly spot the sheets. The dwarf's men had hauled Chaz Burdick's body away, but he'd left a barrelful of blood behind him. All the covers had had to be burned.

As for Chaz himself—he'd likely fed a couple of mountain lions known to prowl the village's far northern perimeter, along a sandy dry wash home to Mojave green rattlers and chaparral cactus. To Griselda's way of thinking, it served him right.

The fool had let himself get shot through a pillow with his own gun. . . .

Mortimer lay Moon on the bed. The dwarf clamped his little fists against his head and moaned, bending his legs and grinding his heels into the mattress.

“Whiskey,” he said. “Whiskey. Oh, God,
whiskey
!”

“Coming right up!” Griselda ran over to a dresser on which many bottles and glasses, mostly dirty, stood.

“Like the others said, Mr. Moon,” Lee Mortimer said with his wry air, standing over the bed. “Good to have you back amongst the living.” He cast Griselda another of his sly grins. “If you need anything, you'll know where to find me.”

He pinched his hat brim to Moon, though the dwarf had his eyes squeezed closed as he continued to moan and writhe. As Mortimer left, Griselda said, “Indeed, we'll know where to find you, Deputy Mortimer—over at that stable you share with that consumptive whore!”

Mortimer stopped at the door. He stood stock still for about three seconds, staring straight ahead.

When he turned back to Griselda, who was handing Moon a water glass half filled with whiskey, his eyes were cold and hard. “She has a name,” Mortimer said, just loudly enough for Griselda to hear him above the dwarf's moaning. “It's Wanda. Next time I'd admire if you used it.”

He held Griselda's gaze for another two seconds, pinched his hat brim to her coldly, and went out.

As Moon slurped whiskey from his glass, Griselda said, “Well, what do you know—looks like ole Mortimer might just love that consumptive saloon doxie.”

She wasn't sure why, but the realization that the old outlaw appeared to be in love made her feel a fleeting heartsickness, a half-conscious but poignant jealousy, maybe, as she stared down at the wretched Mordecai Moon, who was taking long sips and smacking his lips and lolling his head from side to side on the pillow.

Outside, Griselda could still hear the chanting Mexicans. A din was growing in the drinking hall below as the dwarf's men celebrated Moon's return from the dead just as they'd been drinking to his memory less than an hour ago.

Another dark feeling swept Griselda. She looked down at Mordecai Moon. He was more powerful than ever now, having defeated death and become
Santo Senor Moon
.

How would she be able to follow through with her plans to rob the man blind? Oh, she'd find a way. But how . . . ?

Moon polished off the glass and held it up to her in his clawlike hand. “More!”

“Of course, Mordecai.”

She refilled the glass and gave it back to him. He stared up at her, a hard cunning returning to his eyes. “Get undressed and crawl in here.” He patted the bed beside him. “I'm gonna play with your little titties. Make me feel better.”

He winked.

“And, uh”—an evil grin showed all his black teeth—“you can tell ole Mordecai what you been up to around here while I been dead, startin' with how come you made that
Kid
full sheriff. And then you can tell me what you done with the head of that bitch who killed me!”

24

PROPHET BREECHED THE
coach gun. In each barrel a paper wad of double-ought buck nestled.

He snapped the gun back together with a soft click, drew each hammer back to full cock, and pressed his back against the side of the rock wall.

He heard the faint ching of spurs as the man hunting him approached. Gravel crunched faintly beneath boot soles. Breath raked in and out of laboring lungs.

Sound traveled well inside this little devil's maze of ancient lava walls and stony escarpments that Prophet and his ragtag team of trail partners had found themselves in when Moon's small posse had descended on them.

Prophet's heart beat slowly as the spur chings grew gradually louder. He pressed his back harder against the rock wall, felt sweat dribbling slowly down his dusty cheeks carpeted with several days' worth of brown beard stubble.

“Hey, asshole,” said a burly voice. “You in there?”

A shadow filled the mouth of the narrow stone corridor that Prophet was in.

“Yep.”

Prophet turned the coach gun across his belly and tripped the left trigger. The bounty hunter could just barely hear the man's shrill scream beneath the gut shredder's roar as the fist-sized cluster of double-ought buck lifted the man up off his feet and sent him flying back with a cracking thud against the stone wall behind him.

He dropped down the wall, leaving a large, thick smear of dark red blood on the rock, and fell to his knees. He squeezed his eyes closed, sighed, and fell forward to grind his forehead into the ground.

He knelt there, head to the ground, shivering as life left him.

Prophet spied movement to his left and ahead of him and jerked his head back a half second before a rifle blasted a slug into the rock wall behind his right shoulder, peppering his shoulder, neck, and cheek with sharp stone shards.

He raised the gut shredder toward a face shaded by a dusty cream Stetson with a snakeskin band, and a rifle barrel poking up from behind a thumb of rock, ahead and to his right. He tripped the coach gun's right trigger and saw the face turn the red of a ripe tomato smashed against the side of a white privy.

The man hadn't even had time to scream before his head was pulverized. The lower jaw sagged a little, but then the crimson-splattered head, suddenly minus its hat, dropped back behind the thumb of rock and out of sight.

Prophet heard the shooter's rifle clatter against the rocks.

Crouching, slinging the shotgun back behind his shoulder, Prophet grabbed his Winchester from where he'd leaned it against the wall he'd hidden behind when he'd heard Moon's man stealing toward him. Now he racked a fresh round into the chamber and looked around, crouching, ready for another attack.

He saw no one to either his right or his left along the dusty corridor in the mass of strewn boulders. Gunfire prattled off to his right, so he headed that way, turned, and tramped quickly down another corridor, the gunfire growing louder before him.

He stopped suddenly. Colter Farrow was shooting from atop a bluff ahead and to Prophet's right. The kid was shooting down the bluff's opposite side. Prophet recognized him by the long, red hair hanging straight down from his tobacco brown Stetson.

A man was slinking up the slope behind Colter, just now lowering the rifle in his hands and sliding a knife from his belt sheath. The man was tall and thin, with long, blond hair, green silk neckerchief, and a bright yellow shirt and deerskin leggings. Prophet remembered the distinctively dressed gent from the gallery of Moon's House of a Thousand Delights, when Prophet was getting the shit kicked out of both ends.

The man was about seven steps away from Colter now, and he was lowering the knife while angling the point for a quick upthrust into the kid's back.

Prophet snapped his Winchester to his shoulder. “Hold it!”

The man turned suddenly, awkwardly on the gravel-strewn slope, rocks tumbling down and away from his spurred boots. He'd dropped the knife and was starting to raise his rifle when Prophet stained his pretty yellow, bib-front shirt with two round, red holes across his chest. The blond-headed hombre grimaced, fell back against the slope, dropped his rifle, lost his hat, and rolled, limbs akimbo.

Prophet stepped aside as the blond-headed hombre rolled past him to pile up against a boulder on the far side of the corridor he was in. The dead man had lightly splattered the gravel in his wake with red.

Colter Farrow had jerked around quickly at the shooting behind him. He looked from Prophet to the dead man, flushed with chagrin, and shook his head. “Shit.”

“Yep,” Prophet said, climbing the blood-splashed slope.

“Maybe I can return the favor some time.”

“Hope not.” Prophet looked over the slight gap in the rock through which the kid had been shooting. “Who you shootin' at over here?”

Then he saw the stocky Mexican lying just beyond the wagon-sized boulder he'd apparently been crouching behind, his rifle and a pistol lying nearby. A horse stood ground-tied about fifty yards beyond him, along a rocky wash tufted with lemon green brush.

“Think that's all of 'em,” Colter said as he stood beside Prophet, plucking cartridges from his shell belt and punching them through his Winchester's loading gate.

Just then another shot sounded from the north, ahead of Prophet's and the kid's position.

“That must be Louisa,” Prophet said, and he slipped between the rocks at the top of the bluff and began slipping and sliding, holding his arms out for balance, down the other side.

They'd come upon Moon's riders earlier that day, in the early afternoon, when they'd been traversing the Chisos range looking for another place to hole up while they waited for the furor over the dwarf's demise to die down in Chisos Springs. The riders had taken Prophet's group by surprise, and they'd split up in this badland area on the eastern slopes of the Chisos, Ruth remaining with Louisa because they'd both been riding Louisa's pinto. Moon's men had split up to come after them, and during his brief game of cat-and-mouse amongst the rocks, Prophet had lost track of the others.

Until now.

He and Colter ran through this relatively flat stretch of desert in the heart of the rocky badlands, climbing up and over low hills and dashing across two dry watercourses. Rifles continued prattling before him. A man was shouting. Louisa was shouting back at them though Prophet couldn't hear what they were yelling beneath the rifle blasts, but he had a feeling that Louisa and the man weren't complimenting each other's bloodlines.

When Prophet and Colter gained the crest of a low hill near the shooting, they dropped to their bellies and doffed their hats. On the far side of the hill, smoke puffed and guns crashed behind two nests of rocks about thirty yards apart from each other.

A dead man lay in the gap between the two shooting factions, facedown and spread-eagle, his hat lying far beyond him against a clump of Spanish bayonet. Prophet saw Louisa and Ruth hunkered behind scattered boulders to his left, while he glimpsed two men shooting from the rocks clustered on his right—both parties about sixty yards away from him and Colter.

“Come on out here, you little bitch!” one of Moon's men shouted. “And sit on my
face
!”

The two men laughed as they each triggered another round toward Louisa and Ruth.

Louisa's cool retort was, “I've seen privy seats more attractive than your face, amigo. They probably smelled better, too! But I'll make a deal with you. You both walk out here in the open instead of cowering like a couple of yellow dogs back there in those rocks, I'll sit on
both
your faces!”

“You
will
?”

“I
promise
!”

The two Moon shooters conferred briefly and then one of them shouted angrily, “Lyin' little
bitch
!”

Prophet laughed.

On his left, Colter said, “She always talk so nasty?”

“Ever since Mexico. Don't ask.”

One of the Moon shooters half stood behind his blocky covering boulder, and raised his Winchester. Louisa triggered a shot at him, blowing his hat off, and he gave a yelp and dropped down the boulder.

Prophet raised his own Winchester and started firing one shot after another, peppering the rocks and dust and cacti around the two shooters until his rifle's hammer pinged on an empty chamber.

During his fusillade, he could hear the men yelling and yelping. They hadn't expected an attack from Prophet's quarter. Now they scrambled around and took off running through the rocks and shrubs farther off to Prophet's right, deciding, the bounty hunter supposed, that they weren't about to die like their pards had died—for a dead man.

Louisa leaped to her feet and emptied her Winchester at the two retreating shooters though her bullets merely plumed dust behind them. When her rifle fell silent, she whipped her head toward Prophet and shouted, “Shoot 'em down, Lou! Shoot 'em down like the dogs they are!”

Prophet lowered the Winchester.

Colter was staring toward Louisa. “She does have some chili pepper in her, don't she?”

“My dear old pa would've said she had fire ants up her skirt.”

Prophet began reloading the Winchester as he and Colter began walking down the hill. Louisa walked out from the rocks and rested her own repeater on her shoulder. “You have a soft spot for slave traders?” she asked Prophet snidely.

He walked past her to the man lying belly down in the dirt, planted a boot on the man's back, between his shoulder blades, to see if he was still breathing. He wasn't.

“We've killed enough of the dwarf's men to discourage any others, most like. Most outlaws I know aren't loyal enough to die for a dead man.”

Ruth walked out from the rocks, dressed in Louisa's spare trail duds of a wool skirt, checked shirt, half boots, and a yellow neckerchief tied over her head, bandanna-style. Her brown hair dropped down from the bandanna to hang across her shoulders. She had a stricken look on her face as she regarded the dead man and shook her head.

“He was one of those that Moon sent for me. Probably one of those who hanged Frank.” She'd spoken in a dull, emotionless voice, her eyes opaque. But now she lifted her gaze to Prophet, wrinkling her brows with a faint desperation. “I have to go back and cut him down and bury him, Lou.”

Prophet shook his head as he plucked the spent wads from his barn blaster. “Too dangerous. We'd best hole up out here for a few days. I'll head into town soon and see what's happening at the dwarf's place, maybe fill our canteens. If I can, I'll bury your husband, Ruth.”

“What?” she said. “We're just going to hole up out here like desert rats?”

“I'm not leaving,” Louisa said, staring south, in the direction of Chisos Springs. “Not until I've seen about the dwarf's slave-trading operation and done what I can to bring it down.”

Prophet shook his head wearily. “Leave it for the Rangers.”

“You saw what happened to the two Rangers who merely wanted to fill their canteens at Moon's well, Lou!”

“Most likely, with the dwarf dead, his men will pull out soon. Hell, they can't run a business! They'll tire of the girls and probably turn them loose.”

“Maybe,” Louisa said. “But I'm not going to count on it.”

She turned and walked away.

Prophet sighed, scratched his temple with the barrels of his coach gun. “That girl's gonna be the death of me yet.” He sighed again, turned to Ruth. “I do believe we might have gotten you a horse. You can ride, I take it?”

Ruth was still staring down at the dead man in that cold, bitter, emotionless way of hers. She nodded.

Prophet glanced at Colter. “You wanna fetch our horses? I'll see if I can't run down an outlaw mount for Mrs. Rose, and then we'll find us a cave to hole up in for a few days . . . if you've a mind to hang around, that is?”

Colter considered Prophet with a brow raised in surprise. “You'd want me to? Hell, I almost let that fella stick a knife between my shoulder blades!” He scowled with incredulity and kicked a stone.

“Ah, hell, I've done that! Truth is none of us has eyes in the back of his head. I'd admire if you hung around and helped me watch her back, though”—Prophet jerked his chin in the direction in which Louisa had gone—“because she's liable to get herself killed trying to free them slave girls from Moon's whorehouse, and I could use a hand backing her. She's a handful, that girl!”

The truth was, Prophet genuinely liked Colter Farrow, who reminded him a little of himself at that age, trying to make his way solo in a strange, forbidding land. The boy had obviously been alone a long time, and he could use a friend, just as Prophet could have used a friend out here at Colter's age. His only friend, however, had been Ole Scratch . . . and all the doxies he could afford.

“Well, if you need the help, Lou,” the kid said, hiking a shoulder, maintaining a calm expression but with the light of pride flashing silver in his brown eyes, “it wouldn't be right for me to pull foot on you.” He narrowed a suspicious eye. “You ain't just askin', though, are you, 'cause you think I got nowhere else to go?”

“Hell, kid,” Prophet said, slinging his double-barreled barn blaster behind his back, “if you had a place to go, I'd have you take me there!”

Colter smiled. “All right, then.” The redhead held out his hand. “Pards.”

Prophet shook it. “Pards.”

Colter walked away. Prophet watched him. After a time, he felt Ruth's eyes on him, and he flushed with embarrassment.

She walked over to him, rose up on the toes of her borrowed boots, and pressed her lips to his cheek. “Not hard to see how a woman could fall head over heels in love with you, Lou Prophet.”

“Pshaw!”

“Oh, she has.” Ruth glanced toward where Louisa had disappeared to fetch her horse. “She's been plum gone for you for quite some time.” She gave a wry, almost longing smile. “You must know that, Lou.”