Hell's Angel (2 page)

“Sorry, amigos,” Prophet said. “But better you than me!”

Prophet swung away from the dead Rurales and continued running for his horse, hearing more shouts rising beneath the consarned tolling of that damned bell.

2

PROPHET APPROACHED THE
livery barn that sat near the north edge of San Simon, near the old, crumbling adobe church that humped up beyond it, blotting out the stars. He'd chosen the barn because it was off the beaten path, and he figured no Rurales would house their own horses there and recognize his own rather conspicuous, somewhat notorious beast, the appropriately named Mean and Ugly.

Now he slipped between the wooden doors and drew them closed behind him. There were only four or five stalls in the place, with a paddock out in back.

As he latched the doors and quickly lifted the bale on a lantern to light it, a voice said in Spanish from the dense shadows, “If you're here to rob me, I must inform you that I am old and blind, and the merciful
Jesus
watches over me and my horses from the cathedral next door! Stealing pesos from me will get you sent straight to hell!”

Prophet hung the lantern on a rusty nail. “Go back to bed, old man. It's only me—Lou Prophet. I'm just gonna saddle my horse and fog the sage. I'd appreciate it if you'd never heard of me, if anyone asks—especially the men of Arturo Campa.”

“Oh, you.” The old man, whose name Prophet remembered was Santiago Sandoval, materialized like a lumpy ghost in the murky shadows, carrying his own, spy-flecked lantern by its handle. “The bell tolls for thee?” He rolled his dark eyes toward the front of the barn, to indicate the continued tolling of the bells at the Rurale headquarters.

“They toll for all of us, sooner or later,” Prophet said, stepping into his horse's stall, the mean, hammer-headed roan twitching his ears devilishly.

“I should have known it was you.”

“What do I owe you?” Prophet asked, throwing his saddle blanket over Mean's back.

“Six pesos. And an extra one for the patience required to house and feed such a wretched, contrary beast. He tore the seam in my serape earlier, when I was only trying to comb him.”

“I'll make it seven,” Prophet said, understanding.

A woman's voice said from a lean-to partition in which the old man and his wife lived: “Come back to bed, Santiago. My feet are cold.”

The old man gave a wan smile and shrugged. “Leave it on the water barrel.”

He and his lantern slipped back into the shadows, and Prophet quickly rigged up the dun in the darkness.

Mean stomped and snorted, playful and excited despite the lateness of the hour to hit the trail again. Mean and Ugly didn't care to be housed in livery barns unless there were a frisky mare or two for him to touch noses with, stomp with, and to generally try to impress despite the fact he'd lost his balls to the gelding knife many years before. Prophet had just turned his back on the horse to grab his saddlebags off the stall partition when out the corner of his eye he saw the dun lower his long snout toward the bounty hunter's shoulder and peel his leathery lips away from his teeth.

“Goddamn your cussed hide!” Prophet hissed, jerking around and smashing his left elbow against the side of the horse's stout jaw just in time to keep the shoulder of his tunic from being ripped out.

The horse lurched back, blowing, snorting, shaking his head, twitching his ears, and showing his teeth. If there were ever a horse who could laugh in ribald mockery at its rider, that horse was Mean and Ugly.

“Why the hell do you do that?” Prophet asked the wicked beast, tossing his saddlebags over the horse's back, behind his saddle. “As if I got all night to dance around in here with you, sportin' for a fight. We got them Rurales on our asses again, no thanks to Senorita Ramonna—if you can't trust a whore,
who can you trust
?—and I got no damn time for your nonsense. You know, if I had a lick of sense, I would have listened to everyone who's so willingly given their opinion on the subject and ridden you off to the damn glue factory years ago!”

He led the horse to the front of the barn, blew out the lantern, tossed some coins onto the rain barrel's wooden cover, and then slipped out between the doors, closing them quietly behind him.

He cocked his head to listen. The bells had stopped tolling. The silence was even more menacing than the tolling had been. Campa's Rurales were after him, but where were they searching?

Oh, well,
he thought as he stepped into the leather
—at least they don't know where I am, either.
He slid his shotgun over his shoulder, letting it dangle down his back, and booted the horse around the side of the livery barn, wanting to light a shuck out of San Simon as quickly as possible but also get as far away as he could from the Rurale outpost on the south edge of town.

He steered the snorting horse between unlit shacks, stock pens, and corrals.

The flat roofs around him were limned in starlight. Low hills humped darkly in the north, and a lone coyote's keening cry beckoned him. Ahead on his left, lantern light guttered, and he was about to turn away from it when he saw a figure kneeling on the rear stoop of a small, adobe house. Another silhouette, this one with a rounded figure and with long hair—a girl—crouched over the one kneeling and leaning forward, loudly convulsing.

Prophet drew up to the rear of the house, a few yards away from the stoop, and rested his hand on the butt of his Winchester '73 jutting up from the sheath under his right thigh. The girl was speaking softly in Spanish to the young man airing his paunch in the wiry brush of the neglected yard.

A spindly looking creature, the kid had long, copper red hair, and he was dressed in only threadbare balbriggans and socks. He looked up, and the long strands of his copper red hair fell away from his face, revealing what appeared to be a palm-sized S that had been burned into his left cheek, at a slight angle tilting from the bottom corner of his right eye to the upper right corner of his thin-lipped mouth.

In the light of the lantern that the girl held, Prophet saw the kid curl his lip and say raggedly and with a good degree of self-deprecation, “Haven't learned how to mix tanglefoot with tobacco and women yet, but I'm workin' on it!”

“Don't be in a hurry, Red.” Prophet stared at the S-brand on the kid's face that looked familiar, shuffling through memories. “Have we met?”

The kid regarded him skeptically, cautious as a desert coyote. “Have we?”

“What's your name, kid?”

The pale, gaunt-faced younker gave a wry grin. “What's yours?”

Prophet returned the smile. Hoof thuds sounded from the other end of the shack, and men's voices rose. He could hear the squawk of tack, the rattle of bit chains, and he cursed under his breath.

Someone must have seen him light out from the livery barn.

He looked at the scrawny, redheaded kid still grunting sickly on his knees and said, “Do a fellow gringo a favor—will you, junior? If anyone in dove gray inquires about a man named Prophet . . .”

“I hear you,” the kid said, tilting his head toward the shack behind him, listening to the thuds of approaching riders rising in the south.

Prophet booted Mean and Ugly on along the broad alley he'd been following, angling northwest, letting the sure-footed horse pick its own way through the darkness. When he was sixty or so yards from the shack, he hipped around in his saddle to see several riders stopped near the edge of the lantern light. They wore gray uniforms and gray hats with black visors.

The kid was standing and pointing straight out from the rear of the shack, and Prophet could hear his voice speaking Spanish about as proficiently as Prophet himself would.

When the Rurales veered off to the northeast, Prophet heaved a relieved sigh, muttered, “Thanks, junior,” and booted Mean on out of the village, following an angling horse trail northwest into the hills toward the Rio Bravo that cut through the desert along the southern edge of the boot heel of Texas, too damn many miles beyond.

He was climbing a long hill when the drum of hooves sounded behind him.

Glancing back, he saw two riders galloping down a hill about fifty yards behind. In the darkness he could see their pale uniforms and the silver insignias on their sombrero brims reflecting starlight, gray dust rising behind them.

Prophet stopped Mean just beneath the brow of the hill and slid his Winchester from its saddle boot. He cocked a round, aimed, and fired two shots quickly, watching the gray dust fan up on each side of the riders. They drew so sharply back on their reins that the horses ground their rear hooves into the tough terrain and skidded several yards before stopping.

Prophet triggered two more rounds in front of the riders then heard them both curse in Spanish. He watched as they neck-reined their mounts around, batted their heels against the mounts' flanks, and galloped back up and over the hill and out of sight. The rataplan of shod hooves dwindled quickly, and then the only sound was the indignant yammering of two coyotes in the dark hills to the east.

Prophet waited, listening, watching for more riders. When none came, he plucked four fresh shells from his cartridge belt and thumbed them through the Winchester's loading gate. Sliding the rifle back into its scabbard, he pointed Mean north once again and touched spurs to the horse's flanks. He did not gallop the mount and risk Mean breaking a leg and stranding him out here at the mercy of Campa, but only trotted up and down the long hills cloaked in starlight.

Several times he stopped to let the horse rest and drink from his hat. He'd left San Simon so quickly that he hadn't had time to fill his canteen, so he continued north across the dry Chihuahuan Desert with only a little brackish water sloshing around in the flask. There was a Mexican stage line that ran through this part of the desert, and there were of course wells at all of the stations along the line, but since he didn't know their exact locations, finding one in the dark would be almost impossible.

Best to avoid the stations for as long as he could. As few folks who saw him on his run to the border, the better.

He'd stay clear of the country's main trails, as well. If he was lucky, he'd run into a spring. If not, he and Mean would have to wait to refresh themselves at the Rio Bravo. They'd gone without water before.

He continued riding, slowly but steadily widening the distance between himself and Campa. Staying off the main trails should buy him enough time to get across the border before the jealous Rurale colonel could catch up to him. It would be damn near impossible for Campa's men to track him out here in the dark. There was no moon, and it didn't look like there was going to be one, and while the stars were bright, they weren't bright enough for efficient tracking.

After an hour of relatively hard riding, hearing no one behind him, Prophet allowed himself a saddle snooze. When he awoke, he rested Mean, dampened the horse's mouth and nostrils with a wet bandanna, and then set off once more. Dawn found him skirting a broad canyon that he knew fed into the canyon of the Rio Grande, which meant he was getting close to the border.

The gray light turned a soft red, and shadows drifted out from rocks and small bunches of dry, brown grass. Sotol cacti sent their saber-like stalks straight up from their ragged bases around him.

The sky turned slowly from green to a cobalt blue. To each side were mountains. Behind were the rolling, brown, rock-stippled hills he'd passed through in the dark.

Around nine o'clock, judging by the sun's angle, he spied some relatively heavy growth sheathing an arroyo just east of him. He reined Mean into the shallow wash and loosed a ragged breath when he saw shiny water bubbling up from tan shale rock along the wash's southern bank, nourishing the galleta grass and a few spindly willows drooping around it, offering shade. The water winked gold in the intense desert sunlight. A kangaroo rat scurried behind a hump of gray rock on his left, and he could hear the rapid thumps and grunts of what was likely a javelina that had probably been enjoying the water before Prophet and Mean had interrupted it.

Mean smelled the water and shook his head in eager anticipation, rattling the bit in his teeth.

Prophet rode the horse ahead and climbed heavily out of the saddle, looking around carefully. When water was this scarce, there were likely to be more critters nearby than wild pigs and kangaroo rats. Border toughs, maybe. Possibly Kiowa, as this was their traditional stomping grounds, though he was glad he'd seen no recent sign of the fierce nomadic warriors.

When he'd slipped the bit from Mean's mouth and loosened his latigo strap so that the hammer-headed dun could drink freely, Prophet dropped the reins and let the horse have at the chuckling spring. He'd ridden slowly, easily for the past hour or so, so the dun didn't require the obligatory cooling. Even if he tried, he doubted he'd be able to hold the stubborn beast back from the faintly murmuring springs.

While the horse drank, Prophet climbed the arroyo's north bank, starting a little at a sand rattler that had been sunning itself on a flat rock but now slithered quickly off into the rocks beyond a paloverde tree. Mean continued to drink loudly, twitching his tail at flies, as Prophet scanned the area for interlopers.

When he figured Mean had had enough, he went down, pulled the horse back away from the spring, and crouched beside it, doffing his hat and lowering his mouth to catch a slender freshet tumbling over the shelving sandstone.

The water wasn't over cool but it was fresh. It tasted richly of minerals. Instantly, he felt it reviving him. When he'd had a bellyful, he walked over to where Mean stood hip-cocked, and unslung his canteen from his saddle horn.

The flat, unechoing crack of a rifle exploded the sunny stillness. The canteen jerked wildly in Prophet's hand. The bullet crashed through it and ricocheted off a rock near the springs.

“Shit!”

Prophet dropped the ruined flask and lunged for his rifle.