The Devil’s Laughter: A Lou Prophet Novel (27 page)

“Come and sit, senor.” El Lightning beckoned to Prophet, then lowered his head to speak to the princess, who turned and trotted off in the direction of the horses. Turning back to Prophet, he said, “I would use your proper name if I knew what it was.”

Prophet introduced himself as he looked warily around at the hard-faced braves all staring at him with open menace. They not only smelled like bobcats, they looked like them—cunning and savage. Some were cleaning rifles or greasing arrow shafts while others devoured small rabbits they'd cooked over the fire, grunting and groaning and breaking the small bones to suck out the marrow, scrubbing their hands on their arms and thighs.

They all kept firing quick, hungry, eager looks at Prophet, grinning at each other, as though at some private joke amongst them.

Prophet felt like a rabbit at a rattlesnake convention. He glanced at the three braves who'd slapped their horses away toward where the Indians' cavvy was gathered farther up the wash. They seemed to have divvied up his arsenal—one taking his Colt, one his Winchester, the last his shotgun. That brave was now showing it to another, older brave who was lounging back on his elbows and hiking a shoulder and pooching his lips with disinterest.

El Lightning barked orders and waved his arms in annoyance, and three braves who had been sitting around the fire scrambled to their feet, grabbed bows and arrow quivers or Spencer carbines, and scrambled off toward the horses. They'd been ordered to keep watch on San Gezo, Prophet thought. Maybe relieving other pickets. They were obviously keeping a close eye on the town. Watching for some indication of where the gold had been hidden.

El Lightning gestured for Prophet to sit down in the space opened up by the three dismissed braves. Then he sat
down himself, pressing his moccasins together and resting his elbows on his raised knees. Two long-barreled Colt Army revolvers jutted from the red sash around his waist, and his brass-cased Henry dangled down his back.

The comely Mojave princess came out of the trees on the other side of the wash. She had an intoxicating walk—one which Prophet could have more fully appreciated in less threatening circumstances. She had a sheep's bladder flask dangling from her neck by a leather cord. The flask jostled atop her breasts that were also jostling behind their scanty deerskin covering.

As she approached the fire, the reflection caressing her smooth, cherry-dark skin, El Lightning said something to her in their tongue. She continued past the war chief and knelt down so close to Prophet he could smell the girl's not unpleasantly gamey aroma.

She looked down at him, her eyes cold, one nostril flaring slightly. Her breasts rose and fell behind the flask. The fire shunted dark shadows across her round, pretty face. She sat so close to Prophet that he could see a couple of widely spaced freckles on her neck and along her jaw.

El Lightning chuckled, then lifted a hand to indicate the flask. “
Por favor
, amigo. Drink. Sno-So-Wey doesn't bite, though she looks like she could, huh?” He laughed.

Prophet saw that the girl wasn't going to extend the flask to him but instead sat there within two feet, silently taunting him. So he reached out and lifted the flask from her breasts. A .45 shell casing was shoved into the lip of the flask. Prophet removed it and, leaning close to the girl because the cord wasn't very long, took a tentative pull of the tiswin.

He'd prepared himself, but it still hit him like a loaded lumber dray, burning his throat as it went down and slammed against the bottom of his belly. He thought he heard it gurgle and steam down there. He'd drunk tiswin before and knew that if you drank too much you'd wake up later feeling like you'd been run over by a Baldwin locomotive screeching brakeless down a steep mountain.

El Lightning stared at him expectantly, the skin above
the bridge of his nose wrinkled slightly. So as not to offend that war chief, Prophet took another, deeper pull from the flask.

He doubted the Indians intended to poison him. One, they hadn't gotten what they wanted from him yet, and, two, no Mojave would ruin good tiswin. He drew a sharp breath through his teeth, trying to quell the fire smoldering on his tonsils, then corked the flask with the .45 casing and set it back against the girl's lovely, jutting breasts. The tender nipples of both were outlined behind the deerskin swatch.

“Nothin' like tiswin,” Prophet said, giving the girl a wink, which she totally ignored as she got up and went over to kneel before El Lightning.

“Not bad, huh, Lou? My squaw, I mean. She's Yuma. Stole her from Chief White Horn before I gutted him for allowing his sons to steal horses from my own band.” El Lightning took a drink, then leaned over and kissed the girl full on the mouth. He set the flask against her breasts, fondled one of them, causing the girl to smile at him smolderingly, then waved her away.

When she was gone, El Lightning stared at Prophet for a long time. The bounty hunter held the war chief's gaze. He didn't have the information the man wanted, and for that he knew he might very soon be saddling a cloud or enduring excruciating torture. He wasn't sure how he was going to escape this wildcat lair, but he had to find a way or he'd die very slowly, Mojave style, screaming.

“Now, then,” El Lightning said. “You've enjoyed my hospitality. Tell me where the gold is.”

“How is it you have such a command of English, if you don't mind my askin'?” Prophet said, trying to buy time. But he was also genuinely curious.

El Lightning gave an indulgent smile. “I am only half of the blood. My mother was a Mejicana-Irish woman from Sonoita, captured by the Jicarilla and sold to the Mojave. She took me with her when she escaped. I was six. And all Mojave. I ran back when I was ten.” The war chief smiled
with satisfaction. “And became the greatest warrior the Mojave people have ever known.”

“Modest, too.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind,” Prophet said. “You didn't care for the reservation, I take it.”

“I wouldn't know. I never went. A select few of my people and I—braves who vowed to follow me and to fight the white men to do the death—hid in the Sierra Madre. We will take our land back. It will require time as well as arms and ammunition.” El Lightning bored holes in Prophet with his eyes. “And gold. It will take much gold for all the arms and ammunition we will need for the final revolution.”

“I doubt Johnson has that much gold. Probably just robbed a bank along the border. They don't grow banks very big along the border.”

El Lightning shook his head. “I saw the strongbox through the spyglass I stole from an American cavalry officer I gutted and left to die howling in the desert.”

He paused, making sure the threat struck home. It did. Prophet felt his intestines sort of coil and uncoil like disturbed snakes.

“It was a large box and a heavy one, lashed to a big mule. Much gold. I will ask you only once more, my friend Prophet. Where is it? Buried out here? Or hidden in the saloon?”

Prophet sighed, made a fateful expression. “I don't suppose it would do any good to tell you I'm not a member of that gang. I'm a bounty hunter. I rode in here with some curly wolves I was tracking. We threw in together on account of you slingin' lead and arrows at us. Ran into Johnson in San Gezo. Wouldn't know him from Adam's off ox. Never even heard of the man. West Coast brigand, it seems.”

El Lightning merely arched a brow. The story had fallen on deaf ears.

“Well, shit,” Prophet said, glancing at the three braves behind him, armed with his own guns and staring at him like a pack of hungry wolves. “I'm not sure what to tell you.”

“Don't bullshit me, Prophet. Where is the gold? Buried out here? Surely, they don't have it with them in the saloon!”

“I do believe that's where they have it,” Prophet said, not knowing what else to say, merely trying to buy as much time as he could.

He had no satisfactory answer to El Lightning's question. All he could do was hem and haw and hope maybe one of the braves moved up close enough that he could go for a gun. If he was going to die, he'd die at some cost to the Mojaves. He also wanted to make it a fast death. Being slow roasted over an Mojave fire wasn't how he wanted to be sent off to his pal, Ole Scratch.

“You lie like a coyote, Lou.”

“Now, hold on, El Light—”

“They would have hid it or buried it outside where flames could not reach it if we burned the saloon.” The war chief grinned. “Have you ever seen a flaming Mojave arrow, Lou?”

Prophet let his gaze flick toward the two long-barreled Colts protruding from El Lightning's sash. “I'm gettin' damn tired of all this palaver.” He gave a ragged sigh. “All right—here's the information you're wantin'. You know that little pink adobe at the far end of town?”

“Si.”

“We buried it in there—” Prophet cut the sentence off as he bolted off his heels, dove over the fire, and smashed his head and shoulders into El Lightning's chest.

The war chief gave a startled grunt and hit the ground on his back. Prophet wrapped his hands around both Colts' walnut handles and rammed one of the guns into the war chief's belly. El Lightning slashed that hand away before Prophet could cock the weapon. On the ground around him, shadows moved.

Something hard slammed against his head. It felt as though his skull had been cleaved in two.

The area around the fire pitched and bobbed around him, slowing blurring before turning completely, mercifully black.

THE FIRES OF
hell were finally consuming Lou Prophet. He hadn't counted on the heat being this intense. He also hadn't counted on the fact that Ole Scratch would have laid him out on a rough stone slab when he should have been working.

Where were the planet-sized coal piles?

Where was the stove?

Where was his shovel?

There was only darkness and heat. A fierce, burning heat and the savage smashing of a giant sledgehammer against his exposed brain.

He tried to squirm his way off the slab but he couldn't move. His hands and feet were secure. He shook his head from side to side as the flames licked around his face, at times more intense on one area than another. He struggled. He groaned. His mouth was as dry as a swatch of old leather left out in the desert, his tongue so thick he had trouble keeping it in his mouth and out of the flames.

Something sharp dug into his chest. He felt a warm draft, heard a guttural chortling.

Finally, to his own surprise, he was able to open his
eyes. The light was like razor-edged javelins impaling the orbs. He squeezed them shut, slitted them, the light slithering like burning kerosene under the lids. Inside the light, he saw the bird—a large, bald-headed bird with flat, BB-like eyes and a wretchedly hooked beak.

The bird's head suddenly turned red. The body jerked and sort of leaped in the air. A rifle barked somewhere in the distance as the bird flew off Prophet's chest and landed in the red gravel to his left. Prophet's head pounded. The back of his neck was stiff and sore. He lay his head back against the ground.

Shortly, he heard the thuds of an approaching horse. He turned his head to the right, saw Mean and Ugly galloping toward him down a low rise. A small man with a straw sombrero and wearing flannel shirt and ragged denims sat in the saddle, holding a Spencer carbine in his right hand. Mean snorted and blew and for a second Prophet thought the horse would trample him before coming to a skidding halt, spraying sand and gravel over the bounty hunter's bare arms and chest.

“Senor,” a man's low voice lamented. “Ah, senor . . .”

Prophet couldn't see the man's face against the brassy sky, but he recognized the voice of Senor Bocangel. Through one squinted eye he watched the short, wiry little Mexican swing awkwardly down from Mean's back, a canteen in his hand. The horse snorted and stomped.

As Bocangel dropped to one knee beside Prophet, the bounty hunter looked around, trying to get a better fix on his circumstances, his condition.

Looking down his chest, he saw that he was naked. Not wearing a stitch. The skin across his long, broad body was blistered, brassy and mottled red. His ankles were strapped to stakes buried in the gravely ground. Same with his wrists.

“Oh, senor,” Bocangel lamented again, popping the cork on the canteen, then cradling and lifting Prophet's head with his left arm. “Here . . . fresh water from the well. Drink.”

Prophet let some of the cool liquid dribble into his
mouth. It was instantly refreshing. He could have drunk the entire canteen but just a few sips made him feel queasy, so he stopped.

“How long I been out here?” he asked the Mexican.

“The Mojaves pulled out day before yesterday. In the morning. They staked you out here just before they left, I think.” Bocangel shook his head. “You are very lucky. They must have seen Johnson pull out with the others and decided to follow them rather than torture you, as only Relampago can torture.”

“I got all my parts?”

“As far as I can tell, amigo.”

“Untie me, will you?”

“Si.”
Bocangel set the canteen aside, slipped a folding knife from his right boot, and began sawing through the leather strap tying Prophet's left wrist to its corresponding stake.

When his last limb was free, Prophet rolled onto his side. His head did not hurt as bad as it had sometime over the past day and a half. It was mostly a dull ache in his jaws and behind his eyes. His face and the top half of his body—every inch of it—felt as though someone had raked him hard with coarse sandpaper.

He looked around, ran the tip of his tongue across his lips. They were cracked and bloody from the burn, tasted like rock salt. The sun blasted down on him and Bocangel, who had stepped away to retrieve Prophet's hat from where the Indians had scattered his clothes and his boots.