The Graves at Seven Devils

FOR THE SECOND time that night, Prophet dragged the half-breed out to the edge of the yard and rolled him up onto the other four dead men. Prophet had no doubt the man was really dead this time, as there were nearly two separate halves of the man to drag off, such was the size of the wound that the ten-gauge gut shredder had carved through his middle.

That task completed, the bounty hunter wiped the blood off his hands in some Mormon tea growing near the cabin, then turned Big Hans’s claybank into the well-concealed brush corral in which the outlaws’ horses milled. Mounting Mean and Ugly, he headed back the way he’d come, scouring the thickening, still-dripping darkness for Louisa, thoroughly baffled and anxious and wondering what had become of his hot-blooded, head-strong partner.

He doubted that the banditos they’d fought off at the monastery had taken her, because she’d been ahead of Prophet, and he would have seen any banditos overtaking them. Of course, Apaches were always a threat out here, but in a raging desert gully washer?

Most likely her horse had fallen, and she was lying along the trail somewhere, injured, possibly dead.

When he came to the scuffed area marking where Big Hans had been dislodged from his claybank, he continued moving north, staring at the terrain even more closely, keeping his Winchester’s butt handy beneath his right thigh while holding the sawed-off ten-gauge straight out from his belly. The banditos from the monastery were no doubt twanging guitars in front of a warm fire by now, but he wasn’t taking any chances.

The farther he rode without seeing any sign of Louisa or her pinto, the heavier and sharper the frustration grew inside him.

Between two hogbacks, he drew back on Mean and Ugly’s reins and frowned down at the ground just left of the trail. Hoofprints, nearly obliterated by the wind and rain and darkness, angled off to the west.

If Louisa had gotten off the trail here, between these hills, Prophet wouldn’t have seen her. The terrain being a mess of rocks, brush, and several fallen saguaro skeletons, it would have been easy for Louisa to mistake the forking game trail for the trail Big Hans had been following. Especially during the height of the storm.

Prophet followed the game trail meandering through the scrub and into a dark defile in the canyon wall. He’d ridden only a few minutes when a black earthen mass rose up before him—a good two-hundred-foot-high pile of broken boulders that completely blocked the passageway. The faint, sporadically washed-out prints Prophet had been following disappeared at the base of the slide.

The jagged mass loomed before him, wedged tight between the defile’s steep walls and capped with stars flickering down from a black velvet sky. The muddy earth around it was scuffed and scraped from the recently fallen rock, several saguaros and ironwood shrubs flattened beneath wagon- and barrel-sized slabs. Many chunks had rolled several yards out behind Prophet, leaving scuffed, water-filled troughs in their wake.

Again, Prophet looked at the tracks that disappeared at the rock pile’s base. He rose up in his saddle, his heart thudding. If Louisa had ridden this way—and it looked like she had—either she lay crushed at the bottom of the slide, or she’d made it through before the defile had been sealed and was wandering around on the other side.

Prophet’s own voice startled him. It sounded unnaturally loud and forlorn in the quiet desert night relieved occasionally by the scuffs of some burrowing critter, the distant bugling of a wild mustang, and the soft hoof thuds of a foraging javelina.

Finally, convinced that there was no way through the massive snag, and that to find Louisa he’d have to locate another route back behind the mountain walls on either side of it, he reined Mean and Ugly around and jogged back the way he’d come, his hoof clomps echoing in the stony silence.

When the defile fell back behind him, he took a sharp right and rode along the base of the steep western ridge humping up blackly in the darkness, searching desperately for another passage south.

He rode for a good hour, finding nothing but occasional clefts and box canyons, a few more fresh rock slides, what appeared to be an ancient prospector’s dilapidated fieldstone cabin at the bottom of a cactus-choked arroyo, and a pile of fresh bobcat plop. No more defiles or passages into the next canyon.

Tired and weary, he realized that his fevered following of the ridge base had gotten him perilously disoriented; it took him another hour to find his way back to the cabin.

He took the time to rub Mean and Ugly down thoroughly before feeding and watering the mount, then turning him into the brush corral with the claybank and the outlaws’ horses. Inside the cabin, he found Big Hans snoring raucously and smelling like a whiskey vat.

The whore, Loretta, sat on a nearby cot with a couple of blankets wrapped around her shoulders, her whiskey bottle propped against a hip. She strummed a beat-up guitar—a sad, lonely Mexican ballad that complemented Prophet’s dark mood and his worry over Louisa.

He went over and picked up the bottle. Loretta continued singing, eyes on some spot in the low ceiling on the other side of the room, as if at the man or the lost, lamented years she was singing about. Prophet took a couple of pulls of the busthead, corked the bottle, returned it to Loretta’s hip, then sagged down to the first cot he came to.

Pensive, his thoughts on Louisa, he pulled off his boots. He doubted he’d sleep, but he needed some rest if he was going to do more than a half-assed job of looking for the girl in the morning.

He pulled his blankets up to his neck, closed his eyes, and as Loretta continued keening and plucking the solemn guitar strings, he drifted faster than he’d thought possible into a deep, warm pool of healing darkness.

Cora stretched out on the bed beside Louisa. Her lips widened into a smile, but the skin above the bridge of her nose was furled, a dark cast in her crazy, green eyes. Her left hand had disappeared under the bed, and now, as she rolled toward Louisa, until Cora’s breasts were mashing into Louisa’s, she lifted a bone-handled stiletto up high so that the wan lantern light flashed off the round, pointed steel blade.

Louisa’s blood rushed to her face—a toxic mixture of fear and fury. Mostly fury. She remembered Big Hans’s story about the gang including Cora chasing Louisa’s cousin into the rocky desert north of Seven Devils. Her cousin had either been thrown off the cliff, or she’d jumped off to save herself from more of the same torture she’d no doubt suffered in the brothel. To save herself from the kind of deaths suffered by her son and her husband.

Despite her boiling blood, Louisa kept her face implacable as she watched the stiletto drop slowly toward her face. Cora laid the tip against Louisa’s nose. Nibbling her lower lip, the redheaded killer slid the stiletto tip across Louisa’s lips to her chin. The sharp blade, not quite tearing the skin, traced a straight line down Louisa’s neck.

“Sooo purty.” Cora swallowed, her pale cheeks flushing slightly, as she followed the blade’s trail with her eyes. “Such soft skin.”

As she slid the blade down between Louisa’s breasts, which her wet shirt conformed to like a second skin, Cora lowered her head and pressed her lips to Louisa’s left cheek.

“Gotta tell me,” she said in a strange singsong. “ ’Cause, ya see, I don’t believe that story about you and your old, prospectin’ Uncle Lou. Uh-huh. Not in the least bit.” She stopped the stiletto halfway down Louisa’s chest and pressed the tip against Louisa’s left breast. It barely pierced the surface, feeling about like a mosquito bite.

Holding the blade still against Louisa’s breast, keeping a firm pressure, Cora pressed her lips to Louisa’s other cheek—a warm, lingering, diabolical kiss. “No siree, girl. When I first saw your eyes, you know what I saw?”

She drew her lips back from her teeth, the spittle crackling softly as she opened her mouth slightly, lifting her chin to stare down both sides of her nose. “I saw myself.”

For a half second, Louisa felt as though the stiletto blade had slipped through her skin to pierce her heart. Though she kept a level stare, the young woman seemed to sense her reaction. Cora lifted her chin slightly and pursed her lips. “Now,” she said, “you gonna tell me what you’re doin’ in the Seven Devils?”

Louisa let a stretched second pass. Then she nodded once and, clicking back the hammer of the double-barreled, silver-chased derringer that she’d slipped out of her boot when Custer had laid her on the bed, she said, “I’m here to blow your vile brains all over that wall over there, see?” She hardened her jaws as she angled the popper’s upper and lower barrels toward Cora’s left temple. “Because you killed my cousin and her son and husband, and then you burnt her town. Remember?”

Cora’s eyes grew glassy with shock and caution as they slid toward the derringer in Louisa’s fist.

Louisa’s fury was a wild mustang inside of her. There was no taming it, no reining it in despite her knowing that the shot would alert the other gang members and no doubt get her killed.

Still, her index finger tightened against the trigger. As it did, Cora jerked her left elbow up and twisted her head sideways, lifting her chin and snarling like a bobcat.

Louisa’s derringer popped loudly. Cora squealed as the bullet carved a bloody gash across the nub of her right cheek and a bloody notch across the top of her right ear. As she flew sideways off the bed and hit the floor with a loud, tearing shriek of pain and fury, Louisa dropped her legs to the floor and lowered the derringer toward Cora scrambling on all fours toward the little shack’s opposite wall.

Louisa had vaguely heard, beneath the hammering fury in her ears, the thud of loudening footsteps as men approached the cabin. Now a sharp exclamation rose from outside. As the door burst open and the handsome gent, Squires, bolted into the room clawing a revolver from a low-thonged holster, Louisa rose to her feet and, hair flying about her head, teeth gritted, swung the peashooter toward the door.

At the same time, Squires threw himself sideways, tripping over his own boots and piling up at the base of the far wall with a pained grunt and a curse. Louisa’s .32-caliber slug had slammed into the chest of the tall, skinny gent rushing in behind Squires.

He groaned and, throwing his arms up and wincing as dust puffed from the hole in his soiled duck shirt and dusty, sun-faded vest, stumbled back out the cabin’s open doorway.

Cora was kneeling at the base of the far wall, in front of Squires. The handsome blond outlaw, bunching his lips and slitting his eyes, raised his revolver toward Louisa, who bolted to her left.

Louisa took two long, running strides and dove through one of the room’s two windows, hearing the bark of Squires’s six-shooter once more and feeling a bullet nip her boot heel as it cleared the window ledge.

Squires fired two more quick, hammering shots as Louisa hit the ground outside—a violent landing on the stony, prickly ground still wet from the rain—then rolled down a slight grade to the base of a gnarled cedar.

There was the rake of soft leather heels as Squires scrambled to his feet inside the shack. Outside, heart hammering, Louisa gained her own feet.

Clawing at the ground with her hands and digging her heels into the sand and gravel, she bolted out from under the cedar and headed up the grade toward cover in the form of rocks, shrubs, and boulders rising blackly against the starlit sky.

Squires’s mocking, echoing shout was drowned by two more loud revolver barks. The slugs plunked into the gravel just inches off Louisa’s pounding, raking heels as she half crawled and half ran up the rocky slope toward the towering northern ridge a good two hundred yards away.

When the echoes of Squires’s last two shots had dwindled, he shouted, “Got us a crazed polecat, fellas! Better come hither and pronto. I mean, vamoose!”

The voice, muffled by the growing distance Louisa was putting between herself and the cabin, echoed ominously in the silent, clean, pine-scented night. She hadn’t run far amongst the ruined shacks cropping up out of the chaparral, looking as though they’d been here as long as the rocks, when she realized the flooded arroyo had taken more out of her than she’d thought.

Her feet and legs grew heavy, her breath short. Her lungs felt little larger than prunes. Her chest ached.

Behind her, the outlaws were calling back and forth. A couple whooped and yowled like wolves on the blood scent. Cora continued screaming so shrilly that Louisa couldn’t make out her words, though she was sure the crazed she-bitch was demanding Louisa’s head.

Boots thumped, gravel crunched, and spurs rang. Louisa could hear labored breaths raking in and out of her pursuers’ lungs as they stormed up the grade behind her and fanned out across the slope, stalking her. She could sense their bloodlust, the thrill of the chase, the fevered anticipation of what they’d do once they caught her.

If they caught her, she knew what they’d do. And without her weapons and ammunition for the derringer, there’d be nothing she could do about it.