Chapter 3
A little over five minutes before Prophet trimmed Wind River Bob’s wick with his .45’s barrel, Louisa kicked in the roadhouse’s front door and stepped quickly to the door’s right side, where the outdoor light, as fading as it was, wouldn’t outline her.
As her eyes quickly adjusted to the dingy light inside the roadhouse’s broad drinking hall, she saw a girl with a bruised, Indian-featured face lying across a table to Louisa’s right, her molasses-dark eyes wide and staring straight up at the ceiling. The girl’s throat had been cut. One arm hung down over the side of the table, as did both smooth, copper-brown legs.
Two men were crouched before two windows running along the wall to Louisa’s left, beyond a crude wooden stairway. The men were shooting rifles through the broken-out windows, angling the barrels back toward the roadhouse’s rear, toward Lou. They were firing quickly, pumping their cocking levers, empty cartridge casings arcing back over their shoulders to clatter onto the floor around their boots.
A bearded man stood behind the bar about halfway down the room, along its right wall. He was setting bottles onto the bar, as though preparing to load them into the large canvas war bag resting on the pine planks before him. His movements were quick and nervous.
Boots thumped and men shouted in the ceiling above Louisa’s head. Another man just started down the broad wooden stairs to Louisa’s left though she couldn’t yet see him, for he was somewhere above the second-floor landing. She could hear only the fevered thundering of his boots growing quickly louder.
The gang, their hideout having been discovered, and not knowing how many had discovered it, was preparing to pull out.
The bearded man behind the bar had swung his head and his sharp, nervous eyes toward Louisa. He bellowed a curse as he reached behind him, pulling up a long-barreled, double-bore shotgun from where it had been resting atop the back bar.
“It’s her!”
Louisa snapped up her Winchester and threw a round at him just as he stumbled backward and slightly sideways, so that the bullet merely shredded his right earlobe before shattering a bottle and the back bar mirror. The man bellowed another curse, hardening his jaws against the pain in his ear, and swung the gut-shredder in Louisa’s direction.
As the big popper roared, flames lapping from one barrel, the report like the explosion of a keg of dynamite in the close confines, Louisa dove onto a table ahead and on her right. She hit the near end of it, and it sank beneath her to the floor, rising on its far side and becoming a shield—an inadequate one, she discovered a second later, when the man behind the bar tripped the shotgun’s second trigger.
The buckshot blew a pumpkin-sized hole through the upper half of the table, maybe four inches above Louisa’s now-hatless head. Scrambling onto a knee, Louisa poked the barrel of her Winchester through the big hole, aimed hastily, and sent two quick rounds hurling toward the man behind the bar.
He was just then tossing the shotgun onto the bar, knocking over several bottles he’d set there, and pulling up two long-barreled Smith & Wessons from holsters strapped around his broad waist.
Louisa’s first bullet drilled a quarter-sized hole through his left cheek, just beneath that eye. His head jerked backward, nodding as though he were in firm agreement with something that she’d said.
Louisa’s second bullet drilled another hole through the dead center of the man’s forehead, jerking his head back once more and sending his whole body flying into the back bar. He blinked his eyes quickly as he rolled down the back bar’s shelves, dislodging bottles left and right, and dropped to the floor with a resolute thud.
The man on the stairs was in full view now as he stopped four steps up from the bottom—a long-faced hombre with close-set eyes and long, lusterless blond hair. “We got trouble inside, boys!” he bellowed to the gang in general, bringing the Spencer repeater down off his shoulder and quickly aiming at Louisa, who swung her Winchester in his direction and shot him twice.
The slugs punched him backward, firing his own rifle into the ceiling. He fell onto the steps, howling and reaching again for the rifle. Louisa calmly aimed and punched another pill through his forehead, silencing his infernal caterwauling.
“Ah hell, it’s that damn Vengeance Queen!” That had been shouted by one of the two men who’d been shooting out the windows just beyond the stairs, to each side of the large, fieldstone hearth in which a fire popped and crackled, tempering the smell of cordite in the air with the tang of burning pine.
The shooter who’d spoken swung his rifle from the window but before he could even get a fresh round racked into the breech, Louisa’s slug punched a hole in his Adam’s apple and sent him hurling back through the window, breaking out what glass had remained in the frame.
The other shooter, nearer Louisa, had already turned and was crouched over his Winchester, flinging lead at the Vengeance Queen. Bullets screeched through the air around Louisa’s head, thudding into the front wall behind her and into the table, which she’d crouched behind once more, angling the table toward the shooter to act as a shield.
When she heard the shooter’s rifle click empty, and the man say, “Crap!” she rose to her knees. Instinctively knowing that her own nine-shot carbine was also empty, she lifted her head from behind the table and snatched both her matching, pearl-gripped, nickel-washed pistols from their hand-tooled, brown leather holsters thonged on her thighs, beneath the flaps of her heavy wool coat.
The shooter flung his rifle away and reached for a pistol tucked into a shoulder holster between his quilted leather coat and his sheepskin vest. “Oh hell!” he cried, his blue eyes sharp with terror, seeing that Louisa had the drop on him.
“That’s where you’re headed, all right.” Louisa curled her ripe upper lip as her right-hand Colt bucked a quarter second before the one in her left hand bucked, both rounds thumping into the screaming man’s chest and punching him straight back through the window out of which he’d been flinging lead at Lou.
A pistol cracked behind Louisa. The bullet was like a hot andiron laid against the right side of her neck, just above the collar of her wool coat. She flinched and swung around, raising both her fancy Colts to see a man standing on the second-floor balcony stretching across the saloon’s far wall.
Louisa had started to squeeze both triggers, but now she eased the tension in her trigger fingers. The man—a big man with a black beard cleaved by a long, thick scar running crookedly down his left cheek—held a young girl clad in only pantaloons, a thin shift, and a string of colored feathers and faux pearls, one purple and one bright red ribbon poking up from the mess of light red hair wound and secured into several buns atop her head.
The girl was very young, Louisa judged. Maybe sixteen, maybe younger. She was missing an eyetooth. Louisa could see that because the girl’s lips were stretched back from her lips in terror and agony, for the big man standing behind her had one beefy arm, clad in red calico, hooked around her neck, drawing her head back taut against his broad, lumpy chest.
He held a cocked, stag-butted Colt Lightning taut against her right temple. The fleshy hand gripping the gun was covered in small, light brown freckles. “Drop them Colts, woman!” the man bellowed through his beard, narrowing his dark brown eyes beneath the brim of a black, bullet-crowned hat to the front of which the moon-and-star badge of a deputy U.S. marshal was pinned.
That told Louisa which gang member he was—N. B. Stone. He’d killed a federal lawman several years ago in Montana, after murdering two doxies and a deputy sheriff in a whorehouse in Bannack. His way of thumbing his nose at anyone who would come after him for such crimes had been to pin the dead lawman’s badge to his hat.
A badge of honor, so to speak.
“Hello, Mr. Stone,” Louisa said, gazing up across the barrels of her aimed Colts at the man.
“Drop ’em, Bonaventure! Drop ’em now! I’ll kill this girl—drill a hot one right through her purty little head. You know me, so you know I’ll do it!”
Louisa swallowed down a tight knot of apprehension in her throat. As she moved forward across the room toward a second stairway ahead of her, sitting parallel to the saloon floor and angling up toward the second-story balcony, running parallel to the saloon, she kept the anxiety out of her voice as she said, “You’ll do it even if I set down my guns.”
“Stop there!” Stone bellowed, hardening his jaws inside his thick, black beard. “Stop there, or I’ll shoot her!”
“No, you won’t. You’re not suicidal, are you, Norman?” Louisa kept moving toward the rickety-looking, unpainted plank board stairs ahead of her, kicking chairs out of her way. “You look like a man who enjoys life far too much to see it all end right here in this lonely saloon out here in the middle of nowhere.”
Louisa put her right boot on the first step and, keeping her eyes on Stone and the girl above her, near the top of the stairs, she said, “You have too much life left.” She gritted her teeth but kept her voice calm, even. “Too much thieving . . . and raping . . . and killing to do . . .”
“That does it—I’m gonna shoot her!”
“No!” the girl cried, struggling against the man’s chest.
Stone held her fast with his thick left arm, pressing his pistol firmly against her temple. “Please! Please, don’t kill me!” Through tear-glazed eyes, she gazed beseechingly at Louisa moving slowly up the stairs. “Please . . . don’t let him kill me! I . . . don’t wanna . . . die!”
“He’s not going to kill you,” Louisa assured the girl, though she herself wasn’t sure at all. “He’s not going to kill you, because Mr. Norman Brian Stone doesn’t want to die.” Louisa gained the top of the stairs, stepped onto the second-story balcony, on the same plane now with Stone and the horrified girl, and kept walking ever so slowly, menacingly, toward them.
She shook her head. “You don’t want to die here, Norman. Not now. Not like this . . . killed by a woman.”
Louisa smiled coldly, jeeringly over the barrels of her nickel-washed pistols six-guns aimed straight out in front of her. “Do you, Norman? You don’t want to be just another notch on the Vengeance Queen’s belt, do you?”
Stone’s cheeks turned red behind and above his beard at the notion of being killed by the notorious female bounty hunter.
“I’m gonna warn you for the last time!” Stone yelled, stepping back and jerking the bawling girl along with him, keeping her pulled taut against him, drawing her back through an open door, her bare feet entangling with his boots. “You put them hoglegs down, or I’m gonna blow her head off!”
“You do that,” Louisa said, slowly following the man and the girl into the room, “and I’ll blow yours off right after.” She passed through the doorway and into the small bedroom crudely furnished with a dilapidated chest of drawers, a zinc-topped washstand, and a brass bed. The room smelled like man sweat and sex and tobacco smoke. A single lamp burned on the chest of drawers. “Think about it, Norman. Death. Annihilation. No past, no future. Worm food.”
Louisa stopped just inside the doorway.
Stone stopped then, as well, near the foot of the bed, a window directly behind him. He held the girl as before, his beefy arm hooked around her neck, drawing her head back. Her face was red and soaked with tears that flowed steadily down from her horrified eyes.
“Please,” she kept begging through her tears. “Please, please, please . . .”
“Think about it, Norman,” Louisa said again. “You got your whole life ahead of you. What are you—thirty-five? Forty? You have thirty, forty years left. You don’t want it all to end here today. All you’ve been. All you are. All you’ll ever be. Killed in a remote Dakota watering hole”—Louisa curled her upper lip—“by a woman!”
Stone stared at her for a full ten seconds, thoughtful. He looked down at the girl writhing against him. He cursed as he turned back to Louisa. “If I turn her loose, you’ll set your guns aside?”
“If you holster your pistol and turn her loose, I’ll let you walk out of here. You can fetch your horse and ride clear. I’ll inform Lou of our arrangement.”
Stone turned his head sideways. His right eye twitched. “You’re bluffin’!”
“My word is bond, Norman.”
“Bullcrap—you’re a kill-crazy bounty hunter! Everybody knows about you!”
“I’m that rare bounty hunter with honor, Norman. Empty your pistol, turn the girl loose, and live to eat another meal, to drink another glass of whiskey . . .” She glanced at the doxie’s right, discolored eye and drew a deep, calming breath. “To beat another defenseless girl in some remote roadhouse . . .”
Stone’s eye twitched again, skeptically. “You lower yours first. Shove it into your holster and secure the thong over the hammer.”
“Not a chance. You’re going to have to trust me. You holster that pistol and turn the girl free. I lower my Colts, and you walk out of here. I keep my guns. More importantly, you keep your life. Or . . .” Louisa hiked her right shoulder. “Kill her and die here today. Let this be your last day on earth.” Louisa smiled. “The wolves will be dining well this evening.”
“You’re plum loco! I heard tell about you. Now I know it’s true. You’re crazier’n an owl in a lightin’ storm!”
“Be that as it may . . .”
Stone’s gaze was darkly pensive. Sweat dribbled down his cheeks and into his beard. He looked at the twin maws of Louisa’s Colts aimed at his head. He shifted his gaze to her eyes. “All right. I’m gonna trust you. I’m gonna believe you’re an honorable woman . . . despite all the men you’ve killed.”
“Despite all the bad men I’ve killed.”
“Let’s not split hairs here. I’m gonna holster this pistol. Then I’m gonna turn her free. Then you’re—”
“Then I’m going to step back out of your way and wish you a good rest of the day, Norman. Who knows—maybe we’ll meet again someday.”
Stone flared his nostrils and shook his head. “You better hope not.”
Louisa smiled.
“All right,” said Stone. “I’m gonna holster this hogleg.”
“Get on with it,” Louisa said. “Can’t you see how frightened the poor girl is?”
“You’re an honorable woman. Remember that.”
“I’ll remember.”
“All right.” Stone swallowed, lowered the pistol from the girl’s head. He slid it into its holster, fastened the keeper thong over the hammer. Slowly, tentatively, he removed his left arm from around the girl’s neck.
The girl gave a relieved cry and ran toward Louisa.
“Get behind me,” the Vengeance Queen ordered.
The girl stepped behind Louisa.
Stone stared at her, anger sparking in his eyes. “Lower them Colts! Step aside!”
Louisa stretched her lips slightly back from her teeth in a shrewd, mocking smile.
The fear in Stone’s eyes brightened. He jerked his arm up and pointed an accusing finger at Louisa. “You made a promise—you remember that! I held up my end of the bargain, you bitch!”
“Unlike my friend Prophet, Norman,” Louisa said, sliding her lips farther back from her perfect white teeth, “I do not bargain with the devil.”
Stone replaced his pointing finger with his palm turned outward. “Wait, now—hold on!”
Louisa’s pistols bucked and roared. The girl behind her screamed as the bullets cut through Stone’s chest and hurled him straight out the window behind him.