Chapter 6
Prophet dropped back down the stairs to the main saloon hall.
Louisa stood at the bar. Several sets of saddlebags lay atop the bar around her, as well as several stacks of greenbacks and burlap sacks of coins. While Prophet had been sorting out the bodies, Louisa had been going through the dead gang members’ gear, looking for the money they’d stolen out of a bank in Wyoming.
They’d gotten away with almost forty thousand dollars and there was a 3 percent safe return fee in addition to individual bounties, which meant more bounty money for the bounty hunters.
“Well, we’ve gotten quite a bit of it back,” Louisa said as Prophet walked around behind the bar. “They split it up but didn’t have much time to spend it. Let’s hope Hatchley and the others don’t, as well.”
“Not much to spend it on around here,” Prophet said, “this far off the beaten path.” He splashed whiskey from his bottle into a shot glass. “I reckon ole Wind River Bob didn’t care to share any of it with Jiggs or his girls. You’re tighter’n a heifer’s ass in fly season, Bob!” he yelled over the bar at the outlaw lounging on the sofa, his injured leg drawn up, the other one on the floor.
“Why buy the cow when you can have the milk for free?” Bob threw his head back and howled with delighted laughter, slapping the sofa back. He laughed for a long time, eyes squeezed shut.
Finally, his guffaws dwindled to hiccups and chuckles.
“I tell you what, you Confederate devil,” he said, brushing tears from his cheeks, “I’ll pay you full price for a bottle of that liquor you’re makin’ sure I know how much you’re enjoying over there.”
Prophet threw back the rye. He smacked his lips and shook his head. “Mmmm-Mmmmm! That there is nectar of the gods. Makes me feel sooo good! Why, it take all the soreness out of my joints—you know, the ones you tried to pulverize with that Appy?”
“Spare a bottle—damnit, Prophet!” Bob punched the sofa back.
“I tell you what, Bob,” Prophet said. “I’m gonna do just that.” He pulled a bottle down from a back bar shelf. Walking around from behind the bar, he said, “Maybe this will silence your infernal caterwaulin’. It ain’t a labeled bottle, you understand. It’s probably tarantula juice old Jiggs brewed out in a stock tank in his barn, complete with strychnine and rattlesnake venom, maybe a dead lizard for seasoning. I see no reason to waste good liquor on a raping, thieving killer like you, Bob.”
“Keepin’ the good stuff for yourself—eh, Lou?” Bob accepted the brown, unlabeled bottle. He pulled the cork out with his teeth and spit it toward the leaping flames of the fire.
“An’ why shouldn’t I?” Prophet tramped back over to the bar.
He stopped near where Louisa stood, still counting money and penciling figures onto an open notepad, and turned his head to see Toni coming down the stairs on the room’s opposite side. The young doxie held the same quilt as before around her slender shoulders, drawing the corners up tight beneath her chin.
“Sorry, honey,” Prophet said. “I said I was gonna bring you some vittles. I reckon I got sidetracked.”
“That’s all right.” Toni moved from the bottom of the steps toward the bar. “I ain’t hungry, after all. Couldn’t sleep, either. I keep seein’ . . .” She shook her head as though to nudge troubling thoughts away.
She moved up to the bar near Louisa.
“I reckon I didn’t feel like bein’ alone up there,” the girl said in a thin, faraway voice.
“We’re all alone,” Louisa said, absently, scribbling figures on the pad. “Either up there or down here.”
Prophet nudged her left boot with his right one. When she turned to him, brows arched, he gave her an admonishing look. Louisa hiked a shoulder and returned to her figures.
“Ha-ha!” Bob laughed. “Ain’t that just like the Vengeance Queen? As philosophical as she is purty.”
Toni turned toward the sofa. “That him?” she asked. “That the last one?”
Prophet splashed more whiskey into his shot glass. “Pretty close to the last one. Four more are still running off their leashes but not for long.”
Toni pushed away from the bar and, holding the quilt taut beneath her chin, walked over to the end of the sofa. She stopped and faced Bob, standing near his left boot resting on the hemp rug on the floor before the snapping hearth. She shook the thick ribbons of her red hair back from her eyes.
Bob looked her blanket-wrapped body up and down, slowly, leeringly.
“Hello, sweet thing,” the outlaw grunted. He quirked half of his mouth in a mocking grin. “You miss ole Bob?”
The girl stared at him dully, shook her head slowly.
“No, I haven’t been missing you, Bob. I’ll likely smell your stench, just like Hatchley’s, till the day I die.”
Bob chuckled.
“I’ll tell you who’s calling for you, Bob.”
“Oh?” Bob said, arching one brow. “Who’s that?”
“The devil.” Toni opened her hands, releasing the quilt. It dropped to her bare feet. In her right hand was a .38 caliber, elaborately engraved, Merwin & Hulbert revolver. “You should go see him, maybe.”
“Whoa now!” Bob said, sitting straight up and holding both his hands toward the girl, palms out. “Stop! Stop! Sto—”
The pop of the little pocket pistol cut off Bob’s last plea.
Bob howled and snapped his right hand down, falling back against the sofa arm behind him. He held his hand up in front of his face, mouth wide in astonishment. The bullet had drilled a bloody hole through his palm. It had drilled a second one into his chest from which blood was now beginning to ooze.
“Stop her!” Bob wailed, looking down in horror at the blood bubbling out of his chest. “Stop her! For chrissakes, stop the crazy little polecat!”
Holding the pocket pistol in both her small hands, Toni fired again, again, and again. She blinked with every shot, gritting her teeth.
With each shot, Bob jerked violently back against the arm of the sofa. As he rolled to his left and fell off the sofa to the floor with a heavy thud, Toni fired twice more. She would have fired one more time, but the pistol’s hammer pinged benignly against the firing pin.
Lou and Louisa stared in shock from the bar.
Toni stared down at Bob. Smoke from the Merwin & Hulbert wafted around her.
“There,” she said, finally, reaching down and pulling the quilt up around her shoulders again. “I think I’ll sleep better now.”
She padded barefoot across the room toward the balcony stairs.
Prophet turned slowly to Louisa, his lower jaw hanging.
Louisa raised her brows and dipped her chin in appreciation. “She’ll do.”
* * *
Prophet dragged Wind River Bob outside and added him to the carnage in the barn.
He also hazed the horses into the barn from the corral, for the wind was really howling now, and more snow was coming down. It was damn cold and would likely get colder. Horses needed shelter from such weather as much as people did.
Prophet knew from previous experience how cold it could get here. And how much snow could fall, choking the ravines. This wasn’t the first time he’d gotten caught in Dakota Territory this late in the year, when he should have been close enough to the Mexican border that he could smell the tequila and pulque, the carnitas enchiladas, the salt tang of the Sea of Cortez, and the beguilingly gamy aromas of the dusky-skinned señoritas who plied their artful trade in those balmy climes.
When he’d gotten the dozen or so horses into their stalls, he heard Mean and Ugly kicking his own stable door and whickering darkly, customarily spoiling for a fight. Most of the other horses just glanced sidelong at him over their stall partitions, their eyes glistening in the darkness, skeptically pricking their ears.
“Look how well behaved these killers’ horses are, Mean,” Prophet admonished his ewe-necked hammerhead. “Ain’t you ashamed?”
With that, he closed the barn doors and ran to the roadhouse, holding his hat on his head with one hand and watching his footing. It was true dark now and about all he could see before him was murky darkness stitched with swirling snow.
Once back in the roadhouse, he ate some of the beans Louisa had cooked from a tripod over the fire, then brought a bowl up to Toni. The doxie was sound asleep in her bed, snoring softly. Prophet smiled at that. He vaguely wondered if Toni and Louisa weren’t somehow related, for nothing made the Vengeance Queen sleep so well as killing men who needed killing.
He left the beans on the doxie’s chest of drawers, banked her fire against the cold night, then went back downstairs and polished off the whiskey in his labeled bottle. He was too exhausted to talk. Louisa appeared that way, as well.
She sat staring into the fire, sipping her coffee. They both had a good long ride ahead of them tomorrow, possibly in several feet of snow, so Prophet shrugged out of his coat and hat, kicked out of his boots, and plopped down on the same sofa on which Wind River Bob had met his well-deserved, bloody end. He drew his blanket roll up over him, against the chill wind howling through the broken windows.
Louisa sat up for a while, staring into the fire.
Finally, she banked the fire in the hearth, nudged Prophet as far back against the sofa as he could get his tall, brawny frame, and then stretched her slender, willowy body down against his, facing away from him. He wrapped his arms around her, sniffed her hair, nuzzled her neck, and kissed her left ear.
“Thanks for breaking out those windows,” he growled, shivering against the unabated breeze.
“Don’t mention it.”
She put his right hand on her left breast, snuggled back against him, groaning luxuriously. She ground her round rump against him then glanced over her shoulder at him, frowning.
“Take your gun off.”
“I did.”
Louisa’s frown became an exasperated scowl. “After this long day and a whole bottle of whiskey?” Louisa lay her head back down with a sigh. “Men!”