Two days later. Lou Prophet awakened in the Queen Bee to see a lovely brunette standing naked before him. Biggest tits he’d ever seen, much less squeezed.
“How in the hell old are you, anyway, Sally?”
The girl looked at him as she bent over to step into her bloomers, the enormous breasts hanging straight down before her like oversized hot-water bottles. Her face paint was smudged, her hair was a mess, and sleep lines creased her face, but she still looked glamorous for a whore in these parts.
“Twenty-two, and I’m Katie.” She stretched a tolerant smile. “Sally was two nights ago. Sally and Jen, I believe. It was me and Cassandra last night.”
Prophet pushed himself onto an elbow. His arm was in a sling that Doc Barnhardt had furnished when Prophet dropped off the bodies. The doctor had also offered to furnish laudanum for the pain, but Prophet had declined. He hadn’t thought he’d need it, with all the whiskey he’d intended to drink. And he’d been right.
“You mean, I been here two days already?”
Katie was looking around the floor, in the mess of her clothes and his, for some article of her own attire. “That’s right, lover.” She giggled. “Boy, you do like to have a good time, don’t you?”
“I reckon,” Prophet sighed, glancing at the washstand, on which two empty whiskey bottles and several beer bottles stood. He was sure there were several more bottles scattered here and there about the floor. “I didn’t get into any trouble, did I?”
His heart quickened a little, and he felt a touch of dread. He knew he couldn’t have gotten into anything too deep, because he wasn’t in jail, an occurrence that was happening less and less as he matured. He was grateful for that, but it was only last year he’d bet a thousand dollars he hadn’t had in a poker game, and had gotten into a brawl with a half-breed bean-eater named Oscar Sanchez who’d cracked six of his ribs and chipped two of his teeth. Tracking fugitives to pay off the thousand-dollar debt, when you had to ride hard with six broken ribs, had taught him a healthy fear of his own excess.
Katie had found her camisole and pantaloons and was sitting down in a chair against the wall. She shook the camisole out before her and dropped it over her head, covering those lovely breasts. “Well, that depends on what you call trouble. You drank about six bottles of rye in the last two days, and about twenty bottles of beer, lost about three hundred dollars playing poker with Crazy Jack Thompson, and diddled four whores ... on credit.”
“Well, if that’s all,” Prophet said, falling back with a relieved sigh, “I’m makin’ progress!”
Katie ceased dressing to frown at a broken nail. “You been like this all your life, Lou?”
“How’s that?”
She shrugged. “Livin’ for fun and money.”
He pursed his lips and gazed at the drawn shade, behind which flies buzzed against the fly-flecked window. “I was in the war, Katie. Wore butternut gray. I saw Chattanooga and Utoy Creek, among others.” He paused, remembering it against his will—the human viscera, the smell of exposed bowels and blood mixed with burnt powder, grass and trees, the gleam of bone and dead eyes in the bright sun, the buzz of the flies, the pink water of the Tennessee.
Suppressing it, he turned to the girl, forcing a grim smile. “No ... after that I made a pact with the Devil. I told him that if he showed me one hell of a good time for the rest of the life I had left, I’d shovel all the coal he wanted down below.”
She was staring at him, her brown eyes serious, chiding. “That’s an awful thing, Lou Prophet ... makin’ a pact like that with the Devil.”
“Oh, it ain’t that awful,” Prophet said, wanting to lighten his own mood as well as hers. “Besides, like I said, I been makin’ progress.” He grinned big.
She returned it and resumed dressing. “Well ... don’t forget, Mr. Progress, that you owe Cassandra, Sally, Jen, and me each twenty-five dollars.” She slipped into the pantaloons and turned to him quickly, remembering something else. “Oh—you owe Jen for a shoe, too.”
“A shoe?”
“You broke the heel on one o’ hers.”
“How’d I do that?”
Katie shrugged. She picked up her remaining clothes, approached the bed, leaned down, and kissed him on the lips. “Don’t ask me, lover.” She patted his face. “Lordy, you’re a handsome devil ... in a crazy sort o’ way.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Means you’re the kinda man I married ... twice. So don’t you think you can charm me with those big green eyes of yours, neither, or that big stick you got between your legs, ’cause you can’t.” She walked to the door, and turned around with a coquettish flair. “But I’ll be glad to haul your ashes whenever you’re in town, Lou.” She blew him a kiss, opened the door and left.
He listened to her feet padding down the hall, then down the stairs toward her own room. Quiet followed, with the soft snores of a drunk sleeping off a hangover somewhere down the hall, and ungreased wagon wheels screeching outside, a dog barking, a man calling to another and laughing. Prophet listened hard, trying to suppress the screams of the dying that were always there, like a low inner hum, just beneath his consciousness.
He sighed, reached for his watch, and opened the old turnip. Eleven-thirty. Jesus Christ, had he slept! But then, he supposed he hadn’t gotten to sleep until five or six ... not with the poker game he was beginning to remember, and the two lovely whores riding his bones.
Thinking of the whores made him think of the showgirl. What was her name again? Diamond. Lola Diamond.
“Sounds right falutin’.” He smiled in spite of his aching, foggy head— a remnant of all the booze.
He considered getting up and going downstairs for a bath, then decided he’d lie here a few more minutes and figure out how he was going to approach this woman ... this Lola Diamond. What would he do if she got nasty? What would he do if this Lola Diamond refused to accompany him down to Johnson City?
Well, by god, he had a job to do and a favor to return. And he’d been paid to boot. He’d throw the cuffs on her. The shackles, too, if he had to.
Prophet reached over to the night table, opened a drawer, and retrieved the show poster he’d placed there, after swiping it off the wall at Dave’s Place. It was a circular advertising Big Dan Walthrop’s Traveling Dolls and Roadhouse Show, giving the names of the four “dolls” and telling where they were going to be and when. Typical roadhouse fair. Prophet had learned from Dave himself that the troupe master stood at least six-five and weighed a good two-fifty.
“That’s all right,” Prophet told himself. “Guys like him’s what the Peacemaker was invented for.”
Reluctant to start a day of business when it seemed he’d only just started having fun, he tossed the covers back, crawled out of bed, and started gathering his clothes. Dressed, he went downstairs to the dining room and ordered a steak-and-egg breakfast complete with a tall glass of milk and a cup of hot, black coffee with a medicinal jigger of rye whiskey.
When he’d finished his food, he drank two more cups of laced coffee, lingering over a cigarette, then paid his bill and went out. Stepping onto the boardwalk, he watched two whiskey drummers cross the street in front of Dave’s Place, holding their crisp bowlers on their heads. Both men wore broadcloth suits and vests, gold watch chains bouncing at their sides.
The civilized attire of the two men made Prophet conscious of his own shabby dress—worn, undershot boots, faded denims with threadbare knees, a calico shirt that reeked of stale smoke and sour whiskey, and a ratty Stetson beaten by hail, wind and snow, and sweat-stained the color of old burlap. Half-consciously seeing himself through the eyes of Miss Diamond, he wrinkled his nose.
“I look like hell.”
He turned and made a beeline for Sandoval’s Dry-goods. The bell jingled as he pushed through the door.
A short, stout Mexican with a wispy black mustache and wearing a white apron looked up from dusting a display of women’s soaps.
Prophet stopped in the shadows just inside the door. “Paco,” he called, “can you set me up in a new suit for thirty bucks?”
Paco frowned. “Thirty bucks?”
“That’s all I got. I’ll be needin’ boots, as well.”
The frown still in place, Paco said, “What you want a suit for, Lou—you’re a bounty hunter.” The man’s frown was instantly replaced by a grin, his small, white teeth gleaming in the light angling through the windows on his right.
Unable to see the humor in his request, Prophet snapped, “Can you do it or do I take my business elsewhere?”
The man shrugged exaggeratedly. “Okay, okay. I feex you up, Lou.”
He beckoned Prophet to a back wall, where men’s clothes were displayed on wood shelves and hanging from racks. Hemming and hawing aloud, he measured Prophet with his gaze, then produced a pair of whipcord trousers from one of the shelves, and a wool vest and frock coat from a rack. Placing it all on a straight-backed chair before a floor mirror, he retrieved a neatly folded and pinned shirt from a wire bin.
“That the best you can do?” Prophet said, gazing critically at the shirt.
“For thirty bucks?” Paco asked, incredulous.
“What about that one?” Prophet said, pointing at another shirt hanging from a display rack behind the coats and vests.
“That’s linen.”
“How much?”
“Twelve-feefty.”
Prophet aimed a sharp look at the proprietor. “My credit’s good here, ain’t it?”
Paco was incensed. “For twelve-feefty!”
“Come on, Paco, throw it in. Remember how I covered for you with Estelle when she thought you were diddling that whore back in the pens ... and she was right? Huh? You remember that?”
Paco whipped his head around, red growing beneath the almond of his cheeks. “Shhh! She’s in the back room—”
“Throw it in.”
“Okay—it’s in, it’s in.”
Another dickering war broke out when it came to the calfskin boots, which were fifty dollars and ran Prophet’s bill up to an even hundred. The war ended quickly, however, when Estelle walked out of the back room to wait on two other ladies looking for muslin.
“Okay, okay,” Paco said, quickly lowering his voice, “I throw in the boots! Calfskin ... madre Maria ...”
An hour later, Prophet walked out of Haugen’s Tonsorial Parlor, looking just like what he was—a big, sunburned, freshly shaved and bathed bounty hunter stuffed into a suit complete with a brown felt bowler that would have been the envy of any whiskey drummer in Montana Territory, and a pair of calfskin boots so soft they felt like moccasins.
The new duds gave him confidence, however. They made him feel downright civilized and the most respectable thing to hit the West since the railroad. He’d always wondered what wearing a suit would feel like, and now he knew. It made you feel like sticking your nose up and your chest out and not being quite so friendly to folks.
He thought he suddenly understood all the businessmen he’d known and disliked.
Now all he needed was a badge to pin to his vest. It would lend him an official air, and he thought it necessary to approach Miss Diamond looking official. It wasn’t that he wanted to impress her. Well, that wasn’t his sole purpose, anyway. The badge would lend him a bureaucratic respectability, making it a hell of a lot easier for him to get her on the stage. Yessir, the badge and the pickup order would make a package not even a jaded showgirl could refuse. Once he got her to Johnson City, he’d tell her he wasn’t a lawman.
Well, the only place to find a badge was a sheriff’s office. With a fateful sigh, he stepped off the boardwalk and headed across the dusty street, his new boots squawking like a baby duck on his heels. Midway, he met a gent who looked a lot like him—big and sunburned and hard-looking—but without the friendly glitter in Prophet’s eyes. Besides that, the man had an enormous nose—a nose so large it made Prophet’s look small.
Prophet tipped his head to the man. The man tipped back. They passed with no further ado. But when the other man came to the boardwalk Prophet had just left, he turned to watch Prophet approach the sheriff’s office and knock on the splintery door. The man swept the folds of his claw-hammer coal back from a brace of well-oiled forty-fours, and watched with faintly smirking interest as Prophet stepped inside the jail and closed the door behind him.
The man watched the closed door thoughtfully, rubbing his tongue over his teeth. Then a knowing light entered his gaze, and he headed out in search of a whiskey and a cool place to wait.