Chapter 12
When Prophet had absorbed that last piece of grisly information from Jackie, he said, “I don’t see what any of that has to do with your boyfriend over there not killing Dahlstrom.”
“How do you know it wasn’t Phoebe who killed her own husband . . . that old, dried-up gourd of a man, Dahlstrom . . . and then blamed Charlie because he was an easy one to blame? After all, everybody knows about what Charlie did up in Alva and the second judge turning him loose. Everybody around here’s been layin’ for Charlie ever since. All except his own kin and Mr. McReynolds, that is.”
Prophet shook his head. “I know you believe in Charlie, Miss Lowry. But you’re buildin’ way too big of a story to support him. Phoebe’s foreman and one other man saw Charlie shoot Dahlstrom.”
“Oh, and you can say for sure they ain’t lyin’!” the girl castigated him, planting a fist on her hip and firing lightninglike daggers at him with her gaze.
Charlie Butters lifted his head from his pillow with a start, his eyes wide and fearful. “Wha . . . huh?”
“Oh, easy, darlin’, easy!” Jackie said, rising from her chair and hurrying over to where Butters lay on the settee. “I’m sorry I raised my voice and gave you such a start. That was so inconsiderate of me. You go back to sleep, sweet Charlie.”
She sat on the edge of the settee, cradled Butters’s ugly head in her arms like some grisly infant, and smoothed his short hair back from his temples, rocking him, cooing to him gently. “There, there . . . hush, hush, sweet Charlie.”
Prophet rolled his eyes as he slid his chair back and gained his feet.
He looked at Louisa. She’d gone back to reading her book.
Prophet opened the front door and stepped out onto the front veranda and looked around. The rain had turned to a spitting mist. The storm’s rumbling was growing fainter, the lightning more distant, its brief umber flashes silhouetting clouds in the far northeast. If Butters’s relatives were on their way back from Mexico, they were likely holed up out of the rain. Every arroyo in the storm’s path would be flooded until morning.
Still, Prophet wouldn’t be getting much sleep. Any one of the three in the cabin was a threat, and Prophet didn’t have it in him to tie up the old woman and Jackie. He supposed he could tie Butters but what was the point if he didn’t tie the women, too?
He might catch a few winks, but he and Louisa would have to take turns staying awake so they didn’t end up with a knitting needle or anything else embedded in their persons.
Prophet yawned and went back inside. Jackie was still cradling Butters’s head in her arms. She sat back against the wall, her eyes closed, one leg outstretched along the edge of the settee. On the opposite side of the room, Louisa slowly turned a page of her book.
Prophet walked over to her. “What the hell you readin’, anyways?”
She kept the front of the book pressed up against her raised knee. “Nothing.”
“Let me see.”
“No.” She was about to pull the book away, but he grabbed her right hand and held the book at an angle he could read it by.
Across the top of the cover were the words BEADLE’S DIME NOVELS.
Beneath those words was a detailed sketch of a pretty, saucy-looking, long-haired young woman dressed entirely in buckskins and with fringed buckskin boots and two pearl-gripped Colt revolvers in her hands.
She was shooting one of the Colts at a big, burly gent hulking up before her. He had a hatchet in his hand and a look of shock on his bearded face. The girl was slashing the barrel of her second Colt toward the man’s left temple. The two were in a saloon, men and painted ladies sitting or standing around, watching the festivities.
Beneath the sketch was the title of the featured yarn: LOUISA BONAVENTURE.
Beneath that was the tale’s subtitle: THE VENGEANCE QUEEN GIVES NO QUARTER!
Louisa jerked the book from Prophet’s grip. Her cheeks colored a little as she looked vaguely sheepishly up at him, curling a wry smile.
Prophet snorted.
“Give no quarter, huh?” he said.
“They got that part right, anyway.”
“They mention me in there?”
“Not one time,” Louisa said smugly.
“Since you’re so involved in your own story, you can keep the first watch. I’m gonna catch thirty winks. Wake me when you get sleepy.”
“The Vengeance Queen will never rest until she has attained the justice she rides for, Lou.”
Prophet gave another snort and then walked back to the table. He sat down and rolled another smoke. When he finished the quirley, he dropped it into his coffee cup, doffed his hat, and laid his head down on the table. Instantly, soothing slumber washed over him. He woke later to what felt like a large, hot hand squeezing the back of his neck.
He lifted his head from the table with a groan, and, blinking, saw the Vengeance Queen sitting across the table from him, raising a cup of steaming coffee to her lips. Pale light shone in her hazel eyes and painted the steam rising from the coal black surface of her coffee.
“Ow,” Prophet groaned again, rubbing the back of his neck and hipping around to peer out the windows. “You mean to tell me it’s mornin’?”
“Close.”
He turned back to Louisa. “Why didn’t you wake me?”
She hiked a shoulder as she sipped her coffee. “You were dead out. I thought you needed sleep more than I did.”
Prophet groaned again as he rubbed the fist-sized knots out of his neck. “Yeah, I know—the Vengeance Queen don’t need sleep. All she needs is justice.”
He looked around. The cabin was all smeared shadows and blurred gray edges. A ray of pale light streamed over Butters and his girl on the settee. Jackie was curled up close against Charlie’s side. Charlie snored softly. Jackie had one arm draped over his belly.
“Look at them two lovebirds,” Prophet said, yawning and scrubbing a hand down his face, trying to get awake.
Louisa followed his gaze. “What about ’em?”
Prophet frowned at her. “You think there’s any chance she might be right about Charlie?”
Louisa sipped her coffee again and set the cup down. “You saw what he did in Alva. You tell me.”
“You think a zebra can change his stripes?”
Louisa glanced at Charlie again. “Not that zebra.”
Prophet slid his chair back, rose, hearing the bones in his back and knees pop. He yawned as he headed for the big coffeepot steaming on a warming rack of the range. “I’m gonna have a cup of mud. Then I’ll fetch the horses.”
* * *
“Arrestin’ the son of Emmett Lowry’s cousin is one thing,” Charlie Butters said. “But killin’ his boy is somethin’ else altogether. When you killed Tom Lowry, you really grabbed the devil by the tail, Proph.”
“I been grabbin’ it a lot lately, Charlie.”
Prophet, Louisa, and Butters were riding between two eroded buttes, following the trail back north, toward Carson’s Wash. It was midmorning, the sun high and hot, gradually burning off the humidity after last night’s downpour.
All of the arroyos that Prophet’s threesome had crossed so far had been merely muddy. Water drained fast in this sandy country.
Prophet stopped Mean and Ugly. Butters’s blue roan, which the bounty hunter was leading by its bridle reins, stopped just behind him. Prophet turned Mean and rode back until he sat stirrup to stirrup with Butters, who rode with his boots tied together beneath the roan’s broad barrel.
“You sent Lowry after me, Charlie,” he said. “You got word that Ford had sent for me. So you sent your cousin out to wait for me. To bushwhack me. I put them bullets in him, sure. He was needin’ ’em, sure enough, a long time ago. But you’re the one who killed him when you sicced him on me, Charlie. So don’t sit there like you don’t have as much of Tom’s blood on your hands as I do.”
“Nuh-uh,” Butters said, shaking his head slowly. “You got it wrong, Proph. I didn’t send Tom after you. I didn’t know nothin’ about Ford sendin’ you after me. Hell, I didn’t even know your purtier half was in this country.” He smiled seedily at Louisa. “Hell, why wouldn’t I have sent Tom after her, then, too?”
“Maybe I was next,” Louisa said.
“Maybe,” Butters said. “Maybe not. No, sir, Prophet. You grabbed the devil by the tail when you shot Tom. Tom was Emmett’s favorite boy. Him and the other half dozen—Cal, Randall, Bad Frank, Les, Willie, and Little Steve—will be ridin’ into Carson’s Wash just as soon as they return from Mexico. Should have been back by now, matter of fact. They’ll be gunnin’ for you soon.” He looked at Louisa. “Both of you.”
“Stop, Charlie,” Louisa said. “You’re scaring me.”
Butters’s little eyes sparked with anger, and he hardened his jaws. “You two got it all wrong, damnit. I didn’t have nothin’ to do with Dahlstrom’s killin’. I was in McReynolds’s line shack, baiting a panther! I’m gonna be a poppa, damnit! I’m gonna marry Jackie and do it up right!”
“Even if you didn’t kill Dahlstrom,” Prophet said, raising his voice in frustration, “you blew your chance of that happening when you shot Ford’s two deputies.”
“I didn’t know they was Ford’s deputies. They didn’t identify themselves. I just heard someone sneakin’ up through the brush, and when I looked out, one of ’em leveled a Winchester on me. So I fired back. What would you do, Lou?”
He stared at Prophet as though awaiting an answer. When Prophet didn’t have one, Butters just stretched his lips back from his teeth and said, “Oh, goddamnit all, anyway!” His quavering voice cracked with what sounded like genuine emotion.
A tear oozed out of his right eye and dribbled down his severely, crudely chiseled cheek.
Prophet studied him for a moment, then reined Mean back around and headed on up the trail. “Let’s go,” he said.
After a few minutes’ hard pondering, he glanced at Louisa riding beside him. “Tell me I’m a fool for starting to wonder if he’s not tellin’ the truth.”
“It’s already been established that you’re a fool,” Louisa said, glancing over her shoulder at Charlie riding with his eyes closed beneath the brim of his old hat, head lolling on his shoulders. “And it’s already been established that Butters is a killer. You’ve seen his carnage yourself. He’s working you. Him and that girl were both working you.”
“Do you think she’s lyin’ for him?”
Louisa glanced back at Butters once more, a look of disgust on her mouth. “No, I think she believes in him. Which makes me hate that viper even more.”
She paused as they rode a few more yards along the meandering trail. A deep line of consternation was carved between her brows.
She said, “What difference does it make, anyway? If he didn’t kill Dahlstrom, he’s killed plenty others.”
“If he didn’t kill Dahlstrom—who did?”
“It’s not our jobs to worry about that. Jonas is only paying us to bring in Butters. The rest of it is up to him . . . and a judge and jury.”
“And an executioner for Butters,” Prophet grumbled.
“High time.”
Prophet glanced back once more at Butters, who still rode with his head wobbling as though broken on his shoulders. But now his eyes were open. He stared at Prophet without expression.
Lou turned his head back forward. “Reckon.”