Chapter 12
Prophet looked around. All the shooters near him were dead.
Hearing more gunfire, he whipped his gaze to the south. Colter Farrow was on one knee over there, maybe sixty yards away from Prophet, punching lead into one man and then into another, spread out much as Prophet’s own victims had been, slinging lead toward the carriage.
Two of Colter’s targets were crouched behind the same boulder. Victims, rather. Calmly, the redhead jacked another round into his Tyler Henry and fired, shooting one of the two. The other one returned fire with a long-barreled revolver but his partner had just flopped against him, and his shot flew wide.
He didn’t have time to get off another one. Calmly aiming down his Henry’s barrel, Colter chunked a. 44 round between the lapels of the man’s stitched leather chaqueta jacket. The man dropped to the ground on his back, howling.
Colter fired again and his third target slammed back against the broad stock of a barrel cactus and hung up there, impaled on its spines. He screamed, blood gushing from his chest, turning his head this way and that, struggling against the thorns, before ripping himself loose, dropping to his knees, then falling onto his side.
The second man Colter had shot lay writhing, digging his heels and elbows into the ground, lifting his back up off the sand and gravel. Colter pumped a fresh round into the Henry’s action, rose from his knee, walked over to the man, and aimed the rifle casually in his right hand at the man’s head.
“No!” the Mexican screamed.
Colter didn’t hesitate. All business, he squeezed the Henry’s trigger. The rifle bucked, roared, and stabbed smoke and flames at the man’s head, slamming it back against the ground, where it and the rest of the man lay jerking in sudden death.
“Oh yeah.”
Colter shook the rifle, cocking it one-handed, and glanced toward Prophet. The bounty hunter gave a weak smile. He’d be damned if the young redhead didn’t, indeed, remind him of a particular pretty blond who was just as coolly efficient at killing.
“That all of ’em?” Colter called.
Prophet looked at the dead men around him and the redhead. “We’re missing one.”
He turned toward the carriage and started to raise his Colt once more. He stayed the action, seeing that the man moving over there was one of the señorita’s guards. He’d obviously taken a bullet, maybe more, and was staggering around as though badly drunk. He held a hand to his belly, was clawing at the air ahead of him as though negotiating his way through a heavy curtain.
He stopped suddenly, wobbling on his hips. He gave a strangling cry then fell face-first in the sand and rocks, doing nothing to break his fall.
Prophet started walking toward the carriage, looking around for signs of life, his blood still racing in his veins but this time with worry about the señorita. “Bloody murder,” One-Eye had said. It wasn’t only the south-of-the-border folks who sometimes got love and murder mixed around in the same barrel, but they were especially adept at it, and ugly about it.
“You see the señorita?” Prophet called to Colter, who was roughly fifty yards to Prophet’s right, also striding toward the carriage.
“Nope.”
“What about Juan Carlos?”
Colter looked around some more. “Nope.”
Prophet walked up to the carriage. The left side’s two doors were open. Lou peered into the shadows within the contraption.
There was only one person inside. The señorita’s aunt, Señora Aurora Navarro, sat slumped in the carriage’s opposite rear corner, head canted back and a little to one side. The woman’s eyes were open but she wasn’t seeing anything. Angels, maybe, if she’d kept up with her rosary. The puckered hole in the dead center of her withered forehead dribbled blood down into the corner of her right eye and then on down her right cheek, along the base of her pointed nose. It glistened in a single beam of sunlight angling into the carriage over Prophet’s left shoulder.
Prophet studied the ground beneath the door. He spied the moccasin-like impression of a woman’s soft slipper. Stepping out away from the carriage and then walking up around it and the team, he spied more prints. They were overlaid with the deeper impressions of spurred boots with high heels.
The girl had run out away from the stage and a man had pursued her.
Prophet followed the sign around the front of the fidgeting team.
“You find something?” Colter asked, walking up behind Lou.
Prophet studied the rocky slope ahead and on the far side of the team. It was stippled with desert brush and cactus. He could see where rocks had recently been displaced and rolled down the slope and into the wash. “I think so.”
Quickly, Lou reloaded his Colt from cartridges in his shell belt, dropping the empty casings on the ground at his boots. Flicking the loading gate closed, he spun the wheel and ran forward.
He climbed the steep slope, dropping to his hands and knees and sort of half crawling and half running up the incline, causing a landslide of sand and rocks behind him.
At the top, he paused a moment to catch his breath.
Picking up the sign again, he ran forward but quartering to his right, following the two sets of prints through the scrub, tall cactuses like misshapen, tendril-bearing monsters rising around him.
He lost the woman’s and the man’s trail in gravel sliding down from yet another sandy slope.
Colter ran up beside Prophet, breathing hard.
“Damnit,” Lou said, raking his gaze desperately across the ground.
“There!” Colter pointed toward the indentation of a man’s boot heel and the dimple of a large spur rowel.
Prophet broke into another run, scissoring his arms and legs. He pushed through some prickly shrubs, wincing as the thorns grabbed and tore at his shirtsleeves, then dropped into another low area.
Ahead, a man gave an angry, screaming wail.
Prophet stopped, looked around, trying to locate the source of the shout.
Again, the man shouted. The señorita shouted back at the man, just as angry.
“This way,” Prophet told Colter, who’d caught up to him again.
Prophet ran ahead, angling left. He ran for maybe a hundred more feet before he stopped again.
Straight ahead, the señorita stood atop a low shelf of jumbled rock. Desert willows flanked her, partly shading her.
Facing her at the base of the shelf was Juan Carlos. He had a silver-chased pistol in his right hand, aimed up the shelf at the woman. The señorita held a wicked-looking, black-handled, silver-bladed stiletto, threatening Juan Carlos with it.
Juan Carlos was bent slightly forward at the waist, shouting in Spanish. He spoke so quickly it was hard for Prophet to follow, but it seemed to his crude ears that the man was professing both his love and hatred for the woman, who, it also seemed from Prophet’s limited understanding of the señorita’s rapid Spanish, was taking a wicked satisfaction in mocking and taunting him.
The señorita was calling Juan Carlos an ugly, gutless dog whom she wouldn’t marry if . . . and here’s where her voice rose to such a crescendo that Prophet couldn’t understand another word.
“Carlos!” Prophet shouted.
The man and the woman suddenly stopped screaming and swung their heads toward where Prophet stood fifty feet away, Colter flanking him on his right side, both men sweating and breathing hard from the run.
“Put the gun down, Carlos!” Prophet ordered.
Juan Carlos kept his long-barreled, silver-chased Colt aimed at the señorita. He grinned at Prophet, spreading his lips wide.
“You come to watch this Mexicana bruja, this cheap puta, die bloody, amigo?”
“Kill him!” the woman shouted at Prophet, bending forward at the waist. “Kill him now!”
That didn’t faze Don Carlos a bit. Raising his voice and keeping his eyes glued to Prophet, he said, “She is a common hog-pen moaner, this woman. She is a mad dog in heat. A double-crossing puma with the perpetual springtime itch! That is what she is—no more and no less than the lowest of rabid animals!”
“Kill him!” Marisol shrieked at Prophet, her eyes glinting furiously. “Kill him now—I order you to shoot this devil and stop this insanity!”
Juan Carlos smiled again. He swung his pistol toward Prophet, his smile in place but a flat darkness spreading across his eyes. In half a second, his Colt would be aimed at Prophet’s head. Again finding himself with no choice, Prophet squeezed his own Colt’s trigger.
Juan Carlos jerked.
He took one uncertain step backward, triggering his own Colt wide of Prophet and Colter. An expression of deep surprise shone in his eyes. His face turned one or two shades paler even than its natural cream, and he looked down at the blood bubbling up through the hole in his red silk shirt, just beneath the tail of the black silk bandanna knotted around his neck.
He placed a finger in the blood there then let that hand drop to his side. The Colt fell from his other hand to the ground.
Juan Carlos looked at Prophet, his brows furled as though with great concentration, his eyes still cast with exasperation. “This gringo killed Juan Carlos Anaya Amador,” he announced flatly, unable to believe his own words.
He gave a dry chuckle, as though at a cosmic joke he’d found himself the butt of. His eyes crossing and lower jaw falling slack, he stumbled backward, raking his spurs across the ground, and collapsed on his back, one leg angled beneath the other one. He gave a long, ragged sigh and lay still.
Silence had fallen. The only sounds were those of the desert birds piping in the bushes.
Slowly, Prophet lowered his smoking Peacemaker.
Marisol stared in dumb shock at Juan Carlos, her beautiful mouth forming a perfect O of exasperation.
“Juan Carlos?” she said. She drew a deep breath, her well-filled bodice rising and falling sharply. “Juan?” she repeated. “Juan Carlos?”
She dropped the stiletto, ran down the shelf, and dropped to a knee beside the dead man. “Juan?” she said, nudging the dead man’s shoulder. She looked at the blood bibbing his fancy shirt then turned her head slowly to Prophet. Her own features had paled considerably.
“Oh my God—you killed him,” she said in a voice hushed with awe. “You killed Juan Carlos!”
Prophet and Colter shared a dubious glance.
“You killed Juan Carlos,” Marisol said again, in shock.
“Well, hell,” Prophet said, aware that he seemed to have suddenly found himself in a situation far too similar to the one that had transpired in Buzzard Gulch, with Jasmin and Roscoe Rodane, only a short time ago. “I thought you wanted me to!”
“Sí, I wanted you to, but I didn’t think you’d really do it, you crazy gringo!”
It was Prophet’s turn to be exasperated. “It may be all right if a fella points a pistol at you, señorita, but it sure ain’t all right if he points one at me!”
Marisol gained her feet. “Sí. He probably would have killed you. But you might be better off.”
Again, Prophet shared an incredulous look with Colter.
“My . . . aunt?” Marisol asked. “Is she . . . ?”
“Dead,” Prophet said.
Marisol bunched her lips and kicked the dead man with her slippered right foot. “Savage fool. Savage, love-struck pendejo!” She gazed down at the dead man. “He could never get me out of his head. He couldn’t have if he’d lived to be a hundred!”
She sighed, raised her hands, and let them flop against her sides. “Well, we’d better get him back to the rancho. Tía Aurora Navarro, as well. Mi padre will know what to do about Juan Carlos. He’ll want to bury his sister in the cementerio familiar.”
“You want us to take you home?” Colter asked her, skeptically.
The señorita looked at him, scowling. “Sí.” She glanced around. “Who else is there to do it? I take it all of my men are as dead as Tía Aurora, or they’d have made an appearance by now.”
She gave a haughty chuff, then, shaking her head as though she were dealing with morons—fools from America, no less—strode past Prophet and Colter on her way back to the carriage.
Prophet glanced at Colter again. “I warned you.”
“Yeah,” Colter said, raking his thumb across his chin, staring dubiously after the haughty señorita. “You did at that, Lou.”