Chapter 22
“Stay put,” Lou told Pilar, though he doubted she needed the admonition.
He pulled her door closed again and, turning toward the stairs, slid his Peacemaker from its holster.
Another creak came from the stairs. It was followed by the very faint groan of a strained riser. He slowly clicked the Colt’s hammer back. From behind Colter’s door, Lou had been hearing the light thumps of the redhead stumbling around, hastily dressing. Now that door latch clicked.
As Colter began to draw the door open, a head slid into view at the top of the stairs. Prophet saw the red-trimmed gray collar of a rurale uniform and part of a sombrero dangling down the man’s back by a neck thong. The rurale’s eyes focused on Prophet, and widened, and as he bolted up onto the second-floor hall, raising a pistol, Lou yelled, “Down, Red!”
The Peacemaker roared.
The bullet flew wide of the first rurale as a second rurale leaped onto the second-floor hall, inadvertently nudging the first man to one side. The first man fired, and then the second man fired, and then Prophet returned fire, and that bullet took the second man through the chest. Meanwhile, Colter had hurled himself onto the floor of the hall in front of Prophet, triggering his Remington and punching the first rurale straight back against the wall behind him.
The rurale cursed, dropped to his knees, and fell sideways down the stairs.
Yet another rurale leaped over the falling man and into the hall, extending two revolvers toward Prophet and Colter, who both fired at the same time, punching lead through the man’s upper torso. He was thrown back against the wall, as well, triggering both pistols into the ceiling before falling sideways down the stairs, his body’s heavy thumps joining those of the other man plunging toward the first-floor drinking hall.
“Let’s go, Red!” Prophet ran forward, clicking his Colt’s hammer back again.
“We gonna have to shoot our way out of here, you think?” Colter asked, scrambling to his feet and then running beside Prophet as they both made for the stairs.
“There’s no door up here and the windows are a craps toss with the house rigged against us, so . . .”
“I reckon we’ll be shootin’ our way out of here!”
“No problem,” Prophet raked out as they gained the top of the stairs. “There’s only three left. At the most, four!”
He thought he’d counted around a half-dozen rurales gambling at the table near the saloon’s front wall.
Crouching with their smoking pistols extended, Prophet and Colter started down the stairs. As they took the steps slowly, one at a time, their index fingers pressed taut against their triggers, Lou could see more and more of the saloon spreading out before them.
It was vacant.
At least, it appeared that way. All that remained of the crowd that had been gathered there was the tobacco smoke wafting in the ragged spheres of light cast by a half-dozen lanterns and bracketed wall candles trying feebly to shoulder away the stubborn shadows of the night.
Lou and Colter dropped lower into the saloon . . .
When they were halfway down the stairs, Prophet saw that two tables had been turned onto their sides. One was on the room’s left side, near the one he and the redhead had occupied. The other one was on the room’s right side, near the back. At the same moment he saw the overturned tables, two heads jerked up above the one on the right while one more head darted up from behind the one on the left.
Three pistols flashed and roared, the bullets tearing through the air around and between Lou and Colter, hammering the steps and the rails to each side. Prophet crouched, extending his Peacemaker in his right hand, and returned fire.
Colter leaped over the rail to his right as two bullets ripped wood from it. He hit the floor beside the stairs with a thud. A second later, he was throwing lead toward the table on the room’s right side while Prophet, dropping down the steps, peppered the table shielding the other two rurales on the room’s left side.
He was nearly to the floor when his Colt clicked on an empty chamber.
He cursed as more bullets cut the air around him. He leaped down the last three steps to the saloon hall floor and dropped behind a table near the bottom of the stairs. Immediately, he flicked open the Peacemaker’s loading gate and began reloading.
In the corner of his right eye, he saw Colter do the same thing behind a chair just ahead of the bar. The redhead knocked over another chair to add additional cover.
“Yep, should have brought the Richards,” the bounty hunter chided himself.
As Lou quickly shook the spent cartridges out of his Colt’s wheel, letting them clatter onto the floor, bullets hammered the top of the table behind which he crouched, throwing slivers onto his hat. They threw glass shards from the glasses and bottles that had been left on the table after the drinking hall had been hastily vacated, the other customers apparently realizing what had been about to happen and not wanting to get caught in a cross fire.
One of the rurales shouted in heavily Spanish-accented English, “You crossed over again, Lou! No, no, no—I told you not to do that!”
Prophet flinched as a sliver of glass cut into his cheek. Brushing it away, he said, “Well, well—Lieutenant Oscar Ruiz! Is it really you, you chili-chompin’ old polecat?”
Ruiz must have gestured for the others to hold their fire, for the shooting died abruptly.
“It is me, Lou! Have you missed me, you old Confederate?”
“I thought I recognized that ugly face of yours. You still look like an old rattlesnake that tangled with a rabid coyote!”
“I will give you that, Lou! And you yourself still resemble what the banker’s sick dog leaves on a neighbor’s porch!”
Prophet punched a cartridge into the wheel’s sixth chamber, flicked the loading gate home, and spun the cylinder. “I been called that an’ worse from better’n you!”
“You might as well give yourselves up—you and your tattooed friend—or I will nail your hides to the wall!”
“Go back to sleep and keep dreamin’, Oscar!” Colter shouted, adding his own two cents to the palaver.
“Is that your tattooed friend, Lou?”
“That’s him, all right!”
“What’s his name?”
Colter jerked his left hand up and fired two rounds toward where Oscar Ruiz was poking his head up above his table. Ruiz cursed as he jerked his head back down behind the table. He cursed again, his voice shrill with fury.
“That’s his name, Oscar,” Prophet yelled with a laugh. “You think you can remember it?”
“He damn near shot my ear off!” Ruiz bellowed. “For that, I am going to cut both of his off—after I have killed him very slowly—and wear them both on a string around my neck for the rest of my life! I will be buried with them!”
“Careful, Oscar,” Prophet warned. “Red’s got a temper.”
“I don’t appreciate being bushwhacked,” Colter yelled at the rurale. “Especially not when I’m funnin’ with a purty puta!”
Prophet glanced at his partner, frowning. “What the hell were you doin’, anyway, kid? Pardon my curiosity.”
Colter blushed, shrugged. “How do you know this fella, Lou?”
“Oscar and I tangled over in Sonora a time or two. He don’t like it when gringo bounty hunters cross ‘his’ border after bounties on ‘his’ Mexican cutthroats. Leastways, he don’t like it when gringo bounty hunters balk at sharing said bounties on Mexican cutthroats . . . with him. ¿Comprende?”
“Is it so much I ask?” Ruiz said in a tone of mock injury. “To be respected by foreigners on my own soil?”
“See, it’s ‘his’ soil,” Prophet said. “Now do you understand why it’s impossible to get along with this jackass?”
“Some folks are contrary that way,” Colter said.
“What happened to your face, you ugly gringo shaver?” Ruiz asked. “Did your horse of a mother kick you after she dropped you?” He wheezed a high, mocking laugh.
“That tears it!” Colter bolted up from behind his table.
“No!” Prophet shouted. “That’s what he wants you—”
His warning was cut off by Ruiz’s own gunfire. The rurale lieutenant had been ready to spring, waiting for the kid to show himself, and now he did just that as Colter’s shoulders cleared his covering table. Ruiz’s first bullet punched into Colter’s left arm, sending the redhead stumbling back against the bar, dropping his Remy and gritting his teeth.
Ruiz’s second bullet punched into Colter’s left thigh, making Colter give a sharp yowl of pain as well as anger.
Ruiz was about to put another bullet into the young redhead when Prophet, trying to ignore the bullets being thrown at him by the other two rurales, swung his Peacemaker up over his table, aimed hastily, and fired. He was happy to see Ruiz slap a hand to his neck, trying to stem the flow of blood from it, just before the man dropped back down behind his table.
He howled a curse that echoed even above the gunfire.
As a bullet fired by one of the other two rurales on Lou’s side of the room seared a hot line across the outside of his neck, Prophet set his Colt down, grabbed an edge of his covering table, and pulled it over on its side. Broken glass from glasses and bottles came crashing down to the floor in front of him, spilled liquor soaking his trouser knees.
Bullets punched into the table with loud smashing barks.
Lou crawled to his left, pulled another table down, and crouched behind it as bullets hammered into it and the contents from its top crashed around him, glass and liquor tumbling onto his hat.
He bulled the table out ahead of him, using it for a shield as he crawled at an angle across the saloon floor, pulling down yet another table and using it, too, for cover as he crabbed even farther forward and toward the saloon’s left wall. He pulled down another table, and another . . . until he’d worked his way around the left side of the two shooters. As the two rurales fired into his current covering table, Prophet snaked his right arm over the top of the table and aimed at the two men who’d turned toward him, eyes wide in shock.
They were both fully exposed, and they knew it.
They both swore and, aiming their pistols at him—they must have had at least two, possibly three, apiece—clicked the hammers back. They’d thrown all the lead they were going to throw for one lifetime, however.
Prophet had the drop.
Quirking a devilish grin, Lou let two bullets fly and then three, four, and five for good measure, making sure that both rurales, who were writhing on their backs, swinging their arms and kicking their legs, would never get up again. He saved the sixth pill in his wheel for Oscar Ruiz, who appeared to still be breathing where he lay on the other side of the room, head propped against the base of the far wall.
Lou rose heavily. He was wet from the drinks spilled from the tables he’d knocked over. He was also peppered with glass, and a few playing cards stuck to the wet spots on his clothes. He glanced at Colter, who sat back against the bar, clutching his left arm and wincing. The kid had lost his hat and his long hair hung over one eye.
“You still kickin’, Red?”
“Just not so high.”
“I’ll be right over.”
Prophet walked over to where Lieutenant Oscar Ruiz lay against the wall. The man had his left hand pressed to his neck. The hand was all red from the blood that had poured out of him. He held a Smith & Wesson New Model No. 3 revolver in his right hand, on the floor. The top-break gun was partway open and covered in blood. Apparently, he’d started reloading the weapon but weakness from blood loss had kept him from finishing.
Ruiz glared up at Prophet, flaring his nostrils. He flared them wider and squinted one eye as he began raising the Smith & Wesson, also called a “Russian.” He pressed the barrel against the floor, closing the gun with a click, but before he could raise it any higher, Prophet pressed his left boot down on it, pinning it and the man’s hand to the floor.
“¡Bastardo!” Ruiz yelled, though in his depleted state it was more of a rasp.
Prophet raised his Peacemaker, aiming down the barrel at the lieutenant’s head. “Maybe see you down below, Lieutenant,” Lou said with a grim smile.
Ruiz turned his head slightly, eyelids fluttering as he awaited the bullet with dread. “There are more where I came from, Lou.” He tried a mocking, satisfied smile to go with the faint singsong in his voice.
“Then you’ll be in good company.” Prophet’s Peacemaker bucked.
Ruiz’s head bounced off the wall then settled back at an angle against it, the man’s eyes rolling up in their sockets, his tongue sliding to one corner of his mouth. His chest sank as his last breath left him, and he lay still.