Chapter 38
“Violación, my ass!” Prophet bounced up from the bed and stared toward the windows looking out on the bastion’s broad yard. He threw out an arm to Alejandra. “Pipe down, you crazy wench. I’m here to save your loco hide. You don’t wanna stay here and lounge around like some hop-headed queen of Sheba!”
“¡Violación! ¡Violación! ¡Violación!” the girl screamed at the top of her lungs.
On the other hand, it appeared she did.
Prophet’s heart turned painful somersaults in his chest. His head throbbed miserably, nearly blurring his vision. He stood in shock, staring toward the windows, as the señorita de la Paz continued to scream in Spanish for someone to help her, the americano bastardo was raping her!
How in the hell do I get myself into these situations?
Lou ran to one of the windows and peered into the yard. Men were shrugging out of their drunken slumbers from various encampments by the near wall, where fire pits were mounded with cold, gray ashes and where small flames leaped in others as a few men, awake now that it must have been nearly midmorning, were preparing coffee.
Several had already grabbed guns and, staring puzzledly toward the señorita’s windows, were striding clumsily this way. Others, also staring toward the señorita’s room, pulled on boots and strapped cartridge belts around their waists.
“Ah hell!”
Lou lifted his gaze toward the wall facing the Sea of Cortez. The Gatling gun swung toward him, a guard hunkered on one knee behind it, aiming down the barrel. Another guard standing on the wall nearly straight out from Prophet was aiming a rifle toward Lou, the guard’s head tipped sideways against the rear stock.
The rifle blossomed smoke and flames. The bullet slammed into the masonry wall to the right of the window, only six or seven inches from Prophet’s head. Lou pulled back behind the casement, gritting his teeth. The hammering concussion of the bullet pummeled his ears and brainpan. He thought for a second he was going to pass out.
He cussed loudly and turned to the girl sitting up and smiling smugly on the bed at him. “That tears it!”
“Whatever that means, you stupid gringo, it sure does tear it!” She laughed.
Half to himself, he said, “Goddess, my ass.”
“What?”
“More like a viper hiding inside the thousand-dollar body of a spoiled puta.”
Alejandra’s eyes drew sharply up at the corners as she glared at him. “How dare you call me that! You better run, run, run the hell out of here, pendejo. Run if you can, but there’s nowhere the major and Lieutenant Rhodes won’t find you. Not after what you’ve done to me.” She smiled again, mockingly. “What a brute you are to force me to do such horrible things!”
Prophet ran back to the bed, picked up his right boot, and pulled it on. “Throw something on that purty body of yours, Alejandra!”
“What?”
“Get dressed. You’re comin’ with me.”
“Go to hell!”
Prophet shucked his pistol from its holster, aimed it straight out from his right shoulder at the girl, and clicked the hammer back. “Throw something on and do it now, or I’ll drill a hole through your pretty head.”
“You wouldn’t!”
Prophet manufactured a devilish grin. It wasn’t hard to do. Outside, men were shouting and he could hear them running toward Alejandra’s chamber, cocking rifles. He drew his index finger taut against the Peacemaker’s trigger. “By the count of three . . .”
He couldn’t kill her. He knew that. But she didn’t.
“One . . . two . . .”
Giving a frightened cry, she scrambled off the bed and picked up the gown she’d been wearing last night. She shook it out quickly, eyeing Prophet fearfully, glancing at the big .45 bearing down on her. She pulled the gown up over her head and let it tumble bewitchingly down that long, slender, high-busted, creamy body until the still-damp hem settled around her ankles.
“Let’s go!” Prophet grabbed her arm and half dragged, half led her to the door.
“Ow—that hurts, you brute!”
“Not as much as a bullet between the eyes!”
He opened the door and peered into a stone-floored hallway. It looked as derelict as most of the rest of the bastion though someone had informed him over the past several days of his debauch that parts of it had once been used by the federalistas as a prison, so parts had been somewhat modernized. The hallway was deserted but he could hear the clacks of running boots down the cavernlike hall to his right.
“Come on!”
“Help me!” Alejandra screamed in Spanish, in the direction of the oncoming men. “Help me—the brute is trying to kidnap me!”
Prophet ran down the hall, weaving around gouges in the ancient stone floor as well as masonry fallen out of the walls or the ceiling.
The footsteps grew louder behind him—several men coming fast. The clattering echoed loudly. “¡Ahí!” There!
A gun barked.
Alejandra screamed.
“Damn fools!” Prophet stopped suddenly, wheeled, extended his Peacemaker, and fired three quick rounds. Two of the running men—it was too dark in the hall for him to see exactly how many there were—fell and rolled, howling. The others stopped and dropped to their knees, extending pistols or rifles.
One shouted, “Don’t shoot, you fools! If we hit the girl, Yeats will string us up by our cojones!”
Prophet grabbed Alejandra’s arm and kept running, the girl groaning and trying to pull away, her bare feet slapping on the rough stone floor. Prophet slowed when he approached a T in the hall. Boots clattered down the wing to his right.
“More are coming!” the girl reveled. “You’ll never get away, you big, stupid—!”
Prophet wheeled on her, glaring and snugging his revolver’s barrel up taut against her left temple. “You scream out one more time, I’m gonna kill you, señorita. You got that?”
He pressed the gun barrel even harder against her head, driving the point home.
Wide-eyed, she nodded once but rasped out wickedly, “Brute!”
Prophet continued forward, pulling her along behind him with his left hand. He stepped to the wall on the hall’s right side and raked his shoulder against it as he continued to the T. The clatter of running men grew louder.
Prophet swung his gun hand around the corner and aimed down the hall on his right, saw a handful of men run up into the light offered by a large, ragged-edged hole in the ceiling. The men running ahead of the others widened their eyes in shock and began to open their mouths to shout, but neither got a word out before Prophet shot them both and one more.
Screams vaulted around the hallway, on the heels of Lou’s loudly echoing gun reports.
Prophet pulled his gun back into the hall he stood at the corner of. He shoved the girl down to her knees. She gave a clipped, indignant scream. “¡Bastardo!”
“I told you to shut up.” Lou also fell to a knee, flicked open the smoking revolver’s loading gate, and rotated the cylinder, quickly shaking out the spent cartridges.
“Yeats will catch you and if he doesn’t kill you he will draw and quarter you and gut you like a pig!”
Hurriedly thumbing fresh rounds into the Colt’s empty chambers, Prophet glanced down at the girl, who stared up at him from below his left shoulder. Her brown eyes were slitted. They blazed like two nuggets of high-grade gold. Her copper-red hair was a lovely, tangled mess all about her head and slender shoulders. He chuckled, flicked the loading gate closed, and said, “Goddess, my ass . . .”
She snarled at him, flaring her nostrils again defiantly. “You enjoyed me, though—didn’t you? Admit it!”
“Oh, I had a grand old time,” Prophet said. “What I can remember of it. Don’t forget”—he patted the shoulder she’d sunk her teeth into—“you did, too, sweetheart.”
He laughed.
A flush rose up Alejandra’s fine neck and into her cheeks, and she dropped her eyes in chagrin. Prophet peered down the hall he’d fired into and where one man was sobbing shrilly and asking Saint Peter to forgive him for his earthly sins. “It was Yeats’s fault, San Pedro!” he bellowed. “I was a good man before I fell into bad company!”
“Likely story.” Lou hurled two more rounds down the hall where he could see several faces peering toward him from the dense shadows. The faces jerked back or dropped toward the floor as the two reports reverberated like cannon fire in the close confines.
Before the echoes had fallen silent, Prophet leaped to his feet, jerked the girl up, as well, and bounded down the hall opening on his left. “Sure wish I had my barn-blaster,” he complained as he ran, pulling the girl along behind him. “Nothin’ better’n two wads of twelve-gauge buck in close quarters. Hell, I could take out two, three of these bean-eaters at a time.”
“What are you saying, you gringo pendejo?” the girl asked, breathless.
“Don’t mind me—I just yak it up when I’m nervous.” Prophet leaped another large, jagged crack in the stone floor. “Watch your step, princess!”
Prophet laughed.
“¡Cabrón!”
They dropped down a crumbling staircase, climbed another.
Prophet heard men running down an open corridor to his left, so he swung right, climbed another staircase, ran down another open corridor, then hung a right at an intersecting corridor that appeared to be an ancient cellblock, with banded iron doors on either side.
Men turned a corner ahead of him and ran toward them. They were all wielding pistols.
They saw him a second after he saw them. Lou was already aiming his Peacemaker.
The big, burly, mustached Mexican running out front of the others stopped suddenly and threw his arms out to his sides, trying to forestall the others behind him. His large, drink-bleary brown eyes found Prophet, and he yelled, “Noooo!”
There were seven of them, including the big man out front. Prophet emptied his Colt into them, taking out all seven because one of the six madly fired his own pistol into the neck of one of the others as he twisted around, dying and spewing blood and howling like a lobo.
“Damn, you’re good with that thing!” Alejandra stared up at him, aghast.
Prophet flicked open the Colt’s loading gate. “If I remember correct, that’s what you said last night.”
He couldn’t help laughing at his joke as he spun out another batch of spent cartridges. She gave an angry wail and lunged at him, punching him with her tightly clenched fists. Prophet crouched beneath her onslaught as he thumbed a fresh round of six cartridges into the Peacemaker’s cylinder.
“Ouch, damnit—that one hurt!” he complained as she kneed him very close to where she’d intended to. He flung out his elbow to hold her off. He must have flung it out harder than he’d meant to, because she gave a scream and flew backward, hitting the back of her head with a clang against an iron-banded door.
Her eyes rolled back in her head, and she sagged to her butt, legs sticking nearly straight out before her. Her head flopped to one side, chin resting against her shoulder.
Prophet stared down at her, frowning. “Princess?”
She didn’t move.
“Princess?” Prophet’s heart lurched. Oh, for Pete’s sake—did you kill her, ya big galoot? he silently berated himself.
He crouched over her. He could hear her breathing, saw her ample bosom rising and falling slowly behind the gown’s low-cut bodice. He gave a sigh of relief, then, hearing footsteps growing louder behind him, he said, “Quieter this way,” and grabbed her hand and pulled her up over his left shoulder like a hundred-pound sack of potatoes. “Much more pleasant . . .”
He took off running, wincing under the weight. Not that she was all that heavy, but he was still slightly drunk and hungover and cracked bells were tolling in his ears and badly assaulting the exposed nerve of his brain. When he came to a corner, he swung left. He wanted to get away from the main yard and the damn Gatling gun over there.
It wasn’t going to happen. On his left men were running toward him down another open corridor. Lieutenant Will-John Rhodes was in the lead, holding a pistol in each hand.
“There!” he shouted, raising both guns toward Prophet.
Lou raised his own Peacemaker to the girl’s side and cocked the hammer back. “I’ll kill her, Lieutenant! I’ll drill a hole right through both kidneys! Stay back or you’ll have to explain the death of this purty little devil here to the Mad Major!”
“Hold up!” Rhodes shouted to the men running behind him. He stopped and raised both his Colts barrel-up.
Prophet heard more footsteps behind him, coming from the direction of the yard. Ahead rose a cracked stone wall. Behind him, more running feet clattered as another pack of Yeats’s wolves was charging hard in his direction.
His heart pounded. Sweat streaked his face.
They had him cornered.
Quickly, he thought through his options.
Options? Hell, what options? He almost laughed at the thought. He was a dead man.
If he had any hope at all, it was the main gate. If he could get through the main gate—which was one mighty big if—he might have a chance. A slim one, but what the hell else was he going to do except run in circles until he exhausted himself or one of Yeats’s rannies finally called his bluff on his threat to kill the princess and kicked him out with a cold shovel?
He swung around to face the men running toward him from the yard. They’d just climbed the top of the stone steps, and now the first men had seen him and were widening their eyes beneath their sombrero brims and raising their guns.
“Back!” Lou shouted, trying to put as much crazy-wild rebel in his voice as possible, which wasn’t too hard, given where he hailed from and his current predicament. “Back, you chili-chompin’ curs, or I’ll drill the princess here a pill she won’t digest!”