The Devil's Lair (A Lou Prophet Western #6) Read online

  Issuing classic fiction from Yesterday and Today!

  When bounty hunter Lou Prophet and his partner Louisa Bonaventure capture a gang of stage-robbers, they haul their quarry to a remote town to get their due. But Bitter Creek proves even more dangerous than hunting outlaws when Sam Scanlon and his murderous riders hang all the lawmen. Now, Lou Prophet is going to show them that justice doesn't always wear a badge.

  THE DEVIL’S LAIR

  LOU PROPHET 6

  By Peter Brandvold

  First published by Berkley Publishing Group in 2005

  Copyright © 2005, 2014 by Peter Brandvold

  Published by Piccadilly Publishing at Smashwords: March 2014

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader.

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Series Editor: Ben Bridges

  Published by Arrangement with the Author.

  For Mike and Madeline, and Lucy and Bob

  Chapter One

  “Ridin’ that stage down there’s the ugliest woman I ever laid eyes on,” said Nasty Turk Mahoney. “I seen her when she boarded in Rosehawk.”

  “Ugly, eh?” said Jethro Hall, grinning around a chewed cigar.

  “So ugly, she’d make a freight train take a dirt track.”

  “Big, mean-lookin’, and hairy,” Jubal Maguire added grimly, hunkered over his saddle horn. “I seen her too.”

  The men and three other hard cases sat their horses on the wooded ridge, staring north along the valley below.

  A stagecoach had just come into view, moving west behind a six-horse team. From this distance, the red Concord coach was little more than an oval speck trailing a blond dust cloud. Its path through the sage-tufted canyon rimmed with towering pines would bring it to a point just below the ridge.

  The six well-armed riders in dusters, soiled hats, and black bandannas stared like hunting hawks while their horses stomped impatiently, twitched their ears, and swished their tails at gnats.

  Mike Ensor adjusted his two-hundred-plus pounds on his silver-trimmed saddle, spit a quid of chew on a fir tree, and crinkled his tiny eyes at Nasty Turk Mahoney.

  “It ain’t right to call a woman ugly,” Ensor growled, his jowls turning red. “How’d you like it if someone called your ma ugly?”

  Smirking, Mahoney turned his one-eyed gaze to Ensor. Mahoney’s own face looked as though it had been hacked apart by Apache tomahawks and sewn back together by drunken army medicos. “My ma was ugly. I got my good looks from my pa.” He chucked himself under his chin, his chapped, scaly lips shaping a grin.

  Ensor stared at him, his doughy cheeks bunched with seething anger. “It ain’t right, callin’ a woman ugly.” His voice was as taut as a dead man’s noose.

  “Lookit you, Mike,” Mahoney taunted. “Why, an idiot as big and plug-ugly as you’d have to have a ma even uglier than mine. I bet plenty of people called her ugly. Probably called you ugly too—ain’t that right, ‘Little Mike’?”

  Ensor’s soft, round face turned a deep russet from his triple chin to the brim of his broad, black hat.

  Mahoney held his stare with a mocking smile. “Fat and ugly shittin’ out fat an’ ugly.” He shook his head. “Should be a law against it.”

  “Is that why you killed her, Little Mike?” J.D. Brennan asked, holding his double-barreled shotgun snug against his hip and looking on with amusement. “’Cause she passed on her ugly features?”

  Ensor switched his acrimonious gaze to the stocky Brennan. Slowly, his fat, sunburned hand slid up his thigh to the long-barreled Smith & Wesson on his hip.

  “All right, that’s enough!”

  The gang leader, Pike Thorson, rode up on his Appaloosa and swatted Little Mike with his soiled planter’s hat. “I’ve heard enough o’ this bullshit for one day. We have a job to do, so get serious!”

  Thorson had stolen the hat and his black frock coat from a Southerner whose wagon train he and the gang had raided two months ago along the Overland Trail. He was tall, rangy, and black haired, with sharp blue eyes and bushy black sideburns. He would have been handsome if his face hadn’t been pitted with buckshot scars, his nose blunt and misshapen from several fractures.

  Lips pinched with anger, he again swatted Mahoney with his hat. “I told you boys not to fight amongst yourselves. We’re s’posed to be a gang. Remember what happened to Billy Tribble? First one o’ you kill’s another gang member, I’m gonna cut you up slow for wolf bait.”

  Mahoney shifted another hard, mocking look at Little Mike, who stared back just as hard but whose hand had stopped its slide to his pistol. Finally, Mahoney gave him a taunting wink and turned his gaze to the valley.

  The stage was only a couple hundred yards away now, its clomp and clatter rising on the wind. The driver’s muffled yells rose as well, and the long blacksnake cracked like pistol fire.

  Pike Thorson checked his pocket watch. Returning the timepiece to his shirt, he said, “Right on time.” He leaned back in his saddle and toed his big Appy off the ridge. “Quit your damn bickering and move out. We got work to do!”

  As he spurred his paint horse after the leader, Turk Mahoney sidled up to J.D. Brennan.

  “Why did Little Mike kill his ma?”

  Brennan snickered as he leaned back over his plunging horse’s rump, holding the reins chest-high. “’Cause when he was twelve years old, she got drunk and told him she couldn’t believe what an ugly ringtail she had for a son!”

  Galloping across the canyon bottom toward the stage road, Brennan and Mahoney threw their heads back and roared.

  Inside the rocking, rattling stage, Lou Prophet shifted uncomfortably in his forward-facing seat. Within the tiny confines in which Prophet and six other passengers had been sealed like slugs in a revolver’s cylinder, the air hung hot, heavy, dusty, and reeking with sweat.

  They were high on the high Wyoming plains, but it was still damn hot, and no one was more aware of it than Prophet, clad in widow’s weeds—a woman’s high-buttoned black dress with a cape and stitched white collar. The collar pinched his neck until he felt as though the blood had been cut off from his brain. His neck itched so bad he felt like ripping the dress open and hacking at himself with the Arkansas toothpick hanging from a rawhide strap down his back.

  Under the pillow strapped to his chest, giving him a bosom the size of a stock trough, sweat ran in rivers down his belly.

  The matching black hat with a gauzy black veil didn’t help matters. It sealed the heat inside his body, making him feel like a boiling English teapot. The black, square-heeled shoes—the largest he could find—were two sizes too small, which made keeping his feet set primly together beneath the hard plank bench as demanding as keeping mum while rats chewed your privates.

  Hoping his wince passed for a priggish smile befitting an elderly widow, he stared out the windows and assuaged his discomfort with remembered images of bathing naked in a clear, flowing creek near his boyhood home in the Appalachians of north Georgia. Interrupting the daydream, an elbow poked his ribs.

  He turned to his left and looked down at his partner, Louisa Bonaventure, clad in a summery yellow form-fitting dress and looking for all the world like a wholesome young parson’s daughter on her way to a church picnic. She smiled up at Prophet sweetly, pushed up on her tiny rump, cupped her hands around her mouth, and whi
spered in his ear, “Stop squirming, you big idiot!”

  She drew away, her feigned smile so bright that her cheeks dimpled, but Prophet recognized the tartness in her hazel-eyed gaze.

  He leaned sideways, nudging her shoulder, smiling the old-lady smile he’d practiced so well, and grunted through clenched teeth, “I can’t help it!”

  Louisa’s smile brightened, as though she and Prophet were merely discussing an anticipated pound cake and tea later in Bitter Creek. But as she turned away, Prophet felt the sharp pain of her bony elbow stabbing his ribs.

  He turned to the window again, clutching the lumpy, leather reticule in his lap and smiling instead of cursing.

  As he did so, he caught a glimpse of the man sitting directly across from him. Since the man had boarded the stage in Rosehawk, he’d either been checking his tarnished silver pocket watch every ten minutes, or making eyes at Louisa. He was staring at her again now, his eyes hooded and leering. Louisa ignored him, staring out the window to her right.

  Prophet eyed the man through his veil. He had hardcase written all over him—from his unruly, long blond hair falling down from his shabby bowler to his hatchet face, which he tried to soften with a pair of tiny, green-tinted, rectangular spectacles riding high on a long, broad nose.

  He wore a black suit with a fawn-colored vest and polished brogans, but the worn cartridge belt and long-barreled Remington tied low on his right thigh gave the lie to the cheap gambler’s duds.

  He was no more a gambler than was Prophet a Presbyterian minister.

  Prophet shuttled his gaze around the stage, quickly taking in the portly businessman reading a newspaper on the other side of Louisa, and the plain-faced, young woman clad in homespun cotton and holding a blanket-wrapped infant.

  The girl’s stocky husband, dressed like a farmer, sat between her and the hardcase, directly across from Louisa. The young man snored softly, his chin tipped to his chest, revealing the tattered, sun-faded crown of his black felt hat trimmed with a red squirrel’s tail.

  Prophet tensed when the hardcase’s hand moved suddenly. His muscles relaxed as the man again plucked his tarnished silver watch from his vest pocket, flipped the lid, glanced at the face, and casually returned the old turnip to its pocket.

  The man sighed as though bored, leaning forward to look out the window. He gave the passing countryside—a forested ridge beyond a meadow splashed with wildflowers— a casual glance, then sat back in his seat and returned his leering gaze to Louisa, his eyes flickering across the girl’s small, firm mounds pushing at the yellow cloth.

  Instinctively protective of Louisa while knowing she needed little protection, Prophet felt the urge to kick the man’s knee with one of his stout, black shoes, but restrained himself.

  As though sensing Prophet’s acrimony, the hardcase turned to him. Prophet slid his eyes to the window and tensed, feeling the man’s gaze on him, appraising, scrutinizing. Prophet tightened his big, white-gloved paws on the leather reticule, gently squeezing.

  The hardcase cleared his throat. “Sure is a lovely ... uh ... fine young lady travelin’ with you today, ma’am.”

  Prophet turned to him, prickling with jealous anger. Before he could reply, Louisa gently elbowed his ribs, warning him to keep his emotion on a short leash. Prophet swallowed his anger and considered a feminine response. He’d practiced a high-pitched voice on Louisa before boarding the stage, and they’d both agreed he should open his mouth as little as possible.

  Prophet smiled behind his veil and tittered modestly.

  “Yessiree,” the hardcase drawled, his frankly appraising gaze glued to Louisa’s breasts, “she sure looks like a ... uh ... mighty civilized young lady.”

  Politely, her hands folded in her lap, Louisa said, “Why, thank you, sir. I do endeavor to make myself an asset to society.”

  The man glanced at Prophet, the bridge of his nose wrinkling distastefully. “You two can’t be related.”

  Prophet stared at the man, straining to maintain his mute, witless smile.

  “Of course we are,” Louisa said. “Aunt Eloise is my dearly departed mother’s older sister.”

  “You don’t say. There sure ain’t much of a family resemblance.” The hardcase tilted his head as he shuttled his gaze back to Louisa. “What do you say Auntie Eloise and I switch places?”

  Louisa glanced at Prophet. “Why would you want to do that?” she asked innocently.

  The man didn’t say anything for a moment. Through a lusty grin, he said, “So we can ... get better acquainted. Maybe, uh ... snuggle a little.”

  Louisa’s voice turned hard. “I don’t snuggle with strangers, sir!”

  The man looked surprised. “You don’t? A pretty little piece o’ poon-tang like you? What a shame!”

  Prophet hoped Louisa would keep a lid on her rage. You never knew what she would do, one moment to the next.

  “What did you call me, sir?” Louisa’s voice was as sweet as Christmas fudge, but Prophet noted the dangerous edge.

  Oh, no. Smiling gently, Prophet placed a hand on the girl’s thigh, silently commanding her to ignore the man.

  The hardcase’s eyes went snaky-flat as they again strayed to Louisa’s pert bosom and continued down her slender but well-turned legs sheathed in the form-fitting dress. To Prophet, he said, “Come on, Auntie. Let’s switch places.” The man slid forward on his seat.

  Prophet’s smile tightened into a silent warning. Beside the hardcase, the sleeping young farmer snorted and bobbed his head, chin grazing his chest. The baby fussed, and the farmer’s wife rocked the child from side to side. She watched Louisa, Prophet, and the hardcase, a nervous look on her moist, unadorned features. The businessman glanced at the hardcase and quickly buried his face again in his newspaper.

  “Come on, Auntie,” the hardcase insisted, “let’s switch places. You’ll get a change of scenery, and I’ll ... well, I’ll get acquainted with your lovely niece.”

  “Aunt Eloise appreciates your concern, sir,” Louisa said, and Prophet was happy to hear the equanimity restored to her voice. “But she gets sick when riding backwards. We wouldn’t want her getting sick on the stage”—Louisa snickered—“after all the pig’s liver and buttermilk she ate at the last way station.”

  She glanced at Prophet, drawing her full, cherry lips wide with a humorous grin. Prophet turned to her, smiling stiffly.

  The hardcase’s features blanched and his grin quickly faded. Compressing his lips with defeat, he sat back against the stage’s front wall. He said nothing, but his frustrated, lusty eyes played openly over Louisa’s body for the next five minutes. Then, as if remembering something, he stiffened and reached for his watch. Before he could open it, guns popped in the distance.

  “Oh, my word!” the young mother exclaimed with a start. “What was that?”

  “Yes, what was that?” Louisa echoed. She too was staring out the right-side windows, where several horsemen could be seen, galloping across the meadow on an interception course with the stage.

  Prophet did his best to look surprised, gasping and trilling and craning his neck to look out the window with everyone else. Everyone but the hardcase, that is.

  A gun hammer clicked. Prophet turned back to the hardcase, who waved his Remington, grinning with smoky delight.

  “That, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “is a holdup.”

  Chapter Two

  “Everyone just stay calm and don’t try anything funny,” the hardcase said, concentrating his attention on the young farmer and the portly businessman, who regarded him fearfully, hands raised.

  Sensing the danger, the baby had started wailing.

  Outside, the gunfire died as the stage slowed, the driver yelling, “Woooo-oo-ahhhh! Wooooo-ahhhh!”

  The Concord rocked and bounced as it slowed, its leather thoroughbraces quacking like ducks. Inside, the blond hardcase, smiling with self-satisfaction, kept his long-barreled Remington aimed at the passengers, making sure no one went for a gun.


  Prophet hadn’t seen a weapon on either the businessman or the young farmer. If they were heeled, he hoped they had sense enough to keep their iron stowed. Going for guns would only get them ventilated.

  The stage stopped so abruptly that Prophet, Louisa, and the businessman had to grab the hanging ceiling straps to keep from being thrown forward. Outside, voices rose above the clatter of prancing horses, commanding the driver and shotgun messenger to throw down their weapons.

  Prophet rolled his eyes to the windows while keeping his gloved hands raised.

  Four riders appeared around the stage, the blond dust sifting around them. Three aimed pistols. A fourth man—a tall, bull-necked hombre with full red sideburns and crazy eyes—leveled a heavy, double-barreled shotgun at the Concord’s right windows.

  Gents, Prophet thought with grim satisfaction and a healthy dose of caution, meet J. D. Brennan of the Thorson-Mahoney Gang.

  Brennan was the gang’s newest member, having escaped a federal lockup in Arkansas after strangling three guards and slitting the throat of a fourth with a sharpened chicken bone. The reward for him alone was five hundred dollars—more than enough to give any bounty hunter, including the big-spending, womanizing Prophet—one hell of a shindified night in Denver City ... if he lived long enough to collect it, that is.

  “You hear me, Auntie?” It was the blond hardcase staring at Prophet hard, eyes red-rimmed with rage. “I said, get your fat ass outside, and be damn quick about it!”

  Prophet trilled fearfully, clumsily gaining his feet. All the passengers but Louisa had already disembarked.

  She took Prophet’s hand. In a fear-brittle voice, which Prophet knew to be total playacting—the girl had killed more men than Billy the Kid and would not have blanched at a diamondback under her pillow—she said, “Come, Auntie. Don’t be afraid. We’ll be all right. I promise we will ... ”

  Prophet stumbled, nearly breaking his ankles in the hard, undersized shoes, and cooed like a frightened crone. As the stage rocked on its thoroughbraces, he accepted Louisa’s hand with his left while clutching the lumpy reticule in his right. He took mincing, old-lady steps to the door.