The Cost of Dying Read online

  THE COST OF DYING

  THE VIOLENT DAYS OF LOU PROPHET, BOUNTY HUNTER

  PETER BRANDVOLD

  PINNACLE BOOKS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PINNACLE BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2019 Peter Brandvold

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  PINNACLE BOOKS and the Pinnacle logo are Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  ISBN: 978-0-7860-4446-7

  Electronic edition:

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-4447-4 (e-book)

  ISBN-10: 0-7860-4447-0 (e-book)

  For Alice Duncan

  Chapter 1

  “Wake up, Lou! Big trouble! Oh, Lou—pleeease wake up! Loo-oooo!”

  The voice had entered bounty hunter Lou Prophet’s sleep from a long ways away, but it had quickly grown louder until it was accompanied by the tapping of running feet.

  Bare running feet, judging by the slap-slap-slaps.

  The voice was a pleasant female voice, lightly Spanish accented. It would have been a whole lot pleasanter if Prophet had heard it later—over breakfast, say, or, even better, over afternoon shots of tarantula juice. He didn’t want to hear any voice when he was dreaming of running buck naked through spring woods near some idyllic mountain stream, trying to catch a pretty Apache princess who, just like himself, was bedecked in only her birthday suit and coaxing him on with her lusty laughter.

  Run as the big bounty hunter might, he couldn’t catch up to the girl though he kept catching brief, enticing glimpses of her copper body through the forest’s interwoven branches.

  A hand grabbed Prophet’s arm and shook him. Now the formerly pleasant voice was downright unpleasant, originating as it did just off Prophet’s left ear.

  “Lou!” The girl shook him again, with both hands now. “Por favor. Wake up! I need your help, muy pronto!”

  The Apache princess in Prophet’s dream had just stopped to let him catch up to her when the dream dissolved and Prophet was pulled up out of his fanciful slumber to blink his eyes and smack his lips, watching a small, shabby room take shape around him.

  “Wha—huh?” The tendrils of sleep were slow to disentangle themselves from Prophet’s brain while the girl on his left continued to jerk him so that the entire bed was bucking and pitching like an unbroke bronco stallion on the run from a wildfire. “Oh, Jesus . . . leave me . . . leave me alone . . . I’m . . . I’m sleepin’, honey! Ole Lou’s sleep-time now!”

  The girl kept shaking him. Oh, why couldn’t she stop?! “Lou, you have to help Dora!”

  “Wh-who’s Dora?” he asked, hoping that the question might get the girl to stop her consarned shaking if only for a few blissful seconds.

  “A close friend of mine! I am afraid that her life is in danger! Oh, Lou—please wake up!”

  Prophet had rested his head back against his pillow. His eyelids, which weighed ten pounds apiece, had dropped shut of their own accord. But now two fingers peeled the left one open, and Prophet found himself staring up into a pair of dark brown eyes set above a fine, pale nose and ruby red lips. Curly, dark brown hair, mussed from sleep and love, framed the girl’s young, pretty face that bore a heart-shaped birthmark just under her left eye.

  Jasmin. That was her name, pronounced “Yas-meen.” The handle floated into the bounty hunter’s unconsciousness though how it made it through the gallon or so of rotgut tequila he’d soaked his brain in last night while he and Jasmin had run up one side of town and down the other, dancing to several different bands in a handful of saloons and cantinas before repairing to the puta’s humble crib was beyond him.

  He’d met her only a few hours ago, depending on what time it was now . . .

  “What the hell time is it, anyway?” he rasped.

  “I don’t know,” the girl said. “Who cares?” She was tugging on his arm again, making the wild stallion of the bed resume running from imminent danger. “Dora is in big trouble, Lou! Only you can save her! ¡Rápido! Por favor, Lou—there is no time to waste. ¡Rápido!”

  Prophet cursed and, merely to get the girl to stop tugging on his arm and making his hungover head pound all the harder, he sat up and dropped his bare feet to the floor. He felt as though he were speaking around a mouthful of jawbreakers. “Where is . . . where is this Dora . . . an’ what trouble’s she in, darlin’?”

  A pistol cracked. That cleared a few more of Prophet’s cobwebs, as a pistol crack tended to do for a man like Prophet, who had spent most of his life either hurling or dodging bullets and who never knew from where the next bullets would come but always knowing that there would, indeed, be more bullets on the way . . .

  “What was that all about?”

  “That was Dora!” Jasmin was running around the small, crudely furnished crib gathering up Prophet’s longhandles, socks, and boots from where she’d tossed them on the floor after she’d helped him undress— a task which, in Prophet’s condition, had required four hands. “Well, not Dora herself . . . but the man who is going to kill her! I just know he is going to kill her this time for sure! He is very drunk and very angry!”

  She spat out several lines of unadulterated Spanish only a few words of which Prophet, who had only a crude working knowledge of the border lingo, could decipher.

  “Who is this rannie?” Prophet asked, running a big hand down his face as Jasmin tossed the big loose ball of his clothes onto the bed beside him.

  “Roscoe Rodane!”

  “Who in the hell is Roscoe Rodane?” Another pistol crack issued from the open window in the wall before Lou.

  “He is the gringo necio who is going to kill Dora! He is in love with
her, or so he claims! He is in the Buzzard Gulch Inn across the street. Oh, Lou—get dressed and hurry! Dora is like a sister to me!”

  Yet another pistol report issued from out there in the night somewhere. A cool dark night, judging from the view from the window and the breath of chill desert air wafting through the ragged calico curtain buffeting inward, rife with the smell of trash heaps, woodsmoke, horses, men, and sagebrush. Typical western frontier fare.

  Somewhere a dog was barking as though in response to the pistol fire. Beneath the dog’s barking and between pistol shots, Prophet thought he heard a girl scream.

  Jasmin sucked an anxious breath while she helped Prophet pull on his longhandles. “Mierda. It might be too late.” The pretty puta sobbed, her upper lip trembling. “I might have just lost my best friend!”

  “All right, all right.” The girl’s obvious terror sobered Prophet somewhat. At least, it got his heart going. He heaved himself up off the bed and took over his own dressing, going only as far as the longhandles, boots, and his hat. That’s all he needed.

  He intended to be out of bed only long enough to quiet the infernal commotion over there across the street at the Buzzard Gulch Inn, so he could return to bed in peace and catch a few more hours of shut-eye before the hot Arizona sun reared its rosy head and cast its summer rays and debilitating heat through the window, rendering further slumber impossible.

  When he’d cinched his Colt Peacemaker and cartridge belt around his waist, Lou grabbed his twelve-gauge Richards coach gun, slinging its wide leather lanyard over his head and shoulder, positioning the savage double-bore gut-shredder against his back. Making his way none too steadily to the door, which Jasmin held open for him, regarding him anxiously, Prophet stepped out into the dingy hall, hearing the girl mutter a prayer in hushed, quick Spanish behind him.

  She added in English for his benefit, calling cheerfully behind him, “Thank you, Lou! I will make it up to you—I promise!”

  He heard her blow him a kiss.

  Grumbling moodily, Prophet made his way downstairs and across the small, earthen-floored saloon called Cantina Perro de Tres Patas, or the Three-Legged Dog, taking the name from the proprietor’s three-legged cur that wandered the premises all day, performing tricks for chugs of cheap ale and nibbles of beef and ham from Jimmy Rodriquez’s free-lunch counter.

  Prophet stumbled across the saloon occupied now by only two Mexicans, one of whom was conscious, and the three-legged cur now snoring peacefully on a straw mat beneath the pine-plank bar. Only a couple of candles burned in wall brackets, so the saloon was in more shadow than light, and Prophet rapped his knee painfully against a chair before he finally made it through the batwings.

  Cursing roundly and limping, he crossed the street at a slant, making his way toward the Buzzard Gulch Inn, which was a slightly tonier place than the Cantina Perro de Tres Patas, which sat on the south side of Buzzard Gulch’s main street, known as the Mexican side, while the north side of the street was known as the gringo side. Prophet preferred the south side for the simple reason that the Mexicans tended to have more fun.

  “I’m gonna ask y’all one more time,” a man bellowed inside the Buzzard Gulch Inn, his voice badly slurred from drink. He punctuated the statement with another pistol shot. “I’m gonna ask you one-more-time,” he bellowed, louder, “who’s been makin’ time with ole Roscoe’s girl when I been away?”

  A girl’s voice rose shrilly: “Roscoe, I told you, I am not your girl!”

  She’d barely gotten that out before she screamed.

  The scream was followed by another pistol report.

  “Liar!” Roscoe bellowed.

  Another pistol crack rocketed around inside the saloon.

  “Christalmighty—ain’t there any law in this jerkwater?” Prophet asked himself, glancing both ways up and down the short main street and seeing no one.

  Not that he could have seen anyone if anyone were out there. The night was as black as the inside of a glove save for a sky dusted with twinkling stars. Somehow, the light from the stars didn’t seem to make it down to Buzzard Gulch. It was dark, all right. The only place showing any life at all was the Buzzard Gulch Inn, and the inn was showing too much life.

  Way too much life for a fella to get a decent night’s rest anywhere nearby.

  Prophet hurried up the inn’s three porch steps then, not wanting to waste any time, bulled quickly through the batwings, and stepped to the right, extending the Richards coach gun straight out in front of him, ready to silence Roscoe Rodane with a fist-sized wad of double-ought buck.

  Lou blinked into the heavy shadows of the room before him. The Buzzard Gulch’s main drinking hall was only a little better lit than the Three-Legged Dog had been, with a couple of bracket lamps and candles.

  The bar ran down the wall to Prophet’s left. To his right were tables and chairs. Three or four gents were crouched down behind one overturned table and a couple of chairs. An old man and a blond young woman in a red and black corset and bustier, and with feathers in her hair, were crouched behind the piano abutting the wall to Prophet’s right.

  Prophet could see several other men pressed up against the saloon’s rear wall, raising their eyes to gaze up toward the man standing slumped on the second-story balcony directly above them. The man up there was leaning forward over the rail.

  He had three pistols resting atop the rail, and he was fumbling fresh shells into one of them. As he leaned forward, his longish, sandy hair hung in his eyes, so Prophet couldn’t see his face. But the bounty hunter could hear the man sobbing and quietly mewling like a gut-shot coyote taking his last few breaths.

  Everybody on the saloon’s main floor was being quiet as a church mouse with the reverend on a tear until a man raised his head above the bar to Prophet’s left and said, “Roscoe, won’t you please leave those damn guns alone and listen to reason?”

  The speaker was a craggy-faced gent with wavy, dark, pomaded hair and a thick dark mustache.

  “I been listenin’ to reason,” Roscoe said up where he was reloading his pistols on the second-floor balcony. “An’ reason, she been tellin’ me my purty girl, Miss Dora May, has been two-timin’ ole Roscoe with a coupla the boys from the Triple-Six-Connected. An’ now, lessen I don’t hear which ones she been makin’ time with right quick, I’m gonna kill ’em all right here an’ now—tonight!”

  Prophet hardened his jaws as he pushed away from the wall behind him and said, “You ain’t gonna kill anybody here tonight, Rodane! Now put them pistols down an’ stop this nonsense!”

  Prophet glanced quickly at the man poking his craggy head above the bar. “Ain’t there a lawman in town?” he asked.

  The barman opened his mouth to speak but stopped when Roscoe Rodane lifted his head abruptly, tossed his long, sandy hair back from his eyes, and cast Prophet a mean-eyed stare. “Who in the hell are you and where did you come from?”

  “I’m Lou Prophet, bounty hunter. Now put them pistols down and go sleep it off, amigo. The town’s done tired of hearin’ your caterwaulin’ foolishness not to mention your infernal pistols. Don’t you realize what time it is?”

  “You butt out of this!” Rodane bellowed, closing the loading gate of the Colt he’d just reloaded and raising the gun to his shoulder, barrel-up. “This ain’t none of your business, Mr. Bounty Hunter!”

  He started to aim the pistol toward Prophet.

  “Oh, Roscoe, please!” the blonde begged where she crouched with the old man behind the piano, snugged up taut against the wall. “I’m sorry if I made you think that I was your girl. I am not any one man’s girl, Roscoe. I’m a whore!”

  One of the two men crouching behind the overturned table just ahead of Prophet and to his right snorted an ironic laugh.

  “You think it’s funny, Norm?” Rodane yelled, shuttling his enraged gaze toward the man behind the table. “You think it’s funny?”

  He triggered a shot over the rail. The bullet plunked into the table and nearly blasted through
to the other side. Prophet saw the crack it made, showing its snub nose through the crack and making both men crouching there jerk with horrified starts.

  “Christ, Roscoe!” shouted the man behind the table—the one who hadn’t snorted. “This is insane. It’s just insane, I tell you! And it’s all because you started drinkin’ again, an’ you know you can’t hold your lightnin’!”

  “Was it you, Rod?” Roscoe aimed his pistol over the rail again, narrowing one eye as he aimed down the barrel.

  “Hold on!” Prophet bellowed. “Put that gun down or I’m gonna paint the wall with you, you drunken tinhorn!”

  Chapter 2

  Prophet started walking across the saloon, weaving between tables and chairs, kicking a few chairs out of his way, keeping the Richards aimed at the gun-wielding drunk on the balcony.

  “Look out, mister,” one of the men warned him. “He’s crazy when he drinks, an’ he don’t care who he shoots!”

  Prophet just then saw that the man wasn’t exaggerating. He stopped and looked to his right. A man lay on the floor, in a pool of his own blood. He’d taken a bullet through his forehead. He was tall and lean, with long, washed-out blond hair, and his vaguely startled blue eyes stared up at Prophet.

  He was dressed in crude, weathered range gear, like most of the other men in the place.

  Prophet muttered a curse then looked up at the man on the balcony, who was grinning down at him, aiming his pistol at Prophet’s head. He, too, had blue eyes. Cobalt blue. The light of madness glinted in them. A two- or three-day growth of beard stubble bristled on his round, puffy face with thin yellow lips. His eyes were deep set and his nose was long and broad and splotched red and blue from burst blood vessels, a testament to too much drink.

  “Drop the Greener, mister,” Roscoe said through his devious grin. “Or I’ll drop you right where you stand.”