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  Prophet dispatched one of the soldiers—a fat corporal with a long, tangled beard—before the man could slip his Remington from a shoulder holster, sending him into a bizarre pirouette across the bench. The robe-wearing bounty hunter killed two more with a single bullet each before the Colts leaped and roared four more times, and all seven Rurales were either down or going down bloody, screaming and yipping like coyotes, one blindly triggering his revolver through the cheek of a bellowing compatriot.

  As powder smoke billowed around him, Prophet quickly aimed his cocked Colts at the guard tower just left of the open doors, where a Gatling gun bristled like a giant, deadly mosquito, flashing brassily in the late-morning sun. He ratcheted back both hammers but held fire when he saw the guard who’d been manning the tower turn a somersault off the tower’s rickety wooden rail, losing his sombrero and rifle and hitting the ground with a dull thud that clipped his horrified shriek.

  His rifle landed with a clatter a half second later.

  Two familiar figures stood in the tower—peon-revolutionarios in their traditional white pajamas, serapes, and wagon-wheel sombreros. The younger man held a machete while the older one, known as Tio Largo, or “Big Tio,” grinned delightedly down at Prophet while turning the Gatling gun toward the fort’s courtyard with a squawk of its dry cylinder swivel and squatting down behind it.

  Prophet lifted a hand to his temple in salute and dropped to a knee to reload his gut shredder. When he’d filled both tubes and closed the ten-gauge with a loud clack, he jerked with a start as Tio shouted, “Here they come, Lou!” and opened up with the Gatling gun, laying down a deadly line of fire on the courtyard where Rurales in all stages of dress poured out the doors of the prison buildings and stables.

  A second later, one of the other Gatlings in another guard tower began roaring as well. Looking up as he shook spent casings from one of his .45s, then filling the empty chambers from his cartridge belt, Prophet saw a dozen or so peon-revolutionarios—all Big Tio’s men whom Prophet had thrown in with in the scrubby hills around Del Rio—whooping and hollering as they spilled down the fort’s east and north walls.

  They dangled from ropes or dropped into the courtyard while the men behind the deadly Gatling guns turned the Rurales spilling out of the guardhouses and barracks and big central prison block to a wheeling, screaming mass of bloody carnage tumbling down stone steps or rolling in the hard-packed, straw- and dung-littered dirt of the yard.

  Above the din rose a girl’s shrill scream.

  Prophet gritted his teeth as he spun the cylinder of his third filled Colt, wedged the gun behind his cartridge belts, grabbed his shotgun, and sprinted between the fort’s gaping doors and into the bloody, smoky melee of the courtyard, bellowing, “Looo-eeeezzzz-ahhhhh!”

  2

  RUNNING THROUGH THE gate’s open doors and into the prison courtyard, Prophet threw a hand in the air, signaling Big Tio to hold off with the Gatling gun.

  He heard the Mexican revolutionario leader shout the cease-fire orders to the other towers, all four of which had been overtaken by the nimble, mountain-bred rebels while Prophet had diverted the guards’ attention outside the front gate.

  The angry, ragtag bunch led by Big Tio had been chomping at the bit to take out the corrupt Rurale contingent stationed here at San Cristobal for several months. The Rurale officer overseeing the headquarters and prison, Major Rudofo Montoya, was in the business of kidnapping young women from the nearby mountain villages and selling them into prostitution in the mining perditions of southern Chihuahua, where isolated rock breakers, more savage than any Apache or Yaqui, paid good money for female companionship. The younger the better.

  But while they paid good money for the young women and girls—some as young as eight—they went through them quite quickly, always needing more. Prophet’s sometime partner, sometime lover, Louisa Bonaventure, had been caught in a trap sprung by Major Montoya three weeks ago in the village of Del Rio, and she and the young peasant girls she’d been captured with had been brought here where they were awaiting transportation by mule train into the Sierra Madres.

  All this Prophet had learned from Big Tio’s spies. And that was when the American bounty hunter, who’d met Big Tio on a bounty-hunting expedition to Mexico several years ago, had helped the revolutionario leader organize the raid on the prison here at San Cristobal.

  Now, as the Gatling’s cover fire died, leaving countless Rurales sprawled and groaning around the big monastery building that Montoya had converted into a prison, Prophet dropped to a knee and extended the sawed-off shotgun from his right side.

  Two Rurales had just bolted out of a low, arched doorway in the officer’s headquarters in front of him, one extending a rifle toward Big Tio’s guard tower, the other clamping a hand to a bloody shoulder while cursing loudly in Spanish and raising a pearl-gripped Remington. Prophet tripped both triggers, and the stout weapon leaped and roared in his hands, blowing both officers off their feet and piling them up on the floor of the low stone stoop just outside the door from which they’d emerged.

  Big Tio’s roaring laughter carried down from the guard tower. “Lou, remind me to buy that savage popper from you before we part ways again, amigo!”

  Prophet snorted and, realizing he was still wearing the cumbersome brown robes, shrugged out of them, letting them drop to the dust. Beneath he wore only his longhandle top and denim trousers, which he’d rolled up nearly to his knees to give the impression that the robes were all he had on. Jerking the cuffs down to his bare ankles, making it easier to run, he leaped a dying Rurale as he headed past the officer’s headquarters, making for the prison’s main doors.

  With rifles, pistols, machetes, sickles, and any other weapon the peasants had managed to get their hands on, Tio’s men were cutting down the Rurales who’d dodged the Gatling fire. The gunshots were sporadic but furious. Men screamed and cursed and one dying Rurale was down and wailing near horse stables, from which the frightened screams of the horses sounded above the shooting.

  The prison’s main, double doors stood at the top of high stone steps that fairly glowed in the midday sun. At the bottom of the steps, a Rurale guard who’d been shot through the belly was crawling toward his dropped rifle. Prophet drilled a .45 round through the guard’s head from point-blank range then took the steps three at a time, his bare feet slapping the hot stones as he heard once more the shrill scream of the girl inside the mission /prison.

  Hearing several of Big Tio’s men running up the steps behind him, Prophet pulled one of the heavy, brass-handled doors open, throwing it wide so the revolutionario behind him could catch it. He bolted inside, his shotgun dangling from the wide leather lanyard around his neck, holding a cocked Colt pistol in each big, calloused hand.

  A ways inside the door, a girl sat on the floor against a cracked stone pillar. A tray, a broken bottle of clear glass, and two shot glasses lay nearby. The senorita, only fourteen or fifteen, was barefoot, and her shabby gray skirt was pulled up around her dark brown thighs. Silver hoop rings dangled from her ears. She wore no blouse. Her small, tan breasts peeked out from behind her long, mussed hair, which was the color of dark chocolate.

  Her brown eyes flashed in terror when they found Prophet, and her entire body quivered as she crossed her thin arms on her chest and loosed another scream.

  Prophet looked around quickly. Spying no other movement in the broad, dark foyer and atop the flagstone stairs that rose on his right, he lowered his pistols and moved inside, gesturing to the revolutionarios behind him to spread out. They needed no further orders; they all knew that their mission here was to kill every Rurale they ran into and to free the prisoners from the dungeon moldering in the bowels of the hideous place.

  As the men ran off, some up the stairs, their sandals or bare feet slapping the floor, the barks of pistols sounding presently, echoing up and down the halls, Prophet dropped to a knee beside the girl. “You’re all right, senorita. No one’s gonna hurt you. Comprende?” He switched
to his cow-pen Spanish, gesturing with his hands. “We’re here to set you free.”

  The girl stared at him in awe, her brown eyes wide. Relief washed over her round features, and her thin lips shaped a shivering smile. “You are the one called Prophet!”

  She grabbed his arm with both her small hands, digging her fingers in. “You have come like she said you would!”

  “Who?” Prophet asked, unable to control his own excitement. Only one person could have told the girl about him. “Who said I would?”

  “La muchacha rubia!”

  The girl’s voice was nearly drowned by more gunfire inside the building, the shots echoing loudly with the screams and shouts of fighting, dying men. Prophet set his pistols on the floor and grabbed the girl’s shoulders, shaking her gently, unable to contain his own excitement.

  Ever since he’d heard that Louisa had been taken, he’d been sure he’d find her ravaged body along the trail. Or worse, he’d never find her at all and he’d have to finish out his days, wondering what had happened to the beautiful, persnickety, young hazel-eyed blond—beautiful like a stalking panther, some would say, for there were few deadlier bounty killers than Louisa Bonaventure—who’d been born and raised in Nebraska Territory by a family she’d seen mercilessly butchered by cutthroats.

  “Where, senorita?” Prophet pleaded with the girl. “Where is the muchacha rubia?”

  She pointed up the stairs and prattled off Spanish too fast for Prophet to follow beyond gathering that Louisa was two flights of stairs up and on this side of the building. He stopped another of Big Tio’s men making his way into the foyer and ordered the man to give his serape to the girl and to stay with her until it was safe to take her out.

  As the older, fatherly gent quickly lifted his serape over his head and knelt down beside the girl, Prophet holstered his pistols and hustled up the stone steps, breeching his shotgun and replacing the spent wads with fresh. He quickly checked out the second story, finding nothing but empty rooms, before heading up to the third, where, as he strode slowly along the dim hall, his ears sharply pricked, he saw a shadow move under a door.

  The door was not latched, and as Prophet stopped in front of it, it moved slightly.

  He stopped, squared his shoulders, and rammed his right boot against the heavy door. A man gave a cry as Prophet bolted into the room, his shotgun in one hand, a Colt in the other, and saw a scrawny, curly-headed, thick-mustached man wearing lieutenant’s bars on his grimy tunic stumbling back toward large windows. He tried to set his feet and aim the pistol in his hand, but Prophet shot him twice with the Colt.

  As the lieutenant sagged down against the far wall, Prophet raked his gaze around the large, high-ceilinged room, seeing nothing but a few desks, near-empty book-cases, a Mexican flag jutting from a brass stand, and two empty gun racks.

  A door showed in the room’s left wall, set deep in an arched doorway between two filing cabinets. Prophet punched the latch. It was locked.

  He put his ear up to the heavy, tall door on which a wooden crucifix hung from a nail. He heard something behind the door, but he wasn’t able to tell exactly what.

  He said, “Louisa?”

  A groan.

  Prophet bunched his lips and stepped straight back away from the door, aiming a pistol at the tarnished brass latch. The gun popped, blowing a quarter-sized hole through the lock. The door jerked and shuddered as it swung halfway open, and Prophet bolted inside, tossing the shotgun over his shoulder to hang from the lanyard down his back and raising both Colts while thumbing their hammers back.

  He stopped and looked around at the large, cave-like room—at the opulent furnishings including a wagon-sized, canopied bed against the room’s far wall . . . and on which a blond girl lay on her back, her wrists and ankles tied to the bed’s four oak posters. The varnished wood glistened in the sunlight webbed with gold motes streaming through the heavy velvet drapes over the three large windows to Prophet’s right.

  His heart kicked like a mustang in his chest.

  Holding both Colts straight out in front of him, he moved ahead slowly. The smell of cigar smoke hung heavy in the still air. He could hear only intermittent shots and shouts on the other side of the building. Knowing he could very well be walking into a trap, he swung his gaze from left to right and back again but, seeing no one in the large room except for the naked blond tied spread-eagle upon the rumpled bed, he advanced.

  Prophet stopped at the end of the bed and looked once more around the room that was all bright sunlight and shadows before returning his gaze to the girl. He climbed onto the bed and crawled up to straddle her hips, noting the scrapes and bruises on her long, pale legs. He set his guns down on each side of the girl, noting that her chest rose and fell faintly.

  Tipping his head over her chest, he was grateful to hear a heartbeat, albeit a faint one.

  “Louisa.” His voice was low and thick with restrained emotion. “Jesus, girl, what in the hell’d that old bastard do to you?”

  He choked back a sob as he inspected her face—her beautiful angel’s face that was now puffed and bruised, eyes swollen shut, the rich full lips cracked, her cheeks torn from the slaps of powerful, be-ringed hands. Louisa’s breasts were red mottled, chafed. There were even knuckle-shaped bruises on her flat belly, and on her hips were what could only be cigar burns.

  Prophet reached up to pull his big bowie knife from the sheath tethered behind his neck and cut the girl’s right wrist free of the poster.

  “It’s okay, Louisa. You’re gonna be all right. Ole Lou’s here, and he’s gonna get you outta here.”

  He reached over to free the girl’s other wrist and stopped. He’d heard something. Looking around quickly, he saw a cigar smoldering in a stone ashtray on a table beside the bed, near a half-filled glass of clear liquid—probably tequila. His gaze continued roaming and stopped on the heavy drapes over the windows. They were billowing ever-so-slightly.

  Might only be the breeze through the window, but . . .

  Prophet’s eyes dropped to the floor beneath the moving drapes and bored angrily into two pale, bare, bunion-gnarled feet that appeared between the drapes and the floor.

  Prophet hardened his jaw and, scooping up both Colts from beside Louisa, stepped down from the bed.

  3

  PROPHET RATCHETED BACK the Colts’ hammers and held them out before him as he crossed the room and stopped six feet away from the drapes. He looked down at the bare feet. They hadn’t moved since he’d first spied them from the bed, and for a moment he wondered if they weren’t part of some ugly stone statue.

  The velvet drapes moved again slightly, as though a round paunch was pushing against them from the other side.

  Suddenly, one of the feet moved, and a voice snarled as a bare arm shoved the drapes back to reveal a naked man with a large, bulbous belly and long, birdlike, blue-veined legs lunging toward Prophet with a pearl-gripped knife raised high in his right hand.

  His silver-streaked hair was thin, his face hawkish, with eyes so deep-set it was impossible to tell their color. He reeked of smoke and tequila and sweat, and as he lunged toward Prophet, whipping the knife toward Prophet’s neck, the bounty hunter triggered both pistols.

  The booms thundered in the close quarters, the maws flashing brightly.

  The naked man—it had to be Major Montoya himself, who always kept the prettiest of his prisoners for his own sick pleasure—jerked back against the drapes and the wall flanking them, between the two tall windows. Squeezing his eyes closed and sucking a sharp breath through gritted, yellow teeth, he twisted around, dropping the knife and clamping his hands over the twin bullet holes in his belly, just above his pale, limp pecker.

  He dropped to his knees, threw his head back, and loosed a tooth-gnashing scream. When the scream’s echoes had died, his wide, pain-racked eyes raked Prophet venomously. “Who are you, gringo bastard? And what are you doing in my private quarters—you who have the manners of a back-street cur!”

  Pro
phet would have loved to keep the man alive for a while, to let him die slowly as his blood and guts leaked out on the polished flagstones around his bony, white knees. But he had Louisa to tend to.

  “Love to stay an’ chat, but I gotta run, Major. Suffice it to say that girl over there’s a real good friend of mine. So when you see El Diablo, which you’re about to do in about three seconds, tell him his old friend Prophet said to crank the furnace up.”

  The major’s eyes opened wider, as did his mouth, but Prophet rendered the man’s scream stillborn by drilling two .45 slugs through each temple, hammering him back into the wall behind him with a sharp thud and a then a groan of the man’s released final breath.

  As he hit the floor, he gave a loud fart, and kicked his spindly legs wildly. Prophet holstered his pistols and hurried back to the bed, where he cut Louisa free of the other posters, wrapped her up in a blanket, and picked her up in his arms.

  “You with me, girl?” he said, turning toward the door he’d blown open. “Stay with me, all right? Wouldn’t hurt if you said somethin’ or opened your eyes a little, let ole Lou know you know I’m here.”

  As Prophet passed through the door, Louisa gave a groan. Her eyes fluttered, and she rolled her head toward him, burying her face in his bicep.

  “Good enough,” Prophet said as he moved through the office toward the dim hall beyond. “That’s good enough for now.”

  He found his way to the door through which he’d entered the building and stood blinking in the sunlight at the top of the steps. Two covered wagons had been driven into the yard and stopped amongst several Rurales lying dead in the dirt.

  Big Tio’s revolutionarios were scurrying about the wagons with the group of young girls standing nearby, sobbing and shading their eyes against the sunshine. Just led up from the dungeons in the prison bowels, they all looked disheveled in their sackcloth dresses, their hair hanging limp and lusterless. Several showed bruises on their young, pretty faces and on their bare legs. That some had been forced to walk from where they’d been captured was evident by their bloody, swollen feet.