The Devil's Lair (A Lou Prophet Western #6) (22 page)

The hall had fallen silent. All eyes had
turned to him,
tense, waiting

It took about five seconds for the others
in the hall to realize what had happened. The man to the green-eyed
gunman’s left made the first move, bolting to his feet and clawing
his Beaumont-Adams revolver from his holster.

He had the pistol chest-high when his head
took the blast from the sawed-off’s left barrel. The distance was
great enough, the spread of the buckshot wide enough, that the
blast didn’t blow the head off the man’s shoulders, only turned it
tomato-red and sprayed blood across the two men sitting on either
side of him.

As the man stumbled backward, shrieking,
his revolver popped, the wayward slug tearing into the green-eyed
gunman’s right boot toe, evoking another raucous bellow.

Now the three other gunmen,
including the big Irishman by the batwings—had filled their hands
with iron. Down on one knee, his face splattered with blood and
wincing against the pain in his hand and toe, the green-eyed man
shouted,
“Kill
that son of a bitch!”

Two pistols cracked, the slugs whistling
past Prophet’s head and burying themselves in the wall behind
him.

Another gunman stepped behind a ceiling
joist, his frock coat swirling about his holsters. He extended his
revolver, fired two quick, errant shots, and ran for the stairs,
taking three steps at a time as he headed for the balcony.
Straightening from a crouch behind the railing, Prophet extended
the barn-blaster straight out in his left hand, and fired.

“
Gee-awww!”
the man screamed as the
double-aught buck took him through the chest and shoulders, blowing
him back against the wall in mid-stride.

He bounced off the wall, dislodging a gaudy
painting of a naked Indian girl riding a white horse. He stumbled
forward and fell headfirst over the rail, somersaulting to the main
floor.

He landed with a thud buried in the
yelling and the pistol shots directed at Prophet, who’d dropped to
his side, behind the railing, letting the slugs sail over him and
into the wall or snap widgets from the scrolled rail supports. He
cast aside the coach gun and extended the Peacemaker.

As a slug tore through a support post six
inches to the right of his head, he fired two quick rounds. One
clipped an empty chair while the other took the big Irishman, who
was bolting around the tables holding a Winchester across his
chest, through the shoulder.

The man cursed as the bullet spun him around
and into a table, tossing the Winchester out before him.

As several more shots wracked the room,
Prophet grabbed his shotgun and rolled back against the balcony’s
rear wall. Quickly, his hands working automatically, he broke open
the shotgun and replaced the spent shells with new. Snapping the
gun back together, he rose to a crouch, bolted forward ten feet,
then ran to the railing.

As he extended the shotgun and thumbed
back the rabbit-ear hammers, he saw that two tables had been
overturned. The fourth gunman and the green-eyed man, who’d
produced another pistol, were hunkered down behind them.

To the table overturned on his left, he
offered both barrels, the report sounding like a Napoleon cannon in
the wood-lined room. The buckshot blew the table nearly in two,
evoking pained cries from behind it. But Prophet didn’t have time
to survey his damage.

Dropping the empty shotgun, he
crouched, ran back to his left, and extended the Peacemaker,
thumbing back the hammer as the Irishman bolted out from behind a
chair, yelling, “You’re a dead son of a bitch now, me
boy!”

He extended his own six-shooter, aiming
toward the balcony. He and Prophet fired at the same time. The
Irishman’s shot nipped Prophet’s left arm, just above the elbow.
Prophet’s shot crunched through the Irishman’s brisket. Wailing and
raging, flailing his arms for balance, the big man stumbled
backward and crashed through an overturned table.

Spying movement to his right, Prophet
turned to see one of the gunmen jerk Janice out from behind an
overturned table in the room’s southeast corner. “No!” she cried.
She folded her arms protectively over her naked breasts and
clutched her head. “Please don’t shoot me! Stop!”

Burt Carr’s head appeared above the table.
He reached for the girl, but the gunman jerked her out of his
grasp, thrusting her shield like out before him. Janice’s face
paint was smeared by perspiration and tears as she stared up at
Prophet, beseeching.

Her light-blond hair hung in tangles along
her face. Her pale, plump body looked terribly fragile against the
tall gunman standing behind her, one arm crooked around her neck,
the other holding a long-barreled Remington to her head.

Her lips trembled.

“
Throw those irons down here,”
the man shouted through gritted teeth barely visible behind his
soup-strainer mustache. “Or I drill daylight through this bitch’s
skull!”

Prophet straightened slowly, his pistol in
one hand, the shotgun in the other, keeping them raised just above
the balcony rail and extended only halfway.

“
Now, why would you wanna go and
do a thing like that?”

“
I said—”

The crack of Prophet’s revolver stopped
the man only two words into his sentence, drilling a small, round
hole through the left corner of his mustache. The man’s head
whipped back on his shoulders. Janice screamed and dropped to her
knees as the Remington drilled a bullet into a rafter.

Prophet waited, Colt extended, to see if
another shot would be necessary.

But then he saw the hardcase drop his
Remington as he crumpled up beside the piano, near where Sorley
Kitchen was cowering behind the overturned bench. The man panted
like a dying dog, jerking both legs wildly.

Prophet slid his gaze through the smoke
haze, looking around for more threats. What he saw resembled the
aftermath of an Eastern hurricane. Tables and chairs were
overturned, glass and bottles strewn about the floor, blood
painting the sawdust, brass spittoons, square-hewn ceiling joists,
and chairs.

Prophet caught only glimpses of patrons
cowering behind overturned tables. One man had dived behind the
bar; now he peered over the mahogany, only his scalp and eyes
visible.

The only sound was Janice sobbing quietly
where she had fallen onto her knees.

Three of the five gunslicks could be written
off. The one Prophet had blasted from behind the table was
questionable, hidden as he was beneath the rubble of the
shotgun-blasted table.

The green-eyed man, lying under a broken
chair, grunted and wheezed. Cursing, he flung the chair aside,
heaved himself onto a knee, and grabbed a pistol off the floor.
Grunting and wheezing, he climbed to his feet and hopped on one
foot toward the batwings.

“
Hold it,” Prophet said, leveling
his Peacemaker.

The man stopped, wobbled on his left foot,
nearly fell, and turned, raising the revolver.

Wanting the man alive to answer questions,
Prophet shot him through his left thigh. The hardcase screamed,
fired a stray shot, twisted around, and dropped to both knees.
Prophet hurried downstairs, keeping the Colt extended before
him.

He was halfway across the room, kicking
overturned chairs and tables out of his way, when the hardcase
scooped the pistol off the floor. He turned toward Prophet, who
stopped and said, “Don’t do it, damnit!”

The hardcase grinned with savage defiance
and extended his .44.

“
Ah, shit,” Prophet
said.

He shot the man through the forehead,
spraying the batwings with blood. The man flew onto his back, legs
curled beneath his butt. His arms flopped like the wings of a
wounded bird trying to take flight, then lay still.

Prophet lowered the Colt and walked to the
gunslick, now staring up through his half-open, death-glazed eyes,
the snarl still curling his mustache.

Blood dribbled down the batwings behind
him, through which one of the saloon’s disheveled customers slipped
with a distasteful expression, and hurried off down the
boardwalk.

Prophet looked around the room. Sorley
Kitchen had crawled from his hiding spot and was bending over the
hardcase lying under the table. The banker, Ralph Carmody,
inspected the Irishman.

Prophet said, “He dead,
Sorley?”

Kitchen nodded. “Just took his last
breath.”

Prophet turned to the banker. “What about
yours, Carmody?”

“
Deader’n hell.” The banker gazed
around the room, wincing and clearing the smoke from his face with
his hand and regarding Prophet anxiously. “You killed ’em all,
deader’n Hell …”

“
Better them than me. Who were
they anyway?”

Carmody glanced at Kitchen.

“
Just owlhoots, I reckon,” the
banker said, avoiding Prophet’s eyes. He looked at the five men
who’d crawled out from behind their poker table near the front of
the room. “One of you men fetch the undertaker, will
you?”

As one of the five scrambled through the
batwings, Carmody turned, looked around the blood and wreckage,
grabbed his hat from under a chair, and headed for the
batwings.

“
Hey,” Prophet called to the
banker, wrinkling his brows. “Who were these men ... and what in
the hell were they doing here?”

Without turning, Carmody shrugged, paused
before the doors, and wrinkled his nose at the blood. He jabbed the
right batwing open with a finger, and slipped through the crack,
careful not to spoil his fine, gray suit.

The other poker players regarded Prophet
sheepishly and, worrying their hat brims in their hands, headed for
the door. “Frank, Shep,” Prophet called to two of them, his voice
raised with impatience, “who were these men?”

The two shrugged and filed outside.

Prophet turned to the back of the room.
Several other customers had crawled out from their hiding places
and were making for the door, avoiding Prophet’s eyes.

Hearing a loud sob, Prophet turned to see
Janice kneeling beside Burt Carr, wrapping the man’s bloody hand
with a handkerchief. As she worked, sobbing and sniffing, she
seemed oblivious to the fact that she was as naked as the day she
was born.

Carr’s face was ashen and sweat-streaked,
his lips stretched painfully back from his teeth. “That’ll get me
over to the doc, Janice. You ... you best go on upstairs ... take
care of yourself. Take a bottle from behind the bar. On
me...”

With another sob, she nodded, stood, and
walked over to the bar, her full breasts jiggling. Her pale
nakedness in the room’s smoky ruins lent the room a dreamlike
quality.

As she went behind the bar and removed a
bottle from the back shelf, Carr headed for the batwings, squeezing
his wounded left hand with his right. Then Janice walked up the
stairs, the bottle in her hand, casting an oblique look at Prophet
over her naked right shoulder.

When Janice disappeared through the door
at the top of the stairs, Prophet and Sorley Kitchen were the only
living men left in the place. Kitchen looked dumbly around for
several seconds, slowly shaking his head. “Buckshot shore leaves an
oozy corpse.”

Seeing Prophet staring at him, scowling,
he recoiled as if from a gunshot and bolted toward the entrance
calling, “I’ll help you over to the doc’s place, Burt!”

Prophet stepped in front of the man, feet
spread, blocking his way. “Old man, you ain’t goin’ nowhere till I
get some answers.”

The stove-up ranch cook was
nearly bawling. “What makes ye think I know anything? I don’t
know
nothin’!”

The old man was quicker than he looked;
before Prophet could grab him, he’d feinted right and bolted left.
When Prophet got turned around, all he saw were the two batwing
doors shuddering in the oldster’s wake.

His eyes flinty,
Prophet turned back
to the dead men.

He walked over to the leader, hunkered
down on his haunches, and searched the man’s pockets for
identification, finding only playing cards, a derringer, and thirty
dollars in silver.

He was patting down the man’s vest pockets
when he glanced at the sightless green eyes and froze.

There was something familiar about those
eyes and soup-strainer mustache, that deep crease low on the left
cheek. After a few seconds, a name washed up from the gloom.

Dean Lovell.

Regulator from Colorado and New Mexico.
Worked for cattlemen mostly, but he wasn’t picky—anyone who had a
score they couldn’t settle themselves. Prophet had seen him once
before, with the famous cattleman Lou Dempsey in the Kansas House
in Trinidad, Colorado.

Prophet left the silver and other
possibles for the undertaker and headed over to Frieda’s place for
some answers he knew he wouldn’t get anywhere else. Unless he put a
gun to someone’s head. He found the cafe empty. The lovely redhead
was cleaning tables.

She looked up when Prophet walked in,
slack with fatigue. “Lou!” Her eyes found the blood on his left arm
and she added with quiet concern, “Your arm ...”

He offered a wan smile. “Just a scratch.”
He sat down at one of the clean tables, setting the Richards on the
chair to his right, tossing his hat down on top of it.