The Devil's Lair (A Lou Prophet Western #6) (12 page)

“
Proph here has saved this town
from ruin!” Wallace Polk exclaimed, clapping Prophet on the
shoulder.

“
Well, in that case, mister,”
Janice said, canting her head and shutting one eye to stare up at
the big bounty hunter wistfully, “you deserve an extra special
treat on the house.” She smiled at the others. “Don’t you think,
boys?”

All agreed with hearty laughter,
slapping Prophet on the back as the girl led him toward the
room
’s rear
by his right hand. His ears and cheeks were as hot as a
locomotive’s boiler, but he didn’t object. Getting his ashes hauled
was going to be a hell of a lot more fun than getting his picture
taken.

She led him up the stairs at the
back of the saloon
’s main hall. Prophet admired the sexy hitch in her
git-along, nearly salivating at the prospect of taking the girl’s
round butt in both his admiring hands. When she’d opened one of the
doors on the left side of the hall, she led him inside, shut the
door, and turned to him, smiling alluringly.

“
You have no idea how happy I am
to have the Scanlons dead,” she said, her voice growing hard and
her eyes snapping a bit but the smile remaining. “As if we didn’t
have enough trouble without them adding more…”

There it was again—another
allusion to trouble. It went in one of Prophet
’s ears and out the other as he
watched her remove the wrapper, drop it, and begin unlacing the
corset.

“
Well... I was glad to oblige,”
Prophet said, watching heavy-throated as the girl’s smooth, pale
hands loosened the whalebone’s ties.

The corset bobbed away as her breasts sprang
free. The garment dropped and two full breasts lay before him—
porcelain-white and pink-tipped. They were the most delicate of
fruit, highlighted by the window behind her and slightly to the
left.

When she reached up and back to
loosen the bun at the back of her head, the smooth, pale globes
drew up and flattened against her chest. Her hair fell down across
her shoulders, and the breasts resumed their natural shape
once
more,
alluringly framed by the rich blond hair that owned a touch of
sunset red.

The girl
’s full red lips spread with a smoky
smile as she moved toward him, rose up on her tiptoes to kiss him.
He fondled her breasts gently, and she leaned back with a swoon.
Slowly, she began unbuckling his belt and unbuttoning his fly. When
the trousers and his summer underwear fell below his knees, her
eyebrows arched.

“
Oh ... my ... !”

Prophet grinned.
“You do know how to
start a man’s fire.”

“
Yes,” she said breathily, gently
stroking him, inching her face slowly toward the object of her
attention. “Yes, I reckon I do.”

Then she closed her mouth over
him and, as he eased toward the bed, she went to work showing
him—in the kind of expert fashion he
’d known only in cities like Denver and
St. Louis and once in the lodge of an Indian chief’s talented
daughter—how pleased she was that he’d snuffed the Scanlons’
candles and sent them all to hell with coal shovels.

“
You sure are
a well-built man, Lou Prophet,”
Janice cooed as she tattooed his broad chest and tight,
rope-muscled belly with kisses, long after they’d gotten on a
first-name basis.

Naked, he lay back on the
sheets, which he could tell by the starchy smell and crisp feel had
been washed only that morning, and stared dreamily up at the lemon
rectangles the west-angling sun made on the hammered-tin ceiling.
Absently, he squeezed the girl
’s left breast with his right hand and sighed with
contentment.

“
Thank you, Janice. You ain’t
built so almighty bad your ownself.” He frowned at her. “I been in
the saloon a few times and didn’t see you. Where do you keep
yourself anyway?”

She planted a soft kiss on his belly button,
then rose up onto her knees. She straddled him, her pale orbs,
mottled now from his whiskers, swaying this way and that. In her
right hand she held a water glass half-filled with whiskey she and
Prophet had been sharing.

“
The gent who owns the place,
Burt Carr, doesn’t think I should work the main room with the other
two girls. He thinks stayin’ upstairs and only comin’ down for
special occasions or to sing on Saturday nights gives me an air of
mystery.”

With that last, she sipped the whiskey and
threw her head back with theatrical drama, tittering. Then she gave
the glass to Prophet and massaged his equipment back to life with
her own.

“
I see,” Prophet said. The girl
gently engulfed him in her warm, moist center. A deep, happy fog
streamed over him with the golden sunlight angling through the
window. “But I don’t think a girl of your, uh, talents needs any
such smoke and mirrors to make her more enticing. You do just fine
your ownself.”

She tittered again.
“Why, thank you,
Lou. You’re gonna give me a big head!”

“
Wouldn’t be nothin’ you ain’t
already done for me,” he chuckled, his chest shivering, “... four
times, by my last count—”

Before he and Janice were through, the other
posse men began yelling up at him, telling him to quit lazing
around all day and to get down there and help them celebrate the
demise of the Scanlon Gang. Prophet and Janice ignored them, though
they got louder and louder. Someone even banged the ceiling with a
broomstick or something.

“
Oh, I guess we shouldn’t be
rude,” Janice allowed, taking Prophet’s wide, scarred, sun-seared
face in her hands and planting a brusque peck on his nose. “But
God, I could stay here all week!”

Prophet reckoned she was right,
and after they
’d each taken a sponge bath and helped each other dress,
Prophet and Janice left the room and headed for the stairs. They
strolled arm-in-arm down the staircase at the rear of the main hall
and joined the crowd that had grown so large
several men had to stand in the
open batwings to drink their beers.

Prophet hadn
’t walked far before a beer was
thrust into one hand, a whiskey shot in the other. He got separated
from Janice for a while, and then she was on his knee as he sat at
a table in the middle of the room, surrounded by townsmen standing
or sitting, all drinking beer or whiskey or tequila and generally
stomping with their tails up.

After a few drinks, the world got hazy. It
kept getting hazier until he was only vaguely aware of being helped
up a staircase that kept skittering out from under him like the
deck of a storm-battered ship. The world became a dark, warm arena
of vague, erotic sensations punctuated with the sounds of girls
cooing, sighing, and tittering.

Then it went black altogether.

He didn
’t know how much time had passed
before he awoke. Opening his eyes and blinking against intense,
golden light sending razor like javelins careening through his
brain, he found himself lying face down on a soft bed, one foot on
the floor as if to keep the world from spinning.

He blinked again, lifted his
head, and turned from the light. Two girls lay beside him, one
practically on top of the other, one wedged so tightly against him
their skin stuck as if glued. He saw that, under the fan of blond
hair in her face, the one closest to him was Janice. The other was
a sandy-blonde, shorter and plumper than Janice, lying
face down, her head
on Janice’s right shoulder, facing the opposite
direction.

Tracy, her name was. Or was it Stacey?
Possibly Lacey ...

All that Prophet could remember about the
girl was that she had one blue eye, one brown eye, and a bawdy
laugh. He also had some vague, half-remembered images of Janice and
Tracy getting nearly as friendly with each other as they had with
him.

Prophet groaned and put the
brunt of his weight on his left foot clamped tight against the
floor. Janice stirred and muttered sleepily,
“Mornin’, Marshal.”

Prophet frowned down at her as he pushed
himself to a sitting position, planting both feet on the floor.

Marshal?

She must have had as much to
drink last night as he, and was imagining she
’d spent the night with Whitman.
Hard to imagine Prophet being mistaken for the older Whitman,
though.

And a little insulting ...

He stood and was pleased to note
the room no longer spun, but only wobbled a little. He and the
girls had slept without covers, but the room owned a morning chill
in spite of the sun slanting through the windows, so he covered
them both with a quilt. As he did so, Janice yawned luxuriously,
stretched her arms over her head, catlike, then turned onto her
side, muttering,
“Oh ... I feel so safe…”

Prophet grunted, chuckling, and reached for
his underwear. Pulling on the threadbare underclothes, he smacked
his lips, noting the taste of whiskey as well as beer and tequila.
It made his stomach roll, tempering his desire for a cigarette.

When he had his jeans on, he reached for the
buckskin shirt lying over a chair back. Something clattered against
the chair. Something solid and tinny.

He held up the shirt with one hand and
scowled. He blinked again, only vaguely aware of the ball-peen
hammers smacking both temples in unison. Pulling the shirt closer
to his face, he studied it as if some dog had shit on it.

But that wasn
’t a dog stain up there over the
right pocket sewn with cow gut. It was a five-pointed star on which
the words BITTER CREEK MARSHAL had been engraved.

Suddenly, he was as sober as a
Baptist sky pilot.
“What the hell is this all about?”

He turned to the two sleeping
beauties in his bed, elongated lumps under the rose-trimmed white
quilt.
“What
the hell is this all about?” He held out the shirt in his right
fist.

Tracy sighed and rolled over.
Janice moved her right foot and mumbled into her pillow,
“Not now, Lou,
please. We really need our sleep.” And then she was again breathing
deeply through parted lips.

With mute exasperation, Prophet plucked the
star from the shirt, jammed it into his jeans pocket, and quickly
donned the shirt. No longer trying to be quiet and ignoring his
throbbing, hungover brain, he stomped into his boots, grabbed his
gunbelt off a bedpost, and wrapped it around his waist.

Looking around, he saw with relief that
someone had brought his rifle and shotgun up from downstairs.
Grabbing both, he stalked out of the room, closing the door behind
him and donning his hat.

“
Mornin’, Marshal,” greeted the
barman, sweeping up last night’s liquor- and tobacco-stained
sawdust at the bottom of the stairs. The tall balding man smiled up
at Prophet ingratiatingly. “Did you have a good time last
night?”

“
I must have had such a good,
heel-stompin’ ole time that someone pinned this here badge on my
chest.” Prophet dug the star out of his shirt pocket and flipped it
in his hand. “You don’t know nothin’ about that, do you?” He
couldn’t remember the man’s name, if he’d been told.

The man stopped sweeping and
held the broom
’s handle in both his callous-gnarled hands. “Why, sure.
Don’t you remember? Henry Crumb—that’s our mayor and the depot
agent—talked ye into takin’ the marshal’s job ... at least until
your reward money for the Thorson-Mahoney bunch gets wired to the
bank anyways. We sure do appreciate that, Mr. Proph—I mean,
Marshal!”

The barman grinned, showing big,
chipped, tobacco-stained teeth and red-rimmed eyes. No doubt,
he
’d joined
in last night’s celebration.

“
Crumb, eh?” Prophet grumbled
thoughtfully, giving
the star another flip. “Much obliged—uh, what was your name
again?”

“
Burt Carr’s my handle, Marshal.
I hope my girls pleased you well enough. Anytime you want another
roll in the proverbial hay—”

Prophet kicked an empty bottle
and headed for the saloon
’s front doors, his pulse throbbing
angrily.

Outside, he got his bearings and headed for
the telegraph office, nearly getting run down by a battered yellow
farm wagon in the process.

“
Sorry about that, Marshal!”
yelled the grizzled old-timer on the driver’s seat, yanking back on
the reins of his beefy dun.

Prophet snarled and continued across the
street, mounting the opposite boardwalk.

He was frowning at the shades
drawn over the stage station
’s two front windows and at the placard tacked to
the door:
out
of town on business until next Tuesday.

“
Next
Tuesday!”

An unseen projectile sliced the
air about two inches in front of his nose and shattered the window
behind him. He heard the rifle
’s crack a half second later as, recoiling from
the bullet’s close passage, he stumbled sideways. Tripping on his
own feet, he hit the boardwalk.

He cursed and jerked a look
across the street. A rifle barrel flashed sunlight as a gunman
ducked behind the false facade jutting above the
bank
’s shake
roof.