The Devil's Lair (A Lou Prophet Western #6) (14 page)

The woman ran her hand along the
horse
’s
sweaty coat and turned to Prophet, narrowing her eyes accusingly.
“Why, she’s been ridden!”

“
Sure looks that way,” Prophet
said. “You’ll wanna take her nice and slow on the way
home.”

He took the
lady
’s arm
and gently lifted her into the saddle, then wheeled and strode back
to Main Street. He waited for a couple of burly miners to pass in a
heavy ore wagon, a cream-colored bulldog barking in the box, before
crossing the street and retrieving his shotgun from the boardwalk
before the stage station. He was a little surprised to see the
shotgun still lying where he’d left it, in a town with Bitter
Creek’s reputation for outlawry.

He stood on the boardwalk before
the closed station house, gazing at the sparse wagon traffic
passing before him—one-horse spring wagons and a few buggies driven
by ranch women no doubt heading for one of Bitter
Creek
’s two
grocery stores.

A few horses were tied to the
hitch racks before the two saloons—the American and the Mother
Lode.
A big
Studebaker was parked before the feed store, and several men
dressed in range clothes were loading fifty-pound oat
sacks.

Prophet
’s brain registered little of it. He
was too busy trying to figure out who wanted him dead. Not that it
was all that bizarre. Bounty hunters made plenty of enemies. But
something in his gut told him that this attempt on his hide had
nothing to do with bounty hunting.

His stomach rumbled, and he
suddenly realized he hadn
’t had breakfast.

Deciding to ponder his problems
later—including what to do about the marshal
’s star he could still feel in
his
denim’s
pocket—he headed east up the street. He’d just stepped off the
boardwalk fronting Polk’s Health Tonic and Drug Emporium when a man
spoke on his left.

“
What was all the shootin’ about
earlier, Mr. Prophet?”

Prophet turned to see the
mild-faced Wallace Polk standing on his store
’s front step. The weather had
warmed, and the door was propped open to the breeze. Polk wore a
white smock and bowler hat. His fair cheeks were still red from the
sunburn he’d incurred on the Scanlons’ trail.

“
You tell me, Mr.
Polk.”

Polk
’s cheeks flushed behind the tan. He
wrinkled his eyes.

“
Forget it,” Prophet said. “I’m
just owly ’cause someone took a shot at me and ran like a
yellow-bellied dung beetle. I’ll feel better once I get some food
in my gut.”

Polk looked concerned.
“Took a shot at you?
And you have no idea who it was?”

“
Man in a blue shirt’s all I
know.” Prophet looked around. Half the men going in and out of the
stores and the land office wore blue shirts. Glancing back at Polk,
Prophet grunted and continued angling across the street.

He turned the corner at the
blacksmith shop and headed south to Gertrude
’s Good Food—a white frame house with
a shabby barn out back. He opened the screen door and heard Ronnie
Williams and a woman talking in the kitchen. They were discussing
the deer. The woman had a German accent.

Gertrude, no doubt.
He
’d seen her
before but had never learned her name.

It was late morning, so Prophet
had his choice of the dozen or so tables covered with red and white
oilcloth, several still bearing dirty breakfast dishes. When
he
’d doffed
his hat and sat down, a full-hipped woman with an attractive, oval
face and thick red hair stepped into the room.

“
Ah, the new marshal!” she said
in her German accent. “No?”

“
No.”

“
No? I thought...”

“
Ma’am, I’m so hungry my stomach
thinks my throat’s been cut, but I don’t have a plug nickel to my
name. If you’d—”

“
You are Mr. Prophet,
no?”

He sighed.
“I’m Prophet.”

She reached back inside the
kitchen, produced a small brown envelope, and walked to
Prophet
’s
table, her swinging hips snapping the stained apron about her
thighs. She was large but graceful, and her face and neck were
flushed from serving the morning breakfast crowd.

Her white blouse was open at the neck, and
her full breasts strained against the cloth. She exuded a raw
sensuality as she smiled and set the envelope on the oilcloth, her
voice a little breathless.

“
Mr. Crumb left this.”

Prophet picked up the envelope, upon which
his name had been penciled. Inside was a note and a small sheaf of
greenbacks. Prophet opened the note:

Mr. Prophet, I am deeply
indebted to you for accepting the marshal
’s job on a temporary basis. By the
time you read this, I’ll have ridden out to talk to a man about
taking the job permanently. With luck, I should have a full-time
marshal in place in a couple of weeks. Enclosed find two hundred
dollars. Your reward money for the Thorson-Mahoney Gang as well as
the Scanlon Gang should be wired here soon. I intend to be back to
Bitter Creek in a few days. Again, your help in this trying time is
very much appreciated.

Gratefully and humbly yours, Henry Crumb,
Bitter Creek Mayor

P.S. I hope the hangover is not overly
severe, ha.

Prophet threw the note and the
money on the table.
“Damn it all!”

The woman
’s brown eyes snapped wide, and her
jaw dropped. “What is wrong—you don’t like?”

Just then, Ronnie Williams stuck
his head through the kitchen door.
“Proph? I thought I heard your voice.
What’s wrong?”

Prophet
’s eyes narrowed. Adding to his
quagmire of problems, the kid was indeed wearing a shirt of the
same faded blue as the threads he’d found on the nail.

It was not
to Lou Prophet’s credit that
when faced with a surfeit of perplexing problems he often turned to
whiskey and women.

The predicament of the ambush
and of the marshal
’s job he seemed to have been hornswoggled into accepting
were certainly not going to be decided on their own. But after he’d
finished breakfast, he told the German woman who ran the
restaurant, by way of small talk, that he was heading over to the
bathhouse for a hot dip.

She responded by inviting him to
take a dip with her in the pantry she
’d turned into a bathroom complete with
big porcelain tub and a small stove with a copper
boiler.

Her devilish smile set off
fireworks in the large, brown eyes flicking across his wide chest.
Cheeks flushed and damp, with wisps of cherry-red hair sticking to
them, she said in stilted English,
“I am closing until four this afternoon,
and vy vaste vater, no?”

Never a man to argue with a
woman
’s good
sense, Prophet followed the girl, whose name he learned was Frieda,
granddaughter of the late Gertrude, into the pantry.

Waiting for the water to boil,
they stripped and made love on their clothes, Prophet grunting
bearlike between the girl
’s spread knees, her ankles crossed on his back,
her hands pulling at his hair.

When they finished, Frieda
donned Prophet
’s hat with a joyous trill, then poured a steaming bath
tempered with cold water from the kitchen pump.

She tested the water with a toe,
took Prophet
’s hand, and in a minute they both stood in the tub.
Prophet soaped Frieda from behind, massaging her large, pendulous
breasts with slow strokes of the perfumed soap, gradually working
his way down to her soft, slightly swollen belly, to her thighs ...
and then the insides of the thighs to the silky nap between her
legs.

She swooned back against him, so that he
practically had to hold her up with one hand while he bathed her
with the other, covering every inch of her big, smooth, hot body
with the soap.

She reached above her head, moaning and
caressing his jaws and clutching his shoulders as though clinging
to a life raft in a raging, boiling sea.

“
Goot enough for now. Now, my
turn,” she said throatily, twisting around to him, taking the soap
as she kissed him.

She opened her mouth, stuck her
warm tongue between his lips, and lapped his teeth as she scrubbed
his broad shoulder blades, hard as a smithy
’s anvil. She kneaded the muscles
with her knuckles and thumbs, pushing and grunting, her hands
owning a bread baker’s strength.

Her pinching, probing, soothing hands worked
down his back, then came around to his belly. She briefly stuck a
finger into his belly button and tittered.

Then both hands were again
caressing, moving higher to the
stone like slabs of his chest. She pinched
at the nipples and pressed the heels of her hands against the
muscle tapering into the sloping, hub like shoulders.

Suddenly, she fell against him,
nibbling his neck while
her hands closed around his jutting tool,
exploring like a blind person learning a hammer by touch. She
worked him into a delirious, near-catatonic state, and when the
last few rational cells in his brain realized they’d better sit
before they fell, he drew her down with him into the
water.

Quickly, she straddled him, or
tried to. The tub was bigger than any he
’d seen beyond San Francisco and St.
Louis, but there wasn’t straddling room. She sat atop him, leaned
back, and draped her feet over the sides. He grabbed her fleshy
butt cheeks in both hands and drew her onto him. She made a noise
that anyone passing the window might have misconstrued as a
guttural cry of shock and horror as he plunged deep within her
liquid, satin depths.

He pistoned her back and forth, up and down,
between his raised knees. When they were finished, there was barely
two gallons of water left in the tub.

“
We made one hell of a mess on
your floor there, Frieda,” he said when he’d caught his
breath.

She was leaning back, as he was,
against her end of the tub. Glancing at the floor, she said,
“It vas vorth every
drop!”

“
It’s been a while, hasn’t
it?”

“
Over two years.”

While they lounged, legs
entwined, Prophet learned that Frieda was only twenty-four, but
she
’d been
married twice, once before she’d come out West with her
grandparents, and once after. The first husband, twenty years her
senior, had killed himself during the stock market troubles of the
early ’70s.

She
’d met her second husband in Bitter Creek.
A young farmer from north of town, he and Frieda had been married
two months when he’d gotten drunk in the Mother Lode and gotten his
throat cut by the shirttail cousin of a prominent Cheyenne
businessman he’d played poker with.

Her grandparents had died of pneumonia last
year, within two weeks of each other, leaving her alone to tend the
restaurant.

“
Lonely place for a pretty,
needful young woman,” Prophet said wistfully. She was nibbling his
ankle like a ham bone. “Ever thought of packin’ it in?”

She looked at him.
“Pack it
in?”

“
You know—hightail it for higher
ground? Leave?”

“
I can’t leave,” she said as if
he’d just suggested she turn cartwheels down Main Street. “My
grandparents left me vith too many debts.”

Prophet shrugged.
“Sell out. Let the
buyer assume your debts.”

She looked at him slack-faced,
as if wondering if he was being serious.
“You don’t know much about Bitter
Creek—do you, Lou?”

“
I reckon not. And though I have
a feelin’ it won’t be good for me, I got a bad itch to
know.”

“
If you vear that badge, take Mr.
Crumb’s two hundred dollars, you vill know soon enough.”

He was about to ask her what she
meant by that when hushed voices rose beyond the
room
’s single
window, followed by the unmistakable rasp of a revolver being
cocked.

Fifteen minutes ago, two riders rode into
Bitter Creek from the south, wending their way between shanties and
piles of split cordwood, scattering chickens and setting several
dogs to barking.

One of the riders, Leo Embry, was tall and
thin, in his early twenties, with a hard-jawed, expressionless
face. A new, wide-brimmed, cream Stetson sat at a rakish angle atop
his head.

Embry wore a yellow-and-red
checked shirt and a silver-plated Remington low on his right hip,
the holster thonged just above his thigh. The shirt, gun, and
holster were new as well. Embry had bought the works in the Bitter
Creek mercantile three months ago, when he
’d decided to become a gunslick, like
his first cousin, Pike Thorson.

The other rider was a kid in his mid-teens
named Gaelin Murphy, an orphan who swamped out saloons and mucked
out livery stalls for spare pocket jingle, meals, and an occasional
place in which to throw down his army blanket.