Free Hell's Angel by Peter Brandvold Page B

opposite side of the street from the hotel, up near the jailhouse. The salmon and green light angling over the town from the west revealed the tall, rangy frame and pinto vest of the Rio Bravo Kid. He stood spraddle-legged, thumbs hooked behind his cartridge belt. The barber stood near him, head canted skeptically to one side, watching the grim doings by the well. The barber drew on the cigar he was holding and blew out the smoke as he turned to the Kid and said something that Prophet couldn’t hear.
    Prophet looked around. Where was Mortimer?
    The real threat here had switched to the unseen sheriff. Was the former gunman, Lee Mortimer, trying to plant a pair of rifle sights on Prophet? Prophet knew the man’s reputation as a cold-blooded killer, so it wasn’t out of the realm of possibilities that he might try to bushwhack a man.
    The bounty hunter looked at the dwarf, whose lips had acquired a faint smile, telling Prophet that he might have the drop now, but this wasn’t finished.
    Prophet knew that, too. It could have been finished if he’d had a canteen, but the Rurale sniper had drilled a bullet through the bounty hunter’s flask at the river. The loss of that canteen was even more significant now than it had been before.
    Prophet backed the horse up as far as the Rose Hotel and Saloon, and then he turned Mean around and booted him on down a break between the saloon and a stone, brush-roofed hovel with chickens pecking around the barren yard. A young Mexican woman stood in the shack’s open back door, holding a small baby to her breast and regarding Prophet apprehensively.
    â€œEverything’s all right, senorita,” he said, automatically pinching his hat brim to the nervous mother.
    But he heard the lie in his own words.
    Nothing much was all right here in Moon’s Well, least of all himself.

8
    WHEN PROPHET’S PISTOL had spoken the first time out in front of the hotel, Ruth Rose had been putting a fresh pajama top on her husband, Frank, and she’d jumped with a start, releasing one arm of the top so that it hung off Frank’s bare, pasty shoulder.
    â€œOh, god!” she said, backing into the dresser beside the bed, nearly knocking over the unlit Tiffany lamp.
“Now what?”
    Ruth looked at Frank as though for help. He stared up at her as if seeing right through her, as though he hadn’t heard the gun report, as though he’d neither heard nor been aware of anything at all. He’d been this way since his stroke eighteen months ago, after Moon had come for his monthly tax payment along with a ghastly amount of rent for the land the hotel stood upon. Frank’s eyes were sunken, his cheeks sallow. If he’d heard the reports of the dwarf’s pistol, as when the vile little man had shot the Rangers only a few hours earlier, he’d shown no sign of it.
    Ruth’s heart thudded as her thoughts turned to what was happening outside, and what it might mean for her and Frank. The town of Moon’s Well was a powder keg that would surely soon explode and take her and Frank and the hotel—all that they’d worked for—right along with it. The hotel wasn’t really theirs, for the dwarf owned the land it stood upon and had even imposed a tax on every penny the hotel brought in. Ruth would have abandoned the place and fled the town if Frank had been able to travel.
    She glanced at him once more, quickly buttoning his pajama top as she listened with a keen, raking dread to the men’s voices pitched with anger up the street toward Mordecai Moon’s place. Frank wasn’t capable of dressing himself or feeding himself. Sometimes he didn’t even use the chamber pot she kept beneath the bed for him. He couldn’t speak. At times, she wasn’t even sure he knew her.
    How could she ever get him across the desert and across the panhandle back to Missouri? In a year and a half, he hadn’t stepped foot outside even