Helldorado Read Free Page B

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