Stagecoach to Purgatory (Lou Prophet, Bounty Hunter) - Softcover

Brandvold, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0786043466 ISBN 13: 9780786043460

Publisher: Pinnacle, 2018

Synopsis

When it comes to gun-blazing, bone-crushing action, no one tells a tale like acclaimed Western writer Peter Brandvold. These are the violent days (and reckless nights) of Lou Prophet, as told to his ink-stained confessor. Most of these recollections are brutal. Others are bloody. Some might even be true . . .
 
LAST STAGE TO HELL
What do you get when you take one stagecoach out of Denver, add a thousand-or-so bullets whizzing past your head, while sitting next to two headless corpses caught in the crossfire? If your name is Lou Prophet, you get revenge. Raucous, rowdy, ruthless revenge. Next question?
 
DEVIL BY THE TAIL
How do you catch a fork-tongued demon who’s busted out of prison to wreak all sorts of unholy hell on a small Texas town? If you’re Lou Prophet, you team up with red-hot Louisa Bonaventura, aka “The Vengeance Queen,” and cut a swath of merciless Prophet mayhem in return.
 
Due process be damned . . .
 
Praise for Peter Brandvold
 
“A storyteller who knows the West.”—Bill Brooks, author of Stolen Horses
 
“A writer to watch.”—Spur Award-winning author Jory Sherman
 
“Action-packed . . . for fans of traditional westerns.”—Booklist

About this title

About the Author

Western novelist Peter Brandvold was born and raised in North Dakota. He has penned over one hundred fast-action westerns under his own name and his penname, Frank Leslie. Head honcho at Mean Pete Publishing, publisher of lightning-fast western ebooks, he has lived all over the American West but currently lives in western Minnesota. Follow his life and works at www.peterbrandvold.blogspot.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Stagecoach To Purgatory

The Violent Days Of Lou Prophet, Bounty Hunter

By Peter Brandvold

KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.

Copyright © 2018 Peter Brandvold
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7860-4346-0

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright Page, 
Dedication, 
LAST STAGE TO HELL, 
DEVIL BY THE TAIL, 
Epilogue, 
BLOOD AT SUNDOWN, 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR, 

CHAPTER 1

Something or someone peeled Lou Prophet's right eyelid open.

A female voice, soft as tiny wooden wind chimes stirred by an April breeze, said as though from far away, "You've ruined me!"

The bounty hunter's rye-logged brain was only half registering what his optic nerve was showing it, what his ears were telling it.

A face hovered over him, down close to his own, in fact, but the features of that face were a blur. He could better make out what he was not looking at directly. The head that the face belonged to owned a pretty, thick, long mess of light red tresses curling down onto slender shoulders as white as new-fallen snow on Christmas Day in the north Georgia mountains of Lou Prophet's original and long-ago home.

The girl released Prophet's lid, and she disappeared behind a veil of darkness. The accusatory words had stirred him somewhat, despite that his brain was a sponge still soaked in last night's tornado juice. He had no idea what had been meant by the accusation, and, while vaguely curious, slumber tugged at the ex-rebel bounty hunter like a heavy wind, albeit a wind that owned the inviting aroma of lilac water and natural, bed-fermented female musk.

Down, down, Prophet fell ... until his other lid was tugged open, and the face appeared again, even closer to his own this time, so that he could see a gunmetal blue eye staring into his own left one. "Did you hear me? You've utterly and completely ruined me! Ohh! "

That nudged Prophet closer to full wakefulness. What in the hell was this girl, whoever in hell she was, talking about?

Ruined ?

While Prophet had a somewhat wide-ranging reputation as a hard-nosed man hunter, he'd never been anything but gentle with women. Unless said women were running on the wrong side of the law and had tried to kill him, of course. (One of the first things he'd learned when he'd first turned to bounty hunting after venturing west after his beloved South had been whipped during the War of Northern Aggression was that not all hardened outlaws were men.) But those women were the exception rather than the rule, and he doubted that any of them would say he'd "ruined" them.

Prophet tried to say the word but, just as his brain was not yet hooked up to his eyes, it was not attached to his mouth, either, so that what he heard his own lips say as they moved stiffly against each other was: "Roo-hoom ... d ...?"

"Ruined!" the girl said, louder, heartbroken. "Purely ruined!"

The half squeal, half moan was a cold hand reaching down into the warm water of the bounty hunter's slumber and plucking him into full wakefulness. He bolted upright in bed, blinking, heart thudding, wondering if he'd done something untoward during his inebriation.

Untoward, that was, beyond the usual transgressions of gambling himself into mind-numbing debt, drinking himself (as he'd obviously done last night) into a coma, frolicking with fallen women, brawling, fighting with knives, pistol-shooting shot glasses off neat pyramids arranged on bar tops, howling at the moon, swinging from the rafters, herding chickens, stealing bells from courthouse cupolas, singing to his horse, getting beaten up or thrown in jail or both, and, as per one occasion, asking a fallen woman to be his bride and actually going through with the ceremony. (Fortunately, the union had been rendered null and void when it was revealed that the minister had been defrocked due to his having had carnal knowledge of his organist.)

Prophet turned to the girl sitting naked beside him, not having any recollection of who she was or where he had met her but vaguely amazed at her sparkling, Christmas-morning beauty, and wrapped his left arm around her. "Oh, honey, I'm sooo sorry if I did anything last night that ... that —"

"Oh, Lou — you've ruined me for all men hereafter. Last night was ... well, it was absolutely magical. I've never been treated that way before ..."

"Honey, who is your pa, anyway? Apparently, he knows me ...?"

"Oh, Lou," she said, rubbing against him and purring like a kitten, "stop fooling around, would you? You know very well my father is Richard Teagarden, governor of Colorado."

Prophet's heart hiccupped. He jerked his head up as a rush of disconnected images from last night battered his tender, sodden brain. As disjointed as the images were, they told the story of Prophet recently riding into Denver with the body of Lancaster Smudge draped over the saddle of the horse Prophet had trailed behind his own hammerheaded dun, Mean and Ugly.

Over the past year and a half, Lancaster Smudge and his gang of five other owlhoots had become the bane of the territory not to mention of the Denver & Santa Fe Railroad, whose trains they'd preyed on without mercy, threatening to run the company into the ground and leave Colorado where it had been ten years before — relying on stagecoach services and mule trains for transport and commerce.

Many lawmen had been sicced on the gang, and a goodly portion of those few lawmen who'd gotten close to their quarry had ended up turned toe-down and snuggling with the diamondbacks in a Rocky Mountain canyon. The Smudge Bunch, as the papers had cheekily called Smudge's gang, were as elusive as Arizona sidewinders.

Prophet, however, working in cahoots with his sometime partner, Louisa Bonaventure, had proven the equals of the Smudge Bunch, and taken them down in their hideout up near the little mining town of Frisco, when the boys had let their hair as well as their pants down to enjoy a romp in Mrs. Beauchamp's House of the Seven Enchantments.

After Prophet had turned Smudge into the federals for the two-thousand-dollar reward, the jubilant governor had insisted on inviting the bounty hunter out to the Larimer Hotel for a meal on the state's tab. There, Prophet had met the stately, smiling but distracted-seeming Mrs. Teagarden as well as the governor's pretty, precocious daughter, Clovis.

Clovis! Her name was Clovis Teagarden! Whew!

Prophet had never been given such grand treatment before. Bounty hunters were more or less considered vermin on the frontier, not all that higher on the human ladder than the men they hunted for the bounties on their heads. So Prophet was more accustomed to being treated like dog dung on a grub line rider's boots when he wasn't being ignored altogether by those of a more prestigious link in society's chain.

He certainly had never been invited out to dinner by anyone as important as a governor.

However, it had turned out that Governor Teagarden, being of a romantic turn of mind as well as a frequent reader of dime novels and the Police Gazette, was a secret fan of both Prophet and Louisa Bonaventure, whom the pulp rags had dubbed "the Vengeance Queen." Teagarden had apparently followed the duo's bounty hunting careers in the western newspapers, including Denver's own Rocky Mountain News.

Prophet suspected that the dapper little gray-haired man, who wore a gold ring on his arthritic little right finger and a giant, gray, walrus mustache on his lean, pasty face, had wanted to meet the comely blond Louisa far more than he'd wanted to dine with the scruffy Prophet. When Lou had informed the man that Louisa would not be joining them, as she'd decided to light out after a trio of outlaws they'd learned about near Leadville rather than accompany her partner back to Denver with a dead man, Teagarden had acquired a fleeting but poignant expression of deep disenchantment.

His sprightly and precocious daughter, Clovis, however, had kept her eyes on Prophet all through dinner, till he thought her smoldering gaze would burn a hole right through him. Still, the bounty man had been more than mildly taken aback when she'd slipped him a room key as he'd shaken her hand after dinner. It turned out the girl often spent nights in her father's private suite in the Larimer Hotel — under the strict supervision of a female chaperone, of course — because she attended a finishing school only two blocks from the hotel.

It also turned out, to Prophet's incredulity, that the girl's chaperone, Mrs. Borghild Rasmussen, who supposedly resided in the hotel, did not, in fact, exist, and that the bank drafts the governor wrote her were, in fact, never cashed. The governor's private secretary, a male no doubt under the mesmerizing influence of the carnal Clovis, kept it all a secret from the doddering fool.

So Clovis was pretty much running off her leash in the burgeoning and colorful cow town of Denver, inviting bounty hunters — well, one, at least — to her room.

Prophet rubbed the heels of his hands against his temples. "Clovis, I, uh ... don't know what to say."

"You did remember my name!" the girl said.

"How could I forget a girl like you? It was a wonderful night, Clovis, but I tell you, honey, I never realized you were only sixteen. Hell, I thought you were at least twenty-one pushin' forty-five!" Prophet scuttled over to the side of the bed that was, he saw now, enormous. It was easily the largest bed he'd ever seen let alone slept in.

"Oh, Lou — where are you going? You can't go yet! The day is just getting started!" Prophet scowled over his shoulder at her, trying to ignore the fact that she was naked, not an easy task even in his whiskey-logged state. "You best get ready for school, little girl."

"Oh, phooey," Clovis said, leaning back on her elbows, pooching her pink lips out in a pout. "I'm going to skip school today. I often do. Father doesn't care. Neither does Mother. She'll be busy with her tea parties and such. Father's so busy with affairs of state he doesn't think about much of anything but work, work, work ... and getting reelected, of course."

She rolled her eyes then beamed at Prophet. "That's why we can spend the whole day together, Lou."

"Doesn't your father ever check up on you?"

She only tittered an ironic laugh and wrapped her hands around her ankles, pulling her feet back toward her shoulders, giving him a haunting but unwanted eyeful.

Between love bouts the previous night, she'd told him a lot about herself, but he'd drunk so much whiskey, having gone without any skull pop for the past month he'd been hunting owlhoots in the mountains with the teetotaling Vengeance Queen, that he could remember only bits and pieces.

Clovis was a talker, though — he remembered that.

He'd made a mistake when he'd tramped up the Larimer's broad, carpeted stairs to find the lock that fit the key Clovis had given him.

Having entered a celebratory frame of mind the second he'd hit town, he'd gotten drunk before he'd dined with the governor's family, so his judgment had been off. And, if the truth be told, Prophet was far too weak a man to be able to ignore the fact of a pretty young woman handing him her room key with a coquettish dip of her chin and alluring glint in her eye.

In such a situation he was not now nor ever had been the type of jake who could shake his head and say, "Sorry, ma'am, but I'm not that sort of fella," and walk away. Just as he was having trouble averting his attention to what she was teasing him with now ...

And some day he'd likely be fed a couple loads of buckshot for just that failing ...

Or ... maybe that day was here now, he amended the unspoken warning to himself as someone hammered on the room's door and a man's angry voice said, "Clovis? Clovis, are you in there?"

CHAPTER 2

Clovis gasped and drew her knees together.

The knock came again — two knocks, in fact, much louder than the previous ones. "Clovis? Clovis, I know you're in there, damnit!"

Prophet turned to the girl staring in wide-eyed shock at the door. "Who in the hell is that?" The man on the other side of the door must have had the ears of a jackrabbit. "Who in the hell is that?" he yelled.

Clovis drew her hands across her mouth and said just loudly enough for Prophet to hear, "That is Miles Swarthing ... son of the lieutenant governor ... and" — she rolled her terrified gray eyes up to Prophet — "my betrothed!"

"Betrothed?" Prophet said, aghast.

Three more hard knocks came on the door. They were like three quick belches of a Gatling gun, and they made the stout walnut door bounce in its frame. The reverberation nudged an empty whiskey bottle off a table by the bed to drop to the carpeted floor with a dull thud. "Clovis, I will not ask you again. Who is in your room?"

"He is supposed to be in military school," Clovis said in dull shock behind her hands, which she'd steepled to each side of her nose. "He's supposed to be in Pennsylvania!"

"Oh, for Pete's sake!" Prophet grabbed his longhandles that were hanging off the carved arm of an upholstered chair. As he did, he looked for an escape route but found none.

It didn't matter. He wouldn't have had time to skin out through one, anyway, because just then the angry Miles Swarthing bellowed, "Clovis, damnit — what in hell is going on in there?" With "there," the door exploded inward to bang against the lavender-and-gold-papered wall, knocking an oil painting of ships jouncing on a rowdy sea from its nail over a distant fainting couch.

Prophet had only just grabbed his longhandles but had not yet started to draw them on when a cleans-haven young man in a dark blue military uniform complete with a gold-buttoned cape and leather-brimmed forage hat stormed into the room like a bull through a chute. He wasn't very tall but he was stocky, and his head sat like a large red roast set atop broad, thick shoulders.

"Oh my God," Clovis squealed. "Rape!"

"Wait," Prophet said, turning his incredulous scowl to the girl on the bed. "What?"

Clovis clawed up one of the several twisted sheets on the bed and drew it over her nakedness and, shuttling her terrified gaze from Prophet to her betrothed standing crouching in the open doorway, facing the bed, screamed louder this time, "Rape!"

"Rape?" both Master Swarthing and Prophet said at the same time, in the same tone of voice.

"Oh God, Miles," the girl squealed, kicking her bare legs to scoot toward the far side of the bed, as though to put as much distance between herself and the big man standing naked before her, "I just woke to find this ... this animal in my room!"

"Oh, you did, did you?" Miles said, stomping toward Prophet, his beet red face bunched in anger, raising his balled fists. "We'll just see about that!"

Prophet dropped the longhandles and raised his hands, palms out. "Now, just hold on there, kid. I didn't do any such —"

Clovis held several sheets up to just below her wide, glistening eyes.

The uniform-clad younker, who was a good foot shorter than Prophet's six-four, came at Lou like an angry mule, swiping at the air with both fists before swinging his right fist hard at Prophet's face. The bounty hunter jerked back into the night table, and the kid grunted as his fist whistled through the air where Prophet's head had just been.

Prophet took a step back, holding up both placating hands. "Kid, it ain't what you think!"

The kid shuffled up to Prophet, moving his feet like a practiced pugilist, and sent a left jab toward Prophet's jaw. Lou raised his right arm, deflecting the blow. "Kid, it ain't what she said, and if you don't get your neck out of a hump, I'm gonna hurt ya!"

But then the kid landed a solid right to Prophet's bare belly. It wasn't much of a blow, really. It might have been for some men, but Prophet had been injured worse throwing the wood to the younker's girl the previous evening. The punch did, however, bring a hot ball of anger up from the base of Prophet's spine.

As the kid tried to land another similar blow to the bigger man's belly, Prophet rammed his right fist into the younger man's right temple — two short, swift, hard hammering blows that made resounding smacking sounds.

The kid stumbled backward, bringing a hand to his injured forehead and saying, "Ohhh!"

He dropped to a knee, blinking, holding his hand to his head. "Ohhhh!"

"Rape!" screamed Clovis from the bed.

Prophet scooped his balbriggans off the floor and turned to her. "Clovis, will you knock that nonsense off?"

He shook out the twisted garment before him and stepped into one leg. He tried to step into the other leg, but the determined and fiery Miles Swarthing bolted off his heels and came storming at Prophet like a bull at a red cape.

"Oh, fer Pete's sake!" Prophet stepped to one side, grabbed the young man by the collar of his cape, and, pivoting on his hips, thrust him into the wall behind him.

"Ohhh!" cried Master Swarthing, crouched with his forehead kissing the wall, pressing his hands to both sides of his head. "Ohhhhh!"

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Stagecoach To Purgatory by Peter Brandvold. Copyright © 2018 Peter Brandvold. Excerpted by permission of KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Pinnacle
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0786043466
• ISBN 13: 9780786043460
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 400