THE SEQUEL TO THE DEVIL’S BRIDE IS HERE...
“Lou Prophet and
Mathilda Anderson, I now pronounce you man and wife!”
Getting hitched in Colorado is one of the last things Lou
Prophet remembers before he finds himself stumbling around the Mexican desert
with a bloody gash in his head and a small army of Mexican cutthroats hot on
his trail. The mercenaries are being led by a stubborn Pinkerton detective
named Wolcott.
Wolcott is looking for the stolen train loot that Prophet
had been supposed to return to the U.S. Marshal in Denver.
But that was before the bounty hunter got married. Before he was supposed to live happily
ever after with the charming, beautiful mail-order bride, Mattie Anderson, whom
he’d met in the Colorado Rockies while retrieving the loot in question from the
outlaw Frank Beauregard.
Now Prophet is stumbling around Mexico, dodging bullets and
bad men and trying to find out just how deep a hole he dug for himself when he
said “I do.”
Maybe Louisa Bonaventure, the Vengeance Queen herself, can
help the confused and badly battered bounty hunter make some sense out of the
mess his marriage and his life have become...and find the woman and the loot
before the diabolical rurale, Colonel Rafael Teviño Quintero, can turn them all
toe-down in a Gatling gun hail of deadly Mexican lead!
From the book:
“Cuttin’ it a
little close, maybe,” Prophet muttered, leaning his rifle against the rail to
his right.
A dove-colored
cloud of jostling shadows ran outward from the post house, flames lapping from
pistols and rifles. A couple bullets chewed into the rail around Prophet’s
tower. A couple more plunked into the underside of the brush roof above the
bounty hunter’s head. One spanged off the housing of the Gatling gun just as
Prophet reached for the handle.
He jerked his
hand back as though from a hot stove, then grabbed the gun, raised its brass
snout, slanted it down toward the oncoming crowd of yelling rurales, and turned
the crank.
As the machine
gun commenced roaring and lighting up the area around the tower, spitting red
flames, a similar roaring kicked up from the tower to Prophet’s left. The
bounty hunter turned the crank and swiveled the canister from left to right and
back again, grinning in satisfaction as the rurales were blown off their feet
and sent rolling in the dark dust, bellowing and cursing.
Prophet glanced
toward the Kid’s tower, grinning again as he saw jets of fire licking out into
the night from beneath that tower’s thatched roof, pale smoke wafting thickly.
Prophet hadn’t fired a Gatling gun in years, and the thrill of it caused him to
cut loose with ripping Rebel yells as he gritted his teeth and turned the crank
over and over again...until the gun clicked and fell silent.
The clip poking
up from the canister was empty.
A few seconds
later, the Kid’s gun stopped hiccupping, as well.
Prophet’s blood
was up. “Take that, you demon-worshippin’ dogs!” he shouted, reaching for his
rifle.
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