Cord 4 Read online

  THE OUTLAW’S CODE IS SEALED IN BLOOD

  Blackjack Kinsolving was once an outlaw. Now he wears a sheriff’s badge. But whether he can stay on the honest side of the law depends on how far a greedy lady and her desperado friends can push him. Cord and Chi must help decide Kinsolving’s fate ... before the bullets start flying.

  One

  The cantina was called Los Tres Hermanos, although the cantinera was a plump cheerful woman with a wide dark smile, a mustache, and no brothers at all. It was one of several small mysteries Cord was enjoying. The way into the Hermanos was through an unmarked doorway off an alley filled with garbage and barnyard livestock and manure. The cantina room was a dim fortress of windowless adobe, its air thick with the stench from the alleyway.

  But when you passed through and climbed four steps, you came out into sunlight on the patio, and it was here that Cord and Chi had gotten used to doing their drinking since coming into Ciudad Juarez two weeks earlier. The patio was a little above street level and surrounded by a waist-high ’dobe wall. At each corner a poinsettia bloomed in a clay pot. The four round tables of unfinished wood were bleached nearly white by the sunlight; a dozen or so chairs were divided among them. The patio faced out onto the town plaza, and Cord and Chi sat at the table nearest the wall, where they could watch the ciudadanos go about their business beneath the bright thin winter sun.

  “There are times,” Cord said, “when this country reminds me of the Staked Plains. This time of year mainly, when the light shines low and glary, and the horizon country is flat against the sky and a long ways off at the same time. I remember some days …” Cord chuckled to himself, and Chi raised her eyebrows and studied him. But Cord just chuckled again and sipped at his glass. They were drinking from tall mugs of dark beer with thick caramelly heads that never seemed to go flat. Each of them had a salt shaker and between them on a plate were a dozen wedges of fresh lemon.

  “We were north of Lubbock somewheres,” Cord said. “Up near to the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River.”

  “Who was?”

  “There’s this story I’m going to tell you.”

  “Ah,” Chi said with saintly patience. She was having a good time.

  Across the street was the Plaza Mayor, and in its middle there was a crèche, a little half-shed of weathered planks; inside were carvings from juniper of the Virgin Mother; Joseph, and the Three Kings. The statues had been freshly painted in exquisite detail, though they were probably ancient as the town. A papier-mâché bundle swathed in white linen lay on a bed of straw in a manger; and straw was strewn around the beat-dirt floor. A post-and-pole fence enclosed the display, and within were live animals: goats, kids, lambkins, a splay-legged colt. Half a dozen dark-skinned children were hanging on the fence, laughing and squealing and reaching between the rails to grab and pet the baby animals, which could not have been much different from the animals they had lived around all their lives. Except these were touched by the magic of Christmas, which had been the day before.

  “I was a kid,” Cord said, “my second year away from home and still thinking that tending cows on the open range was the finest life a man could ever wish—and it was, compared to what I’d left behind in East Texas.” Cord shook his head and muttered something.

  “How’s that?” Chi asked.

  “Jim,” Cord repeated. “I was thinking of my brother Jim back on that hardscrabble ranch where we were kids together. You remember Jim.”

  Sure, he thought, she remembered Jim.

  “Mmmm,” Chi said by way of neutral encouragement.

  “Anyway,” Cord said, brightening again, “this outfit—the one I was working for then—it was owned by a hombre named Hacksaw Harris, and it was spring and time for branding. Bert Golden was the foreman, and we’d set up camp near to a little headwaters creek and started gathering off the desert, which is what it was most of the year in those parts.”

  On the other side of the street a man and woman passed, both dressed all in white, the man in a loose-fitting white blouse, white trousers, and a dashing white sash, the woman in a full-skirted white dress with a deep, square-cut bodice. Cord thought the woman looked strikingly like Chi: high cheekbones, glittering dark eyes, the same challenging smile animating her olive features. She wore her hair like Chi too, long dark braids to below her waist, tied off with rawhide thongs trimmed with turquoise. But Chi would never dress like the woman; at least Cord had never seen her any other way than she was now, in dark leather britches tucked into the uppers of knee-high tooled boots, a black flat-brimmed sombrero, and a wool serape that served her in any weather

  Cord looked at his partner; tried for a moment to picture her dressed in swirling white skirts and a tight low bodice. Chi watched him with her faint knowing grin, and Cord, momentarily disconcerted, let go his imagining and picked up his story.

  “That year there was a greenhorn who had signed on for the branding, a heavyset older fellow named George Straight. This George had come west from working as a prison guard at Sing Sing, in New York State. He told us it had come to him one day that he could not stomach any more of the pen, that he had to have nothing but wide-open spaces for the rest of his life. Well, he got that all right, out on the Llano Estacado. You got to admire him for working out his change like that, except maybe for the one thing, which was horses. George had too much gut and not enough leg to sit a horse properly, and he didn’t like animals much to start with. Jesus!” Cord shook his head and chuckled some more.

  “Anyway,” he went on, “we’d been branding in open country, and George was packing the irons when we came to one of those alkali sinks. The cattle had churned the whole thing to the color of a gravestone and not much thicker; but it was the only water for your horse in miles.

  “But old George’s sorrel mare would not lower her head to drink.”

  The plump cantinera came out and sat fresh glasses of dark beer before them. Chi murmured, “Gracias, señora.”

  “You got to see it,” Cord said with great glee. “Here is George Straight, out in about a foot and a half of mud and six inches of dirty water; and his mare gone contrary in front of everyone. George tries pushing down on the mare’s head, and he tries cursing. Nothing works. So he pulls one of those irons out of the old scabbard he is carrying them in, and he brings it down dead square between the sorrel’s ears.

  “Maybe he figures that will teach her some sense,” Cord said. “What it does is knock her out cold as a wedge. Down she goes like she is shot, kerflop, into the mud and water; legs splayed out like a trophy rug. George goes down with her; and before he can kick free she comes around and starts kicking and rolling, covering herself and this greenhorn with mud thick as plaster.

  “The rest of us,” Cord said, “sat there horseback, watching George and his foolishness, and shooting looks at Bert Golden, wondering how he is going to handle this. Finally George gets his boots undone from the stirrups, and the mare lurches to her feet, leaving George on his hands and knees in the mud, breathing hard. Bert Golden is studying him like he is a new species of critter.

  “Finally George Straight looks up at him.

  “‘Well, George,’ Bert says, ‘you catch up.’ And the rest of us turn and ride on. It was near dark before George came along, the mud all over him and the sorrel dried hard as slate and the same color. From that day on we called him the Spook.” Cord looked at Chi to gauge how amused she was by this tale. She was staring back stony-eyed.

  “Madre Dios,” she said. “This is what I get for a partner.” But then she had to look away, unable to keep from laughing. “Here’s to spooks,” she said. “To all the spooks and brujos and witches we ever knew.” They touched glasses and drank.

  From where they sat the Rio Grande was a couple of hundred yards away, and ac
ross it the outskirts of El Paso, the farthest west Texas outpost. But in the Mexican plaza on this holiday afternoon Cord was the only gringo. He sprinkled coarse-ground salt on the back of his hand, licked it off, and bit the pulp from a wedge of lemon, then chased the sour-salt flavor with a deep swig of the heavy beer. The couple in white were on a bench across the plaza, their heads together. The man said something and the woman laughed gaily, the clear pure tones of her pleasure stippling the quiet afternoon. Cord felt the sun’s warmth on his hands and face, and he was glad of Chi’s companionship.

  The morning before they had lingered over coffee after a long late breakfast. Chi surprised Cord by reaching under her serape and setting a small sandalwood box on the table before him. Inside, cushioned on a scrap of velvet, rested a Hamilton pocket watch in a gold case. Cord snapped it open and read the inscription engraved on the inside of the cover; written in Spanish over Chi’s name.

  “Feliz Navidad,” Chi said softly.

  His gift to her was wrapped in a chamois cloth, and when she undid it her eyes quickened and then softened. Cord had visited a metal smith earlier that week. The artisan had fashioned a silver bracelet, wide yet thin as the soft metal would allow, set with matched pieces of turquoise.

  Chi’s fingers toyed with it now as they sat on the cantina’s patio. Cord had been almost afraid to present it to her; but the watch made it all right. In the ten years they had ridden together they had never exchanged Christmas gifts, but Cord sensed their life was changing in lots of ways. The partnering was working better than ever, and breaks were falling their way. At least the fears and dangers and doubts had been minor and manageable.

  Cord thought of saying these things, which was invariably hard. The bracelet would serve. Chi understood. She gave him the gold watch.

  Explanations were not their way, because talk never solved anything and sure as hell never lasted. Still ... Cord reached across the table for Chi’s hand.

  “Listen,” he began.

  From the doorway the cantinera called out into the cantina’s dimness. Chi said, “Si,” and because she had not moved her hand or gaze from him, Cord did not know to whom she was responding.

  But then the cantinera hoisted her bulk up the four steps and came to the table, and the moment was broken. Her Spanish was too rapid-fire for Cord to follow.

  “Si,” Chi said again. “Por favor.” To Cord she said, “There’s a man who wants to talk to us.”

  “Gringo?”

  “Yes.”

  Yes. Well, that changed everything for the time being. Men were too often looking to talk to them, him and Chi. There was money on their heads, having to do primarily with banks and gun work, and from time to time they were the objects of the law’s unsolicited interest. Besides, over the years Cord had gained considerable repute as a man with gunhand speed and steadiness. Mindless as it was, that alone was reason enough for some men to try killing him, men who operated out of the twisted notion that such repute was a fine thing to seek out and own. Living with all that was part of the deal Cord and Chi had worked out in choosing to live in the West by their own rules, but sometimes—now was one—it meant putting future plans aside in favor of present survival.

  The man who came up the steps in the sunshine was in his early to middle twenties, maybe ten years younger than Cord. He was rangy, with long legs that looked longer in stovepipe gabardine trail pants. Around his narrow waist was a gunbelt, in its holster a Smith and Wesson Schofield .45. He had straight, not-too-broad shoulders, and the sleeves of his woolen shirt were rolled up and the top buttons undone, as if even the mild warmth of the Mexican winter was too much for him. He wore a palomino Stetson with a rolled brim. His hair was dark and needed cutting, and though he had made some effort at brushing off the dust of whatever road he’d come riding down, his boots were scuffed and turning down at the heels.

  The man stood at the top step and took in Cord and Chi, then the rest of the patio and the plaza beyond, like a stage actor counting the house.

  He came across, stood over the table, and said to Cord, “You’re not wearing a weapon.”

  “Nice day out here,” Cord said. “I didn’t figure I’d need one, not to drink a beer in the sunshine. Could be I was wrong.”

  The man gave that some thought.

  “Now, my partner here,” Cord said, “I don’t know if she’s wearing a gun or not, because as a general rule she straps it on under that serape, about where her hands are hiding. I’ve never known her not to wear a gun, but there’s always a first time.” He looked at Chi. “You never can tell about women.”

  But Chi was watching the man with something like amusement. That eased Cord’s mind. Chi had instincts about people that turned out right most of the time. Besides, the man did not have the pure nostril-pinching smell of trouble. There would be no shoot-’em-up nonsense to break the spell of this afternoon.

  “Can I sit down?” the man said.

  “Sit, muchacho,” Chi said with grave politeness. If the man realized the diminutive was a tease, he did not show it.

  “That dark beer—” the man said. “Is that all they got?”

  “Do you want one?” Chi said.

  The man shrugged. Chi called in Spanish, and the three of them waited in silence until the cantinera brought another glass.

  The man sipped, made a thoughtful face, and said, “My name is Thomas Bowen.”

  “Hola, Thomas Bowen,” Chi said. She looked at Cord. “Do we know any Thomas Bowens?” All this came sober as prayer; but Chi was having a high time with the young man. Maybe she was too long with just his company, Cord thought.

  “What do you want with us, Thomas Bowen?” Chi asked.

  “I am deputy sheriff of Prine County, Kansas,” Bowen announced, as if that explained everything.

  Cord sighed. He had no use for lawmen. He’d seen his share in his years on the outlaw trail, had even spent a few months in their jails. They were not bad people, except they would never leave you be.

  “You are a ways from Kansas, Deputy Sheriff,” Cord said.

  “There’s a reason. You got the makings?”

  He was better than Cord at rolling smokes, but then, most everyone was. When he was finished, Chi took the pouch and rolled two more, passing one to Cord.

  “The seat of Prine County is a town named Weed,” Bowen said. “I rode out from there six weeks back, ten days before Thanksgiving. I have been through three states and two territories, following up everything from gossip to rumor to for-sure eyewitness swear-to-God fact.” Bowen blew out smoke. “I was looking for a man.”

  “This man got a name?”

  “Yeah,” Bowen said. “But I haven’t come to that part yet. What I want with this man isn’t official lawman business, even though it was my boss the sheriff asked me to go on the search. I was doing a favor; not following an order.”

  “Who’s sheriff up in Prine County these days?” Chi asked. “I haven’t been up that way for years.”

  “Miss,” Bowen said, “you have never been up there. If you had, they would still be talking about you.”

  Chi smiled at the compliment, and once again, even in the middle of this roundabout story, Cord thought how good it was to see her relaxed and happy with herself and him.

  “All right,” Chi said, “but who is sheriff?”

  “John P. Kinsolving.”

  Cord drank half the beer in his glass, then drew in cigarette smoke and let it dribble out in a thin stream. Kinsolving was a name he knew.

  “What does he want with me?”

  “I don’t know.” Bowen was playing straight, now that Cord had owned up to himself. “All he told me was find you and fetch you back—if you’d come. I know it doesn’t have anything to do with you busting banks here and there. He doesn’t mean to take you in or anything.”

  Bowen finished his beer. “I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t know how you’d take this, but I’m not looking for any gun trouble. Maybe I came on a little strong. You k
now how it is.”

  The deputy pushed back his chair. “That’s all of it. What happens next is up to you.” But at the top of the four steps he turned. “I was to ask, that’s all. I wasn’t supposed to try to talk you into anything.”

  “Is that what Kinsolving told you?”

  “‘You ask,’ he said. ‘And you only do it once.’ Those were his words.”

  Chi was watching Cord expectantly, and Cord looked past her to the plaza and the laughing children and the animals, and the river and the border station on the bridge, staring hard like the scene was a stage drop curtain about to part and reveal the deep past.

  “Yeah,” Cord said. “I can hear his voice.”

  Two

  The man did not look like a banker. Most bankers Cord had encountered wore long faces and dark clothing, like there was something mournful about spending your working days surrounded by other people’s money. Jasperson wore a cream-colored suit and a linen shirt with a four-in-hand tie. He held a flat brimmed fawn Stetson in both hands. On the better side of forty, he had a round open face and manicured fingernails, and he projected serenity.

  Cord and Chi were passing time in Flagstaff, Arizona. It was November, six weeks before their encounter with Deputy Sheriff Thomas Bowen on the patio of Los Tres Hermanos. They had narrowed the possibilities down to moving south toward the desert country or west to the coast, but then banker Jasperson knocked on the door of Chi’s room at the Holme House Hotel. When Cord opened it, standing well to the side, Jasperson gestured meaninglessly with the fawn Stetson and said, “May I come in?”

  “Why?”

  Jasperson looked up and down the hotel corridor. “I’m a banker and you are a bank robber. We might kick that around a little.”

  Cord glanced over his shoulder Chi was frowning. She liked people better when it was clear what they were about.

  While Cord was looking to her, Jasperson slipped into the room, pulling the door shut behind him.

  “You take some awful chances, mister,” Chi said.