Cord 7 Page 4

  “Why make up a story that has so many dips and curves?”

  “So it sounds true.”

  “All right. Forget it. I want a drink.”

  Chi tipped her head to one side, studying him like a mistake.

  “Well what the hell?” Cord said. “Telling us lies and paying us a thousand dollars.”

  “I want to know,” Chi said, and Cord saw there was no stopping her now.

  “At least let’s get rid of these saddlebags,” he said wearily.

  The desk clerk inside the Continental Hotel read their names upside down in the register as they signed. The names seemed to mean something, because he turned a shade paler and asked, “Staying long?”

  “Eight or ten weeks,” Cord said.

  The clerk smiled at Cord, as if he hoped this were a joke but did not wish to laugh until he was certain.

  “One night,” Chi said.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” the clerk said. The hell with him, Cord thought—Citizen Cord, who can stay anywhere he wants, Citizen Cord who would like a drink of bourbon. One drink of bourbon.

  “Have your boy take these bags to our rooms,” Cord said grandly. “We got business.”

  “Little Mr. Pearl,” Chi said. Cord sighed but nodded: first things first if you wanted peace or whiskey.

  They found Pearl’s horse down a side street back toward the tracks, saddled and uncared for after the long ride. The animal was hitched in front of a bar called the Fort Laramie, the sort of drinking establishment which catered to ranch hands sent to town on errands, railroad men between trains, stock tenders washing the manure-flavored dust out of their throats.

  Cord and Chi pushed through the swinging doors, waited a few moments while their eyes grew accustomed to the dim light. “Over there,” Chi said in a low voice. Pearl’s short tight pant legs showed beneath the table in a high-sided corner booth, hitched up above his dirty white socks.

  Cord and Chi weaved among the tables. Pearl was talking animatedly, bobbing forward and gesturing with his hands. He stopped as they came to stand over him, gaped, and started to rise.

  The man seated opposite slapped his palm down on the tabletop. It made a sound like a rifle shot. Pearl sat down again.

  The other man wore a buff Stetson with a very tall domed crown. His right hand was crimped around the handle of a beer stein. He kept his head down, so the wide brim hid his face. “You had to have yourself a drink right off. You got your horse out front, still wearing your tack. You’re a damned fool.” The man had a hard coarse guttural voice.

  Cord knew that voice.

  The man let go of the beer mug, made a fist, and drove it forward like a battering-ram. It moved no more than nine inches and caught Pearl in the middle of the face. There was a nauseating sound of crunching bone and Pearl screamed like a wounded rodent. He fell out of the booth and rolled into a ball in the dirt and spilled beer on the floor.

  The man in the tall Stetson leaned out and said, “Get away from here.” Bernard Pearl got to his knees and spat out blood and two teeth. He made it to his feet and staggered between the tables to the dimness at the far end of the bar. The other man looked at the smear of blood across two knuckles of his right hand. -He pulled a grimy handkerchief from a rear pocket and wiped it off.

  Cord shook his head. It could not be...

  The man at the table finished his beer and put down the foam-streaked glass. He used one finger on the brim to push back his high-crowned Stetson and looked up at them. His face was primarily brutal, with hard mean eyes, a mirthless smile, snaggle teeth, a knife scar fading on one cheek, and a broad nose that had been broken more than once, bunched with rearranged cartilage and spider-webbed broken capillaries. He wore neither beard nor mustache, and when he doffed his great hat in mocking deference to Chi, they saw his head was shaved to the scalp. He smiled. It was the sort of smile you might note among spectators at a dog fight, as the winner sank its incisors into the throat of the loser.

  “Well now,” he snarled. “Ain’t this an unexpected pleasure.”

  Five

  At the end of the bar Bernard Pearl was snuffling into a filthy towel. He wiped his face and moaned at the pain it caused, then held the towel to his broken mouth. Five customers at the bar stared down into their glasses and minded their own business. Only the bartender seemed still interested in the violent goings-on. He stood down by Pearl, three quarters of a fried ham sandwich on a white chipped plate at his elbow. He stared at the corner table, smiling vaguely, as if thinking that with action like this, he’d never need to hire any dancing girls.

  Neither Cord nor Chi had moved.

  The coarse man with the shaved head wore woolen trail pants held up by suspenders over a union suit, a greasy leather vest, and under his gut a gunbelt sagging with the weight of a heavy revolver. He ran his forefinger almost tenderly along the line of scar that ran from his right cheek bone straight down to his jawline. “We do not forget,” he murmured.

  “I remember,” Chi said. “A dirty pig-son named Enos Ryker.”

  Ryker’s hand twitched. He lowered it halfway to his hip, then changed his mind and kept the hand above the tabletop. He was in no position for gunplay, and anyway Chi was faster. Ryker knew it, but still his eyes narrowed when she drew, so quickly that no one could truthfully claim to have seen the movement, only the gun which had magically appeared in her fist.

  Ryker eased the vest aside, using careful unambiguous motions. A golden star was pinned to the breast of his union suit. “I’m still U.S. Marshal, case you were wondering. You’ll spend the rest of your days in the dark.”

  “You’ll spend eternity with the worms.” Chi took two steps back and tucked her pistol back under her serape. “Now it’s a fair fight. Stand up, pig-man.” Cord moved off to one side, and the five customers at the bar rose together, smooth as a cancan line, and elbowed out the door. Someone had been peeking.

  “Now see what you done,” the bartender said, as if someone had spilled a drink.

  Ryker looked up Chi’s gun barrel. “Sit down,” he suggested. “Take a drink.”

  “No.”

  “I’m the law.” Ryker had nerve, anyway. “What I say goes, and I say take a drink.”

  At the end of the bar, Pearl lowered the towel from his mouth and leaned forward to examine himself in the smoky glass of the mirror. His upper lip was big as a bratwurst and his nose was all over his right cheek. “Oh, Lordy,” he moaned.

  “You shut up.” Ryker’s rage was rabid, touched with the irrational. “Shut up or get out.”

  That looked to Cord like a fine time for Pearl to leave, but the little man shook his head, shut his mouth, and stayed put. “Awright now,” Ryker said. “Just sit down and have a goddamned drink.”

  “We got to go,” Chi said to Cord.

  “You’re bucking Federal law, lady.”

  “There’s no Federal paper on us, no paper at all.”

  “So I heard. Too bad.” Ryker kept an eye on the spot where her hands were covered. “Even so, I can jerk your strings, make life real unpleasant for you in these parts. I don’t give away no weight around here.” Ryker gestured and the bartender came over with glasses and a bottle each of bourbon and tequila. How did he know? Cord wondered. Was Ryker expecting them? Cord hated brainteasers.

  Ryker’s whole-hog craziness made Cord edgy. Cord equated survival with the ability to predict with some accuracy the actions of others; men who believed they were acting on some principle of self-interest were not hard to read. But Ryker was capable of insane rages in which, oblivious to consequences, he tried to destroy whatever rankled him, and now here he was, with all his vengeful brutishness focused on Cord and Chi.

  Cord sat down. It looked like the most direct trail to defusing the moment and getting answers.

  Ryker filled a shot glass with bourbon, another with tequila. Chi picked up her glass, examined the contents with a practiced eye, and poured it out on the floor. “I’m not drinking today. Bad stomach.” S
he tossed the glass on the table. It fell on its side and rolled around on its thick false bottom. “You make me sick,” she told Ryker. “I am leaving now, and you won’t stop me.”

  She kept staring long enough to let him think about an answer, then snorted and went through the maze of tables and out the door. Ryker and the bartender watched her go. Cord toyed with his glass but did not drink. “Did you send Pearl for us?”

  Ryker turned. “Sure, he’s my boy. Some story, huh?” Cord felt his stomach clutch, as if he had reached under a rock and felt something cold but alive. “What’s this about?”

  “You know.”

  “Games.”

  “My games.” Ryker thumped his chest with his fist. “My game, my rules, and I win. How do you like it?”

  Cord told himself this was pointless ranting from a man gone clear to maniac.

  “I’ve got you this time, Cord, you and your bitch. You’ll get what you deserve, and I’ll be there when it happens. I’ll watch your faces while you piss your pants and sob.” Bernard Pearl stood at the end of the table. “Kill you dead, bastard,” he lisped, staring down at Cord with livid loathing.

  “I wasn’t the one who knocked your teeth out,” Cord said, alarmed. Jesus, they were both bullshit.

  This was going nowhere. Cord slid out of the booth and pushed Pearl out of the way.

  “Cord!” Ryker’s voice was hard and demanding. “First off, you give me back my thousand dollars.”

  Cord walked away.

  “Keep it close to hand,” Ryker shouted madly at Cord’s back. “I’ll take it off your corpse.”

  Six

  Cord speared a round slice of crisp water chestnut, dipped it in the pepper sauce and hot mustard he had mixed together on the edge of his plate, and munched it down. The mustard left his sinuses clear and tingling; pinpricks of sweat popped out along his hairline and made his eyes water, but he could not stop himself from dipping everything in the fiery condiments. Chi was concentrating on her plate of chop suey, shoveling beef and bean sprouts and gummy sauce into her mouth with chopsticks. Voices chattering in Chinese drifted faintly from the kitchen, but Cord felt out of sight and secure in the dimly lit booth, mostly hidden behind a folding bamboo-framed screen with wispy dragons hand-painted on rice-paper panels.

  Cord wasn’t much for skulking around, but truth to tell, Ryker had spooked him more than somewhat. There was no profit and enormous danger in dealing with a crazy man.

  “Part of it was pure dumb luck.” Cord used the wooden ladle to scoop chop suey from a japanned bowl, poured it onto a bed of steamed brown rice. “We get our names in the paper, and Ryker sees it and has an idea. He makes up a very good story—he’s crazy but he is not stupid—and sends his boy Pearl down to tell it to us.” Cord stabbed a sliver of beef and considered it, on the end of his fork. “And we buy his tall tale like a fifty-cent watch.” Cord dipped the beef in his hot sauce and ruminated. “It listened okay, but we didn’t pay close enough attention. You get to thinking about your future life and you lose track of what’s happening right now. I should have noticed, riding up here: no creeks were running anywhere near bank-full.”

  “Even so, the timing was too good.” She carefully balanced a little stack of rice and chop suey on the ends of her chopsticks, and her eyes crossed a little as she followed the food into her mouth, snapping her jaw quickly shut as if afraid it would escape.

  Cord shook his head no. “I went by the depot, talked to the agent. No creeks up, no bridges out, and a milk train comes in from Denver at nine every morning—brings a bundle of that day’s bulldog edition of the Rocky Mountain News, too. Took us five days horseback, takes the train about that many hours.” Cord raised his little porcelain cup of Chinese green tea and smiled sourly. “A toast to modem times, where you can get anywhere you want, except lost.”

  “Ryker reads we are in Denver,” Chi said slowly, piecing it out, “about the same time we’re drinking our coffee in the Brown Palace, the morning after all this started on the Post Road with those stage robbers. He also reads we don’t get the reward money until the next day.”

  “And he knows us. We’ll wait twenty-four hours for six thousand dollars every time.”

  “Well we did,” Chi said. Cord looked up, but she shook her head a little; she wasn’t blaming any of this on him.

  Cord poked at his food. “There is a late train back to Denver, so Ryker had most of the day to cipher out his lie and still get Pearl to Denver by the next morning.”

  “Ryker!” Chi spat the name like a curse. “What is he doing around here?”

  “Not a damned thing.” Cord rubbed a thumbnail along his jawline. “I got a shave I didn’t need. The barber talked, as barbers will. Ryker drifted into Casper with the spring. Rumors are that he picks up spare money from the big cattle interests chasing nesters out of the country—probably where he got the idea for his story. He’s a U.S. marshal. He can do anything, go anywhere, and he came here.”

  “Our luck. What does he want?”

  “Satisfaction. The question is, what is he doing about it? He knows he’d be beat if he went up against either of us in a heads-up showdown, but if he only wanted us dead he could have ambushed us off the trail. I don’t know.”

  “Trouble, anyhow.”

  Cord pushed his plate away and stifled a belch. “Well sure.”

  Somewhere out on the street, gunfire crackled, a few pistol shots and then the sharper snap of rifles, the whine of slugs glancing off brick walls. People were shouting.

  Cord and Chi sat quietly. This business began with chasing after trouble that was not theirs—except Cord had the eerie feeling this had something to do with them. Chi was already out of her seat. The bamboo-and-rice-paper screen teetered and fell. Cord went out the door on Chi’s heels.

  The gunfire was coming from a block up the side street where it intersected Center. Two riders came around the corner at full gallop, lying low in the saddle. Two men on foot appeared, firing pistols, and more armed men followed, a mob. Cord and Chi ducked into the cover of the restaurant’s doorway recess and the riders raced past, firing blind over their shoulders.

  “What the hell?” Cord yelped.

  The lead rider wore a dark Stetson, a leather vest, a Colt .45 Peacemaker, and rode a bay gelding. The drawstring of a large canvas bag was lashed around his saddle horn.

  The second rider was a dark woman in a wide-brimmed black sombrero over leather britches tucked into the high uppers of hand-tooled black leather boots. Her hair was in long black braids and she carried a second canvas bag.

  “Jesus Christ.” Cord stared after the riders.

  It was them, him and Chi.

  And they had just robbed a bank!

  Seven

  “Goddamn the scheming cabrón!” Chi swore.

  Cord looked at her, befuddled.

  But she had already seen through to the why of it. “The bastard couldn’t chance murdering us in cold blood. He’s a government man, has too much to lose. But now he’s got us nailed into a frame, wanted for bank robbery—God knows what else—and he can ride us into the ground as he pleases, shoot us dead for resisting arrest, take his time...’’

  “Why?”

  “You know why.”

  Cord thought back to another bad day with Ryker in it. But how long could a man hold a killing grudge?

  “Let’s move,” Chi said. Cord followed her back inside and instantly a tiny Chinese woman began jabbering at them angrily. She grabbed Cord’s sleeve and he gawked down at her before he got it. He stuffed a banknote into her tiny hand and pushed past down a row of screened booths into the kitchen. The tiny Oriental woman followed, plucking at the hem of his vest.

  The kitchen was full of steam and exotic spicy aromas. An ancient parchment-skinned man draped in skin robes sat on a stool in the corner, drawing from a long-stemmed pipe. A man and a woman tended cauldrons bubbling atop a twelve-burner gas range, and three or four almond-eyed toddlers played at their feet. All of
them stood motionless, watching inscrutably as Chi and Cord went out the back door.

  Cord stopped so abruptly in the alley that Chi banged into him from behind. “Where we going?” Cord tried to gather his wits into some kind of plan.

  “Hear that?” Chi said.

  From the direction of Center Street—and their hotel—came the swelling noise of the crowd, mindless shouting and hoorahing in search of a target. Cord was frightened. He’d seen a man killed by a mob once, in Hays City, Kansas, when he was eighteen and on his third spring cattle drive north from the Nueces River country. The man was a Mexican, a boy really, about Cord’s age, and the mob got it in mind that he’d kidnapped a town woman and her two girls, beaten them and taken outrageous liberties. They stomped him to death with their boots in the middle of a back street. Cord remembered the timbre of the Mexican’s scream, and his broken faceless corpse puddled in the dust. Later on, Cord heard that the woman identified her attacker, some crazy old jasper who had lived out on the prairie for years. Cord still wondered from time to time if the anonymous mobbed-up citizens of Hays still saw that Mexican boy in their nightmares. Cord did.

  Cord drew a deep ragged breath and exhaled the memory with it. “The money,” he said. “Our money, in that hotel safe.” Nobody was going to buffalo him to the point where he ran off and left his goods, not after all these years...

  A man in a bowler hat stuck his head into the far end of the alley. He stared at them bug-eyed. “I got ‘em cornered,” the man hollered like an idiot. “Come a-running!” He reached under his waistcoat and came out with a huge colt Navy .44 with freckles of rust on the barrel and frame. He needed both thumbs to cock the hammer back; he squinted down the gun’s length, grimacing with concentration.

  Cord drew and bounced a shot off the brick wall a foot above the man’s head; chips showered down on the man’s bowler. The man yelped like a girl, dropped his weapon and ran, waving his hands over his head. But the noise of the rabid mob was getting closer, and now there was not enough money in the world to convince Cord to stand and face the crazed citizens of Casper. “We’ll come back for it,” Cord said. “If the hotel doesn’t hold it, we’ll sue, get Lawyer Meeker to plead our case.”