Cord 9 Read online

  Other robbers flocked to him for his luck, only to learn that his magic did not extend to others. Men joined his bunch and died, while Hardiman remained always charmed. Hardiman was destiny’s darling and he never feared.

  Then, one day years later in a town not far from Victoria, Hardiman walked out of a bank with some of its money, and someone put a gun barrel against the side of his head.

  When this had happened before, Hardiman knocked the gun away and disarmed whoever was foolish enough to challenge his enchantment. This time he hesitated for some reason. It occurred to him later that he may have recognized the voice or manner or something about the man who ordered his hands up. In the end, though, he decided his hesitation was preordained, as much a product of fate as his gift.

  The man came around to where Hardiman could see him: it was the sheriff from the bank in Victoria all those years ago, gray and balding now. He no longer wore a badge; his sheriffing days were behind him. His revolver looked about as ancient as he, a skinny old Colt Navy .38 with rust on the frame and barrel. But the tip of the cartridge in the cylinder looked huge and past them Hardiman saw dangerous emotion on the old man’s face.

  It frightened him.

  “Come around,” the ex-sheriff said, and led him behind the building, poking at him with the gun.

  The one-time law dog was an addled old jasper now, and Hardiman had laughed in the face of men ten times as dangerous. But right then the chance of Hardiman disarming the old man was about on a par with levitation. Fear tasted bitter in Hardiman’s mouth and sat heavy on his gut. It mystified and stupefied him.

  Behind the bank in a barren vacant lot, the ex-sheriff turned Hardiman around and stepped back a yard or two, keeping the gun carefully lined on Hardiman’s face. “Lookee here,” the ex-sheriff said, and at first Hardiman thought that was the signal for shooting. The fear was nauseating him; if he could move he would vomit.

  Sweat blurred his vision, so at first he made out only a shape waving back and forth. Hardiman blinked. The ex-sheriff was holding the rust-flecked revolver in his left hand and showing Hardiman his right. “Look here,” the ex-sheriff insisted. Three of his fingers were stiff and useless and pointed in odd directions, and Hardiman remembered the gun in the cash drawer. “How charmed are you feeling now, you finger-busting son of a bitch?”

  Hardiman thought his knees would buckle, but before that could happen, the ex-sheriff took a step back and gasped and pulled the trigger.

  The gun went off with a tremendous roar, and something seared into Hardiman’s cheek. It pained him but did not knock him down. Someone screamed horribly. It was not him.

  The black powder smoke cleared, and Hardiman saw the ex-sheriff cradling his left arm against his chest. There was a greasy bloody stump where the old man’s hand had been. The ill-used revolver lay in the dirt, and a big gritty cloud of black-powder smoke mushroomed up from it.

  The bullet’s charge had been too great for the age-fatigued rust-rotted metal. The chamber under the hammer had blown out and fired off the two adjacent chambers. The top half of the cylinder and frame was gone, and what was left was jagged orange-glowing scrap steel.

  And the explosion had blown the ex-sheriff’s good hand to Hell.

  Blood dribbled from the point of Hardiman’s cheek. A piece of shattered gun frame had cut a three-inch gash from one ear nearly to the corner of his mouth. As cuts went, it was pretty bad, but it would not nearly kill him.

  Hardiman felt like he’d been suspended three feet in the air and his boots were only now touching back down. He moved automatically, as if someone else were working his strings. After he tied the ex-sheriff’s neckerchief tight around his lower arm, Hardiman got the old man under his arms and dragged him out to the main street. He mopped the extra blood from his cheek with his own neckerchief, then held it up against the cut to keep it from giving ideas to the men and a few women who came running. But they were purely interested in the show of the ex-sheriff’s bloody stump, and no one paid the vaguest mind to Hardiman as he got his horse and rode away from there, fast as he could without looking back, as if he were running for his life.

  Which he was, in a way. Soon as he was into the countryside, Hardiman slid out of the saddle—fell, almost—and sprawled out in the brown grass. His heart was slapping against his breastbone, his face was glazed with chill sweat, and he could not draw enough breath into his lungs. He dragged himself to a sitting position, drew up his knees and dropped his head between them, and stayed like that for the ten minutes it took for the shock to pass.

  He pretended it was the cut and the loss of blood, but it wasn’t and he knew it. It was fear, pure and crystalline as cold-spring water.

  Oddly enough, once he’d recognized it, Hardiman was pretty much okay and saw how it was. The bleeding had mostly stopped, and Hardiman rode on until after nightfall, circling around the first five towns. He rode into the sixth, rousted a surgeon, and got his cheek stitched up. He spent the next week gathering money from the places he had cached it over the years, and then he rode north.

  Here Chi stopped and stared across the table at Stern as if expecting comment, and getting none, she stared at her glass for a time. When she looked up, Stern was smiling as if he knew a secret.

  Chi frowned. “He went to Waterloo, Iowa,” she said, “and took up farming. Corn and hogs. Maybe he is there today, plowing and hoeing and slopping those swine. That surgeon was good with a needle and thread, and Hardiman gets plenty of sun. The scar is old and faint now.”

  Stern clasped both hands around his glass and leaned forward, his head cocked confidently. “Listen,” he said.

  “Wait.” Chi raised one finger, and Stern shut his mouth. She sensed he would not get it, and her hunches rarely failed her. But she had told him her story and must try one last time. “Hardiman was enchanted, all those years. He knew he could not be touched by any other man, and it was true.”

  “Bullshit,” Stern said, but he kept his smile.

  Chi shook her head vigorously. “He believed it—that was enough. Even the old ex-sheriff’s gun could not shoot him down.”

  Stern started to shake his head. Chi stabbed at him with a forefinger. “But something—maybe the little piece of gun metal that grazed his cheek, maybe only the loud noise so close—something reached deep down inside him, way down into his guts, and uncovered the fear that he’d locked up there so many years before. Now he knew: Some time down the road—maybe not right away, but some time—a man would fire at him, and with the magic gone, Hardiman would be shot dead.”

  “Okay,” Stern said.

  “But that isn’t it either,” Chi said. “The point is that he could accept the change. For a time he was accustomed to being immortal, but then he got accustomed to being mortal after all. Fate stopped watching over him, so he took over the job himself.”

  “That’s all of it?” Stern asked.

  Pendejo, Chi thought. A smug sharper son of a bitch who would not know how to act if God himself demanded he be a man. She tried to sit on her anger, but it was rising like beer in a spigot.

  “Hey,” Stern said softly, recognizing it. “Take it easy.” One hand came away from his drink and eased across the table like a lizard. It touched lightly at her. Chi did not pull away, so Stern took her hand.

  “That’s why you sat here listening to me all afternoon,” Chi said. “So you could hold my hand.”

  “Actually,” Stern said, “no.”

  Chi drank down her last drink.

  “Hand holding isn’t what I have in mind,” Stern said.

  “Which is?”

  “You know.” Stern’s smile got broad and lewd. “Sure you do.”

  Chi took a drag on her cigarette and ground it into the back of Stern’s hand, at the webbing between the middle and ring fingers. Stern bleated like a goat and jerked his hand back. He stared at her furiously.

  Chi watched him as if he were a spinning roulette wheel and she had money on the red. If he does not say it
, she thought, I will let it go.

  Stern rubbed at the little circle of bum, his eyes coring into her. Chi watched with fascination. He would not be able to stop himself—not unless he looked at her closely enough to see what could happen.

  “You bitch,” Stern said in a low hard voice.

  Chi grabbed the edge of the table and tipped it over into Stern’s lap. He was thrown backward, and his chair rose on two legs and toppled, dumping him onto the sawdust covered floor. By then Chi was on her feet and around to him. She kicked him in the face, and when he covered it with his forearms, she kicked him in the stomach, and then she kicked him twice in the ribs.

  The bartender was touching her arm. Chi spun around and half raised a hand, and though his shiny fat cheeks lost some color, the little man did not flinch from her. “Hey, now,” he said, in a voice soft and expressionless enough to cut through the tequila and shame her.

  Stern’s nose was broken. There was blood all over his lips and chin and he was making bubbly sobbing sounds. He stared up at her through his tears in shock and bewilderment.

  “That wasn’t right,” the bartender said in his soft voice.

  Chi drew a deep shuddering breath. She reached under her serape, came out with a fistful of loose greenbacks, and held them out. When the bartender did not take them, she threw them at his feet. He wore black laced shoes shined to an ebony luster.

  Her shoulder hit the doorjamb when she went out, and she had to think a moment about which way to turn. She hated every one of them at that moment but none more than herself.

  Chapter Three

  Cord opened his eyes slowly and carefully so he would not jar himself or irritate what felt at that moment like a terribly fragile world. He was lying on his back, naked between clean cotton sheets; their touch was cool and slightly abrasive against his bare skin. He felt the weight of a light blanket atop him, and his head was cushioned deep in a feather-stuffed pillow.

  Around him was neatness, order, and the trappings of genteel living. This bedroom was decorated carefully as a stage set. The bed had a head-and-foot piece of brass, a good firmly ticked mattress, and sat high off the waxed-and-polished hardwood floor. A subdued brown hemp oval throw rug covered the center of the floor.

  Across the room, on the wall to one side of the door, was a three-quarter-length mirror. Cord tried to shift to a position where he could see into it. The movement was not without pain.

  His head ached beyond reach of the worst hangover, with a deep insistent pulsing throb that was enough to freeze him, propped on one elbow and balanced carefully against motion. Concentrating on himself in that position, eyes half-closed, he became aware that his right hand was wrapped in swathing. He opened his eyes again in a hurry.

  It looked like he was wearing a mitten on his gun hand. Here was a new and disturbing experience, unprecedented in twenty years of mortal dependence on the assurance that a gun, and the skill and willingness to use it, was a thought away.

  Cord stilled himself with effort. A fireplace was set into the wall to his left, with a tall, freestanding oak wardrobe standing alongside. To his right was a flattop desk with three drawers down one side and a straight-backed chair, and above the desk a white cabinet on which someone had taken some care to paint, freehand, a knobbed staff with wings at its top and two snakes twined around its shaft—a caduceus, a physician’s symbol.

  Two oil paintings hung to either side of the desk, landscapes in simple wooden frames. Each treated the same yellow-brown sweep of plains grass, with sharp-peaked mountains rising into the sky beyond, country like the basin.

  Windows draped in lace curtaining flanked the bed. On a night table to Cord’s left sat a reading lamp, a water glass and pitcher, and his watch. A second chair sat close by, facing the bed. His gun and clothes were nowhere evident.

  Cord got himself painfully to a sitting position. The watch was stopped at 10:03. Cord turned it over and found a deep dent in the back of the case. The stem spun loosely between his fingers, and when he shook it, the works rattled. That figured.

  Using the chair, Cord made it to his feet, grunting. His ankle was sprained, and he lurched to one side as he made for the wardrobe. He managed to get there without falling on his face. Inside he found only his boots and hat. He touched absently at his head and got another shock. Cord went to the mirror. An egg-sized patch of hair above his temple had been shaved down to the scalp and bandaged.

  Cord stared at his naked body in the glass, the dressings on his hand and head—and around his neck, a rope bum, nothing deeply marked, just a ragged reddening, but enough to remind him of what had happened. With all his cuts and bruises and bandages, he looked like a newspaper caricature. But it was not so funny.

  He was in strange territory, his weapons missing, and worst of all, he was debilitated in frightening ways. If someone were to come after him, he had nothing with which to defend himself and could not run. He tried the door. It was not locked.

  He stood for a time with his hand on the knob, but he was beginning to sway unsteadily. The pain in his head was awful. He climbed back onto the bed. He was not going anywhere, not just yet.

  Cord eased back and tried to absolutely clear his mind. Think nothing, he thought, and the ache will go away. What the hell can they do to you? The door latch clicked, and the door began to ease open, as if someone was concerned about waking him, just looking in.

  Or slipping into position for a clean shot.

  Cord lay quiet. What could he do?

  The door swung full open and a handsome woman stood looking at him. Cord was pleased to be looking back. This woman was about Cord’s age, tall and healthy-looking, with very dark hair done up on her head, dark eyes, and cleanly delineated features. Something in her face or expression struck Cord as smart, or skeptical, or merely amused—anyway, here was a woman who would brook no nonsense, but she might be willing to listen to sense. She wore a cardigan sweater over a dress and had good sturdy hips and a fine rise of breast. The earpieces of a stethoscope were hooked around her neck, connected by rubber tubing to the transmitter piece, which sat in the pocket of the sweater. “Where’s my revolver?” Cord demanded.

  “Whom do you wish to shoot?” the woman asked coolly.

  Some sons of bitches who tried to hang me dead, Cord almost said. But it seemed best to keep quiet until he got a sense of the wind’s direction in these parts and who sided with which.

  “Why don’t you start over?” the woman said wryly. “Try this: ‘Where am I?’ ”

  “Enterprise, is my guess,” Cord said, thinking out loud. It was the only town within fifty miles of where he’d been dropped, according to that barroom map that had set him out on this jaunt. “How did I get here?”

  “I don’t know,” the woman said blandly. “I found you on my door stoop, like a basket of kittens no one wanted.” She came over and sat in the chair beside the bed. “This is the surgery.”

  “Where’s the doctor?” Cord asked.

  “I’m the doctor. My name is Fiona Cobb.”

  Cord was pretty sure she was having him on, but his head hurt too much to make an issue of it.

  “Give me your hand, Mr. Cord.”

  Cord gave her a questioning look. “You know me?” Fiona Cobb shook her head no. “Not before last night.”

  “See here,” Cord said. “Who brought me to this place?”

  She sobered, pursed her lips. She seemed about to answer, but then she shook her head slightly instead, as if to discourage him from pursuing the subject.

  Cord did feel a little weary for this game at the moment. He settled for, “Where are my clothes?”

  “Being washed. Don’t worry, it won’t do them any permanent damage.” She leaned forward in the chair. “Give me your hand.”

  Cord did it. She cradled his hand in her lap palm up and began to unwrap the bandage. Cord felt the warmth of her thighs through the material of her dress and became aware of her odor. He thought at first it was medicine and then recogn
ized it for whiskey. There was whiskey on this woman’s breath. Cord wondered if the doctor knew his nurse was nipping at the medicinal alcohol.

  “How does your head feel?” she asked as she unraveled gauze wrapping.

  “It hurts.”

  She glanced up at him. “I’ll bet it does.”

  Cord stared with dismay when the last of the dressing came off his hand. His palm and the insides of his fingers were flannel-red and raw, and covered with open blisters.

  Fiona Cobb frowned. Cord closed his eyes so he would not have to look at his damaged hand and saw the big dark man named Bliss cutting the rope with his saber and then the flaming beam falling toward him. As he passed out he must have pushed it aside, his hand closing over the glowing char. He imagined the odor.

  Fiona Cobb went to the cabinet decorated with the caduceus and returned with a roll of fresh bandages and a jar of some sort of ointment. The sight of his half-cooked hand was making Cord nauseous. “How long?” he croaked.

  She rubbed cool ointment into his palm. “A day or two,” she said. “It’s a deep burn, and it will surely become infected if it is not kept medicated and bandaged until the sores scab over.”

  “Where’s the doctor?” Cord demanded,

  “I’m the doctor.” She finished her bandaging. “So if it does become infected, I’ll be the one to cut it off.”

  “Jesus,” Cord said. “That’s not a pretty thing to say.”

  “What else hurts?” Fiona Cobb said briskly.

  “Twisted my ankle,” Cord said. She pulled back the blanket and sheet in one long swift motion and leaned forward in the chair to probe at the joint with careful fingers.

  “Minor sprain. Good as new in a day or two.”

  Fiona Cobb pulled the bedclothes back up over him. Her smile was a foot from his, and he felt her cool fingers trace the faint line of rope burn around his throat. That was how they were when the door opened.

  The man who came through it was about Cord’s age, though his hair was fine and beginning to thin. He wore dark britches, shoes, a dark vest over a white shirt, no collar or hat. He shut the door, leaned back against the mirror with his arms folded across his chest, gave Cord the once-over, and nodded. He looked a little smart-assed for Cord’s mood, as if he were checking out a new rooster in the barnyard and deciding that the threat was minimal.