Cord 7 Page 6

  His mother sold the farm at four bits an acre and took up hand laundering in Grand Island. “Scrubbing other people’s dirty wash,” Greer muttered, “while her Kyle learned a respectable calling.” Ever since, he’d spent his work days ciphering columns of tiny figures and reassuring old ladies that their couple hundred dollars of life savings were safe as the vaults of Heaven.

  “I was like my daddy,” Greer said. “Drowning in dirt. Then my ma took sick and I had to do double time, got a night job swamping out a saloon. Something like bank work, you get my meaning. Influenza.”

  “What?”

  “My mother had the influenza, and she wasted and died. She was a pious Christian woman, and if there is justice in the universe she is sitting on the right side of God. But right there is devout as I get. She did her best, but I never took to godly ways. When she died, I got a little house and fifty-seven dollars, but mainly I got free.”

  Cord sensed the boy was feeling a little guilty, but that was irrelevant to the major topic of discussion. “So you decided to rob your own bank. You’re some thinker, boy.”

  “That’s right,” Greer said. “I been thinking plenty. I saw my fortune in the big city—fact is I was riding for Denver when I spotted the two of you coming through Julesburg. Your pictures are in more banks than the President’s.” Greer smiled into his coffee cup. “Two years of working with other people’s money and I never thought of taking a penny, but seeing you, I come to a great discovery. Take a penny, take it all.

  “I got ambitions,” Greer said. “I don’t want to die in a collapsed well nor live under the thumb of no bank. I want to travel around, see the sights, explore opportunities...” As the boy talked on, Cord recalled his own early days on that dry-land patch in southeast Texas, how quickly he had run when he’d had the chance. “First thing is money,” Greer said. “A man ain’t shit without money.” He looked up, shook a finger. “And this here is Army money, Government money. We ain’t gonna steal some old lady’s purse.”

  “It’s money, that’s all,” Chi said. “Ours, if we take it.”

  “That’s right,” Greer said, happy as a proctor whose student has just grasped a particularly abstruse lesson. “We have ourselves a deal.”

  As it happened, they did, and the bank job came off smooth as glass. They rode into Grand Island two days later, a few minutes before three on a fragrant drowsy Friday afternoon. On the farms and ranches spread across the prairie, men worked and sweated and stared at the sky for some hint of rain cloud. In town few people were abroad. The business of the week had been wrapped up early, and the Army payroll was safe for the weekend in the Agrarian Exchange Bank, awaiting Monday and the escort from Fort Kearney.

  It was a single-story stone building in the old part of town, near the river and the stockyards, sharing a street corner with a hardware store, a vacant lot, and an old abandoned homesteader’s cabin that was left over from the pioneer days and was too much effort to tear down. The better part of town had moved further up the bluffs. Back of the bank was a workingman’s boarding house that had once been a traveler’s hotel. A narrow alleyway ran between the buildings to a back street that would deliver them to the main road west out of town.

  Greer was horse holder, with orders to stay out of sight. Cord and Chi were already wanted by plenty of law, but there was no need for Greer to get tagged with a part in this, assuming all went well.

  Cord came out of the alley on foot and crossed to the shade of the hardware store’s awning. He watched a man exit the bank, touching his hat to Chi as she went in past him. The man stared at where she’d been for a moment, then shook his head; a notion had flitted through his mind and been instantly rejected as being as likely as resurrection. The man tucked his money into his billfold, his billfold into his coat pocket, and went off briskly toward the center of town.

  Cord saw Chi behind the stenciled window. She nodded. He crossed the street and entered the bank. The big-faced Roman-numbered clock on the wall above the tellers’ counter read one minute to three.

  There were no customers. The two tellers, young men in tinted celluloid visors, striped shirts, and arm garters, were toting up the day’s transactions. Behind the cage-railed counter in an office area was a vacant desk and beside it an easel and a high stool, at which the head cashier made entries in a ledger book. He was an aged turkey-necked geezer with a long beak upon which pince-nez glasses perched delicately as a butterfly. He frowned at Cord; here was a man who spent good cheer frugally. Kyle Greer’s boss; it was a wonder the kid had lasted long as two years. A mother’s love, Cord thought, and a son’s wish to please.

  Chi’s lever action Winchester came out from under her serape. Cord drew his .45 and showed it to the tellers. “Grab some sky,” Cord said. Behind him, Chi snorted. A couple nights earlier, he had been reading to her from a Deadeye Dick novel, and the line was Deadeye’s. The tellers didn’t get the joke. They raised their hands and stared stupidly. The old cashier opened his mouth and clamped it shut, jarring his pince-nez from his nose. He caught it in a cupped palm. A walk-in vault was set into the wall behind him, and to one side was an oak door.

  Cord came around the end of the counter. “Open that vault.”

  The cashier replaced the pince-nez and examined Cord through it. “Only Mr. Farley can open the vault,” the old man said irritably, as if everyone knew about Mr. Farley. He dipped his head at the oak door.

  It opened at that moment to admit a jowly, roly-poly little capitalist with a black suit and a red face. “What goes on?”

  Chi came around the counter behind Cord. “Open the vault, Señor Farley.” Cord stepped back to cover the tellers and the scrawny cashier.

  Farley drew himself up to his full stature of five feet three inches. “I will not.”

  Chi shrugged. “Kill him,” she said to Cord.

  Cord pursed his lips and shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said reluctantly.

  “Never mind,” Chi snapped. “I’ll do it.” She levered a cartridge into the breech of her Winchester, jammed the muzzle into Farley’s gut, and cocked the hammer.

  Farley gasped and scuttled to the vault.

  Cord fought to keep a straight face. This was an old time-saving gag that hadn’t failed yet. To the typical banker, Chi was alien as an Ethiopian, and maybe crazy enough to kill in cold blood. From there on the bank job was incidentless as a poem. Farley opened the vault and they rode north out of Grand Island with more than $10,000. By nightfall they were well on the other side of the Loup River, and that night they drifted into a sleep easy as well-suckled babes.

  Cord was snoring softly and dreaming of rosy ladies in barroom paintings coming to life when the cold muzzle of a double-barreled shotgun jabbed painfully into his forehead.

  Cord opened his eyes and held his breath. He saw a canopy of cottonwood branches, stars peeking through their heavy leaves. He lowered his eyes. A thick stocky bulk moved back and the pressure of the shotgun eased. Cord sat up and exhaled. It felt like two or three in the morning.

  The man with the shotgun removed a high-crowned Stetson. His shaven head gleamed in the starlight. “You know me.”

  “Ryker,” Cord muttered.

  “Pinkerton cabrón.” Chi was off to one side where Kyle Greer, the turncoat son of a bitch, was covering her with his Remington Frontier .44. She turned on him, ignoring the weapon. “And you, you son of a whore.” Greer winced at the insult to his mother. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” Chi scolded. “You pretended to be my friend.”

  Chi slapped Greer’s face, a hard stinging blow that left her livid handprint on his cheek. Miraculously, no one shot her.

  “No more of that now,” Ryker ordered. “Get on your feet,” he told Cord.

  “My revolver is rolled in my poncho.” Cord cocked his head at his makeshift pillow. “Wanted you to know, so you don’t get excited when you find it and do something I’d regret.”

  “Nothing is going to happen. No accidents anyway.” R
yker spooked a man, his brutal face under his big-domed hat. He looked like a circus ape dressed in man’s clothes.

  An ape with all the guns. Cord stared at Greer. “You pleased with yourself, boy? You going to think back fondly on this night?” Cord had a hunch that the kid was less than totally committed to these proceedings. He might be their only hope.

  “You shut up,” Ryker snapped. Perhaps he sensed his weak side lay with the boy. “We are going down to the river now.”

  “What for?” It was Greer.

  “You keep your counsel, boy.” Ryker waved the shotgun at Cord and Chi. “Now move.”

  They led the way down a deer trail toward the water. The Federal money on them was dead-or-alive, and this crazy bald-headed Pinkerton son of a bitch meant to collect the easy way.

  Only first there was the entertainment.

  The trail ended in a clearing amid the willows, a little grassy beach. The water of the Loup River glinted with points of starlight. Ryker held the shotgun on them and Greer stood a little to one side with his revolver. He was frowning and trying to swallow what was coming next.

  “Get away from your boyfriend a mite,” Ryker said, gesturing with the double-barrel. Chi took a couple of steps toward the water.

  “Now, you want any chance of survival, you start stripping out of them Mexican duds. Show me that you are too fancy to kill, chiquita.”

  “This isn’t right,” Kyle Greer said.

  “You don’t like it, get the hell out of here.” Ryker kept his eye on Chi. “Strip ’em off.”

  Chi did not move for a long time. Finally her hands went to the brim of her sombrero. Ryker watched like a hobo at a bakery window.

  “He’s going to kill us anyway,” Cord said conversationally to Greer. The kid was fascinated as Ryker by Chi’s slow hypnotic moves. “How long you been a Pinkerton, boy?”

  Ryker did not seem to hear. Chi pulled the rawhide thong up over her chin and took off the sombrero.

  “Ain’t no Pinkerton,” Greer said sullenly. “I work for him.”

  “Bull,” Cord said. “Like the rest of your story.”

  “No. Everything I told you was true, about my mother and working for that hawk-nosed cashier.”

  “Only you left out one thing,” Cord said coldly.

  “Stand away from him, Cord,” Ryker barked from near the water. “You keep that goddamned gun on him, boy.”

  “You going to have Kyle here pull the trigger on us, Ryker?” Cord called.

  Ryker smiled at Chi. “This scattergun holds a load for each of you. What washes ashore downriver is gonna look like gunny sacks of raw meat. The hogs’ll strip your bones clean.” Ryker snapped his fingers. Chi drew her serape over her head and dropped it on the grass.

  “You think on this, boy,” Cord said to Greer, his voice low and hard. “That crazy man yonder is your fit partner, and he is fixing to murder us—soon as he finishes his other nasty business. And you are just as big a part of it, killing for money.”

  “You say,” Greer challenged. “All them banks you robbed.”

  “Read the posters. Not one says a damned thing about killing. We got only one murderer here—two, unless you stop this.”

  “Greer!” Ryker’s voice sounded hoarse. “Fetch me your revolver. I’ll hold it until this is done with, keep you from getting involved.”

  Greer did not move.

  “Boy, you give me that gun.” Ryker’s tone was low and menacing as a grizzly’s growl. He kept his eyes and the shotgun on Chi.

  “I don’t think I will,” Greer said.

  Ryker turned his head for a second to flash a furious look at Greer. Chi was on Ryker’s back instantly, moving quick as chance in the silvery starlight. She threw her weight forward and they were on the ground, wrestling for the shotgun. Ryker got half turned and Chi put a knee hard between his legs. His breath exploded in a moaning sigh and the end of this was past doubt.

  All of this happened in a second or two. As Chi jumped Ryker, Cord chopped the side of his left hand into Greer’s wrist. The Remington fell to the ground and Cord went after it, rolled, and came up with the gun cocked and on Greer, who appeared paralyzed by this sudden unpleasant turn in his country-boy fortunes.

  Chi was liable to blow a huge hole in Ryker’s middle at any moment. Her eyes glowed with feline intensity and she was rigid with terrific anger. Cord tensed in anticipation of the roar and the fiery blast, but then Chi tossed the shotgun to him. He was startled and caught it awkwardly by the stock. Right now Chi was spooky as Ryker.

  She retrieved the serape and shrugged into it. “Muchacho,” she said without looking at Greer, “you ride out of here. Do it quick, before my temper goes.”

  “Get yourself horseback, boy,” Cord said under his breath. “Hold up.” Greer shook his head, coming back to himself. “I ought to have a share. Nobody would have any money if it wasn’t for me.”

  “Pendejo,” Chi spat. She stalked over, wrenched the shotgun away from Cord, and blew off a barrel into the ground at Greer’s feet. Flame like lightning spewed from the muzzle, and pellets thwacked into Greer’s boots and his shins. He yelped and stumbled away into the trees.

  Chi’s anger was building like surf when the wind freshens, and Cord wondered whether he would get her stopped before Ryker was dead, and how much he cared. Except that what they did not need out of this was a dead Pinkerton. Cord heard Greer’s hoofbeats recede into the darkness.

  “You want to play funny games?” Chi said to Ryker. He backed away toward the water, his hands up. “We will play some games.”

  She backed Ryker up to a thick, gnarled willow trunk, then threw down the shotgun and bound his hands behind him with a leather thong. Cord kept Ryker covered, but by now the bullet-headed detective was incapacitated by his own fear.

  Chi drew her knife and smiled. Cord felt a little sick in his stomach.

  She skinned his clothing off delicately as a surgeon. She cut his suspenders and slit his britches up both legs and peeled them away, and then she did the same with his union suit, the knife whispering through cloth and never touching skin. Ryker stood in the starlight naked except for his boots. His belly was thick and white and puffy.

  “Let’s go,” Cord said.

  “All right,” Chi said pleasantly. “We’re mostly done here.” She laughed and turned and took a step toward Cord, and then she spun like a duelist and her knife ripped down the flesh of Ryker’s face.

  Ryker screamed and the flesh over his cheekbone parted in a perfect straight line from below his left eye to his jawline, a three-inch slit welling blood. It dribbled over his chin like drool and plinked onto his bare chest.

  “Jesus,” Cord breathed. All their years together, and still she could shock and frighten him.

  Chi waved the bloody knife in front of Ryker’s eyes. “You’ll wear my mark for life, cabrón. You will see my brand every time you pass a mirror. I’ll tell everyone what happened.”

  “Bitch.” Flecks of blood flitted in the air, and Ryker began to blubber like a child.

  “Time to ride,” Cord said neutrally. He did not want to set her off again.

  But Chi smiled mildly enough. “Sure. That might do me good, a quiet ride under the stars.”

  Cord took a last look at Ryker, weeping and tied up naked in his own blood and filth. Good enough, Cord decided. They broke camp quickly and saddled the horses, and were on their way within minutes. At the last, Ryker was bawling and howling like a slobbering rabid dog.

  Time and again, here and there, they heard stories. Six months after their run-in, Ryker was fired from the Pinkertons for trying to work some dirty setup or another; that much was true fact. Other tales listened less well: Ryker had turned outlaw, or bounty hunter, or regulator for a big land company near Red Bluff, California. Cord and Chi paid minimal attention; there was no career in worrying over the Enos Rykers of the world. Looking over your shoulder all the time kept you from seeing the way ahead.

  Then, a couple of years
back, there were articles in the papers about Ryker being appointed a U.S. Marshal by the President. Cord figured Ryker bribed some Senator, or maybe ran a little blackmail. Either way, Ryker began to gather up a small sort of reputation, for manhunting and ruthlessness. Cord remembered a broadside with a photograph of the three murdering Barnabas brothers, laid out on shingles neat as a string of trout. “The law has seen fit to post these men dead or alive,” Ryker told some reporter, “and I never gainsay the law.”

  Ryker went on bringing in men cold as winter, and crowing to the newspapers. He took to announcing to the reporters whom he would pursue next, called it “giving fair warning.” He generally got his man anyway, because he spent money on stoolies, turncoats, and stupid boys like Kyle Greer.

  Cord noted with passing interest that Ryker never mentioned him or Chi in his boasting, but didn’t put any stock in it one way or the other. They stayed clear of him as they would any U.S. Federal marshal. Ryker was one of many law-dogs and bounty men determined to convert their hides to fame and cash money.

  Now, riding west of Casper across the Wyoming prairie toward sundown and the distant mountains, Cord considered that they had underestimated the depths of Ryker’s hatred. He had never crowed about catching them because it was for him a personal matter, and he wished them to die in special horrible ways. Cord saw Ryker tied to the willow in the bright summertime starlight, naked from the boot tops up, and Chi with her knife, slashing at him. Enduring that could turn a man crazy with hate, narrow the mind’s view until it saw nothing but vengeance.

  Cord put his pondering aside. Only one thing mattered now: Ryker was two miles back and going to kill them, barring luck or a good idea.

  Ten

  If there were a way out, it lay west, across the open empty country to Wind River and beyond into the gulch-cut foothills of the east slope of the Divide. Riders could fold away into such territory and be gone forever, maybe even from a tracker of Mr. Earl’s skill. It was the one best chance for now.