Kyle Greer had become confused and his confusion had to trap him, in a real prison or the one in his head. Kelsey had made a bad trade, her abusive father for Greer. She’d be caring for the boy like he was her child, all the rest of her life. He and Chi had avoided such traps, and now was the time to get out. Cord thanked his stars.
But there was this Ryker business...
Knuckles rapped on the door. Cord stubbed out his cigarette in a dish beside the lantern on the night table and threw back the quilt. He padded across the dark room in his union suit, thinking pleasurably that it was Chi.
It was Kelsey.
“What?” Cord said, disconcerted and sounding cross.
Kelsey ducked under his arm. Cord shut the door and leaned against it. A woman coming in the night could be low adventure, but he was in no mood for this one. He felt halfway naked and more than a little stupid, standing in his union suit, but Kelsey did not seem to notice.
“You’ll do it, won’t you.”
Cord peered at her. “Do what?”
“What you promised.”
“Nobody made any promises ... promised what?”
Kelsey went to the window. Beyond her the terraces steamed white shadows above the dark hulk of the bathhouse. “Sometimes he gets better,” she said. “That bank job in Casper, he pulled it off without hearing voices or seeing monsters. Ryker can scare him gentle sometimes. Kyle still ain’t right, but he can see to business, like his brains are unhooked but his flywheel is still spinning. Do you know what I mean?”
“No,” Cord said. He wanted this girl out of his room.
“But when he has to do Ryker’s dirty work, Kyle goes back into a state. It takes longer each time before I can bring him back, and he always stops short of getting to where he was before. So I know what will happen, next job or the one after that, Kyle’ll be gone for good, and useless.”
For Cord’s money the boy was already useless.
“Ryker will kill him soon as that happens—unless we kill Ryker first.”
“Who is going to do the deed?”
“I love that benighted boy, Mr. Cord.” She drew breath, steeling herself for what came next. “I’ll show you how much.”
Kelsey flopped the suspenders off her shoulders and pulled the top of her union suit over her head, so quickly Cord could do nothing except stand there with his mouth open. She came and put her arms around his neck. Her breasts were small and hard as walnuts.
Cord shoved her away. He snatched up her shirt in one hand and her elbow in the other, opened the door and threw her out, tossed the shirt in her face. She clutched it to her chest.
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, girl,” Cord said, waving his fingers like the schoolmaster in a farce ... and Chi came around the corner at the end of the hall, heading for her room.
There was Cord, in drooping long johns, gaping like a fish and his cautionary finger in midair ... and there was Chi, folded up with laughter.
Kelsey looked at them both and fled.
Cord stomped into his room and slammed the door. He could hear Chi trying to stifle her laughter, and finally the door of her room open and close. Even so, as he got back into bed and pulled the quilt to his chin, he felt righteous and strong, and still goddamned lucky.
Nineteen
Cord awoke from dreamless sleep clear-headed and hungry, a little stiff from the long hours in the saddle the previous day but all there and himself, no hangover. Going to bed the night before a fight without being gut-full of whiskey: there was some invention.
The smell of the sulphur brought him all the way awake. The room was chill from the misty night, and Cord settled for splashing water onto his face before pulling on his shirt and britches and dry jacket. It was dawn of a dirty-looking day. Rain fell steadily from a slate-gray sky, the fat drops sizzling into the pools on the hot-spring terrace. Steam drifted everywhere.
From his window, Cord saw Abraham Buskirk heading out west across the swinging suspension bridge, a bedroll tied on behind his saddle, off to find his Arapaho pinochle partners. Buskirk turned his horse on the opposite bench and studied his sulphurous kingdom. He spotted Cord and waved, looking a little shame-faced at ducking the fight. But Cord held no resentment; he admired the old man for pulling off a feat of extraordinary survival in a changing West.
No one was in the big sitting room when Cord came down, although fresh dry wood crackled in the fireplace. He followed the smell of fresh coffee through the dining room and found Kelsey behind the high counter of the kitchen. She handed over a cup.
“You shamed me last night, Mr. Cord.” Her eyes were cast down. “Made me feel small.”
Her candor arrested him. Cord had thought he’d been the one to play the fool. “You forget last night.”
Kelsey looked up, wet-eyed as a puppy. “I got grub on.” She nodded past Cord. “Kyle and Miss Chi are waiting yonder.”
They were at the table behind the wood stove, where a fire was crackling. At their elbows were placemats and flatware and spotless white linen serviettes, and between them was another pewter coffeepot. Greer was talking in a low voice and Chi was listening with something like fascination, as if hidden within his mad chatter were coded truths. This rubbed Cord against the grain, Chi paying attention to a fool. Even if they killed Ryker, they were still in trouble; Cord was busting with frustration that wanted some fit outlet.
Greer shut up when Cord sat down, and Chi carefully bit off a smart remark about his ridiculous getup the night before. “Morning,” Cord muttered.
Greer leaned toward him. “You did me a good turn that day on the North Platte,” he said. “Letting me loose before you worked on Ryker.” He sounded halfway lucid.
“Then why did you go back, boy?”
“Don’t remember,” Greer said. “But I remember that damned night. He got me anyway, didn’t he, good and proper.”
“Are you going to be all right?” Cord demanded. “Can you carry any weight at all when trouble starts?”
Greer looked at Cord idiotically, and Cord saw the lucidity drift. “He tells me what to do,” Greer said. “I hear his voice talking in my head.”
“Los manos de Dios,” Chi said. “Touched by God’s hand. Those voices in his head, the Indios think it is the true word of the Lord.”
“What do you think?” Cord asked sharply.
Chi deliberated. “I think he is loco.”
“Good for you,” Cord said, “because this is sure as hell no day for nonsense about God’s hands.” Men’s hands would decide this fight, with guns.
Kelsey came through the kitchen door carrying two plates on each arm. She dealt them out and took a chair. On each platter were three fried eggs and a thick slab of bright red corned beef. Greer was captivated by the sight of his food. He cut one of his eggs down the middle, folded it over, sopped up the oozing yellow, cut a square of corned beef, impaled it on his egg-filled fork, and shoveled the dripping stack into his mouth. He chewed vigorously, absorbed by the ritual completeness of this transaction. Kelsey smiled at him, like a wife gauging the depth of her husband’s love by his appetite.
Cord dusted his eggs with pepper and dug in. The corned beef was salty, but otherwise the food was hot and good. They ate in silence, and when they were done Kelsey refilled coffee cups and Chi rolled cigarettes. This room irritated Cord; the tourist appointments that had bemused him the previous night looked stupid and annoying in daylight. “Where does that swinging bridge lead?” he asked. Kelsey looked up brightly. “It hooks up with the main wagon road, the one the tourist folk take down from Grey-bull, just over the rise. Ryker won’t come from there—the Indian’11 be following your track, and Ryker will follow the Indian.”
“I figured that—I wasn’t thinking of Ryker.” Cord looked at Chi. “We could cross that bridge, though it’s an idea I hate.” Through cracks in plank decking, Cord saw rapids swirling fifty feet down. “But we could do it just the same, cut the ropes behind us and dump that bridge in the river
.”
“He’d find us,” Kelsey bleated. They had to kill Ryker for her; that was the heart of her plan. “That Mr. Earl would pick up our trail.”
“He is only talking, hermana.” Chi smiled at Cord. “Aren’t you?”
She was right. By the end of the next day at the latest, they would be worse off than when they had started, chased beyond this safe haven deep into wilderness, until their horses died and everyone was out of ideas, short of basic dry-gulching.
“We got food and fire and dry clothes, under a good roof. Wherever Ryker put up last night, some scared nester’s soddy or whatever, he’s going to be cold and wet and getting impatient. Now it is us who can do the waiting out. Let’s see how he likes it,” Chi said.
“Maybe. Ryker has pledged five years on this chase already. He will probably try to pull some stunt.”
“Just the same,” Chi sighed, “we got no choice.”
“Not for long, if we are lucky.” Cord wondered if he were being drawn into this impatience by a clear mind. Maybe he was better off with a numbing hangover. Maybe one drink right now, some of that Vicksburg bourbon in his coffee. Maybe that was a poor idea...
“He’ll be in,” Kyle Greer said.
Everyone looked at him.
“This ain’t Fort Laramie,” Greer said, sounding sane enough. “Over that ridge behind us there is maybe a half dozen deer trails, no brush to speak of, but he has got the cover of rain and steam and this ugly day ain’t never going to get much lighter than it is now. He is out there, him and his faggot Pearl and the rest of them.”
“Hush, boy,” Chi said quietly.
“Kyle can tell,” Kelsey said. “He has got what they call a sixth sense.” Kelsey put her tiny hand on Cord’s forearm. “Will you do it?”
Cord pulled his arm away, and Chi made an impatient noise. The question was pointless now. Enos Ryker meant to kill them, without compromise or parley. Now there was only the fight. Kelsey’s fondest wish was about to come true, unless the Ryker bastard got real lucky...
“When Ryker is dead,” Cord said, “we still got trouble to spare.”
“A bank job and two murder charges.” Chi nodded. “But there is nothing for it, Cord, not right this minute. We will worry about clearing our good names after we see to Ryker.”
“There you are,” Greer said. “Good names...”
Crazed mutterings were something Cord could not at the moment abide. He pointed a finger at Kelsey. “You keep a rein on him, girl.” Cord lowered the finger, reminded of the silliness of the previous night. “Once this gets rolling, I want no trouble with bedlamites.”
“Except Ryker,” Greer said soberly.
“I am losing my patience, boy,” Cord growled. “Listen,” Greer said. He touched two fingers to his forehead and closed his eyes.
“You shut up!” Cord pushed back his chair.
“Momento,” Chi said. “Can’t you hear?” Chi stood and went through the archway into the front room. Cord followed her, thinking dark thoughts about Mexican women and demented boys who shared visions. Kelsey trailed after him, but Kyle Greer kept his seat, as if there was nothing happening he could not already see.
Cord found Chi on the porch, staring up at the terraces rising beyond the bathhouse. Rain slanted down from the flat colorless sky, and clouds of steam wafted across the sulphur-covered rock shelves, alternately draping and revealing parts of the eerie otherworld that was Buskirk’s little enclave.
Chi pointed into the mist. Cord peered hard and saw nothing at first, but then the wind gusted and the curtains of steam parted. For a moment Cord could see all the way along the line of the wooden aqueduct where it cut along the terrace’s edges, climbing a couple hundred feet to the bowl’s east ridge.
Mr. Earl stood above the steaming shelves, arms folded and still as a wax model in a nickel museum. Rain splattered off his cocked top hat and his bare chest and ran off fringes of his buckskin leggings and the folded uppers of his soft leather boots. The Indian looked down at them and nodded once.
Cord felt the irritability and impatience drain from him like rain off oilcloth. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s see to business.”
Twenty
The bathhouse was a cavernous ghostly shell fifty yards long and half as wide. A high corrugated tin canopy ceiling was mounted on six-by-twelve beams; a six-foot canvas modesty wall open at the top was tacked to the post. A narrow plank deck rimmed the huge dark pool, which was empty except for a few inches of rain-seep in the bottom. The pool’s curved walls were fashioned of heat-warped boards sealed with pitch.
The aqueduct entered at the far end, opening into a wide chute; when the sluice gates on the terraces above were opened, hot water would fill the pool in a few hours. On either side of the intake were doors leading to dressing rooms.
Cord stood in the shadow of the doorway at the opposite end. He carried a Winchester .44 carbine borrowed from Buskirk. Guns were not a problem now: Chi had the rifle taken off the dead Payne boy, and Kelsey had her own Winchester. In the front room of the hotel, Cord had watched her fumble cartridges into its magazine with twitching fingers.
“You going to be all right, girl?” Cord asked.
“I killed a man,” she reminded him. Her plain boyish face was pale. But once the fight began, she would have to care for herself like everyone else.
“Okay,” Cord had said, and was buttoning up his jacket and on the way out when Greer came to life.
“I want my shotgun,” he said.
“Just what we need,” Cord muttered. “Another crank with a gun.”
“I got a right,” Greer said reasonably. “I want Ryker bad as anyone.” Greer stood. “Give me my gun, Mr. Cord.”
Cord went behind the front desk and got the sawed-off shotgun. He tossed it to Greer, who caught it by the stock. “We’ll maybe need the extra gun, boy,” Cord said, “but if you hear any voices, make sure you listen carefully before shooting. Think first.”
Now, from the shadow of the bathhouse door, Cord threw a hi-sign to Chi, positioned atop the three-story hotel. Greer and Kelsey were holed up below in the lobby, ready to move with the fight. Cord wanted them together; she could maybe keep him pointed straight ahead for the next twenty minutes or so.
Cord held the rifle against his chest and went through the bathhouse door. He cat-footed along the desk, crouching so his hat did not show above the canvas modesty wall. He passed the door and eased behind the cover of the aqueduct.
Mr. Earl remained on the ridge above the top terrace, impassive as a marble bust. Cord rose to his full height. Mr. Earl’s dark head, framed by the loops of his braids, turned slowly as a lighthouse beacon. His red-tinted spectacles were opaque in the odd light and speckled with rain drops. Steam swirled around his leggings. Mr. Earl touched two fingers to his temple and nodded. The steam rose up thicker and obscured him.
Behind Cord, a boot scraped board.
Cord whirled and stepped back and went down on one knee. A rifle cracked and a slug punched through the dressing room door. One of the Payne boys, on the deck across the corner of the pool, was working the lever of his rifle.
Cord fired the carbine one handed from the hip, rushing the shot, but the Payne boy flopped forward anyway and slid face first down the curve of the empty pool’s wall. Cord rose cautiously and went around toward where he had fallen.
A rifle fired from the direction of the hotel, and the other Payne boy came through the door at a dead run. Cord fired at him as the other man slipped on the sulphur-slime coating the decking, dropping his rifle over the lip of the pool. The man was up and running instantly. Cord worked the rifle’s lever, tracked onto him, got the spot between his shoulder blades in the open sights, and swore and did not fire.
The gunman threw his shoulder into the door of the woman’s dressing room and crashed on through. The door rebounded and slammed shut behind him.
Cord was already moving around the corner of the pool. He put three slugs through the door, fast as h
e could fire, then planted his boot in the middle of the door and went in low.
He saw a row of wash basins along one side wall, a line of shower stalls along the other, and four dressing cubicles in front of him, each with a closed canvas curtain hanging from a rod. Cord fired waist-high into the curtain on the left, levered, fired into the next one, levered again.
The curtain on the far right exploded outward and the Payne boy came through, waving a revolver. Cord shot him in the chest, and the Payne boy half turned and clawed at the canvas curtain. Its rod broke in the middle and the heavy canvas fell over him like a shroud.
A shot sounded from the hotel. Cord went out, rifle ready, round the corner of the pool.
It was empty. No Payne boys were lying face down in the bilge water. The damned carbine... Cord was used to a longer gun and must have merely creased the other gunman.
Across the yard, Kelsey screamed.
Nothing moved in the open space between the bathhouse and the hotel’s porch. The fire in the hearth threw flickering shadows across the windows. Cord drew two quick breaths and dog-trotted for it, rifle up and ready. No one shot at him until he was halfway there.
The bullet splashed into a puddle a foot in front of him. Cord zigzagged and belly-flopped behind a horse trough. Mud splattered his face.
“Cord!” Ryker screamed “You are under arrest, you murdering son of a bitch. Throw out that carbine and show yourself.”
Cord kept still. There were wisps of steam everywhere, but the rainwater pool in which he lay was frigid.
“I got the girl and Greer,” Ryker called, “and your partner is treed. So you come in here and take your medicine, bucko.”
Cord took off his hat and peered above the lip of the trough. The door was open, but he could see no one.
“First thing is ... I’ll shoot the girl and then the fruitcake,” Ryker called from inside. “Then I will torch this place and cook your partner like a suckling pig. You ever hear of a hot piece of ass, Mr. Cord?” Ryker guffawed.
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