Cord 9

by Owen Rountree

  “Not yet,” Oakley said. “That was them in the horse pasture at the big house, watching Stringer try to beat Cord’s brains out.”

  “I thought they might be,” Cord said. “Couldn’t tell for sure. There was a moon that night, but I was interested in other animals.”

  “I mean to take back my horses before they are moved out,” Oakley said. “Anyone want to come along?”

  “We got other troubles begging to be looked into,” Cord said. “I hurt Stringer pretty bad, least I hope so, but he’s not dead and he won’t run, not with all those guns to back him. Once he’s able—tomorrow at the latest, is my guess—he and his bunch’ll come riding for me.”

  “There is the idea,” Oakley insisted. “With Stringer down, tonight is the time for getting back my horses.”

  “I got other fish to fry.” Cord touched at his split lip with his bad hand. “I got to conserve my strength,” he added. “What I got left.”

  “I’ll ride with you,” Chi said to Oakley.

  “Say what?” Cord barked.

  “We can take a look around at the setup anyway.” Chi turned to Cord. “Stringer is too beat-up for gunfighting tonight.”

  “Maybe,” Cord said. He wished she would not go with Oakley, but she knew that.

  Oakley stood and went to his horse. “I’m going to keep moving,” he said. “I trust no one tied to Bliss, and that goes for those two back in Enterprise. I want my back against no walls.”

  Oakley swung into the saddle. “I’ll be at that windmill around dusk.” He nodded to Chi. “See you.” He gave Cord a cool, neutral look, and rode off.

  “Come on,” Cord said. He could not keep his voice entirely free of annoyance. “I think I might be able to use a drink.”

  “You sure could use a bath,” Chi said. “You decide about the drink.” She knew how Cord got around whiskey. Sometimes his timing was awful, but right now she decided not to worry about it.

  They rode in silence for a time, the hot thick wind rolling over them. “You told a lie, querido,” Chi said after a time.

  “How’s that?”

  “Bliss was the one, wasn’t he? He ordered Wee Bill’s death.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “You can’t keep secrets from me,” she said lightly. “You try, but it never works.”

  “I changed the story,” Cord admitted. “I don’t know—like you said at the big house, I guess I know who has got to pay.” He gave it some thought. “Bliss is crazy—there is no point in looking for satisfaction from him. He would never get it. It’d be like trying to teach a duck to read.”

  “He is lost,” Chi said.

  “That’s no excuse.” Cord shook his head. “But still, I reckon that somewhere the killing and vengeance has got to stop.”

  Chi nodded, as if he had passed a small test. “But not until after Stringer …”

  “You bet,” Cord said.

  Chapter Ten

  Cord jerked back. Fiona Cobb grabbed his wrist, twisted it so his hand was once more faceup on the table, and splashed more witch hazel over the hash of scratches and blisters on his palm. The sting of the liniment brought involuntary tears to Cord’s eyes.

  “Hold still,” Fiona Cobb said.

  “I bet that smarts.” Richard Carlisle leaned on the bar, a bottle of gin and a tumbler close to hand.

  “I will show you smart,” Cord warned. He drank the rest of the bourbon from his shot glass, using his left hand. The whiskey was starting to touch him. Well, that’s what it was for....

  Back in Enterprise from Bliss’s ranch, he’d pulled off his muddy clothes and flopped down in one of the rooms upstairs to sleep away his aches and pains and most of the afternoon. When he awoke, clean clothing from his saddlebags was laid out, and somewhere beyond the open door, Chi was singing in Spanish. Cord wrapped a sheet around himself and followed the sound to a bathroom at the end of the hallway, where he found Chi dumping the last of a bucket of hot water into an iron tub. She was in a gay mood and offered to scrub his back. He shooed her out gruffly; the business with Oakley had come back to mind by then.

  Now, downstairs in the saloon, Fiona Cobb worked the medication into his hand. “You ought to take better care of your body, Cord,” the doctor said. “You are not as young as you once were.”

  “I don’t need a surgeon to tell me that,” Cord said. He ran his free hand through his damp hair. It wanted cutting.

  Chi appeared from the back door and smiled across at him.

  “Drink?” Carlisle offered.

  “Not right now,” Chi said.

  Cord looked out the window, and sure enough, up the street at the base of the windmill, Nick Oakley sat his horse, its white hide turned golden in the twilight. She would know he was there; she always knew those things.

  Chi stopped at the table. “You be careful,” she said to Cord.

  “Take your own advice.” It sounded surlier than he’d meant.

  “I won’t be long.” Chi reached down and ran a fingernail over his hurt hand. “Querido,” she said gently.

  “Sure,” Cord said. “Go on.” He watched her unhitch her mare, swing gracefully into the saddle. The last of the sun shot its rays between the peaks of the divide, far off west beyond the roofline of the library.

  “Your partner is an extraordinary woman, Cord,” Fiona Cobb said.

  “Yeah,” Cord grumbled. “Sometimes a little too extraordinary for my taste.”

  “You’d prefer she’d stayed here with you.”

  Cord looked away; he did not wish to see them ride off together. “You want a drink?”

  “Yes, thank you.” Fiona Cobb began to unravel fresh bandages from a roll. Cord carried his glass and hers to the bar. Fiona Cobb was drinking whiskey and water.

  The rattlesnake slept in its jar at the other end of the bar, near the connecting door to the cafe. Carlisle refilled Cord’s glass from a bottle of Jim Beam and Cord put the liquor down neat. “ ’Nother, while I’m here,” Cord said. “Save me a trip.” Carlisle poured again.

  Cord carried the glasses back to the table. “There’s times she goes her own way,” Cord said.

  Fiona Cobb sipped at her drink. She wore a long dark velvet dress cut low across the bosom.

  “Me, too, sometimes,” Cord went on. He gave Fiona Cobb a lickerish smile, but she didn’t get it, or chose to ignore him. “She doesn’t take orders well. People try to tell her what to do, she gets awfully wrought up.”

  “Give me back your hand,” Fiona Cobb said. She started to rebandage it.

  Cord was three drinks into what he suspected would be a pretty fair session of packing down the juice. Fiona Cobb and Richard Carlisle, near as he could tell, had something of a habit; most always they were somewhere close to a drink. Yet both seemed more or less sober, anyway pretty far from falling-down drunk.

  “That must be something to see,” Carlisle said. “Your partner wrought up.”

  “You don’t want to be at the other end of it. Take it from someone who knows.” Cord took his drink in a quick series of swallows.

  “Another?”

  Cord shrugged, and Carlisle refilled his glass. But then Cord decided that maybe this was a bad time to be a complete moron and let the bourbon sit. “You mind if I make myself a sandwich in that café of yours?”

  “You can have a steak if you want. Beef is what we got plenty of.”

  “Sandwich is okay,” Cord said. “I want to stay upright for a while, but I hate to ruin a good drunk with too much food.”

  “I’ll get it,” Carlisle said. “It makes me feel useful.”

  Cord tapped a finger on the tabletop. “Tomorrow, maybe the next day, Stringer is coming in with his boys. I’m who he is mainly mad at, but he’ll want you out of his hair as well, so if he gets me, you-all are next. Plan he’s got doesn’t call for any doctors or librarians.”

  This time Cord sipped his drink. “I am going to try to stop him. Right then is when you are going to be real useful, ’caus
e you are going to side me. Both of you.”

  “Me?” Fiona Cobb tied off the bandage. “I have little experience with guns.”

  “You point at what you want to shoot.” Cord extended the forefinger of his left hand at her and cocked his thumb. “You pull the trigger. Boom,” Cord said softly.

  “Take it easy.” The heat in Carlisle’s tone surprised Cord. Carlisle paused in the entryway to the cafe and turned to Cord. “No point in throwing needless scares into people.”

  “You scared, Mr. Librarian?”

  “Yeah. That’s right.”

  “You got to think about it.” Cord felt the drunk stirring inside him, trying to get loose and cause mischief. “You got to know what you are going to do when the trouble starts and there is no more time for thinking.”

  “Go out after dark,” Carlisle suggested. “Find Stringer in his weakened condition and kill him.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Why not?”

  “You ever kill a man in his sleep?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then you do it,” Cord said. “It’ll be a new experience for you.”

  “What difference does it make how Stringer dies?” Carlisle said. “The man is a murderer a dozen times over. Who cares if he sees the man who makes him pay for it?”

  “I care. I’m the one who’ll know, the one who will wake up at three o’clock on the odd morning, sweating ice water and trembling like I was damned. There is some physiological psychology for you, Doc,” Cord said. He looked back to Carlisle. “A fight will come, sure as sunset, and you just might be a part of it. Hope to God you can hold up your end.”

  “I guess we’ll see what happens,” Carlisle said. He went into the kitchen.

  Fiona Cobb took a long pull from her whiskey and water. Cord let his drink alone for a moment. “The snake,” he said, breaking the twilight silence.

  “Richard?” Fiona Cobb was surprised.

  Cord turned back to her. “The one in the jar. I hate snakes.”

  “Few people like them.”

  “I knew a woman who did, though. Had one for a pet, the kind that squeezed little animals for food—a constrictor.” Cord was half talking to himself now. “Used to be in the carnival.”

  “The snake or the woman?”

  “Both. They did a dance. Anyway, this woman I’m thinking of, when she touched that snake, played with it, she got—”

  Fiona Cobb leaned forward over the table. “Aroused?” Cord studied Fiona Cobb’s breasts. “Something like that.”

  “What the hell?” Carlisle stood in the connecting door with Cord’s sandwich, frowning. “Did I miss something?”

  “Freshen my drink, please, Richard.”

  Carlisle came over and put down Cord’s plate. “Why not?” Carlisle took Fiona Cobb’s glass behind the bar.

  The sandwich was that morning’s breakfast beef between two thick slabs of the wheat bread, with horseradish and mustard. The first bite reminded Cord he was hungry. “Damned good,” Cord said. He looked toward the bar. “I been riding you a little hard. Sorry.”

  “Decent of you,” Carlisle said, still a shade miffed.

  “You bake the bread?” Cord asked Fiona Cobb.

  “I bake the bread,” Carlisle informed him.

  “Good,” Cord mumbled. He was tired of spatting.

  “Cord was telling tales, Richard.” Fiona Cobb watched Cord eat. “About women and snakes. He likes the former and hates the latter.”

  “I will tell you a tale,” Cord said abruptly.

  Fiona Cobb and Carlisle looked at him curiously. Cord pushed away the unfinished half of his sandwich and got out his makings. “Can either of you roll a cigarette?”

  Fiona Cobb took the pouch and began to worry open the drawstring.

  “There is a man and a woman in this tale,” Cord said, “and a snake as well. Nick Oakley and my partner are the man and the woman.”

  Cord took the cigarette Fiona Cobb handed him, lighted a match under the lip of the table, and fired up, exhaled smoke.

  “I am the snake,” Cord said.

  Carlisle brought bottle from the bar and joined them at the table. “I like a good tale,” he said.

  “As it turns out,” Cord said, “me and Chi and Oakley, along with that Wee Bill Blewin, once partnered up. Or meant to, anyway.”

  Carlisle refilled Cord’s glass. Cord was not sure why he was telling these people things—except he’d had enough to drink and had to tell someone, clear it out of his head. He pursed his lips and blew out a smoke ring and peered through it into the long ago.

  The first part of the tale went way back in Cord’s career to days before he partnered with Chi, when he was just one of a gang and Nick Oakley was another. Oakley was sixteen years old, looking to be tough but hanging on mostly as a horse holder and camp cook. One time another of the gang, an old outlaw hand, bullied Oakley, and Cord, hardly past twenty himself, stood up for the kid. There was a fight.

  “I won,” Cord said. “There was Toad Matson, sitting in the campfire and spitting teeth, and there was Oakley, looking at me as if I was his hero. But he had it wrong: I only never liked seeing the helpless get pounded around. I would have defended a dog same way, least in those days.” There was no edge in being someone’s hero; it made them expect you to act certain ways, and when you didn’t live up to the image they’d invented, the admiration could turn to hate …

  The gang broke up without making any real money, and life meandered on. By and by Oakley got partnered with Wee Bill Blewin and Cord with Chi. Then, a half dozen or so years later, on a hot sweaty summer day in Denver, Oakley and Cord ran into each other once more.

  Oakley recognized Cord, though Cord likely would not have recognized the younger man. In his mid-twenties, Oakley had grown good-looking, and self-assured without being cocky; there wasn’t any of the dim worshipful kid to him now. With Wee Bill, he had come to a measure of outlaw renown, and it sat on them gracefully enough.

  Cord and Chi should not have been in Denver. Those days they were wanted in one state, two territories, and by the federal government, so they made a habit of avoiding cities. But Denver happened to be where they had stashed their savings, two thousand dollars, all the real money they had in the world, in an account under the name of Epheseus Palmerson in the First Denver Reliance and Trust Bank.

  At this point in the story Carlisle laughed. “I thought you two were in the bank-robbing business. I’d expect you’d sooner hide your money under a rock in the desert.”

  “Only in the dime novels,” Cord said. “Big city banks are safe as they come. They have big city vaults and big city guards, and big city cops come after you when you’ve done the job. Only a rube would think of trying to knock one over.”

  The idea was to get in, withdraw the money they needed to get by for a while, and haul ass back to the territories. But then they ran into Oakley and Blewin.

  Oakley was no longer panting in Cord’s wake, but he accorded Cord some frank regard. It was honestly earned: Cord and Chi had gone some further in outlawing than Oakley and Blewin—more people were after their hides anyway. Oakley expressed his respect forthrightly. He had an idea for a job, and he offered them in on it.

  “This particular job required more than two people,” Cord said in the saloon. “Oakley reckoned I was someone he could trust.”

  “Sure,” Carlisle said. “You taking his side against bullies and all, you’d be aces in his book. So,” Carlisle said. “Were you someone he could trust?”

  Cord winced at that part of the memory. “Keep still,” Cord said. “Maybe you will find out.”

  “The suspense is delicious,” Fiona Cobb said. Her glass hid her face as she drank, so Cord could not tell if she were serious.

  Nick Oakley had in mind a robbery, but not a bank: his target was the Railway Express Agency office at the northwest end of Sixteenth Street, near the Union Pacific terminal. Wee Bill had been hanging around the barrooms down near the ra
il yards—“Looking for opportunities,” as he put it. A couple of nights earlier Wee Bill had gotten an express clerk very drunk and had come away with a lesson in a new and specialized corner of commerce.

  When you were a big mining magnate and had all the gold and silver the greediest man could ever want, the clerk told Wee Bill, you sought new ostentations. To this end, the mining men occasionally shipped ingots of the purest metals from the company mines in places like Leadville, Aspen, and Ouray to artisans in Chicago, to be fashioned into fine jewelry. In three days a large consignment would return by express to decorate the thick wrists and wrinkled necks of mining men’s blubbery wives.

  The person who took delivery at the express office was the local jeweler who brokered the deal. There was nothing to the job, Oakley said. They needed only to wait until the jeweler picked up the pieces, accompanied as per his habit by a single guard. Then they would take the goods away from him. Easier than any bank, Oakley insisted: no safes to open, no citizens getting in the way, no secret alarm buttons or hideaway guns.

  “Well, I didn’t like it.” Cord paused while Carlisle poured him another stiff drink. There was a lamp on the table now against the encroaching darkness, and Cord held his glass to its light as if examining the whiskey for impurities. “As I said, big city cops tend to be smarter and more tenacious than country sheriffs. And the weather bothered me as well. It was way too hot for that place and the time of year.”

  “Like this basin about now.”

  “But this was the big city,” Cord said, “and it was having one of the worst heat waves anyone could remember. It gets hot enough in the city, and people start to go crazy. Bet that’s in your book, Doc.”

  Nor did Cord like messing with mining magnates. They were different from the garden variety of capitalist: Most of them started out as raggedy-assed prospectors themselves and had hung on to some goldfield toughness and tenacity. They were likely to get pissed off at having their goods stolen and try to do something about it—like hiring a goon squad of killer Pinkertons to run down the thieves like dogs.

  Finally, Cord and Chi had a rule against stealing property. It had to be converted to cash money, and that meant involving other people and bringing in all sorts of new and unacceptable risks.