Forty Loads - Couverture souple

Cogburn, Brett

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0425272419 ISBN 13 : 9780425272411

Editeur : Berkley, 2014

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PROLOGUE

The old Mexican stood long in the shadows of the balcony, staring at the lighted windows across the street from him. He waited unmoving, despite all the long miles behind him. Patient, yes, but that wasn’t the only thing that kept him still. He was sure that he was being followed. Perhaps all that he had to do was to walk out into that street—so small a thing, dying, the matter of a few steps.

His weariness made it easier to wait. The journey had demanded much of him, and he wasn’t sure how much more he had to give. There was only so much one could do out of loyalty. He was only a man, after all, and an old man at that. Terribly tired—the kind of tired that would take away a man’s cautious edge, make him impatient . . . get him killed.

He scanned the mold black shadows carefully, but nothing was stirring except for the moths and mosquitos flittering in the pale light thrown from the row of windows and balconies lining that long ribbon of stone cutting through the old city. The gas lamps spotting the edges of the street glowed feebly, as if the hot, humid dark was too thick and heavy to allow light to pass through it.

Gut instinct, if nothing else, told him that trouble was near. He couldn’t name his enemies, but twice, bandits had lain in wait for him along the trail. Maybe he was simply unfortunate enough to be the next traveler to come along after they set their ambush, or perhaps they waited for him in particular, some criminal sixth sense telling them that he carried a thing of great value. Gold will do that to wicked men, and oftentimes to men only a little wicked.

Quick footsteps sounded, and he sucked back tight against the wall. His hand found the butt of the ancient, smoothbore pistol tucked behind his broad belt. He pressed the trigger so that the hammer would make no sound as he thumbed it back, and then relaxed his finger when the gun was at full cock.

The white of his eyes followed the slave girl as she passed him by with her bundle of laundry clutched under one arm, her skirt hissing over the cobblestones. She never looked right or left in passing, as if she too realized the night bore bad tidings and wanted nothing more than to get behind the locked door of her master’s home. He listened as her footsteps faded, and then to the sound of someone singing in French far up the street, accompanied by an instrument he could not name. The music was happy and light, and it was no way in keeping with the mood that had overcome the Mexican. A riverboat’s horn bellowed from down at the docks.

It smelled as if it was about to rain, but then again it always smelled to him as if it was going to rain in the city of New Orleans. It rarely rained where he come from, other than the brief monsoon season in the fall that quickly lost itself in the parched sands. But the water in Louisiana seemed to swell up from the ground itself, and the black earth smelled like worms and rotten decay.

Travel overland to New Orleans from the west turned out to be a chancy thing at best, and his last weeks amidst the swamps had been a nightmare. Time and again, when he left the road for fear of pursuit, he found himself blocked by some dead-end bog or flooded quagmire. It seemed as if he had waded or swam most of his way to New Orleans, but it was the loss of his horse that bothered him most. While crossing a great, stagnant slough, a giant alligator had taken hold of his good gelding’s hind leg and drug it down into the oily, black water. The last he had seen of his loyal animal was when its head appeared one last time above the roll of churning water, with its nostrils flared wide and its eyes wild and wide with terror. He knew that it would have screamed if it could have.

The Mexican felt for the scabbard on his hip and was soothed somewhat by the long-bladed knife there. He could always trust his knife. All men bled when pressed against sharp steel. A gun might fail you, hearts and tongues might lie, but a good blade was always true.

He held the pistol before his eyes. Truly, it was a poor peon’s gun, and there were far more modern and better weapons to be bought by a man with more money than he. However, it had always served him well enough, and it comforted him like an old friend. The three of them waited together: the knife, the gun, and the man.

He stepped from under the balcony when the moon passed behind a patch of slow-moving, smoky clouds. He was halfway across the street when he heard a horse coming. He started down the street in the opposite direction, but only made two steps before he heard the whispered talk of men moving toward him. He didn’t have to listen long to determine that they were seeking him.

It started to rain, and not gently. The boom of thunder sounded like a starter’s gun, and the dark sky opened up and poured forth big, warm drops slanting through the pale streetlights. He stood trapped in the middle of the lonely street with a steady stream of water running off the broad brim of his sombrero—a hat that marked him for the foreigner he was in a place where no men wore such things. He went back to the door he had studied so long and knocked on it. He knocked again and still no answer.

Stepping from under the balcony overhead, he craned his neck until he could see the second floor and the curtains of an open window billowing in the light breeze the rainstorm brought. He took the bag from his belt, and with a grunt, lobbed it through the open window and listened to the heavy thump of it landing on the floor inside, hoping that he had the correct address. Not perfect and not as he had envisioned delivering that which was entrusted to him, but the best he could do.

In the end, that was all a man could hope for—to say that he had done his best. He started up the street, wanting to get as far away from the house as possible, so that maybe his pursuers wouldn’t guess where he’d been or what he had left behind.

He didn’t go far before he spied a lone rider coming toward him. The stranger rode a horse almost as dark as the night, and the Mexican could see nothing of his hands under the black, caped oilcloth overcoat he wore. Rainwater ran like glowing quicksilver down the silhouette of man and beast when they parked broadside before him.

“El Hombre Viejo de la Muerte,” the Mexican whispered, half in fear that the dark angel would hear him, and half as if greeting an old friend.

He had talked to a man at a tavern back up the trail three days before that looked very similar to him that waited there and then. That man had asked too many questions about his journey. However, it had been daylight then, and never had he thought that the man was any more than a man—a cutthroat maybe, but at least a man.

Staring at the thing caped in black before him, the Mexican knew he was about to die. He knew that, not just by the blackness that surrounded the thing, but also when he saw that single, Cyclops eye tilted down at him and the leering smile with the quicksilver rain parting around it, as if no moisture could wet those grinning teeth.

The Mexican gave the Devil no chance to ask for his soul, or time to make any demands on the bit of life he had left. He lifted his pistol and squeezed the trigger. His powder was too wet, and the metallic snap of the hammer fall was the only sound in the world. Misfire.

The one-eyed devil’s coat moved, and a pistol appeared out of those dark folds. It was a ridiculously large revolver, and the rain made the charcoal blue barrel shine like polished ebony. The horse stamped nervously in the road and the pistol wobbled and strained to locate its target, moving in synchronization with the cold eye behind it.

The Mexican threw aside his own pistol and drew his knife. He could hear shouts and running footsteps splashing up the street behind him, but he ignored them and charged with his blade bared. Flames flashed before his eyes and the Devil disappeared.

The next thing the Mexican knew, he was lying on the street with water rushing down his sides and the rain falling gently onto his face. Couldn’t move and didn’t seem to have the will to. He was vaguely aware of a group of men standing nearby, silently watching him, faces devoid of all emotion. He looked up into the dark sky overhead until the Devil’s face filled his sliver of vision and stared back at him with that leering eye. He knew what the Devil wanted to ask even before he asked it.

“You are a hard man to follow.” The Devil cocked his head, his one good eye like a bird of prey studying its food for signs of life.

The Mexican smiled, although he didn’t know why. For some reason, both his fear and his pain were gone. He felt light and careless, and found it amusing that the Devil spoke with a slight French accent. In all his life, he never would have guessed that. Living was full of all kind of surprises, and dying seemed no less adventuresome.

“I mean to have what I came for,” the Devil said.

It took the Mexican three tries to speak again, and he felt his own blood on his chin, warmer than the rain, and seeping from him with every working of his mouth. “And you’ll die for it, as I have.”

The Devil’s one eyebrow tilted down. “You could have given it to me back at the tavern, whatever this precious thing is that you carry. Who knows? Maybe I wouldn’t kill you.”

“I was never going home.” The Mexican hacked up a ragged spray of the rainwater flooding his open mouth. “I knew it from the moment . . . the moment I said I would come here.”

“Here? To this place?”

The Mexican tried to shrug, but only coughed again.

The devil eye staring at him was as wide and wild as a scared horse’s, and the mouth below it parted like a cadaver’s slowly contracting flesh into a patronizing grin, teeth wet and yellowed like varnished, aged ivory—an ancient smile, fallen, as old as the turning of the earth. “I’ve been here many times. This moment. Different places and different names, but still the same. Sometimes it pays; sometimes not. But this time . . . ah, yes . . . wouldn’t be any other place since I guessed what it was you carried. Something very heavy in your purse.”

The Mexican exhaled a groan.

The Devil held his stamping horse by one rein and squatted over his victim. He gestured casually and languidly with his pistol barrel for emphasis while he spoke—as if the Mexican wasn’t dying, as if it wasn’t raining, and as if they were two friendly strangers who had met on the roadside with all the time in the world for pleasant, idle conversation. “And that is the true measure of worth in all things, old man. The world balances itself. Am I to blame for being willing to take your life for something that is so valuable that you are willing to die for it? I think not. You were simply here, as I’m here. There could be no other reckoning.”

“Fool. Pendejo!” The Mexican was too weak to spit in the Devil’s eye, but it still felt good to call him a dumbass.

The Devil laughed. “But there is a chance, and a good chance, mon ami, that I will die a richer fool than you. Tell me what it is you know, and about this thing you carried that is so precious to you. You’ve got my bullet in your guts. Big bullet, maybe busted your back from the way you’re lying, no? Hurts, doesn’t it? Tell me now, and I’ll put another one in your head. Ease your suffering.”

The Mexican was too close to death to feel any more pain, and the Devil’s voice seemed to come from afar. He felt cold hands slipping inside his vest and tugging at his pockets. He tried to find the moon above him again, but it had long before disappeared somewhere into the smoky clouds drifting so low overhead. There was nothing but raindrops pelting his face and spotting his fading vision.

He took one last ragged breath. The things men would do for gold—pack loads of dull, yellow metal waiting for the taking a thousand miles toward the setting sun. Fools. Had he not been dead he could have told all who would listen that el oro was much easier to find than it was to keep.

CHAPTER 1

“I’ll call.” Faro Wells shoved a small stack of coins into the middle of the table and counted twenty heartbeats waiting to see the result of his decision. The swaying lantern above the table intermittently lighted half of his still, unreadable face.

Faro knew he was a loser, even before the riverboat captain showed his hand. The slow smirk building at one corner of the man’s walrus mustache gave it away. He wished the fat man had been so easy to read earlier, then maybe he wouldn’t have called.

“Tough luck,” the captain said as he reached out with one hand and smeared the winning cards faceup across the table before him.

“Full house, ain’t that the drizzlin’ shits.” The slave trader beside Faro let out a low whistle when he saw the captain’s hand. He paused with a smoldering cigar suspended between two fingers before his lips and clucked like an old hen and shook his head somberly, as if he would have played Faro’s cards differently.

The captain leaned forward to encircle the pot with both forearms. “Can’t say as I blame you for staying on three jacks. I’ve risked more on worse hands.”

Faro Wells watched stoically as the last of his fortune was slowly drug across the scarred oak table and into the fat captain’s belly. He frowned at the pasteboards he’d just thrown down as if they’d failed him. He was dead broke, courtesy of another losing hand. And not just the no-money-in-your-pockets kind of broke, but the no-money-in-your-pockets, lose-everything-you-have, nasty-people-wanting-to- break-your-legs-for-what-you-owe, soon-to-be-no-roof-over-your-head, starving kind of broke.

Faro shrugged. He leaned forward until his entire face was in the light. It was a rugged face, with the angle of his jaw darkened with a two-day growth of whisker stubble. A round, seamed scar the diameter of a pinky finger dimpled the cheekbone just below his left eye. His lips parted to reveal a perfect row of white teeth, but the forced gesture fell short of its nonchalant intent. It was a pirate’s smile that both those who knew him and those who didn’t were never quite sure how to take.

“You know what they say, Captain. Sometimes the worst hand a man can have is a good one.” Faro fought back the exasperated sigh that he so badly wanted to let escape his lungs.

“Better dig in your purse for some more coin.” The clammy-skinned lunger beside Faro coughed into a filthy kerchief before gathering the cards to shuffle for his deal. “You win some, you lose some.”

Faro merely grunted at the sickly cardsharp. Win some, hell, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d walked away from a poker table a winner. A man could tell himself that his luck was bound to turn for only so long. He’d always been good with numbers, and he did a swift mental calculation of just how poor his luck had been for the past year. The answers he came up with were quite astounding—astronomical in fact—when considering that a man could be dealt so many poor hands and play what good ones he garnered so badly. It was a miracle of the worst kind, and the kind of miracle he believed in.

“No, I’m played...

Biographie de l'auteur :

Brett Cogburn is the great-grandson of the man who inspired True Grit, Rooster Cogburn. He was reared in Texas and the mountains of Southeastern Oklahoma, where his grandfather taught him to ride a bucking horse and his father taught him to hunt. For many years he made his living from the back of a horse. Somewhere during his knockabout years cowboying and working in oil fields, he earned a B.A. in English with a minor in history. He lives with his family on a little ranch in Oklahoma, where the West is still teaching him how to write.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Berkley
• Date d'édition: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0425272419
• ISBN 13: 9780425272411
• Reliure: Poche
• Nombre de pages: 384