Читать книгу Dead Men Don't Lie - Jackson Cain - Страница 10

Chapter 1

Rachel Ryan stood at the Hermosillo cantina bar, staring into her glass of tequila. Glancing around the crowded taberna, she absently noted the two dozen tables with their quartets of straight-backed chairs. Coal oil lamps were bracketed against the walls, and twenty or so hung randomly from the ceiling.

In a corner, a mariachi band played all the great plaintive Mexican songs—“Corrido,” “Dormir Contigo,” “Te Desean,” “La Incondicional,” “Mi Terco Corazón,” “El Son de la Negra,” “Algo Tienes,” “La Cárcel de Cananea,” “Tu Amor,” “Vive el Verano,” “La Paloma” as well as hers and Richard’s personal favorite, “La Golondrina.” The band included a trumpet, an accordion, a violin, a high-pitched, round-backed vihuela guitar, and its big, bulky, bass counterpart, a guitarrón. The cantina featured a large dance floor. Since Sonora’s main fort was nearby, half the clientele were soldiers in gray uniforms. A dozen or more cavalry officers had on brown, roweled riding boots, which clinked on the wood floor when they walked. The other half of the clientele were civilians. White cotton shirts and faded Levi’s were popular among the civilian men, white cotton dresses among the women. Since La Paloma was an upscale cantina, even the putas sported white cotton dresses.

Fluent in Spanish, Rachel and her brother, Richard, both understood the song lyrics around them. After three months in this country she was even dreaming in Spanish. Rachel listened to “La Golondrina,” absently taking in the song’s words:

A donde irá

veloz y fatigada

la golondrina

que de aquí se va

por si en el viento

se hallara extraviada

buscando abrigo

y no lo encontrara.

Ever the clown, Richard mockingly warbled the English translation:

Where can it go

rushed and fatigued

the swallow

passing by

tossed by the wind

looking so lost

with nowhere to hide.

“Sort of summarizes our whole trip, doesn’t it?” Rachel said.

Richard let out a long sigh. “Are you questioning the wisdom of our venture?”

“Maybe.”

“Don’t let Mom hear you say that,” Richard said. “She’ll never let us live it down—sneaking off like we did in the dead of night, then coming back broke, our tails between our legs, admitting we screwed up.”

“I’m starting to wonder why we came here at all,” Rachel said.

“We wanted to know if Sinaloa was as bad as we’d heard, and if it posed a threat to El Rancho, which it does.”

“I wanted to hook you up with our Lady Dolorosa,” Rachel said. Now it was her turn to mock.

“Yeah, right, pimp me out. Maybe I could earn us train fare back.”

“From what I hear her lovers do not find her generous,” Rachel said.

“She’s built an Aztec pyramid behind her main hacienda. She’s installed Aztec priests and brought back their rituals. Her priests even conduct human sacrifices atop those temples.”

“That’s where she sends the lovers who disappoint her,” Rachel said.

“After her Grand Inquisitor finishes with them in his torture chambers,” Richard said.

“That’s when her Aztec priests take over,” Rachel said. “After flaying them whole, they cut out their hearts atop those pyramids, then bleed their remains out into troughs, like stuck pigs.”

“That’s only because they failed to satisfy her in bed,” Richard said, thumping his chest, “which in my case could never happen.”

“You’re different, Virgin Boy?” Rachel said, taunting him with her favorite nickname for him—and the one he hated the most.

“‘My strength is as the strength of ten, because my heart is pure.’”

“What’s that from?” Rachel asked.

“Tennyson,” Richard said. “Idylls of the King, but don’t bother reading it. You wouldn’t get it.”

“Why?”

“It’s literature.”

Rachel gave her brother a condescending frown.

Six rurales in gray, silver-trimmed uniforms and dark brown riding boots, heeled with razor-sharp buzz-saw rowels, bellied up to the bar on their right. They had .44 Colt revolvers on their hips and bandoliers crisscrossing their chests. They all wore broad-brimmed sombreros with triple-creased steeple crowns, which matched their uniforms. The tallest of the six pounded on the bar with his palm. Eléna, the woman who owned the cantina and served the drinks, didn’t take anything off anybody, and she glared at him. An attractive widow, her hair was as black as a crow’s wing, and her tight-fitting red cotton dress showed her figure off to her considerable advantage. She was a successful, good-looking businesswoman. Men vied for her attention and tried hard to stay on her good side.

“Mateo,” she warned the officer, “keep it up and Antonio will break a shotgun butt on your thick skull.”

Major Mateo Cardozo grinned widely. Under his black, downward-sweeping horseshoe mustache, his white even teeth shone brilliantly. Mateo and Eléna were both playing a favorite game.

“A thousand pardons, señorita,” Mateo implored, “and a compliment on your belleza [beauty]. Also a bottle of tequila for my men and myself, por favor.”

“I can see you hombres have already had a bottle somewhere else.”

“Two bottles,” Mateo said.

“You have to make five a.m. roll call, not me.”

She gave him a bottle and six glasses. He gave her the money.

“Who knows, señorita?” Corporal Rinaldi said. He pulled himself up to his full five feet, six inches of height, his forehead furrowed but his dark eyes glittering. “Tomorrow, we may not even be in the army.”

“That is a fact,” Mateo concurred.

“What’s wrong?” Eléna asked, polishing a glass.

“We have to figure out those goddamn howitzer trajectories,” Sergeant Enriqué—the big, bearded guy—muttered under his breath, “and until we do, those damn guns won’t hit shit.”

“General Ortega is madder than hell at me,” Mateo admitted. “Díaz and the Señorita are planning another attack, and if we can’t get our artillery up and running, we’re screwed.”

“We’re all screwed,” Eléna said softly, nodding.

Rachel gave Richard a quick hard look. “I’m going to the excusada [the restroom],” she said, “then let’s slope on out of here. I’ve had it with Méjico Lindo. This whole trip was a bust. As much as I hate to admit it, Mom was right. We’ll figure out how to find our way back to Arizona tomorrow.”

Richard nodded his agreement.“Verdad.” [“Truth.”]

Mateo was still complaining about his cannons. “That’s ’cause those cannons are old Napoleons, and no one has fired them in a decade. The generals can’t 14 Jackson Cain expect us to learn this shit overnight. We don’t even know how to aim the damn guns.”

“I don’t even know how much powder to use,” Rinaldi said.

“Or how to make the right kind of hideputa [son-ofa-whore] powder,” Mateo said.

“We’re using the same mix of sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter that we use to load rifles,” Enriqué said.

“Except those howitzers aren’t saddle rifles,” Mateo said.

“They aren’t handguns either,” Enriqué said.

“Why’d the general give us the job anyway?” Enriqué asked. “We’re cavalry. We ain’t no artillery.”

“Someone has it in for us,” Rinaldi said.

“He gave the job to me,” Mateo said, “not to you hombres. You won’t get blamed. I will, and Ortega will be right. I was supposed to figure out how to make those guns work. I let him down.”

“It’s not our fault that Sonora doesn’t have real artillery officers,” Rinaldi said.

Richard had just graduated at the top of his class from West Point as an artillery officer. He was so young though, only nineteen, that they asked him to take a year off before the army gave him a field commission. Emboldened by three shots of tequila, Richard tore a sheet of writing paper from his knapsack pad and began filling it with ballistics equations. He then tapped Mateo on the shoulder.

“You have three basic problems,” Richard said. “You need someone from your university who knows integral calculus to compute your trajectories. He’ll understand these equations here.” Richard wrote out a glossary, defining the symbols. “He then has to find a good book on the chemistry of explosives. He will then be able to tell you how to mix the cordite you need to power your shells.”

“Cordite?” Mateo asked.

“None of the European Great Powers are using black powder for their artillery and their other high-powered weapons,” Richard said. “Not anymore. America is phasing it out too. You’ll need nitroglycerin, if you want to manufacture nitrocellulose and nitro-guanidine, both of which you really need if you want to produce the cordite necessary for really high-quality howitzer powder. It’s not easy to make though.”

“I can’t even make a shell go a hundred yards,” Mateo grunted, eyes downcast.

“Aim the guns at a forty-five-degree angle for maximum range,” Richard said, “and then—”

Stopping in midsentence, he looked up from his paper full of equations and saw the troopers were all circling around him, staring at him, fixedly, fascinated—a little too fascinated. Mateo was suddenly putting his arm around his shoulders.

You had to show off, didn’t you ? Richard cursed silently. How in living hell do you get out of this one?

Rachel came back. Hearing Richard’s last remarks and seeing the paper full of equations, she instantly realized how badly Richard had screwed up. She removed Mateo’s arm from Richard’s shoulders.

“Richard, we are out of here.”