Читать книгу Dead Men Don't Lie - Jackson Cain - Страница 8

PROLOGUE

A bullet always knows.

High up in the San Carlos mountains in southern Arizona, a woman with shoulder-length auburn hair sat cross-legged. She was studying the cliff face in front of her. Dressed in a blue close-fitting denim work shirt and Levi’s, she sported an old, worn, light brown, scoop-brimmed work Stetson and hard-used riding boots, which were heeled with large steel rowels. She looked fit, and she was. Her long tresses, full mouth, flaring cheekbones, and expressive green eyes still drew stares—even from men a fraction of her thirty-five years. A pair of saddlebags were casually spread out on her lap; a black-and-white Appaloosa with a mottled rump was rein-standing beside her.

The woman stared fixedly at the three circular points embedded in the cliff face. Each of them was approximately two inches in diameter—two on top, one below, each approximately eighteen inches from the other. Pale as old ivory, these disks were considered by her godmother and legendary Apache war shaman, Lozen, to be sacred.

The woman needed something sacred at this moment. True, she and her husband, Frank, owned the largest ranch in the entire Arizona territory as well as several extremely profitable silver mines, but now, it seemed, her wealth no longer mattered. For the past twenty years, the woman’s life had gone from marvelous to monstrous. Her two headstrong children—nineteen-year-old Richard and eighteen-year-old Rachel—were continually running off on “adventures.” Their hair-raising exploits had always frightened the woman out of her wits: Richard’s rock-climbing, high diving, and heavyweight boxing drove Katherine to distraction, and she was convinced that Rachel’s obsession with breaking wild mustangs would be the death of her only daughter.

But now the two had topped themselves. They had set out on another “adventure” in the dead of night, without warning, leaving only a letter of good-bye. In it, they explained that they were hopping a freight train down to Mexico. Traveling in peon garb, they intended to explore Sonora and Sinaloa—two of Mexico’s most lawless states. Sinaloa was especially frightening. Brutally tyrannical, its titular head was a dimwit named Eduardo. His shockingly psychopathic stepmother—known throughout Mexico as “La Señorita”—really ran it, and she had brought back the torture chambers of the Spanish Inquisition and the sacrificial pyramids of the Aztecs, on one of whose summits her faux-Aztec priests cut the hearts out of anyone who crossed her. In short, her political systems—which Porfirio Díaz privately and wholeheartedly supported—were derived from the worst excesses of the Spanish Inquisition and the Aztec Empire. Since the Señorita was also Díaz’s most generous personal benefactor and political contributor, her power throughout Méjico was surpassed only by that of El Presidente Díaz.

For the past decade she and Méjico’s vicious dictator, the same Porfirio Díaz, had embarked on a path of conquest and had subjugated almost everything and everyone in Mexico. Only the state of Sonora had fought them off and remained free. But Sinaloa and Chihuahua, under Díaz and the Señorita, had allied themselves against Sonora, and that state’s days seemed to be numbered. The Señorita let everyone know that after Sonora she also planned to come north and reclaim the Arizona Territory for herself and Díaz.

The Señorita had spouted that theory one too many times, and Katherine’s children decided it was time to stop speculating on Sinaloa and its empire from hell and find out what was really going on. In the letter they had characterized their expedition as “a reconnaissance mission and fact-finding operation.” They quoted Sun-tzu’s dictum: “Know thy enemy.” They believed they would return with “indispensable intelligence, which will determine the survival or the extinction of El Rancho del Cielo.”

As Frank had once observed, the two young people “suffered the curse of Odysseus—incurable curiosity.”

“Which will lead only to Cyclopes, sirens, Scylla, Charybdis, and witches who turn people into swine,” Katherine had added.

“Then why are they doing it?” Frank had asked.

“They like living close to the bone, on the razor’s edge . . . on the hair trigger’s trembling touch.”

“In other words, they’re like their mother was when she was their age,” Frank had answered.

Katherine had been abducted by the Apache as a child and Frank believed the experience had left her with a wild, rebellious streak, and there was some truth to his theory. But contrary to much rumor and false report, Katherine was not made of stone and was not impervious to fear or anxiety.

And now Katherine was facing something more unbearable: Frank had always been a dynamo of indefatigable energy. Not only was he the foremost surgeon in the entire American Southwest and not only was he running that region’s most modern, scientifically advanced surgical hospital, he was also indispensable in running and expanding the ranch and their mines. Now, however, he was constantly in bed and devastatingly exhausted. Even worse, over the last several months he’d begun experiencing intestinal pain.

Then came the diagnosis: terminal abdominal cancer.

And her children were down in Mexico—incommunicado.

Katherine secretly feared that all she and Frank could do was hope that their children were safe and wait the disease out—until finally Frank’s suffering came to its inevitable end.

Katherine, however, was not good at “waiting things out,” which was why she’d come up to the San Carlos mountains to meet with her lifelong friend and mentor, Spirit Owl.

* * *

Seated earlier that morning in his heat lodge—a brush wickiup filled with aromatic smoke and scorchingly hot steam—Spirit Owl had spoken to her of her children:

“Everyone is an individual with a different destiny. You have to learn to leave people alone—Frank as well as your children. You have to learn to let them choose and follow their destinies. You have to stop manipulating everyone.”

“If I had adopted that attitude twenty years ago, there would be no Rancho del Cielo. It has survived and thrived precisely because I have, when necessary, told people what to do, even when they resisted. It’s survived because I have run it with an iron hand.”

“But you run the lives of those you love with that same iron hand even when they need kindness and understanding.”

“I can’t help interfering in their lives if they are hurting themselves and those around them. Noninterference in such situations isn’t love.”

“You came to me because you’re depressed. That’s because, in truth, you don’t do good deeds for their own sake. You do good works because you live to control people. Now you feel that control slipping through your fingers. Frank is ill, your children are in Mexico, you can’t manipulate them, and you mourn the loss of your power.”

“Richard and Rachel went down to Mexico and into the heart of hell. You’re saying I shouldn’t have tried to stop them. I should have let them go—let them get tortured and killed?”

“Did it ever occur to you that they did the right thing? The Rancho knows nothing about Sinaloa. It was time you learned what you’re up against.”

“But our spies are my children.”

“Oh, I get it. It’s okay to send someone else’s children down there but not your own.”

Katherine buried her face in her hands. “Spirit Owl, I’m losing my grip.”

“You mean you’re losing your control.”

Katherine raised her head and stared at the Owl angrily. “Richard and Rachel kept their trip a secret from me. Had I known, you bet I would have ‘controlled’ them. I would have locked them up and tied them down till the insanity passed.”

“That’s because you’re a miserable person, Katherine, and you aren’t happy unless you’re making those around you miserable. Grow up and learn to stop meddling.”

* * *

His advice depressed her even more. She’d brought her Colt .44 army-issue pistol, ostensibly to fight off pumas, javelinas, and diamondbacks, but as of late she had increasingly considered another use for it. A little voice said inside her head:

I’m sorry, Frank, Richard, Rachel, Owl, I just can’t take it anymore.

She put the pistol to her temple.

And after a moment of silence pulled the trigger.

* * *

Suddenly she saw Spirit Owl in a vision. She said to him:

“Am I dead?”

“No,” the Owl said. “Just in Arizona.”

“I’m supposed to be dead.”

“You’re supposed to stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

“I don’t care. Everyone else gives up,” Katherine said. “Why shouldn’t I?”

“You have to care,” Spirit Owl. “You have work to do. Anyway it’s not your time.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’m the Owl.”

* * *

The vision faded and she heard the hammer dry-snap on a dead round.

“Click!”

The Owl was right.

The bullet told her.

And a bullet always knows.