Strong Darkness (20 page)

“I do.”

“Once, not far from here, I rode one that goes backward as quickly as it moves forward. An interesting symbology, don't you think? Since moving in reverse can only mean an acknowledgment of error and one's inability to correct it. An acceptance of that which is wrong.”

“That is not what all you see before you is about. And the product reaped from places like this has helped make you a very rich man far more than your gambling interests have.”

“I don't like your tone,” Chang said, recoiling slightly. “Perhaps you forget your true heritage, to whom you are vastly indebted for overcoming it. You came to us no more than a cheap pornographer, peasant scum with a movie camera, and our backing allowed you to become everything you are today. Yuyuan isn't yours, it's
ours.
Your presence here serves us, something else you seem to have lost sight of.”

“Serves you? By that I'm sure you mean the fifth generation wireless network we are building that will provide China with a treasure trove of America's greatest technological secrets and research. They think their defenses render them immune,” Zhen added, managing a slight smile, “not realizing we constructed those defenses as well. Through our subsidiaries, of course.”

“All the same, like that roller coaster I just spoke of,” Chang countered, studying him closely in the spill of the refracted light off the big kliegs, “sometimes experience in life is enhanced by traveling backward. It has been decided that you should return to China and retake your seat as head of Yuyuan's offices there.”

Zhen reminded himself not to raise his voice and risk ruining another shot. “I would respectfully remind you that my place is here.”

“We cannot allow the arrangement made between our government and the Americans to be compromised,
Xi
ā
nsh
ē
ng
Zhen.”

“You mean the arrangement
I
made, don't you?”

“There is only one ‘I' in China and it is not you. Far, far from it. As when riding a roller coaster, each rise is followed by an even swifter fall. But on a roller coaster, as in life, the next rise is just ahead. Am I making myself clear to you?”

“What is clear to me, General, is that you are here because my American contact must have expressed his concerns to you. And you would take his word over mine.”

“You have become a liability,
Xi
ā
nsh
ē
ng
Zhen,” Chang said, his voice laced with a grim finality. “You will be allowed to save face, but you will not be allowed to save it here. You will return home and do so without delay. On the same return flight that I am taking a few hours from now. I already have your ticket. You can meet me at the airport.”

“You know the proverb that says the rise may be slow, the fall fast, but no one stays at the top between them for eternity?” Zhen asked him.

“No, but it is a wise lesson to keep close in mind.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Li Zhen told General Chang.

 

52

S
AN
A
NTONIO,
T
EXAS

Caitlin had pulled the Venetian blind back up and was standing by the window when Tepper came to reclaim his office.

“The man walked right past me on his way out the door. Felt like a snowman come to life,” he said, plopping into his chair. “I swear, Ranger, this man's body temperature could keep your beer cold.”

“We ever relocate headquarters, let's make sure not to send him the forwarding, Captain.”

“Do I need to ask how it went?”

“Off. I don't know any other way to put it. There were times in our talk where he wasn't even the same asshole both of us know. Like he was reading somebody else's lines. And he brought up the serial killer we're chasing.”

“Guess nothing escapes the attention of Homeland, does it?”

“Question being, why would he care? I don't see any threats to national security in the murders of five prostitutes, unless he also knew Li Zhen's family history in the United States has connections to the old Trans-Pecos rail line. I don't know why he'd even bring it up otherwise, do you?”

“I'm trying real hard not to bother, Ranger, and you should do the same. That's all I've got to tell you.”

“How about telling me what happened after my great-granddad and Judge Bean finished with that engineer at the railroad worksite?”

Tepper shifted about uneasily in his chair, as if Jones had left some oily residue behind on the fabric. “I was hoping you'd let that one go.”

“I did, until I saw pictures of those old railroad days plastered over the walls of Li Zhen's office.”

Tepper lit up a Marlboro, as if to dare Caitlin to stop him. “Uh-oh, the Category Ten winds of Hurricane Caitlin are beginning to blow.”

“What happened next in Langtry, D.W.?”

Tepper took a deep drag on his cigarette. “Well, here's what I recall from the story passed down through the years.…”

 

53

L
ANGTRY,
T
EXAS; 1883

“Now, lookee what we got here.…”

William Ray Strong swung toward the bulbous shape of what looked like an upside down bowling pin, massive across the top with spindles for legs approaching the mess tent where Kincannon told them to wait. Proudly displaying a badge on his lapel that William Ray didn't recognize. He wore a three-piece suit with the top and bottom buttons missing from the vest. The Ranger pictured them bursting off him and taking out an eyeball or maybe breaking somebody's nose.

“It's a genuine Texas Ranger and a fake judge,” the man who looked formed of jelly continued, reaching them.

Roy Bean snickered at that. “Was he talking about you or me?”

“Both of us, I suspect,” said William Ray.

“I'm John W. Bates, chief of the Southern Pacific Railroad Police,” the bowling pin announced, hooking his thumbs in his lapels. “And right now you are standing on land owned by Southern Pacific. That places you in my jurisdiction.”

William Ray took a step forward to meet him. “This was still Texas last time I checked.”

“And you may be chief of the railroad police,” Roy Bean added, “but I'm the duly elected law for the county in which we're all standing.”

“Duly elected?” William Ray posed quietly.

“Well, close enough,” Judge Bean replied in a hushed tone.

In response to the Ranger's request to see the man who'd sewn on the tent flaps, Kincannon had summoned Bates to the mess tent jammed with wooden slab tables laid out amid the dozen posts pile-driven into the earth to hold the grime-strewn tent up.

“We're here about the murders of those four Chinese women,” William Ray told Bates.

Bates rolled his thumbs around, then planted them back on his lapels. “I was meaning to look into that myself, but I've been too busy dealing with hostile locals to bother with dead whores.”

“Yeah,” said Judge Roy Bean, “those locals seem to have a problem with the Southern Pacific stealing their land out from under them to make room for the railroad.”

“We don't steal it. We pay market price per acre. It's called eminent domain.”

“And what do you call the four women killed here in the past couple weeks?” William Ray asked Bates.

“Not my problem.”

“How's that?”

“Chinese strike is slowing us down. I got a thousand other workers in this camp already gonna lose bonus money on account of that. It's all I can do to hold them back from taking matters into their own hands.”

“As opposed to the hands of those Pinkerton men we heard were coming,” noted Judge Bean.

“Sheriff can never have too many deputies, under the circumstances.”

“Is it true the Chinese weren't paid for building that dam?” William Ray asked.

“Far as I know, they were hired to build a rail line and they'll be paid for doing that as soon as they're back on the job.”

“And once they are, will the man who proclaims himself to be the law for the railroad stop ignoring the murders of these Chinese women that happened under his watch?”

Bates thrust a stubby finger at him. “You watch your tongue, Ranger.”

“Got any suspects, Chief?”

“Not that I'm about to share with you.”

“Speak with any potential witnesses?”

“No, sir, I haven't,” Bates said, sounding proud of that fact.

“What about the families of the victims?”

He shook his head. “Not my concern.”

“You know what
bahk guai
means, Chief?” William Ray asked him.

“Nope.”

“It means ‘white devil'—who your Chinese workers believed killed these women. You'd know that if you'd bothered to ask. Since you haven't had the time or opportunity to do so, I don't suppose you'll mind the judge and me picking up the slack,” William Ray said. “At least until these Pinkertons arrive.”

Bates smirked. “You're a Texas Ranger. You got the right. I just wouldn't expect to get anywhere if I were you.”

“You mind if I get back to my work?” Kincannon asked, although it was unclear to whom his question was posed.

“We asked to meet you as a courtesy,” William Ray said to Bates, standing there like an extra pillar to hold up the tent. Then he swung toward Kincannon. “The judge and I will see that man who done the sewing now.”

Kincannon looked to Bates for a reaction. “Chief?”

“Let 'em waste all the time they want, Mr. Kincannon.”

“You're welcome to join the judge and I for the interview, Mr. Bates.”

“I got better things to do with my time, like pick at the warts your damn climate grew on my feet.”

William Ray ignored him. “Mr. Kincannon, if you'd be so good as to point us in the right direction.”

“He's right over there yonder,” Kincannon said with a thrust of his finger.

“Where?” Roy Bean asked.

“Sitting at that table sewing them flags we hang from each train with the Southern Pacific trademark. You can't miss him,” Kincannon continued. “He's the blind man.”

*   *   *

“Yup, I been working the railroad somewhere or other since they crossed the Mississippi,” Abner Ecklund told William Ray and the judge, not even missing a beat on his sewing. “Doing this and that, mostly that.”

He looked to be around sixty, though it was hard to tell thanks to the mottled scar tissue that ran across his forehead, brow, and all the way down to his cheeks. It encased much of his eyes as well, reducing them to sightless slits leaking pus and mucus that dried in a jagged line down from the corners. The light streaming in through the open tent didn't quite reach the section where Ecklund was seated, which, of course, didn't seem to bother him. But it was enough to reveal a deep brownish cast to his skin and hair mottled in kinky waves. William Ray figured him for a mulatto, much reviled in these parts, recalling how Rangers had come upon the corpses of more than one dragged to death after being lashed to a horse. He looked at the scars layered over Ecklund's face like a second skin and pictured it dragging across a dry creek bed of stone and petrified wood. The thought made him cringe.

“You got a true talent, sir,” the judge told Ecklund, breaking up William Ray's thoughts.

“Thank you kindly. What about the two of you, what is it you boys do brought you here?” Ecklund asked, still without missing a beat on the Southern Pacific flag he was sewing. “I know you're new 'cause I don't recognize your voices. And I know all the people here by their voices.”

“I'm the local presiding judge for the county,” Bean said, “and this here's a Texas Ranger.”

“We're here about the murders of some Chinese women in and around the camp,” William Ray picked up. “Only clue we've got is some stitching the killer did to all the bodies. I recognized it from those tent flaps you sewed.”

It was hard to read a man without eyes, but William Ray could have sworn Ecklund's expression turned sad. “How many victims this time?”

“
This
time?”

“Not the first instance this has happened in a railroad work camp,” Ecklund told them, finally interrupting his sewing. “Not the first instance at all.”

*   *   *

“Guess you don't see me as a suspect,” Ecklund continued.

Judge Bean and William Ray Strong just looked at each other.

“That was supposed to be a joke,” the blind man told them. “‘See.' Get it?”

“How many other times?” William Ray asked him.

“Twice in camps I was working, twice more I heard about through word passed around.” Ecklund turned his sightless gaze on the Ranger. “Always Chinese women with their heads sewn on backward, right?”

William Ray nodded, then said, “Yes,” when he remembered the man couldn't see.

“And you recognized my stitching from those tent flaps?”

“I can't say for sure, sir, but it's a safe assumption from my experience. You had some medical training, I'm guessing.”

“Sure did,” Ecklund beamed proudly. “Back in 1870-something or other when I was working the Transcontinental. Cheyenne attacked a work crew scouting the land by pushing receptacles into the ground to see what comes up so we could plan the next leg of the route. We had one doctor who wasn't worth much and one nurse, a Christian missionary, who was. She's the one taught me how to stitch flesh, taught me how to use feeling to replace sight and, damn, if she weren't right. Got so I could see the wound I was stitching in my head. That woman convinced me it was no different from stitching wool really, so long as I could learn to work a smaller needle.”

“How many others this missionary nurse teach to do that?” Bean interjected.