Strong Darkness (26 page)

“I was hoping you'd change your mind, Ranger.”

“Came back as promised, Chief,” William Ray said, as he dismounted, “to get that name from you.”

William Ray didn't need to follow Bates's eyes to know the Pinkertons were coming, the lot of them converging here from whatever posts they'd been standing. “You wanna talk in your office, Chief Bates, or right out here on the street?”

“I don't want to talk to you at all. I said everything I had to say yesterday and your brains got too much range shit stuck in them to regard my words with the impact you should have.”

“You sure take a long time to say a quick thing, sir,” William Ray told him. “As it turns out, guess I should've blown your brains out last night.”

The Pinkertons had enclosed him and Judge Bean in a neat semicircle, the Ranger still paying them no heed whatsoever.

“You know, Judge,” he called out loudly instead, “I don't think Chief Bates here got word of the parade.”

“Don't appear that way,” said Bean from his saddle, unflustered by the guns steadied his way.

“It's in the judge's honor,” William Ray told Bates. “An annual tradition we're gonna call Roy Bean Appreciation Day. Since this is his county, we thought we'd run the parade straight through here so you folks can enjoy it too.”

And with that a flood of pounding hooves sounded just ahead of the wave of riders armed with pistols, Winchesters, and shotguns storming through the camp to take up positions behind the Pinkertons.

“This here's the planning committee,” William Ray continued. “The judge has a lot of friends, don't you, Judge?”

“I do,” Bean said, spitting a huge wad of tobacco to the gravel below.

“Some of these came all the way from El Paso. Why, the judge even closed his establishment for the duration of the parade so these men don't even have any drink inside them yet. But their respect for Judge Roy Bean more than allows for their sobriety, not long for this world since all drinking is free in his saloon once the ceremony is done. So, Chief, what say you and me have a talk while the rest of these boys get acquainted with each other?”

Bates's expression wrinkled in displeasure. “All this for Chinese whores?”

“Last time I checked, whores are still people, Chief.”

“Why bother, Ranger?”

“Because I don't see anybody else about to. Now, about that name you were going to get for me…”

*   *   *

William Ray found the young man to whom Chief Bates directed him in the mess tent, seated at the same table where he'd noticed him the day before while interviewing Ecklund.

“You'd be David Morehouse,” the Ranger said, hovering over him. “I met your father just a few hours back. You sure look a lot like him. I was wondering if I could have a word with you.”

The young man gazed up at him, but his eyes still seemed somewhere else. They seemed unable to focus on William Ray, staring at him the way a young puppy does until it learns how to use its eyes. He had a boy's eyes that wouldn't stop twitching and hair dangling past his shoulders that looked much too long for his narrow face, so gaunt that his skin seemed stretched over his skull.

“They stung me,” the young man said. “Stung me all over. I was out in the brush when they attacked.”

In point of fact he didn't look as much like his father as William Ray had remembered, not much at all other than the eyes. But that was more than enough to form the resemblance that had occurred to him as soon as he saw John Morehouse seated in Judge Bean's saloon. Identical shade of crystal blue and held in the same narrow bent, looking somehow sardonic.

Looking into David Morehouse's eyes, though, the Ranger saw something that wasn't right; very wrong, in fact. The young man couldn't hold his gaze on anything for very long, and when he tried the lids turned all jittery and he ended up squeezing his eyes closed.

“Hornets,” he continued, speaking in a boy's plaintive tone. “They're everywhere. That's why I come in here. I'm hiding from them.”

“You been in other camps 'sides this one, son?” William Ray asked, addressing David Morehouse that way even though the young man was only a few years his junior.

“Hornets,” he repeated, “always hornets. Swat 'em, swat 'em, swat 'em … That's what I do.”

William Ray knelt so he was eye to eye with the young man, his face a mask of comfort. “You wanna show me where they are?”

“Why?” Posed fearfully.

“So they can't hurt you again.”

“They stung me bad.”

“I know.”

“Over and over again.”

“Gotta stop that from happening ever again, don't we?”

William Ray laid a comforting hand over the back of David Morehouse's trembling one. But the young man yanked it away instantly and tucked the hand behind his back, as if to hide it.

“Hornets hurt me bad.”

“Show me where they did it.”

“Hurt me bad, bad…” With that, David Morehouse began to tap his forehead against the hard wood of the table in perfect rhythm with his repetition of the word. “Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, ba—”

William Ray grasped hold of him in midmotion and held the young man steady. He could feel something like electricity dancing on the surface of David Morehouse's superheated skin. It felt like holding on to a basket of snakes. Every nerve of the young man's body seemed to be on fire, sending signals to a brain that was misfiring worse than a Colt pistol soaked in mud.

“I want my daddy,” he called out suddenly. “Where's my daddy?”

“Right here, son,” a voice announced before William Ray could say anything further.

He rose from his crouch and turned to find John Morehouse standing there, board rigid and flanked by the Pinkertons the Ranger remembered from Roy Bean's bar. He pushed his coat back to ready his Colt for a draw. But Morehouse seemed uninterested in him, moving straight for his son without giving William Ray another look.

“The hornets, Daddy, the hornets!” his son wailed when he reached him. “You promised to make them go away, Daddy, you promised!”

“They came back, but we'll do better this time, I promise.”

William Ray backed off, leaving Morehouse to console his son until the man's gaze chased him down.

“You find what you wanted, Ranger?” the man asked him, hugging his son now.

“Your boy needs help, sir.”

“And that's what he's getting.”

“I mean real help.”

John Morehouse regarded him hatefully. “You're trespassing, Ranger. This is Southern Pacific Railroad land, and I want you off it.” He eased his son up from the table and half-led, half-dragged him toward where the Pinkertons were still standing. “Take your judge and gunmen with you and leave, before I contact the governor.”

William Ray tapped his hat against his leg, watching David Morehouse's limp frame pressed against his father. “What's he mean by hornets, sir?”

“That's not your concern; none of this is.”

“Except for those murders, sir. This stopped being Southern Pacific land the moment women started dying. You might have been able to cover that up in those other worksites in other states, but that won't wash here. Know why?”

John Morehouse stopped and looked at him in silence.

“Because other states didn't have Texas Rangers,” William Ray told him, eyeing his sobbing son. “And whoever it is did the deed needs to be held accountable for it before more women die.”

 

67

N
EW
B
RAUNFELS,
T
EXAS

“I guess such behavior runs in your family,” Li Zhen told her, when he'd finished. “First your great-grandfather violates a direct order from the governor of Texas and now you violate an order from your country's State Department.”

“Justice may be blind, sir,” Caitlin said, “but she's not stupid.”

Zhen looked at her through the bright sunshine in Yuyuan's gardens that were invisible from the street or parking lot. He'd led her down here to hear the story on one of the rattan benches inlaid amid the brick walkways that spiraled through the gardens like the yellow brick road in Oz.

“Beautiful place to share a very ugly story,” Caitlin told him, gazing about.

Zhen took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I come down here at least twice every day to remind myself that there's beauty in the world no matter how much the ugliness threatens to dominate. The artificial smells, the recirculated air. Take a look around you, Ranger. Some of these flowers have existed in nature unchanged for millions of years. They've managed to outlive every other species on the planet. Sometimes I come down here and ask myself what makes them better than us. How they've been able to survive for so long.”

With that, Zhen reached around to the outside of the bench and lifted a pair of microtip pruning snips from a hook. The razor-sharp steel glistening in the sunlight, Zhen squeezed the handle to make the pointed tip open and close directly before Caitlin.

“I like to do some pruning every day,” he explained. “Otherwise dead growth could threaten and overcome the living.”

Zhen moved on toward a nearby set of flowering plants, Caitlin taking his explanation as an unspoken invitation to join him. He maneuvered himself before the plants, positioned so that the pruning snips were in easy range of her.

“Seems like you can't see the dead plants without looking well below the surface,” Caitlin noted.

“All things have a right to survive, Ranger. It's a fine line we walk.”

“And snip,” she added, watching Zhen start to clip away at a series flowers that looked smaller, drier, and slightly discolored when compared to those that were flourishing.

He seemed to be having trouble managing the effort. Then the snips slipped from his grasp and Zhen looked up at her after stooping to retrieve them.

“Life can only thrive when the weak are trimmed back,” he said.

“Is that a fact? And who gets to decide on such relative merits?”

“I don't believe they are relative at all.” Zhen stood back up and looked directly into Caitlin's eyes, the tip of the pruning snips just short of her denim shirt. “Weakness and decay are not hard to spot.” He continued to hold her gaze for a long moment before he started snipping away again at the stale undergrowth that fell in clumps to the ground. “And then what we discard gives back of itself so the strength can endure.”

Caitlin angled the brim of her hat to keep the sun from her eyes. “Like those first waves of Chinese that ended up discarded themselves.”

“We were enslaved, Ranger. The Civil War ended, and then we showed up.”

“Slavery didn't end with the Civil War, Mr. Zhen. The railroads took plenty advantage of blacks as well. I think you wanted to tell that story down here because the whole story is so dirty, like it can't shake off a sheen of grime from itself. But I noticed something as you were telling it. You mind if I have a go at those, sir?” Caitlin asked, eyes aiming for the pruning snips.

Startled by her request, Zhen handed the snips reluctantly over.

“The way your eyes narrowed when you got to the part about John Morehouse, head of the Southern Pacific at the time,” Caitlin said, as she picked up the work just where Zhen had left off, doing her best to imitate his motions exactly. “I was looking into the whole period last night when I couldn't sleep, seeing what names came up. There was one that stuck in mind, a Chinese inventor who came over in the 1860s to see if he could sell the railroads on his latest invention. Something that would allow them to transmit Western Union telegrams over long stretches of land strung along poles that would run parallel to the tracks.”

Zhen didn't interrupt or comment, so Caitlin continued as she snipped away at the dried petals and stems from which the color had bled out.

“See, the railroads and Western Union saw what they wanted to do with Morse's invention, but they couldn't figure out how to maintain the integrity of the signal over long distances at a time. All the experiments kept failing no matter what they tried.”

“Wire,” Li Zhen said suddenly.

“Sir?”

“It was wire, Ranger. The railroads and telegraph people couldn't figure out how to push the signals reliably along because the wire they were using was too thick.”

Caitlin brushed the planting free of the dead flower parts her pruning had freed. “That Chinese inventor had developed a thinner wire that was actually stronger and more resistant to the elements than all the brands that had failed. That's what he was trying to sell to the railroads. I believe that would have been your great-grandfather, Tsuyoshi Zhen.”

Zhen nodded, just once.

“And the man he tried to sell his invention to, that would have been John Morehouse of the Southern Pacific, wouldn't it, sir?”

Caitlin could see Zhen's polished veneer starting to crack. She imagined she heard the sound of plaster breaking away from its cast.

“My great-grandfather brought his life's work to John Morehouse in good faith, and the railroad stole it for their own use, giving him no credit or money. There was nothing he could do. He was left penniless,” Zhen continued distantly, looking straight up into the sun without so much as squinting. “Not even the money he needed to get back home. He had placed all his faith in his invention and the integrity of the Americans, and for all his efforts and intentions he ended up working hard labor side by side with men for whom a dollar a day in wages was a dream come true. Ironic, isn't it, Ranger?” Zhen asked her, after a pause that felt longer than it really was.

Caitlin looked up from the fresh area through which she was working the snips. “What, sir?”

“That so much today is spoken about theft of your intellectual property by my country. How we are waiting at every turn with an ear to every door and cup to every wall, listening in order to appropriate all your greatest technological and intellectual property secrets for our own use. When in fact it was your country who launched a big part of its progress toward the twentieth century by stealing from
us
.”