Strong Darkness (31 page)

“I need to know my dad is okay.”

“He is.”

“You can't know that.”

“Yes, I can,” Kai said, taking a shallow breath. “Because he's Cort Wesley Masters.”

“That's what I meant before about whether it was real or not between us—because it was my dad and Caitlin Strong you really needed.”

“I didn't notice that picture until after.”

“After what?”

“Do I really need to tell you?”

Kai left things hanging there, allowing Dylan to invent whatever she was feeling in his own mind. His head began to throb and a sudden pang left him feeling dizzy and nauseous.

“What's wrong?”

“Nothing. Just what happens when somebody jumps you and rattles your brain.”

“I'm sorry.”

“You ran away.”

“And they chased me instead of killing you.”

“So I'm supposed to thank you now?”

Kai lapsed into silence, Dylan studying her closer. He wanted to be angry, but she was just too beautiful. The way her hair tumbled to her shoulders, the roundness of her mouth. Her eyes that seemed wide, barely Asian while highlighting her almond-toned skin and complexion so smooth it looked lifted from a painting. The dark, resin-coated jeans that rode her hips and hugged her like a second layer of skin. She looked like an actress, or a model, the way she held herself, the way she moved.

Then again
, Dylan thought, recalling her actual profession,
she had to be both pretty much.…

“You plan on answering my question?” he asked, the words much harsher than his tone.

“Which one?”

“I don't remember. There's a lot of things I don't remember since that night, like why I let you get inside my head.”

Kai flirted with a smile that didn't quite break. “As I remember, it was because you were trying to get inside me.”

“Why'd you text me the night of the beating?”

“Because I thought your father and that Texas Ranger could help me, help me get him.”

“Get who, Kai, get
who
?”

She checked the sky, as if reading the time by it. “Time to go,” she said, rising from the bench.

Dylan remained seated, afraid if he stood up the world would start spinning and he'd pass out. He felt chilled, a damp cold sweat breaking out on his face. “Where?”

“Texas.”

 

83

N
EW
Y
ORK
C
ITY

Kai remembered the night they came for her. She'd been playing with her dolls, laying them out neatly on her bed. Her favorite ones were the oldest of all, handed down through the family for generations after being hand-sewn by a long-dead relative with a penchant for breathing life into his work. There were seventeen in that particular collection, each beautifully fashioned and realized.

And yet Kai recalled them being uniformly sad in expression, their stitched faces that of straw-stuffed beings who'd known much strife and pain in their lives. Their finely sewn expressions carrying the weight of the world, along with a quiet wisdom. When she imagined her dolls talking to her as an even younger girl, it was always these that spoke in the clearest voices.

After she was taken away, she missed those dolls the most. She would beg her “keepers” to retrieve them for her, after she'd been snatched from her life with only the clothes on her back. In later years Kai would learn this had been done so her life might be started over again, effectively from scratch. There could be no anchors to the past whatsoever, nothing to stoke memories better left behind as well.

Kai didn't have the dolls, no, but she kept close hold of those memories. And when the sadness set in with the reality of her plight, it was the memories to which she turned. Closing her eyes and imagining the dolls talking to her, striving to ease her pain and console her. But they had few truly happy words to offer, as if somehow the sum total of their own experiences had been sad as well. Kindred spirits, then, which may have explained why those old dolls were the ones she kept closest in heart and mind.

There were few memories left from that actual night, nothing really except for her father looking out the window, casting her a final gaze as the car in which she'd been placed pulled away. Not a wave, not a smile, not a tear. Just an empty stare out the window no different from the way he looked when he was waiting for a delivery to arrive. He was there, then he was gone and so was she.

What did I do wrong?

For so many months, if not years, that question had haunted her thinking. She had no memory of her mother, and her father never spoke of the woman who'd birthed her to the point where Kai wondered if she was somehow to blame. Was that what she was being punished for now? Her father had never been the same after the death of her beloved older sister, always her father's favorite who'd followed her mother to the grave not too many years before they took Kai away. The oldest dolls she loved the most had belonged to her sister originally, and Kai vividly recalled the night her sister had left them in her room atop her bed.

Why?
Kai had asked her.

Because I don't need them anymore. They're yours now.

And soon after that she was gone, following Kai's mother into the afterlife and turning those old dolls into her best friends.

The men brought her to a big house far away from the city, more like a palace really. It was surrounded by a gate, the grounds covered in lavish gardens. Other girls around her age shared the house with her. On numerous occasions, some went away and others took their place without notice or fanfare. Kai learned their names as best she could, but the girls were uniformly kept to themselves, together only for schooling that was much different from what she'd come to know in the school she'd attended near her home. Languages and geography and history were the focus, especially languages. Kai learned English first, then Japanese, followed by Spanish. Originally, she'd assumed the big house was just a boarding school; only once months passed with no visitors, including her father, ever appearing did she realize it was more like a prison, a jail, a reformatory.

What did I do wrong?

No one ever told her, no matter how many times she asked. They taught her gymnastics and other sports, but mostly gymnastics. Kai excelled, much better than the other girls, the least gifted of whom she realized were usually the ones there one day and inexplicably gone the next. She learned tai chi as well, loved it for the art's ability to help whisk her away in her mind to someplace else. At first that someplace else was home. Later, when it became clear
this
was her home, she went other places in her mind that almost made her life tolerable.

Almost.

The big house had four floors but Kai's life was confined to the first in her initial months. She heard sounds coming from the floors above, strange sounds, through the nights when she stirred restlessly in search of sleep. Her room, in contrast to the room at what had once been her home, was stark. Bare walls, only a single window that was covered with a grille that shut out much of the light even on the sunniest of days; a bed, a desk, a chair, a lamp. That was it. No television, no radio, no tape or CD player like the one on which she used to play music at home. The only music in the big house came from someone playing a piano somewhere, a piano Kai could never remember actually seeing.

She accepted her routine, grew used to it because she had no other choice. Then one night when sleep wouldn't come, she was stirred from her bed by soft sounds coming from outside. Kai moved to her window and watched a girl a few years older than she dashing across the majestic lawn on a path bisecting the lavish gardens. Kai watched her reach the steel fence and try to scale it, failing twice, almost succeeding a third time when dark-clothed men were suddenly upon her, yanking her down. Kai heard the older girl's muffled cries and screams through the thick glass, pressed herself against the wall so as not to be seen watching. And when she peered out again a few moments later the girl and the dark-clothed men were gone.

Kai never saw the older girl again, but the men, or others just like them, were always about keeping their presence as scarce as possible. That led her to conclude all the girls brought here were indeed bad, that this was a place girls who misbehaved were brought. She was a stellar student, her father always telling her how proud he was of her accomplishments, so her sentence here couldn't be because of school.

Then what was it? Where had she misbehaved so badly to have her father send her away like this?

A mistake, it had to be a mistake! But her protestations to that effect inevitably fell on deaf ears and Kai gave up making them. In her dreams on the nights that she was able to find sleep, the mother she had no memory of came to her. But her shadowy, spectral shape offered no reassurances of Kai's plight, gave no explanations for it at all, and made her feel no better at all.

For good reason, as it turned out.

 

84

A
LAMO
H
EIGHTS,
T
EXAS

The finished basement room was covered in pictures, four walls of them. The girl Li Zhen couldn't take his eyes from at the film studio the day of General Chang's unfortunate passing moaned softly as he entered her on the circular bed. That bed was the only piece of furniture on the otherwise stark floor, and it spun slowly to allow Zhen a view of all the pictures papering the walls. The basement's thin light rising from recessed bulbs fixed in all four corners illuminated a single individual portrayed at all stages of her life, from infancy to her teenage years when death had stolen her from him.

Two years back he'd purchased this eight-thousand-square-foot red-stone mansion that sat on four and a half lush acres in Alamo Heights. The previous owner had been a waste management tycoon, a Mexican immigrant Zhen recalled, whose arrest and subsequent incarceration had led to the price being drastically reduced. The property, originally owned by a drug dealer before the waste management baron, featured a pool, tennis court, tree house, and two-stall covered barn. The soundproof basement, complete with steel-reinforced walls now plastered with portraits of Zhen's only true love, had not been among the features advertised.

He had arranged those pictures clockwise chronologically, so the slow turn of the bed allowed him to relive his true love's all-too-short life. The girls he had Qiang bring to him here were no more than surrogates for the girl captured in those portraits. They all made for poor facsimiles, some posing a greater challenge to his imagination than others.

Today that challenge proved especially great, the typical reverie and release Zhen experienced in these moments lost to thoughts of Caitlin Strong. She seemed not to stare at so much as through him, and Zhen was left with the terribly uncomfortable sensation that she could see all the way to his soul and the truths it revealed.

Including the truth about his one true love in whose pictures his mind normally feasted in times like this.

Zhen believed in fate above all else, but right now the message such fate carried was distinctly unpleasant. No amount of the sights revealed by the slowly turning bed could relieve the discomfort he felt over Caitlin Strong's dogged pursuit of him. Then, suddenly, her face replaced that of his true love's across the walls. Zhen looked down and the Texas Ranger was beneath him, eyes boring into his soul and seeing what no one had ever seen before.

I'll kill you.

Zhen wasn't sure whether he spoke the words or only thought them. But then his fists were in motion, pounding and pounding. Feeling the crack of bones breaking and squish of flesh splitting, as blood flew into the air.

 

85

N
EW
Y
ORK
C
ITY

Cort Wesley ducked into one of a million Starbucks in Manhattan when he saw it was Caitlin calling. “Just give me a sec, while I get somewhere quiet,” he said. “I just walked into a Starbucks that has two floors, if you can believe that.”

“We've got them here in Texas too, Cort Wesley.”

“We do?”

“Paz just picked up Luke at school. He's fine.”

“Well,” said Cort Wesley, “one of two ain't bad.”

*   *   *

He'd been walking the streets ever since, sensing Dylan was okay as dusk approached but having no way to be sure. Unless …

“About time you realized I was here,”
Leroy Epps said, suddenly by Cort Wesley's side, walking in perfect rhythm with him.

“You got the answer I'm looking for, champ?”

“Depends if you asks the right question, bubba.”

The last of the bright sky didn't have a cloud in it. The sun's weakening rays hit Leroy Epps and seemed to pass straight through him. But Cort Wesley noted his old friend still squinted as he faced him, his eyes narrowed into slits that left only a glimpse of the whites visible. He wet his lips, as if the sun was drying them out.

“No riddles today, please,” he heard himself saying.

“Wasn't a riddle, just a fact. And you know I can't answer that kind of question, even if you did ask it. Them's the rules.”

“Since when did rules matter to you?”

“Since I got here, bubba. You want the kind of liberties I got extended to me, you don't want to risk upsetting the balance of things. It's so damn delicate you just wouldn't believe. 'Sides, you don't need me to answer a question you already got figured yourself.”

And with that Leroy wet his parched lips again. Cort Wesley thought they looked cracked, bleeding in a few spots as if Leroy had been chewing on them. He also realized people he passed were staring his way, a big man who looked out of place here to begin with in a heated conversation with himself. He touched a finger to his ear, pretending to have a Bluetooth piece there.