Strong Darkness (32 page)

“You wanna explain that to me clearer, champ?”

“You know what you feel in your heart, bubba. Don't need it said by me or any other. That's the problem with folk when they're still walking the earth 'stead of kind of passing through it like I be. You learn to trust only what you can see and touch. But trust me when I tell you that don't even begin to scratch the world's itch.”

“How about the future, champ? Any words of wisdom there?”

“Same as it always be,”
the ghost of Leroy Epps told him.
“Cloudy with a chance of clearing up later.”

“That's not a big help.”

“Future's easier to see than folks realize, bubba. Like climbing a staircase, it's not just about looking ahead but remembering the steps you took to get you as far as you got. Make sense?”

“Not really.”

“It will. Fact is it has already.”

“How's that?”

“How is it you figure you survived at this game 'long as you have? How many gunfights you walked away from, not even counting today's? You think that's an accident, luck? Bullshit's what I say, 'cause there's no such thing as either. You made it this far on account of you letting what's behind you tell you what's ahead. Sorry I can't be more helpful.”

“Me too,” Cort Wesley said, his skin suddenly tingling and the breath starting to constrict in his chest.

Leroy swiped his tongue across his lips again, eyes widening toward something across the street.
“Say, how about you grab me a bottle of root beer at that stand over there? You used to pay to have the guards smuggle it into the Walls for me after I took sick. I'm not sure if I ever thanked you for that.”

“You still get thirsty, champ?”

“No, sir. I just like the taste and the smell. You can't wait to need something to want it. Comes down to terms and nobody's better at dictating those than you. Dispensing a little whup-ass just like you did in that hotel earlier today. What's your heart tell you about your boy?”
Leroy asked thumping his own chest with the same fist that had knocked out twenty-six fighters after he turned pro.

“That he's out there. And he's not alone,” Cort Wesley added, with no clear grasp as to why.

The ghost grinned.

“Why you smiling, champ?”

“Folks don't see everything that's in front of 'em 'cause it'd mess with their minds too much if they did. The more you see, the more you know.”

“Well, am I right? Is someone with him? Is it that Chinese—”

Cort Wesley felt a drop as he stepped off the curb, realizing too late he was walking straight into traffic. He felt a hand grab him and draw him back onto the sidewalk, but when he looked back to thank whoever had done it, there was no one there.

“Thanks, champ,” he said out loud, not caring if anybody heard.

 

86

S
AN
A
NTONIO,
T
EXAS

Caitlin hung up the phone, her third call to Cort Wesley in an hour completed and making her even more anxious than the first two.

“No sign of Dylan,” she told Jones.

They'd relocated to the Juan de la Cruz's front room immediately behind the screen porch, the former doctor having vacated the premises on Caitlin's instructions.

“But,” Caitlin continued, “according to the NYPD detective I talked to, a young Chinese woman was spotted approaching him in the lobby just before the shooting started upstairs.” She studied Jones's expression, waiting for him to respond. “This doesn't surprise you.”

“You didn't do your homework.”

“On what?”

“Not what, Ranger,
who
.”

“Li Zhen?”

“Yes. And no.”

“Is this what I saved your life for?”

Jones laughed and kept laughing even when pain stretched across his features and it seemed he might split the neat stitches de la Cruz had left over his bullet wounds.

“I must've missed the joke,” Caitlin told him.

“No, this time you
are
the joke, Ranger, because you've got everything turned around. Who do you think they were coming for next? You'd be dead now if I hadn't offed the team that came for me.”

“How many, Jones?”

“Three. At the airport. I was flying back to Washington to pull the plug.”

“On your own people,” Caitlin surmised.

“They're not my people. I don't have people. That's why we get along so well, Ranger. Deep down inside we're the same.”

“Only on my worst days,” she told him. “What'd you do with the bodies?”

“They were waiting for me in a parking garage—that's where it all went down. They got off their shots and I got off mine.” He stopped, suddenly out of breath. Several long moments passed before he got it back. “They're in the trunk of the car I parked in that lot outside the Medical Examiner's Office, maybe three down from where I found your SUV.”

“How'd you know I was there?”

Jones tried to flash his smirk, but his expression wouldn't cooperate. “Your captain told me after I threatened to pay him a visit. I don't think he likes me very much.”

“Can't imagine why. Get back to Li Zhen.” Caitlin rose, hands planted on her hips with heat flushing through her cheeks. “I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that Zhen handed his one surviving daughter over to the Triad's sex trade in return for them setting him up at Yuyuan. She ends up turning thousand-dollar tricks in the United States for a human trafficking network Cort Wesley found headquartered in New York City. They sent her to Providence where she met Dylan who ends up getting his head bashed in by thugs looking for Kai after she apparently strayed. Have I got this right?”

“Pretty damn close.”

“Then let me ask you this, Jones: did you know Li Zhen used to traffic in porn when you went into business with him?”

“I didn't go into business with him, Ranger; I went into business with Yuyuan for what their fifth generation wireless network could do for Homeland.”

“Know something?” Caitlin asked him. “You've spewed so much sanctimonious shit in your time that it just rolls off your tongue now. I wish you could hear yourself, Jones, I truly do.”

He tried to stand up, grimaced badly, and plopped back down to the wood-framed couch covered in upholstered cushions showing various discolored patches of stain in the sunlight.

“What's this all about exactly?” Caitlin resumed.

Jones pushed himself to his feet, wincing badly this time. “I need some air. Help me out onto the porch, Ranger, and we'll take a little trip back into history, all the way to 1883.”

 

87

E
L
P
ASO,
T
EXAS; 1883

“I can't let you into Mr. Morehouse's room, Ranger,” the hotel clerk said. “He doesn't just run the Southern Pacific, he owns this hotel.”

Judge Roy Bean tapped the folded-up, chewing tobacco–stained paper he'd laid on the reception desk counter. “You know what a search warrant is, son?”

“I do not, sir.”

“It's a document that permits a judge to order a search of a man's residence and possessions under the provisions of the Fourth Amendment. I filled this one out myself upon the request of the Ranger here.”

“Judge, I still can't—”

“You'll be jailed unless you do—my jail in Langtry, son, which is a place you definitely don't want to be.”

The clerk tapped his teeth against his upper lip. “I should really cable Mr. Morehouse for instructions.”

“No, son, you shouldn't.”

The clerk shrugged and reached behind him for the right key.

The morning after meeting David Morehouse, son of the head of the Southern Pacific Railroad, William Ray Strong and Judge Roy Bean rode into El Paso and to the hotel that served as the company's headquarters. As a result, it boasted no vacancies, just about all its rooms rented out to railroad officials to make use of as they saw fit. One of these was a suite rented out to John Morehouse himself, his son David living in the suite's adjoining bedroom.

The clerk escorted them to Morehouse's top-floor rooms and unlocked the door.

“Should I go inside with you?” he asked William Ray Strong and Roy Bean.

“No, son, you should most certainly not,” the judge said in what sounded like an order. “The Ranger and me will be just fine on our own.”

The clerk nodded grudgingly as the two men entered.

“What was that paper you said was a search warrant?” William Ray asked the judge.

“A marker from a man who lost bad at cards last night,” Roy Bean told him. “Sumbitch was such a piss poor card player, I didn't even have to cheat.”

*   *   *

It didn't take them long to locate David Morehouse's bedroom and not much longer to find exactly what they'd come looking for.

“Boy didn't even bother to hide the evidence,” Judge Bean said as William Ray removed the items he'd spotted in the bottom drawer of the clothes bureau and laid them out neatly atop it.

Both men found themselves looking at a collection of fine sewing needles of various sizes, some with thin or wiry material still threaded through them. William Ray couldn't tell if it was the same material used to sew the female murder victims' heads back on, but it was close.

“Don't look much the kind of needles you'd use for stitching, though,” the Ranger noted. “Look more like the kind used for sewing.”

“Sure,” Bean snickered, “sewing a head back on. Not like he's gotta worry much about a fine line or causing further pain to the victim.”

“All the same,” William Ray told him, taking a fresh inventory of the assortment of needles they'd found in the bottom drawer, “this looks more like a seamstress's collection for easy work along with the finer, more delicate kind.”

“Finer, more delicate kind would work pretty dang well on a neck, don't you think?”

“I suppose.”

“So what's got your britches in a huff?”

“Something don't feel right, Judge, that's all.”

“Hell, Ranger, we got four bodies with their heads stitched on backward in this camp and who knows how many more in those others. This dumb-ass kid's the devil in disguise, I tell ya. You want to argue the point, go right ahead.”

William Ray nodded and started tucking the evidence into a saddlebag. “What do you say we ride back out to the camp and go from there?”

*   *   *

The crew was in the process of moving the railroad farther down the line, trying to make up as much lost time as the unseasonable wet weather had cost them. The workers were crowded onto the empty train cars of the steam engine–driven locomotive that moved with them for the two-mile jaunt, the buildings and businesses constructed on their behalf shrinking in the distance.

But Chief Bates's office, with
RAILROAD POLICE HEADQUARTERS
stenciled over the doorframe, was just where it had been. William Ray and Judge Bean found him inside with his boots kicked up on his desk, alternating between a cigar and cup of tar-black coffee while a pair of deputies flanked him on either side.

“I come here as a courtesy, Chief,” William Ray said with the judge just behind him, “to inform you that I am placing David Morehouse under arrest for the murders of the four Chinese women in this camp.”

“Is that a fact?”

“Don't make me repeat myself.”

Bates chewed on his cigar, seemed to be giving consideration to William Ray's words. “Sorry, Ranger, I can't help you.”

“Why's that?”

Bates removed the cigar from his mouth long enough to sip some of his coffee that left a dark ring on his upper lip. “On account of the fact that the boy ain't on the premises any longer. His father found a proper place for him to reside. Boy ain't right in the head, you know.”

“I did get that impression, but it doesn't change the need for justice to be done.”

William Ray was still staring Bates in the face when the echo of gunfire, constant and unbroken, crackled beyond the shack.

*   *   *

William Ray Strong had never ridden a horse faster than he did the quarter-mile out to the camp where the Chinese workers remained on strike. The volley of echoing gunshots had slowed to single volleys by the time he leaped down with Colt in hand amid the litter of bodies and gun smoke drifting with the breeze.

He shot two Pinkerton men just as they were sighting in on a Chinese man trying to flee with a child in his arms and wife by his side. The Pinkertons fell to the ground over their Winchester rifles with great coats billowed to both sides. Two more rushed him and he shot them too, spotting the figure of the man he knew as Su dashing straight into the open space between a series of clotheslines to scoop a crying toddler up from the ground. Fresh gunfire rang out and William Ray watched Su's spine arch as he was hit. The force of another round doubled him over, but he staggered onward still clutching the toddler until he reached a shrieking woman who took the boy from his grasp and ran off into the brush where other Chinese had scattered to escape the massacre.

William Ray watched Su keel over dead and used his final bullet to gun down one of his killers. The Ranger stood right there in the open while he reloaded, as bullets whizzed past him on both sides. He snapped the cylinder back into place, drew the Colt's hammer back and sighted in on another gunman who'd shot Su in the back. The man opened up with his Winchester from thirty feet away, missing three times before William Ray fired twice, his second bullet taking the man square in the heart.

He used three more shots to clear a path to the cover provided by a pile of cut wood for burning, and reloaded again as wood shards and splinters flew through the air behind a torrent of return fire. William Ray cursed himself for not bringing his own rifle into the battle. His horse had bravely stood its ground, but was too far away to chance the effort now, leaving him with these fresh five shots and the ten additional bullets in his belt. He popped out from the right of the pile to return fire, then twisted to the left where he caught another Pinkerton by surprise.