Please meet me in an hour at the storage shed. It is an adobe shack near the northern cattle pen. It is near where the hills start. I long to see you in a place where we can be alone and private. Dale.” the letter read.
Lijuan smiled softly. She could not help enjoying the attention she received from Dale. And there she was some seconds ago, enjoying a bath and about to move on to the thought that they were going to Saddle Gap for an evening at the saloon. She guessed her new lover wanted to cut through the formality and get right to a rematch of yesterday afternoon.
“I guess my draft beer is going to have to wait,” she said out loud to herself and started finishing up her bath to get ready to meet her lover. She could have her long soothing bath another time.
“He is worth it,” she freely admitted to herself as she also considered that if her three sisters could see the dashing cowman they would agree as well.
Chapter Seven
Lijuan walked up to the described cabin, a smile creeping to her face as she noticed the hills that shot up like dark shadows behind the small structure. Dale had a good taste for romantic locations and for the second time, she was impressed with his choices. As she stepped onto the porch of the house, she smiled again when she noticed that there was a very small window next to the door, and the light from a small candle flickered from within. Unable to control her excitement, she began to imagine all the pleasure that waited for her inside and the notion of Dale before allowing her hands to roam all over his hard-muscled body.
She stopped just outside and adjusted her hair and dress. She wanted to look good for the man; he had done everything to deserve it. When she was certain she looked good enough, she gave herself a crisp nod and she walked in through the door.
That was when it happened. She instantly felt a weight hitting her head, a flash of pain and then the world went dark.
***
When she came to, she found herself on the floor with her hands tied behind her back. She was in the cabin alright, but it wasn’t Dale in the small hut. It was Lettie, the evil scoundrel witch. She never gave up, did she? Lijuan watched as she towered over her with arms crossed and a maniacal grin plastered on her face. The bandage had slipped, and she could see the horrible burn on her face.
“Thank God Cassandra isn’t here,” she muttered, still trying to adjust her vision after the horrible pain that had made her unconscious.
It had been awhile since someone had pistol-whipped her and she was certain that was what Lettie had done.
“Cassie would be mortified that you got the drop on me, not once, but twice in the same day,” Lijuan muttered again, irritated with herself.
“Actually, this would be the third time since you came to the ranch. I caused your little buckboard accident,” Lettie confessed, her chest puffing out.
“That was you?” She asked the crazy woman. Lijuan knew she had been wrong earlier, Lettie in her infinite madness could still surprise her.
“I just wanted to expose you for the fraud you are. Looking back on it though, it would have been better if I just killed you then and there. I had a rifle. I could have clipped you. It would have been easy to have blamed it on one of Black Hawk’s Omega warriors. Them stories I heard about your little sister aren’t the only ones I heard. I know that renegade and his Omegas got it in personally for your family. Now if I had done that my face would still be whole, and I’d still have a chance with Dale,” she said, almost kindly. Her moods were shifting all over the place. Lijuan knew the woman was the most dangerous now. She had nothing left to lose.
“That ship sailed … forever,” Lijuan told Lettie.
“I know it has. That is why I’ve done what I’ve done,” she returned.
“Which is?” Lijuan asked.
“After I kill you, I am going back to the loft above the barn. I have Dale tied up there and I am going to burn him alive. If I can’t have him, no one will,” she said, and her voice scaled up into crazy sounding.
“There is no way you got him,” Lijuan tried saying.
“It was easy, he was so busy getting all spruced up to escort you to Saddle Gap that I slipped in and took a page out of your hussy sister’s book and cold cocked him with a gun. This gun in fact,” she said, holding up a pistol and waving it around. “Just like I pistol-whipped you.” She finished confirming Lijuan’s earlier suspicions.
“So, you are going to just shoot me here and now with that I suppose?” Lijuan said.
“There is no fun in that. I want your last minutes to be horrifying, Lijuan.” Lettie said with an unusual chuckle. The woman had gone mad without knowing it. “So, I am going to use this,” she continued, placing a bundle of three sticks of dynamite on the table.
Lijuan’s eyes went wide. She had not seen that coming. Lettie wasn’t just mad. She had gone completely maniac!
“We keep the explosives around to blow tree stumps or make wells for the animals.” She had the decency to even explain how she got the TNT. “I’ve been working on this one while you were snoozing. I made a long fuse, so you can watch your death get closer and know there is nothing you can do about it. Every breath will be closer to the end. You will be suffering the torture of the damned before it blows up and burns the building down. That will serve you right for coming here and ruining my life,” she explained with a sort of maniacal glee.
“Your life was ruined a long time ago and not by me,” Lijuan shouted at her. “There is something wrong with you, Lettie. Something dark and sick, twisting at your insides. What’s more is, you know it.”
Lettie knelt next to Lijuan, bent over, and looked her in the eye. There was darkness and fire in her eyes at the same time; Lijuan could see them so bare as if they had flesh and bones.
“It takes a sick person to know one,” Lettie said, as if she could read Lijuan’s mind, “I see something wrong with you in your eyes. I don’t know what it is from, but it is there. You can’t hide it from me, missy! That violence in you, viciousness you are dying to let loose with. It’s the only release you can get from whatever the darkness is that you’re holding onto. What are you hiding, Lijuan Wilde? What’s your secret?” Lettie cajoled, licking her lips with insane delight.
Darkness. There it was. A word she knew well. Lijuan suddenly felt as if her own darkness actually brought a distant kinship with this tragic woman out to kill her. Am I really that different from her? This frightened her more than anything else had in her life; more than the thought of losing that very life if Lettie achieved her aim. No! She would not die her in this stupid little shack on a ranch far from her beloved Cedar Ledge and the rest of her family! She would do what she always did and draw on that darkness to spur her to find a way out of this.
“You can still walk away from this, Lettie. My father knows some very fine doctors. They could help you.” She said feigning her best sincere voice.
She needed to bargain anything. Lijuan figured she could tell the woman what she might want to hear. She really hoped Lettie would consider it for it could be the last chance for Lettie to save herself! Otherwise, Lijuan knew she likely would ultimately end up having to kill her.
“I don’t want or need your help! I just want you dead, girl. Now I got to go see about dispatching Dale from my misery. The both of you can meet again in hell,” she said, standing and leaving Lijuan to snarl with the anger eating up into her spine. “If so, you will be there first waiting for us,” she spat, irritated.
Lettie hissed and hurried over to the dynamite on the table. “When this goes off, nobody will know whether you were tied up or not. There won’t be enough left of you to tell. They will only wonder how the fire started and what you were doing here. Nothing will be provable however,” she said, giggling.
“If I had my gun, the last thing you would see is a bullet racing between your eyes,” Lijuan retorted. “Lettie! Listen to me!”
Lettie tossed her hair back and shook her head, amused.
“Yes, Lijuan.”
“What my
father said about me and my four sisters back there at the wagon crash was all true. Take this last chance to save yourself. If you don’t, you will be —what’s the phrase my sister Honor Elizabeth likes to use? —you’ll be courting your own destruction, because I’ll kill you, and I will kill you with my bare hands.”
Lettie just laughed and held the fuse to the candle, her eyes going wide with happiness as the fuse caught fire and began to burn slowly. She glanced once at Lijuan. She simply turned her back and strode out of the shack, locking the door behind her.
Even after what Cattie had done to her earlier and with her warnings, Lettie still had no idea what it was like to deal with a Wilde, Lijuan thought. She wasn’t one to be paralyzed by fear, neither was she too weak to find a way to stop her own murder. Quickly, she looked around the room for options, calculating that she had little time before the burning fuse met the dynamite sticks. When Cassandra had taught them all of what she had learned as a Pinkerton, one of the things she had emphasized that there were always options.
Options, Lijuan thought rapidly. Options! Then in a burst of inspiration she found hers. With a grunt, she got to her feet and went to the table. She was thankful Lettie apparently only had enough rope to bind her hands. If her feet had been tied, her next stop would have been the hereafter. Jumping backwards she hopped her butt up on the table, her short legs swinging in the empty air between the tabletop and the floor. Next, she strategically swiveled her petite body around on the table. That gave her quite the opportunity to pick up the dynamite cluster with her feet. She could see the fuse had burned down enough that she only had one shot at her do-or-die plan. Wasting no time, she thrust the explosives through the window with her feet and then rolled backwards off the table.
She ended up face down when the explosion rocked the adobe shack. The door blew in and the rest of the window shattered. The ringing sound of the explosion echoed in her ears for a while before everything subsided, shattered wood raining down around her. Lijuan quickly staggered to her feet afterwards and backed up to the shattered window, knowing that she had little time. Using a shard of broken window pane that remained attached to the frame, she managed to cut her bonds and free herself. Peering out the window she gave thanks that Lettie apparently was so eager to finish the job with Dale, that she hadn’t lingered around to make sure Lijuan had died. Lettie wasn’t the first to underestimate a Wilde and wouldn’t be the last, Lijuan knew. The only question now was whether it would cost Carson Bell’s stepdaughter her life.
“It is time to get my little friend from the coach, and you, Lettie Bell, are in for a shock. One that is liable to turn fatal.” Lijuan muttered out loud and took off running to the family’s coach.
***
Lettie splashed the can of kerosene around the straws of the barn with a happy grin, her mind exhilarated with the idea of revenge. No one was around to see her enter the barn, and none would notice when she would slip out. She had timed everything right and now, both Dale and his mistress, Lijuan, could spend the afterlife together realizing she was not one they should ever have dared to cross. When she had been racing back to ranch she had heard the explosion that had gifted the world one less China woman, and now she just had to attend to Dale. Dale, who had broken her heart by laying with that Asian girl and treating her like she didn’t matter.
The stamping of a hoof in the far corner of the stable drew her attention. Lettie pluck a lit kerosene lamp from one of the studs and walked over to look at Thunderbolt, Dale’s horse.
“Oh, you sinless, brute.” She bit her lip as she peered into the stall where Dale stabled his horse. The large animal was quiet the entire time, doing so well not to arouse any attention that there was something amiss in the barn.
“No sense you dying with your horrible master,” Lettie finally whispered, caressing the animal’s mane before setting down the lantern and opening the stall door. “It’s not your fault he had to throw me over for some rich spoiled brat. She should have given thanks every day for being born into the family of a wealthy white man,” she continued to speak to it while she led it out of the barn.
“I heard the blast a little while ago, so she isn’t a problem anymore. Now to take care of your rider,” she said to the horse as she tied it up out of sight behind a large tool shed. Then satisfied, she went back in, closing the door to the barn with the intent of resuming where she had left off.
For a brief moment, her eyes turned to the door to a supply room in the barn. She thought she had heard a noise come from beyond the door. Lettie paused and listened, and subsequently heard nothing. She contented herself that nothing had changed from when she had entered it earlier to retrieve the kerosene and dealt with the unforeseen wrinkle in her revenge plot. The door was still locked from the outside by her hand and any sound she thought she had heard must have been her mind playing tricks on her she surmised and turned to focus on the task at hand.
“Time to spread the second can upstairs and on Dale himself,” she giggled cheerfully as she placed her foot on the first rung of the ladder and bent down to pluck the kerosene can from the floor. At the same time, she was startled by a sudden whooshing sound and jumped with fright as something impacted with one of the rungs of the ladder snapping it. Her eyes widened at the sight of a small blacksmith’s hammer clattering to the floor.
Spinning around she saw Lijuan, perched midway up one of the barn walls in the window once used for passing hay into the barn from a hay wagon that still sat outside, weathered and worn that Lijuan had scaled to gain access. Lijuan leaped into the room through the window and landed on her feet, her hand on her pistol that she had also retrieved after fetching her hammer from the coach. Baring her teeth, Lijuan ordered Lettie to stop as her hand was slowly rising towards where her own weapon rested in its holster.
“I should call you Lucky Lettie. If you hadn’t bent down when you did I would have taken your head off with my hammer.”
Lijuan could see Lettie flush as the woman flexed her fingers as her eyes protruded from her head. “Yeah, I’m real lucky. Scarred for life because of you!”
“You pick a fight with a Wilde then you better be prepared to ride out the consequences,” she said as she suddenly let her hand fall away from the grip of her gun, her eyes growing cold and flinty.
“Let’s settle this like women. No guns. No weapons. Just you and me, one on one! I’d take great pleasure in giving you a long overdue ass whipping. It’s what Carson should have done with a whiney brat like you long ago!”
Lettie, already having a soiled mood because of Lijuan’s refusal to die answered her by unbuckling her holster and letting it drop with a thud to the hay-strewn floor. She balled up her fists as she gazed with hate towards her sworn enemy, determined to kill her with her bare hands, if that was what it took. A moment later Lijuan’s gun belt joined Lettie’s on the floor. A stony silence followed for a moment before each woman let loose guttural cries of rage as they charged at each other.
Immediately, Lettie began swinging wildly at her with her fists. Though she, like most of the foes Lijuan went up against, towered over her and easily outweighed her. Lijuan however enjoyed the advantage of being light on her feet with loads of experience behind dating back to the knock down drag out hair pulling fights with Honor Elizabeth over toys in their childhood right up until life of death throw downs such as a recent brawl she had in a dilapidated water tower in a far-off ghost town.
Lijuan was doing a good job at skirting the blows, from her sweating, swearing opponent when she had the misfortune of dodging backwards smacking into one of the support pillars holding up the catwalk than ran along in front of Dale’s rooms on the next level of the barn. Jolted forward by the impact she landed into the path a right hook from Lettie. She barely had time to taste the blood in her mouth as the blow spun her around, when arms encircled her shoulders and held her fast.
Lettie practically had her lips pressed to Lijuan’s right ear taunting her. “Never should have reli
ed on dynamite to do you in. I should have done it right, up close and personal! I’ll squeeze the life right out of your body you little, man stealing bitch!”
As the breath left her lungs, with great alarm Lijuan knew that Lettie wasn’t just talking bluster as she began to squeeze her slowly and steadily. In another lifetime when Cassie had resented her intrusion into the family the older child had delighted scaring young Lijuan with stories of Boa Constrictors under her bed after reading her a story about such creatures killing colonialists. Lijuan hadn’t thought about that in years since the sisters came to love each other to a degree that almost couldn’t be measured. Now she was imagining that this must be what the hapless victim in the story felt like.
All her actions to the contrary though, Lettie was no snake. She was a human being and those could be tricked, Lijuan resolved and ceased her struggle, pretending to go limp as if she had been rendered unconscious. Instinctively Lettie relaxed her grip and opened herself up to Lijuan suddenly mashing her boot down on one of Lettie’s feet.
If she didn’t break one of Lettie’s toes it would be a miracle, Lijuan thought as she took advantage to squirm out of Lettie’s grasp as the insane cowgirl reeled. Lijuan spun around using her left fist to deliver solid blow across Lettie’s jaw. The blood that flew from the woman’s mouth gave Lijuan no small degree of satisfaction.
Momentarily stunned, Lettie began to swing about wildly again her attempted blows wind milling through the empty air. Lijuan intended to take advantage of this and sprang at Lettie but the bigger woman managed to side step the blow while extending her leg tripping her. Lijuan’s head bounced off the floor with a cracking sound and her brain went cloudy for a moment. She barely managed to clear her mind before Lettie leapt on top of her.
Dark Rivals: Lijuan Wilde Tale 0f Suspense (Half Breed Haven Book 3) Page 9
