Strong Darkness

by Jon Land

  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

  ALAMO HEIGHTS, TEXAS

  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

  NEW YORK CITY

  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 br
ight 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.

  “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

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  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

  EL PASO, TEXAS; 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.