Colter's Path (9781101604830) (33 page)

He went looking for Paco to remind him that he would be absent for a time, but he found the big Mexican asleep and snoring and opted not to wake him. Paco slept with a pistol nearby, and had a dangerous tendency to snap it up and level it if anyone awakened him unexpectedly. He'd even fired it off at Turner a time or two before he was fully awake, though luckily Paco was the worst of pistoleers and seldom hit any target he aimed at. Still, Turner was in no mood to dodge bullets, and let Paco snore on.

Turner went to the little stable shed where he and Paco kept their horses, saddled and bridled his chestnut-colored gelding, and rode out onto the little trail that led down to the road between Scarlett's Luck and Bowater. He glanced at the strange little pair of roadside graves, one for a little girl, the other apparently for a cat, and shook his head in bemusement. One saw a lot of unusual things in California these days.

Turner was well away from his camp of captives when the door of Emma's pen pushed up and open. Emma
climbed out, eyes peeled for any sign of Paco. She knew Turner was gone because she'd caught a glimpse of him on horseback, riding out, and because Rosita had overheard him telling her father that he was going to meet during the morning with a Chinaman about “business.”

“We have to let the others go,” Emma said to Rosita as the younger woman followed her out of the pen. Rosita nodded, but whispered, “Speak softly. My father is a stupid bull of a man, but his ears are keen. And before we free them, there is something I must do, or it will not matter.”

“What?”

“My father always sleeps this time of morning. I will be back in minutes…. Wait for me, and free no one else yet.”

Emma watched Rosita limp away toward the area where Paco had pitched his tent. The terrain did not allow her to see the tent, but two minutes later the Anglo-Mexican girl reappeared, coming back toward Emma with a smile on her face and a more game step despite her lameness.

“Is he asleep?” Emma asked.

Rosita laughed. “Oh yes. He sleeps. And will sleep on now, very soundly.”

“What did you do?”

“I know that we are commanded to do no murder,” Rosita said. “But I do not believe it is murder to end the days of such a wicked man as my father.”

“Dear Lord, Rosita, did you—”

“He had slept outside his tent, which made it easier. More room to swing the pick I found. Something a miner had left leaned against a tree somewhere that my father had found and taken for his own. I stood over him, straddling his chest, and I took careful aim and swung it down as hard as I could. My strength was greater than I had known…. The point of the pick went through the top of his head and came out his mouth.”

“Oh God!”

“I confess…,” Rosita said, then paused. “I confess that I laughed to see it.” She laughed again then, and
with her finger pointed outward from her mouth, imitating the emergence of the pick point. “Do you believe I have sinned, Senorita Emma?”

“Only in laughing at it, perhaps.” Emma looked around at the prison pens. “For the other part, the doing of the act…no. No, I don't believe you sinned.”

Turner reached the abandoned cabin without difficulty and tied his horse off to a branch. He checked to make sure his pistol was loaded—a standard precaution anytime he was about to meet with anyone he did not already know to be a safe person for him—and continued down to the open door. It was open because the door itself had been removed for use in some other miner's habitation.

“Mr. Li, sir, I am here!” he called as he walked down toward the cabin. “I believe I am slightly early, so I must ask your pardon.”

A smiling man stepped into the doorway with a shotgun in his hands. This was no Chinaman…. Instead the tall fellow, sandy-haired, had a decidedly European look.

“Pardon is granted, sir,” the man said in a brogue Turner recognized as Irish. He'd had a few Irish maidens among the “product” he'd move down the line through the years, and some of his fellow traffickers were Irish as well. “Please do come in…and forgive Mr. Li if he doesn't greet you. He is at the moment quite occupied in being dead.”

Turner stood frozen, trying to make sense of this. He could not take his eyes off the shotgun. “Come closer,” the Irishman said.

When Turner did come closer he saw that the man had an oddity in his appearance: a missing section of his right ear. Turner paid little heed to that, the shotgun still occupying his attention.

“What's this here?” Turner asked, raising his hands to shoulder level to demonstrate that he had no weapons in hand, nor any plan to draw the one in his holster. “What happened to Mr. Li?”

“I'm afraid I had to kill him,” the Irishman said. “Name's Finnegan, by the by. Declan Finnegan. And you, if I had to guess, are one Mr. Liam Turner, from Atlanta by way of Kansas.”

Something in the Finnegan name was familiar to Turner, but he could not recall just why. But how did Finnegan know him?

“You very well may be right as to my identity, sir,” Turner said. “But I am at a loss as to how you know me. And why it is that your name has a familiar ring in my own ear.”

Finnegan lowered the shotgun a little and motioned Turner to come on in. When Turner entered he caught the strong smell of blood in the little structure, and saw the corpse of Li cut nearly in half and lying near the place where a stove had once sat when this cabin was in use by miners. The degree of damage to the body caused him to look again at the shotgun, noticing then it had been cut down in length, heightening its destructive power at close range.

“Why did you kill him?” Turner asked. “It had been my hope to enter into a business arrangement with him.”

“Aye, and what a convenient thing it is that you have brought up the matter of business at this particular moment!” Finnegan said, for some reason sounding even more Irish now that his voice was amplified to Turner by the cabin walls around them. “Because it is in the realm of business that I have familiarity with you, sir, and perhaps you have heard of me as well. We work for and with some of the same folk, you and I do.”

Turner was unsure what to say. He could not trust this man, did not dare even lower his hands as long as Finnegan had that shotgun, and certainly could not begin talking freely about his particular line of thoroughly illegal and immoral work without knowing who and what Finnegan was.

“I have put you in an awkward position, Mr. Turner,” Finnegan said. “Perhaps I can improve it. I am Declan Finnegan, member of an old and noted Irish family. My grandfather, Samuel Finnegan, was one of the isle's wealthiest men, and used his wealth to finance a collection
of the world's most excellent and costly gems, including what became known as the Finnegan ancestral diamonds. Samuel Finnegan was a man of the highest moral and religious character, a great believer in the American cause and philosophy of freedom, and a particular supporter of education and academia. He attracted to him other men of great wealth and note, some of them of a decidedly lower level of moral conviction and quality than he was himself. He scarcely seemed to notice it…. It was his way to think highly of others unless compelled by the clearest evidence to do otherwise. I, on the other hand, was able to see the underlying and veiled characters of some of his peers quite easily. Perhaps because I shared, by nature, some of the same values…or lack thereof.” Finnegan paused and laughed, and Turner dutifully did the same, though he as yet hardly knew what Finnegan was coming around to. Finnegan went on. “In time I was taken under wing, so to speak, by some of my grandfather's wealthy peers who were at what most would see as the bottom rung of the moral ladder. Men who used their wealth to finance their own debaucheries and degenerate pleasures…the very things that appealed to my own spirit. It was through my association with one of these men that I found a place for myself in the trade which we share, the vending of fleshly companionship both willing and unwilling to those capable of paying for it, and willing to do so. As I worked, I heard certain names spoken—yours among them—and began to understand the scope of this business of ours.”

“One moment, sir…I have not said that I am involved in this ‘business' you talk of.”

Finnegan smiled darkly. “No, you have not. But we both know what we know, aye, brother?”

Turner merely looked at him.

“The role I began to play most frequently in the trade was that of corrector and punisher. As you know, secrecy is of the utmost importance. Some, though, are less able than others to maintain that secrecy. It became my assigned task to track down and forever silence those
proven unworthy to the secrets they were given to hold. Those who did not hold them well.” He paused and tossed his head in the direction of Li's corpse.

It was beginning to seem pointless to Turner to pretend ignorance of the things Finnegan was talking about. “I was to talk to Mr. Li about some Celestial girls today. Perhaps it is best that meeting didn't happen, if he is…was loose of lip.”

“His lack of discretion caused many problems, here and in almost every place the trade extends its reach.”

“Everywhere, then.”

“Aye, so it is. With scarce an exception.”

“It was to deal with Li that you came to California, then? Or were you here already?”

Finnegan stood his shotgun in the corner now, apparently having decided Turner wasn't a threat. Turner lowered his hands gratefully, shoulder muscles aching.

“Have you heard people speak of so-called divine providence, Mr. Turner? Something generally perceived when events and timing and seemingly unconnected circumstances come together in a noticeably fortuitous manner?”

“Of course.”

“Well, my experience in past months might lead me to suspect there is a similar kind of providence that is far, far removed from the divine. A ‘dark providence,' you might call it. Because though I was bound to come to California in any case on the matter of our friend Mr. Li, it so happened that I was given yet another reason to make the same journey. I was hired to find a thieving college president, or former college president, from Tennessee. He had taken items of great value that had been given to his college for its use in advancing education in areas where it is too often lacking. It so happens the giver of that gift was my own grandfather, Samuel. The gift he gave was a selected number of the extraordinarily valuable Finnegan ancestral diamonds.”

“So it was your kin who sent you after this thief?”

“It was not. It was the man who had chaired the board of that college's trustees. A man named Sadler. Along
with his brother, he sponsored an emigrant band to travel to California under the piloting of a Carolina-Tennessee frontiersman named Colter. And interestingly, one of the emigrants who went with that group was none other than the thieving college president himself, a man named Zebulon McSwain. He came both to flee from his crime back in Tennessee, and to see his daughter, a young woman named Emma, married to one Stanley Wickham, owner and operator of the camp store in Bowater.”

Turner's mouth dropped open as he saw the most unexpected connections falling into place. Finnegan, into his story, did not notice Turner's startlement.

“I followed the Sadler group across this broad nation, but never found good opportunity to attempt to recover the diamonds from him. To my knowledge, he still has them. It is still my hope to gain them back from him.”

“And return them to the college from which they were taken?”

“Of course not. On any road, that college no longer exists in the same form it did. No, when I get my hands on those diamonds, in my hands—Finnegan hands—they shall stay.”

Turner was in a quandary. That he should have encountered this particular man and discovered such an interconnection between their lives and purposes was remarkable. Perhaps there truly was some kind of “dark providence” such as Finnegan had mentioned at work here.

Or perhaps it was all a matter of them both being involved in the same grim line of work.

Whatever the truth about such matters, one thing was clear to him: he and Finnegan had one more thing in common than Finnegan knew about. When Wickham had put his wife into Turner's hands, Turner had begun to think of those diamonds that Emma's father possessed as being something he would take for his own. With Emma under his control he held a powerful ace in this particular game.

But now here was this Finnegan, his own ambitions
centering on possessing those same diamonds. That would not do. They could not both possess them.

Moving fast and without warning, acting on the impulse of a moment, Turner swung about, swept up Finnegan's shotgun from the corner, and shot the Irishman squarely in the center of his face.

The results were ugly, and when the red mist had settled across the already-bloodied room, Turner saw from the corner of his eye that something had landed on his shoulder. He reached up and pinched it up between thumb and forefinger.

An ear. Finnegan's ear.

Feeling the typically human burst of revulsion at the gruesome thing, he almost flung it away, but something about it made him take another look.

Odd. There was a notch of flesh missing from the ear. Not shot away by the blast that had just killed him, either. This was a long-healed-over wound.

Turner decided then that maybe a notched ear, obtained in such an unusual fashion, might make for a good souvenir of this strange, violent day. He rubbed the raw, just-severed base of the ear against the fallen Finnegan's sleeve to get the worst of the blood off it, then put the ear into the side pocket of his own jacket.

He took from Finnegan's body the pouch bearing his shotgun ammunition and accouterments, and Finnegan's boots, which Turner had noticed. They fit him well. He hefted up his new shotgun and left the cabin that was now spackled with a generous interior coating of blood and aerosolized flesh. He walked back up to where his horse was tied, unhitched it, mounted, and rode back up toward the Bowater Road.