Lone Star 01 (17 page)

Chapter 11

Dawn.

A vague dribble of light began seeping through two thin cracks in the boards across the shed. With a patience he had learned over the years, Ki remained sitting on the same spot where he'd slept, watching the dull gray light ease in time across the flooring. There was no use trying to beat himself against the door and walls, hopelessly wasting his energy. Sooner or later someone had to come in, or he would be led outside. Given a split-second's chance, he would take full advantage of it.

A field mouse scuttled out from a hole and raced around the floor in the feeble light, before returning to its burrow.

Ki thought about that for a while.

Steps sounded outside, and Ki flattened his back to the wall, arms behind him as if the ropes still bound his wrists. The chain rattled slightly, and the padlock made a soft, muffled click. Gently someone pulled the chain loose and eased open the door.

The girl stood outlined against the dawn sky.

“Yü nü,”
“ Ki greeted her with a mocking bow of his head. ”What, no Volpes?“

“I'm alone. But don't let my nighty fluster you.”

“I don't care if you're naked,” Ki said. “What I want is in your hands. That is a bowl of soup you're holding, isn't it?”

“Yes,” she replied crossly, moving toward him. “And if you don't stop calling me ‘fair lady' in that horrid Chinese accent of yours, I'll beat you to death with it. My name is Daphne.”

“How fitting,” Ki murmured sarcastically.

“Daphne Chung,” she continued, “daughter of a coolie spiking track on the Central Pacific, and an Irish camp follower on the Union Pacific. Not that I'd have to kill you, Ki—”

“You know me?”

“I know of you. You're all he talked about last night.” She squatted in front of Ki and regarded him with her proud onyx eyes.
“He'll
kill you,” she said, obviously still meaning Volpes. “Soon's Ryker's finished and turns you over to him, he'll kill you as fast as a trench can be dug. You're dead, Ki, dead.”

“Is that why you're here, Daphne? To rub it in?”

“I suppose even a condemned man deserves food,” she replied grudgingly, and began spooning soup from the bowl.

Ki kept his arms behind him, getting perverse pleasure out of fooling her. Yet, as she silently helped him eat, another part of his mind was in a quandary, his emotions strangely ambivalent toward this cool-eyed, terse-lipped Eurasian. And when he finished and she asked if that was enough, Ki could only nod dismissively, finding himself unable to thank her for her solicitude.

“That's right, spurn me,” she snapped, sensing his rejection. “Daphne the doxy, no better than a second-generation
ukareme.”

Ki gave a sardonic laugh, amused by her use of the antiquated Japanese term for a lewd and dissolute woman. “You're not Japanese,” he retorted. “Instead, how about
yü
chi?” Which was equally obsolete Chinese for a third-class “flower girl” who serviced the general public.

She slapped his face, hard, anger flaring in her smoldering black eyes. “Of course, I see now. It's not that I'm a tramp, it's that I'm half Chinese! And the Japanese half of you finds that repugnant, doesn't it? Well, the Japanese make me just as sick.”

“Just my luck,” Ki sighed. “One of the few times I'm not taken for Chinese, I'm hated for being Jap—”

“Invading us for centuries,” she rushed on in her fury, “Ever the conquerer, lording it over us, bloated with superiority and smug contempt!” The girl leaned closer, eyes narrowing, lips peeling back over short, sharp teeth. “But you're the lesser, Ki. At least I'm true to whatever I am. But how false you are to the
yang
of kindness and the
yin
of righteousness, to which you pay lip-service as the basis of your
tsui-kao jih-shih,
your supreme instruction.”

Stunned and chagrined by her bitter outburst, Ki could not utter the slightest word of rebuttal. “Daphne, where did you learn ... ?”

“I was raised by my father, my mother didn't want me. He was a dirt-poor coolie to the West, but to the other Chinese he was a teacher of
T‘ai-chi Ch'uan,
the ‘supreme ultimate', which makes your pugilism possible—”

She stopped with an abrupt sucking in of air, the sound of heavy footsteps growing louder as they neared the open shed door. Paling, she straightened and backed into one corner, where the shadows were deepest, lines of fear suddenly creasing her almond-hued face.

“Hell, looky there,” a man's voice growled. “The door ain't locked like it orter be. Guess this's my lucky day.”

A weasel-faced man strutted bowlegged into the shed, and stood with legs apart, fists resting cockily on his hips. “Well, now, I heard tell you was here,” he said to Ki, walking closer, and then his sneering grin widened when he glimpsed Daphne hunching in the corner. “Didn't know you was here too, gal. Guess none of us did, ‘specially Volpes. Maybe we can fix it so he don't find out, eh?”

Snickering, he turned back to Ki. “Know who I is?”

“Not by name,” Ki said with a slight quiver to his voice, hoping to draw the man out. “Didn't I see you the other night in the saloon?”

“Right, boy. You saw me there, gettin' my hide blistered by that uppity galfriend of yours. Seems she ain't the only bitch liking yaller meat, is she?” the man added, leering at Daphne again.

“I'll tell him,” Daphne hissed. “I swear I will.”

“You ain't tellin' Volpes nothin‘,” the man retorted snidely. “You ain't got the guts to. Ain't got much brains, either. If'n you're gonna fool around on him, you orter leastwise have the sense to do it on the sly. Keep it private, like this.” He pulled the door shut, plunging the shed into murky dimness, and returned to Ki, nudging him with the toe of his boot. “Ryker's sendin' a note to your gal, boy, tellin' her he's got you hid, an' if'n she wants you back, she'd better come collect you. You're bait, boy, live bait. 'Cept I've gotta a few scores to square on my own, an' the way I sees it, I got the chance, and nobody's told me how ‘live you've gotta be.”

“Leave him alone, Nealon, and get the hell out!”

“I'll tend to you in a minute, slut,” Lloyd Nealon snarled, and rearing, he kicked Ki viciously in the stomach.

Ki, anticipating, had already used an exercise to relax his muscles, and the kick hurt hardly at all. Straightening from his sitting position, arms still behind him, he said coldly, “Try that again, and I'll kill you.”

The former Flying W foreman laughed derisively. “Why, you nervy asshole, I'm gonna give you a taste of whupping, like I whupped ol' man Waldemar.” Drawing his sixgun, Nealon swung a pistol-whipping blow with his right hand while gut-punching with his left, adding, “Only this ain't gonna look like no accident!”

Ki killed him.

Ducking, Ki gripped the revolver and bent it back, breaking Nealon's trigger finger with a spasmodic firing of one shot. Ignoring the bullet slamming upwards into the low roof, and the explosion thundering in the tiny shed, Ki firmed the hold of his other hand on the arm of the first aiming for his stomach. In a blur of motion, Ki spun Nealon with
kuwatago
—a short “flying mare” toss that sent Nealon sailing over his shoulder.

Nealon landed on his back, screaming as his pelvis cracked. Then he stopped screaming as Ki kicked in the side of his head, crushing the temple bone like an eggshell.

“I'll dump the garbage,” Ki said affably, glancing at Daphne. She was standing rigid in the corner, face flushed, mouth wide, and it seemed to Ki that a faint gleam of hope lit her eyes. He wasn't sure; perhaps he imagined it, he thought as he lifted Nealon, but it seemed that way to him.

He dragged Nealon by the collar and belt, using the man's broken skull to push open the door. With a swing, he heaved the corpse outside, where it landed, mucous and blood spewing from its mouth and nose, just as seven men came rushing up, pistols in hand.

The man in the lead was yelling, “The shot came from—” Then, seeing the body and Ki standing in the doorway, they pulled up short. “Look what he done to Lloyd! Gun him!”

“Go ahead,” Ki called, smiling. “Shoot.”

Seven revolvers were leveled, fingers squeezing triggers.

“Shoot me,” Ki urged again. “Ryker will love you for it.”

The men hesitated, frustrated by uncertainty.

Shrugging, Ki stepped back inside and calmly closed the door.

Daphne came toward him, her voice a whisper. “You are a
lei jen,
a man of thunder ...” Her words were momentarily lost in the noise of the men running up outside and rechain ing the door. She went ashen, hearing the snap of the padlock, and when she spoke again, her voice was no longer hushed. It was hard, loud, and angry. “You're also a fool! Why didn't you just keep going while you were out there?”

“I wasn't finished.”

“You're finished!” she said furiously. “Oh, God, you are!”

“A man of thunder? What difference if I'm made of thunder or not?” Ki snapped back. “I'm still a man, and a man can't get far with seven revolvers aiming point-blank at him.”

“We're both finished,” Daphne moaned, slumping to the floor. “We're both locked in here now. We're trapped!”

Chapter 12

Jessica continued her dogged search, going over the same ground again and again, trying to spot fresh details each time. But Ki was gone, vanished, most likely dead. As long as he had been with her, his optimism and courage had sustained her. Now, without him, Jessica felt at her heart the cold hand of futility and grief.

Yet she refused to admit her fears, to accept the obvious. Some small doubt wormed in her mind, and its persistent squirmings sharpened her eyes. Bloodstains. In a wide patch near the boulders across from Ki's dead horse, she glimpsed splattered blood like freckles, and wondered how she'd missed them all the times before.

She stood back a short distance to survey their pattern, curious about how these stains looked different from the smudges and pools around the dead steers, horses, and rustlers. It almost looked as if it had been caused not by the stampede, but by a fight, a scuffle of some sort.

Moving into the area, Jessica hunkered down and began to study it inch by inch, trying to sort out and piece together what had happened here. She found bootprints, a lot of them, pivoting and squirreling in all directions, as if following the call of some odd, macabre dance. Then her practiced eye caught the faint, scuffed outline of Ki's distinctive rope-soled slippers.

Pulse quickening, she hunted for more. She found a few, a very few, but was able to make out where Ki had evidently been dragged to where six or seven horses had stood. All the hoof-prints that left the area were pointing toward the plateau. One of the horses, she saw, had a cracked fore shoe.

Swiftly she returned to her horse and rode out of the gorge. Reaching the mouth of the canyon, where the herd had spread out across the plateau, she dismounted and started another painstaking search for some sign of that broken shoe. Locating it, she swung back into her saddle and followed it across the plateau to the entrance of the pass leading to the Block-Two-Dot.

There the horse had stopped with the others for a long enough while to leave droppings and splashes of urine. Scouting, Jessica determined that the bunch was definitely seven in number, joined by an eighth horse coming up out of the pass. She felt a sneaky hunch that the eighth had been ridden by Ryker, after she'd found the butt of an expensive Havana cigar doused in one of the urine puddles.

The meeting had split up, with four of the horses going into the pass. The other four, including the horse with the broken shoe, had angled westward toward the rising slopes of the mountains beyond.

Jessica trailed the broken shoe. It was easily traced across the plateau, but once it entered the rocky, forested uplands, the going got more difficult.

Jessica took her time, gauging the vast raw stone and wooded scrub for the dim, indistinct clues of passage. Much of her tracking was done by instinct; once she went a half-mile up a culvert free of any sign at all before she found that her trust had been good. A white scratch, the iron of a horseshoe against a rock... and then, a little farther on, a stepped-on twig, cracked and showing pulp.

The path kept close to the contours of the foothills, rarely along the ridges, but through clefts and hollows. Most of it seemed little used, and at that, mostly by game.

Once, when she discovered a solid imprint of a hoof, she stopped and examined it closely. The edges hadn't crumbled, but there were indications of dew; the track had been made early last night. She continued on with grim satisfaction. Twice more she had to rein in and study the terrain, unraveling the path as it wove higher among the crags and spurs and overgrown canyons.