Lone Star 01 (4 page)

“I certainly don't think you're silly or crazy, Mrs. Waldemar,” Jessica sighed aloud, spreading the letter back out on the hearth.

She crossed to her slicker and took out her derringer, then went to her trunk and unwrapped the gun-cleaning kit. All the while she mulled over the letter, pondering how it fit with other facts she knew. Closing the lid of the trunk, she sat down on it and began drying and lubricating the derringer, then hesitated, frowning as she glanced over to where Ki was still squatting motionless.

“Ki, how did Ryker know we were coming?”

“Your supper with Governor Hoyt,” Ki murmered, un-moving.

“Of course,” Jessie said, mostly to herself. Finishing with the derringer, she picked up her revolver and started to clean it, her mind shaping small links into a pattern, as a child might fashion a delicate pine-needle chain. Her eyes flashed a peculiar greenish shade, the hue of an iceberg's edge when salt water washed it. Her father would have said she was in one of her “damned moods.”

Amabelle Waldemar's letter, which had started it all, had been addressed to the general offices of the huge Starbuck cattle operation in Texas, headquartered at the sprawling Circle Star ranch. Initially it was treated the same as the many other missives received every day, and was transferred to the section that handled sales and purchases for routine response. On the surface, it was routine. Starbuck contracted with hundreds of small, under-financed ranches to supply beef for the burgeoning markets in America and Europe, and a certain percentage of failures and bankruptcies were expected.

In the case of Waldemars' Flying W, it was one of a half-dozen borderline ranches in the area, which the Circle Star had helped to arrange into a loose sort of cooperative. Banding together allowed the ranches to operate as effectively as larger spreads, but the Circle Star's motives were not entirely altruistic, for it also guaranteed a reasonably steady source of meat.

The previous October, the Circle Star had been notified that the Block-Two-Dot ranch had been sold and was dropping out of the co-op. Starbuck field men, going there to try renegotiating the deal, reported back that they'd been tossed off the property at gunpoint. At the time, neither this nor the name of the new owner sparked any alarm. Then Amabelle Waldemar's letter arrived. A sharp-witted clerk, perceiving that an anguished plea for help was implied in the message, and remembering the strange incident at the Block-Two-Dot, sent the letter and a memo explaining the connection on to his superiors for review.

It didn't take long for Jessica to get the letter—after all, the Starbuck buck stopped with her. Reading it and the memo, the name of the Block-Two-Dot's owner struck her as sounding familiar, and she then began leafing through the pages of the little black book.

Guthried Ryker was listed in it.

Another connection was now forged, one far more sinister than the lowly clerk could have imagined. Contained within the notebook's leather covers was a ledger detailing the names and activities of a vicious international ring intent upon gaining control of America's business and political establishment. Jessica's father had started compiling the information while in the Orient, during his first meager years of building what would ultimately become the Starbuck business empire, and had scrupulously kept the book up to date ever since. In his subsequent battles with this criminal conspiracy, his wife was killed while Jessica was still a baby. Eventually he too was murdered; though, by then, Jessica was a young woman, old enough to know and understand his persistent fight.

Vowing revenge, and aided by Ki and her wealthy inheritance, Jessica continued her father's war against the insidious network of graft and corruption—against the traitorous businessmen, lawmen, politicians, and outright crooks who'd sold out America to this merciless cabal that had slaughtered her parents. Guthried Ryker was one of them.

The entry stated that Ryker, Guthried Hannibal, aged forty-seven, had been born to a socially prominent family in Philadelphia. He was well educated, with no military service—putting the lie to his aggrandizing title of “Captain.” He was unmarried, and a frequenter of prostitutes who specialized in whips and ropes. Currently he was the figurehead president of Acme Packers & Purveyors, a front company for the ring, which operated out of the Chicago stockyards.

Evidently, Ryker was quite the city-slick bastard...

And at the moment, as Jessica sat on her broken trunk, rubbing whale oil on her revolver, she couldn't help wondering why the devil Ryker had chosen to move to Eucher Butte. She could envision the kind of man he was: ambitious, greedy, devious, with a streak of cruelty just beneath his sophisticated facade. He would likely enjoy the role of cattle baron, but she couldn't figure how he hoped to attain that by owning such piddling ranches as the Block-Two-Dot and the Waldemars' Flying W. Nor could Jessica see him running them. If the report was accurate, and she'd no reason to doubt it, Guthried Ryker had never roped, branded, or castrated a calf; had probably never, in fact, stepped in cow dung. He was the type who'd stay comfortably away and hire lesser men to do his dirty work for him.

Dirty work like the ambush that had been laid for Ki and herself.

The surprise attack at the bridge still puzzled her. Ki had answered the
how
behind it: Ryker had undoubtedly heard they were coming, thanks to John W. Hoyt, territorial governor of Wyoming. Hoyt had greeted Jessica and Ki in Cheyenne, admitting that he'd learned of their arrival from the Wichita stationmaster, who'd recognized Jessica when they'd boarded the Union Pacific there, and had wired ahead for red-carpet service, thinking he was doing her a service.

Hoyt had insisted that
the
Starbuck of
the
Starbuck empire dine with him at the capital. On trips like this, Jessica preferred to keep a low profile, but there hadn't been any way to decline his offer graciously. She'd been politely vague about their destination, even though she knew the governor to be an honorable man beyond reproach. Nor did she believe he'd purposedly tipped off Ryker—except perhaps in the same respect as the stationmaster had, by innocently requesting other important personages to host her royally wherever she went. And certainly, as president of a Chicago packing company, Ryker was the most—probably the only—person of any note around Eucher Butte. On the other hand, the news could just as easily have been sent by an eager reporter or political flunky keeping tabs on the governor's doings. Whatever, the dinner's high visibility had resulted in warning Ryker, giving him plenty of time to arrange an appropriate welcome ...

But that still failed to solve the
why
of it. Obviously, Ryker had deduced that he was the reason for their trip, and had figured to kill them before they could threaten his schemes. Jessica didn't know what those schemes might be, yet for Ryker to have tried such a drastic act as that ambush convinced her he was after more than merely grabbing the Flying W. No matter what his motives, one fact was clear: their journey to Eucher Butte was already proving to be complicated and dangerous, far more than their original purpose of helping Amabelle Waldemar would have led them to believe.

“I hate to admit it, Ki,” Jessica said, setting her revolver aside and smoothing her skirt, “but Ryker has got me baffled.”

Ki said nothing.

“I mean, what's he up to?” she continued. “The region's pretty remote, lacking mining potential and only fair for grazing, and the only rumors of a possible new rail line are about the Chicago & Northwestern laying track way to the north. What do you think?”

Ki still did not respond.

Jessica looked carefully at Ki, wondering if something was wrong with him. He remained quiet and motionless in his cross-legged, cross-armed position—a position she knew he used for more than simple relaxation. As Ki had often told her, it was a position he practiced for fifteen or twenty minutes almost daily, as an exercise to strengthen what he termed his “intrinsic energy,” that inner concentrating force which permeated most Asian martial-arts systems, and which was the underlying basis of his own power and agility.

No, nothing seemed to be wrong. In fact, as Jessica started toward him to check, Ki appeared to look superbly healthy. With his lithe-muscled naked back, his bronzed bare arms, and his mane of blue-black hair cascading around his corded shoulders, he resembled something like a pagan earth god, virile and primally desirable.

Reaching Ki, Jessica felt her breasts begin to tingle perversely, and she told herself to be a good girl. Ki was out of bounds, just as she was for him. It wasn't because he worked for her; Ki may have been on a different social level, but so had been many of her lovers. And it wasn't because he would have rebuffed her seduction; though unspoken, she was aware of how greatly he cared for her. Rather, it was because they were as brother and sister, two halves of a partnership equal and compatible. To have surrendered to a moment of physical bliss would have ruptured forever that deeper, more fundamental bond of admiration, trust, and affection that they held for each other.

She touched him lightly. “Ki?” she whispered.

Ki did not answer. He was sound asleep.

Chapter 4

The night passed without incident.

Jessica and Ki awakened just before daybreak, to find that the residue of the storm had blown itself away, wheeling south into Colorado. But the fire had long since burned out, and the gray false dawn was cold, adding impetus to their movements as they hurriedly changed their clothes and left the cabin for Eucher Butte.

In the flush of a serene, fiery dawn, they began their long hike down the trail. Jessica was now in her figure-squeezing denim jeans and jacket, her derringer concealed behind the wide square buckle of her belt, her custom .38 holstered at her thigh, her notebook safely hidden inside her silk blouse, pressing against her flat belly under the swell of her firm, unbound breasts. Ki too was wearing jeans, along with his cotton-twill shirt and moccasin-like slippers, the weapons he'd salvaged from his case now hidden on his body and in the many pockets of his worn leather vest.

They reached Eucher Butte with the noon sun overhead, the Wyoming sky a soft powder-blue enamel, warm and benevolent.

The town swelled like a festering sore near the banks of the North Laramie, sprawling in the same pattern as a thousand other small cow towns, with an outscatter of corrals and sheds at one end, and a rutted main street leading to a cluster of frame houses at the other.

Walking along, Jessica and Ki passed a livery stable and yard, a funeral home, a gunsmith, and an imposing saloon with the name THUNDERMUG painted on its etched-glass windows. Directly across from the saloon was a combination barbershop and bath house, and a tucked-away restaurant with no name at all. Farther on could be seen a bootmaker, a general store and feedlot, and a false-fronted three-story hotel called the GRAND CONTINENTAL, with most of its ground floor taken up by a bank. Flanking the hotel was a telegraph and post office, and a bleak stone building with a weathered sign over its door reading ALBANY CO. SHERIFF. Buckboards and wagons were almost as prevalent as horses, and the boardwalks were crowded for this time of day, sure signs that, come evening, a lot of merry hurrahing would break loose in the gaming rooms and crib parlors of the large, obviously profitable saloon.

They went as far as the restaurant, where they ordered the first decent meal they'd had since yesterday morning. While eating, Jessica thought that probably Eucher Butte wasn't too awful a place—it merely seemed that way. It was wild, typical of the territory and the breed infesting it, no worse than other small cattle towns and maybe a little better. She doubted they'd get much cooperation here; likely the townsfolk wouldn't be partial to strangers poking their noses in local affairs, especially now that Ryker, forewarned, had had a chance to cover himself and spread a bunch of horse manure around. But it would furnish their more immediate needs, and from that point of view, Eucher Butte was quite satisfactory.

Leaving the restaurant, Ki said, “No telling what Ryker has in mind, Jessie, and I'd hate for him to catch you with empty pistols. Let me go buy you some fresh ammunition. Then, if you want, I'll hire a horse and ride back to the cabin to collect our luggage.”

“It's liable to be all stolen by now.”

Ki shrugged. “No great loss,” he replied, adding with a sly grin, “besides, if any thief looked finer in your tweed outfit than you do, I'd say you ought to let him keep it.”

Jessica laughed. “I would, gladly. Better yet, Ki, see if you can find some kid who'd fetch it for you, and ask directions to the Flying W. If there's time, we'll ride out there today. If not, we'll stay over at the hotel and leave early tomorrow.”