Lone Star 02 (7 page)

“You just do that,” the guard guffawed, his eyes on Jessie's bouncing bottom as Ki hurriedly pulled her along.

Jessie waited until they were out of sight, as well as earshot, before digging in her heels. “I wish we could have gotten a glimpse of what it was those poor men were unloading,” she sighed. “That sort of information would have been very useful in building a case against Commissioner Smith.”

“Oh, we will find that out, all right,” Ki remarked. “I pulled you away like that because I did not want the guard to take special notice of us.”

“We do sort of stand out,” Jessie admitted. “You're going back on your own, I take it?”

“I would like to,” Ki said slowly. “But I am concerned about your safety.”

“Don't be,” Jessie reassured him. “I have my derringer with me, you know. What I'll do is take a cable car back, and do some of that shopping I'm so looking forward to. I'll meet you back at the hotel lobby. We're to meet Moore there at two.”

Ki nodded. Moore had suggested that his partner, a man named Shanks, take over the job of concentrating on getting evidence against the corrupt waterfront commissioner. Moore, after first offering to act as Jessie's bodyguard, a gesture that Ki found immensely amusing, was going to build upon his tentative relationship with the Tong leader Chang to see if he could infiltrate the cartel.

After seeing Jessie safely off the docks and onto a cable car, Ki returned to the cartel's ship. The guard and his dog were nowhere to be seen, but there was still the billy-club-wielding foreman to get past.

Ki slipped beneath the stiff, salt-encrusted ropes barricading the actual loading area from the esplanade, and sauntered up to the foreman, whose attention was focused on the coolies. As the foreman turned, Ki pressed his stiffened fingers against the man's neck. The clipboard and club fell to the planking as the men slumped first to his knees, and then over on his side, out cold.

Ki grabbed the man's legs and pulled him flush alongside a stack of crates protected with a canvas tarp. He pulled the tarp lower to cover the unconscious body, and then stood back to survey his camouflage attempt. He doubted that the other guard would connect an extra bump in the lumpy canvas with the missing man. As for the coolies, they were all studiously avoiding Ki's eyes and simply continuing on with their work, as if nothing had happened. He doubted that any of them knew enough English to inform the guard, even assuming they felt they had a reason to...

Right now, time was Ki's only worry. The
atemi
technique he had used against the foreman, the sudden sharp pressure against a vital nerve center, was much more silent and faster than any hand or foot strike. But whereas Ki could, from long experience, gauge how long an adversary would remain unconscious after one of his more violent strikes, there was no way to know how long the effects of an
atemi
technique would last on any given opponent. That the foreman would soon wake up wondering what had happened to him was a certainty, but how soon was the question.

Ki kicked the billy club into the water, picked up the fallen clipboard, and strolled up the gangplank, past the scurrying coolies who now, kowtowed to him as if he were their new foreman.

On board the ship, using the pencil attached by a string to the clipboard to scribble nonsense, Ki began to make his way toward the cargo hold. He came across three men in longshoremen's canvas garb, lounging on the deck. These men were white, and content to merely watch the coolies work as they passed a bottle of rum among themselves. Ki stopped short, hoping to back off and come around another way before he was noticed, but it was too late.

“Who the hell are you?” one of the men spat. “Where's Willie?”

Keeping his Stetson's brim low, Ki approached them. “Willie's busy. I've been sent down to take a special tally of the goods.”

“We don't know nothing about that,” another of the men muttered. “You just shove off before you get hurt.”

Ki quickly scanned the clipboard. At the top was a printed form a half-sheet of paper long. In the space marked “Foreman” was scrawled the first name, Willie, and in the three spaces designated “Crew Supervisors” were written the names Tom, Matty, and George.

“You get off this ship, hear?” one of the trio now warned, rising to his feet and unbuttoning his coat. On the deck beside him was a baling hook. The man bent down and picked it up, all the time keeping his menacing scowl on Ki. As he straightened up, Ki noticed that the man's belt buckle was an oval plate that framed a raised, nickel-plated M.

“Take it easy, Matty,” he said, turning back the way he'd come.

“Wait a minute!” the man ordered. “How'd you know my name?”

“See you around,” Ki said matter-of-factly. He made a vague gesture toward the other two. “And Tom and George. I've seen you all around. No need to get so hot under the collar. I'm leaving. I'll just tell
her
that it was you three who—”

“Just hold on now!” Matty interrupted hastily.
“Who
are you going to tell?”

“Miss Kahr, of course.”

“Oh, Christ!” one of the other two—either George or Tom—piped up. “Don't do that, man! She'll skin us for sure!”

“Don't I wish old man Burkhardt was still running things,” Matty winced, shaking his head. “He was all right, he was.”

“But Miss Kahr is certainly prettier,” Ki bantered. “What with those big, violet eyes of hers...”

“You talk like you know her pretty good,” Matty said thoughtfully. “Look, I'm sorry about before, but we was just doing our job, right?” He looked down to see the grappling hook still clutched in his hand, and hastily dropped it. “You go right ahead with whatever it is you're doing, sir,” he continued, his voice now meek and mild.

“Right, then,” Ki said crisply. “See you later, boys.” He sauntered past them, smiling to himself. Sir! But of course. At this point none of them would dare admit that they'd forgotten his name!

Ki climbed down the narrow ladder, into the main cargo hold. There were two coolies waiting to climb up, and one whose bare feet were on the rungs just above his head.

“Matty!” Ki shouted up toward the square patch of blue sky framed by the hold's open bay.

“Yessir?” came Matty's faint reply.

“Keep these men out of the hold until I'm done with my tally!”

“Yessir!”

Ki continued on down the ladder, all the way to the bottom. The two coolies, who had respectfully stood aside, now climbed up. When they were gone, Ki was totally alone in the bowels of the cartel's ship.

A long, dark corridor, lit only by the shaft of light beaming down through the open bay, led to the cargo area. Ki's shoulders brushed either side of the corridor's mildewed walls as he hurried down it, breathing through his mouth so as not to smell the filthy stench of the ill-ventilated place. As he walked, he listened to the high-pitched squeaks and dry scrabbling of the rats that thrived in the hold.

By the time he'd reached the cargo area itself, it was completely dark. Ki wondered how the coolies knew what they were hoisting onto their backs. He struck a match, and in its flickering circle of light he spied a kerosene lamp hanging from a nail hammered into a splintery crossbeam. The lamp's wick sputtered, but finally lit. The lamp hissed softly, its light driving back the shadows—and the rats—to the hold's farthest corners.

Stacked ten feet high were row upon row of wooden crates. Ki went to a case lying where one of the coolies had left it. Its lid was nailed tight. Ki formed the fingers of his right hand into a one-knuckle fist, focused his mind, and struck straight down, driving his knuckle into the wood. There was the hiss and rasp of Ki's sharp exhalation, and the crack of the lid splintering. Ki tossed the shards of wood aside.

He had to tear through several layers of oily brown paper before he reached the crate's contents, but long before that, the sweet, pungent smell rising up told him what he needed to know.

Opium. The rough-hewn bricks of the narcotic looked almost black in the kerosene lamp's illumination. Ki pinched off a bit and rubbed it between his finger and thumb. It was sticky and malleable, potent with the juice of the opium poppy. Ki quickly examined the rest of the crates; all were the same, and most likely, all were filled with blocks of opium. He hefted the crate he'd opened. It weighed about seventy-five pounds.

Seventy-five pounds of potent narcotic, multiplied by so many rows, each ten feet high...

He thought about the barefoot, frightened, sickly coolies on board this one vessel, and how they would soon join their fifty thousand brothers in the fetid squalor of Chinatown. No wonder the countless opium dens of the area were filled to capacity! Homesick and hopeless, the Chinese flocked to the dark havens where they could escape into their sweet dreams of home, and fantasies of the future, while the opium further weakened their already ravaged bodies.

Behind him, Ki heard a thud, and the scratching of claws too large for any rat scrabbling for purchase on the smooth wooden planking. There came the sound of wet panting, and then a deep-throated growl.

Ki saw the silhouette of the guard dog as it stood at the head of the corridor, just out of the soft light coming down from the open bay.

The dog, all shoulders and massive head, began padding down the corridor, straight toward Ki. From its throat there came that low, constant growl, rising to a snarl as Ki stepped into the corridor to meet the big animal.

Ki felt his body flood with adrenaline. The hold seemed to fill with odor as the animal lifted its hind leg in order to piss against the corridor wall. The canine was establishing its mastery of the hold. It was issuing its challenge to battle.

Beneath his jacket, Ki's shirt was sticking to his back. He felt fear crawling through him, but fought it. If the dog sensed it, all would be lost.

The dog was a problem. The corridor was too low and narrow for Ki to feint and dodge the dog's attack. He would have to stand his ground, meeting the brute head on, in order to kill it.

That he could kill the lumbering brute, Ki had no doubt. But he would have to do it with his hands. The narrow corridor would not allow him to get a shot at the dog's side with his
shuriken
blades, and the canine's low-hanging head protected its chest. Ki doubted that a
shuriken
tossed from this short distance away would be able to penetrate the dog's massive skull.

Ki would have to kill the dog with his hands. But the animal's powerful jaws could easily rip his arm from its socket.

It would be little comfort for Ki to know the dog was dead, if it had his severed arm in its lifeless jaws. He himself would end up helpless, and in the cartel's cruel clutches.

No, battling this four-footed killer on its own ground could lead only to his own defeat...

Ki could not fight the dog. So he would have to
charm
it.

It was called
ninpō inubue
—the ancient
ninja
technique of training animals such as monkeys, wolves, birds of prey, and dogs against an enemy. More than one hapless samurai had lost his eyes to the
ninpō inubue
-trained crow of an adversary, as the bird swooped down like some angry
shura
, or fighting demon, to pluck out his precious orbs. Huge, bearlike
akita
watchdogs often prowled the nighttime halls of Japanese nobles' castles, so that the guards could sleep, and in that way be refreshed for the next day's battle.

But every technique had a counter-technique. It was possible for the prepared samurai to distract the attacking crow by throwing bright coins into the air. It was possible for the infiltrating, black-clad
ninja
to ally himself with his enemy's watchdogs...

Ki began to breath in a deep and regular rhythm, focusing his
ki
—the physical and spiritual energy-substance that pervades the universe, and from which Ki had taken his chosen name—so that it flowed outward toward the now confused, but still wary beast.

Ki began to move toward the dog. He was careful to keep his steps feather-light, to allow no vibrations to travel through the wooden floor to the dog, thereby breaking the fragile spell. During Ki's years of training in the
bugei,
or martial arts, he had learned to walk on fragile, eggshell-thin, porcelain teacups without breaking them. This was how he now walked. An insect would not have been crushed beneath the leather soles of his Wellington boots.

The beast's growl still sounded. It stretched its neck out and up, angling its blunt head to peer at Ki's face. Not trusting its weak eyes, the dog's wet black nostrils widened as it sniffed this thing's scent, so manlike, yet so unlike any man it had ever confronted.

Ki did not look directly at the dog, but kept his eyes averted, watching the animal with his peripheral vision. To lock eyes with a beast was to challenge it, and Ki had no intention of doing so. Let the dog challenge
him;
it was always the challenger who was in the less secure position.

Ki began to speak to the dog, not in English, but in Japanese. He did not want to take the chance of inadvertently blurting some trick phrase—“good fellow,” “nice dog”—that the animal's trainers might have drummed into its brain as the signal to instantly attack whoever uttered it. In any event, except for such training phrases, it was the tone of a man's voice that mattered with animals, not what was being said.

Now he was less than six feet away from the dog. Once again the low growl became a warning snarl. Ki knew that from the dog's point of view, he was now taller than the space separating them was long. This was the moment of truth. The dog had to decide whether it wanted to fight or capitulate.