Strong Darkness Read online

“Nineteen, Ranger.”

  Bean’s features tightened enough to close his eyes halfway, mouth wrinkled in disgust. He blew out some hot breath. “What do you make of him sewing her head on backward before he stuck himself inside her?”

  William Ray smacked his lips together, thinking on that. “Only thing I can figure is he didn’t want her to see him doing it, dead or alive.”

  Judge Bean looked toward Su. “That a Chink thing or something?”

  “It wasn’t a Chinese who did this,” Su told him calmly.

  “Son, I don’t see any other way whoever did this could move about so close to the camp without drawing notice.”

  “Unless it was invisible.”

  “It?” from William Ray.

  “The land is angry over what we’ve done to it, Ranger. The Indians you’ve been to war with left many burial grounds behind that we’ve ravaged in laying track. Maybe one of them finally got angry.”

  “But that’s not what bahk guai means, is it?”

  Su glanced toward Roy Bean, as if the judge’s presence was keeping him from elaborating further. “Death follows in the wake of the White Devil, these victims only adding to his tally.”

  * * *

  “Make you a deal, Ranger,” Judge Roy Bean offered outside the tent, the two of them glad for the fresh air after soaking up the spoiled, sickening stench that continued to cling to their nostrils like prairie dust. “You catch him, and I’ll hang him.”

  “Might be a good idea to give the sumbitch a trial first, Judge.”

  “That never stopped me before,” Roy Bean winked.

  William Ray considered Bean’s proposal, working his tongue around his mouth from left to right and sweeping it across the inside of both cheeks, pushing one out and then the other. “Is what you said really true, about only hanging one man?”

  “Sentenced two. The other escaped ’fore I got the chance.”

  “That don’t answer my question.”

  “It’s a fact, yes, though I don’t suspect I’d want to see it written down nowhere. Man don’t got much to stand on ’sides his own reputation.”

  “In that case, I’d be glad to have your help, Judge,” William Ray told him.

  “Then what say we head back to the Langtry saloon and do us some drinking?”

  “Rather we have ourselves a look-see down at the head of the tracks.”

  “Fine by me,” Judge Roy Bean said, “long as we drink up afterward.”

  “I’m buying, Judge.”

  “Didn’t you hear?” Bean grinned. “All drinks are free on hanging days, son.”

  “Gotta catch the sumbitch first.”

  “A mere formality,” the judge followed.

  17

  PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

  “What’s the connection with this new serial killer?” Caitlin asked, after Tepper finished a part of the story she’d long forgotten.

  “What do you think? We got the bodies of five women scattered across the southern part of the state, all with their severed heads sewn back on their necks facing the wrong way and all raped postmortem. Department of Public Safety has assigned the case to the Rangers.”

  “Lucky us.”

  “Lucky you. This thing goes public, the whole damn state crawls under a bed until they find out a bona fide gunfighter is on the job. So the Department of Public Safety wants me to put that well-earned reputation of yours to good use.”

  “I’ll take the first flight out of Providence tomorrow morning.”

  “There’s one leaving out of Boston in a couple hours. Get you in the air before midnight.”

  “Sorry, Captain, I won’t be able to make it.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s something I gotta do first.”

  18

  PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

  Dylan was dreaming, at least he thought he was. He felt something cold grasp his hand, tried to squeeze back but couldn’t. Then remembered it didn’t matter because he was just dreaming.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Or was he?

  “This was all my fault.”

  Because the soft voice in his ear felt very real. It sounded like Kai and he wanted to tell her she had nothing to be sorry about; maybe he did tell her, because he felt something squeeze his hand harder.

  “Can you hear me?”

  Kind of.

  “Squeeze my hand back if you can.”

  Sorry, no can do. Hey, am I dreaming or are you really here?

  “Say my name.”

  Kai.

  “Say my name.”

  Kai. Can’t you hear me?

  In his mind, Dylan remembered spotting her across the nightclub floor, the blueish translucent lighting almost identical to how they’d shot the last scene of the video from which he’d immediately recognized her. Like there wasn’t any doubt and no coincidence at all. It was the same girl from the video, Pumping Iris or something, in the flesh only covered up. Wearing skintight jeans that looked painted onto her perfect lines, coated with something shiny so they were more like leather than denim. She looked really athletic and for some reason Dylan pictured her on horseback. Made for a great opening line.

  “Say, do you ride?”

  The way she looked at him made him feel like an idiot, a loser, and he regretted even coming over until she grasped his arm tenderly and then stroked it.

  “I’m sorry I got you involved in this,” he heard her say now, wherever he was.

  But Dylan was thinking about how he’d taken her back to his room. He’d had more than his share of girls in high school, but nothing like this with a room all to himself and no fear of his brother, father, or Caitlin walking in on him. He’d never been with a girl before already wrapped up as a fantasy in his mind. Couldn’t believe it was really the girl from the video that had been spreading around Delta Phi. And, truth be told, he hadn’t known for sure she was a professional, or what that meant exactly, until they were back in his room for a night that couldn’t have been better if his imagination had conjured up the whole thing. They’d finally drifted off to sleep together around dawn and Dylan woke up to find Kai gone, realizing he’d already missed his first class.

  It was the next day that he began to realize she was in some kind of big trouble, figured it out only when she began to pester him about Caitlin Strong after spotting her in pictures in his room and on his phone wearing her Texas Ranger badge. At first she thought it was a Halloween costume, didn’t think a woman could become a Ranger.

  Boy, could I tell you some stories …

  And Kai pestered Dylan to do just that, something clearly on her mind the night they’d met up at Spats just before he’d been jumped.

  “I’ll make it up to you,” Dylan heard her saying now. “I brought you something so when you wake up you’ll know I was really here.”

  But where was he? Where was she?

  He heard her speak but couldn’t respond, as if in some deep sleep from which he couldn’t rouse himself.

  “I promise,” she said. “I won’t let you—”

  She stopped there, her voice immediately replaced by those of his father and Caitlin approaching the room.

  19

  PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

  “You can still make that flight tonight,” Cort Wesley told Caitlin as they entered Dylan’s room.

  “I need to see him again before I head home.”

  “Expecting a miracle, Ranger?”

  “He’s gonna be just fine without one, Cort Wesley.”

  As they reached Dylan’s bed, to find a pink rose sitting atop his covers, Caitlin caught the reflection in the window glass of a figure darting out from behind a door down the hallway. It was just a glimpse, but enough to identify her as a young woman who matched the description of the Chinese girl from the video and the bar.

  “Stay with him!” she instructed Cort Wesley, as she burst out into the hall.

  Caitlin swept her gaze in the direction she thought the young woman had fled
, then remembered it was a reflection, meaning she had it backward. And sure enough a shape crashed through an exit door into a hospital stairwell halfway down the hallway in that direction instead. She charged after her, the door just closing when she reached it.

  Caitlin had her gun out by then, more instinctive than anything else, as she followed the echo of footsteps downward, passing level after level. She was gaining no ground at all. The echo of her steps ended with the thump of another door crashing open, Caitlin heading down the last flight to see the door leading into the hospital’s engineering room just swaying closed.

  She shouldered through it before it sealed, any potential sound of footsteps lost to the hum, whir, and grind of machinery, fans, air exchangers, and pumping apparatus. Caitlin felt as if she’d been dropped into some horror movie with the killer certain to lurch out from behind a rusted baffle or drop down from the steam pipes hissing overhead.

  Instead, she spotted the young woman speeding through the clutter of the floor with a dancer’s agility.

  “Stop!” Caitlin yelled, picking up the chase but gaining only modest ground. “Stop!”

  The clanking and rumbling of machines drowned out all other sound, this level empty save for the two of them so late at night. Huge fans spun on both sides, making her feel as if she’d landed in a world of giants, air forced up through the network of flexible and tin ductwork. She smelled grease and oil and the distinct scent of what could only be WD-40.

  Up ahead the young woman found her path blocked when the passage narrowed to the width of a massive exhaust fan placed to drain heat from the potentially stifling confines around them. Caitlin thought she had her then, realizing only in that moment she was still holding her SIG at the ready. She left it in her grasp as she picked up the pace, closing the gap further, when the young woman grabbed what looked like a broomstick from the floor and used it jam the fan’s blades still.

  Caitlin lit out into a mad dash, as the young woman squeezed through a gap that looked much too narrow to accommodate even her lithe frame. But she made it somehow and charged on without seeming to even have missed a step.

  “Stop!” Caitlin shouted, reaching the seized-up fan to realize the gap was too tight for her to squeeze through in pursuit. “Wait!”

  The young woman turned at that, slowing her pace enough to meet and hold Caitlin’s gaze. Then her eyes moved to the pistol Caitlin was still holding; just then the broomstick snapped, the fan started spinning again, and she was gone.

  * * *

  “We gonna tell Finneran about this?” Cort Wesley asked her when Caitlin made it back upstairs to Dylan’s room, still struggling to get all her breath back.

  “Why bother?”

  “I wonder how long she was in the room before we got here.”

  “Nobody at the nurse’s station noticed a thing.”

  Cort Wesley looked back at Dylan, as if something may have changed in his condition in the past fifteen seconds. “You get a good look at her, Ranger?”

  “I think so.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Something about her eyes, the way she looked at me when she saw my gun. I’ve seen it before, a few times anyway.”

  “Saw what exactly?” he asked her.

  “I think she wanted me to shoot her, Cort Wesley,” Caitlin said, her gaze joining his on Dylan. “I think she wanted to die.”

  20

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  “The American police refuse to remove the protesters,” the head of Yuyuan’s security detail told Li Zhen as they approached the stage hastily erected for the occasion. “They claim they have the right to peaceful assembly.”

  “Then let them learn of a future they can do nothing about,” Zhen said.

  He let his gaze drift to a scraggly bunch at the rear of the dignitaries, officials, and invited guests assembled for the ceremony. Each of the protesters held a torn, tattered piece of the Chinese flag, waving them in the air as if this were some American sporting event.

  Zhen couldn’t help but smile smugly. “They deface the symbol of our people without realizing how beholden they are to us.”

  Zhen continued shaking hand after hand of those gathered on Alamo Plaza for the ribbon-cutting ceremony, turning away to steal the moments he needed to spray his hands with antiseptic cleaner and rub them dry before returning to the task at hand. Finally the head of Yuyuan’s public relations department, who’d coordinated the event with officials in Texas and Washington, eased him aside and then up toward the podium that had been placed upon the stage. Far more people had shown up than expected, drawing a cringe from Zhen when he emerged from his limousine. China was a culture steeped in secrecy, while the United States prided itself on just the opposite. He wondered how it was possible anyone ever got anything done here, as Yuyuan’s PR chief backed off to leave him alone behind the microphone.

  “I would like to thank you all for coming,” Li Zhen greeted into the microphone without further delay.

  The milling crowd swung toward him in uniform fashion, a few of them still speaking in hushed tones. Zhen resisted the temptation to cease his address until all were quiet and no lips moved. But he remembered the lesson of congeniality and the politics in play that were never a concern back in China, where the only audience that mattered were representatives of the government and military. And before he could consider the matter further, the protesters began waving their pieces of the Chinese flag higher in the air to further mock him.

  Zhen scanned the crowd and found Brooks lurking near the rear not far from the protesters, a caustic look on his face as if he were sucking on something bitter. But he spotted something else as well that grabbed his eye and made him forget all about the fragments of his country’s flag flapping in the breeze: a group of high school girls on some kind of field trip that had coincidentally brought them to the Alamo this morning. They were dressed like an assemblage of dolls in white blouses and plaid skirts that hung high on their thighs, porcelain dolls like the ones his oldest daughter had once collected and were still arranged just as she’d left them back in China before her death.

  “This is truly a glorious day for both our nations,” he continued. “I am Li Zhen, CEO of the Yuyuan Corporation. My company has been welcomed by the people of Texas into this wonderful state, a favor we intend to repay many times over given this opportunity we consider a great privilege.”

  Louder applause filtered through the crowd. Before him, two more members of the Yuyuan public relations department stretched a red ribbon between two stakes that had been hammered into the soft earth of Alamo Plaza. But Zhen’s gaze again drifted well past it to that group of high school girls clustered near the back, the lips of their skirts tossed about by the breeze revealing even more of their shapely thighs. He suppressed a shudder, the air suddenly alternating between waves of heat and cold, as if the sun itself was betraying him. In his mind the many others gathered before him for this momentous occasion could read each and every one of his thoughts, and Zhen imagined a curtain drawing across his mind to keep his most base secrets safe.

  “There are those in this country who would chastise and target China for our self-interested pursuits, just as there are those in China who choose to do the same with the United States. On the field of business, though, we stand side by side to make ourselves stronger through an honest and fruitful association, born of supply and demand. There is demand for a fifth generation wireless transmission network and Yuyuan has been graced with the privilege of supplying it to the betterment of all Americans. We were not selected because we were the lowest bidder or even the only company in the world capable of achieving such an arduous and unprecedented task. Yuyuan was selected because we were the best suited for the task, and we are grateful for the opportunity to prove this to all in this great country.”

  Li Zhen fought to keep his eyes off the cluster of schoolgirls and failed completely. In his mind they were all naked now, mocking him in the rear of the crowd. Spectral
shapes leering at him lasciviously, wetting their lips with their tongues and spreading their legs, the stiff breeze tossing their hair from one side to the other and back again. How many girls little older than this had he put on film to be immortalized and celebrated forever? Zhen’s mind began to wander once more, taking him back to the times before his initial visit to the Triad, to when he was a different man entirely. Peasant scum, one of the captains had called him.

  True enough then, he supposed, but not now, not ever again.

  And yet to the befuddlement of Yuyuan’s public relations people, Li Zhen decided to end his planned remarks early and stepped out from behind the podium. From there he made his way down off the makeshift stage toward the ribbon strung before him, intending to continue the ceremony without a microphone on ground level where the spectral schoolgirls would be harder to glimpse and thus tempt him. He recalled an old Chinese proverb that warned only the man who crosses the river at night knows the value of day, just now grasping its meaning. He had spent so long in the night that renouncing its darkness had become impossible. If he couldn’t resist the sight of the uniformed schoolgirls, he must deny it to himself here in the day.

  “Today I am proud to announce that the first segment of the new five G, fifth generation, wireless network is fully operational.” Zhen accepted a pair of scissors from the head of his PR department and eased the twin blades over the red ribbon. “Let this be a symbol of a new beginning,” he proclaimed proudly, “a new road that will take us into a bright future full of life and promise for our two peoples.”

  And with that Zhen drew the scissors closed and felt them slice through the ribbon effortlessly. Applause rippled through the crowd and more mindless handshakes followed, while his attention was drawn to a school bus to which the schoolgirls, fully clothed once more, were now headed. Then a shadow crossed before him and he looked up to find Brooks standing there.

  “You have absolutely no fucking idea what you’ve done,” the big man sneered.

  Zhen felt his heart skip a beat over being caught in the act of leering at the schoolgirls. In just a matter of days now, Brooks would be dead, the schoolgirls too probably, and another quarter billion of Americans with them.