Strong Darkness

by Jon Land

  “But I’m familiar with the story of those murders back in 1883,” Sharon Yarlas continued. “Believe they ended up being responsible for shutting the whole line down.”

  “I wasn’t aware of that, ma’am.”

  “Well, the Southern Pacific made sure nothing was ever written about them, so most of what I’ve learned is based on conjecture.”

  “In my experience, when it comes to the past, that passes for fact often enough.”

  The nearby train blew its whistle so loud it made Caitlin flinch, a spout of steam pouring out the engine’s chimney. The coal-black, silver-fronted engine looked like a shiny dinosaur lifted from the ground and placed right here on the track beds that may well have been laid by the Chinese workers in the camp William Ray Strong and Judge Roy Bean had visited to begin their investigation.

  “Well,” started Sharon, “that’s my train there. How about you hop on board with me and I’ll tell you what I know during the ride?”

  Caitlin nodded, watching four clowns in cowboy regalia that included holstered pistols mixing among the visitors waiting to board the train as well. A young boy was playfully slapping at one of them, the smallest, who kept arching backward at the last moment to agilely avoid the blow. Finally, a second clown stooped down and flattened himself out directly behind the other, and this time the young boy pushed instead of slapped. The smaller clown went tumbling over, his sneakers kicking up into the air, to the delight of all those standing in line.

  “You just never know what you’re going to see here,” Sharon grinned, shaking her head. “Something wrong, Ranger?”

  Caitlin watched the clowns staking out a place for themselves in line, still playing with the crowd, one of them juggling three rubber balls. “Guess I’m just scared of clowns, ma’am.”

  Sharon adjusted the kerchief tied around her neck yet again. “Why, I didn’t think Texas Rangers were scared of anything.”

  “You’d be surprised,” Caitlin told her, still eyeing the clowns.

  30

  PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

  “Nothing to worry about,” Dr. Hirschman said, continuing to shine a penlight into Dylan’s eyes that had grown alert again. He had stringy hair and shoulders so bony that Cort Wesley could actually see the ridges protruding under his white lab coat. “Just like the neurologist said.”

  “Then why am I seeing two of you and why does my head feel like somebody took a sledgehammer to it?”

  Hirschman squinted as he looked into Dylan’s eyes. “Because that’s pretty close to what actually happened. We were bringing you out of the coma slowly and you woke up ahead of time. What you’re feeling, that’s just the effects of the medication.”

  Cort Wesley could see the bedcovers flutter slightly as Dylan wiggled his toes beneath them.

  “Yeah, it’s starting to come back now.” The boy winced. “Yup, I can feel the knee I hurt in practice again.”

  “Which knee?” Cort Wesley asked, drawing closer to his bedside. “You hurt yourself?”

  Dylan shook his head. “Aren’t you supposed to be a tough guy?”

  “I thought you were too.”

  “Hey, I’m the one who almost got his brains scrambled.”

  “My point exactly, son. Big, tough college football player like you ought to be able to take better care of himself.”

  “I’m tough, but I’m not big, at least that’s what everybody keeps telling me.”

  “Hey, Doc,” Cort Wesley said, everything about the world feeling lighter, “they got something that can help the kid out there, make him bigger?”

  “Yes,” Hirschman said, finally switching off his penlight. “It’s called genetics.”

  “You call Caitlin?” Dylan asked.

  “Damn.” Cort Wesley felt for his cell phone, finally found the pocket in which he’d tucked it. “Not yet.”

  “You better, or she’s gonna be pissed.”

  “She’ll already be pissed I wasn’t dialing before you finished your first word.”

  Cort Wesley hit CAITLIN and waited for the call to go through.

  Dylan looked back toward Dr. Hirschman who was rechecking all his vitals and comparing them to the LED readouts on the monitors. “Where’s the other guy?”

  “Who?” the doctor asked him, while Cort Wesley heard the phone ringing on the other end.

  “The other doctor. He was standing in the doorway when I first woke up, when I started calling for my dad. An Asian guy.”

  Caitlin’s phone went straight to voice mail and Cort Wesley looked back toward Dylan before leaving a message.

  “Strange,” he heard Dylan’s doctor say. “Neither the resident nor attending assigned to your case is Asian,” the doctor said. “In fact, no physician assigned to this floor fits that description at all. You must have been dreaming.”

  “Sure,” Dylan shrugged. “I guess.”

  The doctor grinned and squeezed his arm. “Everything looks good. You’re a very lucky young man.”

  Dylan nodded, forced a smile back. He and Cort Wesley both watched Hirschman take his leave.

  “I wasn’t dreaming, Dad,” the boy said, as soon as he was gone. “I woke up and a Chinese doctor was standing there.”

  “Chinese,” Cort Wesley repeated.

  Dylan tightened his gaze, starting to realize that his father must’ve had a pretty good idea of what had led to his getting the shit kicked out of him. “Where’s Caitlin?” he asked, looking around the room as if expecting her to appear.

  “They needed her back home, son.”

  “Maybe we need her here too.”

  “Let’s talk about the other night,” Cort Wesley said, sitting down on Dylan’s bedside. “Let’s talk about this Chinese girl you got yourself mixed up with.”

  Dylan held his eyes closed and massaged his temples. “Later, Dad. Okay?”

  “She was here, in your room.”

  “Who?”

  “The girl.”

  Dylan’s eyes snapped open. “Kai?”

  “That’s her name?”

  “Kai was here?”

  “She ran off. Caitlin chased her but couldn’t quite catch up.”

  “I thought it was a dream…”

  “What?”

  “I heard her talking to me, telling me she was sorry, shit like that. I tried to answer her back but my mind kept drifting.”

  “She left you this,” Cort Wesley said, producing the rose he’d spotted atop his son’s bedcovers when he and Caitlin had first entered the room the night before.

  Dylan took the pink rose in hand, smiling slightly. “That was nice of her.”

  “Right, nice gesture considering this girl’s responsible for you being here.” Cort Wesley moved right up to his son’s bedside. “You ready to talk about that now?”

  31

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  “Where would you like me to start?” Sharon Yarlas asked, after the last ticket was collected and they boarded the train.

  The whistle blew two times again and the train began to rumble forward, clinking and clanking, taking Caitlin back to her visits here as a little girl when she might well have ridden in this very car. That memory got her thinking about the clowns again, something wrong about them that she couldn’t quite put her finger on, and she wondered where in the train they might be.

  “How about with what you know about the Trans-Pecos line in general?” Caitlin told Sharon.

  “There were actually three separate short lines constructed in the Trans-Pecos region that stretches westward from the Pecos River and includes some of Texas’s highest mountains and its hottest deserts. The first rail line into the Trans-Pecos was the spur that ran eastward. It reached El Paso in May 1881 and met up with the westward line from San Antonio in 1883 when a silver spike joined the two at the Pecos River.”

  Caitlin cast her gaze down the aisle and noticed the clowns working their way through the center car immediately behind this one, joking it up with the riders. “How about the wo
rk being done on the Trans-Pecos in 1883 in the area of Langtry?”

  “That would have been the line linking up with the spurs already completed to the north. The Southern Pacific relocated the workers to the Langtry area after that silver spike was driven at the Pecos River.”

  “I was hoping you could tell me what happened when my great-grandfather, Texas Ranger William Ray Strong, and Judge Roy Bean got to the main camp at the head of the track after they inspected the body of the most recent victim.”

  The older woman’s gaze drifted, her mind flashing back to an unwritten chapter of history nearly lost to the years. “I’ll do the best I can, Ranger.…”

  32

  LANGTRY, TEXAS; 1883

  The chief engineer was a man named Kincannon who smelled like tar and had grease stains all over his face and bare arms. He’d torn the sleeves off his shirt to reveal beefy arms layered with bulk instead of firm muscle and had a beard he seemed fond of scratching. He carried a shovel with him everywhere he went and leaned on it like a crutch as he addressed William Ray Strong and Judge Roy Bean. Nearby, an Irish work crew was busy shoring up the ground enclosing the track bed bending north.

  “I think you’re full of shit,” Kincannon said, spitting tobacco down into a pool of rain that had yet to dry on the hardpan of the West Texas prairie.

  Judge Roy Bean ejected a wad from his mouth that landed right atop Kincannon’s. “I’ve put men in jail for saying less than that to me.”

  “Only if you’re really Judge Roy Bean.”

  “Who you think I am?”

  “Don’t know, don’t care.” Then Kincannon’s big, droopy eyes turned back to William Ray. “I ain’t scared of you none neither. That Ranger badge of yours ain’t worth shit here. I answer to a higher power.”

  “Who’d that be—God?”

  “Nope, somebody higher: the head of the Southern Pacific Railroad, John Morehouse. In case you ain’t noticed, they run this country now. And, in case you ain’t noticed, I am their duly appointed emissary in these parts. Morehouse might as well be president of the whole dang country, and that means I don’t need to take no shit from the likes of you.”

  William Ray Strong took a step closer to the bigger man, the two of them drenched in sunlight while distant thunder rumbled in storm clouds visible over the nearby mesas. “You from Texas, sir?”

  “Nope. Alabama born and bred, but I been pretty much anywhere there’s track to lay, and if you knew anything outside this bone state of yours, you’d know that was pretty much everywhere.”

  William Ray hitched his coat back so Kincannon could see his Colt. “They don’t have Texas Rangers everywhere, sir, they only have them here. So I’m going to forgive you your disrespect of both myself and the judge and remind you of one simple fact: you might not be from Texas, you might’ve spent all but a speck of time inside Texas, but you’re here now in your position as chief engineer of the Southern Pacific and that places you in my jurisdiction where I am the law. Ain’t that right, Judge?”

  “A Texas Ranger tells you to kiss your ass,” Bean told Kincannon, “you’d be wise to figure out a way to stick your head under your balls.”

  Kincannon turned his gaze away from the sun toward the Irish work crew, sneering. The worksite was located maybe a quarter mile from the Chinese camp. Besides three separate work crews, flattening and hard packing the soil bed to ready it to take track again now that the dam was finished, there wasn’t much else to speak of. A pair of rectangular tents held up by thick wooden beams driven into the ground contained construction supplies and the cafeteria, respectively.

  William Ray figured a smaller tent complete with flaps blowing in the breeze functioned as the camp office, another an infirmary, and a third seemed to house a makeshift church. A big steam engine with five cars sat parked at the head of the tracks laid so far and would inch forward along the two or so miles construction covered every day once the ground dried out. A host of stands and shanties from which local vendors were peddling this and that to the workers dotted the landscape as well.

  William Ray could see measurements being taken and, well off in the distance, a pair of wagons toting crates he guessed contained dynamite toward a rock face the Southern Pacific needed to blast through to link up with its sister track to the north. Closer by, a crew was pushing rods into the ground to gauge soil depth in plotting the straightest route around deposits of limestone and shale.

  Kincannon swiped a hand inside his cheek and emerged with a wad of tobacco that looked like moist moss. He aimed it downward for William Ray’s boot and just missed.

  The Ranger retrieved the wad and tucked it into Kincannon’s vest pocket. “Believe you dropped this, sir.”

  Kincannon’s breathing picked up. His eyes narrowed on William Ray, then swept to both sides as if measuring how many men in the area he could count on if it came to blows. But then his gaze fastened on William Ray’s Colt instead.

  “I’ll talk to you,” he said, prying the wad of tobacco free of his pocket and tossing it well clear of William Ray this time, “because it’ll be easier if I do than if I don’t.”

  “You hear about the murders of these Chinese women?” William Ray asked him.

  “I suppose, but I didn’t listen much.”

  “Having a killer at large at your worksite didn’t concern you?”

  “In case you ain’t heard, the Chinese went on strike this week.”

  “We heard.”

  “Bastards ought to be grateful for having food on their plates and a roof over their heads.”

  “A tent, you mean,” the judge reminded.

  “It’s them you should be arresting,” Kincannon sneered. “Maybe make them see the light before things turn ugly.”

  “What you mean by that?” William Ray asked him.

  “We’re gonna fall behind if they don’t smarten up. And that means less money for everybody else, including me. I heard Pinkerton men are already en route. The Chinks know what’s best for them, they better come around.”

  “So you never thought to report these murders to the authorities,” William Ray surmised.

  “You hear what I just said?”

  “I must’ve missed the part about how you dealt with a bunch of killings.”

  “I reported them all right, to the only authority that matters: the Southern Pacific Railroad. You got no authority here and neither do you, Judge. This here land doesn’t even belong to Texas anymore—it belongs to the Southern Pacific and the railroad makes the only law I abide by.”

  “What do you say about that, Judge?” William Ray asked him.

  “Nothing I can say, Ranger. The chief engineer here’s right, so far as the track goes. That’s Southern Pacific territory for sure, the whole six-foot-wide stretch of it for as far as it goes, all the way to hell for all I care.”

  William Ray kicked at the dirt at his feet, fully dried since it got sun all day without benefit of shading even from mesas towering to the west. “Well, it doesn’t seem like there’s any track bed here.”

  “You’re right,” Roy Bean said, scratching his forehead. “This here’s Texas land, which means I can issue any legal order I so choose, and right now I think I’ll have every man not standing on that track there yonder thrown in jail.”

  “You can’t do that!” Kincannon protested, starting to spit before he remembered he’d tossed his tobacco away.

  “You can raise that at the hearing, son. I’ll schedule it to give your bosses plenty of time to send their lawyers, say a week’s time. Of course, we’ll have to order you to cease and desist all work in the interim.”

  Kincannon stamped the earth hard enough to cough dust on the two Texans’ feet. “All right, just tell me what you want.”

  “Any of your men show any signs of blood on their clothing?” William Ray Strong asked him. “You catch any of them wandering around between here and the Chinese camp? Anything about any of them strike you as standing out in a way that made you take notice? Any
of them have the kind of violence in their past that suggests them capable of killing women?”

  “They were whores, each and every one of them, not women.” Kincannon’s expression crinkled. “And pretty much all the men in this camp have some violence in their past. Too many suspects for you to bother with.”

  “Well, I’ll be the judge of that, Mr. Kincannon. What about men with prison records?”

  “Imagine we got our share of jailbirds, but ’long as they do a good day’s work, I let their pasts be.”

  “You got records I can look at?” William Ray asked.

  “I got records, but not that you can look at, not without permission of my superiors at the Southern Pacific.”

  “We back to that again?” Judge Bean spat at him. “You seem hell-bent on pissing me off here, Mr. Kincannon.”

  William Ray looked toward one of the tents with flaps rustling in the late-afternoon breeze, something striking him about it. “Nice sewing job somebody did on that tent,” he told Kincannon, thinking of how the heads of the victims had been sliced off and sewn back on. “You can see the stitch lines where he meshed the material together.”

  “You’ve done wasted enough of my time,” Kincannon said and took a single stride with his boot, big enough to put William Ray’s eyes even with his. “And I mean to get back to work now. You’ve wasted enough of my time and I ain’t got no more to give. You hear that—”

  Before he got his next word out, William Ray slammed a knee into his groin that dropped him to the hardpan where Kincannon’s face went beet red under the sun, grimacing in pain and letting out huge gushes of breath. William Ray yanked him up to his knees by his mustache and stuck his Colt Peacemaker into Kincannon’s mouth while he continued to gasp.

  “When I remove my gun,” William Ray said, conscious that all work had ceased for the moment, the entire site gone quiet with its attention turned toward whatever was transpiring here, “you’re gonna tell me what I want to know or I’m gonna jam it back in and break all your teeth. Nod if you read me, asshole.”