by Jon Land
“I’m the local presiding judge for the county,” Bean said, “and this here’s a Texas Ranger.”
“We’re here about the murders of some Chinese women in and around the camp,” William Ray picked up. “Only clue we’ve got is some stitching the killer did to all the bodies. I recognized it from those tent flaps you sewed.”
It was hard to read a man without eyes, but William Ray could have sworn Ecklund’s expression turned sad. “How many victims this time?”
“This time?”
“Not the first instance this has happened in a railroad work camp,” Ecklund told them, finally interrupting his sewing. “Not the first instance at all.”
* * *
“Guess you don’t see me as a suspect,” Ecklund continued.
Judge Bean and William Ray Strong just looked at each other.
“That was supposed to be a joke,” the blind man told them. “‘See.’ Get it?”
“How many other times?” William Ray asked him.
“Twice in camps I was working, twice more I heard about through word passed around.” Ecklund turned his sightless gaze on the Ranger. “Always Chinese women with their heads sewn on backward, right?”
William Ray nodded, then said, “Yes,” when he remembered the man couldn’t see.
“And you recognized my stitching from those tent flaps?”
“I can’t say for sure, sir, but it’s a safe assumption from my experience. You had some medical training, I’m guessing.”
“Sure did,” Ecklund beamed proudly. “Back in 1870-something or other when I was working the Transcontinental. Cheyenne attacked a work crew scouting the land by pushing receptacles into the ground to see what comes up so we could plan the next leg of the route. We had one doctor who wasn’t worth much and one nurse, a Christian missionary, who was. She’s the one taught me how to stitch flesh, taught me how to use feeling to replace sight and, damn, if she weren’t right. Got so I could see the wound I was stitching in my head. That woman convinced me it was no different from stitching wool really, so long as I could learn to work a smaller needle.”
“How many others this missionary nurse teach to do that?” Bean interjected.
“None I’m aware of, Judge. See the typhoid got her before the Cheyenne or the winter ever had a chance to. I was with her when she went. She thought I was her dead husband and I went right along with it. I believe she was a pretty woman, though I couldn’t say for sure.”
“How many men have you taught?” William Ray asked suddenly.
“Couple here and there.”
“Any in this camp right now?”
“Just one,” Ecklund told him. “But I wouldn’t pay much heed to him.”
“Why?”
“I can’t say, Ranger. Don’t have the stomach to be dragged over land again.…”
Ecklund’s voice drifted off, his ears perking up as he heard something ahead of the judge and William Ray. He turned with Judge Bean to find a host of hardscrabble men with shoulders bursting out of their shirts coming up on them. Looked to be eight at least, each as big as the next and all holding what looked to be cut-down pieces of lumber for rail ties discarded because of wood rot. William Ray lurched up from the chair, instinctively placing himself in front of Roy Bean.
“We’re here to tell you boys that you don’t belong here,” the biggest of the men said, addressing William Ray first before moving his gaze to Judge Roy Bean. “We don’t recognize your law or your authority and we don’t give a goddamn about those Chinese who don’t think enough of this country to handle their load.”
William Ray made sure the speaker could see his hand holding rigid just over the Colt holstered on his hip. “Then it’s a good thing the state of Texas does, friend.”
He noticed Chief Bates standing just by the main entrance to the mess tent, grinning with clearly no intentions of intervening. William Ray figured these men for his deputies.
“I ain’t your friend,” the big man said. “And your hand moves any closer to that pistol, I’ll bust your fingers into porridge mix.”
“Only if you’re faster than me, son.”
“You won’t be faster than all of us standing here. And I ain’t your son neither. Two of you need to ride out of here and leave railroad business to the railroad. We don’t need word of dead Chink whores gumming up our works, already three weeks behind schedule.”
William Ray grabbed Judge Bean by the suit coat, dragging him backward toward the quickest exit between two heavy posts holding the mess tent up. “Well, I’d never want to be a bother, so we’ll just be on our way.”
And with that he laid his boot into the nearest post hard enough to crack it and send the bigger part pitching inward. That section of the tent collapsed onto the big man and his gang, their beefy frames outlined in canvas as they struggled futilely to free themselves.
* * *
Chief Bates slept on a cot squeezed behind a sliding curtain in the back of his office. That evening, he lumbered up the four steps leading to a narrow, flap-tented structure built up on a wooden base. His nightly rounds had finished in his usual stop at the saloon, where the Irish proprietor never charged him for a drink. He’d plop himself down on the feather mattress that smelled of his own sweat and let the sun wake him in the morning.
But a Colt Peacemaker shoved against his face and then into his mouth changed his plan.
“This is all legal and proper, right, Judge?” William Ray asked Judge Bean who was standing off to the side just out of reach of the flickering lantern light.
“Be hard for Chief Bates to testify otherwise with his head missing. And the action does conform to that writ of habeas corpus I got here in my pocket for sure.”
“That’s right,” said William Ray. “So, Chief, what we got here is a list of all the other railroad camps where Chinese women have been murdered. Mr. Ecklund told us he taught a man to sew who was in all of them to the best of his recollection. Since he wouldn’t tell us who that be, we thought we’d ask you. Hell, you should be thanking us, sir; we’re letting you do some God’s honest police work. Nod if you’re okay with giving us an answer as opposed to me splattering your brains.”
Bates nodded.
* * *
“What exactly is a writ of habeas corpus, Judge?” William Ray said, as he and Roy Bean walked back to their horses.
“I haven’t got a goddamn clue, Ranger. But it sounded good, didn’t it?”
54
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
Tepper stopped when the phone rang. He answered and listened briefly before replacing the receiver.
“That was Doc Whatley. He’d like to see you right away. Notice I didn’t ask him what it was about.”
“I need you to have Young Roger check out something for me, Captain,” Caitlin said, handing a slip of paper across his desk.
“What’s this?” Tepper asked, squinting to better regard it.
“The URL link to a porn video.”
“For Young Roger?” he followed, befuddled by Caitlin’s request.
“I need him to find out everything he can about who produced it and where. I can’t even find the site on my computer. Keep getting a message that it doesn’t exist.”
Tepper shook his head and laid the piece of paper down at arm’s distance, then reached for the pack of cigarettes he’d laid down on the desk blotter to find them gone. “You a magician now too?”
“Am I missing something here?”
“No, Ranger, I am: my cigarettes.”
Caitlin crouched down to retrieve a pack that must’ve been lying on the floor. “Here you go.”
“Thanks,” Tepper said, taking the pack from her and tapping it on his desk blotter. “Hey,” he called, when she was halfway through the door, “it’s empty.”
55
PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND
“Not sure about this one, bubba.”
Cort Wesley looked toward the ghost of Leroy Epps, once again standing by the window of D
ylan’s hospital room. “Neither am I, champ,” he said, and looked down at his sleeping son again, not wanting to wake him. “No root bear today?”
Epps grinned, his teeth full, white and showing no signs of the rot held over from his mortal life. “Things seem to sell out even where I be these days. By the way, that was one slimy hombre you just talked to. There ain’t no hell, bubba, but he’s living proof there should be.”
* * *
“Dealers,” Nicolas Dimitrios had told Cort Wesley back at the University Club.
“Drug?”
“Something else: people.”
“Human trafficking,” Cort Wesley realized, as the sirens screamed closer, his cue to make his exit fast. “They supply you with women.”
“And more,” Dimitrios said, looking down. “They supply everyone,” he added, looking up again.
“Everyone?”
“Coast to coast. Like a fucking franchise. You wanna do business, you do it with them or not at all. You run a big enough operation, they find out you’re not cutting them in and your establishment gets torched.”
“Where can I find them? Give me a name, an address.”
When Dimitrios didn’t respond, Cort Wesley jerked the man toward him by the lapels. “You really want to make me ask again, hoss?”
“My wallet,” the Greek mumbled.
Cort Wesley jerked it from his pocket and pushed it against Dimitrios’s chest. He fished a black keycard from one of the compartments and handed it to Cort Wesley in a trembling hand.
“The Flatiron Building on Fifth Avenue,” Dimitrios managed. “Twenty-third floor. You’ll need that card.”
Cort Wesley had managed to get back to the rental car just in time and drove off right past the quartet of Providence police cars screeching to a halt before the University Club seconds apart. His heart was hammering so hard against his chest he had to pull over as soon as he was back up around the Brown University campus, careful to park in a lot just across the street from the Rockefeller Library, between a white truck and van both marked FACILITIES MANAGEMENT. Cort Wesley opened the windows and took a series of deep breaths, trying to calm himself when he noticed Leroy Epps seated in the passenger seat.
“Want me to drive, bubba?”
* * *
“Why don’t you go to the cafeteria and get me a bottle?” Leroy Epps continued in Dylan’s hospital room, wetting his lips as if he were thirsty. “I’ll watch the boy here for you. Want me to wake him up? I can do it in a dream.”
“Let him sleep.”
“Why is it we like watching our kids sleep so much, bubba?”
“You don’t ask me a whole lot of questions, champ. Usually it’s me doing the asking.”
“That’s on account of the fact that I got most of the answers I need already and most of the ones you do too.”
Cort Wesley watched his sleeping son flick some hair away from his closed eyes, his hand staying on the pillow when he was done. “I think it’s because they’re safe, maybe the only time the bad stuff can’t hurt them. We hover over them in the false belief we’ve got a measure of control over their lives, that we can keep the demons away.”
“Well, that’s about as smart a way as anybody could put it. You hit all the right chords with what you said. Makes me think you don’t need me coming around as much as you think you do. You got the same answers I do. All having me around does is let you pose the questions.”
“I never did like you much anyway, champ,” Cort Wesley winked.
Leroy Epps’s eyes followed Cort Wesley’s to Dylan. Plenty of times when he appeared the whites of those eyes were stained with blood and broken veins thanks to the diabetes that had ultimately killed him. But today they were blisteringly white, almost as if old Leroy had used some heavenly concoction to bleach them.
“Know what I regret most? Dying in the god-felootin’ prison. Makes you stop appreciating what the world outside looks like, all it’s got to offer. You see my point?”
“No.”
“Goes like this. We don’t value all the good we got until we’re looking at it through barbed wire. ’Course I got a grand view of things from where I be now, though I don’t always like what I see.”
“Like right now, champ?”
“I heard what that sumbitch wearing red wine over his clothes had to say on that account. Sounds like you’re up against some pretty bad hombres this time. That’s why I need to question where you take things from here.”
Cort Wesley followed Leroy Epps’s gaze back to Dylan. “Doctors say he’s fit to travel.”
“Question being is he fit to travel where you’re fixing to take him?”
“He’s safer with me.”
“You want to believe that, bubba, be my guest.”
Dylan stirred, his eyes peeling open to find Cort Wesley looking down at him and a fresh change of clothes at the foot of the bed.
“How you feeling, son?”
“Better.”
“For real this time?”
The boy yawned then stretched. “For real.”
“Then get dressed,” Cort Wesley said, noticing his old friend was nowhere to be seen, having slipped back into the ether. “We’re going on a little trip.”
“Where?” the boy asked sleepily.
“New York City. Take ourselves a bite out of the Big Apple.”
56
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
Guillermo Paz stood in the sun at the farmers’ market on the grassy outskirts of Olmos Basin Park just short of the thick woods that rimmed the property. It was a simple scene in his mind, laid out over what might have been the infield of a former Little League baseball field since the canopied tables of fresh fruits and vegetables were placed on gravel stretches inlaid amid thick, uncut grass. This particular market offered truly field-to-table produce picked anywhere between only a few minutes and a few hours before going on display. As such, pickup trucks and vans dotted the scenery, giving the otherwise pristine setting a cluttered look that kept it from being a throwback to the simpler times Paz sometimes believed he was searching for.
He spotted a man wearing a black jacket over his white priest’s collar, walking with a canvas bag in hand ready to be filled. The man was taller than Paz had expected and walked slightly hunched over as if hobbled by back pain, one of his legs dragging a bit on alternate steps. He had thick white hair plastered to his scalp, the waves combed out with oil that had dried to the texture of concrete. The warm sun didn’t seem to bother him at all and Paz saw him clinging to it as opposed to the available shade.
He caught up with the priest casually, joining in step with him, the man becoming aware of his presence when Paz’s shadow swallowed up the light.
“Hello, padre,” Paz greeted. “We haven’t actually met before, not officially anyway.”
The priest froze, looking as much through Paz as at him, as if he didn’t believe him to be real.
“A woman at the church told me I could find you here. I told her it was an emergency. I hope you don’t mind me stopping by.”
The priest continued to stare at the man who, up until that moment, he’d only glimpsed through his church’s confessional screen. A mystery and an enigma now revealed in flesh and blood with nothing between them.
“You mind if I walk with you, padre?” Paz continued.
The priest nodded, his lips quivering slightly. “We share God’s earth, and its bounties, together, my son,” his familiar voice intoned, cracking a bit. He looked at Paz as if not sure he was really there, seeming to need confirmation in the stares others cast the huge man’s way.
“Glad to hear you say that, truly grateful. But I don’t deserve such consideration. Not at all.”
“Perhaps this is a conversation better had in our normal setting,” the priest said, stiffening a bit.
“Oh, I didn’t come to confess anything, padre, at least not yet. I came to apologize.”
“Apologize?”
“For turning in other direct
ions, for not appreciating the guidance you’ve given me. First, there were those college classes I audited; that didn’t go well. More recently, I’ve been teaching English to immigrants mostly to think out loud to myself until some great cosmic realization strikes me in front of a classroom of people who can’t understand a word I’m saying. But if I spoke to them in Spanish, I’d have to have something to say that was important to them instead of to me. Does that make sense?”
“Actually, it does,” the priest said, nodding as he shifted his still empty canvas handle bag from one hand to the other.
Around them, the farmers’ market was comfortably cluttered, the air rich with the smell of flowering plants, fresh greenery, and vegetables thriving on the vine, tree, or bush mere minutes before.
“You know what I was thinking of when I saw you walking, padre?” Paz asked him, not giving the priest a chance to continue.
“What, my son?”
“That priest back home in the slum who I witnessed being murdered for just walking down a street like you were. He was carrying a bag just like that, full of bread. You remember me telling you about that?”
“I remember you telling me how you killed the man who murdered him. How you never forgot and waited until you were old and strong enough.”
“But that’s the point, isn’t it, padre? How do we know we’re strong enough to suit the task before us?”
“My son?”
“I work for the Americans now, for the good guys, you might say. I’m not asked to burn or strafe villages or generally destroy the lives of anyone who opposes the government. They send me out after people who are a lot like I used to be, determined to do harm often for its own sake with no regard for the toll on humanity it takes.”
“That sounds like a noble transition.”
“It should be, but it’s not. It feels the same, leaves me just as empty and rudderless. I think I realized why when I watched you walking. I was a boy again, back in the slum, standing outside the church while the priest walked toward me. I saw the gang coming before he did, saw them grab for the bread stuffed into his bag. I ran to help but I was too small and too slow, and by the time I got there they’d stabbed him to death because he resisted. The bread ended up in the street, covered in dirt and grime. I wanted to chase after the gang, but I stayed with the priest instead. I was with him when he died. I ever tell you that part?”