Colter's Path (9781101604830)

by Judd, Cameron

  Emma had no idea who the murdered young woman was, having barely caught glimpses of the handful of other prisoners in this compound of covered log pens. Even so the fact that someone in the same victimized position as she had fallen victim to such purposeless violence moved her, and a tear rolled down her dirty face. There were tears in Rosita’s eyes as well, but her look was less a sad one than one of determined fury.

  “A ‘twist-foot hen,’ he called her. ‘Twist-foot hen.’ As if she had chosen it for herself. As if she had made herself crippled just to give him annoyance. Damn his devil’s soul!”

  Emma was growing puzzled. “Why have you come to me to tell me all this?”

  Rosita drew closer, eyeing the space between Emma and one corner of the pen. Emma scooted over some to make more room, and Rosita sat down beside her, their sides touching.

  “I tell you because you are his favorite. I always can tell the favorites of him and my father….” She paused and spat as though admitting her kinship to Paco made her mouth taste foul. “There have been many favorites among the ‘product’ for both of them. But for Senor Turner there have been none like you before. He looks at you in a way different than he has looked at any other woman or girl ever held here that my eyes have seen.”

  “But why have you come to me?”

  “Because he killed the crippled one. The one who was like me. And because he called her what he did. It fires a fury in my heart—‘twist-foot hen.’ Damn him! May the mighty God damn his soul to the eternal flame!”

  “Even so, why have you—”

  “I have come to set you free,” Rosita said in the faintest of whispers. “Because if you are free he is deprived and made sad. He does not deserve to be happy. If I take you from him, his happiness is gone. And…” She paused and looked earnestly at Emma. “…and you can take me away from here, hide me, and help me escape them. I hate them, hate them both…what they do, what they say, what they are. I hate my father, but Senor Turner, Diablo Turner, him I hate most. He is the one who led my father into such dark ways.”

  This was all stunning and fully unexpected, despite whatever prayers she had prayed for rescue. Emma could hardly find her voice, but did. “Yes, Rosita. We will both get away from them and this place. First you must cut the cords on my hands and feet. There is a knife beside me that I have been unable to reach.”

  Rosita quickly found and picked up the knife. “This is the blade of the diablo,” she said, astounded. “How do you possess it? He is never without it.”

  “I was able to knock it free of its sheath when he was in here. I pretended to want him to come to me, and when he reached me I was able somehow to free the knife. I hid it beneath my dress but was not able to reach it with my hand, because of my cords. But you are here now, and you can use it.”

  Rosita was deft and fast, and within a minute Emma’s bonds were severed. She had hardly realized how tightly she had been tied until the pressure of the cords was released. The relief was sufficient to bring tears to Emma’s eyes.

  “Bless you, Rosita…. God bless you! Now we will leave this devil’s ground behind us, together.”

  “Adios, Diablo! Adios, mi padre!” Rosita whispered.

  “Yes,” Emma said, nodding and smiling at the teary-eyed girl. “Let’s go, Rosita.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  The human devil named Turner was ruthless and without morals, but not without sense. He’d been at his trade long enough to know that such activity could not forever be kept hidden, particularly in a place where every piece of land was destined to be scoured over by gold hunters somewhere along the way. The ruse of also using the pens to hold bears trapped for the violent bull and bear fights that were common entertainment in the mining camps had proven, so far, a successful one. Profitable, too, though at a lesser level than the trade in women.

  All past success in covering up the truth aside, Turner was aware of the recent increase of rumors regarding the use of the site as a way station in human trafficking. The secret could not be kept much longer. He thought it likely that the women held here now would be the last at this particular station.

  No matter, really. There were other such stations across the frontier and even in the big cities back East. Some were remote clusters of cabins and pens like this one; others were underground in the literal sense, built in caves and tunnels and the like. Turner knew of one station in Kansas that was located beneath an esoteric, purportedly “religious” community that excluded outsiders and was known for its eighteenth-century style of life and the habit of its members of excavating huge cellars beneath their homes, churches, and even barns.

  The real purpose of those cellars was known only to a few, and even in a case or two where word had gotten out where it should not have, the damage had been controlled by the network of traffickers of which Turner was but one part. Turner knew that at least two county sheriffs in Kansas were possessors of “cellar maidens” provided to them in exchange for averted eyes and closed mouths. Turner knew this because at one time he’d been a part of the “religious” community with the prison cellars for unwilling females destined for hard lives and harder deaths as the chattel of rich and depraved men. Turner sometimes referred to his time in that strange little Kansas community as his “religious days.”

  Turner had moved on to his “business days” by now, and as a man of business, he attended his share of meetings. One such was to happen this day, in an empty cabin near an already played-out parcel of mining claims that had been abandoned to the Mexicans, who in turn had abandoned them to the Chinese. Turner was to meet with a certain Chinese gentleman who had hinted he could provide Turner with some of the finest “Celestial” maidens to be found outside the old nation itself. If all went well, Turner and his network of fellow traffickers would be able to offer up a new and profitable line of “product” to those around the world with a taste for the Orient.

  Turner trudged through the little basin with its smattering of log pens, halfheartedly casting his eyes about for his lost knife as he went. He’d stopped expecting to find it; probably it was simply hidden beneath brush, leaves, and the like after an accidental loss, but it wasn’t worth the effort to turn over every bit of rubbish in this camp to find one knife. He could tell by glancing through the unchinked pen walls that all the women were still in place…all but one, that is. The crippled girl he’d beaten to death earlier obviously was no longer part of the count. He grimaced as he thought of her, not because of regret, but because faulty “product” always set his teeth on edge. Not much chance for profit in cripples, blinders, deaf-mutes, and the like. The demand for such was simply not strong enough to make it worthwhile to waste time and pen space with them. Good riddance as far as Turner was concerned.

  Thinking of the gimp-footed girl whose life he’d ended caused him to think of the polar opposite of flawed “product,” the lovely Emma Wickham. He was still debating inwardly about whether to go ahead and send her on through the trafficking pipeline or keep her as his own personal trophy and toy. The latter option had its appeal but would present challenges, too. He would have to guard her, protect her, keep her hidden…almost impossible for a man in his position to do. Any of the other captives he would be ready to abandon at any time, if flight was necessary, but Emma would be in a different category. Still a captive she would be, but no longer “product.” She would be his captive, his possession.

  He went looking for Paco to remind him that he would be absent for a time, but he found the big Mexican asleep and snoring and opted not to wake him. Paco slept with a pistol nearby, and had a dangerous tendency to snap it up and level it if anyone awakened him unexpectedly. He’d even fired it off at Turner a time or two before he was fully awake, though luckily Paco was the worst of pistoleers and seldom hit any target he aimed at. Still, Turner was in no mood to dodge bullets, and let Paco snore on.

  Turner went to the little stable shed where he and Paco kept their horses, saddled and bridled his chestnut-colored
gelding, and rode out onto the little trail that led down to the road between Scarlett’s Luck and Bowater. He glanced at the strange little pair of roadside graves, one for a little girl, the other apparently for a cat, and shook his head in bemusement. One saw a lot of unusual things in California these days.

  Turner was well away from his camp of captives when the door of Emma’s pen pushed up and open. Emma climbed out, eyes peeled for any sign of Paco. She knew Turner was gone because she’d caught a glimpse of him on horseback, riding out, and because Rosita had overheard him telling her father that he was going to meet during the morning with a Chinaman about “business.”

  “We have to let the others go,” Emma said to Rosita as the younger woman followed her out of the pen. Rosita nodded, but whispered, “Speak softly. My father is a stupid bull of a man, but his ears are keen. And before we free them, there is something I must do, or it will not matter.”

  “What?”

  “My father always sleeps this time of morning. I will be back in minutes…. Wait for me, and free no one else yet.”

  Emma watched Rosita limp away toward the area where Paco had pitched his tent. The terrain did not allow her to see the tent, but two minutes later the Anglo-Mexican girl reappeared, coming back toward Emma with a smile on her face and a more game step despite her lameness.

  “Is he asleep?” Emma asked.

  Rosita laughed. “Oh yes. He sleeps. And will sleep on now, very soundly.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I know that we are commanded to do no murder,” Rosita said. “But I do not believe it is murder to end the days of such a wicked man as my father.”

  “Dear Lord, Rosita, did you—”

  “He had slept outside his tent, which made it easier. More room to swing the pick I found. Something a miner had left leaned against a tree somewhere that my father had found and taken for his own. I stood over him, straddling his chest, and I took careful aim and swung it down as hard as I could. My strength was greater than I had known…. The point of the pick went through the top of his head and came out his mouth.”

  “Oh God!”

  “I confess…,” Rosita said, then paused. “I confess that I laughed to see it.” She laughed again then, and with her finger pointed outward from her mouth, imitating the emergence of the pick point. “Do you believe I have sinned, Senorita Emma?”

  “Only in laughing at it, perhaps.” Emma looked around at the prison pens. “For the other part, the doing of the act…no. No, I don’t believe you sinned.”

  Turner reached the abandoned cabin without difficulty and tied his horse off to a branch. He checked to make sure his pistol was loaded—a standard precaution anytime he was about to meet with anyone he did not already know to be a safe person for him—and continued down to the open door. It was open because the door itself had been removed for use in some other miner’s habitation.

  “Mr. Li, sir, I am here!” he called as he walked down toward the cabin. “I believe I am slightly early, so I must ask your pardon.”

  A smiling man stepped into the doorway with a shotgun in his hands. This was no Chinaman…. Instead the tall fellow, sandy-haired, had a decidedly European look.

  “Pardon is granted, sir,” the man said in a brogue Turner recognized as Irish. He’d had a few Irish maidens among the “product” he’d move down the line through the years, and some of his fellow traffickers were Irish as well. “Please do come in…and forgive Mr. Li if he doesn’t greet you. He is at the moment quite occupied in being dead.”

  Turner stood frozen, trying to make sense of this. He could not take his eyes off the shotgun. “Come closer,” the Irishman said.

  When Turner did come closer he saw that the man had an oddity in his appearance: a missing section of his right ear. Turner paid little heed to that, the shotgun still occupying his attention.

  “What’s this here?” Turner asked, raising his hands to shoulder level to demonstrate that he had no weapons in hand, nor any plan to draw the one in his holster. “What happened to Mr. Li?”

  “I’m afraid I had to kill him,” the Irishman said. “Name’s Finnegan, by the by. Declan Finnegan. And you, if I had to guess, are one Mr. Liam Turner, from Atlanta by way of Kansas.”

  Something in the Finnegan name was familiar to Turner, but he could not recall just why. But how did Finnegan know him?

  “You very well may be right as to my identity, sir,” Turner said. “But I am at a loss as to how you know me. And why it is that your name has a familiar ring in my own ear.”

  Finnegan lowered the shotgun a little and motioned Turner to come on in. When Turner entered he caught the strong smell of blood in the little structure, and saw the corpse of Li cut nearly in half and lying near the place where a stove had once sat when this cabin was in use by miners. The degree of damage to the body caused him to look again at the shotgun, noticing then it had been cut down in length, heightening its destructive power at close range.

  “Why did you kill him?” Turner asked. “It had been my hope to enter into a business arrangement with him.”

  “Aye, and what a convenient thing it is that you have brought up the matter of business at this particular moment!” Finnegan said, for some reason sounding even more Irish now that his voice was amplified to Turner by the cabin walls around them. “Because it is in the realm of business that I have familiarity with you, sir, and perhaps you have heard of me as well. We work for and with some of the same folk, you and I do.”

  Turner was unsure what to say. He could not trust this man, did not dare even lower his hands as long as Finnegan had that shotgun, and certainly could not begin talking freely about his particular line of thoroughly illegal and immoral work without knowing who and what Finnegan was.

  “I have put you in an awkward position, Mr. Turner,” Finnegan said. “Perhaps I can improve it. I am Declan Finnegan, member of an old and noted Irish family. My grandfather, Samuel Finnegan, was one of the isle’s wealthiest men, and used his wealth to finance a collection of the world’s most excellent and costly gems, including what became known as the Finnegan ancestral diamonds. Samuel Finnegan was a man of the highest moral and religious character, a great believer in the American cause and philosophy of freedom, and a particular supporter of education and academia. He attracted to him other men of great wealth and note, some of them of a decidedly lower level of moral conviction and quality than he was himself. He scarcely seemed to notice it…. It was his way to think highly of others unless compelled by the clearest evidence to do otherwise. I, on the other hand, was able to see the underlying and veiled characters of some of his peers quite easily. Perhaps because I shared, by nature, some of the same values…or lack thereof.” Finnegan paused and laughed, and Turner dutifully did the same, though he as yet hardly knew what Finnegan was coming around to. Finnegan went on. “In time I was taken under wing, so to speak, by some of my grandfather’s wealthy peers who were at what most would see as the bottom rung of the moral ladder. Men who used their wealth to finance their own debaucheries and degenerate pleasures…the very things that appealed to my own spirit. It was through my association with one of these men that I found a place for myself in the trade which we share, the vending of fleshly companionship both willing and unwilling to those capable of paying for it, and willing to do so. As I worked, I heard certain names spoken—yours among them—and began to understand the scope of this business of ours.”

  “One moment, sir…I have not said that I am involved in this ‘business’ you talk of.”

  Finnegan smiled darkly. “No, you have not. But we both know what we know, aye, brother?”

  Turner merely looked at him.

  “The role I began to play most frequently in the trade was that of corrector and punisher. As you know, secrecy is of the utmost importance. Some, though, are less able than others to maintain that secrecy. It became my assigned task to track down and forever silence those proven unworthy to the secrets they were given to hold. Tho
se who did not hold them well.” He paused and tossed his head in the direction of Li’s corpse.

  It was beginning to seem pointless to Turner to pretend ignorance of the things Finnegan was talking about. “I was to talk to Mr. Li about some Celestial girls today. Perhaps it is best that meeting didn’t happen, if he is…was loose of lip.”

  “His lack of discretion caused many problems, here and in almost every place the trade extends its reach.”

  “Everywhere, then.”

  “Aye, so it is. With scarce an exception.”

  “It was to deal with Li that you came to California, then? Or were you here already?”

  Finnegan stood his shotgun in the corner now, apparently having decided Turner wasn’t a threat. Turner lowered his hands gratefully, shoulder muscles aching.

  “Have you heard people speak of so-called divine providence, Mr. Turner? Something generally perceived when events and timing and seemingly unconnected circumstances come together in a noticeably fortuitous manner?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, my experience in past months might lead me to suspect there is a similar kind of providence that is far, far removed from the divine. A ‘dark providence,’ you might call it. Because though I was bound to come to California in any case on the matter of our friend Mr. Li, it so happened that I was given yet another reason to make the same journey. I was hired to find a thieving college president, or former college president, from Tennessee. He had taken items of great value that had been given to his college for its use in advancing education in areas where it is too often lacking. It so happens the giver of that gift was my own grandfather, Samuel. The gift he gave was a selected number of the extraordinarily valuable Finnegan ancestral diamonds.”