Lone Star 02

by Ellis, Wesley

  A dock foreman, holding a clipboard, watched over the longshoremen who were tossing from man to man the crates of tea and spices and bolts of silk that made up this particular consignment. Finally they were stacked in Starbuck-marked dray wagons. Jessie and Ki stood well away from the action, and no one noticed them.

  “I shall introduce you to the foreman,” Ki said.

  “No.” Jessie took hold of his arm. “I’d rather they didn’t know I’m here. I just want to see how it’s done, Ki. I just want to watch it all happen, the way it happened when I was a little girl and my father was still alive.”

  Ki nodded, and left her to her memories. His own thoughts drifted back to his homeland, to the stem chain of islands that made up Nippon, the Land of the Rising Sun. His memories were nostalgic, but they were not happy. In Nippon, Ki had been considered a barbarian’s offspring, a half-breed, a mongrel not fit for society.

  He glanced at Jessie, so lovely in profile, her eyes half closed, dreamy with fond memories. What was she thinking of? Her blond-haired, blue-eyed father who smelled of the cherry pipe tobacco he smoked, and fragrant green tea and spices he imported? Of his worn leather jacket that—when she was little—smelled of the salty sea, and when she was an adult, carried the honest scent of clean, healthy horseflesh?

  “Yes,” Ki said, so abruptly that Jessie was startled. “Yes, your father’s kami is here,” he continued. “He watches over the men working, and he is proud to see that his daughter does the same.”

  Jessie, beaming, rose up on her toes to plant a soft kiss on Ki’s cheek. “Then let’s leave,” she said. “All’s well.”

  His cheek still tingling where her lips had touched, Ki took her arm to lead her away from this place so filled with bitter-sweet memories for both of them. Suddenly he stopped and raised a hand to point at a pennant snapping in the breeze above a nearby ship. The flag bore the insignia of one of the shipping companies that either belonged directly to the cartel or paid the organization a percentage of their profits for the privilege of being allowed to remain in business.

  “The cartel’s shipping dock!” Jessie exclaimed. “Let’s see what’s going on there!”

  The dock and cargo shed were much the same, but the loading crews were not at all like those manning the Starbuck slip. Here, a rough-looking, unshaven dockmaster holding a billy club sauntered back and forth along the planking, goading his men to work ever faster. The workers were all Chinese, but unlike the other Oriental crews working the waterfront, these men wore the garb of coolies. They had no shoes to protect their feet, nor gloves for their hands as they scampered past the club-wielding foreman. The Chinese were thin and sickly. Some looked as if they would not last out the day’s hard labor.

  “These men are being used as slaves,” Ki seethed. “It is clear that they receive only pennies—if that much—for their work.”

  “I’d love to know what contraband they’re being forced to unload,” Jessie replied. “Come on, let’s go see—”

  “Just what do you folks want?” came a voice from behind them.

  Ki and Jessie turned to confront a large, corduroy-suited figure holding a mean-looking, snarling dog on a short length of braided leather leash.

  “We’re just tourists out to see the sights!” Jessie remarked innocently, batting her eyes at the guard while Ki nonchalantly tugged lower the brim of his Stetson. From past experience he knew that his height, his garb, and his Caucasian features allowed him to pass as a non-Oriental as long as he kept his eyes shaded. He did not want this man to report back to his superiors that Jessica Starbuck had been spotted snooping about. A man and a woman could pass as just another tourist couple, but a woman of Jessie’s beauty, accompanied by a half-Japanese, was another matter entirely! It was just his good luck that his encounter with Greta Kahr yesterday morning had ended as well as it did. Obviously she had just arrived—as had Jessie and Ki—and had not yet received a briefing on her enemies. Today she doubtless realized, as Ki now did, that she had made love with an arch-rival.

  “You two go do your sightseeing somewhere else,” the guard warned gruffly. “This here’s private property.”

  The dog, a big, ugly brute, dull yellow in color, with a squashed-in face, drooled spittle from its loose black jowls as it shifted its attention back and forth between Jessie and Ki. All the while, a low, constant snarl vibrated from its throat, and the short fur along its spine stood stiff.

  “Easy, boy,” the guard muttered. As he bent to pat the dog, his corduroy jacket gaped open, revealing the worn wooden butt of a revolver shoved into his belt.

  “Come, dear,” Ki urged, before Jessie could say anything else. “We’d best be getting back to the hotel.”

  “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 to
ward 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.

  Rows upon rows of crates, stacked ten feet high ...

  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.