Lone Star 02

by Ellis, Wesley

  If an enemy had happened to choose that instant to strike at Ki, the samurai might well have shattered into a thousand pieces. His body was rigid with anger.

  “You did not fight for your daughter’s honor?” he demanded. “You would not fight for her?”

  “We all would have died!” the father said fiercely, but he too was now weeping, like the rest of his kin. “My whole family! I am not a skilled warrior like yourself. My whole family would have been slaughtered, and still Chang would have taken my daughter.”

  “She will be avenged,” Ki whispered. He turned to go.

  The horrified coolies had been watching all this. They knew no English, but words were not needed to comprehend Ki’s agonized reactions to what he was being told. One of them now spoke to the father, who, in turn, translated the message for Ki. “They thank you for their freedom,” the father said. “They hope that someday, someone will pay you back the boon—that someday, someone will unlock the shackles on your soul.”

  Chapter 14

  “Wake up! Damn you!”

  Jessie’s eyes sprang open. She stared up at the gray, pinched face of Mrs. Fitzroy. “What? What time is it?” she yawned.

  “Well after midnight,” the matron replied. “You’ve been sleeping for hours. Foxy let you come up to your room for a nap, but she never intended for you to sleep the night away. Now come on!” She gathered up a lock of Jessie’s hair and gave it a tug, pulling Jessie out of bed.

  “Ow! All right!” Jessie exclaimed. “I’m up!” She hopped off the narrow bed, ruefully thinking about how Ki had been in the room just a few hours ago, and how she could have escaped with him then. Well, one more night of this, and it would be all over. “Where am I going?” she mumbled as she rubbed at her sleepy eyes.

  “The client you’ve been promised to is here,” Fitzroy said wickedly. “Your time has come, girl!”

  “B-but—” Jessie stammered, trying to thing. “I was told it would be a few days,” she pleaded. “You were going to teach me things...”

  “Well, all that has changed,” Fitzroy chuckled. “You’ll be taught by the expert in these matters.”

  “Who is he?” Jessie moaned.

  “He? Who ever said it was going to be a man?” Fitzroy said mockingly. “You were brought here to please a very important woman. She waits for you now. I’m to take you to one of our rooms upstairs. She will then join you.” The matron smoothed Jessie’s scanty gown. “This woman heads up a huge business organization. Tonight that organization suffered an expensive mishap. One of their ships, along with its crew and cargo, was destroyed by her enemies. All the worse for you, I’m afraid.”

  “How so?” Jessie, frightened, stared at her captor. “What will she do to me?”

  The matron’s eyes glinted with cruelty. “At her best, she delights in inflicting pain upon her lovers. Tonight, the woman you belong to is in a foul mood.” Fitzroy roared with laughter as she steered Jessie out of the sanctuary of her little bedroom. “Dear, sweet, Annie. When Greta Kahr is done with you, you may not have eyes left in your head to see the coming dawn!”

  Ki climbed up the rear of the bordello. As he clambered up the thin cord he’d hooked into the house’s roof, he took a moment to check Jessie’s room. It was dark, and she was not in it. Very well, he would find her later. The plan had changed. She would have to come out with Su-ling and himself this very night. Ki did not intend to leave this house standing. He would burn it to the ground, the way he’d burned the cartel’s clipper ship.

  The layout Moore had earlier sketched for him showed that the third and fourth floors were reserved for the entertainment of the bordello’s clients. Ki had already been on the third. The rooms there were small, and the walls flimsy. No, Chang most likely had a more luxurious retreat on the fourth floor. A bed-chamber fit for a Tong leader, Ki mused sourly.

  The samurai climbed all the way to the roof. He would prowl the perimeter of the building until he found the room Su-ling had been taken to. Then he would swing down from the eaves to rescue her. He wondered if Chang and his guards were still in the bordello. Ki hoped that they were. Chang, and a lot of guards. The samurai knew he could not kill all of the men in the Steel Claw Tong, but tonight he intended to kill very many indeed.

  Ki skipped lightly across the steeply slanted shingles with the agility of a cat. At each top-floor window he lowered himself by hooking his toes into the roof gutter and hanging upside down, like a bat. In this way he was able to peer into the various rooms. He found her in the second room he checked. She was alone, nude, lying on a big double bed with her back to him. The lushly appointed room was decorated with Chinese painted screens, jade carvings, and intricate ink-and-brush paintings. This was, indeed, Chang’s private hideaway.

  The window was unlocked. Ki slid it open and jackknifed himself inside. Su-ling turned to face him. The expression on her face went from joyful surprise to a sadness so awful that Ki thought his heart would break.

  “I have come for you,” he said.

  “No.” She shook her head, frowning. “Please!” she began to cower like a whipped dog. “Do not look at me!” she begged. She laced her arms across her breasts. “They have taken my clothes. What they have left me is a whore’s garb, but I will not wear it. Ki! No!”

  But he had already crossed the room to hold her in his arms. “I have come for you,” he repeated.

  “Not for me,” Su-ling murmured, pressing her face against his chest. “You came for who I used to be. But the Steel Claw has changed all of that. Look at me! At my face! Then tell me everything has not changed!”

  Ki stared down at her. Her shiny black hair, her face, were both as lovely as ever. Then he gazed into her big dark eyes, and was forced to nod sorrowfully. They no longer held the serene glow that had captivated him; they were the tortured eyes of a slave.

  I will kill him, Ki vowed silently, but the threat seemed so pitifully weak against the enormity of what Chang had done to Su-ling. Addressing her, Ki whispered, “For me, nothing has changed. We will leave this place and forge a life for ourselves.”

  “But I am ruined. Chang has taken my virginity,” Su-ling wept. “I am now a whore—”

  Ki cut her off with a kiss. His hands roamed across her finely sculptured buttocks, then rose to cup her small, delicately formed breasts. She moaned in his embrace, melted against him, and darted her hot, wet tongue into his mouth.

  “Prove to me that nothing has changed?” she now begged him. “Heal me...”

  Ki picked her up to lay her gently upon the bed.

  Su-ling shuddered. “He had me on the bed. Make love to me on the carpet...”

  Ki quickly stripped off his clothes, and once more wrapped his arms around her. Together they folded onto the thick, soft rug.

  Ki nuzzled the sweet fragrance of her neck, licked and sucked at her dark nipples that stood so pertly erect in worship of his flicking tongue. The room seemed to spin, so dizzy with desire was the samurai for this woman.

  “I have bathed myself,” she whispered bashfully as Ki’s gentle fingers explored the wetness between her legs. “I want you so much,” she moaned. “But do not think his taint is still upon me—within me—for I scrubbed myself to cleanse—”

  “Silence, woman!” Ki pleaded. “It is in the past. It is a nightmare from which you have awoken.”

  “Please, prove that to me,” was all she would say as she spread her legs for his pulsing hardness. “Heal me,” was all she whispered as Ki slid into her, to the hilt.

  They rocked together, saying nothing, but constantly staring into each other’s eyes for long minutes. It seemed to him that just being inside of her, and having her long, lovely legs clamped about his back was sensation enough, and almost too intense to bear.

  He used his strong back muscles to raise them both up, and then he moved into a cross-legged, sitting position. Su-ling’s strong internal muscles kept him safely nestled inside of her while she settled herself upon his lap. She now began to
moan. Ki gazed down at the rise and fall of her sweat-sheened breasts, and at the undulations of her soft, flat belly. His thighs felt the birdlike quivering of her satin-smooth bottom as her sweet center rose and fell upon his glistening, marble-hard shaft.

  She cried out as she climaxed, her warm juices flowing to soak his loins. “The Steel Claw tried to wrench this moment from us,” she whimpered between her shudders of pleasure. “Chang tried to tear this most precious prize from me. He took everything from me, but this he did not get. All last night and today, I kept my sanity by imagining how I might finally offer this to you...”

  She began to ride him, hard. She seemed half mad in her frenzied desire to feel him spend himself inside her. Her tongue licked hungrily across his chest. She chewed and sucked at his nipples until they were exquisitely aroused, twin buttons of sensation. Her fingers herded shivers up and down his spine. Her supple hips gyrated against his lap. She rode him as though he were truly a steed who could carry her far away from this horrid bordello. She rode him until he began to feel his own orgasm coming closer and closer, like a boulder rolling down a mountain side, a boulder about to crush him beneath its awesome mass. When he came, it was all he could do not to howl as a wolf howls at the moon.

  “I am healed,” she told Ki as she kissed his closed eyes. “I will always love you, no matter what happens.”

  Ki thought her choice of words was ominous. He stared intently into her eyes. The fear seemed to be banished, to be replaced by some measure of their previous serenity, but all was not as it had been. Before, Su-ling’s eyes had been those of a young girl. Now she had the eyes of an old woman.

  But he had brought some peace back to her, the samurai reassured himself. With careful nurturing, who was to say that he could not coax back her original joyfulness? And if he couldn‘t, he would count himself lucky to have her as she was. Truth to tell, his eyes were no longer those of a spiritually young man...

  “I thank you for healing me,” she smiled. “You have given me back a sweet thing to meditate upon.”

  Ki wondered how to begin to tell her what he felt inside. All the words he could think of seemed so inadequate. Finally, all he could do was smile at her. “You have given me back my home,” was what he said.

  Jessie waited in anxious solitude. She’d been led by Mrs. Fitzroy to a dimly candlelit room on the fourth floor of the big house. The room was mirrored on all four walls, except for the window, and one narrow area where various leather whips, iron manacles, and riding crops hung from pegs. The ceiling above the double bed was mirrored as well. The bed was a four-poster. Jessie did not have to guess what those satin cords hanging from each post were for...

  Well, here I am, the lamb waiting for the slaughter, she thought to herself. But this is one lamb who’s going to fight back.

  She tried the door, hoping that she might be able to sneak downstairs to the second floor and retrieve her gun, but Mrs. Fitzroy had locked it securely. Jessie gazed about the place. There were whips and things that she could use as weapons, but first she would have to get close enough to Greta Kahr to get the drop on the woman. That wasn’t going to be easy. Kahr knew what Jessie looked like. The Prussian would walk in here, take one look at her “prize,” and shout bloody murder!

  Jessie wandered over to the wall to inspect the various implements of torture so conveniently arranged for Greta Kahr’s pleasure and her own anguish. As she fingered the hard, black leather braid of one of the riding crops, she thought back on what Ki had said concerning his experience with Kahr after he’d unknowingly rescued the cartel leader from those purse-snatchers. According to Ki, she liked to feel pain during lovemaking, not inflict it...

  But maybe that’s how she is with men, Jessie mused as she lifted a black leather hood from its place on the wall. Maybe Kahr wants men to hurt her, but likes to hurt women ...

  The hood had slits cut for one’s nose, mouth, and eyes, and an opening at the top, for ventilation, Jessie imagined. As she stared down at the face, carved into the leather the way a jack-o’ -lantern’s face is carved into a pumpkin, she began to formulate her plan...

  A half hour later, Jessie heard the door to the room being unlocked. She was all ready. She’d shucked her thin chemise, and had put on the leather mask. She’d taken a kneeling position on the carpeted floor, angling her uplifted, shapely, and quite bare bottom toward the door. Her masked chin was resting between her hands upon the carpet, but she was able to gauge the reactions of her visitors by watching their reflections in the wall mirror opposite the doorway.

  In came Greta Kahr, flanked by Foxy Muscat and Mrs. Fitzroy. She was the same auburn-curled, middle-aged woman Jessie had spied at the after-hours club Jordan had taken her to. Kahr was dressed in a low-cut gown of green velvet. Around her shoulders was a full-length cape of mink that matched the reddish-brown shade of her hair. As on that previous evening, she clutched a tightly furled umbrella.

  Kahr’s violet eyes widened in surprised glee as they feasted upon Jessie’s angled and splayed bottom. Watching them all in the mirror, Jessie sardonically noted that Mrs. Fitzroy, too, was licking her lips.

  “Allow me to introduce—” Foxy Muscat began, but Greta Kahr cut her off imperiously with a wave of her finely manicured hand.

  “Leave us,” the Prussian commanded. “No introductions are necessary.”

  “Yes, ma‘am,” Foxy said meekly. Both she and Mrs. Fitzroy left, closing the door behind them.

  Jessie waited until she felt certain that the duo had reached the stairway and were out of earshot. Then she stood up.

  “Ah, but I did not give my slave permission to rise,” Kahr chuckled. She set her umbrella down upon the bed, then shrugged off her cape, carefully letting it drop to the floor.

  Jessie watched the woman sashay across the room, to the wall of whips and crops. Kahr selected the braided riding crop and then turned to face Jessie.

  “You must be punished for your impertinence...” Kahr sneered. Beads of spittle collected upon the thick red gloss that colored her mouth. She approached Jessie. Kahr’s purple eyes ran the length of Jessie’s nude body, lingering on her full breasts and the golden-red thatch of hair between her thighs. “With this”—she waved the riding crop in front of Jessie’s masked face—“I will teach you obedience!”

  “You and who else?” Jessie shot back, pulling off her hood.

  Kahr stared in disbelief. “Jessica Starbuck?” she gasped. The riding crop fell from her hand as she made a mad dash for the bed, where she snatched up her umbrella.

  The umbrella! Jessie realized. Of course! Jessie picked up the riding crop, moved into position, and whipped it down hard upon Kahr’s hand as the woman turned, with the long, thin, gleamingly sharp rapier inside her umbrella already more than half drawn. Kahr screamed as the harsh leather bit into her hand. The umbrella-sword fell to the carpet. Jessie let the riding crop fall beside it. Before Kahr could open her mouth to scream again, Jessie knocked her cold with a right uppercut that landed flush against the Prussian woman’s weak chin. Kahr fell across the bed, her violet eyes showing their whites as they fluttered and then rolled up into her head.

  Jessie grabbed the woman’s mink cape and clasped it around her shoulders. Lord above, she thought happily. It does feel good to have substantial clothing on again! She stared down at the sword sheathed in the woman’s umbrella. Clearly this was the weapon Kahr had used to stab poor old Shanks, Moore’s partner, to death.

  Jessie went to the door and opened it partway, peeking up and down the corridor to make sure she could escape undetected. There was nobody around. She darted down the hallway to the stairs, and then sneaked quietly down to the second floor. Once she thought she heard footsteps behind her, but when she turned, the corridor was empty.

  Inside the little bedroom, she dragged the mattress off the bed frame and tore open the ragged stiches she’d sewn. She removed her revolver and extra ammunition, stashing her spare rounds in an inside pocket of the mink cape.

/>   She held her gun beneath the cape as she left the bedroom. She was about to make her way downstairs when a gruff male voice suddenly commanded, “Freeze!”

  He couldn’t have seen my gun, she reminded herself. I’ve got the element of surprise ...

  She whirled, bringing up her Colt. “You freeze!” she retorted, snapping back the hammer of her double-action .38.

  Jordan Moore laughingly held up his hands.

  “How’d you get in here?” Jessie sighed in relief. She lowered her gun and gave him a big hug.

  Moore squeezed her tightly. “Hey,” he chuckled. “You don’t have anything on under this fur.”

  “How did you get in here?” Jessie repeated, smiling up at him.

  “I’m a very important client,” Moore reminded her. “I just put on my ‘Oregon wastrel’ outfit, and dropped by for some fun. I hired one of the girls to take me upstairs, and then I began to search for you. I heard the commotion, and followed you down to your bedroom.”

  “How do you rate the fourth floor?” Jessie teased.

  “Well, they do want to make me happy,” Moore smiled mischievously. “They’re trying to butter me up. They were so apologetic about not being able to deliver the slaves my daddy wants.” The detective winked. “Seems that somebody sank their expensive old boat.”

  “I heard about that,” Jessie giggled. “You said you were with some woman. Won’t she sound the alarm about you wandering around unescorted?”

  “Don’t worry about Ruthie,” Moore replied. “I left her bound and gagged on the bed.”

  “That’s awful!” Jessie scolded him. “She must be petrified.”

  “Ruthie loves being bound and gagged. It’s her specialty.”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” Jessie sighed. “Come on, let’s see what’s going on downstairs.”

  The duo crept down the stairs, to the landing just above the first-floor-front parlor. The big sitting room was now empty of both girls and clients. The bartenders were gone, as was the kindly black piano player. Mrs. Fitzroy and Foxy Muscat were both seated on one of the long, black leather sofas. Guarding the door to the room were two Tong bodyguards armed with pistols shoved into the belts of their long blue cotton tunics. Sitting on a straight-backed wooden chair in the center of the room was a quite unhappy-looking Commissioner Smith. His hands were tied behind his back. Standing above him was Chang, the Steel Claw, leader of the Tong.