The Railroad War Read online

  “Yes.” Jessie sipped the fragrant coffee. “Ki and Bobby and I met some of them on our way into town, remember.”

  “If that’s where you intend to go now, I’d better rouse the Captain. Even at this time of day, that’s no place for you to go alone.”

  Jessie shook her head. “No, Martha. He needs to rest. He had a very long day and a hard night, and he’s not a young man anymore. Even if he should wake up and want to come looking for me, don’t let him.”

  “But, Jessie—”

  “No,” Jessie repeated firmly. “And please don’t suggest that I take Bobby along, Martha.” She pulled her jacket aside to show the holstered Colt. “I’m well prepared to handle any kind of trouble I might run into.”

  Martha sighed. “Well, I suppose you know best, Jessie. But I’ll worry about you until you come back.”

  “I’ll come back in good shape,” Jessie promised. Then, her jaw set firmly and her green eyes crackling with fire, she added, “And when I do come back, Ki will be with me!”

  Reminding himself of the adage that even a journey of ten thousand miles begins with a single step, Ki began exploring the midnight-dark room in which he’d found himself confined.

  He started at a corner and felt his way along the wall, moving in carefully spaced paces and counting his steps. His fingers told him two things as he edged slowly along, feeling for clues by sliding his hand against the surface. The room was large, and it was not a basement or a cellar. He could feel the cracks between horizontal boards, and the dents made in the wood where nails had been hammered to hold the boards to wall studs. The wood surface had a neutral temperature, neither warm nor cold, which ruled out a basement room, for wooden basement walls were always chilly to the touch.

  Until he got midway along the second wall, Ki wondered why such a large room would be without windows or doors. Then he reached one of the two spots he’d noted when he first revived, where the quality of the darkness was different from the dense blackness elsewhere. At close range he could see a lessening of the darkness. The patch was not bright, or even gray, but was infinitesimally less dark than the area around it.

  Ki’s fingers revealed that the area was defined by a piece of board nailed to the wall. He measured the board by spreading his thumb and middle finger to form a span; the plank was one span wide by four spans long. Ki could think of only one reason why a board should be placed there; the area it covered was too small for a window, so the board must have been nailed over a ventilation opening such as would be found in an attic. The suggestion of light around the edges indicated that night had fallen while Ki was unconscious. In daylight, the tiny crevices between the cover and the inner wall would be brightly outlined. Tugging at the protruding edges of the board, Ki found it unyielding.

  Deferring further investigation of the spot until later, Ki completed his circuit of the room. He felt around the second area of lesser darkness; it corresponded exactly with the first in its size and placement. After he’d covered four walls, Ki paused and stood quietly while he mentally summed up his discoveries.

  As he’d guessed, the room was large and exactly square, thirty paces on each side. Its size, combined with the covered spots and the absence of a door, led him to an immediate conclusion: he was in the attic of the rooming house to which he’d gone with Cheri. There was no other answer possible.

  In an attic, there must be a trapdoor, Ki told himself. He set about finding it. Stepping out of his slippers, and using the hazy areas of the facing walls to orient himself, he crossed the room diagonally, feeling for a crack or the protruding edge of board that would indicate a trapdoor. He slid his bare feet silently over the floorboards, for he was not sure what lay below the portion of the room where he was confined. There might well be cartel hoodlums in a room below, and any noise he made would bring them running.

  His diagonal crossing was unrewarding. Extending an arm at shoulder level, sliding his fingertips along the wall to be sure he did not walk in a curve in the darkness, Ki next walked very slowly, with carefully silent steps, around the room’s perimeter. He had covered two sides and was moving along the third when his feet encountered the irregularity he’d been hunting, the edges of the trapdoor that led to the floor below.

  Hunkering down, Ki ran his fingers around the square frame. There was no latch, and the top of the door had been finished with boards that leveled it with the floor. The door had no handle, but when Ki made a more painstaking exploration of its surface, he discovered a finger-hole centered near one edge. Inserting a finger, he tugged, but the door was immovable, locked or latched from below.

  Sitting down, Ki took a shuriken from his jacket pocket and began scraping with one of its star-points from the finger-hole to the near edge of the door. When he’d gouged a groove deep enough to be felt easily in the dark, he scraped from the opposite rim of the fingerhole to the far edge. Ki neither hurried nor wasted any motion. He knew the job would take time, but the trapdoor was his only hope of escaping.

  A few shreds and splinters at a time, the hard yellow pine yielded to Ki’s patient shaving. He stopped when his labor had scored the cover of the trapdoor to a depth he estimated at just less than a quarter of an inch. Laying the shuriken aside, he knelt and inserted the middle finger of his right hand in the hole and grasped his right wrist with his left hand.

  Flexing the muscles of his hands and arms with all the strength he could summon, Ki pulled upward. He listened hopefully, willing the wood to crack along the scored vee he’d made, but the door neither creaked nor opened. Standing up, he braced his feet wide apart and tried again, and this time he lifted with his back and shoulder muscles as well as those of his arms, but the result was as disappointing as his first tries had been.

  Sitting down, Ki went back to his scraping. The tough wood seemed to grow tougher as the grooves deepened and a greater area came in contact with the tip of the shuriken. Patiently, Ki persisted. Measuring by feel, he stopped when his fingertips told him that the groove had deepened to almost a half-inch. He put the shuriken aside and stood up to try again.

  This time the wood creaked when he applied the first real pressure with his arm muscles, and when he stood up and added the power of his shoulders and back, the wood cracked. A few more hard tugs, and the board split. Ki worked the split open until he could pull the halfboard free from the trapdoor’s frame, and used it as a lever to pry up the remaining boards.

  Engrossed in his task, Ki had given no thought to the time. He became aware of its passing when he looked down at the trapdoor and saw that it was outlined in gray. He glanced at the boards that covered the openings made to ventilate the attic, and they too were framed in a nimbus of dawn-gray from light that seeped through the crevices between the boards and frame.

  Spurred by his success, Ki picked up one of the boards he’d pried from the trapdoor and raised it to use as a hammer in removing the bottom boards. Then a sudden thought held his arm in midair. Hammering would attract the attention of anyone who might be in the big, rambling house. Ki lowered the board and studied this new problem.

  A solution popped quickly into Ki’s mind. Slipping his vest off, he wrapped it around the board in his hand. He placed one end of the board on the center plank of the trapdoor’s bottom, and while he held the board upright with his left hand, he concentrated his vital energy and, forming his hand into a fist, brought it down like a hammer on the top end of the board.

  With the end of the vertical board muffled by the horsehide vests, the noise of the impact was no louder than a light cough, but the force of the blow had sprung the plank on which it rested a fraction of an inch. Repositioning the vertical board, Ki struck again. This time the crack opened wide enough for him to get the edge of his improvised lever between the loosened board and the frame and pry it free. The plank popped loose at the end on which Ki had hammered, and hung dangling from the bent nails in its opposite end.

  Dropping to the floor, Ki passed his hand through the opening and
groped for the latch. He found it after a moment, a heavy bolt, and pulled the barrel back. The trapdoor dropped open, letting a shaft of gray morning light flood the attic.

  Ki wasted no time in examining his prison. A ladder had been built on the wall at one side of the trapdoor. Ki pulled on his vest and climbed down.

  He found himself on a narrow landing. A door was set in the wall near the foot of the ladder. Ki hesitated, listening with his ear pressed to the door panel. He heard a low murmur, too faint to be recognizable. After straining his ears vainly for several moments and hearing no change in the volume of the noise, Ki tried the doorknob. The door was not locked. Ki pushed carefully. The door swung open silently on well-oiled hinges.

  For a moment, Ki listened without moving. The murmur he’d heard earlier had stopped. Stepping through the door, Ki found himself on the landing where he and Cheri had stopped earlier in the day while she unlocked the door that stood a few feet away at the head of a flight of stairs. Ki closed the door that led to the ladder, and saw why he had not noticed it. The door had no knob on the landing side, only a keyhole, and it was set flush, without jambs, which made it appear to be part of the wall.

  Stepping across the small landing, Ki pressed his ear to the door that opened into the luxurious, silk-draped chamber with its adjoining bedroom. Now he could hear clearly the voices that had been only a confused murmur. A man was talking. There was something familiar about the voice, but Ki could not identify it from the few words he heard.

  “... before it gets too late,” the man said.

  “We damn sure can’t leave her where she is now,” a second man replied. His voice was not as clear as the first man’s; it sounded farther away, muffled.

  “Why not? All we got to do is lock the door and walk away,” the first man said.

  “Don’t talk like a damn fool, Jug!”

  When he heard the name, Ki knew the identities of the men behind the door. Jug was the hulking hoodlum who’d started the fracas in front of the saloon. The other man was almost certainly the one called Slip, whose elbow Ki had dislocated.

  “Who’s going to come up here?” Jug asked.

  “Who do you think? The boss, if he blows into town.”

  “You know he ain’t likely to, Slip,” Jug replied. “He said he was going to leave that fellow that’s already here to run this job by hisself.”

  “When he hears how you fucked things up, he’s more’n likely to cut a shuck down as fast as he can!” Slip retorted.

  “Don’t go putting the blame on me, Slip! You was the one that was holding the knife.”

  “And you shoved her into it!”

  “Well, the dirty bitch bit me! Damm it, you could’ve just held her for me, like I told you to!”

  “How in hell did you think I was going to handle her, with one arm all busted up? If you’d been satisfied just to screw her the regular way, like I did—”

  “Now, Slip, we been runnin’ together long enough for you to know what I like to do to a woman!” Jug protested. “We’d of had to get rid of her anyhow, after we finished.”

  “But not here, you damn fool! Out in the country someplace, like we always do. We’ll take her and the chink in one trip.”

  “That’s a prime idea, Slip! It’ll look like he killed her and she killed him. Come on, let’s go while it’s still dark.”

  “We been up here ever since we found out about the chink, Jug. That’s a long time. Might be it’s daylight by now.”

  “Well, you started to go see if the coast’s clear, before we got into this goddamned wrangle! Go look now, while I get this damn blood off my legs!”

  Ki had heard more than enough. He slid two shuriken from his jacket pocket and held them ready in his left hand while, with his right, he flung the door open.

  Jug was standing in the doorway that led to the bedroom. He was naked, his genitals and thighs covered with dried blood. He was not in a position to reach Ki quickly, but Slip was an immediate threat; he was dressed and walking across the big silkdraped chamber toward Ki. The arm Ki had dislocated was in a sling, but Slip’s free hand had started for the butt of his holstered revolver when he saw Ki in the open door.

  Ki loosed the shuriken that he’d slipped into his right hand the instant the door was open. With unerring accuracy, the thin steel blade spun in a bright, shimmering flash to Slip’s throat and sank deep, its razor-sharp edges severing the outlaw’s windpipe and jugular vein. Clawing at his throat with the hand that had started for his pistol, Slip took two more steps before crumpling silently to the floor.

  When Jug saw his partner fall, he roared like a gored bull and lurched from the doorway, his arms going up, ready to grab Ki as soon as he could reach him.

  Ki’s reflexes were far faster than the big outlaw realized. While his first shuriken was still in the air, he’d taken the second into his throwing hand, and the steel blade was spinning toward Jug as the hardcase took his first step. Ki had not anticipated Jug’s movement. The blade bit into Jug’s collarbone instead of the vulnerable, unprotected flesh of his neck between his jaw and shoulder.

  Jug roared with pain, but did not stop. Ki leaped forward and met Jug in the middle of the room. Jug reached for Ki, but Ki stopped short. His slippered toe took Jug in the crotch. The hulking hoodlum bent forward, an instinctive reaction that Ki had anticipated. Ki’s fingers were already intertwined. He brought his clasped hands down in a swift, merciless blow to Jug’s neck, at the base of the outlaw’s skull, separating the vertebrae. Jug’s momentum carried him one more step forward before he lurched forward and fell facedown, dead before he hit the floor.

  Ki knew what he would find in the bedroom, but he went to the door and looked. Cheri was sprawled naked on the bed, in a pool of the blood that had spurted from a knife-slit in her throat. Her mouth was open in a ghastly grin, her eyes stared unseeingly ahead. The blood from her wound had left crimson bands like ribbons across the billows of her breasts.

  Ki looked for only a few seconds before turning away. He stopped long enough to remove his shuriken from the bodies of Slip and Jug, then left the apartment and went down the stairs to the fenced yard. The fence was no obstacle. He made a short run, leaped to catch the top of the boards, and levered himself over. He landed on his feet in the street and saw Jessie walking toward him. Ki went to meet her.

  Chapter 11

  “Ki!” Jessie exclaimed as they got within easy speaking distance. “I was afraid you’d gotten into trouble when you didn’t get back to Captain Tinker’s last night.” Her eyes took in Ki’s dust-smeared vest and trousers. “From the way you look, I was right.”

  “There was a little trouble,” he said. “It’s over now.”

  “Have you had breakfast?”

  Ki smiled. “I’ve been too busy to think about food.”

  “And you missed supper last night, I suppose?”

  “I was busy last night, too.”

  “We’d better go back to Captain Tinker‘s, then,” she suggested. “We can talk privately while we’re walking, if you’d like to bring me up to date on what happened to you.”

  By a long-standing but unspoken agreement, there were few secrets between Jessie and Ki, though each of them realized there were areas of their personal lives that it would be better not to share. While both he and Jessie were usually aware of the events that took place in the other’s private life, they did not discuss them in detail.

  As he and Jessie turned and started walking toward the town square, Ki said, “We were right about the saloon being turned into a cartel headquarters, Jessie. But I’ll tell you about that later. Last night—well, you remember the two hoodlums who stopped us the day we got here?”

  “Slip and Jug?”

  “Yes. I was foolish enough to let them catch me off guard.”

  “And they held you prisoner?”

  “Only for a few hours. I had been talking to a woman who I’m sure was the mistress of a man who holds a high position in the cartel. I’m r
easonably sure he’s responsible for getting the railroad started.”

  “You’re talking about Prosser?”

  “No, not Prosser. This man is in Virginia City, I’m sure, Jessie. His name is Frank Jeffers. I didn’t get a chance to find out much more. If I’d asked too many questions so soon, she would have been suspicious. I decided not to act too eager.”

  “You met her in the saloon?”

  Ki nodded. “We—we talked. She tried to persuade me to work for the man who sent her here to run the saloon. I’d hoped that through her I could learn who he is.”

  When Ki did not go on, Jessie frowned and asked, “Why do you say you hoped to, Ki? Isn’t there a chance of learning anything more from her?”

  “Slip and Jug killed her.”

  “How? By accident?”

  “They’d have called it accidental, but it was murder.”

  “What happened?”

  “Details aren’t important, Jessie. Slip and Jug killed her before I could break out of the place where they’d put me. I had to kill both of them to get away.”

  Jessie was silent for a moment. When she saw that Ki was not going to add anything more, she said, “There must be some way we can follow this lead you’ve uncovered, Ki.”

  “There is. If the barkeep at the saloon tells the sheriff I left with Cheri, it might be wise for me to stay out of sight for a few days. We can go follow that lead in Virginia City.”

  Jessie shook her head. “I’ve heard that since it’s been rebuilt after that bad fire a few years ago, the silver mines are busier than ever. Ki, there are thirty thousand people there now. And how can you be sure that saloon girl gave you the man’s real name? Finding him could take weeks.”

  Before Ki could tell Jessie that Cheri and the barkeep had given him enough clues to make their search easy, they’d reached the town square. On seeing the courthouse, she pointed to the building and went on quickly, “That’s the first trouble spot we’ve got to clean up, Ki. Unless we can find records to prove that these people who live here have clear titles to their land, the railroad agent’s going to dispossess them, and if he does, we’re going to have a small war on our hands.”