May There Be a Road (Ss) (2001) Read online

  “Stop the car.” Shannon opened the door and got out, despite her protests.

  Ignoring the three, he walked to their car and studied the headlights. One had been replaced by glass from another make of car. When he straightened up, the grins were gone from their faces, and Joe Bowen was frightened.

  “I see you’ve replaced a headlight,”

  Shannon commented. “Was there any other damage?”

  “Look, you… I” Tom Bowen opened the door.

  “I’ll handle this!” Steve Bowen interrupted.

  “You’re looking for trouble, Shannon. If the beating you got didn’t teach you anything, I’ll give you worse.”

  Shannon smiled. “Don’t let that sneak punch give you a big head. Is the paint on this fender fresh?”

  There was a whine of sirens, and a car from the sheriff’s department and also one of the city police cars pulled up.

  “That’s all, Shannon.” Deputy Sheriff Clark stepped out. “It looks to me like you’ve had yours. Now get in your car and get out of town.

  You’re beginning to look like a troublemaker and we don’t want your kind around.”

  “All right, Clark. First, though, I want to ask if Tom has a permit for that gun he’s carrying. Further, I want you to check the number on it, and check the fingerprints of all four of them. Don’t try putting me off either, I’ll be talking to the DA and the FBI about why certain vehicle identification tags are missing and who’s been bought off and who hasn’t. Bowen, by the time this is over you’re going to look back in wonder at how stupid you were when you refused to tow those cars like John Shaw asked!”

  Clark was startled. He started to speak, and the Bowens stared angrily at Shannon as he got back into Marjorie’s car.

  They drove off. “I’ve talked a lot, but what can I prove?” he said. “Nothing yet ….

  The Bowens could explain that broken headlight, even if the make checks out perfectly. What we need is some real law enforcement and a search warrant for those barns.”

  “What’s going on? What are you talking about?”

  Marjorie asked.

  “Hot cars..” and I don’t mean the kind you race.”

  Keller was not around when they rolled into the yard, but there was a telegram lying open on the table, addressed to Shannon. He picked it up, glanced at it, and shoved it into his pocket.

  “That’s it! Now we’re getting someplace!”

  Shannon seemed not to hear Marjorie’s question about the contents. The message had been opened. Keller had read it. Keller was gone.

  “Hide the car where we can get to it from the road, then hide yourself. No lights. No movement. The Bowens will be here as quick as they can get away from Clark. I don’t have a thing on them yet, but they don’t know it. Push a crook far enough and sometimes he’ll move too fast and make mistakes.” There was little time remaining if he was to get to the barns before the Bowens arrived. They pulled the cars behind the house, and Shannon made sure that Marjorie locked herself inside and turned out the lights. Then, careful to make no noise, he descended into the canyon and followed the path from near the junked cars through the wash and then an orchard to the barns back of the Bowen farmhouse.

  By the time he reached the wall of the nearest barn, he knew he had only minutes in which to work. There was no sound. There were two large doors to the barn, closed as always, but there was a smaller door near them that opened under his hand. Within, all was blackness mingled with the twin odors of oil and gasoline. It was not the smell of a farmer’s barn, but of a garage. There was a faint gasping sound near his feet, then a low moan.

  Kneeling, he put out a hand and touched a stub bled face. “Keller?” he whispered.

  The old man strained against the agony. “I stepped into a bear trap. Get it off me.” Not daring to strike a light, Shannon struggled fiercely with the jaws of the powerful trap. He got it open, and a brief inspection by sensitive fingers told him Keller’s leg was both broken and lacerated.

  “I’ll have to carry you,” he whispered.

  “You take a look first,” Keller insisted. “With that trap off I can drag myself a ways.”

  Once the old man was out and the door closed, Shannon trusted his pencil flashlight.

  Four cars, in the process of being stripped and scrambled. Swiftly he checked the motor numbers and jotted them down. He snapped off the light suddenly. Somebody was out in front of the barn, opposite from where he had entered.

  “Nobody’s around,” Perult was saying. “The front door is locked and the bear trap is inside the back.”

  “Nevertheless, I’m having a look.” That would be Tom Bowen.

  The lock rattled in the door and Shannon moved swiftly, stepped in an unseen patch of oil, and his feet shot from under him. He sprawled full length, knocking over some tools.

  The front door crashed open. The lights came on. Tom Bowen sprang inside with his gun ready.

  But Shannon was already on his feet.

  “Drop it!” he yelled.

  Both fired at the same instant, and Bowen’s gun clattered to the floor and he clutched a burned shoulder. Perult had ducked out. Shannon stepped in and punched Tom Bowen on the chin; the man went down. With nothing to shoot at Shannon put two rounds into the side of one of the cars just to make them keep their heads down and ran out back.

  He was down in the canyon before he found Keller, and he picked the old man up bodily and hurried as fast as he could with the extra weight.

  He was almost at the house when Keller warned him.

  “Put me down and get your hands free. There’s somebody at the house!”

  Marjorie cried out and Shannon lowered Keller quickly to the ground, and gun in hand went around the corner of the house.

  Shannon saw Steve Bowen strike Marjorie with the flat of his hand. “Tell me,” Bowen said coldly, “or I’ll ruin that face of yours.”

  Perult came sprinting in the front gate.

  “Hey boss! Tom’s been shot.”

  Shannon stepped into sight and Perult grabbed for the front of his shirt, and Shannon lowered the gun and shot him in the thigh. Jock screamed, more in surprise than pain, and fell to the ground.

  “Fast with the gun, aren’t you?” Steve Bowen said.

  “I suppose you’ll shoot me now.”

  “We’re going back to your place,” Shannon said, and then he whispered to Marjorie. “Get on the phone and call the district attorney. After you’ve called him, call the sheriff. But the DA first!”

  “What are you going to do?” Marjorie protested.

  “Me?” Shannon grinned. “This guy copped a Sunday on my chin when I wasn’t looking, and he beat up Johnny, so as soon as you get through to the DA I’m going to take him back to that barn, lock the door, and see if he can take it himself.”

  Twenty minutes later, Neil Shannon untied Steve Bowen and shoved him toward the door with his gun. They reached the barn without incident.

  Inside, Shannon locked the door and tossed the gun out of the window.

  Bowen moved in fast, feinted, and threw a high, hard right. Shannon went under it and hooked both hands to the body. The bigger man grunted and backed off, then rushed, swinging with both hands. A huge fist caught Shannon, rocking his head on his shoulders, but Shannon brushed a left aside and hooked his own left low to the belly.

  Getting inside, he butted Bowen under the chin, hit him with a short chop to the head, and then pushing Bowen off, hit him twice so fast, Bowen’s head bobbed. Angry, the big man moved in fast and Shannon sidestepped and let Bowen trip over his leg and plunge to the floor.

  Bowen caught himself on his hands and dove in a long flying tackle, but Shannon moved swiftly, jerking his knee into Bowen’s face. Nose and lips smashed, the big man fell, then got up, blood streaming down his face.

  Bowen tried to set himself, but Shannon hit him with a left and knocked Bowen down again with a right.

  Stepping in on Bowen, Shannon got too close and Bowen g
rabbed his ankle. He went down and Bowen leaped up and tried to jump on his stomach.

  Shannon rolled clear, got up fast, and when Bowen tried another kick, Shannon grabbed his ankle and jerked it high. Bowen fell hard and lay still.

  There was a hammering at the door. Shannon backed off. “You’re the tough guy, Bowen,” he said, “but not that tough.” Bowen didn’t move.

  The door opened and Clark came in followed by several deputies and a quiet man in a gray suit.

  To the assistant district attorney he handed a telegram. “From the FBI. I checked on Bowen and found he had done six years in the federal pen for transporting a stolen car. I wired them on a hunch. I think you’ll find that they were paying off certain people in county government to be left alone.”

  “Hey, now wait a minute!” Clark protested.

  “Shut up,” Shannon snapped. “They’ll be looking at you, your boss, and a couple of commissioners, so you’d better start checking your hole card!

  “Johnny Shaw got suspicious when he tried to get the county to make the Bowens move those derelict cars. He found out enough and Bowen ran him off the road. The headlight glass was a Chrysler lens and Bowen drives a 300. Perult and Steve Bowen walked over to the wreck afterwards to be sure Johnny was dead. The tracks are still there, but I made casts of them to be sure.”

  Steve Bowen moaned and sat up.

  “Come on, Steve,” Shannon said. “I think we’re all going to have to go to Ventura and answer a lot of questions.”

  Bowen winced as he stood up. “You broke my ribs,” he growled.

  “Count yourself lucky. If these boys hadn’t come I’d still be at it. You beat up Johnny Shaw… he carried me out of a firefight in Korea when I was wounded.

  There were shells going off everywhere and he’d never even seen me before. They gave him a medal for it. Now, he wasn’t a big guy like you, he didn’t know how to box, and he’d become a medical corpsman because he knew he couldn’t bring himself to kill. But when the chips were down he did what was necessary”

  Shannon took a deep breath. “Plead guilty,” he said. “Because if they don’t have enough evidence to put you away, I’ll find it.

  No matter how long it takes.”

  They were led to the waiting cars, and with the ambulances in the lead and Marjorie following, they headed for Ventura.

  Tohkta looked at the bridge suspended across the gorge of the Yurungkash. After four years, the bridge hung again, and now, at last, he could go to his betrothed, to Kushla.

  At this point the gorge was scarcely a hundred feet wide, but black cliffs towered into the clouds above it, even as they fell sheer away hundreds of yards below. Down those cliffs came the trails that approached the bridge on either side. From where the bridge came into view from above, it seemed the merest thread..” a thin line for which the eye must seek and seek again.

  Scarcely four feet wide, the bridge was built of their handmade rope, of slats cut from pine forests, and of thin planks laid across the slats.

  With every gust of wind the bridge swayed, but those who had built it hoped that it would be their lifeline to the outside world.

  Tohkta’s people were of the mountains, yet once each year they had descended to the oasis towns at the desert’s edge, taking the furs, the wool and hides, for which they were known. The gold they sometimes took was a secret thing. In the timeless kingdom of their mountain valleys the bridge was their link to the future.

  Only once in all the years their tribal memory encompassed had the bridge not been there, hanging five hundred feet above the tumbling white water. And for too long had Tohkta’s people been isolated by its loss.

  Four… almost five years before there had come a great shaking of the earth when the mountains raised higher, and steam and hot water gushed from newly made cracks. There had been a grinding of rock when the teeth of the earth were goa shed together. In the midst of it, the pinnacle that supported their bridge had toppled from the far side of the Yurungkash into the gorge below.

  There followed years of struggle against the high rocks and the torrent, years of terrible work to replace their bridge. Fields still had to be tilled and flocks tended, but two men had been dashed to death on the jagged rocks below when they fell from their ropes. Yet now the bridge was done.

  The Kunlun Mountains rim the northern edge of Tibet, hanging above the deserts of Sinkiang, and are among the loneliest of the world’s mountain ranges. Long, long ago when Tohkta’s grandfather was a boy, a rare caravan still ventured along the ancient track that led from Sinkiang across Tibet and through the Himalayas to India itself, passing close to Mount-Kailas, sacred to Buddhists.

  For centuries that ancient track had been almost abandoned. Only yak hunters, as wild and strange as the creatures they hunted, used it now, or an occasional herdsman taking his flock to secret pasturage in the high mountain valleys.

  Tohkta sat his horse beside his grandfather, Batai Khan, chieftain of their small tribe of fifty-six tents. This was a proud day, for today Tohkta rode to claim his bride from her father, Yakub, a wealthy Moslem trader. He glanced at his grandfather with pride, for the old man sat his horse like a boy despite his almost one hundred years. Fierce and fiery as always, the Khan was the oldest among a people known for their great age and their great strength.

  Few outsiders ever came to know the mountain Tochari, remnants of a proud, warlike race that had ruled most of eastern Turkestan and much of western China. In ages past they had carried their banners against Mongol and Chinese, against Tungan and Turk, against the Tatar and Hun.

  Slowly the column of twenty riders and their pack animals crossed the swinging bridge, and Batai Khan did not start up the trail until all were safely across.

  “Yol Bolsun!” he called out, waving to the people of the village who lined the switchback trail on the other side of the gorge. It was an old greeting to those who rode the mountain trails: “May There Be a Road!”

  And now, for the first time in four long years, there was a road. The home of the Tochari was an island in mountains, cut off by the deep gorges of the Yurungkash and the Keriya, and at its ends by impassable slopes. Within there lay more than one hundred square miles of grassy valleys, forest glades, waterfalls, and grass-covered mountain pastures. It was an isolated paradise among the snowcovered peaks, but now it was isolated no longer.

  Tohkta was impatient. Kushla awaited in the ancient oasis town of Charklik, and how many were the nights he had remained awake to dream of her?

  Batai Khan and Yakub had arranged the match, but since their eyes first met, neither Tohkta nor Kushla had thoughts for another.

  Yet four full years had gone by when no word could be received from her, nor sent to her.

  “She will have forgotten me,” Tohkta said gloomily. “It has been forever.”

  “She was a child,” Batai Khan replied, “now she will be a woman, and so much the better. You are not forgotten, believe me.” He glanced around at his handsome grandson. “I, who know women, say it. You have been a dream to her, and who can forget a dream?”

  In the days that followed the finishing of the bridge Tola Beg, an ancient yak hunter, had been the first to cross, and he brought strange news.

  Chinese soldiers of a new kind had come to Sinkiang and to Tibet. The Dalai Lama had fled to India, and soldiers were in Khotan and Charklik as well as Lhasa. People had been driven from their farms and their flocks to work upon a new road, harnessed like yak or camels.

  “Do not go, Batai Khan.” Tola Beg peered across the fire from his ancient, rheumy eyes, his skin withered and weathered by wind and cold, darkened by wind and sun.

  “They will imprison you and seize your goods.”

  “It is the time for the marriage of Tohkta.”

  “There is danger. The Chinese seek the ancient track to India but it is not India they want; it is the men of our mountains they would enslave.” Tola Beg gulped his yak butter tea noisily, as was the custom. “They respect noth
ing and they have no God. The mosques and lamaseries are closed and the lamas driven to work in the fields. The prayer wheels are stilled and there is a curse on the land.”

  “I can go alone,” Tohkta said. “I will take the gold and go for Kushla.”

  “We are Tochari.” Batai Khan spoke with dignity. “Does a khan of Tochari go like a thief in the night to meet his betrothed?”

  They were Tochari. That was the final word among them.

  Tohkta knew the history of his people, and much more had been told him by an Englishman. In ages past it was said some of his people had migrated from Central Asia, going westward to become the Greeks and the Celts. Others had gone into northern India, to settle there, driven by the Hiung Nu, known to western nations as the Hun.

  The Englishman had dug in ancient refuse piles along the ruins of the Great Wall, searching for bits of wood or paper on which there was writing. He had told Tohkta these fragments would piece together the history of the area, and of the Tochari.

  He glanced at Tohkta’s dark red hair and green eyes, a coloring not uncommon among these people of the mountains, and said the Tochari were a people who made history.

  Batai Khan had rebuked him gently. “We know our past, and need not dig in dung piles for it.

  If you would know it, too, come sit by our fires and our bards will sing for you.”

  And now they rode to claim the bride of Tohkta, for a khan of the Tochari must ride with warriors at his back and gold to consummate the union. Raw and cold was the weather, for the season was late. Soon the high passes would be closed, and the mountain basins would brim full with snow.

  It was midnight on the third day when they reached the outskirts of the ancient town, crossing the road by which silk had once been carried to Greece and Rome.

  They drew up in a grove of trees and waited as the moon set beyond the desert hills. Tohkta was impatient to push on to the town, for eagerness rode his shoulders with sharp spurs. But Batai Khan had the caution of years.

  Old as he was, he sat erect in his saddle, and the broadsword he carried slung between his shoulders was a mighty weapon in his hands. “The town has a different smell,” he said, “there is trouble here.”