Name On The Bullet - Edge Series 6 (24 page)

‘How’s that?’ Haydon carefully folded and replaced the telegraph form in an inside pocket of his jacket.

Edge rasped the back of a hand over his bristled jaw and explained: ‘I sure would be obliged for some soap and water. Then maybe I’ll feel as good on the outside as I do inside.’

‘I expect I could arrange for something like that,’ Haydon said reflectively but made no move to rise from behind the desk.

‘In exchange for what, feller?’

The lawman finger-combed his beard. ‘It’s real good for me the way I was able to bring you in, mister. Be a lot better, though, if I had this Adam Steele guy locked in my jail, too. But I guess you ain’t going to tell me where I can find him?’

Edge answered bitterly: ‘If I knew where he was I sure as hell wouldn’t tell you or anyone else.’ He touched fingertips to the side of his head where a scab had formed on the broken skin.

‘So it ain’t out of a sense of loyalty that you want to protect him, uh?’

‘Figuring out that doesn’t make you the smartest lawman in the state of California, sheriff.’

‘So if you get the chance, you’d like to give Steele a worse time than the law ever could, it sounds like?’

‘Is stating the obvious something you’re famous for around here?’ Edge asked sardonically.

Haydon grimaced. ‘I ain’t famous for anything anywhere, mister. Because I’m just a small time no account county sheriff who ain’t been anywhere or done anything in the whole of his near fifty years. Which ain’t on account of me not keeping an eye open for the main chance.’ He shrugged. ‘In this case, whatever good comes out of me having you locked up in my jail . . . Well, my stock could be increased some if I was able to give the marshal from Sacramento a full account of exactly what happened outside of Broadwater the other night. Who did what to who which ended up with Strachen getting killed?’

Edge stretched out on his back, set his hat over his face and drawled: ‘Despite the spot I’m in now on account of what Steele did to me, him and me go back a long way. I’m pretty dirty from not washing up for a long time but I reckon I can live with the stink of myself that way.’

‘Okay, suit yourself.’ The lawman’s chair creaked as he stood up from it.

‘Like I said last night, feller, it’s something I used to do all the time. Now I do it as often as I’m able to, if the circumstances allow.’

Haydon spoke without rancour as he pulled open the door. ‘Your circumstances don’t allow for much of anything right now, do they?’

‘Into every life a little rain has to fall – ain’t that what they say?’

‘If it was raining for real now, maybe you’d be able to catch some of the water and wash up.’ The lawman laughed mirthlessly as he stepped across the threshold. Edge muttered as the door swung closed: ‘Feller, I’ve got the feeling that me and a whole lot like me have been washed up for quite a while.’

CHAPTER • 14

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THE MORNING dragged by in a series of interminable near silences interspersed
with irregular periods of low key sounds that originated some way off from the law office. For most of the time Edge remained stretched out on his back on the cot, forcing his mind to remain blank because of the risk he would be tempted to indulge himself in frustrating moods of anger and despair. But occasionally he rose to his feet and smoked a cigarette while he paced within the closely confined space or did some muscle flexing to keep his joints from stiffening.

Outside of the sounds of the blacksmith working on new horseshoes he also identified the bell from the schoolhouse. And after what seemed to him like an entire day instead of just a morning, the same bell signalled the noon recess. Not long after this the door opened and Edge sat up as the tall and skinny Fred Whitney re-entered the law office, carrying a tray on which was a plate of food that gave off no aromatic steam along, with a glass of beer.

‘Just cold cuts and some lettuce and salad stuff,’ the scowling kid announced in a contrite tone. ‘I have to say it ain’t my favourite kind of chow, mister. But it’s all we’re having at the Timberland. I got you a beer, though.’

‘Much obliged.’ Edge remained where he was while the kid went through the same nervous routine as this morning in order to slide the tray beneath the cell door. After Edge had moved to pick it up, sat down again and begun to eat, Whitney dropped into the sheriff’s chair at the desk and looked satisfied with a job well done. He waited until a couple of mouthfuls of food were washed down with beer before he asked:

‘Will you tell me something?’

‘You’re the jailer and I’m the prisoner so you can ask me anything you want to.’

Edge’s sour toned cynicism was lost on the preoccupied young man.

‘You and that friend of yours?’

‘Which friend is that?’

‘The one you were riding with . . . Steele, ain’t that right?’

‘The name’s right, kid. But a friend of mine he ain’t any longer.’ Edge absently reached up to touch the crusted wound at his temple.

‘Well, whatever: it seems to figure you and him must have been in real bad trouble to get to kill a United States marshal.’

‘Has your friend the sheriff put you up to this, kid?’

‘Uh?’ He seemed to be genuinely perplexed by the question.

‘Did Haydon tell you to talk to me – boy to man? Have me unburden my soul of the mortal sins I’ve committed so I’ll go to the gallows with a clean slate? And at the same time the sheriff will be more highly thought of by the fellers who make the decisions down in the State Justice Department?’

The young man said earnestly: ‘I ain’t got no idea what you’re talking about, mister and that’s the God’s honest truth.’

The pale faced, red headed youngster looked even more puzzled and Edge decided he was showing genuine bewilderment as he shrugged his skinny shoulders and continued, his acne-scarred expression becoming a worried frown: ‘It’s just that I ain’t against taking a share of the reward money if you and your buddy are real desperate men. Both of you had been doing some serious criminal things to get yourselves arrested by a United States marshal, I mean.’ He shook his head forlornly. ‘But if it was something and nothing you were mixed up in: just a little thing and it was never meant for the lawman to get shot down . . . Well, I wouldn’t be able to sleep nights knowing I’d taken money and got a man hung for – ‘

‘No sweat, kid,’ Edge said into the pause after Whitney lost the thread of the point of what he was driving at. ‘Because I have to admit I can’t deny that I’ve done a whole lot of things in my life that I deserve to be hanged for. So no matter what happens to me you can sleep easy in your bed.’

‘Gee, mister, I’m really glad to hear that.’ He got up quickly from behind the desk and showed a broad grin. ‘And really grateful to you for telling me.’

‘But not grateful enough to turn me loose, I figure?’ Edge answered with a brief, humourless smile that did not take the icy glint from his narrowed, heavily hooded eyes. Whitney frowned again as he said: ‘You know I can’t do that, mister.’

‘Sure I do, kid.’ Edge pushed the tray under the door. ‘But for all those nights of easy sleeping I’ve made sure you’re going to get, I don’t figure it would be too much trouble in return for you to bring me a bucket of water and some soap, uh?’

‘What . . ? Oh yeah, I guess I can fix that without getting on the wrong side of Mr Haydon.’ He stooped for the tray and backed off across the office. ‘No, for sure there’s no harm, in me doing that for you. I won’t be too long, okay?’

‘However long it takes, I’ll still be waiting right here for you. I’ll have a heavier growth of whiskers and probably smell a little higher is all.’

A half-hour later it was not the nervous Fred Whitney who brought what was necessary for Edge to wash up and then shave off his two-day’s growth of bristles. Instead, his caller was a thin faced, scrawny bodied woman of a lot more than thirty but a little less than forty. With long, matted and straggly dark hair and the features of a mulatto, her skin coloration derived from the white bloodline of her heritage, the prominent bone structure of her face delivered from the black. She wore a shapeless grey buckram dress with no feminine adornments and a heavily stained waist apron: carried steaming water in a bucket, a clean towel over a shoulder and took a cake of soap and a straight razor from the pouch of the apron.

Edge said evenly from where he sat on the side of the cot: ‘There’s one thing good to be said about this Pine River jailhouse, lady.’

She shook her head wearily and told him: ‘I’m just doing what I was told. I don’t work for the sheriff.’

‘No sweat. It’s just that the service can be real fine if a prisoner asks the right feller to provide it.’

She gave him a derogatory glance as she advanced on the cell door and put down the bucket and other stuff where two meal trays had previously been delivered. Then answered in a dull monotone: ‘I don’t know what the hell it is you’re talking about.’

Edge held back from pointing out that there was no clearance to slide the bucket under the bottom of the barred door as she backed off. Then leaned wearily against the wall beside the open office doorway, folded her arms loosely across her flat chest and fixed him with a narrow, dark eyed gaze.

‘Which doesn’t matter a hell of a lot one way or the other, I guess,’ Edge allowed with a shrug.

She said in the same toneless voice as before: ‘Slim Haydon came by the saloon for a drink a few minutes ago. And paid me two cents to bring this stuff to you. He told me I’m not to open the cell door for anyone or anything, so you’ll just have to do the best you can the way things are. And I’m to be sure to get the razor back from you when you’re through with it. Too, I have to be careful your don’t use it to hurt me.’

‘I don’t have any reason to hurt you, Loretta. That’s your name right – Loretta?’

She nodded and watched him with a melancholy gaze as he dragged over the three legged stool, sat down on it and reached through the bars: cupped both hands in the bucket of water then threw it into his sweat run, ingrained with trail dust face. She said: ‘I suppose the sheriff and George Guthrie – and even the Whitney kid . . . I suppose all three of three of them have been saying all kinds of awful things about me?’

Edge was soaping his face as he asked: ‘Do you give any kind of a damn what people say about you, Loretta?’

She showed him a sardonic smile. ‘Well, if I ever did, I gave up on doing it a long time ago - so long ago that I can’t even remember when it was I did.’ The scowl returned as she muttered in a vehement rasping tone: ‘But if they said I’m a whore, that’s a goddamn lie. Whatever else I am, I ain’t for sale to any man with a yen and a few dollars in his pocket to satisfy it.’

Edge opened the first strange straight razor he had used in a long time, tested the blade with the side of a thumb and found it as sharp as the one he carried in the pouch at the nape of his neck. ‘Well, I can tell you the kid went out of his way to be sure that I didn’t get that idea from George Guthrie and the sheriff, lady.’ He was well used to shaving without the luxury of a mirror but this was the first time he had needed to pass a razor back and forth through the bars of a cell to bring it between the water and his face. A first glimmer of interest showed in the woman’s dark eyes as she asked: ‘Did the boy tell you to tell me that?’

‘No, he didn’t.’

She nodded pensively, but did not seem to be convinced. ‘It’s just that Fred tried to force himself on me a while back. And afterwards he cried like a baby and told me everyone said that I . . . Well, he’s been trying to make amends ever since.’

Edge continued to shave, feeling better by the moment. And finally he ran a hand over his face and grunted his satisfaction at how he had scraped off all the bristles save for those forming the underplayed moustache that was the most Mexican feature of his appearance. Countered by the glittering blue eyes inherited from his Scandinavian mother that were as permanently narrowed as Loretta’s dark ones when she was briefly giving consideration to the seemingly insignificant.

‘What did Haydon tell you to ask me, lady?’ He finished mopping the final traces of lather from his face, carefully folded the towel and pushed it under the door then closed the straight razor and dropped it on top. Withdrew to the cot and sat down, dug out the makings and began to roll a cigarette.

The woman who continued to stand on the others side of the room watched his actions with disinterest then finally vented a hollow laugh and exclaimed bitterly:
‘Cretin!
That’s a good word for what the sheriff is, don’t you think? Are you smart enough in book learning to know what that word means, mister?’