Ten Grand (4 page)

Edge suddenly released his grip and streaked a hand inside Juan’s shirt, popping buttons. The bandit released a sound of horror as the hand came out holding the block of money. Throughout the ride it had been held pressed against Juan’s sweating side by Edge’s forearm. It smelled of the man.

“Here,” Edge said.  

Matador’s cruel eyes flashed from the money to the face of Juan. Every muscle in the bandit’s body was trembling and his mouth worked soundlessly for several moments as he struggled to hold his leader’s withering gaze.

“I did not know,” he managed to gasp finally. “El Matador, please. As soon as I found it hiding in my clothes I would have given it to you.”

“Give it to me now,” Matador demanded his voice as hard as the rosewood stock he gripped.

Sobbing, Juan snatched the block of dollars from Edge’s hand and reached out towards his leader. Edge looked on without breathing, his eyes narrowed to the merest slits, knowing that a miscalculation by a split second could end his life. Chances were he would die anyway, but self-preservation is an instinct that refused to accept defeat.

At the moment he saw Matadors finger whiten at the knuckle curled around the trigger, Edge pushed himself backwards, his seat sliding over the hind-quarters of Juan’s horse. He heard the gun explode into thunderous sound and felt a searing pain beside his right eye before the sun went out and empty darkness enfolded him. He did not know that a piece of ball shot had smashed into his face, causing a gush of blood: he did not feel his limp body thud into the ground at the edge of the trail and slide down to become an inert, face-down shape in the stream bed.

Neither did he see Juan catch the full blast of the blunderbuss load on the side of his head; the great shower of blood, mangled flesh and shattered bone; the horse bolts forward with its dead rider still mounted, head hanging at a crazy angle and attached to the body by a few strands of lifeless tissue.

Nor the block of bills as it sailed up into the air with a death spasm of a hand, to be neatly caught by the impassive, pock-marked Torres, who thrust the money into his sack. Matador looked from the bolting horse to Edge, his eyes showing satisfaction. He patted the elaborately decorated stock of his weapon.

“I think maybe I killed two birds with one stone as the gringos say,” he muttered in English. “One a jackdaw and one an eagle.” He raised his hand. “We ride.”

This last in Mexican. They went at the gallop.

CHAPTER FOUR

EDGE accepted the facts of what had happened to him that morning without experiencing anger. As he raised himself from out of the shade of the boulder and started back down the trail towards Peaceville, his face was a mask of cold emptiness, blank of any expression.  His mind was laid as waste as his features for there was nothing with which it could work.  El Matador had robbed him and El Matador was a Mexican who would ride south across the border. The decision was made. He needed his horse, his guns and his knife and Edge would go south.

The town was still in a state of shock from the violence of its early morning waking.  Its citizens went about their normal business with the unhurried movements of people in a daze. Physical signs of the bandit raid were in the process of being erased as a group of men worked at repairing the hole in the rear of the bank, householders and businessmen fixed broken windows and, in the church the priest tolled the death knell as two gravediggers sweated outside.

As Edge started down the street, heading for the sheriff’s office, he became the object of shocked recognition which quickly transformed into expressions of mute accusation. He should have been dead: that he was not indicated a sell-out. And men like El Matador did not enter into deals without strong reasons.

Edge ignored the looks and the people. They owed him nothing and he felt not a flicker of interest in them.  They had used each other for as long as it suited all parties and now that was over.

“Edge!”

He recognized the voice and knew he was passing Honey’s Restaurant, glanced over to the door showing no sign of halting his steady pace.  Gail, the paleness of her complexion and residue of horror in her eyes not detracting from her beauty, beckoned to him from the doorway.

“Edge!” she said again, on a rising pitch when she saw he was ignoring her.  “You’re walking into a trap.”

This brought him up abruptly.  He took a final look ahead down the street, narrowed eyes searching for danger, then stared at the girl.

“You part of it?”

“There’s two territorial marshals in your office,” she said.

Edge looked round again, obliquely at the front of the sheriff’s office.  He saw no movement there and crossed quickly to step up on to the sidewalk, brush into the restaurant as Gail stood back.  The tables were empty, set for breakfast on a day when nobody had felt like eating.

“Lunchtime will be slow as well,” Edge said, looking towards the door to the kitchen. “Where’s your boss?”

“Honey’s fixing the funeral arrangements. They killed three people, Edge.”

She closed the door, looked with concern at the man’s facial injury.

“Tell me about the lawmen,” he demanded. 

“You’re hurt.”  She approached him. “Come into the kitchen.  I’ll clean it before it becomes infected.”

Edge’s aim came up and he hit her back-handed across the cheek. “The lawmen!” he demanded harshly as Gail’s eyes filled with the tears of pain and she raised a delicate hand to her face.  But in the next moment those same eyes spat hate at him.  The kind of hate that is just over the dividing line from love.

“You can’t hurt me,” she threw at him.  “You can beat me to a pulp and you’ll still be the only man I’ll ever love.  And I’m not going to help you get clear of Peaceville only to have you die with a body full of gangrene.”  The fire died in his eyes and her voice softened. “Now, get into the kitchen, you big oaf.”

Edge’s hands clenched into hard-knuckled fists and his cold eyes bore into those of the girl. Then he suddenly spun and went between the tables, knocking over chairs as he cut a direct route through to the kitchen door.  Gail followed him, a tiny smile playing at the corners of her mouth, which she wiped away as he sat down at a table and his eyes found her again. She had learned just how far she could push this man of iron in whose make-up a pinprick of regard for her provided the only vulnerable spot.

A pot of water was already near the boil on the large, wood-fired stove and she poured some into an iron basin, and got a length of clean cloth from a drawer.

“They rode in an hour ago,” she said as she pressed the hot, soaking cloth against Edge’s wound, angry at herself for feeling a stab of satisfaction when he winced.  “They’ve got a wanted poster on somebody called Josiah Hedges.  Captain Josiah C. Hedges.  Picture looks like you a lot younger. Hedges … Edge. A man you killed called you Captain. Close enough?”

“Not so younger,” Edge allowed.  “Close enough.  It wasn’t murder.”

“The authorities don’t rate it very highly,” Gail said, pouring the reddened water away, getting some fresh and beginning to clean, up where the blood had matted into his beard. “They’ve put a bounty on you.  Only a hundred dollars.”

Edge turned on his grin of ice.  “Even I wouldn’t kill me to raise just that much.  How’d you know all this?”

“I thought you might be back,” she answered evenly, with a toss of her long hair. “Didn’t want anyone to steal your belongings. I went to the office to get them. The marshals came while I was there. Asked me what had happened, I told them and then they showed me the wanted poster, wanted to know if I had seen the man called Hedges.”

“Obliged,” Edge said, getting to his feet as she finished cleaning his face. “Where’s my gear?”

“Out back,” she said, nodding to the door. “There’s a horse out there, as well. It’s mine. Fed, watered, saddled and ready to go.” She licked her lips and reached out a hand to touch his shoulder as he turned. “Edge?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m not going to ask to come with you. But if you ask me it won’t take long to saddle Honey’s horse.”

“Where I’m going, women ain’t nothing but something to screw,” he said harshly, saw her wince. His voice softened and he leaned forward, brushed his lips gentle across her mouth. “You’re a good screw, Gail, but you got other qualities.”

Tears welled into her eyes again, and her hand found his, pressed some crumpled bills into the palm.

“Twelve dollars,” she whispered. “It’s all I have.”

“I’ll repay it through the mail,” he told her and strode to the door.

“You won’t be coming back?”

He looked at her with hooded eyes. “What for?”

“I … I guess nothing.” 

“Nothing ain’t worth coming back for,” he said and went out.

The door slammed and she heard the sound of him mounting.  The horse whinnied and then hoofs thudded into a gallop. Gail sat down on the still warm chair and threw her head onto the table, gave herself up to sobs that sent tremors through her entire body.

Honey and the two hard-faced marshals found her like that.

CHAPTER FIVE

EDGE had no idea how far it was to the Mexican-Arizona territory border. He just knew it was south and that was the way he rode, keeping the high, hot sun ahead of him when the trail petered out.  It was desolate country, arid and irregularly featured by high outcrops of rock, dry stream beds and grotesquely shaped cactus plants. It seemed upon first impression to be a dead place, for even the giant prickly growths and infrequent patches of sharp-edged grass seemed to be formed of rock, so still were they in the unmoving air. But Edge and his horse were not the only living things that moved in the area of vast waste through which they passed.

When Edge was well clear of town and slowed the horse to conserve her energy he had time to look about him.  He saw a diamond-back rattler almost as big as the one he killed that morning, coiled in the shade of a rock, a beautifully patterned copperhead on the move, and a bizarrely decorated gila monster which darted across his path, causing his horse to rear up.

But he soothed her into docility again and she fell back into her even gait, obediently responding to a tug on the reins that headed her towards a small canyon that split asunder the high solid face of a stretch of plateau country that stretched across the horizon.  As he neared the canyon mouth, Edge saw that a wide slash of disturbed dust curved in from the west.  As further evidence of the passage of a great many horses, dried dung sprinkled the ground.  Edge could see how the riders had been heading directly into the sheer face of the towering cliffs, had made a broad, wheeling turn to go into the canyon which provided the only route south for many miles on either side.

“I figure my money came this way,” Edge muttered and the horse picked up her ears. The rider leaned forward and ruffled the short, tough hair between them. Then, when he heeled her into a gallop, she seemed to be as anxious as the man to reach the shade afforded by the canyon. It was mid-afternoon now and the sun, as hot as ever, was slanting its light and heat from the west, so that the western wall of the canyon threw a giant shadow.  But not for any great distance, for although the canyon was narrow at its opening, it broadened almost at once, the boulder littered ground on each side sloping away fast like the sides of a shallow bowl. Ahead was an expanse of desert country as desolate as the plain Edge had just crossed, but featured with many more outcrops and sparsely vegetated hills.

Edge stayed in the shade for as long as he could see the tracks made by the Mexicans’ horses.  But they were on the far side of the canyon, the Mexicans having taken advantage of the shadow of the eastern wall thrown out by morning sunlight.  And soon he was forced out into the harsh glare again in order to keep on the trail of his quarry.

His horse died beneath him while still on all fours, the sound she made as she collapsed, throwing him clear, merely the whoosh of air venting from crushed lungs. The rifle crack that had sent a bullet piercing into her brain echoed between the canyon walls with such stark clarity that the sound stung Edge’s ears.  He lay absolutely still where he had fallen, shielded on one side by the bulk of the dead horse, exposed on the other where there was just an expanse of open terrain scattered with small rocks.