“Get the bastard’s head,” he heard a voice shout and from the light from the street, saw the kid who had shoved him launch himself forward.
Edge heard a sound and twisted his head clear, felt the rush of air cross his ear as a heavy foot missed its mark by a hairsbreadth. Then the kid thudded on top of him, a fist crashing into his jaw. The foot came off his arm and Edge reached up, flipping on to his back. His big hand formed into a claw, he grabbed at the white blur that was the kid’s face and closed the grip. The kid, bringing up his arm to start another blow, screamed in pain and terror as he felt the fingers dig into the flesh on his face like talons before they were drawn downwards. The skin ripped in two places, beneath the eyes, came off in matching strips down each cheek. His body went stiff with horror of what had happened and sailed through the air like a log of wood as Edge jerked him off with hand and a knee in his crotch.
There were two others and one leapt upon Edge’s back as he came up into a crouch, throwing arms around the victim’s neck, locking his feet around the front of his waist as his legs encircled the body in a vice like grip. Edge grunted and blinked, found he was now on equal terms with his attackers in the matter of picking out shapes in the darkness. The kid with the ripped face sill lay on the ground, moaning, his body now bent double to seek relief from the agony in his groin. The kid on his back was breathing hot and fast into his ear as he forced the grip on with more viciousness and the third kid was coming at Edge with something that glinted faintly in his right hand.
A fast glance over his shoulder showed Edge a vertical row of rusty iron brackets climbing the wall of the building forming a crude means of access to the roof. Despite the weight of the kid on his back, the pain of his grip and the fact that he had his arms pinned to his sides, Edge broke into an awkward backward run, Retreating from the advance of the kid with a knife. The kid, mistaking the reason for the retreat, took time to savor his imminent triumph. A grin flicked across his features, froze in the instant he saw what was happening. Edge judged his distance and launched into a short backwards jump to increase the power with which he slammed his burden against the wall. The kid cried out once as his spine snapped in three places as it met the solid obstacles of the brackets. His arms and legs went limp and he slid to the ground in a heap behind Edge, who in the next moment had sprung forward, hand flashing from his neck, holding the razor in its accustomed, concealed position.
“You killed him,” the third kid said in shocked rage as he came forward, certain that he was going up against a man who was going to defend himself only with bare hands.
“He died for ten dollars you ain’t going to get either,” Edge said as he sidestepped the knife thrust with ease and chopped down with his hand, the razor sliding forward, to be gripped by the handle with the blade fully exposed. Its keen edge made a faint hissing sound as it sliced off the kid’s right ear.
The kid dropped the knife, his hands flying to where his ear had been. “Oh my God,” he whispered hoarsely.
“He wasn’t on your side.” Edge told him.
The kid blinked, gasped, stopped and snatched up the useless lump of severed flesh. Then he spun and ran back down the alley, away from the street. Edge picked up his hat, dusted it off, donned it and continued his stroll towards the restaurant.
“Real nice town, sheriff,” he muttered.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
HER name was Gail. It was said in neatly formed red letters, stitched with thread on the left side of her white blouse where the material started its slope to her neck after cresting the high, pointed peaked swell of her breast. She was a tall redhead, the skin of her face tanned a pretty brown, throwing the whites of her large eyes with blue centers into an attractive contrast. Although her breasts were large her build was slim, with a narrow waist and promisingly curved hips. Her walk was graceful as she threaded between the tables of the small restaurant and her movements agile as she dispensed the plates heaped with fine smelling food cooked by a grinning Mexican who occasionally popped his head through the door from the kitchen to see how business was progressing.
It was good but beginning to fall off as the hours slid towards midnight. When Edge had entered there had been perhaps twenty men and women scattered around the fifteen tables. But he took his time, relishing the inch thick steak, the beans and deep fried potatoes, savoring the apple pie with thick fresh cream, only sipping the hot, sweet coffee. Gradually the diners finished their meals, paid their checks and left, treating the waitress named Gail with courtesy, which she acknowledged with gentle smiles and invitations to return to Honey’s.
The restaurant was situated in mid-town Peaceville and appeared to draw its custom from both areas. But there was something about the standard of the food, the friendliness of its service, the eastern decor of checkered tablecloths, elegant cutlery and fine china that created an atmosphere in which good manners became a matter of course to all those that entered.
“Who’s Honey?” Edge asked as Gail closed the door behind a departing, middle-aged couple, and he and the waitress were alone in the dining room.
She flashed her gentle smile. “The cook and the owner,” she answered brightly, nodding towards the kitchen door. “He has some unpronounceable Mexican name that has a bit in the middle that sounds like Honey. People started to call him that and it stuck. You new in town?”
She arched her eyebrows and looked at Edge with unashamed interest. He wondered momentarily if he should feel flattered, decided she was the kind of woman who would be interested in everybody and everything.
“New tonight. Heading for Warlock and didn’t know I’d arrived ‘til the Sheriff told me you’d changed the name.”
She laughed, a light, tinkling sound. “Nice thought, wasn’t it? The war being over like it is. Trouble is, not much has changed except some signs. Most of the people just used it as an excuse to throw a weeklong celebration. You’ve arrived for the tail end.” Her expression dulled into distaste. “You missed three shootings and an attempted lynching and so many fights nobody kept tally.”
“Add one more,” Edge told her, handed her his cup and indicated more coffee.
She filled the cup to the brim from a jug, unsurprised by his revelation. The meal had calmed Edge, the good food nudging him into a mood of quietude that relaxed his body and face, so the girl saw him simply as a tired, travel stained man with nothing on his mind but the prospect of a long rest, with time for maybe a little conversation. She sat down at an adjacent table.
“It’s a good town,” she said with feeling. “There are a lot of decent, hard working people in Peaceville who hope it will live up to its name. And at this end, it mostly does.”
She sighed and Edge felt a stirring of desire as he watched her breasts rise and fall.
“But you get the trouble makers in here as well as peaceable folk?”
She nodded and smiled again. “Yes, we do. But they behave themselves in the restaurant. Sheriff Peacock sees to that.”
Now it was Edge’s turn to show surprise, and it drew another smile, lighting up Gail’s regular features.”
“I take it you’ve met him. He tries to have a word with every stranger who rides in. He may seem a bad choice for authority, but he’s right for this town. He recognizes the need for what’s downtown and so he lets it be. Any trouble up this end and he shows how mean he can be. We respect him and they fear him–most of them.” Gail yawned. “Excuse me,” she said as the cook peered outside again and heaved a sigh when he saw the restaurant was almost empty.
“We close after this gentleman has left, Honey,” he said.
Edge finished his coffee at a swallow and stood. “How much do I owe?”
“Dollar, sir.”
Edge gave her two. “Obliged. It was worth double, so I’ll pay double.”
“You don’t have to ...” she began, but Edge had put on his hat and reached the door in three long strides.
“That’s a mean looking man,” Honey said as the door bang
ed shut.
“Oh no!” Gail exclaimed, staring at where the lace frill on the door still swayed from the sudden movement. “That’s a man, Honey.”
Honey shrugged as he untied his apron, muttering: “Women.”
Out on the street the subject of this short disagreement was heading towards where Peaceville was showing no sign at all of giving into the thickening darkness of night, the noise and light raucous and blazing, as if throwing out challenges to the insistent demands of the passing of time. Edge sensed the steely stare of Sheriff Peacock upon him as he unhitched his horse from in front of the New York Hotel and led her along to the livery stable.
The man inside was very old, perhaps as much as eighty years, which was a considerable achievement in that part of the country. He sat cross legged on the straw littered floor, using a hay bale as a table on which he was playing himself a two-handed game of five card draw. All the stalls seemed taken and he looked up without enthusiasm at the prospect of new business.
“Filled right up, mister,” he said, showing a toothless mouth, the loose skin of his cheeks rippling as he spoke.
“How much do you charge?” Edge asked.
“Fifty cents a night, feed and water. When I got room. I ain’t though.”
“I figure you can find it for two dollars,” came the reply.
“He, he,” the man giggled, getting to his feet with remarkable agility for one so old. “Rich men I like.”
He held out a hand for the reins and Edge gave them to him. The man stood quietly as Edge removed the saddle, swung it over a peg on the wall. Then the horse was led to the back of the stable, persuaded gently into a vacant stall. The man returned and held out a hand again, this time for money. Edge slapped a dollar bill into it. The man’s expression showed irritation.
“You said two dollars, mister.”
Edge grinned his icy grin. “And you said fifty cents when you got room. You got room. I want my change.”
The man’s expression became ugly with rage. “I could lame that horse of your, mister,” he spat out.
Edge’s hand flashed to his back appeared brandishing the knife. His voice hissed low. “If that horse ain’t fed and watered and fit to ride when I want it, you won’t have any hands to play poker with.”
The man’s rage withered under Edge’s steady gaze and he suddenly dug a hand into his pocket, came out with some loose change and dropped a great deal through fumbling fingers as he counted out fifty cents.”
Edge put the money away and slid the knife into its sheath. “Obliged,” he said, and moved to the rear of the stable.
“What you doing?” the man demanded, failing to get any authority into his voice.
“Looking,” Edge said.
He had to investigate six stalls before a grunt of discovery revealed his success. Then he went into four more and each time found what he expected to. Each of the five horses stood quietly, calmed by the gentle touch of Edge’s hand on their backs as he stooped to examine the brands seared into their hind quarters. In each case it was identical, a simple, ‘J&J’ with no border.
“You recognize that, mister?” the old man asked nervously as Edge peered over the wall of a stall at the last horse Edge had examined.
Edge nodded. “Stands for Josiah and Jamie,” he said absently, hardly realizing he had spoken aloud as his expression seemed to melt from pensiveness to nothing and then reform into a look of terrible hatred.
The man shrunk back into the shadows as Edge pushed out of the stall, a directness of purpose in his long strides as he made for the door. There was just the sound of his footfalls on the ground, and the jingle of spilt change as his boots trod among it, scattering it. But then a volley of shots rang out and Edge’s hand streaked to his holster, came up with the Remington leveled.
As the old man gasped at the speed of the draw Edge took a final stride to the door and stuck his head out. He saw Gail and Honey turn from fastening the restaurant door and stare down the street. He followed the direction of their claimed attention and saw a crowd milling in front of the hotel, the numbers swelling as he watched. The saloon piano belted out a few more notes, sounding far in the distance, then the player hesitated, struck another chord and stopped.
“They got the sheriff,” a man called excitedly and Gail and Honey started to run towards the activity.
Edge took off after them.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THERE was upwards of fifty people outside the hotel when Edge got there, formed into a wide half-circle facing the sheriff’s office. Mean-faced bounty hunters, frightened saloon and dancehall girls, grim-faced citizens of stature and their shocked wives. There was even a group of three children, two boys and a girl who looked on in wide-eyed amazement. All attention was focused on the sheriff’s office, its windows smashed, door swinging open. The only sound as the audience held its breath in anticipation of what was the come was the faint, regular creaking of the sheriff’s rocker as, empty, it dipped and tipped with the momentum of its recent occupant.
Then the crowd let out its breath in a single rush of escape, the sound magnified by the silence to the height of a sudden gust of prairie wind. Sheriff Peacock had appeared in the doorway of his office, legs apart, arms stretched out so that he could rest his hands around the doorframe to either side. His elderly face, etched with the experience of so many hard, bitter years in the far west, seemed to be set in a position of repose. It was an expression, which took no account of a big patch of blood in the center of his shirt-front, which spread wider as he stood there, like an orator wondering how to begin his address to the waiting, expectant audience.
“Sheriff,” somebody said from the rear of the crowd and the wounded man seemed to recognize the voice, accept it as an invitation to emerge.
He took three normal strides across the sidewalk, but as he stared directly ahead, seeming to search above the heads of the crowd for the man who had spoken his name, he was unaware that he had reached the edge. His foot at the end of the fourth stride found only thin air and he seemed to hang, unmoving in the off-balance position for several seconds before falling forward to land in a heap at the side of the dusty street.
Not a soul moved to his aid as their horror-stricken attention was captured by a new movement. But one pair of eyes in the crowd stared with deeper intensity than all the others: saw the doorway of the sheriff’s office in much stark clarity that it might have been the noonday sun beating down upon the scene rather than the dull flickering light of a kerosene lamp. Edge’s eyes were narrowed to the merest slits and his teeth gleamed between lips pulled so tightly back that they seemed not to exist at all. His fingers gripped the butt of the Remington so hard that his knuckles showed white and his arm ached clear up to the shoulder socket.
Frank Forrest came out first, Colt revolver in his left hand, Spencer repeater rifle in his right. Then came Billy Seward, went to the left, next Hal Douglas to join him on that side. John Scott and Roger Bell emerged to stand on the right. They no longer wore their cavalrymen’s uniform and their faces were as overgrown with week old beards as was Edge’s. But Edge recognized each and every one as easily as if he had seen them on parade, as neatly dressed and cleanly turned out as his brand of discipline had demanded of soldiers serving under his command. Each was armed in the same way as Forrest, except for Seward, who brandished his army saber instead of a rifle.
“Frank Forrest her has got an announcement to make to the people of Peaceville,” Seward said suddenly. “You all better listen and listen good.”
“Right,” agreed Hal Douglas, his eyes roving the ring of faces. “Anyone tries to interrupt, likely he gets his head blown off.”
“We ain’t fooling,” Bell enjoined. “Listen good.”
“Good,” Scott emphasized.
Forrest waved the rifle, telling his men they had said enough and it was his turn.
“Sheriff Peacock there ...” He jabbed at the injured man with the rifle. “… he was a stupid man. He thought h
e had this town and this part of the country sewed up nice and neat. But he was wrong. He scared a lot of people, but he didn’t scare me.”
“Nor us,” Seward put in, the held his silence under Forrest’s stony gaze.
“He had nothing to back him up expecting all you people’s fear of him. You see what good that does him when his time came.”
At the rear of the crowd, standing between Gail and Honey and the old man from the livery stable, Edge watched and listened, his mind floating in a sea of hot, liquid hate that he knew would have to cool and subside before he made his move. Fury was a weapon that was unreliable, could backfire on a man and leave him easy meat in the sight of another man armed with a cool brain.
“That’s by and by,” Forrest went on, his voice dropping to an almost conversational level. “Sheriff Peacock ain’t the law in Peaceville any more. I am, and these are my deputies.” He spat onto the sidewalk. “Won’t be many changed made, far as citizens of the town is concerned. All they got to do is vote me a higher salary than Peacock had, and salaries for my deputies, of course. And any bounty hunters among you the sheriff’s take got to be higher. With all these deputies, the cost of law enforcement has gone up considerably. Ten per cent for me and five per cent each for my boys. Makes a nice round thirty per cent.”
“Screw you,” a man in the crowd said, his voice very clear.
“Too clear,” Forrest said. “Blast him.”
It was Bell who fired and it was as if the bullet had physically pushed a gap into the circle of people. In fact, they had drawn away in horror as the complaint’s forehead cracked open to gush blood in a fountain as he pitched forward. Besides Edge, Gail turned away, a hand flying to her throat as she retched, but failed to raise moisture.
“They’re tough,” the old man on the other side said with admiration.
“Like Rodge here said awhile back, we ain’t fooling,” Forrest went on easily. “So do like we say, and Peaceville will be a fun town to live in.” He transferred both guns to his left hand and held his right aloft. “I, Frank Forrest,” he intoned, “hereby appoint myself new Sheriff of Peaceville, Arizona Territory. I swear to protect its citizens and uphold the law.” He grinned around the crowd. “I ain’t sure of what the right words is but I guess that will have to do.”
Edge: The Loner (Edge series Book 1) Page 10
