‘Miss Lassiter and me used to get on real fine. Used to call me Uncle Wesley. You remember that?’
‘Yeah, I remember,’ Ben confirmed, his own self-confidence beginning to wane. ‘You want a belt?’
‘Sure.’
‘Here you are. Take a belt and then keep your mouth buttoned!’
His voice was harsh as he worked to mask his true feelings. In the crystal clear purity of the mountain air Edge could hear the glug of liquor passing down Wes’s throat.
‘That’s enough, frig it!’ Ben snarled, and snatched back the bottle just as Edge chanced a brief look toward the two men.
‘I...’
‘And I told you to button it!’ Ben cut in. He took a gulp from the bottle himself before capping it and thrusting it into a deep pocket of his long coat.
The progress of the buggy could be heard then—compacting snow beneath hooves and wheel rims and the creaking of springs and timber.
‘Jesus, do I want to crap,’ Wes rasped.
‘Think of somethin’ else, damnit!’ his partner commanded.
‘Uncle Wesley? Is that you, Uncle Wesley?’
The girl’s voice was shrill—whether with the excitement of pleasure or nervousness it was impossible to tell.
‘Yeah, Miss Lassiter, it’s me all right.’
Wes’s tone was thick, as if the words had to be forced through something wet and sticky blocking his throat.
‘And Ben? Ben Buel?’
The taller man waited until the buggy had been brought to a halt before he replied: ‘Right again, miss. And the guy with you is the one you wrote your Pa about?’
When he had first seen it in the white distance, Edge had been unable to tell how many people had been aboard the buggy. Now he leaned forward to chance another look diagonally along the street.
The cut-under buggy had been halted with the dappled grey gelding twenty feet in front of Ben Buel and Wes. On the padded seat in the cold shade of the roof were a young couple in their early twenties. They were encased in thick coats buttoned to the throat and with the collars turned up. A heavy blanket draped their knees. From his brief glimpse of them, Edge got an impression of a soon to be beautiful blonde haired girl and a young man with the handsome features and shaded coloration of a Mexican. The girl had been happy to see old friends but this emotion was just beginning to be replaced by another. Her companion looked as if the expression of fear had been frozen on to his face by the first frost of the Wyoming winter.
‘Yes, this is Joe. Joe Redeker. I’m real glad Dad got my letter and sent you out to meet us. What with the snow I guess it’s not easy to reach home. I’ve been telling Joe all about the place and he’s real anxious to see it. He’ll be a great help...’
‘Forget it, Maria,’ Joe interrupted the too fast, too shrill gushing words of the girl. ‘Seems I’ve got somethin’ else to be real anxious about now.’
His voice belied his looks. The American he spoke was not accented, sounding the same mid-Western drawl as when Edge talked.
‘We’re actin’ on your Pa’s orders, miss,’ Buel said quickly as Maria Lassiter vented a sound between a gasp and a scream. ‘He said for us to kill your beau.’
‘And you know us hands have to do everythin’ the boss says,’ Wes pleaded.
‘Button it, for Christsake!’ Buel used anger to mask his true feelings again. ‘Go help her down and take her inside the store. She don’t have to watch this.’
‘Sure, Ben!’
Wes was eager, grasping the opportunity to be away from the centre of the scene when the murder took place.
Edge peered outside again: watching for longer than before. The shorter Wes had already crunched snow as far as the side of the horse and was extending his hands in preparation to assist the girl down from the buggy. But she had made no move to co-operate—rather, was pressing herself hard against the back of the padded seat. Her posture emphasized the pregnant hump contoured by the shared blanket.
At her side, the freezing effect of fear was transmitted from Redeker’s dark brown face to his body and limbs. He sat like a waxen figure, the reins still firmly clenched in his gloved hands. Then his eyes began to move, switching from one side of the sockets to the other to apportion the reason for his fear equally between the goggled men.
‘Ain’t nothin’ personal, kid,’ Buel offered coldly, controlling his reluctance and mouthing the excuse simply to fill the hard, taut silence. ‘But the boss is mighty angry that you...’
‘No!’ the girl exploded, and snatched her right hand out from under the blanket. Then, in a further flurry of movement, she leaned forward—out of the shade of the buggy’s roof. Like Redeker, she wore gloves. Of thin buckskin that did not hamper her actions as she cocked the hammer of a Frontier Colt and curled a finger to the trigger.
Wes froze, his arms extended. Ben Buel grunted and drew a revolver that was a match for the one in the girl’s hand.
But her gun did not threaten either man. Instead, she raised it to her head and pressed the muzzle tight to her right temple.
‘Sonofabitch!’ Buel snarled.
‘What’ll we do, Ben?’ Wes croaked.
Redeker was able to move. To turn his head and see the cause of the men’s dismay. His own fear deepened. ‘Maria!’ he cried.
Edge continued to watch the centre street tableau with glinting-eyed coldness: feeling not the slightest inclination to break the stalemate which existed. If he experienced anything at all it was merely a mild irritation with the quartet out in the snow—that through no fault of their own they were delaying his departure from the ghost town.
‘Let them explain my death as well as yours, Joe!’ the girl said shrilly. ‘Without you, I don’t want to live. And the baby...’
‘Don’t be a fool, Miss Lassiter!’ Buel cut in. A note of desperation crept into his voice. ‘Your Pa told us he’s ready to forgive and forget what you done. Hell, he might even let you keep the kid.’
His Colt maintained a rock steady aim on Redeker, as certain of its target as was the similar gun in the girl’s hand.
‘Put up your gun and the both of you mount your horses and go back to the ranch,’ Maria Lassiter instructed. She had come up from the depthless chasm of terror and had a tight grip on ice-cold composure. Her mind was made up and was shuttered to everything except the decision it had taken. ‘Joe will take me someplace else to have my baby. My father need never know of this meeting. Or … he’ll know you stood by and allowed me to blow out my brains.’
‘Sure, Ben!’ Wes said eagerly after stretched seconds of heavy silence. ‘We can hang around a while. Then head back. The boss don’t have to know…’
‘Will he agree, too?’ Joe Redeker asked. Hopelessly.
As Wes began to voice his enthusiastic agreement with the girl’s plan, Redeker had made to shift his eyes from the taller to the shorter man. But he was distracted by something on the periphery of his vision. And did a double take to find his gaze trapped by the glinting slivers of the half-breed’s impassive eyes.
The girl looked in the direction of the boy’s nod and just for an instant the sight of Edge’s sunlit head and shoulders above the tops of the batwings threatened a tremor of nervousness that could have tightened her finger against the trigger.
But the movements of others trapped her into immobility inside a capsule of horrified fascination.
The two men on the ground snapped their heads around to show their inhuman-like goggled faces to Edge.
‘Who...?’ Wes croaked.
‘Sonofabitch!’ his partner added—and kicked his right foot against the snow to power a turn of his body. His arm and gun hand swung at a greater speed. ‘Get him!’
Wes continued to be slower in his reactions. Actually had to claw twice before his right hand fastened on the butt of his revolver and drew it from the holster.
Edge could have stepped back into the cover of the saloon. There to shout his intention of not mixing in on other people’s business.
But the intention so blatantly displayed on Ben Buel’s half-concealed face caused the half-breed to instantly reject retreat. Buel meant to kill him—had compounded the sin by calling upon Wes to abet him. The intention was a reflex to instinct, triggered by the desire to survive against an unexpected danger. Which might have been regretted and forgotten had Edge backed off and used his voice. But Edge saw only the pulled back lips and snarling teeth of the present. Then the black hole of the Colt muzzle. And himself responded instinctively to the present threat without further attempt to project events into the future,
So he stepped forward, his right knee pushing open one of the batwing doors. The Remington came clear of his holster with the hammer cocked. And he squeezed the trigger the instant the gun was leveled at its target.
Buel took the bullet in the chest, left of centre. His teeth sprang apart to give vent to a growl of dismay. Blood oozed from the bullet hole in his coat and blossomed into an enlarging stain. As his right arm sagged and his fingers released their hold on the Colt, he tried to stagger backwards. But the snow was too deep and his legs did not have the strength to drag themselves through it. He sat down hard on his rump. His teeth clenched tightly together again.
‘Sonofabitch,’ he said in a tone of surprise. And died, his body and head flopping forward. The rapidly receding heat of his corpse melted a little snow and his folded-over form sank an inch or so before it became totally inert.
Edge heard the final word of the dying man but did not watch the death. As soon as the gun had fell from Buel’s grasp, the half-breed had directed his unblinking eyes and his freshly cocked Remington toward Wes.
The shorter of the Lassiter hands was in the grip of a paroxysm of shaking. But he still held on to his Colt and Buel’s dying curse caused a more violent shudder which squeezed his finger against the trigger. The bullet hissed a hole through the snow ten feet away from Wes’s toecaps.
A third shot sounded like an instantaneous echo of the second. And Wes vomited a great splash of spittle-run blood across the snow. Then he coughed and the damaging bullet rolled over his lower lip and became lodged in the knot of the scarf tied under his chin. The cough was powered by Wes’s final breath and he crumpled limply into death, not quite covering the scarlet mess he had made on the snow. There was very little blood around the small hole in the hairless nape of his neck.
It was Joe Redeker who had fired the killing shot, having snatched the Colt from the unresponsive girl while she was still spellbound by the horror of seeing Buel die.
‘Don’t, feller,’ Edge urged softly as he stepped through the batwings on to the snow.
‘What?’ the boy asked thickly. He looked suddenly very sick.
‘Point that gun at me. I kill people who do that. Warn them first, if there’s the time.’
Redeker looked down at the Colt in his left hand. He was in the process of swinging it to cover the tall, lean man at the saloon entrance. But then he pulled his arm in towards his body and allowed the revolver to drop on to the shared blanket.
‘Who are you?’ Maria Lassiter asked, enunciating her words with great care, as if she was unsure of what they would be until she had heard them.
‘Edge.’ He touched the brim of his hat.
‘Maria and me are indebted to you, Mr. Edge,’ the boy offered, his voice sounding more normal.
The half-breed shook his head as he holstered the Remington. ‘When it happened it was just between him and me. You benefited. It didn’t cost me anything.’
‘When I asked who you were, I didn’t just mean your name.’ Like Redeker, she was making a fast recovery from shock.
The boy took her hand and held on to it tightly. She allowed him to do this, seemingly because she was unaware of the contact. Her brown eyes, which offered the strongest promise of beauty to come, remained firmly focused upon the bristled features of the half-breed.
‘Leave it, Maria. Let’s just thank our lucky stars he was here.’ Redeker shifted his intent gaze from the ardently interested expression of the girl to the totally dispassionate face of Edge. ‘No matter what you say, mister, we’re beholden to you.’
The half-breed acknowledged this with a nod.
‘You don’t know my father?’ Maria Lassiter asked, reluctant to do as Redeker had suggested.
‘No.’
‘Nor Buel or Wesley Young?’ She was prepared for another negative response and was already set to disbelieve it.
‘That’s right.’
‘Then why?’ she demanded. ‘Why did you kill Buel? And you’d have shot Uncle … Young if Joe hadn’t done it.’
She didn’t like what she was saying—was afraid of the implications. Her youthful face expressed a keen desire to be given an explanation she could both understand and approve of.
Redeker was afraid again, fearful the undemonstrative half-breed would read the accusation in the girl’s words and respond to it with renewed violence.
Edge pursed his lips and rasped the back of a hand over his bristled jaw. ‘I’d have to think about that,’ he said evenly.
‘You mean you don’t know why?’ the girl gasped, as the half-breed turned his back on the couple in the buggy and the corpses crumpled in the snow.
Edge halted on the threshold of the saloon, holding open the batwing doors with both hands. There was the suggestion of a smile at the upturned corners of his mouth, but the cold glitter of his eyes contradicted this. ‘I said I’d have to think about it,’ he re-iterated and his tone confirmed neither the humor of the set of his mouth nor the harshness of his eyes. ‘And I always think best when it’s quiet.’ He lowered his eyes just a fraction to direct their gaze at the distended belly of Maria Lassiter, contoured by the blanket. ‘So maybe we should have what they call a pregnant pause?’
Chapter Two
EDGE could hear them talking in low, tense tones as he hefted his gear up from the floor of the saloon, the saddle over his right shoulder and the bedroll under his left arm. When he stepped outside again they curtailed the talk and abruptly—guiltily—shifted their gazes away from the doorway, and found themselves staring fearfully at the stiffening corpses in the snow.
Then they returned to their discussion bordering on argument as he moved along the side of the saloon toward the stable at the rear. The sense of what they were saying to each other did not carry to the half-breed but it was apparent that the short, lean, muscular Redeker was trying to dissuade the pregnant girl from doing something she was determined to achieve.
Inside the stable, with the bulk of the store between himself and the young couple, he could hear nothing except the small sounds he made in saddling the black gelding and lashing on the bedroll. The horse eyed him dispiritedly in equine disapproval that the man had brought no feed.
‘It’s a tough world all over,’ Edge murmured, stroking the animal’s neck before he led him outside and along the alley to the street.
The secretive exchange had been completed and the boy had won the verbal contest. He expressed mild satisfaction while Maria suffered defeat with tight-lipped sullenness.
Nobody said anything until after the half-breed had unhitched the reins of the dead men’s stallions from the rail in front of the store. Then, as he mounted his gelding, Redeker called, ‘Mr. Edge?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Me and Maria are gonna get outta this part of the country just as fast as we can.’
‘Best it should be to where there’s a doctor, kid,’ the half-breed advised, and again looked pointedly at the blanket-contoured hump of the girl’s belly. The Colt was no longer in sight. Maria glanced fleetingly at him and her big brown eyes explicitly expressed a wish that he was also gone.
Redeker nodded shortly. ‘There should be another two weeks before the baby comes. But we aim to make Fallon long before then. By nightfall if we’re lucky. Maria says they got a doctor there.’
‘That’s fine.’ He tugged gently on the reins to head the gelding west.
The boy hurried on, lean
ing forward from the buggy seat to peer along the street in Edge’s chosen direction. ‘Like I told you, we’re beholden to you.’
‘Once would have been enough, kid.’
‘Listen to him, why don’t you!’ the girl snapped angrily.
Redeker laid a restraining hand on her forearm. But he did not look at her, his dark, anxious eyes fixed upon the half-breed’s unresponsive face. ‘Don’t think hard of her. It’s been a bad start to the day. We come all the way up from Denver, hopeful Cole Lassiter would be real pleased to see us. Only to have this happen.’
He eyed the bodies of Buel and Young with a brand of bitterness that seemed to threaten tears.
‘I just told my horse.’
Redeker blinked his confusion, looking very callow.
‘It’s a tough world all over,’ Edge amplified.
The boy nodded emphatically. ‘Around here especially,’ he warned. ‘I ain’t never met Maria’s father. But she’s told me a lot about him. None of it good. I never wanted to come. Maria did. She figured that having a grandchild due to arrive any day might change her father for the better.’
The girl uttered an unfeminine grunt of impatience. ‘He doesn’t want to hear the story of our lives, Joe!’ she chided. And fixed her disapproving eyes on Edge’s face. ‘I don’t like you, mister. And although I think I could have handled Wes Young and Ben Buel, Joe has half convinced me that you may have saved his life. What he’s trying to do now is convince you it would be better if you didn’t ride west from here. Because, if you do go that way, you’ll be on Lassiter range for at least two days. In that time my father is likely to find out two of his best hands have been killed. And strangers will be less welcome on the Bar-M spread than they usually are.’
‘Obliged,’ Edge acknowledged, and nudged the flanks of the gelding with his heels. The animal started lethargically forward, then was turned to head across the street over the snow already disturbed by the horses of Buel and Young as they entered the town.
He sensed the eyes of the young couple staring at his back. Then heard another burst of low voiced talk. This time Maria won her point.
EDGE: Eve of Evil (Edge series Book 28) Page 2
