EDGE: Death Drive (Edge series Book 27)

by George G. Gilman

  Table of Contents

  Death Drive

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  George G. Gilman’s

  Hard-Driving Edge

  ‘One other thing, feller,’ Edge said before the Mexican could speak. ‘You gave your word to stick around so long as I stayed with the outfit. I figure a man who breaks his word ain’t worth nothing more than a bullet.

  Lacalle’s anger broke surface as he whirled to glower at the calm soft spoken half-breed. ‘How can a man like you set store in honor?’ he snarled. ‘A man who can cut the throat of another while holding a gun on him?’

  ‘I am what I am. And I ain’t either proud or ashamed of it … anymore. You’ll go all the way, feller,’ the half-breed said. ‘Or stay right here. As buzzard meat.’

  DEATH DRIVE

  By George G. Gilman

  First Published by Kindle 2014

  Copyright © 2013 by George G. Gilman

  First Kindle Edition February 2014

  Names, Characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  Cover Design and illustrations by West World Designs © 2014. http://westworlddesigns.webs.com

  This is a High Plains Western for Lobo Publications.

  Cover Illustration by Cody Wells.

  Visit the author at: www.gggandpcs.proboards.com

  For C.E.

  A New Hand From

  The Man With No Name Territory

  Chapter One

  THE cantina smelled of bad cooking, spilled liquor, old tobacco smoke, the sweat of unwashed bodies and—strongest of all—the human waste rotting in the latrine out back. The midday heat which oozed in through the open front and rear doorways was absorbed by the malodorous atmosphere trapped between the adobe walls and added to it yet another pungent stench: that of three thousand head of cattle penned in the stockyards on the east side of town.

  One of the trio of men who stepped out of the harsh glare of sunlight into the rancid shade showed no response to the evil odors which at once assaulted his nostrils. While the two who trailed him grimaced—almost as if their sense of smell triggered a stab of pain—and pulled up short on the threshold.

  ‘Christ Almighty, Barney, this place reeks worse than a sewer!’

  He was the oldest of the three, close to sixty with graying and thinning hair that produced enough dandruff to sprinkle his shoulders like snow. He was short and heavily built, his weight problem caused by the ravages of good living. His face was round with soft, curved features. In younger years, perhaps they had been angular which would have made him handsome. Today, though, he was merely a short, fat man moving ungracefully out of middle towards old age.

  ‘And it’s hotter than hell itself!’

  The man who rasped this and waved a hand vigorously in front of his face was in his late twenties—a younger, taller and leaner version of the first speaker. Leaner only because he was six feet tall, so that the fat of over-indulgence was more evenly distributed on his frame. His hair was black and thicker, slicked down across the head in the same neatly clipped style as that of his father. He was good looking in a weak, almost characterless way: for already his face had fleshed out to conceal the bone structure.

  Both men had green eyes which emanated disdain with the ease of long experience. Both had complexions of painful red from being exposed to strong sunlight after a long time of living beyond the reach of the elements. Both wore Western outfits of riding boots, Levi’s, checked shirts, kerchiefs and Stetsons: every item of their apparel stiff with store-bought newness except where patches of sweat staining showed.

  ‘Then I figure we’ve come to the right place,’ Barney answered, his Texas drawl sounding very pronounced after the cultured, Eastern accents of the other two. ‘On account that sewer rats and hellions are the only kinda guys we’re likely to get to work for us.’

  He had come to a halt just inside the cantina and, as he spoke, without looking back at the doorway, he displayed an expression of disgust. But it was obviously his reaction to the occupants of the place rather than to any aspect of their surroundings. He, too, was dressed in workaday Western clothes: but it was a long time since they had been new and he had done a great deal of hard work in them. He carried a battered leather valise.

  He was forty and matched the older man’s height of five feet six inches. But there was no excess fat on his broad shoulders and wide chest. His shirt and Levi’s clung tight to solid, muscular flesh. The skin which was stretched taut over the bones of his face was dark .brown, scarred deep by lines from exposure to the harsher side of life. His teeth were also brown, staining heavier by the moment as he chewed a wad of tobacco. His eyes were coal black, dulled by sourness, as he raked them over the squalid scene in front of him.

  ‘Buenas tardes, Americanos! You wanna drink to make the day not seem so hot, uh? You come to the best place in town. We serve only the best!’

  ‘To the worst people, looks like,’ Barney snarled in response to the cheerful greeting of the beaming bartender.

  The fat, leather-aproned, middle-aged man simply gave a shrug of resignation and assumed his former look of concentration as he watched the mating antics of two roaches on the floor between his bare feet. Everyone else in the cantina appeared equally unmoved by Barney’s insult.

  A dozen of the customers were Mexicans, aged from ten to eighty. A boy was seated on the floor by a door which gave on to the kitchen. After it became obvious the newcomers did not want food, he resumed his study of a man across the room from where he sat. An old-timer held an almost empty beer glass and stared morosely at the flat dregs in the bottom: wanting desperately to drink but deterred by the prospect of having none left at all. The rest were vaqueros. Five slept, perhaps drunk or maybe merely weary of the heat: all snored. Four more played a card game without stakes while another watched. All these had empty shot glasses close at hand and there was a pot of salt in the centre of their table.

  The man who was watched by the boy was not a Mexican. Although there was certainly a look of the Latin about him, Barney and the other two newcomers noted, when he tilted his hat up from his face and eyed the doorway bleakly.

  ‘You got a bad mouth, feller,’ he said lazily and there was no trace of Mexican in his accent. Rather, his voice placed his origins in the Midwest.

  Barney’s scowl deepened as he glanced away from the American to make a second survey of the other customers. ‘I’m known for it, mister,’ he rasped, ‘But there’s good money waitin’ for men willin’ to listen to it from here to Laramie,’

  The card game came to an abrupt end. The non-player woke up one of the sleeping men and nodded towards Barney, ‘Dinero,’ he said sharply.

  And the others instantly jerked out of sleep. They were disorientated for a moment, but then realized their attention should be focused on the three men in the doorway. The bar tender continued to study the roaches, the old-timer to stare into his near empty glass and the boy to watch the
American who so obviously had some Mexican blood in his veins. This man remained slumped low in a chair with arms, far enough back from a table so that he could rest his feet comfortably on its top. Ever since he had pushed his hat off his face and on to his head as he responded to Barney, he had been slowly rolling a cigarette: his elbows braced on the stock and barrel of a Winchester rifle which rested on the chair arms.

  ‘Just for listening, feller?’ he asked after licking the gummed edge of the paper.

  Barney vented a wet grunt of irritation at the interruption which came just as he was gaining the attention of his audience.

  He spat a stream of brown tobacco juice to the floor. ‘For drivin’ a herd of prime longhorns. You’ll get the bad mouth every time you screw up what I’ll tell you to do. And if you ain’t interested, mister, best you shut up so as I can talk to men who are.’

  He looked briefly at the Mexican-American again, but saw little of the face through the cloud of expelled tobacco smoke from the newly lit cigarette.

  ‘Go ahead, feller. But the only mistake that’s been made so far was by you. So best you keep it polite from here on in.’

  It was apparent that Barney was a man with a short temper. But he managed to contain an impulse to show it and merely sighed before replying—his dull, dark eyes swinging across the eagerly interested faces of the Mexicans. ‘From here on into Laramie, Mr. Taggart is ready to pay a hundred bucks a man a week. That sound polite enough for you, mister?’

  Several of the Mexicans gasped their surprise, then blurted out their excitement to each other. Barney, still sullen, shifted his dull-eyed gaze to the man with his feet up on the table. The cigarette had been lowered from the mouth now and he saw the man’s face clearly for the first time.

  ‘It sounds like a lot of money for the worst, feller,’ the man answered as the Mexicans quietened.

  The elder of the Easterners cleared his throat as, like Barney, he did a double take and realized he had received a wrong first impression of the man with the Winchester. ‘It’s the kind of day that encourages ill-temper, sir,’ he said with an attempt at a placating smile. ‘And I’m afraid Mr. Tait is not the most tactful of men at the best of times. If you would care to…’

  ‘Come on, Dad!’ his son cut in irritably, batting his hand more vigorously in front of his face. ‘Let’s leave Barney to sign up those that want to work for us. At the rates we’re paying, we don’t have to beg.’

  The father regarded his son with scornful patience, then sighed as he returned his attention to the man lounging in the chair across the cantina. ‘Ezekiel is also inclined to be rather quarrelsome in this awful heat,’ he offered apologetically. ‘And I have to admit that I have difficulty in abiding by the civilities on occasions.’

  He licked his lips, anxious that his apology should be accepted. His son was still petulant. Barney Tait was enduring a slow burning feeling, uncomfortably conscious that there was a more important reason than the presence of his boss which forced him to keep his feelings under control.

  ‘It figures you people are always looking to pick fights,’ the man allowed evenly as he swung his feet down from the table and eased lazily upright from the chair. Then he canted the Winchester to his right shoulder and curled back his lips to show a quiet grin in response to the quizzical looks directed at him. ‘Seeing as how you’re in the beef business.’

  The boy laughed. ‘That was very funny, señor,’ he called as the man moved between tables and chairs to approach the doorway to the street.

  Others, with the exception of the preoccupied bartender and the old Mexican contemplating his glass, reacted to the abrupt lessening of tension without words or even smiles. While Ezekiel Taggart, directly in the path of the man nearing the door, only now became aware of a feeling much stronger than mere discomfort in the heat and stink of the cantina. And he swallowed hard as he sidestepped to leave the exit clear.

  Just as others had been a few moments before, the young Easterner attired in his brand new Western garb was receiving a second impression of the man. And what he saw triggered an unnerving sense of dread in his mind.

  The man moving across the evil-smelling cantina in a loose-limbed, casual gait was exceptionally tall, three inches above six feet. He was at once heavy, yet lean, his two hundred pounds molded in blatantly masculine proportions to his lanky frame. It was the physique of a superbly fit man in his mid to late thirties, providing an odd contrast with his face, which seemed to be that of a man several years older. It was a long, lean face with clearly defined features, most prominent of which were the eyes—light blue and piercing, permanently narrowed beneath hooded lids. The nose, flanked by high cheekbones, had a hawk like quality. The lips were long and thin above a firm, jutting jaw. His skin was dark brown, deeply inscribed with the furrows of the passing years. The hair which fell from under the brim of his hat to touch his shoulders and top of his back was jet black.

  His dress was subdued and lacked affectation. A straw sombrero and black denim pants. A gray shirt and kerchief. Spurless riding boots. Around his waist, a gun belt with a low-slung holster tied down to the thigh. There was a Remington revolver in the holster and spare shells were slotted into every loop of the belt.

  All this could be seen in a first, indifferent glance at the man. It might also be noted that, when he was freshly shaved, he wore a moustache, for the bristles of more than forty-eight hours sprouted longer and thicker above his top lip and around the sides of his mouth down on to his jaw. And the more perceptive were also likely to discern clues to his mixed blood—the color of his hair and skin inherited from a Latin parent while the blueness of his eyes was undoubtedly drawn from a north-era European heritage. The rest of his features were the result of a harmonious amalgam of the two bloodlines.

  The whole was perhaps handsome, perhaps forbidding—depending upon how one responded to latent cruelty and a capacity to meet evil with like. Behind the veneer of calm nonchalance these qualities of the man’s character were easily seen by anybody who chose to study him with more than mild interest.

  The Mexicans in the cantina had all seen this before the three newcomers appeared. But only the young boy who waited on tables had sensed something about the lone American which was more deeply concealed.

  Barney Tait and the elder Taggart had also recognized early the subtle signs—visible in the cold blue eyes and set of the thin lips—that this was a man different to most others.

  Now the other Taggart received a true impression of the man, and the sweat standing out on his sun-reddened face and staining his new clothes felt suddenly icy—as if frozen by the cold power that came from the glinting eyes.

  ‘You’re not interested in a job then?’ he asked hurriedly, no longer stirring the hot, stinking air in front of his face.

  ‘Sure I’m interested, feller. But for a hundred dollars a week I figure I’d have to know more about beef than that I like my steaks well done.’

  Then he was gone, stepping across the threshold and out on to the broad, dusty street under the harsh glare of early afternoon sun. Taking in a deep breath through flared nostrils but smelling only cows and wood smoke—failing to draw any hint of freshness from the three hundred feet wide Rio Grande which flowed sluggishly past the back lots of the buildings across the street.

  ‘Man, that’s one mean sonofabitch!’ Barney Tait rasped through tightly clenched teeth as soon as the footfalls of the man had receded from earshot.

  ‘You won’t ever say anything truer than that, Mr. Tait,’ Ezekiel Taggart murmured, and took his hat from where it hung down his back, to use it for a fan as his sweat lost its icy feel.

  His father ignored both men to survey the eager Mexicans with distaste. ‘Anybody here know who that man is?’ he demanded, his tone harsh with authority.

  There were shrugs and blank faces. Then the young boy rose to speak, but the bartender replied first, as he dropped a bare heel on the roaches and ground them to a pulp against the dirt floor,


  ‘The Americano, he come to town this morning, señor. He had only dinero for one tortilla and beer. He says little. Sleeps or maybe does not sleep until you come.’

  He had finished and he lifted his foot to study the pulp that had once been a pair of mating roaches.

  ‘He is one sad hombre, señors,’ the boy added with a frown and in a melancholy tone. ‘When I say, why is this? he tells me I remind him of somebody.’

  The elder Taggart shook his head, dissatisfied with the information, Then he swept a hand across the front of his body to encompass the cantina. ‘If this is the best we can get, sign up all those who want a job, Barney,’ he instructed tersely. ‘I’ve got business elsewhere.’

  He spun on his heels and strode outside, reaching over his shoulders to grasp his hat and jam it hard on his head. His son hurried to catch up with him.

  ‘What business, Dad?’ he asked wearily, eyeing the whole length of the hot, dusty, squalid street with grim distaste.

  ‘Hiring him, boy!’ his father growled resolutely, pointing a pudgy finger out of a tight fist towards the familiar tall man leading a horse from a livery stable. Ezekiel opened his mouth to protest, but his father abruptly stepped away from him and shouted: ‘Hey, you there! I have a proposition for you!’

  The man had swung up into the saddle of his black gelding, not sliding the rifle into its boot until he was mounted. There was nobody else on the street and when he had ridden his horse across to where the Taggarts stood they formed a close-knit group in a seemingly deserted world.

  The rider looked down at the two red-faced men, his eyes glinting slits of blue under the shade of the sombrero brim. The butt of his almost smoked cigarette was angled at the corner of his thin mouth.

  ‘I hear you’re broke,’ Taggart said, having to struggle against the impulse to resent the mounted man’s tacit arrogance.

  ‘Bad news always travels fast,’ came the even-voiced reply.

  ‘A hundred and fifty dollars a week. And you don’t have to know a thing about herding cows. Just how to keep men from trying to stop the drive north.’