Edge: Slaughter Road (Edge series Book 22)

by George G. Gilman

  Table of Contents

  Credits

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Other titles in the EDGE series

  Slaughter Road

  By George G. Gilman

  First Published by Kindle 2013

  Copyright © 2013 by George G. Gilman

  First Kindle Edition July 2013

  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 © 2013.

  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 A.F

  Who started in the east but saw the light further west.

  Chapter One

  The tall man looked down from the large window of his top floor room in San Francisco’s Palace Hotel and grimaced. Seven storeys below him Market Street bustled with the traffic of noon. The window was cracked open and the noise, heat and smell of the city wafted into the plushly furnished room. The noise was raucous, the heat was high and the smell was unpleasant. But this was not the cause of the man’s displeasure; it merely contributed to the mood that had taken charge of his reactions at the moment he awakened.

  That had been a few moments ago, when he discovered himself sprawled on top of the bedcovers: fully dressed except for his hat, coat and gunbelt. Last night’s whiskey had turned to acid in his stomach and countless cigarettes were a burning memory seared into the back of his throat. When he swung his feet to the floor the muscles in his legs threatened not to support his weight. A brutal kneading with his knuckles removed the grit of sleep from under his eyelids, but it required an unsteady walk to the window to clear the blur from his vision. At the window, with its spectacular view of the city skyline and heat-hazed ocean beyond, a singing in his ears blotted out all other sounds for a few moments and he was in danger of losing his equilibrium.

  He pushed the window open wider and gripped the frame. The sound inside his skull finished and he could balance himself without support again. Bile, made even more bitter by the flavor of stale whiskey, rose up his parched throat and flooded into his dry mouth. The grimace took a firmer grip on his face, then he pursed his lips and spat noisily out through the window. If anyone far below was hit by the saliva and howled a protest, the cry was lost amid all the other noises. Or perhaps the moisture spattered on the sun-baked sidewalk to be instantly evaporated.

  The man called Edge neither knew nor cared as he turned away from the open window and rasped the back of a brown-skinned hand over his thickly bristled jaw. Moisture had made the bad taste in his mouth worse, his stomach had begun to churn, there was a painful pounding behind his forehead and fresh sweat was oozing from every pore in his body - to activate the evil smell that was latent in the salty beads which had dried on his flesh while he slept.

  He sat on the side of the rumpled bed, took the makings from a pocket of his sweat-and-dirt stiffened shirt and rolled and lit a cigarette. At first, the assault of smoke threatened to erupt nausea from his self-abused insides. But, by the time the cigarette was reduced to the smallest butt, it had produced the desired effect. His hangover was still uncomfortable, but its most distasteful effects had been dulled.

  The tub of water he had ordered sent up last night stood in a corner of the room, beside a ladder-back chair over which his gunbelt, hat and coat were hung. There was a neatly folded towel and a block of soap on a nearby mirrored chest of drawers.

  The grimace, only slightly softened after the cigarette, did not; disappear entirely until he had stripped to near-nakedness and lowered his punished body into the crystal clear water filling the zinc tub. It felt ice cold against his burning flesh for a moment, then pleasantly tepid. He allowed himself a half smile of enjoyment as he soaped his face, torso and arms. Then his features became impassive as he rinsed off the lather.

  Just one item of apparel kept the man in the tub from being totally nude. This was a leather thong hung around his neck, threaded with dull colored beads and supporting a pouch at the back. When he had cleansed his body, he drew from the pouch a wooden-handled straight razor with a point honed as sharp as the edge of the blade. He re-lathered his face and shaved with expert speed. There was no mirror within his range of vision, yet the razor did not alter the line of the moustache which drooped to either side of his mouth.

  By the time the bathe and shave were complete most of the ill effects of the late night drinking session had gone.

  And he felt better still after stepping from the tub and vigorously toweling himself dry.

  It was then that the chambermaid came into the room, without knocking. She was humming cheerfully to herself as she pushed a trolley loaded with fresh bed linen. Edge was midway to the bed, where he had heaped his discarded clothing. The maid, who was in her early thirties and an unpretty redhead, interrupted her tune and pulled up short. She threw her hands to her cheeks and her violet eyes bulged with shock as she stared at the naked man.

  ‘Oh, my God!’ she exclaimed, her face turning crimson from the roots of her hair to the point of her chin.

  Edge halted, turned towards her, glanced down at his exposed genitals, then spread another half smile across his lower face as he looked back at the maid. ‘Different people worship different things, ma’am,’ he allowed lightly.

  She whirled to put her back towards him. ‘I mean … I was told … you shouldn’t… I didn’t know there was anyone in the room, mister.’

  Edge continued on his way to the bed and started to don his red long johns. ‘Won’t be in five minutes,’ he told her.

  She explored behind her with her hands, found the trolley and began to haul it back into the corridor. ‘It’s past noon. Guests that are leavin’ should be outta the rooms by midday. That’s a rule of the hotel, mister.’

  ‘Ought to be a rule about not serving guests enough liquor to get hangovers,’ he told her, pushing his legs into his pants.

  On the threshold, she chanced another look towards him and breathed a sigh of relief when she saw he was decently covered. The high color faded from her face and she showed tight-lipped annoyance. ‘That ain’t no concern of mine, mister. How am I supposed to get my work finished up if guests don’t do like they’re supposed to?’

  Edge shrugged into his shirt. He was already sweating again and the unlaundered clothing had begun to give off a stale smell. His enjoyment of the tub was rapidly becoming a jaded memory. ‘You said it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That ain’t no concern of mine.’

  The maid seemed about to give further voice to her rising irritation. But then her fiery eyes met the ice-cold gaze in those of the man: and she dragged the trolley clear and slammed the door.

  ‘Know how you feel, ma’am,’ Edge growled, and finished dressing.

  His clothing was at odds with the elegant surroundings of the expensive hotel room, in an establishment that was rightly c
laimed to be the most luxurious west of the Mississippi: denim pants and jacket of faded blue which were stained and torn; a black shirt that showed similar signs of long and hard wear; a grey kerchief that matched the color of his wide-brimmed, low-crowned hat; scuffed black riding boots worn under the cuffs of the pants, spurless and down at the heels; around his waist a good quality but ageing gun-belt slotted with shells, with a holster tied down to the right thigh;, in the holster a .45 Navy Colt

  After he had set the Stetson on his head, he went to a curtained alcove to one side of the canopied bed and took out a Winchester 40/44, a saddle and a bedroll. The rifle and gear had seen more better days than his clothes.

  The man himself had seen most of all.

  At first impression the man called Edge might have been any age from thirty to forty, depending upon the set of his features or perhaps the way the light struck his face. Similarly, his face could be considered either handsome or ugly, this decision resting upon the taste of the beholder.

  It was a long, lean face stained to a rich dark brown by heritage and exposure to the extremes of weather. Initially, the skin had been colored by the blood passed on by a Mexican father. The jet blackness of his hair, which was worn at shoulder length, was derived from the same fountainhead. Likewise the high cheekbones and hawk-like nose. But the thin mouth, firm jaw line and clear blue eyes had been inherited from a Scandinavian mother.

  In his youth, before his name had been pared down to Edge from Josiah C. Hedges, these features drawn from a coupling of two races had been undeniably handsome. But during the intervening years much else besides the name had changed. Through a long and cruel war and a longer and in many ways more cruel peace, a boy had been forged by bitter experience into a man. And there were some who might argue that the process had been taken a step further - the man assuming certain characteristics and instincts that placed him dangerously close to being a wild animal in human form.

  The chambermaid had seen something of this aspect of him a few minutes ago, although she probably had not recognized it for what it was. She had simply seen a man who could grin personably without injecting the light of humor into his eyes: then, an instant later and without a batting of the lids, emanate from those same eyes a look that was so cold it seemed to chill the air around him. And this only because she had complained he should not be in his room after midday.

  As he strolled easily along the marble-walled corridor now, Winchester canted to his right shoulder and gear draped over his other arm, the maid emerged from another room and stood looking after him until he turned an angle to start down the stairway.

  He looked a fine figure of a man from a distance, rising to six feet three inches she guessed and weighing close to a muscular two hundred pounds. Now that he was out of sight, she could recall his nakedness without flushing and she began to hum softly again as she trundled her trolley towards the room door he had left open.

  Working as a chambermaid in such a large hotel, the sight of an undraped male form was not new to her. But seldom had she seen such a well-proportioned body as that of Edge. Lean and solid, almost as dark in hue as his face, except for patches of livid scar tissue over old wounds at his left shoulder and thigh and right hip.

  As she entered the room, which still smelt faintly of the man’s presence, the maid sensed a stirring of sexual arousal in her loins and at the summits of her small breasts. It had been more than a year since her husband left her to ship out aboard a clipper from the bay and she had not given herself to a man in all that time. There had been opportunity enough in her line of work, but she had always chosen to evade the advances of amorous guests.

  The man who had occupied this room had made no such advances and yet, as she recalled the dark-skinned, powerfully built, bullet-scarred body she colored up again: this time embarrassed by her own brazen thoughts and the responses they triggered within her. But then her mind visualized again the totally compassionless look in the ice-blue eyes, set in a face etched with countless lines - every one of which seemed carved to further warn of the latent cruelty that lurked just beneath the surface of the man. Each line added by a bitter experience and each experience making the man who suffered it harder, more ruthless and possessed of a greater evil than before.

  That was how it seemed to the maid as she began to strip the bed and was gripped by a sudden tremor in the summer heat of a San Francisco afternoon. In that instant of imagined chill, she was close to understanding the kind of man Edge had become. Then she put him out of her mind, considering that she was lucky to have done no more than trade ill-tempered words with him.

  The Palace Hotel had rope lifts but Edge chose to walk down the stairs as part of the same therapy that had started with a spit from the window and progressed to a soak in the zinc tub. And when he reached the bustling, noise-filled lobby there was just a feeling of mild weariness behind his eyes, for all the other delayed reactions to his prolonged drinking bout had been drained from his head and body.

  His height, build and countenance always caused him to stand out in any crowd: but dressed as he was and carrying the rifle and gear he cut an incongruous figure as he ambled across the luxuriously appointed hotel lobby, peopled otherwise with wealthy men and their ladies attired more in keeping with their city surroundings. But he had been staying at the Palace for seven days without ever attempting to merge into the ornate background: thus, most of the staff and many of the other guests were accustomed to seeing the tall half-breed who steadfastly refused to abide by the conventions of dressing to suit the occasion. There had been some complaints by the easily offended, but they had never reached the ears of Edge. For other members of the hotel staff had reached the same conclusion about him as the redheaded chambermaid - without the need to trade words with him while he suffered a hangover. So the complaints had been countered with the argument that Edge paid his bills and caused no trouble.

  So those who raised their eyebrows and called surreptitious attention towards the easily moving form of Edge as he approached the large reception desk were people who had not seen him before. Either new guests, or non-residents who had come in off the sweltering streets of the city - to enjoy the cool shade of the hotel’s lofty, marble-walled public rooms.

  ‘I hear you lost, Mr. Edge?’

  ‘We are very sorry when we hear this, Mr. Edge.’

  The half-breed halted at the desk and smiled wanly at the two Chinese bellboys who were eyeing him morosely as they stood to rigid attention, waiting for a new chore.

  ‘I was a big tipper, uh?’ he asked.

  The two bellboys, who looked like identical twins of fifteen or sixteen, nodded in unison and grinned broadly. ‘When you are rich, everyone is rich,’ the one on the left announced.

  ‘But we already spend money you give us,’ his partner added hurriedly.

  The captain banged his bell and both the Chinese expressed relief and scuttled away.

  ‘It’s okay, feller,’ Edge said to the nearest of the half-dozen clerks behind the desk. ‘If I spread some of my good luck your way, I don’t want to get it back.’

  The other clerks were busy, making out bills and answering queries for more conventional patrons of the luxury hotel. The middle-aged, bespectacled man Edge spoke to obviously wished that he was previously engaged. He approached tentatively, chewing his lower lip, and took a two-handed grip on the polished top of the long desk.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘One question.’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘Did I pay what I owed last night?’

  There was no need to check the accounts. The clerk nodded emphatically. ‘Yes, sir. That you did.’

  Edge nodded then, with less vigor. ‘Obliged.’

  ‘It has been our pleasure to be of service to you, sir,’ the clerk answered, smiling as the nervousness drained out of him. ‘And may I say how much I admire you, sir?’

  Edge had been about to turn away from the desk. He halted the move and eyed the clerk q
uizzically. ‘For what?’

  The neatly dressed man on the other side of the desk became nervous again. Sweat ran down his neck to add grey stains to his starched white collar. ‘The manner in which you accepted such a large loss, sir.’ He cleared his throat to get the croak out of his voice. ‘You do recall what happened, sir?’

  Edge had suffered hangovers before. Many of them had brought effects far worse than the one he had awakened to this morning. So it was not entirely the churning in his belly, taste in his mouth and pounding in his head that caused the disgust with himself. Rather, it was because there was a period of several hours when he had been awake but which he could not recall. That was something which he had experienced only once before - after the brutally tragic death of his wife. He could not excuse himself that lapse, but time had taught him to forgive it on the grounds of the circumstances.

  ‘A poker game in the bar,’ he told the clerk. With five local fellers. Same ones I’ve been playing with all week.’

  The highest-stake players in the city, I’m told, sir.’

  The half-breed nodded, glancing around the busy lobby. It was becoming more crowded by the minute as people came in out of the galleried Grand Court. The pair of Chinese bellboys had been taken off their usual duties to help organize a line of fashionably dressed men and women outside the firmly closed doors of the Grand Ballroom.

  ‘What I came here to find,’ Edge said. ‘Had four hundred bucks or so when I checked in. Got it up to eight thousand and some by the time the game started last night.’

  The clerk nodded. ‘I know, sir. I took the money out of the safe for you myself. You insisted upon paying your bill and said you intended to stop playing when you had won ten thousand, sir.’

  The well-heeled people gathering at the entrance to the ballroom were obviously not used to being shepherded into an orderly line, albeit with discreet politeness by the Chinese bellboys and other members of the hotel staff.