Edge slammed his leading foot to the floor and brought up his other leg, knee bent. He reached forward with both hands. With the left he caught hold of Saxby’s right wrist as his right grasped a bunch of the brakeman’s hair. Then, in less than a second, Saxby was forced to vent a scream of even higher pitch as three further sources of agony exploded their message to the nerve endings in his brain.
Simultaneously, Edge wrenched the man’s right arm into a hammer lock that snapped the elbow joint and dislocated the shoulder and jerked down on the hair to smash the gaping jaw into his rising kneecap.
For a sliver of time, while Edge continued to hold his victim, Saxby’s body was rigid as carved granite. Then the half-breed released him and stepped carefully to the side, avoiding the scattered packages. The scream and the stiffness was ended then, and the brakeman crumpled to the floor in limp unconsciousness.
For another brief period, Edge used both his hands to massage his own pained kneecaps, as he felt the lines of the brutal grin reshape into an expression of compassionless impassiveness. In those few moments, memories of his week’s stay at the Palace Hotel crowded into his mind: seven days of easy living paid for by money that had come easily. An interval of peace and comfort in a life dedicated to violence - and an interlude during which he had felt nothing.
Just as he felt nothing now, looking down at the pool of blood which expanded from beneath the brakeman’s smashed face: the sluggish liquid trembling with the motion of the train. Just as he had felt nothing after killing Pearce, Fisk and the nameless gunmen outside the Oakland station building?
Maybe, but at least there had been pounding emotion in the mind behind the mask of a cruel grin while he dealt out the violence to those who threatened his survival. Enjoyment? A lower-keyed brand of the exhilaration than had gripped him during the battles of the Civil War? A self-indulgence in blood-lust?
He could not put a word or a group of words to what he experienced. He knew only that the experience itself was as essential to him as eating and drinking. And, once he acknowledged this, he could ignore some of the crazy thoughts that had invaded his mind during the crossing of San Francisco Bay. There had been no crimes in the past for which he was being punished by some Satanic superhuman creature who lived among fire and brimstone. Nor was it God who drove him along the slaughter road - as unerringly as steam power thrust the locomotive and its burden of cars on the Central Pacific track to a predetermined destination.
Edge was his own man, afraid of nothing but admitting the kind of man that had been forged out of Josiah C. Hedges. A man who had acquired a taste for danger and a relish for dealing with it: fully trained and equipped to be an expert in his field.
Jeannie Fisher . . . Beth Day . . . Jamie . . . Emma Diamond. Every man, no matter how much latent evil is inside of him, is provided with the opportunity to enjoy some of the decent things of life. And even men who are totally good suffer the accidents of losing what they cherish, by the provable law of random selection rather than the superstition of the dictates of predestination.
Ten thousand dollars would have bought a much longer interval; seventy-seven thousand an eternity. So, subconsciously or not, it had been the man himself who took the deliberate decision to abandon the goal of riches. Devilish or divine providence had played no part.
‘If I was rich, I wouldn’t be here,’ he said, speaking aloud his thoughts.
Saxby groaned, drew in a deep breath and choked on the blood that it sucked down his throat.
Edge dropped into a squat, gently eased the man’s broken arm to his side and then rolled him over. He was no longer handsome. His nose was misshapen and two of his teeth lay in the puddle of blood. The source of the crimson was his nostrils and the burst gums where the teeth had been. A great deal of blood was smeared over his lower face. More sprayed out of his mouth as he coughed.
‘Hurts, uh?’ the half-breed asked.
The larger part of the brakeman’s new ugliness was due to the contortion of his features by pain. And his face became even more grotesque when he snapped open his dark eyes - recognizing the man crouched beside him and recalling how the agony had been created. Thus, it was a glower of depthless hatred that further rearranged the lines of his punished face.
‘What the hell do you think?’ the brakeman croaked, dribbling more blood over his lower lip.
‘That you could get to hurt a lot worse, feller.’
Saxby screwed his eyes tightly shut as he tried to move his injured arm and strained against the need to vent a sound of the agony it triggered.
‘You busted my arm!’ he rasped as tears squeezed from his eyes and coursed down his cheeks to dilute the blood.
‘I know: But only in one place.’
The brakeman blinked away the tears and stared up into the lean, dark-skinned face of his tormentor. The hat brim shadowed the compassionless features from hairline to midway down the aquiline nose. But enough stray lamplight reached into the shade to set cold fire to the blue slits that were the eyes.
‘All right, mister, I get the message,’ Saxby rasped in a tone of surrender. ‘We were looking for that damn picture.’
‘Seems Craig didn’t get my message.’
The injured man shook his head. ‘You don’t have to start beating on old man Craig. You scared him real good. He didn’t want to tell me about you being in here. And he didn’t want to help me look. But he’s getting old and he’ll need his pension. Which he won’t get if I tell the right people about the way he drinks on duty.’
‘Why, feller?’
Saxby arranged his bloodied lips into a sneer. ‘Because the C.P. don’t like their—’
‘Why were you looking for the picture?’
The sneer remained in place. ‘A quarter of what it’s worth gotta be better than the lousy job I got, for Christsake!’
‘You know somebody who’ll pay that much?’
‘Not somebody, mister. But I know the name of the insurance company that’s covering it over this trip. It was in the Frisco papers. And I figured they’d pay a quarter of a million at least.’ He scowled. ‘That sure turned out to be one lousy idea.’
‘We all get them,’ Edge muttered as he stood up, picking up the Winchester from the floor.
‘Mister!’ the brakeman called. ‘I can’t move. My arm hurts real bad and it feels like I’m bleeding from my privates. You’ll get help for me?’
‘What’d you ever do for me, feller?’ the half-breed countered flatly.
Saxby’s face went blank with shock for a moment. Then he gulped hard and reached up his good hand. ‘I told you what you wanted to know, didn’t I?’ he implored.
‘I figure you told me the truth,’ Edge corrected. ‘But I’m obliged to you for that’
Despite his pain, the brakeman managed to express his relief with a blood-stained imitation of a smile. ‘Then you’ll make sure somebody comes to take care of me? It’s my arm hurts the worst.’ He swallowed hard as new tears oozed from the corners of his pain-filled eyes.
The half-breed curled back his lips and vented a low whistle through the grinning teeth. ‘You sure do ask for all kinds of breaks, don’t you?’ he growled as he turned towards the door.
Chapter Seven
The rain let up while the train made a stop at the Sacramento depot, but the wind continued to blow in constantly veering gusts from the north and northwest, so that as Edge moved slowly along the platform and back again, droplets of water were periodically showered at him from the roof of the station building. Timbers creaked against the hiss of steam from the locomotive and outside lamps swayed, enlarging and reducing areas of shadow.
After the burst of hectic activity immediately following the train’s arrival, the slow-moving half-breed had the length of wooden platform to himself. A dozen short-haul passengers from Oakland had left the train and five men had boarded, in two groups of two and three. The pair of city-garbed men looked like drummers and, Edge guessed, were probably the insurance company d
etectives Drew Grover said would-be boarding at Sacramento. It was impossible to see what the other three new passengers wore under their ankle-length, buttoned-to-the-throat raincoats. But there were Stetson hats on their heads, the brims shadowing grimly-set faces in which the eyes were set like pieces of shiny rock. And, when a gust of wind pressed the loose-fitting coats to them, the waterproof material contoured holstered six-guns.
Edge had time for his leg-stretching stroll because the halt at Sacramento was longer than scheduled - the delay caused by the need to bring a replacement brakeman to the train. The half-breed was standing nonchalantly beside the Pullman steps when an anxious dispatcher was summoned to the baggage car by the even more anxious Craig. He was thus able to overhear Saxby and the conductor back each other’s story that the brakeman was injured accidentally through a sudden shift in the car’s freight.
Craig helped Saxby down from the car and both rail men eyed the apparently indifferent half-breed with an odd mixture of animosity, fear and pleading as they followed the disgruntled dispatcher into the station. Edge had acknowledged his tacit approval of their complicity with an almost imperceptible inclination of his head.
Then he retraced his footsteps to the front of the train again, to swing up on to the platform of the car immediately behind the tender as the new brakeman climbed aboard the brake van and the conductor yelled that the express was about to depart.
With the Winchester sloped casually to his shoulder, he remained on the platform as the train slid away from the station, moving from one side to the other to look along the gently rolling cars. Not until the locomotive was climbing towards top speed did he push open the door and enter the car, sure that the men in raincoats, the detectives and the new brakeman were the only ones to board at Sacramento.
‘Shut that damn door!’ a man growled sullenly as a blast of cold air accompanied Edge into the car, causing the two low-wick lamps to sway on their ceiling brackets.
‘You say something, feller?’ Edge asked of the scowling man, who sat on a forward-facing wooden seat beside a woman, both of them wrapped in blankets. They were in their early thirties, haggard-faced and disheveled, their feet resting on battered cardboard suitcases.
When they saw the harsh set of the half-breed’s shadowed face, the woman laid a restraining hand on the man’s wrist. And the man made his own expression less aggressive.
‘It’s cold enough already in here, mister,’ the weary traveler supplemented, with a whine in his tone. ‘And my wife’s sick.’
‘We all got problems,’ Edge muttered as he started down the car aisle. ‘One of mine was getting inside from outside.’
There were three other couples in the unheated car: a pair of youngsters with a baby in the woman’s arms, and the others middle-aged. Two city-suited men - one youthful and the other an old-timer - sat on either side of the car, each clutching a samples case. Towards the rear, as far as it was possible to get from his nearest fellow-passenger, was a preacher. All of them were using either blankets or top-coats to keep themselves warm. And all of them, with the exception of the preacher, eyed the passing half-breed with a degree of nervousness as he moved the length of the swaying car.
‘It is natural for a man to be concerned about his wife when she is sick, my son,’ the preacher said solemnly as Edge approached him.
Only the starched, reversed collar at his throat gave the man any resemblance to the preacher who had spoken of fire and brimstone in the small Iowa church so many years ago. But Edge was able to raise a cold grin with a glint of triumph for this short, thin, hollow-cheeked padre.
‘Save it for Sunday, feller,’ he said.
The Lord’s gospel may be preached upon any day, my son,’ the man of the cloth responded with equanimity. ‘And it is my belief that His word needs to be heard outside the physical church even more than inside.’
‘Which word is that?’ Edge asked flatly.
‘Perhaps, on this occasion, charity?’
Edge had reached the door close to where the preacher sat. ‘That’s supposed to begin at home, feller,’ he answered with a hand on the knob. ‘Which is where a man should keep his sick wife.’
The preacher made a sound of exasperation. ‘How on earth can you make such a judgment without knowing the circumstances in which—’
Edge jerked open the door and the padre cut himself off in mid-sentence, admitting defeat against the sudden burst of louder noise and the back of the exiting half-breed.
‘Why bother with his kind?’ the elderly drummer called with a sneering grimace after the door had banged closed on the noise, cold and Edge.
The preacher stared up at the moving shadows on the ceiling, as if seeking help with, his response from a greater authority. ‘It is my vocation to save souls, my son,’ he said at length. ‘And my desire to save lives. To save such a soul as that of the man who has just left would, I think, result in the saving of many lives.’
‘No chance,’ one of the middle-aged husbands called vehemently.
The preacher sighed. ‘I saw him for only a few moments, but I think you are right. Like all of us, he is a child of God, but he is beyond salvation.’
Edge moved along the centre aisle of the second car in the train, as convinced as the perceptive preacher about his fate, but no longer considering the reasons for his allotted place in the order of things. He merely surveyed the seven men and one woman in the car, viewing them only as passengers who might feel they had to kill him to get the da Vinci painting. He made no assumptions.
The three men who had boarded at Sacramento still wore their raincoats, now as protection against the interior cold instead of the outside weather. They sat close to one of the lamps, which was turned up to full brightness, playing poker with no money on the spare seat of two facing pairs which they used as a table. Each of them glanced at the casually patrolling Edge with total indifference. They were all in their mid-twenties.
Two men faced each other further down the car, apparently sleeping under hats tipped forward over their faces. A man in his fifties who looked to be part Indian sat across the aisle from these two. He stared stoically out of the window. There was nothing to see except a dark reflection of the car’s interior, but the uninteresting view continued to hold his attention as the tall, lean, impassive stranger passed by.
The seventh man was travelling with the woman. Like the two passengers who slept, they sat on facing seats. He was a good-looking boy of about eighteen with down on his face that glistened faintly in the fringe of light from the other end of the car. She was beyond forty and a kind of down-at-heel imitation of Madeline Grover. Pretty in her youth, she was now attempting to combat the damaging effect of the passing years with an over-abundance of paint and powder. The boy bore no hint of family resemblance to her. But he responded much like a disgruntled son when, with a stern look, the woman warned him against saying something to Edge.
The half-breed again crossed from one swaying platform to another and this time the wind that tugged at his shirt and tried to tear the hat from his head was spotted with new rain. The warmth from the stove in the Pullman sleeper made his chilled cheeks tingle and caused his lips to curl back in a mild grin of pleasure.
The curtains down the aisle on both sides were all drawn. He used his free hand to slightly part each pair of curtains as he made his way down the length of the car. Close to the stove he saw two young children - a boy and a girl - sleeping peacefully in their berths. Zane Yancy breathed deeply without snoring in another. A third had the linen rumpled, but it was empty. A soft word of endearment by a man and a woman’s sigh sounded from another as the half-breed was reaching out a hand to part the curtains.
Then the door at the rear of the car swung open. Edge tensed himself, poised to bring up his free hand and slam the Winchester barrel down into it. But it was only the squint-eyed conductor, carrying a bundle of logs for the stove. The uniformed rail man kicked the door closed behind him.
‘I have to keep the
heat up,’ he explained in an apologetic tone.
The glow from around the stove lid was the only source of light in the Pullman. It gleamed in reflection on the half-breed’s teeth. The captain and his wife are already having a pretty hot time, feller,’ he answered.
The bearded cavalry captain whom Edge had seen come aboard in Oakland with his wife and two children pushed his head out between the curtains. Anger and embarrassment did battle on his angular features. ‘What’s the trouble?’ he demanded, eyes raking from Edge to the conductor and back again.
‘No trouble, sir,’ the conductor assured.
‘No law says married people have to practice berth control,’ Edge muttered as he moved past the railroad man to head for the rear door of the car.
‘What’s that?’ the captain snapped, his tone indicating he was demanding a repetition of the remark rather than an explanation of it.
‘Sounds like something a feller should use on every conceivable occasion,’ the half-breed answered evenly as he let himself out into the cold night again.
The rain which was flung into his face felt like tiny lances of ice: perhaps only in contrast to the stove-heated atmosphere in the sleeper. But his sixth sense for danger drove the irrelevant thought from his mind as he pushed open the door to the Pullman day coach. For a moment a fresh wave of warmth flowed over him, then was beaten back by the stream of bitingly cold air rushing in from behind him.
This is Mr. Hammer,’ Spade called from where he sat beside the stove.
The man he waved towards was sitting stiffly in the chair Edge had occupied during most of the trip from Oakland. He was short and built on square lines suggestive of a compact strength. There was also a squarish look to his head, due largely to the shape of his jaw in combination with the way his black hair was cropped short. At first glance he seemed to be about twenty-five.
But another brief, harder look showed eyes that were a great deal older than this - perhaps only in respect of experience beyond his years. Blue-green in color they dominated the clean-shaven face and robbed it of its otherwise basic handsomeness.
Edge: Slaughter Road (Edge series Book 22) Page 9
