‘Uncle, don’t argue against your own case,’ Orlando urged nervously.
This interruption by his godson did not anger the older man. ‘If the whole truth is not told, then a lie is implied, my boy,’ he explained. ‘So I tell Edge everything so that he is in full possession of all the facts before he makes up his mind. More facts, more truths. If he killed us, who will know? My nigger servants. Mario and Rico. Will he kill these, too? Or leave the servants to free Mario and Rico who will spread the news of our deaths? So he kills all of these? That whore you brought here so foolishly in the belief that she would help appease my anger? Is she dead, or will she have to be killed? I am a businessman with many interests. I receive reports from these interests. People will come and our bodies will be found. It is well-known that this man called Edge thinks he has reason to kill me.’
A shrug of the broad shoulders. ‘Perhaps I exaggerated the truth. Perhaps he will live to see one more sunrise. But most certainly just one. He will be dead before that sun sets.’ He had been looking at the half-breed but responding to Orlando’s comment. Now he spoke pointedly to Edge: ‘Your decision?’
Emilio Marlon’s judgment had been good and soundly based upon the fact that Edge had not crashed into the room shooting. For ever since the blond haired youngster with crooked teeth had blasted the wrong man in the bar of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, there had been a doubt in the mind of the half-breed about who was ultimately responsible for the murder attempt that went wrong. The man who hired only smartly-dressed, smoothly-groomed Italians with guns in shoulder holsters and methods designed to attract the least attention from outsiders? Or an eager-beaver, anxious-to-impress kid-after-his-time who used a trigger-happy bad shot and two brawn-without-brains knifemen?
Now he was sure, for there was no option but to believe Marlon. But if he believed that part, he also had to believe the threat which the older man had so calmly spoken.
‘A contract which has no need to be written and signed,’ Marlon urged. ‘Provided the words exchanged are true. For instance, that you have not damaged my ... interests more than I know of and you have admitted.’
Edge nodded at Orlando. ‘Shot a couple of people at one of his places. Cat house called the Silver Lady Bar on Park...’
‘Fay!’ Orlando blurted, pushing down with his hands on the arms of the chair. ‘Have you hurt my…’
He powered erect and launched into an enraged charge across the room, fists clenched at the ends of swinging arms, face contorted by a mixture of anxiety and anger.
‘Don’t be crazy, boy!’ Marlon snarled, and had to fight against the pain of age-stiffened limbs to get to his feet. Then he realized there was nothing he could do or say to halt the reckless move of his godson. And his eyes became filled with pathetic pleading as they swung to fix upon the impassive face of Edge.
The Remington was still aimed at Orlando, until the moment the almost hysterical man was close enough to swing two wild punches. Then it was pulled up and to the side, became a short club as the barrel was laid across the nape of Orlando’s neck. Edge having slid fast along the wall and folded away from it just as his attacker came to an unbalanced halt and turned to try to re-direct the blows. The gun hit the man hard enough to stun him and to crash his head against the wall, this second impact driving his brain into unconsciousness. He fell into an untidy heap at the angle of the wall and the floor.
Emilio Marlon sank back into the depths of his chair with a long sigh of relief and squeezed his eyes tight shut for stretched seconds. When he opened them they showed a hard expression.
‘If you killed that slut of his who runs the bordello, I can’t guarantee Luigi will keep his part of the bargain.’
‘Bruised her a little is all.’
‘So who did you shoot that you neglected to mention before, cowboy?’
‘We were talking about men that time.’
Marlon looked surprised. ‘Two of Fancy Fay’s whores?’
‘Couple of men’s men, feller.’
The man sucked a final drop of brandy from his balloon, then shook his head. ‘That boy certainly does get mixed up with some strange people. But he’s my dead sister’s son. The only blood relation I have left. I have to look out for him.’ He had been staring down into his empty glass. Now he looked up suddenly and seemed to be embarrassed, as if he realized he had spoken aloud thoughts he would rather have kept private. ‘We have a deal, Edge?’
The half-breed had been holding the Remington loosely at his side since he cracked it against the head of Orlando. Now he slid it into the holster. ‘If we didn’t, your only relation would be spilling some of that family blood now, feller.’
‘So get out of here, cowboy! And if you have the guts to report back to that nigger Black, you tell him I hold him responsible for all the trouble you’ve caused. And that he’ll pay for it. Sooner rather than later.’
Again Edge played it the way the government man wanted it to the extent of not enlightening Marlon about his relationship - or lack of it - with the Negro. Instead, he held aside a billowing curtain and stepped over the sill and out of the room into the ocean smelling darkness beyond.
‘Mathilda!’ Emilio Marlon yelled. ‘Get in here and be quick! Luigi’s been hurt!’
‘But he’ll live,’ the half-breed told. Mario and Rico as the two men aimed their retrieved rifles across the gravel area at the front of the house.
They had taken their time to put their pants back on, but even across a distance of several yards and with the breeze blowing freshly off the nearby ocean, Edge could smell that the Italians had not cleaned off the Winchesters after taking them from the trench in the latrine. But it was hatred for the man in the rifle sights rather than the stench of the weapons which molded the features of their faces into matching expressions of brutal evil.
The taller and more thick set Rico had to speak soft, calming words to still his partner’s finger on the trigger. Then called: ‘Capo! We can finish him now!’
Edge did not turn around as he heard footfalls in the room behind him. The fast, light tread of women running. And the slow, heavy steps of an arthritic man. A little more light fell out of the broken window across the half-breed as the net curtain was jerked aside.
‘Your apologies for bodyguards allowed him to enter my house!’ Marlon said, his voice taut with controlled anger. ‘And I was forced to give him my word I would allow him to leave!’
Their expressions suddenly chastened, Mario and Rico allowed the rifles to sag, the stocks still against their shoulders but the muzzles aimed at the ground.
‘Either of you fellers ever point a gun at me again, squeeze the trigger,’ Edge said tautly. ‘An unfriendly warning.’
‘Not like that, woman!’ Marlon snarled as he released the curtain and turned painfully to take over the tending of his godson’s bruised head. ‘I’ll do it. Clean up the broken glass! You fools out there! Come inside and get rid of the corpses!’
With their boss otherwise engaged, the two hapless men on the lawn had started to glower their hatred toward the half-breed again, perhaps not even hearing what he said to them as their emotions expanded, made more powerful by frustration and the knowledge that others of their kind were newly dead.
‘One of the advantages of being self-employed,’ Edge said as the tension eased out of him. Tension aroused when the slime-covered rifles were aimed at him and his life had depended entirely upon whether or not Emilio Marlon was a man of his word. ‘Man can make his own decisions about who to kill.’
Mario rasped a soft-spoken insult in his native tongue.
Rico injected a tone of embittered scorn into his voice to counter Edge’s cynical claim. ‘You did not kill those you came here to…’
‘Get in here, I said!’ Marlon snarled.
‘But best leave the rifles outside,’ the half-breed advised sourly as the two men moved to obey the command. ‘Figure I already raised enough of a stink in there.’
CHAPTER NINE
THE black-haired whore was waiting where Edge had told her but did not emerge from the stand of sycamores until he had dropped and stepped on the cigarette he was smoking and called out her name. Then she approached him nervously, leading the rented gelding, still not bothering to hold together the two sides of her torn bodice.
‘What happened?’ she asked in an awed whisper. ‘I heard some shots, didn’t I?’
The half-breed swung up into the saddle and then freed a stirrup and offered an arm for her to cling to so she could climb up and sit astride behind him.
‘It was them or me, ma’am,’ he told her, heeling the horse into an easy walk along the dirt road.
‘Mr. Marlon and Lu?’ she gasped. And held him more tightly around the waist, pressing her near naked breasts and the side of her face hard against his back. She sounded both afraid and excited.
‘No.’
‘Didn’t nothin’ happen to you?’
‘Nothing to speak of.’
‘Won’t they come after you?’
‘If they do, you’re between me and them.’
She caught her breath and snapped her head around to look back toward the gateway in the high wall. Then she laughed. ‘But they won’t. Mr. Marlon give you his word, didn’t he? Way you ain’t in no hurry is proof of that. And when Mr. Marlon gives you his word, he don’t never break it. He’s famous for that. A real mean bastard in everythin’ else, but he don’t never go back on a promise.’
‘I already got that message.’
Well, I was just tellin’ you…’
‘Ma’am,’
‘Yeah?’
‘I’m a man who keeps his word, too. Sometimes I like to keep all of them. To myself.’
‘You don’t wanna talk, uh?’
‘Like I said, nothing happened to speak of.’
‘Pardon me for livin’,’ she growled sullenly.
‘No sweat. If you can get to like the quiet life.’
After that, there was just the steady clop of the gelding’s hooves to disturb the peace of the dark night which would probably have been warm had it not been for the chill air pushing gently in off the ocean. Briefly, Edge reflected on his actions and reactions at the Marlon mansion and reached the conclusion that he had done the right thing. Not for Boss Black who was owed nothing anyway. Not for Mason Dickens, but what had the lanky newspaperman done to deserve a favor? And not for Lincoln, who had made a promise he would not now have to keep. But for himself. He had backed off for the very good reason that he wanted to go on living. And he believed what Emilio Marlon had warned about the consequences of more shooting at the house. And immunity from the lethal wrath of every Italian in New York who carried a short-barrel Colt in a shoulder holster was a better deal than amnesty on an ancient murder charge.
Edge curtailed this line of thinking, tried to push it out of his mind but knew this was not possible. The memories of the events which took place and the words which had been exchanged at the Marlon mansion would remain in the dark recesses at the back of his mind. To emerge into the forefront of his consciousness at the most unexpected of times, a constant reminder that he had accepted a compromise to save his own skin, and then had sought to do something which was as impossible as blotting it out of his mind. He had tried to rationalize it.
Glinting lights pinpricked the darkness ahead to mark out the position of St. George and the whore relaxed the tightness of her encircling grip around the half-breed’s waist.
‘You’re city and hate the country, uh?’ he asked.
Without needing to look back at her, he knew the sound of his voice after a long silence had surprised the woman.
93
‘Yeah. Oh, yeah. Damn right, mister. Opposite for you, I guess, You comin’ from…’
‘Iowa,’ he put in.
‘I was gonna say the wide open spaces.’
‘Figured you might say from Texas.’
‘Hell, no. You don’t talk the way them Texans do. Bunch of them come into the Silver Lady awhile back. Cowpunchers.’
‘You being a whore, is everything from Texas bigger and better?’
She snorted. ‘Men are men, mister. Somethin’ about my John wasn’t big, though. And that was his friggin’ heart. Had his thirty minutes of fun and when I ask for the twenty bucks it was like I’d asked for a hundred and twenty. Said that anywhere in Texas he could screw a whore to hell and back for a quarter than much.’
‘Could be,’ Edge replied as he steered the gelding along the alley and out on to the street in front of the darkened livery stable. ‘Hell ain’t too far from anywhere in Texas.’
He reined in and swung a leg over the neck of the horse to dismount. Then, as he reached up to help down the woman, he received an unobstructed view of the complete half orbs of her breasts, the torn dress gaping with the forward cant of her body. She smiled her gratitude and then the expression became professionally sensual
‘It’s ten cents for the ferry fare, mister. So I ain’t about to charge Silver Lady prices.’
He delved a hand into a pants pocket to bring out some coins as he gripped the bridle of the gelding. He gave her two nickels. ‘For holding my horse back there, ma’am.’
His tone was as icy as the glint in his narrowed eyes: his manner far removed from what it had been while they talked over the last few yards of the ride from the Marlon house.
‘Man, you sure blow hot and cold, don’t you?’ she snarled as he raised the latch on the livery door. ‘Way I see it, a man who kills guys ain’t got no reason to lord it over a woman who sells herself to them!’
‘You’re right.’
‘So what the hell?’
‘So ships in the night, ma’am,’ Edge called softy from inside the livery as he unsaddled the gelding.
‘Who the hell are you?’ Belle asked, abruptly switching her irritation with the man inside the livery toward somebody out on the street.
‘Friend of Mr. Edge.’
The half-breed dropped his hand away from the butt of the holstered Remington as he recognized the voice of Lincoln.
‘He’s got friends?’ the woman said sarcastically.
‘He do that to you?’ Lincoln posed, pointing to the torn dress as Edge emerged from the stable and closed the door behind him.
‘No, mister,’ she retorted, and glared meanly at the half-breed before she whirled and flounced across the street. ‘All he wanted me for was to hold his damn horse,’ she trailed after her.
‘How did you make out at the Marlon place?’ the government man asked anxiously, moving away from the store front where he had been waiting for Edge to return.
‘Guess you could say I held my own, feller,’ the half-breed replied, and grinned bleakly in the wake of the scorned whore.
‘You do what I asked?’ Lincoln demanded, grim faced, and hurried to catch up with Edge who had started out across the street.
‘Didn’t tell them I wasn’t on Black’s payroll.’
‘Tell who?’
‘Marlon and Orlando.’
‘You didn’t kill either one of them?’
‘Couple of Marlon’s boys is all.’
‘And the Capo let you ride away from there with one of his godson’s whores?’ Lincoln was not quite sure if he was getting straight answers or if the tall, lean Westerner was working up to another joke.
‘He kicked out Belle before I got to the house, feller. We made a deal. Orlando’s life for mine.’
‘Deal? How? Why?’ The government man was getting angry, the emotion acting to add to his breathlessness as he had to half run to keep pace with the lazily walking half-breed.
‘Marlon doesn’t want the kind of wholesale shoot-out you’re trying to engineer. He was willing to blame Orlando for me killing his men. If I’d call it quits and not kill anymore. Especially not kill Orlando.’
“What about our deal?’ Lincoln demanded. ‘The amnesty I offered to...’
‘Did I agree, feller?’
‘Not in so many words,
but…’
They had reached the ferry slip as the Manhattan-bound boat sirened the intention to leave. Edge spurted away from Lincoln to buy a ticket from the booth and reach the gangway before it could be hauled in. So that the government man had to give chase again, after yelling at the ticket seller to hand over the cardboard suitcase left in his care. The short, flabby man was panting worse than ever as he leapt aboard and waddled over to where the half-breed stood at a deck rail, rolling a cigarette.
‘You’re a double-dealing sonofabitch, mister!’ he snarled through clenched teeth.
Edge waited until he had rolled and lit the cigarette before he turned his head to look away from the slickly dark surface of the water and down into the scowling face of Lincoln. At first glance his own features seemed set in an expression of repose. But on closer inspection the mouthline with the cigarette angled from one end was formed into a vicious thinness and the threaded glints in the almost closed eyes were piercingly menacing through the rising tobacco smoke.
‘You going to arrest me for that Kansas killing, feller?’
Lincoln flinched, as if each word rasped through the near lipless mouth was something palpable and pointed, stabbing into the flesh of his face. ‘Of course not,’ he blurted.
‘Uncle Sam got a whole bunch of city dude gunslingers around this town looking to collect the reward on me?’
‘You know not.’ Then his mood brightened. ‘Hey, you had to say yes to the deal to save your skin. But now you’re in the clear we can approach it from a different angle.’
‘Word for word, feller.’
‘What you had in mind?’ Lincoln could even grin now, as Edge released him from the trap of the hooded eyes to peer out over the water again.
‘No,’ came the response with a shake of the head. ‘Marlon gave me his word. I gave him mine.’
‘Then may you hang in Kansas!’ the government man snarled, spun on his heels and stormed into the cabin.
‘However it happens, there has to be a better place to go than here,’ the half-breed growled, looking balefully toward the approaching lights in the closely packed buildings at the lower tip of Manhattan island.
EDGE: WAITING FOR A TRAIN (Edge series Book 30) Page 10
