She swallowed hard. “I think we should get off the street,” she urged.
“You should never be allowed on it,” Edge told her coldly.
She swung around to face the half-breed, her mind forming an angry insult to fling at him. But the events of the past two days caught up with her. She had not realized, until this instant, the strength of the strain under which she had been living since she had first set eyes on the man called Edge. She had always considered herself a woman with more than the average quota of common sense, able to adapt to each new circumstance with practical acceptance. But what had happened to her since she had looked up from her morning bathe and seen Edge ride around the bluff was too much for a well-brought-up woman to endure without giving way to natural feminine emotions. And because she had kept these at bay for so long, when the breaking point was reached, it was a dramatic one.
They were standing in front of the lighted window of the Cathay Restaurant and had an audience of three broadly grinning Chinese waiters.
“You filthy, rotten, stinking, cross-bred sonofabitch!” the woman screamed and flung herself at Edge, her fingers contorted into talons and her eyes gleaming with new-born tears.
As Elizabeth launched herself towards Edge he bobbed to the side and jerked back. Two rifle shots cracked together. Glass shattered and the woman screamed. One of the waiters took both bullets between the eyes and a fountain of his blood splashed across the shards of window glass in a wide arc as he fell. A second waiter’s face was transformed into a horrific pulp of pumping redness as a spray of gleaming splinters showered at him. He whirled and started to scream in a high pitch as he staggered blindly among the panicked diners.
Out on the sidewalk Pike went full-length to the rough boards and fired the Remington with his unbandaged hand, aiming into the shadowed facade of the Summer Sun newspaper office. Edge got off one shot with the Winchester before the woman crashed into him. But terror had replaced her anger and she clung to him instead of fighting him. Her tears were warm and salty on his lips as her forehead made harsh contact with his nose.
The force of her lunge knocked him backwards through the half-open door of the restaurant and she was dragged inside after him. Two more rifle shots exploded from the newspaper office and the bullets dug wood splinters out of the doorframe.
“Obliged,” Edge hissed in her ear. “You had to do something right some time, lady.”
“I ...” she started, but Edge gave her no time to finish.
She yelled at the pain as he wrenched her hands free and went into a crouch at the side of the shattered window.
“Edge?” Pike called. “I think this is your fight.”
A single shot came from across the street and Edge straightened and pumped three back before withdrawing into cover. “I didn’t ask for no help,” he answered.
A fusillade of shots cracked and glass and wood splinters skimmed over Edge’s head. Elizabeth yelled as one stung her ankle and then she scuttled towards the back of the room where the staff and patrons were huddled.
‘Well either get shot or finish off your playmates. My gun’s as empty as my stomach.’ - ‘Door’s open,” Edge told him. “So’s the window. The Chop Suey smells good.”
“It must be full of ground glass,” Pike tossed back, then flattened himself against the sidewalk as a volley of rifle fire sounded and bullets whistled over his prone body.
“So stay out there and taste the lead,” Edge yelled, rising to empty the Winchester in a burst of rapid-fire.
Pike took advantage of the covering fire to belly towards the shattered window. Then he rose up on to all fours and leapt through, sprawling across the floor beside the half-crouched figure of the half-breed.
“Add chicken to the menu,” Edge called towards the cowering group at the rear of the restaurant as he ducked back into cover and began to pump a fresh load into the Winchester.
Pike stayed on the floor, close to the grotesquely crumpled body of the dead Chinese and looked at the apparently cold expression on the face of Edge. And just as, earlier, Edge had reassessed the character of Pike, so now the smaller man reviewed his impression of the half-breed. He looked through the thin shell of coolness which cloaked the lean face like an insubstantial barrier and saw the controlled heat which burned behind. And he knew that Edge was not a cold-blooded killer. He was a professional who enjoyed his work: a man who did not really come alive until he was pointing a loaded gun in the right direction. He had to have an excuse to kill, but when the opportunity arose he was driven to take it by an inner slow-burning emotion close to ecstasy. “
“Noodles, chow mein, sweet and sour pork and beef with bamboo shoots,” the half-breed hissed at Pike as he levered a shell into the breech. “And a double portion of rice.”
“You’re going somewhere?”
Edge nodded. “But I’ll be back. And I’ll be hungry.”
He stayed down for a few more moments, until four shots had whistled in through the shattered window to thud into the wall. Then he leapt through the jagged edges of glass, the Winchester bucking in his hands. He hit the sidewalk lightly and sprang into the street. Then he ran, swerving to left and right, working the lever action and squeezing the trigger in a blur of wrist and finger movement He received a fleeting impression of a large crowd gathered against the bright lights of Solar Circle: of a face here and there -Truman impassive, the Pitt smiling in enjoyment, the drummer, Mann, scared. And he was aware of the silence which gripped the downtown area, strange because it was so completely out of character with what Summer had become.
Only the sound of the Winchester exploding in his hand shattered the peace.
Then he leapt up on to the opposite side-walk and flattened himself against the front wall of the newspaper office. Rifles cracked from inside, biting chips of wood from the glassless window frame. Edge drew the Colt and snapped off three shots into the office before drawing back and feeding more shells into the Winchester.
“You burned down my place, Edge!” a man snarled from inside.
“And treated me bad,” the liveryman yelled.
Edge curled his thin lips back further to widen his grin. The level of the angry voices told him his rush across the street had driven Chandler and Rivers into the back of the office. His hooded eyes raked across to the front of the restaurant and he saw it was rapidly emptying as the people inside were herded into the kitchen at the back. Then he looked down into Solar Circle at the silently excited crowd and could sense the massed will of the witnesses demanding he be killed.
“Times are tough all round,” Edge called into the office, glancing over his shoulder to where an alley went between the newspaper office and a hardware store.
“You won’t be living through any more,” Chandler called. “Good or bad.”
He punctuated the threat with a shot, but Edge had moved away from the side of the window. He reached the mouth of the alley on the balls of his feet and stooped down to pick up a pebble. Gently, he lobbed it into the darkness, then whirled and got back to the window as silently as he had left it. He heard the pebble glance off the side wall of the building and drop to the ground: then a sharp intake of breath from within.
“He’s goin’ around back,” the liveryman whispered fearfully.
“Come on,” Chandler urged in low key.
There was a scuffling sound from inside as the two men turned to cover an attack from the rear. Edge stepped in front of the window and fired at the noise.
He saw them in the gun Hashes. Rivers took the first shot in the shoulder and spun around, flinging aside his Spencer and gaping his mouth in a scream. Chandler caught a bullet in his hip and his Winchester went off, shattering his own foot.
Edge altered his stance, resting a shoulder against the window frame and taking careful aim with his cheek against the stock. He fired at each man in turn. Once in the groin, then in the stomach: and finally he killed them with bullets in their hearts as they writhed in the slippery pools of their own
blood. The final cracks of the rifle, ending the men’s high, thin screams, prefaced a silence that seemed to endure for an eternity and to deepen with each split-second.
“They dead?” Truman’s voice boomed from out of the crowd.
Edge struck a match and reached in through the window to light a kerosene lamp standing on a desk. His slitted eyes, like tiny lengths of waxed blue cotton in the dark brown lids, examined the still forms sprawled in the blood.
“They sure don’t look too healthy,” he replied in a normal tone. But the town was so still his voice carried to the crowd with ease.
A man broke out from the front row and hurried down August. It was the mortician in his high crowned hat and frock coat. He halted beside Edge and peered in at the blood-soaked tableau. “I’m glad you left enough of them to inter,” he said wryly.
Edge looked into the newspaper office again and tried to understand it himself. The first two shots had been blind but then he had had the men fixed. He could have finished them with one more shot each. But something had driven him to make them die the hard way.
The answer wasn’t with them. They were just a couple of trigger happy bushwhackers who had good reason to hate him. He looked down at Solar Circle, where a piano had started to jangle in The Gates of Heaven and the crowd was dispersing to pick up the action where it left off. It hadn’t been for any of them, either. They already knew that nobody tangled with Edge without being aware of the risks.
It wasn’t until he started across the street towards the bullet-scarred facade of the Cathay Restaurant that Edge discovered the reason for his actions. Jonas Pike was holding open the door for a pale-faced Elizabeth Day to pass through. When she was on the sidewalk he held out his arm and she took it gratefully.
Edge kept his expression impassive as he approached the couple, but behind his blank stare his mind was in a turmoil. Men - and women - had died by his hand for less trouble than this pretty, green-eyed redhead had caused him. But he had never so much as laid a finger on her. And it was because their ambush of him had put her life in danger that Rivers and Chandler had been made to die so badly.
“I thought you’d come back,” Pike said. “So I placed your order.”
Elizabeth met Edge’s cold stare for a moment, then cast her eyes down. “I’m sorry for what I said,” she whispered. Then: “Please Mr. Pike. Let’s go and see how John is.”
There was a glint of triumph in Pike’s smile as he nodded to Edge and escorted the woman down towards Solar Circle. The diners whose meal had been so violently interrupted now began to crowd out through the doorway, but pulled back sharply as the tall, lean, hard-faced half-breed bore down upon them.
Inside, a Chinese woman with the wrinkled skin of many years, was delicately picking glass slivers from the blood-run face of the injured waiter. His dead colleague was being lifted out through the window by two more women, younger, sobbing their grief.
“You eat your meal in kitchen, Mr. Edge?” a Chinese in a starched shirt asked as he constantly bobbed his head. “It warmer there. And no mess like dining room.”
Edge nodded and went through the door which was held open for him. It wasn’t until he was in the steamy, overheated atmosphere being ushered to a ready set table that he recalled how cold it was outside. And how cold he was after the grueling walk. It was as if, ever since the first shots had announced the ambush, almost hitting Elizabeth Day, he had dropped out of reality into a world where the lust for vengeance cancelled out every other sensation.
He sat tacitly at the table, unaware of the fearful subservience with which the cook and proprietor prepared and served his meal. It was characteristic of him that, having accepted what fate had thrust upon him, he did not attempt to explain it to himself. It had happened and he was stuck with it, period
“I was hoping that when you left town, you wouldn’t come back, Edge,” Sheriff Truman said from the doorway.
Edge looked up and across the steaming dishes of Chinese food towards the lawman. He saw no threat in his posture and began to eat. “I don’t figure to be around Summer for much longer,” he said through a mouthful of noodles.
“That’s good news,” Truman answered. “It seems that wherever you show up there’s trouble. Whenever I see you, I start to sweat”
Edge raked his eyes over the cook as he damped down the oven fire; at the proprietor hovering in case he was needed; and settled them on the unhappy face of the lawman. Then he shrugged. “Little homily you might care to remember, Sheriff Truman.” He drew the Colt slowly and rested it on the table top, aimed at the bulky figure in the doorway. “If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen. Now beat it, feller.”
Truman scowled, but turned and went out.
“Meal okay, Mr. Edge?” the proprietor asked deferentially.
“Seems to be just what the doctor ordered,” the half-breed answered.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE noise made by the revelers in The Gates of Heaven reached the kitchen of the Cathay Restaurant as a low, discordant rumble. As Edge finished his meal and rolled a cigarette, it was the only sound in the small room, heavy with the stale odors of day long cooking. He was alone, the proprietor having retired to his sleeping quarters above the restaurant after sending his staff to their hovels in the poor section of Summer at the eastern end of September Street.
So when the harsh roar of an explosion ripped through the night there was no one to see the puzzled frown on his face. Nor to watch as he lit the cigarette, picked up the Winchester and strolled casually through the doorway into the dining room. As he stepped out through the shattered window, lights began to show along the entire length of August and shouted enquiries filled the silence which had followed the explosion.
Down on Solar Circle black smoke drifted lazily up from the front of the Summer County Bank. A man was calling for God’s mercy. The doors of The Gates of Heaven Saloon facing the Circle burst open and a group of drunken men burst out on to the sidewalk. Rifle fire sounded in an angry burst and two of the men stumbled and sprawled into the intersection, already lightly powdered with night frost. The others in the group struggled with each other to get back inside the saloon.
“And I wasn’t anywhere near the place, sheriff,” Edge muttered as he ducked into an opening between the blacksmith and the express office.
“Jesus, they’re knocking over the bank!” a man in a nightshirt yelled to his neighbor.
“I hope they get away,” a woman replied sourly.
“Right,” a dignified old man agreed. “With no money to keep them here that scum will leave town.”
It was a four man gang. All young, all drunk and all broke. They had arrived in Summer over a period of two weeks, strangers to each other. As was the case with so many of the gunslingers who came to take up Haven’s offer, the pleasures of The Gates of Heaven combined with the rumors of stirred up Sioux in the Badlands, was sufficient to cause them to postpone the hunt.
But their stakes were small and their luck turned sour at the gambling tables. It was Bob Martin, a small-time horse thief from Texas who originated the idea - that it would be easier to simply steal the money from the bank rather than risk being scalped by Indians or shot up by the Ball gang to earn it honestly.
The details of the plan were hatched in a back room of the hotel that afternoon, in collaboration with three other youngsters. There was Hal Crane, a bank clerk on the run for embezzlement: Ed Baker wanted for the murder of his mistress’s husband; and Joe Corners a novice bounty-hunter.
They pooled what was left of their bankrolls to buy enough red eye to get drunk and then had their first piece of luck since riding into Summer. For the unexpected gun-fight at the newspaper office held the attention of the entire town and allowed Martin and Corners to stroll into the September Street Gun shop and carry out a sackful of ammunition and dynamite while the storekeeper watched the shooting.
They were simple-minded men and it was the lack of complexity that got them into th
e bank without trouble. As Corners and Baker stood on the sidewalk, pleading with the stone-faced Pinkerton men to be allowed in to see the reward money, Martin and Crane forced a door at the rear. The hell-raising in the saloon across the Circle covered the sounds of their progress through the bank and the guards were sapped from behind before they could even suspect a raid.
Although they were drunk, inclined to be clumsy and to grin and giggle at their hamfistedness, their luck held for a little longer. They placed a charge of dynamite against the door of the big safe and set the cap without anybody in the town being aware of what was happening. This included Sheriff Truman, John Day, Elizabeth and the priest in the jailhouse next door.
Then the dynamite exploded: and their luck ran out. The safe door blew off and its jagged edge sliced into Comers’ right leg, severing it just below the knee before smashing into and through the wall. As smoke filled the room, foul-smelling and eye-burning, the injured man clutched at the meaty stump of his leg and peered desperately through the billowing clouds for the missing part. Then the agony hit him and he began to scream for relief.
“Goddamit!” Martin yelled, running for the gaping hole in the wall and leaning into it, thrusting his Winchester through. “What a way to build a bank.”
Then his mouth dropped open as his whiskey-befuddled brain reasoned the explanation. His rifle swung to and fro, covering the shocked, white-faced figures of a handcuffed Day, his sister, the priest and the sheriff as they sat around the desk in the law office, interrupted in the process of eating supper.
“Hold it!” Martin snapped as Truman leaned back in his chair, reaching for the gunbelt hung on a peg in the wall.
“You’ll never get away with it!” the lawman rasped.
“They’re coming out of the saloon!” Baker yelled from the front door of the bank.
EDGE: BLOODY SUMMER (Edge series Book 9) Page 10