EDGE: Death Deal (Edge series Book 35)

by George G. Gilman

  Or perhaps he did owe somebody something. Kane Worthington the truth about the kidnapping of his younger daughter?

  He vented a low, negative grunt as this doubt crossed his mind.

  He had agreed to do a job and he would do it the best way he knew how. The respective probities of the various parties involved were of no concern to him. For moralizing about his fellow human beings—beyond ironic comment—was not in his nature. If people hurt him, he hurt them back. He didn't care what they did to each other.

  He slept.

  Then woke to the sound of footfalls approaching the homestead, the measured tread of booted feet sounding loud in the total silence of dark night as the man came across the hard-packed dirt of the yard.

  Something harder than a fist banged against the door.

  "Edge? You in there?" It was Chuck Meyers, his voice as grimly determined as his resolute approach to the house had been.

  "Like at the Worthington place, feller. Door's open and I'm decent."

  The half-breed was already up from the bed and had his hat on. He struck a match and put the flame to the wick of a ceiling-hung lamp as the door swung inwards and the Indian Hill lawman stepped across the thresh­old. The powerfully built man with the heavy mous­tache was still holding his Remington by the barrel after banging the butt against the door. He was wearing a thigh-length sheepskin coat cape-fashion over his shoul­ders and his right arm was held across his chest in a sling of dark-colored fabric. The skin of his round face with the high forehead was very pale. His features were set in a hard look.

  "Where's Dibble?" he demanded.

  Edge moved to the stove, rattled the grate and ut­tered a grunt of satisfaction when he saw red embers show- through the gray ash. He pushed kindling into the stove. "I figure he was taken for a ride."

  Meyers used a boot heel to crash the door closed. "It's time for some straight talkin', mister!" he snarled.

  The half-breed filled a pot with water, added coffee grounds and set it on the stove. Did not respond to the lawman's angry demand until he had placed fuel on the flaming kindling. Then he straightened up, turned and nodded impassively as he moved to sit down at the ta­ble.

  "What do you want to know, sheriff?" he asked evenly.

  Meyers was taken by surprise at the calm response. He was still by the door and still held the Remington by the barrel. "Every damn thing," he said in a more mod­erate tone. And seemed to have forgotten he was hold­ing the revolver until he waved his hand in the air. He looked at it, perplexed for a few moments, then thrust it with difficulty into a pocket of the coat. "About what happened between you and that crazy Mexican who calls himself Satanas. About what you and Worthington have cooked up together. About the shots that were fired up at this place this afternoon. About Dibble being missin'. About why you saved me from being gunned down at the bank." His narrowed eyes surveyed the sparsely furnished room while he spoke, then did a double-take at the dirt floor on the other side of the table from where Edge sat. "And about the blood that was spilled down here."

  "Sure thing," the half-breed allowed as he rasped the back of a hand over the stubble on his jaw. "Always like to return a favor."

  "I ain't done you any favors, mister."

  "Like you to do one in the morning."

  "Uh?"

  "Seems like the people of Indian Hill are fixing to make a stand against Worthington. And seems the only man they have any respect for is you. Like for you to talk them out of doing anything about what's gnawing at them until after I've got the ransom money."

  Meyers listened with an expression of incredulity taking a firmer hold on his face with each word that was spoken. Then growled, "I reckon you got more gall than anyone I ever came across, mister. You don't give a shit about anyone else, do you?"

  Edge did not reply to the query. Instead he gave the lawman a terse account of his run-in with the Mexican bandits, of events at the Bar-W ranch house and of what had happened with May Worthington and Roy Dibble on the farmstead.

  For a while, Chuck Meyer remained incredulous as he listened to the evenly spoken words which accused Grace Worthington of being a party to her own kidnap­ping and her sister of trying to cash in on the treachery. But then anger rose to the surface, bringing patches of high color to the centers of his wan cheeks.

  When the story was told, Edge rose to pour two cups of coffee and the sheriff sat down in the second chair at the table.

  "Kane Worthington doesn't know anythin' about it not being a regular kidnappin'?" he asked as Edge re­sumed his seat and placed two cups of steaming coffee on the table.

  "Way things turned out, it is a regular kidnapping now, feller."

  "Even so . . . ?"

  "From what I've seen and heard, Kane Worthington doesn't take kindly to being screwed. And if he can't have something he wants, he sets out to destroy it."

  Meyers grimaced. "You ain't sayin' you're concerned for Grace?"

  Edge lifted the cup in both hands and spoke over the rim after he had sipped the coffee. "If Worthington just wanted revenge, feller, he wouldn't need me."

  The grimace remained in place. "And if you didn't need me, Seth Barrow would have had another grave diggin' chore."

  The half-breed said nothing. Simply looked at the law­man from out of the glinting slits of his eyes beneath, their hooded lids.

  "And why the hell should I do like you ask, mister? Seein' as how, if you'd leveled with Kane Worthington, there wouldn't have been no bank robbery, I wouldn't have took a bullet in the shoulder and the Worthington family's dirty linen would have been laundered a long ways from Indian Hill?"

  "That's right," Edge allowed. "But what's done can't be undone, feller."

  "That don't answer my question, mister. Way I see it, I can spill the whole story to Worthington. What's done can't be undone, but he'll hand back the money taken from the bank and handle things just the way he would've if you'd told him the score at the start."

  The half-breed shook his head. "Not you, feller. That ain't your style. You showed that a while back when you made your stand in front of the bank. A stand against gunlaw. So you ain't going to let Worthington take the law into his own hands again, if you can help it. To go after the Mexicans who murdered those two Wells Fargo men on your patch."

  "But I'll let you go?" Meyers growled sourly. "One law for you and a different one for all the rest, uh?"

  Edge shrugged, an almost imperceptible rise and fall of his broad shoulders. "Like I said. Satanas told me he'll kill the woman as fast as snapping his fingers if anyone but me rides along La Hondonada at noon. You willing to find out if he's bluffing, sheriff?"

  "Satanas!" Meyers rasped, and spat on the dirt floor. "He's Felipe Cortez is all. A lazy, good-for-nothin' cantina owner who most of the time was drunker than his customers!"

  "Times have changed, feller. He's heading up a bunch of twenty guns now. And you ain't just got my word about how he killed those two Wells Fargo men."

  The grimace expanded into a scowl and a silence lengthened in the small and squalid room that was now warmed by the stove. Then a pensive frown spread across the lawman's face and he asked, "What guaran­tee you got that he won't kill you, the woman and just take the money?"

  "I'm being paid two thousand for my trouble," Edge replied evenly. "And I ain't got any plans to have a funeral that expensive."

  "What plans do you have, mister?"

  "I'll think of something."

  "You gotta be kiddin'!"

  Edge remained implacably silent.

  "And what about May Worthington and Dibble? You reckon they rode out to Cortez's camp?"

  "Spinning a coin won't tell us anything for sure."

  Meyers stared hard across the table at the half-breed. Then he jerked to his feet and began to pace back and forth across the confined space of the room. The ex­pression on his face now was one of desperate thought. Eventually he halted and slammed the heel of the fist of his left hand on the table.

  "Dammit
, Edge, why the frig should I trust you? And why the hell should Kane Worthington trust you?"

  "How about you got no other choice, feller?"

  Meyers sank wearily back onto the chair and fixed a contemptuous stare upon the half-breed's face. "Be­cause we place a higher value on human life than we do on money."

  "Guess that's an opinion of common currency, feller."

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  EDGE was seated astride the well-rested and fed gray gelding on the center of Indian Hill's main street when the sun rose and shafted its first rays at his back—to cast his shadow and that of the horse long and narrow toward the rig and riders coming in off the west trail.

  The half-breed was recently washed-up and shaved and he struck a match on the stock of the booted Win­chester to light his first cigarette of the day.

  There was no one else on the street, but most of the town's citizens were awake, waiting with mounting tension for what was about to happen.

  Edge had seen just one man since Chuck Meyers left the Dibble place, promising in grim tones that he would spend the rest of the night trying to figure out a plan of his own to save Grace Worthington and bring in Felipe Cortez. This had been Seth Barrow who had been sleeping in a barn out back of a burned-down boarding house. The barn, which the old-timer had partially con­verted into crude living quarters, was where the gelding was bedded down. After the horse was saddled, the half-breed nudged Barrow awake with the toe of a boot to give him a dollar for his trouble. The old-timer was bleary eyed and thick-voiced with the after-effects of too much liquor as he thanked Edge for the money—grudgingly polite and perhaps a little afraid.

  Now as the mounted half-breed smoked the cigarette and waited for Kane Worthington and his men to draw close, he guessed that the dungaree-clad old man would be among the watchers contributing to the tension which seemed with each passing part of a second to on the point of crackling in the warm sunshine of early morning.

  Ralph Quine brought the cut-under rig to a halt ten feet away from where Edge waited. Craven and Kahn Tuttle and Hanson—the thin scar of the razor-cut bared on his cheek—and the four other Bar-W men who were territorial deputies reined their horses in either side of the runabout.

  Hatred, distrust, menace and nervousness showed varying degrees on the faces of the men wearing stars their eyes shifted constantly in the sockets—from Ed to the neglected facades of the silent buildings and back again.

  Kane Worthington, a cold pipe clenched between his teeth, was as impassive as the half-breed.

  "You are a good time-keeper, sir," the rancher said grimly.

  "Noon is the important time today."

  Worthington took the pipe from his teeth and dug tobacco poke from the stylish suit-jacket he wore. "Give the man the money, Ralph."

  There was obvious reluctance in the way Quine lifted a pair of saddlebags from between his feet and handed them to Hanson. Who took them, moved his horse forward and held them out to Edge.

  "They contain exactly what the Mexican asked for," Worthington said as Edge took the saddlebags and he tamped tobacco into his pipe bowl. While Warren Hanson backed his horse to the side of the runabout. "Show him, Ralph."

  Now, from the seat between himself and the rancher Quine picked up a long, slim envelope, opened it and fanned out the stack of hundred-dollar bills it contained.

  Worthington struck a match and sucked fire into his pipe. On a cloud of aromatic smoke said, "The two thousand you asked for. It will be waiting for you when you return with my daughter."

  "It's what we agreed, feller," Edge replied as he draped the bulging saddlebags over his own.

  Worthington nodded. "An agreement of the best kind, sir. Based upon mutual trust."

  The half-breed turned his horse.

  "Edge!" the rancher called and the tall, lean man reined in his gelding and looked back over his shoulder, saw anguish and exhaustion on the man's face as he allowed his mask of unfeeling coldness to slip. "May has left the Bar-W. It is more important to me than ever that my young daughter is returned to me."

  The half-breed confined his response to the flick of a finger against the underside of his hatbrim as he turned, cracked his eyes to the narrowest of slits against the full glare of the risen sun and heeled his mount along the eastern stretch of the street. And the clop of hooves on the hard-packed, sun-baked surface was the only sound in Indian Hill, which had never looked so much like a ghost town as it did this morning.

  But up on the slope to the north some chimneys emitted smoke and here and there a dirt farmer was already out in his fields to begin another long and grueling day of toiling to stay alive.

  Edge looked back just once, a few yards short of where he would ride around a curve and the town would be out of sight. And he saw that Kane Worthing­ton and his men remained exactly as he had left them and were still the only sign of life in town.

  Around the curve he asked the gelding for a canter and maintained this steady pace until he reached the meeting of the trails where the Wells Fargo stage had been held up two days earlier. His mind was a blank because any train of thought he might choose to con­sider was loaded with too many variables. While he rode at an easy walk out of Indian Hill and onto the open trail, he had been unable to keep his mind clear.

  Kane Worthington was not by nature the kind of man to sit still and wait for things to happen. Or to trust anybody he had no power over. But what would he do if he acted according to character?

  Had Chuck Meyers exerted influence on the town people to ensure that the dawn meeting between Worthington and Edge passed without interference? If he had done so, had it been as a component part of plan of his own devising rather than the asked-for favor for Edge?

  And what of May Worthington and Roy Dibble Had they ridden double on the black stallion to the old Federale post where Grace was held by Cortez and the Mexicans? If they had, how would what they told the one-time cantina owner affect Edge?

  Would a man who shot down two others—three counting Ricardo—on the slimmest of pretexts ever consider keeping his word about a bargain to which he had agreed so lightly?

  Speculation got Edge nowhere and he had not consciously encouraged it in the first place. So he abandoned it as he rode east and then swung south—off the trail and over the same stretch of broken terrain he had covered in the wake of the Mexicans after the hold-up. By turns walking and cantering the strong gray gelding constantly scouring the rugged country for signs that h was being watched.

  Occasionally, as the sun rose higher and became more glaringly fierce, he saw clues that men and horse had come this way. But none of the sign looked fresh. Sometimes he saw a hawk overhead. Once a flock of green jays. Here and there the spoor of a small animal or the track of a snake's passing.

  For the rest just the cloudless sky, rearing rocks, sandy soil and dusty vegetation. With no mark to show where he rode from Arizona into Mexico.

  He halted at about hourly intervals to take a drink from one of his canteens and to allow the horse a mea­ger amount of the tepid water. And he guessed that it was close to nine o'clock when he dismounted at the broad mouth of the canyon known as La Hondonada, used his kerchief to mop sweat from his lean face as his slitted eyes surveyed the broken rims which were etched starkly against the blue sky until heat shimmer in the distance blurred the light and dark of the sky­lines.

  He drank and allowed his horse to drink, then rested himself and the gelding for half an hour in the hot shade under the eastern wall of the canyon.

  On his approach to the mouth of La Hondonada, he had seen that it was easier and faster to get to the rim of the western wall and it was to here that he climbed. On foot after hitching the reins of the horse to a clump of mesquite. He had unsaddled the animal so that a long wait during the hottest part of the day would be more bearable. And carried a portion of his gear up the steep climb—the bulging saddlebags over one shoulder, the two canteens over the other and gripping the Win­chester in one hand.

&nbs
p; The sun beat down on his back, sweat oozed from every pore in his body and he was breathing heavily when he got to the top. But he paused only long enough to survey the terrain in every direction from the higher vantage point. Nothing moved out there, save the opti­cal illusion of heat shimmer which billowed like fine fabric curtains moved by stray and gentle breezes.

  But, as during the morning ride from Indian Hill, he did not trust the stillness and silence and he maintained his vigilance at a high level as he moved south. He progressed as fast as the terrain and his diminishing en­ergy allowed over a distance of two miles, to the point where La Hondonada became narrow and began to twist and turn sharply at its southern end. Then his ad­vance slowed and he cast only infrequent glances to left and right and behind him as he concentrated upon spot­ting any forward sentries which Satanas might have posted.

  There was one, but although the dark eyes of Nino were wide and staring, they failed to see Edge as the half-breed eased around a rock outcrop on the canyon rim at a point where the ground below started to rise toward the rim of the east-west canyon in which the Mexicans had their camp. For the eyes were part of the same death mask which contorted the acne-scarred flesh of the young Mexican's face.

  The boy in the ragged clothing sat with his back propped against a boulder, one of his limp hands still loosely fisted around the ancient and battered Navy Colt in his lap. His dark hair was matted with congealed blood but an area of stark white bone showed on the crown of his head where his skull had been shattered. Dried blood-droplets on the boulder behind him told that Nino had been killed where he sat.

  "Appears headaches are an occupational hazard among bandits hereabouts," the half-breed said evenly. "You still around, Sheriff?"

  Chuck Meyers rose from behind the sandstone boulder against which the corpse was propped. He didn’t have the sheepskin coat draped over his shoulders now. Instead, the shirt he had worn when he was shot—with the right sleeve ripped away so that the doctor could treat the wound. His arm was still in the same sling. The bristles grew thick on his face, dotted with sweat beads. His left hand was fisted around the butt of his Remington.