Killing Time In Eternity - Edge Series 4 (28 page)

‘You ought to start minding your own business, mister!’

‘Yeah, you could be right, feller,’ Edge allowed evenly. ‘My nose for what stinks has got me into big trouble lots of times. And talking of trouble, are you going to claim that it was walking into another door put that dent in your skull? The same way you got the black eye?’

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Brady vented a low-pitched snarl and made to reach a hand up to his bandaged head. Then withdrew it and grimaced, as if a stab of sharp pain was triggered by a vivid memory of the moment when the Winchester barrel crashed into his skull.

‘Who was it did this to me, mister?’ he demanded and began to struggle awkwardly to his feet.

Edge allowed him to get up. ‘Exactly who it was doesn’t matter. Because if you want to make something of what happened out there, you need to take it up with me later. Right now what concerns us is that you could have killed me with that scattergun.’

Brady continued to grimace as a gust of wind flung open the gates. Then they bounced back closed again as a squall of rain that felt like hail beat against the men’s faces.

‘I wouldn’t have killed you, mister!’ Brady pleaded in a whining tone and massaged his crotch. ‘I ain’t a killer. Lester and me talk tough sometimes because Troy likes to hear it that’s all.’

‘Forgetting for the time being about how Walter Benson is cold and stiff in Joel Gannon’s funeral parlour . . . ‘

‘I had nothing to do with – ‘

‘Why’d you aim the shotgun at me, feller?’

Brady waved a dismissive hand. ‘Goddamnit, you know how it was . . . Shit I could ask you why you got that sixshooter covering me right now.’

Edge showed him a cold grin and brushed icy raindrops off his face with his free hand. ‘I’m not at all like you, feller. I can’t claim I’m not a killer. If there was time, I could tell you about a whole bunch of people I’ve killed. But we’re not talking about my past, are we? What we’re discussing is your future. In particular whether or not you have one, if you get my drift?’

‘Hell, I was standing guard, Goddamnit! The shotgun was to scare people off from a place they had no right to be.’

‘Why didn’t I have a right to be there?

‘People need to protect what’s theirs! So what are you doing here then? How’d you get into Troy’s place?’

‘You’ve gone away from the point again, feller. There wasn’t anything to protect at the cannery. Except for a half dozen horses. But if Shaver and Hardin and Olivia Colbert and Baldwin were talking about . . . What were they talking about, Brady?’

‘How the hell should I know? I was outside on guard. You know that.‘

‘I followed you people from town. Like to know who the feller was you all went out there to meet?’

Brady snarled: ‘It’s none of your business what me and Troy and Lester – ‘

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‘I’m making it my business.’

Brady backed off and Edge stepped forward so that the revolver was aimed across a constant two feet. When Brady stopped so did Edge. The rain began to teem, the wind to howl and the gates to bang open and closed.

‘How you gonna do that?’ He needed to shout to be heard. So did Edge. ‘Plan to prove tonight’s get-together had something to do with the way Billy Childs was murdered. Likewise his pa and his pa’s buddy from New York: then Arthur Colbert and the colonel. It’s a bad business, the way one killing leads to another and then another, uh? And it don’t seem right how you and the rest can only be hung one time each.’

Brady snarled: ‘You’re crazy! Me and Troy and Lester got nothing to do with anyone getting killed. Why would we?’

‘To protect what’s yours, in a manner of speaking?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘You tell me. You said that’s why you had that shotgun.’

‘It was private business, mister! And ain’t nothing wrong with that. Nobody wants people poking their noses into their private affairs! And so you can’t blame us for . . . ‘

He raised a hand to touch his injured head. ‘I could have the law down on you for what you and your partner done to me out at the cannery. A vicious assault is what it was. Just because I was doing the job the boss told me to.’

‘Negotiating a new building project, was that what Shaver was doing?

‘I told you it’s none of your damn – ‘

‘I figure it was something a whole lot dirtier than that. Something that’ll bring in a whole lot more money than knocking the slaughterhouse and cannery back into shape ever would.’

Brady compressed his lips and cracked his eyes almost closed in the rainy darkness, his expression like that of a small child determined not to reveal a guilty secret to an adult for fear of harsh retribution. Then he blurted: ‘I don’t have to stand here and be questioned by you, mister! I got more right to be here than you do! And if you don’t beat it right now, you’ll be in big trouble. I’m here to meet with Troy and Lester and as soon as they show up, well you . . . ‘

Edge remained where he was for stretched seconds watching the man’s fear expand, showing plainly on his face. Then he took a step closer to the frightened man and Brady’s Adam’s apple bobbed while his eyes blinked rapidly. ‘You’re right.’ Edge pushed the Colt muzzle into Brady’s middle, fastened his free hand on the lapels of his jacket, bunched them together and pulled the man’s face to within inches of his own. ‘You don’t have to 150

stand here. I can knock you on your ass again. And jump up and down on your ribs until you tell me what I need to know.’

Brady shuddered with fear or cold.

Edge went on: ‘Like I told you, I hate waste. And the older I get the more I realise that time is too precious to be wasted.’

It was as if Brady had been paralysed for stretched seconds while he listened to Edge. Then he started to raise his hands and claw at his captor’s wrist. Until he heard the metallic sounds of the Colt’s hammer being cocked and he dropped his hands and uttered a low groan.

Edge showed a grin. ‘Or maybe I’ll just kill you here and now. And go talk with Shaver. It could be he’ll be proud of how you held out for so long. And send a big bunch of flowers to your funeral? With some nice words of condolence on a card.’

‘Okay, let go of me, Edge! Let me go and I’ll tell you. It ain’t worth me getting killed for, damnit!’

Edge released the lapels and Brady sounded terrified as he directed a backward glance toward the wind flapping gates.

‘Go ahead,’ Edge invited, took a pace backwards and withdrew the gun muzzle from Brady’s middle.

The man swung his head first one way then the other, becoming more desperate by the moment as he searched for a miracle to free him from this terror-filled situation. But he saw nothing that gave him any cause for hope.

Edge backed off another pace, the aim of the Colt unwavering. ‘Okay, go ahead and tell me, feller. What was that meeting for? And why are those half dozen fresh horses out there at the cannery.’

‘For when the train – ‘

At the instant the gunshot sounded it was if Brady suddenly physically diminished before Edge’s gaze. Not only did his shoulders slump, but also his head seemed to sink into them like his neck was sucked down into his chest. The bullet hit the man in the back of his bandaged head and he toppled forward, a scowl forming his death mask. Edge instinctively leaned to the side and triggered a shot to the left of the falling man. Aimed at the area of the muzzle flash he’d seen between one half open gate and the other that was fully closed: but by then the killer was in the cover of the partially rotted but for the most part sound timber. Sound enough anyway to stop a revolver bullet fired over a range of so many feet. Edge was not so sure about the ability of the shack’s walls to withstand the penetrating power of a high velocity rifle. But it was the only nearby cover and he spun around, lunged inside the building and dove to the dirt floor. The eruption of fresh pain 151

from old injuries at the base of his spine and in his belly forced a curse from his lips. But there was no time to indulge this discomfort that was worsened when he powered into a sideways roll, out from the line of the open doorway. A moment before a fusillade of gunfire sprayed a barrage of bullets over the threshold. He heard the thuds and ricochets. But none came close enough to do more than kick dirt and wood splinters at him before he pressed his face into the hard packed floor and folded his arms over his head until the gunfire was curtailed. A single repeater rifle fired by a man who knew how to handle the weapon: every shot accurately placed through the doorway so none had tested the solidness of the shack’s walls.

Edge allowed maybe three seconds to pass after the shooting ended then rose to his haunches and strained to listen for a sound from outside the shack to signal the rifleman was moving or reloading the repeater. But he heard nothing except for the roar of the wind and the teeming of the rain. He reached the shattered window in the side wall, taking care not to tread on the shards of glass scattered across the floor from when he broke it. Concerned that a man with younger ears and a more agile body had made a dash across the cluttered yard and was stationed immediately outside - the rifleman or maybe somebody else?

He took just a few seconds to consider the possibility that the attack involved two men, and then was convinced that this was not how it had been planned so abandoned the window. Ignored the noise he made going out through the doorway and across the yard toward the gates and used his free hand to swing one of them wider. Was in time to see a horse lunge into a gallop down the track and turn on to the California Trail in the direction of town. The rider was crouched low in the saddle and did not look back to where Edge stood in the gateway.

As the raucous noises of the rainstorm masked the sound of hoof beats he trod on something solid in the soft mud and looked down at his feet. Saw the scattering of expended shell cases ejected from the repeater.

He holstered the Colt, stepped away from the gates and went to the rear of the fenced yard. Retraced the route he had followed from the timber stand and unhitched the pair of disconsolate looking horses, got astride his own mount and led the one Sue Ellen had borrowed from Wyatt Ramsay back to Shaver’s yard. Expertly from having had much practise in the violent past and painfully because of the recent beating, he draped the body of Gus Brady over the saddle of the butcher’s gelding and secured the limp corpse firmly in place.

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The animal whinnied in discontent and his own horse vented what could have been a sound of equine backing as he swung into his saddle. Then he commanded a walk out through the gateway and along the track toward the California Trail and said softly:

‘I couldn’t agree more with you fellers. On a night like this there’s a lot to be said for a stable life.’

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CHAPTER • 19

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THE SHAVER house remained in darkness, silent except for the buffeting of the
wind against it as Edge rode by leading the corpse burdened horse. Further along the California Trail the line of houses looked forlorn and deserted in the driving rain. He knew there were certainly people in some of them. But if anyone had heard the gunfire and then the killer galloping through the stormy night and now waited anxiously for the aftermath of the latest explosion of violence in the Eternity area they did no more than silently watch the two slow moving horses pass by. Edge put little trust in his sixth sense for lurking danger these days. For too much water had flowed under too many bridges and too many years had slipped back into history since the days when such defensive mechanisms were honed to their peak of sharpness by necessity. And he did not pretend he could turn back the passage of time and reawaken the skills and tricks of certain trades far more perilous than that of storekeeper. Trades that demanded a totally trustworthy instinct for self-preservation in deadly situations allied with lightning reactions to the threat of mortal danger.

Where Main Street cut off at the meeting of the trails across from the railroad depot he wheeled the horses around the sharp angle in front of the bank. The rain had eased off by this time but there was no moon showing and no lights gleamed as he made slow progress around the curve: funereally slow in terms of the dead man slumped over the back of the horse on the lead line. Just the setting down of hooves in the squelching mud of the street and the lessening sounds of wind and rain kept total silence at bay. Mingled with the familiar dank smell of the sodden town there was a faint trace of wood smoke rising from fire embers in stoves that would not be stirred into fiercer heat for warmth and cooking for some hours yet.