Killing Time In Eternity - Edge Series 4 (30 page)

‘Clay and me already figured that out,’ Flynt snapped irritably with a dismissive hand gesture. ‘That westbound special due to make a water stop at the depot this morning. I asked you if you wanted to hire on as a – ‘

‘What’s so special about this special train?’ Edge asked as he dropped his cigarette butt to the floor and ground out its fire under a boot heel. Flynt showed an embittered scowl. ‘I got no damn idea, would you believe?’ He shook his head and now expressed as much anger as his weariness allowed. ‘I wasn’t informed about that. Just had some secret sealed orders sent me from the Justice 159

Department in Washington that told me a special train from New York City headed for some place west of Eternity is gonna stop here today to take on water. And I have to mount a guard over it while it’s stalled in the depot.’

Edge peered hard at the morose faced lawman whose grey eyes were reluctant to maintain the contact. Then Flynt rose abruptly to go and check on the coffeepot that had not yet started to steam and growled: ‘I guess I should have told you about it - the way you’ve been caught up in the violence around here.’

‘I never took on the job of deputy you offered me, feller,’ Edge said.

‘We figured it out from how that New York detective was gunned down. Clay made me see how Shelby must’ve been sent on ahead of the train to make sure a hick town marshal like me was doing things right. And that tale he told in the saloon about quitting the force was all so much hogwash: just a cover story after he ran into a man who knew he was a lawman.’ He shrugged his broad shoulders and turned from the stove to survey Edge with something close to desperation. ‘It’s getting out of hand, damnit! I was told to guard the train but not what was on it. So how do I know what the hell to guard it from?’

Edge took out the makings as the lawman went on in the same embittered tone:

‘From Shaver and them two so called tough guys that work for him? Well, there’s just Lester Hardin now. Or Olivia Colbert and her men? Though I can’t see a lady that rich getting involved in a train robbery and so much killing. And secret late night meetings at a godforsaken place like the old cannery . . . ‘

He shook his head, shuddered and squeezed his eyes tightly closed for several moments while he kneaded fists against his furrowed brow. ‘And how am I supposed to be sure about a stranger like you?’

Because Flynt was so deeply pre-occupied with the disturbing series of violent events that had visited his usually peaceful town Edge was first to become aware of obtrusive sounds from outside. Raised voices and hurrying feet thudding on the boarding of a sidewalk and splashing in the mud of the street.

‘Hell, what now?’ the lawman snarled at length, whirled and lunged away from the stove. He got to the window in front of Edge who was starting to feel the debilitating effects of last night more acutely with each passing moment. Edge hung the unlit cigarette from the side of his mouth and peered into the marshal’s flushed, grim set face at close quarters for a moment. Then they both directed their attention out through the wind whipped rain toward the far side of the street. And saw a close knit group of four men and two women advancing toward the line of stores of which the Quinn and Son establishment was one.

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Roy Sims was at the door of Edge’s premises, about to let himself inside and seemed unaware of the knot of clearly enraged people: unrecognisable in the dawn light because of the teeming rain and the substantial clothing they wore against the weather. Just as Flynt wrenched open his office door, Sims became conscious that something was wrong, turned around and expressed terror in face of the furious mob that bore down upon him. And he thrust both his hands high into the air.

‘Get out of the damn way, you religion crazed nut!’ a man now recognisably Lester Hardin yelled as he lunged ahead of the others, a revolver thrust out in front of him. ‘It’s that murdering stranger you work for we want!’

‘Yeah, Edge you sonofabitch!’ another man roared. ‘Get your ass out here, you back shooting bastard!’

‘What on earth has – ‘ Sims started to demand.

Hardin reached the paralysed with fear old man, grasped the wrist of one of his trembling hands that was raised in abject surrender and jerked him hard to the side: sent him staggering off the sidewalk and sprawling face down in the mud of the street.

‘It’s Gus!’ one of the women snarled. ‘That man has killed my Gus!’

Hardin kicked open the door of the store and lunged inside. The rest streamed in behind him.

‘Shit, it looks like a lynch mob!’ The taut voiced marshal switched his gaze constantly between the storefront across the street and Edge at the office window a few feet away. ‘The kind of ugly mood them folks are in, I ain’t so sure I can do much to – ‘

Edge spat out the unlit cigarette, narrowed his eyes to glinting slits, curled back his lips from gritted teeth and jerked the Colt clear of the holster. Then he moved from the window to the doorway in two paces.

‘What have you got in mind?’ Flynt demanded, every vestige of weariness now drained from his ruddy complexioned face.

Edge replied evenly: ‘Be obliged if you’d step out of my way, feller.’

‘You ain’t gonna go out there and face them?’ Flynt’s voice was hoarse.

‘I may feel like death, but that don’t mean I want to try the real thing,’ Edge rasped. Flynt shuffled quickly back off the threshold and eyed Edge grimly as he took his place there, the Colt raking back and forth over the empty street.

‘You fixing to go on the run, mister?’ the lawman demanded. Edge glanced at him and saw that Flynt had moved a hand to drape his holstered Colt. He swallowed hard and warned: ‘Because if I thought you was gonna do that, I’d have to arrest you as a fugitive.’

He sounded as unsure of himself as when he first saw the mob on the street. A woman said tensely: ‘You’d better come with me, Edge!’

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He leaned out of the doorway and saw an ashen faced, wide eyed Sue Ellen Spencer beckoning frantically from the corner of the law office. Then looked back at the unnerved Flynt and showed a momentary grin as he touched the underside of his hat brim with the Colt muzzle and said:

‘This could be my final call, feller. So it’s plain I’ve got to take off.’

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CHAPTER • 20

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EDGE MOVED quickly to keep up with the slimly built, warmly dressed woman as
she scurried along the narrow dead end street that started between the law office and the building that housed the
Eternity Post Despatch.
The beating rain and whining wind along with the widening distance soon muted the raised voices of the enlarging crowd that was gathering out of sight behind them. But for a time Flynt’s voice could still be heard: commanding everyone to quieten down while somebody told him what the ruckus was about.

The couple’s hasty retreat slowed when they were through the gateway of the Childs house. And then halfway along the cement walk that bisected the hedge-enclosed front yard and led to the door in the porch where Sue Ellen came to an abrupt halt. Edge moved up alongside her, both of them needing to recover their breath.

‘It’s suddenly gotten to be very ugly for you, hasn’t it?’ she said, her appealing features with her ears sticking out looking drained from exertion and nervous tension. But she still looked good to him as he raised a grin and told her: ‘If you’re fishing for a compliment, it looks real good from where I’m standing, lady.’

‘For God’s sake be serious!’ She had not looked at him for some time and continued to concentrate her apprehensive, short-sighted gaze on the front of the two-story house where no glimmer of light showed at any window as the grimly overcast new dawn broke.

‘I heard about Gus Brady being killed, Edge. And I was terrified I’d be too late: find you as dead as him in the mud on Main Street.’

He abandoned what remained of the grin and admitted: ‘For awhile I was a little worried about ending up that way myself, Sue Ellen.’

‘There’s someone in the house who wants to talk to you?’ Now she looked uncertainly at his puzzled face with the raindrops trickling through the stubble.

‘I’ll listen if he’s a fast talker with something to say.’

‘It’s a woman.’

‘I ain’t biased. At least we’ll be out of this damn rain.’

‘Come on then.’

She was tensely cautious now and he took his cue from her as he moved behind her. And watched their backs while she concentrated her attention on the impassive façade of the silent house. The rainstorm covered the muted sounds of their footfalls on the walk as a body of more raucous noise continued to be discernible every now and then in the distance when the wind briefly eased.

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Sue Ellen swung open the unlocked front door and they stepped into a confined atmosphere that still smelled strongly of polish from Mary Whittier’s conscientious attention many hours ago. Then she led him into a part of the house he had not been in earlier. And at the doorway he knew gave on to the kitchen they turned to the left and moved along a short passageway to reach another door.

She knocked firmly on it, put her face close to the panel and called softly: ‘Victoria?

Are you in there, Victoria? It’s Sue Ellen.’

Footfalls padded on carpet as Edge recalled the situation in which he had last heard the name.

‘Did you bring that man with you?’ Troy Shaver’s wife sounded both afraid and angry.

Sue Ellen looked at Edge, saw his hand had moved toward the jutting butt of the holstered revolver and shook her head sharply then scowled as she turned to face the door again. ‘Yes, he’s here with me, Victoria. Open the door, please.’

She was a short and broadly built woman, wearing a shapeless grey dress under an open coat of the same drab colour that was too thin for the November weather. Her haggard face, with deep set eyes that had seen more than fifty years of hard living, was set in an expression of unremitting enmity as she peered fixedly at Edge and twice opened her narrow lipped mouth to speak while her jaw trembled and her hands shook. At last she managed to give voice to her pent up rage and accused: ‘Why did you have to interfere, you . . . A stranger like you ought never to have been – ‘

‘Victoria, this wasn’t why I did as you asked me and had Edge come here!’ Sue Ellen softened her disgruntled tone as she glanced pleadingly over her shoulder and explained:

‘Mrs Shaver came to my house very early this morning, Edge. When she was even more distraught than she is now. She wanted to know where you were. She thinks we’re . . . Well, never mind. I calmed her and she agreed to try to keep herself under control if I could persuade you to talk to her. I thought it best that we meet here. No one’s likely to ’

Edge cut in sardonically: ‘I guess I can put up with her name calling easier than with what that bunch on Main Street have in mind for me.’

‘And I can’t blame them!’ Victoria Shaver snapped, but could not maintain her high degree of rage.

She spun on her heels and retreated into the room that was obviously where Charles Childs used to tend his patients. A spartanly furnished consulting room, still smelling faintly of antiseptic preparations that was part-study, part-office, part-compact hospital: not comfortable nor homely but adequate for the purposes of the doctor who had once lived 164

and worked in this house. The distracted woman dropped her short and stout frame into one of two wicker chairs set at an angle in front of the large desk and it creaked ominously.

‘Go ahead, Edge,’ Sue Ellen said tautly with a warning glance at the other woman then stepped to one side and ushered him over the threshold into the room that was was cold as the hallway. ‘I think Victoria has about used up all the anger she has for you for now. But I think there’s a whole lot more coming to the boil against her husband.’

‘That’s sure is right!’ The older woman stared down into her lap as Edge and Sue Ellen entered the room and stood to either side of the closed door. ‘I’m Troy Shaver’s wife, in case you don’t know, mister!’

‘I reckon he’s worked that out for himself, Victoria,’ Sue Ellen muttered impatiently. The woman looked up and sighed deeply as she continued to clench and unclench her fists on a handkerchief in her lap. If she had used this earlier to wipe away any tears, her eyes showed no sign of it. But veins pulsing at her temple and throat looked like they could burst open at any moment and need to be mopped clean of spurting blood. ‘I’ve come here to . . . ‘ She swallowed hard.