Killing Time In Eternity - Edge Series 4 (33 page)

The near toothless Loomis suggested suspiciously: ‘You know, Deeks, it seems to me that this guy is expecting some kinda trouble.’

Warner shook his head but chewed anxiously on the inside of a cheek. ‘No trouble, boys. It’s just that there’s been a hard-nosed drifter hanging around town for a couple of days. There was some killing hereabouts and the sonofabitch took a kind of lawman’s interest in it. He ought to be dead himself by now if things had worked out the way I planned them. I’d just like to know where he is and what he’s up to is all.’

‘Just one guy?’ a stocky, dark skinned half-breed Apache of indeterminate age sneered.

‘Just him is all, Greeley,’ Warner confirmed absently.

The near toothless, scar faced Loomis urged: ‘Well, let’s get moving and then we won’t have to worry about him or anyone else around here.’

‘Yeah, if it’s all done, let’s move.’ the rodent featured Ray Baldwin urged.

‘But it ain’t all done, not yet.’ Deeks gestured with his rifle toward Flynt and Hicks. The uniformed railroad man took a fast backward step: came up hard against the depot wall, gulped and failed to find what was needed to voice the degree of terror expressed on his ashen face.

Warner croaked: ‘Shit, Deeks, the marshal is my best girl’s brother!’

Flynt snarled at him: ‘You’re just bound to roast in the hottest corner of hell, you bastard!’

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The youthful Jed and the sunken-eyed Deeks exchanged a glance. The older man nodded and the youngster swung his Winchester: then pumped the action and squeezed the trigger. Four times he did this, aimed first at Flynt, then Hicks: Flynt again and finally Hicks once more. A bullet placed into the centre of each man’s chest, then into his head with bloodier effect as convulsing bodies slid down the vividly stained depot wall. Deeks had not stayed to watch the killings. Instead he swaggered to where Lee Baldwin had dismounted and was calming the horses that were spooked by the barrage of gunfire.

‘I want to thank you two guys for your help,’ Deeks said to the engineer and fireman as, their chores done, they waited beside the steps of the locomotive’s footplate. ‘Young Jed Black’ll see you get what’s coming to you.’

The two men had started to smile in eager anticipation. But now they heard an undertone in Deeks’ voice that warned them all was not as they expected it to be. They scowled their helplessness at each other then expressed the same brand of boundless terror as Travis Hicks had shown just before he was cold bloodedly gunned down. Once more the killer smile spread across the smooth face of the kid as he swung the rifle, pumped the action and exploded a shot into the chest of the engineer who spun and collapsed like a loosely filled sack. The terrified fireman had time to turn and take three fast paces down the side of the locomotive before the Winchester raked toward him. A shell case was ejected and a fresh round jacked into the breech then the trigger was squeezed. The bullet drilled a neat hole through his oil stained dungarees at the centre of his back and he pitched full length to the platform, limply dead before he hit it.

‘That was a fine job, Jed,’ Deeks congratulated nonchalantly and cast a negligent glance at the widely scattered quartet of bullet shattered corpses. Then he and the other escapees stared to buckle on the gunbelts that had been hung over the saddle horns of five of the horses Lee Baldwin had brought from the bunkhouse at the old cannery site.

The boy grinned his enjoyment of the top man’s praise, grabbed the reins of a horse and asked of Baldwin: ‘Have them rifles in the buckets got full loads, mister?

‘They sure have, kid. Every weapon’s been checked over real careful.’

Jed tossed away the killing rifle, finished strapping on a gunbelt and swung up into a saddle. Within moments, every horse but one had a rider. Deeks asked of Warner: ‘What are we waiting for Clay?’

The expression on the gaunt face of the erstwhile deputy and sometime bounty hunter was far removed from the varying degrees of delight shown by the escaped convicts. He was clearly shaken by the violence that he had obviously not expected: drained of his 177

earlier self-confidence by a reaction to the slaughter he had witnessed. Was unable to offer an immediate response and gazed around him while he struggled to find his voice and an opinion he could express in words that would not risk him getting killed. The rodent featured Baldwin brother misinterpreted his dilemma and demanded: ‘You still spooked about that drifter you spoke of, mister? Shit, what can one guy do on his own? And he sure ain’t about to get any help from local folks after they seen what we done to them we ain’t got no more use for.’

Warner nodded absently. Then he sighed deeply and shook his head, thrust his Colt into the holster at his left thigh and climbed clumsily astride the remaining horse.

‘Okay,’ Deeks pronounced with evil delight as he wrenched on the reins to wheel his mount. ‘Let’s go show the people of this hick town we ain’t scared of them. How we ain’t scared of nothing and nobody!’

They started off as a variously beaming or scowling tight knit group: moving across the meeting of the trails and on to the end of Main Street. Their advance plain to see by anyone who cared to look now that the new dawn was fully broken and there was no rain falling. Some rode with a hand on a holstered revolver and the others held rifles, the barrels sloped to shoulders or rested across saddle horns. Clay Warner flanked by Deeks and Jed Baldwin in the lead. Then Loomis, Greeley, Ray and Lee Baldwin trailing in a ragged line of four. The subdued clop of slow moving hooves on the muddy street, the muted jingle of harness and the diminished moist hissing noises issuing from the unattended locomotive were the only sounds to disturb the dank morning stillness that was clamped over Eternity.

Smoke from town chimneys and the locomotive stack rose vertically now there was not a breath of wind to dissipate it. No other sign of life could be seen as the seven riders moved inexorably around the curve of the street between the hotel and the theatre.

‘You sure were right, Deeks,’ Jed rasped through teeth exposed in a satisfied grin.

‘It’s a habit with me,’ the leader of the bunch growled sourly, his narrowed eyes sweeping a suspicious gaze from side to side.

‘I mean killing all of them guys back there. That sure has put the fear of God into everybody in this hick town.’

‘I still don’t like it,’ Loomis complained, fingering the livid scar on his cheek.

‘You don’t like what?’ the half-breed sneered.

‘Way we’re going about this. Why the hell don’t we just beat it fast out into the country? Seems to me that we’re asking for trouble, riding through town this way. A goddamn funeral procession would move faster.’

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‘It’s what was planned and – ‘ Warner started to explain against a growling murmur of agreement with what Loomis had said.

Than all talk was abruptly curtailed: this as the double glass panelled doors of the hotel swung open. And all the riders hauled on their reins to halt the horses and swung to aim revolvers and rifles at the hotel porch.

‘Easy, you boys!’ Warner said thickly. ‘This is the one who bank-rolled the escape and wanted to see – ‘

‘Jedediah, is it you?’ Olivia Colbert exclaimed huskily and stepped through the hotel doorway.

‘It’s the boy sure enough,’ Lee Baldwin said. ‘Just like you wanted, Olivia.’

‘Who’s she’ the youngest escapee demanded and for the first time since he got off the train he looked and sounded perturbed. Almost afraid. ‘How does she know my name?’

Warner told him: ‘Because she’s your ma, kid.’

‘My what?’ His voice was almost girlishly shrill while his fearful expression was unchanged.

Edge unfolded to his full height on the hotel roof immediately above where Olivia Colbert stood on the building’s threshold. And called down in an even tone: ‘Which I figure, kid, makes you a genuine son of a genuine bitch.’

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CHAPTER • 22

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EDGE SQUEEZED the trigger of the walnut butted Colt and the .44 calibre bullet
tunnelled into the face of the stupefied kid, just below one of his bulging with shock eyes. The impact tipped him off his horse: blasted him into a half backward somersault over the rump of the animal and spooked it into a frantic gallop. It was the only shot the impassive faced Edge got off before he sprawled out prone on to the roof: safe under the fusillade of gunfire exploded at him by the panicked men down on the street. Who a moment later thudded heels into horseflesh and raced their snorting mounts in the muddy wake of Jed Black’s bolting gelding.

Stretched seconds later Edge snapped up his head to peer toward the bunch of retreating riders as two or three men got off a few aimless shots. Revolvers fired hurriedly backwards so that the bullets cracked high or low or wide of the man who showed only his head above the line of the building roof. Then, as the desperate men galloped their mounts out of sight, he shifted the direction of his glinting eyed gaze. And was in time to see Olivia Colbert plunge off the hotel porch, slither and almost fall headlong in the mud of the street.

She recovered her footing, staggered a few more paces and purposely prostrated herself across the lifeless form of the kid spread-eagled on the sodden ground. While all the time she voiced her grief, the words made incoherent by the enormity of her inconsolable state. Within moments, her screeching words and shrill screams rose to a volume that made them louder than the fading sounds of the galloping horses. And then her voice was sucked dry of power as the rapidly lengthening distance to the fleeing riders finally muted the sound of their mounts’ pounding hoof beats. Edge made a final survey over the town from his vantage point and saw the escaped convicts and their two accomplices thundering in single file across the plank bridge over the Eternity River. The street behind them was now as empty in the deathly quiet aftermath of violence as it had been before the train rolled into the depot. Then he started down from the hotel roof by way of the outside staircase he had used to climb up and as he stepped out from the alley he pushed the Colt back in the holster. His expression remained devoid of emotion as he moved toward where Olivia Colbert was now hunched in a kneeling position and was as silent and almost as still as her dead son. Only for a moment did he give a concerned thought that he was a clear target for the angry lynch mob that had hunted for him earlier this early morning. Then he said evenly to the distraught woman:

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‘I guess it cost you a whole lot of bucks to grease a whole lot of palms to organise this level of carnage, lady?’

She turned just her head to peer up at him with a scowl of depthless hatred. ‘I’d have spent every cent I had if that was what it required to free my son from the prison he should never have been in!’

Edge drawled bitterly: ‘And the gun crazy little bastard wasn’t worth even a wooden nickel, lady.’

If she heard him she showed no sign of it. Then she vented a single body shuddering sob and moaned: ‘Now my poor boy’s dead.’

Edge did not know if she was aware it was he who had shot her son. He completed what she had been saying about the cost of the prison escape with his own interpretation:

‘And slaughtered every last citizen in this town if that was what was needed?’

She did not follow the direction of his narrow eyed gaze across the meeting of the trails. Toward where the bullet shattered bodies of Marshal Ward Flynt and Travis Hicks, along with the two man locomotive crew and two prison guards were sprawled on the depot platform: all of them hidden from view by the stalled, almost silent train on which were the corpses of four more guards and the brakeman.

‘Certainly! They are nothing to me!’ Her tone was contemptuous as her expression became an ugly sneer. ‘My son was the only person in the world who meant anything to me!’

‘And you’re not going to deny you did your share of the killing to make sure he was busted out of jail, lady?’

‘What?’ She half rose and looked about her as if she had just awakened in a strange place and needed to get her bearings. Then she directed a glazed stare down at the corpse: next along the empty street, finally toward Edge. For the first time he registered, inconsequentially, that the shocked woman had dressed in a high quality, high fashion topcoat, an expensive looking hat and patent leather boots to come meet her son off the train. And she had clearly spent a great deal of time applying cosmetics so that her finely featured face would have looked its best. But now her clothes were mud spattered and her eyes were red rimmed, her cheeks blotchily tear stained.