The Deputy - Edge Series 2 (29 page)

Then when the tender nursing was done and they both knew the blow had badly bruised his arm but not broken it, Edge discovered the true reason why Rosita did not want to have her sick father disturbed. This was less because she wished the fevered man to get a peaceful night’s rest in his bedroom close to the spartanly furnished kitchen where she ministered to Edge’s injury. More importantly tonight, she needed Antonio Jurez to remain deeply asleep so he would not know that his daughter was entertaining a man in the house. She was good. As good as Edge could remember any woman in bed for a very long time. And afterwards, when he lay exhausted by her passionate demands, she breathing at the calm cadence of easy sleep in his arms and sometimes murmuring soft words, he reflected, without any carnal distraction, on the attack. While the degree of discomfort he still suffered reminded him once again that he was not so young as he had been during times when getting mixed up in such violent trouble seemed second nature to him. Had Torrejon, Alvarez and Straker called it right?

Maybe the ambush had been set simply because he was with this woman. And if, on the other hand, the reason had been related to the jailbreak back in Bishopsburg why was it him who had he been singled out from the posse to get a beating or worse?

But if it was jealousy, or had been planned to signal local resentment about a stranger going with a San Luis woman, it was probable that the sleeping Rosita knew the attackers. Which meant she had lied to the Federale when he asked about the two men: for a reason that would become apparent later this night while he was sleeping as deeply as she was now?

165

Hell, no!
He could not believe Rosita Jurez was as cold bloodedly devious as that: surely she could not give herself so completely and unashamedly to a man who she hated enough to lead into a deadly trap . . .

He felt himself drifting toward sleep and made no effect to check the process. Thought with a grim smile for a few drowsy seconds how the pair of Mexicans who made the mistake of bushwhacking him were truly marked men: forbidden from showing their scarred faces in this small community because they were sure to be recognised. He awoke with a start while it was still dark and recalled, not so rapidly as he used to, where he was and who he was with. Next knew he had not awakened naturally at the end of a restful period of sleep which his wearied and pained body had surely needed. And for awhile he held his own breath as he heard two other people breathing. The woman in the bed beside him, inhaling and exhaling quietly and regularly, much as when he last heard her as he sank into sleep himself. And a much more ragged sound: on the other side of the bed, a little way off from it. And along with the sounds made by a third person in this room where there should be only two, there was a smell: the unmistakable stench of putrefaction.

‘Hey,
gringo,
you gonna do right by my little girl, eh?’

Rosita’s father spoke in harshly accented English, with the voice of a very sick man who had to fight for each breath, which left him very little energy for talk. Edge turned his head on the pillow. And let out his pent up breath when he saw the man who sat hunched in the only chair in the cramped, ill-furnished bedroom illuminated by the light of a flickering candle from beyond the half open door. The man’s slumped posture was a match for his exhausted voice and he looked as sick as he sounded – and smelled. Jurez could be aged anywhere between sixty and seventy, his medium height frame emaciated and the face skeletal. There was not a hair on his sweat-beaded skull and his slack mouth looked to be toothless. If there was any light in his deeply sunken eyes it was not picked up by the dim flicker from the candle. He was attired in a crumpled striped nightshirt that had maybe fitted him before serious sickness cost him so weight.

‘What’s that you say, feller?’ Edge was fully aware of what had been said to him and used the just-roused-from-a-sound-sleep ploy to gain time to extricate himself from the arms of the man’s daughter. Then he eased up painfully into a sitting position in the bed: which brought his left hand close to the Colt in the holster on the gunbelt draped over the bedhead.

‘I indulge in wishful thinking,’ the sick old man said in the same laboured manner as before. ‘I am dying and when I am finally dead my little girl will be an orphan.’

166

He began a mirthless cackling laugh that immediately deteriorated into a croaking cough which by clutching with both hands at his throat he managed to keep low before he was able to check it. ‘A girl,
gringo?
An orphan? There is a joke, eh? Rosita is thirty years old. A full-grown woman. And much experienced in certain ways of the world. As you recently found out. But she is unmarried and I fear – ‘

Edge dragged his legs out from under the bedcovers and said as he pulled on his underwear to cover the nakedness of his sex-satiated body: ‘You want me to say I’m sorry for taking advantage of your daughter in your house, Jurez? It shouldn’t have happened and I ought to be ashamed of myself for letting it happen? Is that what you want to hear me say?’

Despite his totally exhausted and utterly dejected attitude in the chair, the way the old man waved his bony hands in a dismissive gesture made him look almost animated while his sunken doleful eyes watched the grimacing Edge get dressed.

‘No,
gringo.
I know my daughter well. A man never takes advantage of her unless that is what she wants him to think he is doing. I have long since ceased to pretend this might be otherwise.’ He shook his head and ran the back of a hand over his mouth. ‘But sometimes when the man she goes with is other than one of the usual local
peons
. . . None of who I ever blame for accepting what she offers. . . I feel the need to act as the father I used to be many years ago. You are not looking for a wife, I suppose?’

‘No, feller.’

‘Is that because you already have one, perhaps?’

‘Not for a hell of a long time.’ Edge peered hard at the old man, wondering if he was about to preach some kind of lay sermon.

But then Jurez shook his head morosely again, sighed and said: ‘I now apologise to you,
gringo.
It is none of my business.’ He waved a hand to encompass the room. ‘None of whatever happens here is any of my business. But I am the father of a daughter who has not yet found a husband. And now that it is near the time for me to go to a better place, I feel I must . . . ‘

Now his entire frame began to shake and for a few moments Edge thought it was a symptom of his sickness that caused the trembling. Until he saw in the candlelight the sparkling tears that spilled out of the deep pits of the suffering man’s eye sockets and coursed down his hollow, deeply time-lined cheeks.

Edge spoke under his breath a string of obscenities while he searched his mind for something to say. But he could not think of anything that had any relevance to the situation. Outside of the empty words of an unwanted and insincere apology and banal 167

predictions for the future that had scant chance of coming true. Then he sat on the side of the bed and reached under it for his boots: froze in the act when he heard Rosita begin to speak, her voice soft but harshly embittered.

She did not move at all and when he turned he saw her head remained firmly pressed into the pillow while she peered fixedly straight up at the ceiling. On her less than beautiful face was an expression that confirmed the depths of the vitriolic anger that sounded in her low pitched voice.

This as she poured out sentiments no daughter should ever voice about her father. Telling him he had no right to interfere in what she did with her life and how she could not wait until he was dead so she would not have to endure him and his meddlesome ways any longer.

When Edge looked toward the frail old man he saw Jurez was rising unsteadily to his feet, wincing as if in physical pain. Which maybe he was. But more likely it was anguish that shaped the expression.

Whether or not she heard the unobtrusive sounds he made getting up from the chair and turning toward the doorway she did not falter in her whispered diatribe. And Edge knew the distraught look Jurez directed toward the bed as he went out of the room was for him. The door was left open.

‘Okay, lady.’ Edge straightened up from the bed and when the stream of malevolent abuse continued he sharpened his tone as he turned to look down at her. ‘I said okay, Rosita! Your pa ain’t in the room to hear what you’re saying anymore.’

She cut herself off in mid-flood and looked up at him with the scowl still firmly set on her face. Then she swung her head to look miserably at the empty chair. He reached for his hat as he said: ‘I guess you drove him away with all that bad mouthing.’

‘Not before he has driven you away with talk of marriage to his daughter, it seems?’

she accused.

Edge gestured toward the window, where the dingy greyness of a new day’s false dawn was starting to lighten the sky in the east. ‘It’s time I went anyway. There are a couple of chores I have to get done.’

She wriggled up into a sitting posture in the bed and modestly held the covers in front of her fine breasts. In the time this took she had shed the expression of embittered ill will and how showed a hangdog mixture of disappointment and helplessness.

‘Then it is best for you to go.’

‘I want to thank you.’

168

‘That is not necessary. My need was as great as your own. Perhaps more so.’

‘If I’m ever through this way again I’ll be sure to stop by. See you and your pa again.’

She grimaced. ‘By then he may have succeeded in finding some
loco hombre
who is desperate enough to marry his ugly daughter.’

She raised her voice to pointedly insist that the old man overhear what she said.

‘But I do not think that is very likely. So you come back by all means,
Senor
Edge. Even though it may be many years in the future and I will have grown old as well as ugly while my father scares off all the men who might have – ‘

Edge broke in: ‘Take it easy, Rosita. Good looks ain’t everything.’

‘Only a man says such a thing. And never means it, I think. All cats are grey at night, is that not what you men say?’

Edge leaned over the bed to kiss her. But she violently wrenched her head away from him and hurriedly gathered the bedclothes more tightly around her naked torso then implored:

‘Please go now. It was a very fine night. After the painful start and before the bad ending.’

Edge remained stooped over the bed for a few more moments, then straightened up, shrugged and put on his hat. ‘Whatever you say, Rosita. But you should know I can understand your father’s point of view. He’s only trying to do what he thinks is right for you.
Adios.’

‘Adios, Senor
Edge,’ she acknowledged softly, her voice trembling and her eyes near to spilling tears.

He kept his face averted as he went to the doorway and out of the room. Beyond the threshold saw that the door to the room down the hallway from where the flickering candlelight came was open. And he paused to look toward it while he contemplated visiting Jurez’s room: to apologise to the sick and surely dying old man for what had happened to his daughter under his roof.

But he shook his head sharply and scowled as he rejected the idea because more than enough had been said already he figured. But as he made to turn and go in the other direction toward the rear door of the house by which Rosita had led him inside, the old man called softly:

‘Hey,
gringo!
You have a few moments to spare, maybe?’

There was in his voice the same lack of spirit as when he was in his daughter’s room. And so Edge felt moved to go toward the door that was ajar without apprehension and 169

pushed it open wider. Found the smell of burning tobacco mostly masked the bad odour of the man’s fevered and rotting flesh. Saw Jurez was again slumped in a chair, this time staring fixedly out of an uncurtained window at the cloudless sky of breaking dawn as he smoked the cigar, his legs and lower body wrapped in a blanket from off the mussed up bed The sick old Mexican held up the half smoked cigar and said without turning to look toward Edge: ‘I am told by San Luis’s apology for a
medico
that these things will kill me. But at my age and in my poor health, I can think of few more pleasurable ways to go, eh?’

Edge went to stand with his back to the wall beside the window, where he was able to look down on the shrivelled form of Antonio Jurez. ‘Hell of a thing, how vices that are bad for us are the most enjoyable ways to fill our time, feller.’

Jurez grimaced through the window and looked as if he was going to comment reflectively on what Edge had said. But instead he went off at a tangent. ‘I hear you are one of the posse of lawmen from some town across the border in Texas?’

‘The town of Bishopsburg. I was just a part time deputy for awhile.’

‘Si.
Since I have been sick Rosita has brought me the news from San Luis. Yesterday she told me about the arrival of you and your
compadres
in the village. Said two of you were
gringos
and all were lawmen. We get quite a few of that kind through here:
gringos,
I mean. Hardly ever any lawmen, though.’

‘Did she tell you why we’re here, feller?’

‘
Si.
There is bad trouble concerning the Martinez family. The wild young son of Eduardo Martinez is running away from the hanging rope, is that not so?’