Name On The Bullet - Edge Series 6 (13 page)

‘Is that right?’ he asked as he dug out the makings.

‘Well, if those Brogan Falls guys ever did figure to come looking for me after they found Julia, it’s plain now that she didn’t point them in this direction and – ‘

‘You were worried she might do that?’

She shrugged and took from a pocket the half-smoked cigarette she had pinched out at the start of their hurried departure from night camp. ‘I ain’t ever been what you’d call the trusting type, mister: been let down too many times before. By women as well as men.’

Each of them struck matches to light their cigarettes before she went on: ‘I figure she let me out of jail because she was too scared to come looking for you by herself. And since you didn’t say for sure that you’d go after the guy that killed her husband, there was a chance she could have tried to have me arrested again. If only to get back on the right side with her family and their neighbours, don’t you think?’

‘I guess that could have been so.’

‘But now I reckon she’s on the square, Edge. And without a bunch of guys on my tail who could maybe turn into another lynch mob, I reckon that I can find my own way to where I’m headed – if I have to?’

‘Feel free, lady.’

She grimaced. ‘But if you don’t have any strong objection to me tagging along, I’d prefer it that way. Until we get to some place where a woman can feel safer than out here in this wild country.’

‘Have you got a place in mind?’

‘Me and Vic met up in Pine River. That’s a town about fifty miles or so south of Brogan Falls along this turnpike.’

‘I know where it is. More like sixty miles, I’d say.’

‘Oh?’

He turned and found her eyeing him with a mixture of the quizzical and the doubtful.

‘Is that where you’re headed?’ she asked, surprised. ‘To take care of this personal business that’s so important to you?’

‘It’s personal business,’ he told her pointedly, then shrugged. ‘But the truth of the matter is, I need to go back to Pine River Junction before I can properly get started on what I need to do.’

‘
Back
there? When were you there last, if that ain’t top secret information?’ Her sarcasm was only half-hearted and then she offered a fleeting smile to augment her softspoken apology. ‘I’m sorry, it seems to me it means a whole lot to you?’

‘It sure does.’

‘It’s just that I was in Pine River for more than a year before Vic Munro showed up. And not long afterwards he asked me to go with him. Like you know, it’s a bigger town than Brogan Falls: but it ain’t no San Francisco or New Orleans and I don’t recall ever seeing you down there?’

‘I ain’t been through there in a few years.’

‘Well, that explains – ‘

‘And when I was in Pine River, I never felt the need to visit the local cathouse.’

She said evenly: ‘I’ve already admitted what I was before Vic came along and wanted me all for himself. So you don’t insult me, mister. I was just making conversation to ease the time on by a little faster. I guess you took a drink or two when you were last there?’

‘I remember there was a place called the Timberland Saloon that was run by a feller named Jack Whitney. But I never had the opportunity to take a drink in the place.’

‘The Timberland’s still in business and Jack Whitney still runs the – ‘

She broke off and reined in her mount when she saw they had emerged on the turnpike again. And when he turned to look back at her he saw she was peering into the northwest. He halted his own gelding and said:

‘I can’t read minds, lady.’ The cryptic comment drew her attention away from the long stretch of straightaway of trail that was empty for as far as could be seen before it swung due west. He went on: ‘But I’d stake money that those fellers have washed their hands of you and are headed back for Brogan Falls!’

‘Yeah,’ she agreed absently. ‘McGowan’ll be happy to have his daughter back safe and well. And all the rest of them will be more than ready to go along with the idea Vic killed Quaid and got his just desserts from someone they’re happy to have running free. Whether it’s a local guy or one of Vic’s old enemies?’

‘About the size of it, I guess,’ Edge said

She shook her head reflectively. ‘Yeah, I was wrong to doubt Julia. It’s for sure she’d have told them a pack of lies to throw them off our tracks. Because you’re the only chance she’s got of finding the guy who killed her new husband.’

Edge started his horse moving and she did likewise, staying alongside him on the broad width of the turnpike. And a few moments later she picked up the thread of what she had been saying earlier.

‘Oh yeah, I was telling you: old Jack Whitney still runs the saloon in Pine River.’ She peered hard at his deeply lined and thickly bristled profile and drew no hint of interest then smiled and went on: ‘But I wasn’t turning tricks at the saloon: on account of Jack won’t allow no girls to work at his place. He don’t mind having them in the saloon if they sweet-talk men into buying drinks. So the girls had their cribs in back of the Junction Hotel. Was that the same when you were in town, Edge?’

He answered: ‘I was too busy with other things to pay much attention to how the local businessmen operated, lady. A beer somebody sent over from the saloon one time tasted good. And I did once get offered a woman not unlike you. But I never took the opportunity.’

He glanced at her and saw her smile briefly again.

She said: ‘I reckon you’ll see some changes since the time you were there, mister. Hey, ain’t you got another name? Edge or mister sounds kind of formal and not very friendly.’

‘I ain’t well known for my friendly nature so that’s maybe why just Edge is all I’ve been called for a lot of years.’

‘Short and sweet.’ She laughed. ‘Which ain’t at all like the man with the handle, is it?

Big and hard like you are?’

‘That’s how most people see me, lady.’ He sensed her peering at him: trying to read a hidden meaning behind the evenly spoken sentiment and remained impassive under her scrutiny.

After a few moments thought she shrugged and said: ‘Okay, We’ve already laid out the ground rules, right? I can ride with you for as long as I stay out of your hair. And anytime I get fed up with your hard as nails ways I can head off on my own with neither of us shedding any tears.’

‘Sounds about right.’

She snorted. ‘So, if we’ve got to cover fifty or sixty or whatever miles, that means it won’t be no short time we’ll be in each other’s company. And the way we got started and how we’ve been since, sweetness ain’t a word that springs to mind about the way we are together.’

‘Does that matter?’

‘Shit, where was I?’

‘You were turning tricks in a crib at the Junction Hotel before an ex-con showed up and took you away from all that. A few years after I didn’t do any drinking at the Timberland Saloon: or went with you or any other whore at the hotel.’

‘Right.’ She nodded emphatically. ‘I never heard nothing about no drifter name Edge who liked to keep everything short and sweet.’ She looked pointedly at him and frowned to acknowledge her resignation that he was not going to make anything out of her attempt to slight his virility. ‘I heard tell how it used to be pretty much of a one-horse town. That was after the steam ran out after the lumbermen first settled it way back. But since then some changes have been made. More folks moved into the valley and set up in business. Formed a town council and tried to fix for Pine River to become the county seat. They never did get it to be that, though.’

Edge said: ‘The Junction Hotel was an empty boarded up shell when I was there.’

‘Not any more it ain’t. It has rooms to let and girls for rent. And you can still get a drink, play some cards and pick up a whore at the Timberland who’ll take you back to her crib at the hotel.’

‘And business is good for a girl who lays down on the job she does?’

‘You have to know that’s true, mister,’ she countered. ‘Whatever else you are, you ain’t no innocent in the ways of the wicked world. In a town the size of Pine River, no matter how respectable the local stuff shirts try to pretend it is, there’s always places where a man can satisfy the pleasure of the flesh.‘

‘But Munro made you an offer the madam at the cathouse couldn’t match, uh?’

She vented a hollow laugh. ‘Well, that’s what it seemed to be at the time.’ There was embittered contempt – maybe self-contempt – in her tone and on her grimacing face. ‘Vic was a good customer and he took a shine to me: more than to any of the other girls. I guess he had a kind of crush on me: and before you crack wise that can happen in my line of work sometimes.’

‘Whatever you say.’ He shrugged.

She scowled. ‘Okay, it usually only happens with green kids getting laid for the first time. But in a kind of way Vic was something like that. He’d been locked up in prison for near twenty years and if the woman at the Junction Hotel weren’t the first he’d ever had, they were sure the first for him in all that time.’ She looked expectantly at him and sighed deeply when he remained impassively silent. ‘And you’re right. Vic made me a better offer than Rose Gore ever did – to ride with him to a place not too far from Pine River. And if I took good care of him – in and out of the sack – I’d get a share of the money he was owed by a guy.’ She looked like she was going to spit but held back from doing so. ‘Course, the sonofabitch never told me the money wasn’t so much owed: that he just figured it was his due from the guy who caused him to rot in prison for all those years. Or that the cash was in a bank that he and a buddy would have to bust into to get at.’

‘By the time you found that out it was too late for you to take off on your own in this kind of country?’ He gestured to indicate their surroundings: the vista on all sides coldly tranquil in the bright winter sunlight of early afternoon.

She grimaced. ‘Hell, the bastard never said anything about that. All he said when we got close to Brogan Falls was that it was where we were headed. And the guy who owed him was named Quaid. I worked out the details after you and them others caught us unawares. And knew I’d been played for a sucker again. Which wasn’t no surprise to me because in my life the downs have come around a whole lot more than the ups.’

‘You wouldn’t be fishing for sympathy, would you, lady?’ Edge asked sardonically.

‘Hell, no!’ she snapped. ‘I can spot somebody else who’s been through the same kind of mills I have. And you and me, Edge, we ain’t the kind to need sympathy. Give me credit for figuring that out, uh?’

‘Tell me something?’

‘You want something that little old me can give you?’ she sneered.

‘It’s nothing I can’t find out for myself when I get to Pine River Junction. But seeing as how you’re the kind who likes to hear the sound of her own voice and we’ve about exhausted one line of conversation - ‘

She broke in irritably: ‘Yeah, okay. Ask away why don’t you?’

‘Did you get to go outside of town much?’

‘Not too often. I’m a city girl: born and raised in Boston. And when I came out west I always hung around towns. First because the guy I travelled with was a card player and all the action was in towns after he got kicked off the riverboats out of New Orleans.’ She smiled at a fond memory of better times. ‘Then after he ran out on me and I had to start fending for myself the only kind of business I was fitted to do was in towns. And I ain’t the kind that sees any pleasure in the country when I ain’t got any business to do.’

‘So you wouldn’t know if a couple named George and Rachel Guthrie still have a place out along the east trail?’

‘Guthrie?’ She implied she gave the name earnest thought, like she was anxious to help if she could. But after several pensive seconds she shook her head and looked genuinely regretful. ‘No, I can’t say the name means anything to me.’

‘No sweat.’

‘Course, I may have known this Guthrie guy by sight.’

‘If you did it would have been from seeing him on the street or maybe in the saloon with his clothes on,’ Edge told her. ‘He didn’t tomcat around. Poker was his weakness.’

‘So, okay. It’s no skin off my nose.’

She became petulantly silent for a long time, like this latest reference to her line of work had finally pierced her thick skin to spark a fit of bad conscience. Then, either because he gave no indication he was affected by her dark mood or she realised it was gaining her nothing, she shrugged it off and asked:

‘This Guthrie couple: are they friends of yours?’

‘No. How about Slim Haydon?’

‘The sheriff?’

‘He still that?’

‘That was the name of the local lawman when I left town with Vic not so many days ago. Did you have a run in with him way back?’

‘We met up at a bad time for all of us. Scratched each other’s backs without it costing anybody too much except for the trouble it took us.’

She thought about this in more silence, then suggested: ‘But there was still some business left unfinished when you rode away from the Guthries and Slim Haydon?’

‘About sums it up.’

‘For you, maybe. But I’m still minus a whole lot of it.’

She gave another exaggerated shrug. ‘But it ain’t none of my concern and I’ve spent enough time with enough men like you to know it ain’t wise for a girl to be too nosy.’

‘And I’ve been around enough women of all kinds to know they’re all just natural born nosy. Had to teach a few the lesson you’ve already learned.’