The Deputy - Edge Series 2 (22 page)

‘
Esto me gusta!’
the Mexican said and Edge guessed the young man was having trouble steeling himself to resist an impulse to race the horse away from the front of the law office. Then Martinez said aloud to reassure himself:

‘They try anything, the sheriff’s head is blown off his shoulders!’

Harvey growled wryly: ‘I figure you guys oughta be real happy we’re taking this yakking sonofabitch off your hands.’

‘Honey, you go first,’ Bryce ordered the woman. ‘Then the rest of us’ll turn around and follow. The sheriff and Don and me next: and kid, you’ll ride drag.’

‘
Senor,
I do not think I – ‘

Edge broke in evenly: ‘Martinez, if you could think with the equipment you’ve got in your head instead of what’s in your pants, none of us would be in this situation.’

‘Don?’ Bryce queried.

‘Yeah, Morg?’

‘I don’t recall exactly . . . Was the price his old man said he’d pay for the kid only if he was delivered in one piece? Or was it dead or alive?’

Isabella had remained reluctantly silent for a long time. Now when she spoke to the glowering Martinez in their own language the strain she had been under while she sat mute in the saddle could be heard in her quivering voice and seen in her twitching face. Jose Martinez looked angry then subservient, swallowed several times and said as she finished: ‘
Si.
Yes. Okay, I will do as I am told.’

The woman moved her horse out into the centre of the street. Then, at a single word of command from Bryce, the sheriff and his two captors - rifles still pressed against each side of his head – wheeled their horses and moved up behind her. Martinez did some more nervous gulping as he cast constant backward glances at Straker and Edge and took up his position at the rear of the group.

‘Let’s go,’ Bryce said and the riders moved off at the same slow pace as they came. But it seemed even slower than before because of the greater tension that gripped 125

everyone in the group and emanated from those on the sidelines who silently witnessed the potentially deadly drama.

Edge guessed that Straker’s nerves were stretched to the limit for he had a rifle at the ready and could use it to blast Bryce and Harvey out of their saddles before they had a chance to fire their own weapons and kill North – maybe. He told the deputy between pursed lips: ‘Just the same as before, feller. Don’t do more than think about it.’

‘I know! Don’t you think I know that?’ He sounded close to losing control and it seemed to Edge he could smell the tension within the man.’

‘So take it easy and no sweat.’

Neither of them shifted his eyes away from the backs of the slow moving riders: occasionally glimpsed the fear-stiffened face of Martinez when he peered around him. Straker asked hoarsely: ‘How did Rodriges get it, Edge?’

‘He never had a chance. They shot him down just because they needed a horse for the woman.’

The younger deputy’s fists tightened around the barrel and frame of the rifle. ‘So they’re likely to blow George’s head off? Once he’s served his purpose? When they’re far enough away to be out of range? Kill him for the hell of it? Or for something he said awhile ago that they didn’t like? Or just out of hate for anyone who wears a badge?’

‘They sure could, feller.’

‘And we wouldn’t be able to do a goddamn thing about it?’

As the riders moved across the intersection with River Road, Edge reminded Straker:

‘It seems to me that North got it right. For now we have to go along with whatever they want.’

‘Sonofabitch, this is terrible!’

‘I figure for North that it’s a whole lot worse.’

‘Yeah, I know it is.’ Straker sighed deeply, shook his head sharply and beads of sweat were thrown off his forehead and jaw line.

Then he and Edge became utterly still again, their unblinking gazes fastened on the group of riders as they halted between the two houses that flanked the end of Main Street where the open trail to the south began. Now, without the sound of hooves against hard packed ground, total silence settled over the town and it was easy to imagine that everyone in Bishopsburg held their breath.

Then voices sounded from the end of the street, pitched too low for anything of what was said to carry to the two deputies out front of the law office.

‘Come on, come on,’ Straker urged softly through gritted teeth. 126

Isabella Gomez was the first rider to start her horse moving again. Then Martinez angled to the side and circled around the line of three men to catch up with her. Neither of them looked back into town.

For stretched seconds it seemed that Bryce, Harvey and North formed a kind of frozen tableau, the lawman still under threat from a Winchester aimed over close range at either side of his head.

Then, no more than half a minute after the halt was called, the threat of the rifles was removed and the Winchesters were slid into the boots. And the two men who had pulled off the dangerous plan to free Jose Martinez urged their mounts forward while North remained unmoving astride the stationery horse.

Next it was as if a mass sigh vented by the entire population of the tense town caused him to sway slightly in a gentle gust of wind. Before Bryce and Harvey turned from the waist and half raised their hands in a mocking gesture of farewell. Perhaps one of them said something sardonic to the lawman as Martinez started to blurt:

‘Come on, let’s – ‘

Edge reached out a hand to restrain the anxiously eager deputy for a moment. But then both of them cursed and lunged off the porch. This as the upraised hands of the riders suddenly swept down to gasp the butts of their holstered sixguns: drew and exploded two shots.

Then they thudded in heels to set their snorting mounts racing in the wake of Martinez and the woman who had commanded their horses to gallop at the first reports. George North lurched to the side and toppled out of the saddle of his panicked gelding. And his bullet riddled body tumbled to the ground through a swirling cloud of dust erupted by pounding hooves.

The riderless horse instinctively raced off in pursuit of four of its own kind while most of the townspeople remained unmoving: some gripped by stunned shock as others shouted their horror at the cold blood gunning down of the sheriff. A handful, including Elizabeth Straker, spilled out on to the street and stumbled toward the blood spattered man who twitched and jerked for long seconds, then curled himself up into a ball and became totally inert before anyone reached him. Straker staggered to an unsteady halt, threw the stock of the Winchester to his shoulder and drew a wavering bead on the riders galloping away from the end of Main Street. But he stayed his finger on the trigger and the barrel dipped toward the ground as he turned to look helplessly back at Edge through glistening eyes blurred by tears.

‘I’m no marksman, mister!’ he croaked. ‘I’d likely hit someone in the crowd.’

127

Edge swept his gaze along the darkening length of Main Street that was now filled with men and women who moved tentatively toward or held fearfully back from getting too close to the gunshot George North: and beyond the milling throng to where the four riders rapidly diminished in perspective. The retreating quartet almost entirely veiled in the dust cloud raised by their headlong pace.

‘Yeah, feller. I figure the odds are against almost anyone pulling off that kind of long shot.’

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CHAPTER • 14

_________________________________________________________________

BILLY INJUN did not know that it was the sound of distant gunfire that awakened
him. All he was aware of for long moments was a feeling of deep despair: for the first thing he saw when he snapped open his eyes was the bottle given him by Sheriff George outside the saloon in Bishopsburg yesterday.

It lay forlornly on its side on the dirt floor, the stopper missing. And for a short time after his head started to pound he had the dreadful thought he must have collapsed into a drunken stupor before the bottle was empty: dropped it so that it rolled across the floor and spilled its precious contents.

But he grunted irritably at the foolishness of this idea and spread a grin across his knife-scarred face as he struggled up into a sitting position on the side of his narrow cot. He had done some crazy things in his life: drunk and sober. But drunk or sober he had never wasted one drop of good – or bad – whiskey!

He rose unsteadily to his splayed feet and waited for his surroundings of the single room in the adobe to come into reasonably sharp focus in the dark and foetid, late evening air. Then, after his vision cleared there was still a dull ache pounding in his right temple but this he was able to endure: for if it could not be called an old friend, it was certainly a familiar acquaintance.

Like many people in this town. He had not a single friend here in the way that Bishopsburg folk all had friends among themselves. Just as he did once, long ago among his own kind when he was an accepted member of the tribe.

He briefly felt his eyes sting with tears that blurred his clearing vision as he fleetingly recalled those old times. Then checked himself from dwelling on such painful memories he knew from bitter experience would serve only to make his hangover more difficult to deal with.

He reflected instead on the present: his situation in this town where, all things considered, he had a good enough life for a mixed breed and often was able to serve useful purposes for which he was paid enough to survive.

Then the pain in his head suddenly had the substance of sound and he raised a hand to press the palm against his skull under which the imagined hammer was beating.
THUD! THUD! THUD!
Each pulse of pain was perfectly matched by the sound. This had never before happened to him and for long moments he was terrified of the possibility 129

that the dangerous condition Doc Friday had warned him of was starting to afflict him. That was the time he got so drunk he fell down in the middle of Main Street and would maybe have died had not Sheriff George taken him to the doc’s house.

‘You got to be careful, Billy,’ the kindly doctor had warned. ‘Liquor’s fine medicine for a man, but only in moderation. If he drinks too much of it over too long a time it turns to poison in his veins. Rots his internal organs and makes him real sick. And it can cook his brain so he can’t think properly. Mind: I’m not talking about not thinking straight in the way you can’t when you’re happy drunk or you’ve got a hangover. I’m talking of driving a man so crazy he starts living in a world where his imagination takes over from reality. And he hears and sees things nobody else can. Terrifying things they can be, too. Things that aren’t really there: but you don’t know that.’

Billy shook his head violently and raised both hands to press them tight against his ears as he scowled. But moment later his expression turned to a grin as the blocking off of sounds from outside his head produced a perfect silence inside. And he knew he had not entered the drunkard’s world Doc Friday had warned him about. He dropped his hands and as he heard clearly the setting down of shod hooves on hard packed dirt he realised a small bunch of riders was heading down the trail from Bishopsburg. He took long strides across the darkened room to its only window and pulled aside the blanket that he always hung there at nights or when the morning sun was too bright. Looked to the left and saw four riders approaching from some two hundred yards up the trail, holding down their mounts to an easy walk as they seemed to spend more time peering back over their shoulders as in the direction they were headed. Until one man laughed, another issued a harsh toned order and the group broke into a canter then a gallop that swept them past the broken down, abandoned looking adobe at breakneck speed. Billy instinctively moved the blanket so there was just a narrow crack between it and the side of the glass-less window and blinked several times, rubbed his eyes with his knuckles then peered again at the riders after they had gone by. Then was certain that one of them was Isabella Gomez, the Mexican woman who gave him a message to bring Sheriff George out to the burial mound. And although he was not quite so sure, one of the three men looked very much like Jose Martinez, who Billy had seen several times at the barred window of the Bishopsburg jailhouse. It was unusual enough for there to be any kind of activity on this stretch of trail this late in the day. And because of the kind of people he thought he had seen in the group and the way they were all laughing or grinning broadly as they raced by the shack, Billy was sure something was badly amiss.

130

He had never considered himself to be a great thinker for he had no formal education so all his learning was gleaned from experiencing life. Which was mostly enough to get him by without too much hardship in the routine way of things. And when he sometimes needed to, he could call upon a shallow reservoir of native cunning he had acquired from being an inferior part-Navajo living first among full-blooded braves and then white eyes. He also had an instinctive sense for knowing what was wrong and what was not: a basic common sense that enabled him to capitalise on this knowledge whenever it was appropriate.