The Quiet Gun - Edge Series 1 (29 page)

Two men broke away from the group as the remainder returned to the hotel. Shannon stooped to pick up McCall’s discarded revolver then went to the bullet riddled carcase of the horse and slid the Winchester from the boot. Remained standing there for as long as it took the two designated men to haul McCall to his feet, drag him like a loosely packed sack of grain up the steps, across the porch and into the hotel.

Then with a final searching gaze that swept over the hillside – as if he was unsure about the guarantee he thought he had got for himself with the threat not carried out – he spun on his heels and went up on to the porch. But continued uncertainty held him back, half turned, from going between the open double doors. Until:

‘Aw, come on, Luke!’ Chrissy Walters yelled in a harshly whining tone she maybe thought was seductively cajoling. ‘Your play sure enough proved there ain’t nobody else from that lousy town out there! Let’s get back to the fun we was having, honey!’

She had stepped on to the threshold and the sight of her body displayed in a sultry pose against the light was enough to convince Shannon he should do as she suggested. The silence in the wake of the violence was such that the thud of their footfalls on the floorboards carried down the street as the couple went into the hotel. Edge and Bannerman made a careful check of their own to ensure the street was indeed empty before the owner of another saloon a long way from here asked:

‘How come you knew Shannon was bluffing?’

Edge had finished rolling the cigarette and now lit it as he replied evenly: ‘I didn’t.’

Bannerman wiped sweat off his high forehead and jutted out a fat lower lip to blow cooling air up over his fleshy face. Countered scornfully: ‘Then you sure did take one hell of a chance with another man’s life, mister!’

‘Some you win and some you lose, feller. It’s called gambling.’ He grinned wryly.

‘And I thought I’d given that up.’

Bannerman rasped: ‘This ain’t any game of chance, Edge!’

‘Life’s a game of – ‘

‘This is real life, damnit! And – ‘

187

Edge turned his back on the scene beyond the threshold of the livery, leaned wearily against the door jamb and interrupted the other man’s interruption. ‘Life’s just one goddamn thing after another. Then you die. Where chance takes a hand in it is whether your number comes up sooner or later.’

Time crawled through the darkness of the evening becoming a night in which the dominant smell of wood smoke was gradually displaced by that of cooking food. Plus the ever present horse odours and sometimes tobacco smoke in the table. And, for the first time in a long time, Edge was aware of the stale sweat on the over abundance of flesh of Bannerman.

The silence that had been clamped over the scattered farmsteads and claims after the gunfire and talk ended remained absolute to the ears of the two men waiting in the stable: badges pinned to their chests again.

While from the Town House the partying noise became intermittent. Sometimes the guitar was strummed melodiously. Then the player piano jangled. Or there was an occasional short lived burst of singing, much of it as out of tune as the mechanised instrument. Men’s roars of laughter. A good natured shriek from a woman or a high pitched scream of joy. Every now and then a crash of breaking glass. But if John McCall was being given a bad time, no sound of his suffering carried down to the livery.

Bannerman remained morosely compliant with the other man’s suggestion that they should stay where they were. While Edge used a few moments of the slow passing time to eat a frugal meal of jerked beef and sourdough bread washed down with canteen water. Bannerman had claimed not to be hungry but he frequently sipped from his own canteen to moisten his throat which never lost its rasping tone of constriction whenever he spoke.

Confined his comments to what a fine lawman McCall had turned out to be for Dalton Springs. How shocked he was at the way the sheriff had abandoned his usual composure and made the suicidal gallop toward the Town House.

After several such remarks, Edge growled: ‘You ever going to get to the point you want to make, feller?’

‘Uh?’

188

‘You’re doing a hell of a lot of talking but not saying much of anything,’

Bannerman showed a sheepish expression in the subdued light of the newly risen moon entering the livery. Then he shrugged.

‘Hell, for a start I’m beating around in the bushes about something you already know of, right? How the sheriff and Kitty Raine have been doing . . . Well, how they’ve been more than just friends for a long time. Everyone in Dalton Springs had an idea of what was happening. Excepting for Phil, of course.’

‘Yeah.’

‘But none of his friends – and that’s about everyone that lives in town – wanted to believe it. John and the wife of the young man he worked with?’ He made a throaty sound of disgust but held back from spitting.

‘None of us is perfect. I guess we’ve all done things that’ll rule us out from getting to be made into saints.’

‘I never wanted to believe it of him, mister. Then we all found out for sure.’ He looked glum.

‘Thinking like that never changes the way things really are.’

‘It must have been the Raine woman led him on.’

‘Takes two to make that kind of mess. Not counting the husband.’

‘You’ve only to look at her to see why he fell for her so hard. Once she gave him the come on.’

Edge rose from the hay bale he had been sitting on and went to the doorway. ‘Do you have any more bushes to beat about to get to the place you’re headed, feller?’

The saloonkeeper stared balefully into the middle distance for several seconds and seemed not to breathe as he thought something through to an end. Then he nodded emphatically, shrugged and announced:

‘That woman’s a bad lot. Not worth going to any kind of trouble for. And as for a guy putting his life on the line the way John did for her . . ? Well, it was a crazy thing for him to do and no mistake.’

189

‘We’re like minded on that,’ Edge said. ‘But it doesn’t change anything about what we have to do now.’

‘For me it could.’

‘How so?’

‘You and John said that’s Kitty Raine’s horse in the corral out back of here. We haven’t seen her, so we don’t know if the horse being here means she’s in Garfield City, too. Of her own free will or otherwise?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Same way we don’t know what they’ve done to John since they took him inside?’

‘I have to go along with that as well.’

‘Is that why we’ve been hanging around here? Waiting to find out, maybe?’

‘Part of it, feller.’ Edge lodged the Winchester in the crook of an arm and rasped the back of a hand over the bristles on his jaw. ‘If they were giving McCall a hard time, I figure we’d have heard something of it?’

‘And done something about it?’

‘Given it a try. But since it sounds like there’s nothing but a good time being had by most people up at the hotel, it seemed wise to hold off for awhile. Back at the start it seemed Shannon wasn’t certain that McCall came to town on his own. He ought to be feeling pretty sure of it by now, though.’

Bannerman picked up his rifle from where it leaned against the wall and nodded his agreement several times as he moved to stand beside Edge on the threshold of the livery.

‘Just want to say one thing?’

‘That’ll make a change, feller.’

‘What I was getting around to before . . . If it turns out Kitty Raine’s up there and we get into a spot where she can make fools of us, I know for sure I won’t fall for it. But how about you?’

Edge responded to the big man’s scowl with a glinting eyed grin. And perhaps Bannerman knew him well enough by now to recognise that in some circumstances the expression was a mask for a mood far removed from humour.

190

‘You seem to have forgotten. I already did. And once bitten .. . ‘

‘She paid you big money. Next time she could try something else and – ‘

‘Her money helped to heal the wound, feller. But more of it – or anything else she has to offer – wouldn’t do the same for an injury that was self-inflicted. You ready to get on with this now?’

‘I’m with you. You got something in mind?’

‘For now we have to play it by ear.’

‘I’m not sure that’s – ‘

‘It seems to me that’s all we can do. Until we get close enough to see the whites of their eyes.’

191

CHAPTER • 22

_________________________________________________________________________

EDGE MADE a narrow eyed survey of the nearby buildings and the scattering of
shacks, few of these with lighted windows now, on the slope behind the business premises on the far side of the street.

Nothing moved within his range of vision and the only low key sounds in Garfield City came from the trio of horses in the livery and six in the corral out back: and the people in the hotel on the hill top.

The animals contributed little to this. And even the noises from the Town House were muted as the time approached midnight: no music at all, sometimes a snatch of loud talk and an occasional burst of laughter. The effect of liquor gone sour was audible in the exchanges and there was a forced ring to the laughter.

Moments later, the two men began to advance up the incline of the street, staying on the same side as the livery, scuttling quickly over the open spaces separating many of the buildings and moving more slowly across their moon shadowed facades. Both were aware of a degree of breathlessness that had little to do with their mild exertions as they moved cautiously forward, frequently checking the hillside which stretched away behind the abandoned buildings on this side of the street was as deserted as that opposite. Glimpsed occasional dim lights, but saw no movement. Some minutes later they reached the cover of the final building: a one time store with the name of the owner or his line of business indecipherable after many years of neglect and exposure to the elements.

The painted sign that named
THE TOWN HOUSE
was faded by age and weather but was still sharp enough to read on a board stretched across the roof of the large, well lit, very much occupied building they peered at over a distance of some two hundred feet.

‘What now?’ Bannerman whispered tautly after Edge had spent a half minute studying the façade of the hotel and the windowless side he could see, which had an outside staircase angling from the front corner to the centre.

‘I’m still playing it by ear.’

‘I don’t – ‘

192

Edge cut in on the fearful and irritated saloonkeeper: ‘Five men came out of the hotel after McCall’s horse was blasted from under him. And three women. I’m trying to figure if all that noise we heard before was made by a bigger bunch of people than that. Don’t sound to be so many of them now, uh?’

Bannerman had begun to peer fixedly with horrified fascination at the horse carcase while he concentrated on listening to the subdued sounded from within the Town House. At length he answered: ‘Hard to tell.’

‘So if there are a lot more than we saw, they’re the strong and silent types, maybe?’

Bannerman’s apprehensive attention continued to be fastened on the dead horse while he appeared about to be sick to his stomach.

Edge rasped: ‘Take it easy.’

The big man wrenched his head around, anger displacing horror. ‘How the hell can you expect me to take it . . ?’ He shook his head violently and showed contrition. ‘Damnit, I’ll try, mister. But I’m just a small town saloonkeeper who never did plan on – ‘

‘If you weren’t scared of getting gunned down like McCall’s horse, you’d be a fool, feller. Just don’t freeze up on me, okay?’

Bannerman took a firmer two handed grip on his rifle, swallowed hard and nodded:

‘Okay.’

‘We’ll go up the outside staircase to get into the place.’

‘Whatever you say.’

‘I say we move: now.’

He took a first step as he spoke the final word. Was aware that Bannerman was close behind him after just a moment’s delay.

Then he ignored the man at his back: concentrated his glinting eyed attention on the front of the hotel – the lamp-lit windows and doorways of the lower floor and the moonlit and shadowed area behind the balcony above.

His own hands gripped his Winchester with painful tightness now, ready to swing and level it: use the rifle at the first sign all was not as peaceful and un-menacing as it appeared to be within the Town House.

193

Then a shrill shriek shattered the silence inside the hotel and he almost halted as he heard a throaty grunt from Bannerman. Next quickened his pace and the man behind stayed close.