The Quiet Gun - Edge Series 1 (7 page)

Bannerman was no longer amiable as he pulled up sharply and peered hard at Edge.

‘Why?’

Edge started to paraphrase himself: ‘She’s a good looking red – ‘

‘She sure is a fine looking woman and no mistake, mister. But it’ll be awhile before she shows any interest in the likes of you. Or any other man itching to get the glad eye from her.’

‘It seems to me that – ‘

42

‘She’s Dalton Springs’ newest widow,’ Bannerman cut in. ‘Kitty Raine.’ He started for an open doorway at the end of the bar counter. ‘Make yourself comfortable out here. Stove fire’s burning real good in the kitchen so it won’t take long to rustle up some breakfast. Holler out if any paying customers show up.’

Edge gestured an acknowledgement and after Bannerman disappeared into the back, whistling happily to signal his pleasure that this day was starting out better than the last one ended, he returned to the front of the saloon. Peered through a smeared window and saw Kitty Raine had withdrawn from where he saw her. Then he took the four chairs off the table nearest the batwings and sat down on one of them, facing the entrance. Nobody came in, but from elsewhere in the town he heard sounds of people beginning their mundane daily routine irrespective of the violence that had disturbed their slumbers. Stores opened up, deliveries began to be made and people with business outside of Dalton Springs started to leave on horseback or driving rigs. Breakfast smelled good, the appetising aromas of its cooking acting to mask the customary rancid smell of the saloon. Then he saw the food looked as good as it smelled when Bannerman brought it to him. He sampled it as the big man sat down to eat an identical meal at the same table and found it also tasted good then asked:

‘You ever thought of giving up saloon keeping to run a restaurant, feller?’

Bannerman waved his fork in a dismissive gesture. ‘Cooking grub as good as this is hard work for me. And if I had to do it for a living, it’d be harder still. And most of the men around here are married. Them that ain’t hitched have got mothers or sisters or whatever to feed them.

‘The women cook as good as you do?’

‘Not too many, I reckon. But they do it for free. Nah, I’ll stick to running the Lucky Break and cooking for myself and the men John McCall has got locked up in the jailhouse every now and then.’

‘It’s a fortunate man who gets to do what he likes to do to earn a living.’

‘Guess so. What line are you in, Mr Edge?’

‘Anything that pays an honest dollar,’ Edge replied with a wry grin. ‘Right now I’m out of work. Plus I’m an out on bail convict. Not a feller with bright prospects, I guess.’

43

Bannerman waved his fork in the air gain. ‘You ain’t no convict, not really. I sure won’t be pressing no charge. And I reckon when McCall gets back he’ll either be so happy at having Shannon locked up again – or too riled at losing him – to bother with a measly disorderly behaviour misdemeanour.’

‘Could be.’

‘My guess is the only reason he locked you up was on account of you being a stranger to Dalton Springs so he couldn’t be sure if you weren’t the kind who’d try to get his own back on me.’

‘Maybe. But since I’m out of jail, I need to get a job. Pay rent for a roof over my head and to eat as good as his on a regular basis.’

Bannerman’s frown deepened. ‘This ain’t no wide open boom town, Mostly folks who are in business just work for themselves or they got long term help: a lot of it family. Ain’t much hiring on done around here.’

‘So maybe I’ll have to think about working for myself.’

He had finished the breakfast, shovelling down the food inelegantly as a hungry man is inclined to do. Now he tried the coffee and found it, too, tasted as good as it smelled.

‘You got anything particular in mind?’

‘Need to see if there’s anything the town needs it doesn’t already have.’

Bannerman’s dour faced and rueful voiced pessimism continued as he shook his head. ‘Seems to me folks hereabouts abide by the rule that if they don’t have it, then they don’t need it.’

A bleak look came into the permanently narrowed, glinting blue eyes of Edge as he dwelt for a few seconds on some lean periods of his recent past. Then he finished the coffee, hefted the carpetbag off the floor beside his chair and spread a cold smile across his unshaven face as he rose from the table. ‘In my experience, the people of this town ain’t unique in taking that view, feller.’

Bannerman shrugged and said morosely: ‘Anyway, lots of luck to you, mister.’

‘Had more than my fair share or that, feller: most of it bad.’

44

The big man nodded his understanding, ‘The lady don’t smile on you so often, neither?’

Edge moved to the batwings. ‘Around me she mostly ain’t a lady. More often than not she turns out to be a bitch who spits in my eye.’

45

CHAPTER • 6

_________________________________________________________________________

IT WAS almost eight o’clock and Dalton Springs seemed to have come fully to less
than bustling Saturday morning life in the warming air beneath a cloudless sky. Except for Phil Raine: whose recent death, Edge assumed, was the reason for the industrious sawing and hammering coming from the premises of Jake Slocum on the corner of the main and side street along which the fugitives and later the posse had ridden out of town.

The undertaker’s parlour and workshop were directly across the street from the house behind the green picket fence where at an upstairs window he had seen the deputy’s widow bidding an incongruously fond farewell to a member of the posse. Because of her affectionate smile and the long range kiss, Edge guessed Kitty Raine would not be overly distressed by the racket from Slocum’s workshop and its patent association with her husband’s violent death.

His mind ran unconcernedly along these sardonic lines as he ambled from the Lucky Break Saloon to the Dalton Springs Savings Bank, which was the only red brick building among the otherwise stone and timber houses and commercial premises spaced irregularly along each side of the broad main street.

Adjacent to the bank’s stout double doors that were firmly closed atop three broad stone steps, a highly polished brass plate was fixed to the wall. Inscribed with the hours of business: nine through five with an hour for lunch at noon Monday to Friday and nine until one on Saturday.

With nothing else to occupy him, he turned and leaned his back against the wall beside the door and scanned the less than frenetic but frequently changing scene on the street. And after awhile his attention was drawn to the Raine house a few hundred feet to the south on the other, shady side of the street. Now all the front windows on both floors were blinded by the drapes as a sign of mourning.

His interest heightened when the door opened and two women garbed in unrelieved black appeared on the threshold. Just for a moment he glimpsed the red headed Kitty 46

Raine before the door closed behind the second woman. She was considerably older, short and heavily built with a mournful expression on her rubicund features under the broad brim of a black hat.

After she was through the gate in the picket fence and began to walk north she was twice accosted by other solemn faced women, doubtless enquiring how the young widow was coping with the tragedy.

She readily provided information and when she reached the front of a three story clapboard building with a
ROOMS FOR RENT
sign hung above the stoop she paused to look about her: clearly searching for others likely to be interested in the news she had to give. But her gaze was met only by that of Edge out front of the bank and over such a distance she could do no more than incline her head in token acknowledgement of the way he tipped his hat to her. Then she climbed the steps and went into the boarding house. The woman was surely Emily Jonas and since the bank would not be open for another forty five minutes or so he decided to fill some time by making arrangements to rent a room: which may or may not prove futile, depending upon how he fared with the banker. He crossed the street, went up on to the stoop and rapped a clenched fist on the door. Which a few moments later was opened by the woman in black who from close range he saw was something over sixty. She had kindly eyes that were a deep brown in colour and a head of sparse silver hair still slightly in disarray from taking off the black hat.

‘How may I help you, sir?’ She did not quite manage to keep apprehension out of her eyes after she had assessed his dishevelled, obviously slept-in clothing and unwashed, unshaven features.

‘My name is – ‘ He showed a smile, hopeful that on longer acquaintance this woman who had such a naturally sympathetic face would not be so flint-hearted as most rooming house keepers he had come across.

Then he interrupted the smile and abandoned the intended request aimed at her seeming good nature. Drew a shrill cry of alarm from the suddenly terrified old lady when he lunged forward and she spun around to press her back to the now wide open door to evade him.

He snarled: ‘Hold it right there!’

47

The yell was directed at the startled Sam Kress who had emerged from a doorway opposite the foot of the staircase, then whirled to take long strides down a narrow hallway toward the rear of the house.

Miss Jonas rasped from her fear constricted throat: ‘My goodness, whatever – ‘

The dudishly attired drummer froze in mid-stride, cast a glance over his shoulder then launched into a clumsy run. Hampered by a bulky suitcase in his right hand, he bounced off a wall and collided with a door that burst open. Edge glimpsed part of a kitchen before the door slammed close.

There was a crash of breaking china and clatter of cooking utensils. Which erupted another cry from the owner of the house. Of high anger this time, before Edge hit the kitchen door harder than Kress: pulled up sharply, flattened himself against the wall and peered back at Emily Jonas to order:

‘Stay back, lady!’

Kress was at the rear door of the house, the weighty suitcase still clutched in one hand as he straightened up from a crouch, the other fisted around the butt of a familiar looking derringer.

Emily Jonas ignored the warning: began to stride purposefully along the hallway as Edge delved into his carpetbag, drew the Colt from the holster and out into the open. But it was Kress’s gun that exploded a shot.

The woman screamed and pulled up short, hurled herself into the cover of the staircase as the bullet from the derringer buried itself in the doorframe only inches from Edge’s head.

The door on the other side of the kitchen slammed closed and Edge lunged into the room, crunched broken crockery underfoot and sent cooking pots skittering across the floor as he detoured around the centrally placed pine table where the utensils had been piled before Kress scattered them.

‘Just look what that crazy man did!’ Emily Jonas shrieked in righteous anger as she entered the kitchen and Edge jerked open the rear door.

48

He snatched a glance to the left and the right as he thumbed back the hammer of the Colt levelled at his hip. But there was no sign of Kress in the small back yard with its neat pile of trash to one side, a well tended vegetable plot opposite. A horse snorted at the side of the house and Edge snapped his head around to look in the direction from which the sound came: saw a shred of grey cloth snagged on top of the six feet high solid timber fence that bounded the property beyond the cultivated area. A match for the fabric of the drummer’s well tailored suit. Edge gritted his teeth, dropped the carpetbag and lunged toward the fence. Leapt for the top and folded over it, one hand still fisted tightly around the butt of the revolver, the other clawed to take a steadying grip should he misjudge the jump: pitch headlong over the fence with uncontrolled forward momentum or start to topple backward. But he got it right: was well balanced, the fence top digging painfully into his belly. He saw the rear end of an enclosed buggy as the horse in the shafts was whipped to an instant gallop and the rig began to hurtle down the alley between the windowless side walls of the boarding house and its next door neighbour.

Clattering hooves and spinning wheels billowed up a cloud of choking dust that enveloped Edge as he swung over the fence and dropped heavily into the alley. He landed off-balance, splayed his feet and was disorientated for stretched seconds. Until the clattering sounds of the racing buggy gave him a bearing.

Then a strident curse and the report from a more powerful gun than Kress’s derringer emphasised the way he should go. Moments later he staggered clear of the alley, couching and fisting the gritty dust from both eyes with his free hand. The street was deserted except for Kress’s rig speeding south and an elderly slightly built man with a rifle who stood unsteadily out front of Jake Slocum’s funeral parlour. He took long, purposeful strides toward the white haired, bespectacled, skinny framed old timer he recognised as Billy Williams. This was the town druggist who had a hand in last night’s poker game while it was still peacefully penny-ante. The man was awkwardly gripping a Winchester and pumped the action, raised the rifle to his shoulder and squeezed the trigger to blast a second shot after the fast moving buggy. But the recoil of the powerful weapon canted its barrel high so the bullet cracked skywards.