Cory paid no heed to the sheriff’s attempted caution, the fixed stares directed at him by his wife, his other customers. Set down the fresh glass of beer, said grimly: ‘Least we know where we stand with this tough nut—unless he’s got any other bad habits we oughta know about to keep us from rilin’ him?’

  ‘Getting cheated is about all, feller.’

  Amos Bryce thrust the Colt back in his holster and fingered the scar on his forehead, muttered: ‘Somethin’ you just cheated yourself, mister. It’s called death.’

  Edge picked up the change Cory made from a pocket of his apron for the five spot. Saw he had taken for the beer, supper and a night’s room rent. Sank half the beer, glanced at the lawman, answered: ‘I’d count that one of my few good habits.’

  Four

  EDGE DISCOVERED EMMA Glaser had not been speaking out of simple politeness when she complimented the cooking skills of Dolly Cory. Unlike Waldo Glaser, the half-breed’s appetite for the beef stew and potatoes was not diminished by anything that had, or had not, happened since he arrived in Holderville. He ate well, enjoyed every mouthful he had.

  While he dined alone in the dimly lit restaurant, where past better standards of the Rest Easy Hotel were maintained to a far greater extent than in the saloon, he heard customers come and go in the room next door.

  He sat at the table nearest to the connecting door, his back to the dividing wall, in part for such a purpose. Also, from this position he could see the window that looked out across the porch to the moonlit street, and the doorway from the kitchen. Through this the white-haired Dolly Cory, a look of bitter resentment on her emaciated face, had brought him the food, flounced out with angry finality.

  Edge paid enough attention as he needed to the buzz of talk that rose and diminished, interspersed with an occasional gust of laughter, in the saloon. Confident he would register anything that signaled trouble for him.

  He knew Nate Cory left his accustomed position behind the bar for long enough to shave the other sideburn off his face.

  Heard Amos Bryce leave the Rest Easy after just one beer.

  The Glasers went up to their room.

  Each new customer to enter—soldiers from the fort, men of the town and a couple of women he marked as whores—commented on Cory’s missing facial hair.

  It was as he finished rolling a cigarette, struck a match on a table leg, that he recognized the voice of Roy Bryce as the young man he was sure was the son of the Holderville sheriff entered the saloon. The latest newcomer to ask: ‘What happened to the finest set of side whiskers in Texas, Nate?’

  ‘Misunderstandin’ with a stranger to town,’ Cory answered, one of many variations on a reply to the variously phrased query. His tone of voice conveyed the shortening of his temper. This time, though, he was able to growl a counter question. ‘So what happened to your hand, boy?’

  ‘Shot my stupid self is what,’ Roy Bryce lied, too quickly, but with just the right tone of self-deprecation in his voice. ‘I was practicin’ fannin’ my gun, damnit!’

  ‘You did what?’ a woman asked, broke into raucous laughter that rapidly spread to most of the others in the saloon.

  ‘Have fun over my misfortune, why don’t you!’ the youngster invited, disgruntled to be the butt of amusement. ‘Give me one of your high-priced shots of whiskey, Nate. For the lousy pain no one gives a damn I’m sufferin’!’

  ‘Boy of your age should be practicin’ somethin’ safer and a whole lot more fun than shootin’ off a gun, Roy!’ another woman cajoled.

  ‘Matter of debate if it’s safe for any man in your house, Nancy!’ somebody yelled. ‘That new girl you got: I hear tell she’s a real maneater of a whore?’

  ‘You heard right, Sergeant!’ Nancy Fox confirmed. ‘But hearin’ about her ain’t no fun, is it? You wanna put up your money, find out where Lizzie’s man-eatin’ mouth is?’

  Edge swung open the restaurant door. The talk and laughter immediately ended as all eyes swung toward him, gear under one arm, cigarette angled from the side of his mouth, glinting gaze raking the saloon. Which he saw was patronized by four uniformed men, a yellow-haired woman of fifty and a less blonde one several years younger, seven townsmen including Roy Bryce.

  The sheriff’s son, his right wrist bandaged, dark blood seeping through the white fabric, looked pointedly at, then hurriedly away from, Edge. But everyone else was too intent upon watching the half-breed to notice the youngster’s odd behavior.

  Edge asked across the quiet, smoke-layered, perfume, liquor and tobacco smelling saloon: ‘Any room except seven, where the Glasers are bedded down, that right?’

  ‘Right,’ Cory confirmed, continued to pour the whiskey Bryce had ordered. ‘There’s a key in the lock of every available room. Take your pick. Sleep well. Wake up feelin’ better in the mornin’, maybe?’

  ‘Hi, stranger,’ the elder, blonder of the two painted, over-dressed women greeted.

  After seeing the whorehouse madam flash a bright smile, the second woman raised one of her own, brittle with falseness.

  Nancy Fox went on: ‘You look like you been out on the trail a long time?’

  ‘Yeah, lady,’ Edge answered, started towards the foot of the stairs. The table there had been vacated by the three troopers, who were now drinking with a sergeant at the bar counter.

  ‘Hell, that ain’t no lady, that’s Nancy Fox!’ Eddie slurred, much drunker than earlier.

  ‘Shut your stupid mouth, jerk,’ the madam growled, not angry. ‘The guy wants to call me a lady, that’s just fine.’

  Edge started up the stairs. Interrupted conversations were restarted. He knew Roy Bryce watched him closely in the mirror, thought that maybe the lawman’s son tried to direct a tacit message towards him.

  Then Nancy Fox brought talk to an end, caused all attention to swing towards Edge again when she called: ‘Guy that’s been out ridin’ the trails, he oughta have somethin’ a little more comfortable to ride his first time for so long in a bed! But you’ll have to stop by my place, stranger! Nate and Dolly, they don’t allow none of that kinda fun in the Rest Easy!’

  ‘Maybe why it’s called the Rest Easy, lady,’ the half-breed suggested.

  ‘If Grace here don’t have no appeal,’ the madam hurried to elaborate on her sales pitch, and her comment caused no change in the professional smile of the hard-as-nails whore who shared her table, ‘then Lizzie Grant, our new girl at the house, she oughta be free pretty soon.’

  ‘Tonight not even for free, lady.’

  ‘Ha friggin’ ha!’ the madam countered, her too-crimson lips and sparklingly bright but hard eyes broadening the smile that owed little to genuine good humor. ‘You know what I mean, stranger. Nothin’ worthwhile is for nothin’. But on account of my girls got lots of stock in trade, I won’t ask a fortune for what they got to sell. Way Nate here does for his liquor.’

  ‘Somethin’ about my liquor, Nancy!’ Cory called, ‘It stays fresh and good as new after it’s been opened!’ A pronounced slur in his voice suggested the freshly shaved man was almost as happily drunk as Eddie.

  The madam allowed: ‘Well, you got a point, Nate. I don’t ever make claims for nothin’ I can’t deliver. Ain’t a whorehouse in Texas, I’d say, nor west of the Mississippi, even east of the Big Muddy, where a man has a snowball’s chance in hell of buyin’ somethin’ fresh, let alone unopened. Unless he’s a damn millionaire, maybe!’

  Edge went on up the stairway, heard other good-natured exchanges between the men and the women, heavily outnumbered, but, as whores, well able to take care of themselves in most situations.

  On the upper floor, beyond the range of the lamplight in the saloon, he used the level of noise from below to steer him to the vacant room most suited to his purpose: the quietest in which to get a good night’s sleep. Moved along a door-lined hallway lit by moonlight shafting through an uncurtained window at the far end. A key jutted from every door lock except for number seven, where a crack of light at the foot went out just before he reached it.

  At the far end of the hallway the noise was muffled: once inside his chosen room it was muted by distance and intervening walls until it was almost inaudible.

  He glanced out through the single window, saw he had his bearings right: the room was at a rear corner of the building, above the kitchen, as far away from the noisy saloon as it was possible to get within the hotel. The window looked out over a trash-littered back yard, the ground beyond sloping up toward the ridge of the north flank of the valley.

  He left the drapes open and enough light from the halfmoon penetrated the lace-curtained window for his eyes to confirm what his nose had already gleaned. His body, clothing and burning tobacco were all that tainted the air of this room. Like the restaurant, the renting rooms were obviously the province of the white-haired Dolly Cory who considered dirt an enemy, insisted upon cleanliness and neatness in her domain.

  The room was adequately furnished with just a bed, a strip of rug on either side, a chair, a table with a kerosene lamp on it, and a rail angled across a corner with some clothes hangers hanging from it.

  There was a staleness in the atmosphere, like the room had been shut up, unoccupied for a long time. And when he had stripped off most of his clothing, slid under the covers with his Winchester rifle for company, the linen felt a little damp, as if the bed had been made up and left unused for just as long.

  He was self-consciously aware of the ingrained dirt of a day’s travel, the growth of more than twelve hours’ stubble on his lower face, the stink he felt sure was emanating from his pores of cheap cantina rotgut liquor and the cheaper whore who had shared another of his beds for so many nights.

  Then the degree of weariness he had experienced when he completed transacting business with Daniel L. Cheetham at the livery stable engulfed him again. Perhaps this was at the moment his head hit the pillow, so he could not even be sure if he actually thought consciously about his disheveled state in this unaired, scrupulously clean room, or if he dreamed it.

  Certainly it was the climax of a dream—more like a nightmare—that jerked him awake, his right hand fisted around the frame of the Winchester. A series of crazy images. Of a crone coming to him. Who started out Mexican, suddenly became a pale-skinned blonde. Sprouted side whiskers. Which she carefully peeled off her face. Next raised the skirt of her too-tight purple-colored gown. Pressed the whiskers against the flaccid base of her belly. Let the hem of the dress fall. Suddenly held a Colt revolver in one hand, a Remington in the other. Had silver stars for eyes. Indian feathers in her hair.

  ‘ ... hell, Amos! You’re either with us or, if you ain’t, you’re against us. And if you’re against us, frig it, get your ass the hell out of here! And you better act dumb, deaf and blind when the rest of us do somethin’!’

  Edge folded up in the bed. Smelt the rancid sweat on his unwashed flesh. Aimed the rifle at lace-curtained window, brightly lit from outside by the moon. Checked the impulse to pump the action. Thought maybe lie came awake with a cry of alarm, but could not be sure.

  Now silence was total for what seemed many stretched seconds. While his mind filled with a series of disjointed memories which he methodically organized into chronological order. Pinned down where he was: everything that happened to bring him here, today, the four weeks in Mexico, the long ride south from Figure Eight Lake up in Nebraska.

  Or maybe the seeming length of the silence was just his jolted-awake mind playing tricks with time. For suddenly he heard Amos Bryce replying to the query he now realized had been voiced by Nancy Fox.

  ‘I’m with you, damnit! I’ve got as much vested interest in this town as anyone else! I don’t make so much money as you do peddlin’ flesh, maybe ... Or Nate sellin’ liquor ... Barny his dry goods ... Whoever and whatever! But I got me a good, regular-paid job in Holderville!’

  ‘And you like it here?’ a man growled.

  ‘Sure he does,’ a woman said. ‘We all like livin’ in Holderville. Like Waldo likes sellin’ his goods here. Other drummers like gettin’ orders from other Holderville merchants. He’s with us. So what we all gonna do to keep the fort filled with men?’

  ‘Stir up the friggin’ Comanches!’ somebody snapped.

  ‘You already decided that,’ Waldo Glaser snarled. ‘How? That’s the question.’

  Edge was in full command of his awakened senses now. The night air was cold, had chilled the sweat of unreasoning fear. He realized the voices were coming from directly beneath the room.

  Slowly he slid out of bed, set down his bare feet as lightly as when he had approached the outcrop of rock at the draw where Roy Bryce hid. Traced the spot where the voices reached into the room at their loudest. Carried up the chimney, which was still warm from the smoke of the cooking fire, that encroached into the room at the angle of the side and rear walls of the building.

  ‘It’s late, so let’s all bed down and sleep on it,’ Nate Cory suggested. ‘Meet here at the Rest Easy noon tomorrow. Put forward what plans any of us have come up with.’

  ‘Quicker the better, I say,’ a man argued. ‘No tellin’ when Captain Cameron’ll get the word to pull out the rest of the men. I reckon we—’

  ‘Be at least a couple weeks more,’ Nancy Fox broke in. ‘I heard Dolan and the troopers talkin’ about it just tonight. Seems Department Headquarters at San Antonio are stallin’.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ the man who wanted fast action growled. ‘Because they’re stallin’, that don’t mean some top brass asshole won’t make a decision—’ the speaker snapped his fingers ‘—like that.’

  Edge heard the creak of a floorboard outside the door. Took his ear away from the smoke-warmed wall, swung around. Aimed the rifle at the door: a dark rectangle against the whitewashed wall on the far side of the room.

  Down in the kitchen the talk continued. But now no voices were raised in angry argument and he was moving away from the sounding board of the chimney, they had become just an incoherent mumble.

  He was half-way to the door when a tentative rapping of knuckles on the panel brought him to a halt in midstride.

  ‘Mr. Edge? Are you awake, Mr. Edge?’ A woman, her voice taut with nervous tension. But nonetheless speaking with the natural refined tone of a good background.

  ‘Yeah, Mrs. Glaser, I’m awake,’ he drawled as he restarted toward the door. ‘What can I do for you?’

  He held the rifle with one hand fisted around the muzzle end of the barrel. So his other was free to turn the key in the lock, twist the knob of the door: if that was what the situation called for.

  ‘Let me in? Please?’

  Edge looked down at himself, attired in worse-for-wear red long johns, told her: ‘I got hardly anything on, ma’am.’

  ‘Neither have I, Mr. Edge,’ she replied quickly, and her sudden breathless tone sounded like it had little to do with former nervousness. Much more was caused by excitement, which mounted when she added: ‘Just as, I think, you imagined me when you first saw me earlier this evening?’

  ‘Mrs. Glaser, I—’

  ‘Mr. Edge, I don’t know how long we have. Before Waldo returns from wherever he has gone. So you had better open this door immediately. Or I will be a very frustrated woman. Disappointed, too, at how badly I misjudged you. And I do so hate to be disappointed.’

  Edge remained aware of the steady rumble of talk from the kitchen below. Equally of the fast breathing of the woman on the other side of the door. Most strongly of all, his state of arousal.

  ‘Well, Mr. Edge?’ A hint of impatience.

  ‘Why not?’ the half-breed perhaps said aloud: as he rested the rifle against the wall, turned the key with one hand, twisted the knob with the other.

  In the moonlight from the window at the end of the hallway, and from that of the room behind him, he looked briefly at the smile on the lovely face of the woman. Spent more time surveying the shadowy form of her slender body that showed through the diaphanous fabric of a white nightgown, which he guessed, in passing, had cost as much as the purple dress.

  ‘You appear to admire what you see, Mr. Edge,’ Emma Glaser said, a hint of laughter in her voice.

  Then she lowered herself on to her haunches, grasped the hem of the flimsy nightwear, straightened up. Moved her arms so the gown lifted smoothly up off her body, leaving its entire length naked, from her long neck to her small feet. Erotically bathed in the soft moonlight that, falling upon the firm smoothness of her pale form from two directions, shadowed only the deepest indentations.

  For no longer than two or three seconds she maintained the alluring pose, arms raised so her small and conical, large-nippled breasts were shown at their most provocative: while her head remained enveloped in the voluminous folds of the gown, bunched up and impossible to see through now.

  Then she jerked it clear, lowered one arm to her side, trailed the gown across the floor behind her as she stepped over the threshold. Her free hand reached towards Edge, arm curled around his back. She pulled herself hard against him, sucked in a deep breath.

  ‘My God, a real man!’ she whispered, her lips a half inch from brushing his. He smelled the sweetness of her breath as she marveled: ‘So big and strong ... Oh, so very big!’

  Now she kissed him, rocking her head one way then another, while she pressed her breasts and her belly and her thighs against him. Their heights almost matched.

  With an arm still curled around Edge’s neck, her lips grinding to his, the rest of her body suddenly went lax. Instinctively, the half-breed encircled her with both arms, prevented her seemingly jointless form sliding to the floor. Then, with one arm clinging to him, she flung back her head, used her splayed hand on his neck to push his face into the length of pale throat presented to him.

  ‘Please, please, please, you wonderful, you big man,’ she rasped breathlessly.

  His lips trailed down the soft firmness of her skin; she shuddered. He ignored awareness of his rough, bristled jaw and cheek scraping against her flesh as she moaned, not from pain. Then, as he swept her naked, pliable body up in his arms, turned, went towards the bed, he was only vaguely disconcerted by the knowledge that it was the woman who had dictated every move he made. Skillfully manipulated him so he had small option but to respond in the way he did: the way she required.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18