EDGE: Vengeance at Ventura Read online

  Table of Contents

  Rough Edge

  Credits

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Edge Series

  ROUGH EDGE

  The man they call Edge is headed across the barren Utah desert when he runs headlong into a violent family struggle. A crazy grandfather, raving about the Second Coming, has a secret cache of several thousand dollars – the kind of money just bound to bring trouble. Trouble so big a father will shoot a son, outlaws will track and torture a woman, and a whole town could lose control in the grip of greed and fear.

  Even Edge’s cool head is put to the test on the small Wild West mining camp where the fastest trigger is law, and cold cash a stairway to heaven.

  For:

  R.W.

  who threw a party out west —

  not of the necktie variety.

  Chapter One

  THE San Juan River in the south-eastern corner of Utah was little more than a trickle of water along a shallow muddy trench when Edge and Crystal Dickens halted their horses and the animals dipped their heads to drink.

  ‘It seems to me,’ the woman growled sourly, ‘that we have ridden an awfully long way to get precisely nowhere.’

  She took off her sweat-stained grey Stetson, made a token attempt to finger-comb her hair, then grimaced at its greasy feel and replaced the hat.

  ‘Everywhere is somewhere, lady,’ the man answered, face impassive as he arced the butt of a cigarette into the dust-clouded water and heard the glowing tobacco hiss.

  She swung to the left and right in her saddle, surveying the desolate terrain of rock and sand and dried up brush and cactus vegetation spread out on all sides. And her grimace hardened into a scowl.

  ‘So where is this?’

  ‘Figure we’re close to a place that’s like nowhere else in this whole country,’ Edge answered evenly.

  She vented a hollow laugh. ‘You could’ve fooled me. This piece of real estate doesn’t look much different from every other mile of country we’ve covered since we left Irving.’

  Her eyes directed a weary challenge toward him.

  Edge pointed a finger to the north-east, then the north-west. ‘There’s Colorado and there’s Utah.’ Now he stabbed a crooked thumb over his right shoulder and his left. ‘New Mexico. Arizona. Ain’t no place else where four states or territories corner like this.’

  Anger flared across her face and her voice was shrill. ‘Shit, Edge, we’ve come all these miles for you to give me a geography lesson?’

  The man raised a hand to rasp a thumb over the bristles on the side of his jaw, apparently unmoved by the ill-tempered outburst. But then his arm swung toward her. Very fast. She started a gasp of alarm, but this was curtailed by a squeal of pain as the back of his hand hit her cheek. She had withdrawn her feet from the stirrups and now released the reins to grab for the saddlehorn. But the finger-hold she got was not sufficient and she was knocked off the horse. The squeal lengthened and became a scream of greater pain when she slammed against the sun-baked mud of the riverbed.

  The scream ended and she sobbed, looked up at Edge from between the legs and beneath the belly of her still drinking stallion. ‘You sonofabitch!’ she rasped through clenched teeth. ‘That is the last time you beat up on me!’ She sobbed again and climbed unsteadily to her feet, to glare at him hatefully across the saddle. ‘We’re through! Like we should have been back in Irving! I should have known you were lying when you told me you didn’t enjoy hurting women! A man like you!’

  The man called Edge nodded and touched the brim of his hat with his fingernails. ‘No sweat, lady. First time I hit you was because you acted like a whore. This time because you talked dirty like one. Been nice knowing you. Some of the other times.’

  He tugged on the reins to raise his gelding’s head then heeled the animal forward, through the three-foot-wide stream and up the slope of the hard-packed and myriad-cracked bed on the other side.

  Edge was a tall man: six feet three inches, and weighed a closely packed two hundred pounds. He was in his late thirties and the harsh experiences which had filled so many of these years could be seen in the deep lines that were carved across the skin of his face. It was a lean face and the skin was stretched taut between the high cheekbones and the firm jaw. Colored dark brown by exposure to the elements - although his complexion had never been pale like that of his Scandinavian mother. For, like the jet black hair which he wore long enough to brush his shoulders and conceal the nape of his neck, it was drawn from the bloodline of his Mexican father. Set into the brown face were eyes of a light and icy blue, between permanently narrowed lids. The nose was hawklike and there was an unsubtle clue to the latent brutality of Edge in the thin lipped mouthline. Several hours’ growth of bristles sprouted on his lower face, slightly longer and thicker above and to either side of his mouth to merely hint at a Mexican-style moustache.

  Women other than Crystal Dickens had found the face of the man attractive. Many more had regarded it as ugly.

  After perhaps a full five minutes of riding north-west from the San Juan River, he heard the clop of hooves behind him. The following horse was moving faster than his own, but then it was reined down and the paces were matched to maintain a gap of about a hundred yards. He did not turn and neither did he show any flicker of expression to reveal what he felt about the woman’s decision to trail him.

  Crystal Dickens was a brown-eyed, dark blonde woman of about thirty. With a heart-shaped face that was interestingly attractive rather than beautiful or even pretty. The lips were full, the nose pert and the cheeks dimpled. Her complexion was unblemished and its coloration had shaded from pale to a pleasant tan in the time Edge had known her. Her build was slender, but there were telltale signs that it would quickly thicken if she did not guard against putting on weight.

  She was attired in much the same style of garb as Edge. Blue denim pants and check cotton shirt. Black riding boots, spurless, and grey Stetson. Her kerchief was red with white spots while his was plain grey. She carried no weapons. He had a Frontier Colt in a holster hung low from the right side of his gunbelt and tied to his thigh. And there was a straight razor in a sheath held to the nape of his neck by a beaded thong that was just visible above the kerchief. The stock of a Winchester jutted from a boot slung from the front right of his Western-style saddle. Both horses had bedrolls lashed on to their backs behind the saddles. Topcoats and cooking and eating utensils were stowed in each roll.

  They had made regular use of the bedrolls and their contents since riding out of the west Texas town of Irving many days ago, but Edge had drawn the revolver and rifle only to clean the guns. And he had taken out the razor merely to shave each morning.

  It was mid-afternoon when they allowed their mounts to drink from the river reduced to a stream. And evening was hovering in the east, waiting to sweep across the desolate Colorado Plateau country in the wake of the set sun, when Edge brought his gelding to a halt on the crest of a rise. His hand moved to within three inches of where the frame of the Winchester showed at the mouth of the boot.

  ‘What is it?’ Crystal called, a quiver of fear in her voice.

  From almost the first moment of their meeting, she had had reason to know that this man called Edge was never at ease. Awake and, she was convinced, also when he was asleep. For most of the time, to the casual obser
ver, he appeared almost lazily relaxed while he surveyed his surroundings with apparent bored indifference. But those slitted blue eyes of his missed nothing. And if they focused upon anything which might signal danger, he was instantly prepared to meet the threat. Just as now, on the top of the slope, he sat rigidly in the saddle. Peering ahead, eyes glinting in the failing light of the sun. Every muscle in his lean body poised to power him into whatever action was required if the threat became a reality.

  The woman demanded a canter from her horse, then slowed him down to a walk again as she closed with the man at the top of the slope.

  ‘I asked what is it?’ she said.

  ‘A boat,’ he answered absently.

  ‘A what?’ She reined the stallion to a halt alongside that of the half-breed and vented a gasp of surprise as she stared in the same direction as him. ‘Well, I’ll be . . . you’re right.’

  ‘It’s what I always try to be, lady,’ he growled. ‘This time it wasn’t so hard.’

  From the point where the two sat their horses, the terrain stretched away northwards as flat tableland for perhaps five miles before the horizon was delineated by a line of jagged ridges. The boat they peered at was the best part of a mile to the north-west, it and the shack it dwarfed clear to see in the soft, pinkish light of the setting sun.

  It was a clinker built craft, maybe fifty-feet-long and twenty-feet from keel to deck. The superstructure was only partially completed, but there seemed to be sufficient lumber stacked on the aft deck to see the job done. The whole construction was held upright by an extensive arrangement of supporting beams.

  The fact that the craft had been a long time in the making could be seen from the various degrees of weathering - the planking close to the keel appeared to have been exposed to the elements for as long as the frame build shack close to the stern. The shack was single storey and not large enough to have more than two rooms. There was a flatbed wagon parked beside it and two horses in a fenced corral out back. While Edge and Crystal Dickens watched, grey smoke began to curl up from the chimney.

  ‘A boat in the middle of a desert?’ the woman muttered. ‘Whoever is building it must be out of his mind.’

  ‘And rich,’ Edge answered, heeling his horse forward with just one hand on the reins, the other staying close to the booted Winchester.

  ‘Uh? Oh, yes. All that timber must have cost a fortune.’

  ‘And hauling it in, another fortune.’

  For a minute they rode side by side in silence. Then, her interest in the strange craft abated, Crystal cleared her throat.

  ‘I was stupid. What I said back there. About being through with you. God knows how many miles from civilization. I promise to watch my language in future. If that’s all right with you?’

  He glanced at her and found she was eyeing him contritely and a little nervously. If the blow had marked her flesh, there had been time for the redness to fade.

  ‘I never was going anywhere special, lady,’ he told her. ‘Figured you knew that.’

  ‘You never said.’

  ‘I never heard you ask.’

  He was concentrating his attention on the boat now, but heard the sharp intake of breath that revealed she was swallowing her anger. And then there was a new silence between them, and all around them, save for the clop of slow moving hooves. Until the shack door creaked open and a man yelled:

  10

  “‘Hey there, you folks! Welcome to you! Glad to see you by here! Coffee’s abubblin’ and I’ll be real pleased to throw some more eats in the cookin’ pot!’

  He was outside the shack by then, head craned forward and eyes squinting to see the newcomers more clearly across the two-hundred-yard gap that separated them from him. An elderly man with grey hair and a bushy grey beard. Short of stature and scrawny of frame. Hatless and bare footed, with a pair of ragged, once white pants flapping around his legs and a torn and heavily soiled sleeveless undershirt fitting where it touched his torso. From the sound of his reedy voice and the slow way he moved he seemed to be very old. When Edge and the woman had ridden close enough to see his lined and saggy flesh, weak and watery eyes and toothless gums they placed him over seventy.

  ‘Name’s Attinger, folks,’ he greeted them in the same gleeful tones. ‘Aristotle Attinger. Like it says up there. Mostly I’m called Telly for short. And I like that.’

  By up there he meant the broad beamed stern of the boat where, to either side of the stout rudder shaft, was the crudely lettered: Aristotle’s Ark.

  The woman seemed on the point of losing control of a grin that would have expanded into a gust of laughter. Until her eyes met those of Edge for part of a second, before the half-breed said to Attinger:

  ‘Coffee sounds good, feller. I’m Edge. The lady is Miss Crystal Dickens.’

  The old timer nodded vigorously after peering hard at both visitors and obviously approving of what he saw. ‘Food, too? It’s just a mess of beans I’m havin’ for supper tonight. You’re welcome to put your animals in the corral out back. Some hay out there. And water in the trough.’

  ‘Obliged,’ Edge said as he slid from the saddle and Attinger swung around and limped back into the shack.

  Remembering the ice-cold look in the half-breed’s eyes, the woman had no difficulty in curbing her instinct to laugh at the crazy old timer and his grandiosely named landlocked boat. And said nothing until they had led their horses to the rear of the shack and were in the corral, unfastening the cinches.

  ‘You don’t find this whole thing ridiculous, Edge?’ she asked coldly.

  ‘Maybe a little more so than what you did, lady,’ the half-breed answered. ‘Did I laugh at you before accepting your hospitality?’

  She scowled. ‘By that, I suppose you mean before I gave you ten thousand dollars and myself? No, you didn’t laugh. You slapped me around.’ She tentatively touched the place on her face where the most recent blow had landed. ‘And I’ll tell you something for nothing, Edge. For choice, I’d rather be laughed at.’

  ‘You had the choice, lady,’ he told her as they carried their gear out of the corral and he replaced the bar across the opening in the fence. ‘Stay or pull out. And you knew the rules from the start. If you stayed, you ran the risk of getting beat.’

  She pouted and snapped: ‘It was never just like a game tome.’

  Edge grinned at the woman. ‘Way I recall it, the first time we laid eyes on each other it turned out to be a matter of stud poke her.’

  ‘You arrogant pig!’ she snarled, and moved ahead of him to go into the shack.

  Crystal Dickens had run a lot of risks to find the man called Edge - leaving New York City and carrying ten thousand dollars cash which she had reason to believe belonged to him. She got lucky and the two came together in the saloon of the small Texas town of Irving, where violence erupted. Men died and, without wanting it, Edge found himself the owner of the saloon with the woman his partner. The violence of that first night spilled over into the following days and, because of the bitter experiences of the long past, the half-breed stoically accepted the inevitable outcome of trouble that was not of his making. And rode out of Irving once again to pick up his life as a drifter. Without a penny of the ten thousand dollars which had never really been his. But, by her own choice, with the woman who had taken so many risks to bring it to him.

  4Guess you folks think I’m crazy as a loon? Like everyone else around here?’

  There was just one room in the twenty by twenty shack. A combination living room, bedroom and kitchen. Furnished with the bare essentials of daily life.

  Attinger was at a stove in a corner, stirring a pot from which arose the appetizing aroma of cooking beans. The woman had dragged the small table over alongside the narrow bed and was in the process of pouring coffee into two tin mugs. Then she sat down on the bed and scalded her tongue when she tried to drink her coffee. Pointedly ignoring the half-breed as he set his gear down on the floor beside hers, she asked:

  ‘Are you a Mormon, Mr.
Attinger?’

  ‘A what, young lady?’

  ‘A Mormon. Religious people who had to leave the east and settled here in Utah.’

  ‘No, no I ain’t,’ the old man answered. ‘I ain’t got no religious label. Just a belief in the Virgin Mary, Jesus Christ and the Lord God Almighty.’

  Edge had taken his eating and drinking utensils from his bedroll and now he carried them to the table, gripping the back of the shack’s single chair and dragging it behind him on the way. He poured coffee into his mug.

  ‘Awhile back, up in Wyoming, I met with some people who figured it was time for the Second Coming, feller,’ he said.

  Attinger turned to look hard at the half-breed, obviously ready to get angry if he suspected he was the butt of ridicule. But Edge was impassive as he sipped at the hot, strong coffee.

  ‘Lots of folks get visions, young man. And I ain’t sayin’ there ain’t many that ain’t crazy. Or just says things out of spite or trickery or some such. But I ain’t got no kinda axe to grind. And I don’t stand to make no money outta what I’m doin’. That coffee all right?’

  ‘Its fine, Mr. Attinger,’ the woman assured him.

  ‘Just the opposite, feller,’ Edge said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s costing you a bundle to build that boat outside.’

  ‘Sure enough is, young man. But it don’t matter. Because I can afford it. And even if I couldn’t I’d have gotten the money somehow. When the call comes from where mine did, a man just has to answer it. Pass your plates, folks. Grub’s ready.’

  Edge remained seated and the woman grudgingly took both tin plates across to the stove, where Attinger ladled a heap of beans on to each of them. Then, as she delivered them to the table, the old man struck a match and lit a kerosene lamp hanging from the centre of the ceiling. The darkness of night retreated beyond the walls of the shack. A wind began to whine softly through the supporting timbers holding the ark upright. And dust was blown in through the doorway of the shack. The old timer crossed to creak the door closed: leaned against it, folded his arms and grinned through his beard. Looking like a man who had achieved something much prized.