EDGE: The Guilty Ones (Edge series Book 31) Read online

  Table of Contents

  AVENGING EDGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Other books by this author

  AVENGING EDGE

  On his way out West, Edge joins up with a Scottish couple, Angus and Ruth Ross, bound on a strange mission. The Rosses are traveling in an old Conestoga wagon loaded with four costly and ornate caskets. They have come a long way in search of four unmarked graves…

  Edge and the Rosses stumble onto their first clue, when they are greeted by nervous, silent townspeople in a small Kansas town. Their silence soon turns into angry violence and Edge and the Rosses are run out of town with a grim warning – give up the search for the graves … or else!

  But they continue to search. And Edge plays his ironic, deadly part in the final scenario of death as the mystery falls away. And the murderous truth emerges.

  * * *

  The Guilty Ones

  By George G. Gilman

  First Published by Kindle 2014

  Copyright © 2014 by George G. Gilman

  First Kindle Edition Aug 2014

  Names, Characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  Cover Design and illustrations by West World Designs © 2014.

  http://westworlddesigns.webs.com

  This is a High Plains Western for Lobo Publications.

  Cover Illustration by Cody Wells.

  Visit the author at: www.gggandpcs.proboards.com

  For V.B.

  A Lady this time, who put me on her list.

  CHAPTER ONE

  EDGE came awake as the first light of a new day spilled across the Indiana prairie and reached into the railroad car’s dusty windows. For just a part of a second after his eyes snapped open he peered into the near darkness of the inside of his hat and wondered where he was. Which was disturbing to him for usually when he woke up he had total and instant recall. But after that brief moment was gone and he knew exactly what situation he was in, he was able to smile as he tipped his head forward, shifted into a more erect posture on the hard seat and pushed the hat on to the top of his head.

  At first he showed the expression to the vast and empty landscape that was flowing smoothly past the car window beside which he sat: a scene that was constantly changing within the confines of the window’s frame and yet one which appeared to stay the same. Mile after mile in every direction the terrain was as flat as a calm ocean, colored green by grass and splashed here and there with other shades where patches of flowers grew. Just occasionally a tree showed on the prairie, forlorn in its isolation. Less frequently the sameness of the country was relieved by a low, gently sloped hill like an island in the ocean.

  All these features were in the distance, far to the south of where Edge sat facing forward in the car, his smiling surveillance of the panorama slightly blurred by the uprights of the telegraph poles which flashed by the window of the speeding train: adding to the optical illusion that it was the prairie which was moving while the man watched from a stationary vantage point.

  But this man, as he shifted his gaze away from the scene beyond the window and glanced along the length of the swaying, rattling, jolting car was in no frame of mind to allow himself to be tricked by an illusion. It was the train that was moving, as fast as the locomotive could haul the line of six cars and a caboose along the arrow straight track, as if racing to stay ahead of the sun which would shortly lance its first ray over the horizon far behind.

  ‘You know somethin’, mister?’

  Edge had finished his habitual early morning check of the passengers who shared the car with him and was in process of digging the makings from his shirt pocket when the young girl spoke. He looked across the aisle to the last pair of seats in the car on that side just as she unfolded her thin body and sat upright, the blankets which had draped her sleeping form sliding to the floor.

  It’s never too late to learn,’ he said as he tipped tobacco into the paper and rolled the cigarette.

  “What?’ she asked, confused, as she fisted sleep from her red rimmed eyes.

  ‘Anything. You want to tell me what you have in mind?’

  He licked the gummed strip, placed the finished cigarette into a corner of his mouth and struck a match on the butt of the Remington revolver which jutted from the holster slung from the right side of his gun belt.

  ‘Oh, I see what you mean,’ the girl with blonde hair, blue eyes, buck teeth and a straight up and down body said. ‘Yes. It’s the first time I’ve seen you smile since you got aboard this train.’ Then she shook her head and her plain face showed nervousness as she tore her eyes away from the level gaze which Edge directed at her through the cloud of blue tobacco smoke. ‘Sorry, it’s none of my business.’

  Edge would have been willing to continue the conversation but the girl retreated into a pretence of sleep or perhaps a genuine attempt to get back to sleep after she had snatched up the blankets and pulled them over herself as she lay across the double seat again. But he was equally content to sit in silence and smoke his cigarette, totally indifferent to the girl’s attitude. And aware of why it had altered from amicable to anxious.

  The smile had caused the abrupt change: a smile which although it was an involuntary physical reflex to a deeply felt pleasure, touched only the man’s mouth and did nothing to add warmth to his eyes. And Edge knew from past experience that this combination of thin lips curled back to reveal twin rows of even white teeth and the ice coldness of the look in his blue, piercingly clear eyes was capable of striking terror into the minds of people toward whom he felt not the slightest ill will.

  Perhaps once he had been bothered by affecting total strangers in this way, but he could not remember. And it did not matter. For he certainly did not care one way or the other now. And now - the present - was all that was important to the man called Edge.

  A Westerner who had gone east and discovered himself to be a stranger in his own land. Was now riding the train westward, three days out of New York City and - as the figureless girl with buck teeth had correctly noticed - smiling for the first time since he climbed aboard the car at Grand Central Station. Was free of scowling depression and as undemonstratively happy as he ever got because this morning for the first time in many days he had opened his eyes and found himself back in his element. Or as close to his element as he had any right to expect on a train a mere three days west of New York. Far on the other side of the Mississippi-Missouri and astride a strong horse instead of sitting in a railroad car was what he was aiming for. But until he achieved that, he could be happy in the knowledge that the train had carried him far enough across the east for the country outside the window to start looking like the west.

  ‘I’m goin’ to California, mister,’ the girl said solemnly from under the blankets. To marry a soldier posted to Fort Yuma. Do you know that part of the country?’

  ‘South of California. North of Mexico. Territories of Arizona and New Mexico. They’re all pretty much the same, miss.
’

  ‘Good or bad.’ She sounded at ease but kept the blankets rucked up between her face and the man seated across the aisle from where she lay, as if afraid she might be provoked to fear again.

  ‘Good,’ he answered, and took the cigarette out of the corner of his mouth so that he could smile again, as he recalled that while he was in New York, he had even come to have a high regard for Texas. So he added: ‘But right now I’m the wrong feller to ask about something like that.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘A long story that wouldn’t be of interest to you. Go to sleep. Yuma’s a long way from here.’ He had hung the cigarette back in the corner of his mouth as he compressed his lips over his teeth, forming his features into an impassive set.

  ‘You don’t wanna talk?’

  ‘Later, maybe.’

  ‘All right, mister. I guess I have to learn to fall in with what a man wants. Seein’ as how I’m gonna be a married woman in less than four weeks.’

  Edge did not accept the bait and as the silence between them lengthened, the girl sighed her defeat. And, a little later, shot a surreptitious glance over the blankets toward the man she found both strangely attractive and unaccountably frightening.

  What she saw was a man in his mid- to late-thirties, tall and well-built, who stood at least three inches above six feet and weighed probably close to two hundred pounds. But he was lean, with many well-pronounced muscles and little excess fat which he emphasized and yet did not appear to be advertising by the way he wore his grey cotton shirt and his black denim pants almost skin tight. His spurless riding boots were black. While his wide brimmed, low crowned Stetson and his kerchief were grey. The kerchief did not completely conceal a row of dark-colored beads which he wore around his neck on a leather thong. There was an old and very scuffed leather gun belt around his waist, the tie which would normally hold the holster to his thigh unfastened while he was seated. A warm looking black leather coat that would reach to his knees was folded untidily on the seat beside him. On the other side of him a repeater rifle - a Winchester, the girl guessed correctly - was trapped by the barrel between his leg and the wall of the car, its stockplate on the floor.

  The face beneath the brim of the man’s hat, which had frightened her so much when she looked at it full on and which she now saw in profile, was long and lean, stained dark brown and deeply cut with many lines, the complexion and texture of the skin obviously drawn from something else in addition to exposure to extremes of weather and by the process of the man growing older. The coloration, she decided, was due in large part to his heritage. Certain of his features revealed this. Jet black hair which he wore long so that the ends brushed his shoulders and hid the nape of his neck and his ears. High cheekbones, a firm jawline and the way the leather looking skin was stretched taut between these, to either side of a hawklike nose, suggested the man had a high proportion of Latin blood flowing through his veins. Whereas the thin, wide mouth and the ice blue eyes which seemed to be permanently narrowed beneath their hooded lids were drawn from a very different blood line. In this, she was also correct, for Edge’s father had been a Mexican and his mother had come from Scandinavia.

  It was a very ugly face, she decided, after snatching that glance at him. It had a cruel set about it which did more than merely hint that this man was a brute. The way those cold eyes looked at a person, glinting in the first light of a new day, in combination with the curled back lips which smiled in the manner of an animal snarling - that was very frightening and so made him ugly.

  But then she immediately changed her mind about this, hidden beneath the blankets and examining a vivid mind picture of him now as he sat gazing out of the car window, his features formed into an expression of easy repose. Those deep lines that were carved into the flesh of his face by more than the passing of time. They seemed to tell a thousand stories, all of them harsh, of what this man had experienced, tales with unhappy endings of the kind of suffering he had endured which had made him brutal and made it impossible for him to smile the way normal people did.

  No, it was not an ugly face, the girl corrected herself, and blamed the mistake on the wrong impression she had drawn from the way he had always scowled until this morning and how he had allowed his bristles to go unshaved for three days. It was an interesting face, filled with character. Bad character maybe but - and she trembled for a moment as if she had caught a chill - she found herself compulsively attracted to the man, lost the mental image she had been studying and tried to sneak another look across the aisle at him.

  ‘He’s an officer?’ Edge asked and the abruptness of the soft spoken question startled the girl.

  ‘Who? Oh, Brad. Yes, a lieutenant. But everyone’s very sure he’ll make captain pretty soon.’ She sat upright and looked out of the window on her side of the car: at the monotonously empty landscape and the overcrowded sky - full of clouds of many colors which hung at several levels, meeting and joining and all starting to match the hue of the darkest ones as she watched. So that it would be touch and go whether the sun rose before the storm cloud cover completely filled the sky.

  She felt guilty and she interlocked her fingers and rubbed her sweat-tacky palms together beneath the blankets which now draped her lap. The man had sensed her brief glances at him - had let the first pass but admitted his awareness of the second. She could understand this. Most people - herself included - had the ability to realize it when they were being surreptitiously watched. But this man seemed to have read into her mind, too!

  Raindrops hit the window and she jerked her head back, startled again. But by something she could comprehend this time. The first flurry of the rainstorm came hard and noisy against the pane and it was an instinctive reaction to flinch.

  She immediately felt better and watched the drops of water become runnels to cut through the grime on the window, taking a few moments to regain her full composure. It had been coincidence, pure and simple, that her travelling companion had referred to the man she was to marry. To be frightened by that, compounding the fear she had felt when he looked at her with those frozen eyes of his, was as childishly silly as her response to the suddenness of the rain hitting the window. They were in a more than half filled railroad car, for goodness sake: and had been within ten feet of each other for three days and nights. In all that time she had ignored him and he had paid not the least attention to her. Now, just because he smiled and she submitted to an impulse to comment on it, her mind had been plunged into a turmoil of conflicting emotions.

  Edge dropped the cigarette on the floor and ground out its red embers under his boot heel. The locomotive whistle howled, its note sounding more mournful than usual through the rain washed dawn air. The doors at either end of the car were wrenched open and men stepped across the thresholds and came to an almost military halt. Two men at the front and one at the rear. None of them dressed for the bad weather and all of them soaked - their hair plastered to foreheads and their shirts pasted to their chests.

  One of those at the front of the car was not much more than a kid – twenty years old at the most. He wore a gun-belt but the holster was empty and he did not have a revolver in his hand. Just a gunnysack which he kept fingering nervously. The man who stood beside him, and the one who was between where Edge and the girl sat were ten years older. Armed with holstered Frontier Colts and Winchester rifles which they held double handed at hip level. They squeezed off a shot each and pumped the lever actions of the rifles to jack fresh shells into the breeches.

  The two gunshots seemed to have echoes running forward and back along the train, but as passengers were jolted awake - cursing, groaning and one woman screaming - Edge knew that other shots had been fired in other cars. Warning shots and signal shots, exploded into the floors.

  ‘Quit the noise, lady!’ the rifleman at the front of the car bellowed as he and his opposite number at the rear began to rake the Winchesters slowly from side to side. ‘Or I’ll kill you!’

  The threat was not yelled so loud
ly as the order. For the doors had banged closed to shut out many of the sounds made by the slowing train, and muted others. And the tone in which the command was given and the expression on the face of the man who gave it caused it to be instantly obeyed by the screaming woman. Then the rest of the passengers who were voicing their shock and terror became quiet.

  ‘Fine,’ the man said, nodding his head viorously. ‘Just like it should be. Everyone stay calm, nobody gets hurt. Guess you all know what’s happenin’? It’s a hold up. Rick here is gonna move down the car and hold out the sack to each of you people. And you’re gonna drop money into it. Money and valuables. Rings, brooches, watches, bracelets and like that. Just the gold and silver stuff. No junk.’

  He was talking fast and seemed to be having trouble maintaining the grim look on his clean-shaven, pale, waxy sheened face. Then he started to sweat from the effort of keeping at bay the tic which threatened to twitch his right cheek and make his nervousness blatantly obvious.

  The youngster took a forward step, and he was not so anxious now that he had something to do. He even smiled as he halted in front of the closest passengers and the expression did not have any hint of bravado about it.

  ‘Hold it, Rick!’ the rifleman between Edge and the future wife of an army lieutenant barked.

  The boy was startled and became rooted to the floor, the smile displaced by gulping fear as his head swung to left and right, wide eyes seeking the source of danger.

  ‘You people should know,’ the man at the rear of the car continued, his voice less biting. ‘When the kid is done we’ll strip search two people. We find they kept anythin’ back, we’ll kill them.’ He nodded for the boy to carry on with the collection and then added: ‘You people should know the chance you’ll be takin’. A few bucks ... a gold trinket? Worth riskin’ your lives for?’

  Passengers who had turned in their seats to look back along the car at him now faced front again and began to bring money and watches from their pockets and purses: and to remove jewellery from their fingers, wrists, necks and clothing.