EDGE: The Blind Side Read online

  Table of Contents

  Sliced Edge

  Dedications

  Copyright

  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

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  SLICED EDGE

  Edge reckoned it was the damnedest thing he'd ever come across: a fashionably dressed couple driving through the desert in a covered wagon complete with a brass bed and a grandfather clock. But he soon found out that all the mystery was locked up in the distorted mind of Mrs. Rochford, a woman as skilled in the pleasures of the flesh as she is in the more subtle manip­ulations of her fellow men.

  She's a dame with a devious game plan. She's just hired Edge. And his troubles are just starting.

  For F.H.

  Another lady who

  provides the proof.

  Chapter One

  Edge rasped an inarticulate sound and reined to a halt the pair of mules and the buckboard, wound the reins around the brake lever and dug the makings from a pocket of his shirt. Then, while he rolled, lit and took a first drag against the cigarette, he watched the activity at the side of the much larger rig that was stal­led on the trail about a half mile ahead.

  It was a covered wagon that needed at least two animals in the traces, but this morning just one of the horses which had hauled the rig out to this point on the Calendar-to-Tucson trail was ready and willing to face up to another day's work in the heat and glare of the south-western sun—the obedient chestnut standing patiently beside the wagon while a man and a woman attempted vainly to stir the gray, sprawled on its side, into at least rising to his feet.

  The couple had made night camp where the trail started to rise up off a broad area of scrub desert and twist through the Gila Mountains-had left the wagon parked on the trail and built their fire, hobbled the horses and bedded down on a lushly grassed patch of ground between it and a partially tree-fringed waterhole.

  Now, in his efforts to coax the obstinate gray into rising, the man carried a skillet to the hole, filled it with water and brought it back to offer to the animal. And, while he was gone the few yards—his back to the scene—the woman directed a vicious kick at the belly of the horse. The mistreatment resulted in a frail motion of the tail, and the setting down of the skillet of water caused the gray to drag its head away.

  Edge had momentarily scowled at the ill-tempered action of the woman, but his features were again in their usual impassive set when he took up the reins, flicked them languidly over the backs of the mules and vented another grunt to start the team and buckboard moving.

  The face of the man was of the kind that di­vided opinion between ugliness and handsomeness—those who considered him ruggedly at­tractive were unworried by a certain quality of latent cruelty that could perhaps be seen in the line of the thin lips and the icily cold light of the eyes. The eyes were light blue and were always narrowed to slits beneath their hooded lids. Above and dropping sharply down to either side of his wide mouth he affected just the merest indication of a moustache. And these two features—the blueness of the eyes and the style of the moustache—provided the least subtle clues to the mixture of blood in his veins that made him a half-breed: he was in fact the son of a Mexican father and a Swedish mother.

  Born to them a little over forty years ago and showing it—and showing, too, that there had been few easy times during his life. This seen in the narrow-eyed, thin-lipped face that was long and lean and cloaked with skin darkened as much by exposure to the elements as by heri­tage; and networked with countless deep lines inscribed by the experiences of as well as the passing of the years. There was little of his-brow to be seen because of the unruly, jet black hair that escaped from under his hat to fall across it. The cheekbones were prominent be­neath the slits of his eyes and the sparsely fleshed, time-scarred skin was stretched taut down to his firm jawline. There was a hawkishness about the shape of his nose, and the nostrils were flared. He had the kind of beard that made it seem like he needed to shave thirty minutes after he already had. This morn­ing, it was three hours since his sun-up shave and his lower face was already sprouting bristles—many gray ones among those of darker hue. There was much less sign of gray­ing among the black hair that framed the stoic face, worn long enough for the ends to brush his shoulders at either side.

  Shoulders that were broad, but by no means massively so—just as his chest did not bulge with muscle, nor his arms. And his waist was narrow, his belly flat. He perhaps looked long legged. But, on the whole, at six feet three inches tall and weighing about two hundred pounds, he seemed to be leanly in proportion and gave an impression of being quietly strong without commanding any obvious brute strength.

  Another impression he gave on this sun-bright, clear-skied and suddenly tension-riddled morning was of being a down-at-heel no-hoper. For his garb was a match for his ap­parently unshaven and uncertainly trail dusty face—a black Stetson with a plain band, a gray shirt, black denim pants, black riding boots and a brown leather gunbelt with a Frontier Colt in the holster that he did not have tied down to his right thigh while he was riding a rig rather than a horse. An upper portion of his red long johns was visible above the top button of his open shirt, and around his unkerchiefed neck there was a string of dull-colored wooden beads. Every item of his outfit was old and worn, sweat stained and dirty with trail dust, scuffed or scratched, torn and sometimes mended, fitting well enough but completely lacking in style.

  Likewise the Western saddle, accoutrements and Winchester rifle that comprised the only freight on the rear of the buckboard. And the elderly buckboard, too, which had bleached and warped timbers, rusted ironwork and a badly repaired off-side rear wheel.

  Not so the mules, though. Which, to the ner­vous gazes of the man and the woman beside the stalled covered wagon looked to be the only possessions of the tall, lean, impassive stranger on which he lavished any care. But they were in no position to see that the six-shooter in his holster and the repeater rifle in the boot of his saddle were perhaps old—but were not forgotten. And they could have no idea that from the rear of the string of beads around the stranger's neck there hung a sheath in which nestled a razor with a blade that was never allowed to become dulled.

  "Morning to you, ma'am," Edge greeted in an even tone, raising a brown skinned hand to touch the broad, curved brim of his hat. "You plan to shoot me, feller?"

  He had closed the distance from a half to a quarter mile when the woman spotted his ap­proach and called the attention of the man to it —and the man lunged around the unwilling horse to reach the front of the wagon, snatched a rifle off the foot rest and whirled back into full view to aim it from the shoulder along the trail. Then remained rock steady in this attitude until Edge spoke and once more halted the mules and buckboard, the totally indiffer­ent animals perhaps a hundred feet from the rear of the stalled wagon.

  "If you intend harm to my wife and I, sir, I will not hesitate to put a bullet in your heart," the man answered, speaking English as only the most educated English spoke it in the half-breed's experience.

  With the hand he had used to touch the brim of his Stetson, Edge took the cigarette from a corner of his mouth, got rid of its dead ash and angled it off his bottom lip again. Drew against it and expelled some smoke on a sigh before he replied: "I have to tell you—"

  "Helen and I will always listen to rational argument, sir."

  "I have to te
ll you," Edge went on as if there had been no interruption, "that if once you aim the rifle away from me don't point it towards me again. Unless you squeeze the trigger. For I sure as hell will do my best to kill you. One of the few things that rile me these days—having a gun aimed at me."

  "Geoffrey?" The woman said, sounding as nervous as she looked—unable to tear her fixed gaze from the quietly spoken, disreputable-looking man on the buckboard. Her intonation added the query that asked her husband to do something, without offering any suggestions as to what this could be. She sounded as upper-crust English as the man.

  "I sense, sir, that you have something else you wish to say to Helen and I?"

  Edge shifted his cold eyed gaze from the man, to the woman who had backed off to stand alongside him and then at the gray geld­ing stretched out on the grass, neck and legs extended to their fullest extent, saliva trickling through his bared and gritted teeth and eye half hidden by the haw.

  "The animal, sir?"

  "You own him, feller?"

  "Geoffrey and I are not horse thieves!"

  "Did he have an open wound?" Edge looked from the distressed animal to the man and back again, ignoring the woman whose ner­vousness was giving way to displeasure.

  "He became snagged on a cactus when we were halted for tea last afternoon," the man answered, his anxiety taking a different turn.

  "Such a small cut on the leg of the animal could not—" the woman started.

  "Got infected through it," Edge cut in on the woman. "Horse has all the signs of tetanus. Which out here, a lot of miles from the closest veterinarian, is sure to be fatal, feller. Since he's your animal, you ought to end his misery."

  "What?" the Englishman asked, and swal­lowed hard—glanced across the front of his wife toward the doomed gelding but did not allow the rifle to waver off target.

  "Tetanus, feller. Maybe you people know it as lockjaw, which is a very painful thing to—"

  "I know what tetanus is, sir. But I've never killed any—"

  "So I have to figure you ain't going to blast a bullet into me," Edge cut in as he wound the reins around the brake lever, turned on the seat and slid his Winchester out of the boot on the saddle in the rear of the buckboard. Then, ap­pearing to totally ignore the couple by the stalled wagon, he swung down off the rig and had the repeater angled across the front of his body and pointed at the sky as he thumbed back the hammer from a breech which already contained a bullet.

  "Geoffrey?" the woman said in the same one as before, or perhaps a little more stridently as she reached out a hand to grasp at the forearm behind the hand that was cupped under the rifle barrel.

  "And you're Helen, ma'am," the half-breed said, aware that he could have swung the Winchester down and raked it to the aim while the Englishman was momentarily off guard. "For a lot of years now, I've been Edge. Figure ain't any of us glad to know us yet. But then we don't know us, do we?"

  The English couple watched the half-breed with a blend of horrified fascination mixed in with perplexity as he closed with the pros­trated gelding, altering the angle at which he carried his rifle and gradually softening his tone until he was almost whispering. Then he came to an easy halt and was silent.

  "Goeffrey?" Helen said shrilly.

  "Shut your stupid mouth, Helen," her hus­band rasped, his tone harsher than that of Edge but his voice no louder.

  The gelding chomped and tried to swallow. His ears pricked forward and he made a pitiful attempt to rise, but it seemed as if every joint in his body was locked solid. He whinnied. Which was when the half-breed stepped across his head, arced the rifle down so that the muz­zle almost touched the animal's half-hidden eyeball, and exploded a bullet into him.

  "Geoffrey!" the woman shrieked, at her loud­est yet in anger. "He shot our horse. He killed Brutus!"

  "Never give animals names, lady," Edge advised as he turned away from the gelding that was shuddering as the nervous system re­acted to the death of the brain. "When they die, it doesn't come so hard."

  He pumped the lever action of the Winches­ter to jack a fresh shell into the breech as the spent case was ejected. And then he eased the hammer gently forward as he canted the barrel to his shoulder, gripping the rifle around the frame in just one second. All this apparently done with a nonchalant indifference to his sur­roundings. But he had seen that the horse was certainly dead, the other half of the pair was not overly disturbed by the gunshot, the gun-smoke and the killing of one of its own kind, the woman was perhaps on the verge of hysterical anger and—most important of all—her husband had lowered his Winchester rifle from its aim at Edge.

  "The poor, wretched creature," Helen wailed, having glanced at her husband's face and seen with the knowledge of experience she could ex­pect no sympathy in a display of temper tantrum—so switching to a hastily summoned ex­hibition of grief on the brink of tears. "We might have been able to save him. I loved that horse, Geoffrey."

  "Yeah, ma'am," the half-breed murmured as he dropped down on his haunches so that he could pick up the skillet with his free hand and raise it to his lips to drink of the warm but fresh water from the nearby hole. "And I saw from back there—" He gestured with the skillet along the trail in back of where the buck-board and mule stood, "—how the horse got a kick out of you."

  Chapter Two

  "You have eaten breakfast, sir?" the English­man asked, after he glanced down at the rifle in his hands, appeared to be embarrassed that he was still holding it and then hurried to stow it back under the seat of the covered wagon.

  He was about the same age as Edge, an inch or so shorter and weighed a good deal less. He had a clean-shaven face with soft-looking skin that was evenly shaded to a darker than natur­al color by the sun it was not usually exposed to. He had reddish hair and clear green eyes, a full-lipped mouth and very even teeth. Prob­ably he had been classically handsome before his nose suffered a break that had left it crook­ed as it healed. This blemish also added char­acter to features which maybe before had lack­ed it. He wore good quality clothing—a Stet­son, shirt, vest, pants and boots which were all black—that was ideally suited to the kind of rough country traveling in which he was en­gaged, all of it purchased fairly recently so that the newness was just beginning to be worked out of the fabrics. His hands, and the arms above bared by having the shirt sleeves rolled up, looked as soft and unused to the outdoor life as did the man's face.

  "Best part of three hours ago, I figure," Edge replied to his question. "Looks like you people are headed in the same direction as I am."

  "Coincidence can be as unkind as often as it can be kind," the woman put in acidly before her husband could respond.

  She was a little younger than the men, no more than two or three years. Dressed in a country rather than a city style, but in an over­ly frilled white gown, smartly heeled blue shoes and paler blue hat with a too-broad brim which comprised the kind of store-bought outfit a farmer's wife or daughter might wear for a church social or Fourth of July picnic. And this woman, who was obviously not the wife of a farmer nor probably was the daughter of one, looked good in the clothes. For she had a brand of pale and delicate beauty of face and fragile slenderness of build that was perfectly comple­mented by the style and texture and colors of what she wore. She was no taller than five feet three inches and could not weigh much over a hundred pounds, the slightness of her build giving her a degree of womanly sexuality that few of her gender, with far more pronounced curves, could have matched. Likewise, the almost doll-like perfection of her oval shaped face with its blue eyes, snub nose, rosebud lips and milk white, flawless skin—in a frame of rich-growing, smoothly waved, honey-colored hair that swung to within a half inch of brush­ing her shoulders—had an undeniable sensual­ity that had to be lurking covertly just beneath the veneer of girlish innocence that was the first impression implied by her face.

  Yes, Edge decided as he looked away from the sour-toned, scowling Helen after biting back on an intended response to her barbed comment:
she was aging well, but what was on the inside of her carefully preserved shell was definitely suffering from the ravages of years that were totaling close to forty.

  "Looking at the springs on the wagon, the rig is loaded heavy, feller?"

  "A road agent, Geoffrey! Didn't I say when I first saw him coming toward us that I thought—“

  "Ma'am?" Edge cut in, venting the single word as part of a sigh.

  "Yes?"

  "I don't like you."

  "Well!" she stuttered as little more than a strangled gasp as she wrenched her shocked gaze from the impassive face of the half-breed to the startled and perhaps ready-to-be-afraid countenance of her husband. Then managed to squeal: "Geoffrey?"

  Edge took another mouthful of water from the skillet, then spat it out like he was rinsing off a bad taste as he straightened up from the crouch beside the head of the dead horse. He canted the Winchester to his left shoulder, tipped the water from the skillet to the ground and extended the utensil toward the woman who moved even closer to her husband, and clutched his upper arm this time, her pale an slender hand formed into a claw.

  "Guess you never will forget your name, will you feller? Mine's Edge, or did I tell you that once already?"

  The Englishman nodded, his features set in grimace now. But he made no attempt to pull free of the painful grip of his wife's talon-like hand. "While you were trying to soothe the horse, Mr. Edge. At least, I assume you were talking merely for the sake of the animal you were about to put down."

  Edge nodded tersely. "That's right, feller. And there ain't many occasions I talk just for somebody to hear the sound of my voice. You and your wife going to listen to what I have to say now? Or will I just get back on the buck-board and leave the pair of you to kill your other animal?"

  "Did I not tell you earlier that Helen and I will listen to good sense?" the Englishman answered, his confidence rising as he realized his feeling about the stranger had been correct from the start. And, as if to emphasize that he was now disassociating himself from those opinions of his wife which he should never even have considered in the first place, he gripped her firmly around the waist to jerk her clawed hand off his arm.