EDGE: The Prisoners Read online

  Table of Contents

  HARD 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

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The EDGE series

  HARD EDGE

  While riding through the scorching Arizona desert, Edge interrupts a gunfight between a sheriff and a vicious half-breed who’s got a $1000 price on his head. The man with the star goes down the loser, and suddenly Edge has the chance to make a tidy income.

  All he has to do is hold onto his booty on the long ride to the nearest jail—no easy task considering the man’s one helluva rebel and Edge isn’t the only fellow who’d like to profit from him.

  Edge is sure of one thing—$1000 isn’t worth dying for…

  For:

  J.H., who keeps the chuck wagon supplied and rolling.

  CHAPTER ONE

  JOE Straw glimpsed the man riding slowly across the slope just below the jagged ridge to the west and reined his own mount to a halt on the open trail. And as the dust motes raised by the wearily moving hooves of Straw’s grey gelding settled back on the hard packed ground behind him, there were just two sounds to be heard in this arid piece of country among the eastern peaks of Arizona Territory’s Santa Rosa Mountains. The breathing of the fatigued horse and of the frightened man seated astride him.

  On the high ground ahead and to the left of Straw, perhaps a half mile away, the man who had triggered the fear in him was no longer in sight. For he had ridden his black mount into the cover of a line of scattered boulders, from which he should have emerged less than a minute after going from sight.

  But a minute and a half crawled into history and then the sweat of the mid-afternoon heat which clung to Straw’s filthy flesh was augmented by the larger, tackier, more draining beads of salt moisture oozed from his pores by heightening fear. It was not the fault of Joe Straw that his body smelled rancid with accumulated dirt: it was on account of his treatment by that bastard John Hackman, sheriff of Crater, Territory of Colorado.

  Was it that hard-nosed lawman up there among the boulders? Pretending not to have seen his escaped prisoner and hoping Straw did not see him? Now, safe in cover, waiting for the man on the open trail to ride within effective rifle range.

  Straw fought against the rising fear and the threat of panicked action that accompanied it. And because he was half Comanche this was not so difficult to accomplish as it would be for most wholly white men.

  He sat his horse in a relaxed attitude - as a man simply taking a rest in the saddle - and glanced about him in a manner of idle curiosity.

  The half breed was a handsome man in his twenty-ninth year, with the curly red hair and flashing green eyes of his Irish father and the bone structure and skin coloration of the Comanche squaw the Irishman raped. He was six feet tall and built on slender lines, his litheness compensating for what he lacked in sheer brute strength.

  Throughout his life, initially with his outcast mother and then as the complete loner after he sold her into slavery in Mexico, he had never attempted to conceal what he was in terms of his heritage. Thus did he choose to dress in a mixture of the Indian and the white man’s styles. On this blisteringly hot day he wore a Derby hat, a beaded waist­coat and highly decorated choker and tie that left his arms and belly bare, blue denim pants and high-heeled riding boots with work spurs. The entire outfit the worse for long wear, although the gunbelt buckled around his waist was relatively new, the loose hanging holster empty. But he did carry a weapon - a throwing knife in a sheath stitched to the inside of his waistband at the small of his back, the jutting handle concealed by his loose fitting waistcoat.

  But such a weapon was of no use to him in this situation and he scoured his surroundings intently from behind a shield of apparent nonchalance, seeking a way to alter the circumstances. Either to get close enough to the man on the ridge to use the knife against him, or to escape without running the risk of pursuit across open country with a near exhausted horse under him.

  The chances of accomplishing either aim looked slender. The stage trail ran along the bottom land of a broad valley, barren of all but a few clumps of desert vegetation and sparse areas of the kind of broken rocky terrain in which the man on the ridge was concealed. The trail was much closer to the western slope than to the east, and ran arrow straight ahead of him until it disappeared into the slick looking heat shimmer.

  Behind him was the head of the valley, where the ground sloped gently upwards, and Straw realized that to retreat in this direction was the only course open to him. He would have to ride across a quarter mile of featureless terrain, but he knew that beyond the ridge over which the trail curved there was another valley, completely devoid of vegetation but filled with countless pockets of cover among a petrified sea of crumbling rocks.

  So, if he could spur his weary horse to cover the open ground fast enough to stay out of range of a well placed rifle shot until he was beyond the crest of the rise, he would have a chance of retaining his freedom. Maybe even to guarantee it if John Hackman got careless and allowed himself to be lured into a trap.

  But a nagging doubt held Joe Straw where he was for several stretched seconds. The valley behind provided the ideal opportunity for the lawman to swing wide and get ahead of his escaped prisoner. It was also the perfect terrain in which to set up the kind of dry-gulching trap which Straw was considering. So why had Hackman been riding across the open slope?

  Straw sent a globule of saliva down at the trail and set his well sculptured features into an irritable scowl. Whether the man on the ridge was John Hackman or not, he had seen the other lone rider on the trail. And the fact that he was in hiding did not augur well for Joe Straw.

  He thudded his spurs into the sweat lathered flanks of the gelding and voiced a shrill curse as he jerked the reins to the side. The horse snorted his distress, but responded to the commands. Brought up his head, wheeled into a tight turn and began to beat at the sloping ground with galloping hooves.

  Over the first twenty yards or so, Straw kept his head craned to the side, peering back over his right shoulder. And saw not the slightest sign of movement among the jagged boulders where he knew the man to be.

  Then his horse made to stumble on legs that were incapable of maintaining the speed the rider demanded. Straw used spurs and reins viciously to steer his mount out of the threatened fall, so that pain rather than exhaustion became the dominant sensation in every fiber of the gelding’s being. The equine brain decided that speed provided the only means to escape further ill-treatment.

  Sitting astride his black mare in a depression behind the boulders on the ridge, the man called Edge growled, ‘Toss the bastard out of the saddle, you crazy animal.’

  But it was a bullet that unseated Joe Straw. Blasting into the front of his left upper arm and tearing free at the back in a welter of blood and remnants of flesh. He vented a shriek of alarm as the impact of the lead spun him into a half turn. Then the sound took on the tone of mixed fear and anger when he glimpsed the man who fired the shot.

  With the vicious bite of the spade bit no longer digging into his tongue and the constant stab of the spur rowels momentarily ceasing their punishment of his bleeding flanks, the gelding submitted to the now irresistible urge to slow from the grueling gallop. All four of his legs, simultaneously drained of strength, splaying out to the sides so that the animal came to a slithering halt on his belly. The sudden loss of mo
mentum lifted the rider off his back and pitched him over his violently shaking head.

  A great cloud of fine white dust exploded up from the trail and the wounded Joe Straw was hurled

  out of its midst, to thud to the cement-hard ground twenty feet ahead of where the horse struggled to rise. But a trailing hind leg was broken, the jagged bone jutting through a blood soaked hole in his coat, and he gave up the struggle and lay almost as still as the unseated rider.

  The short and solidly-built, twenty-five-year-old lawman from Crater, Colorado, was also unmoving for long moments. He sat erect in the saddle on his black gelding, the Winchester rifle still to his shoulder aimed rock steady at Straw after tracking his involuntary plunge through the air. Then, certain the man crumpled on the ground was unconscious or dead, he lowered the rifle and booted it, clucking his horse into an easy walk from the high point of the trail where it ran from one valley into the other.

  There was a bewildered expression on his square shaped, ruggedly hewn, heavily bristled face as he made a quick survey of the valley ahead of him. What puzzled the black clad man with a six pointed star pinned to his left shirt pocket was the reason for the Comanche half-breed’s frenetic race up the slope, back tracking on a trail he had to know was being followed. For there was just nothing out along this virtually featureless valley that hinted at danger.

  Hackman was close enough now to see that Joe Straw was still alive: his chest rose and fell steadily, his breathing stirring the dust in which the side of his face lay.

  Ignoring the weak struggles and faint sounds made by the suffering horse, the man stopped where Straw lay and swung out of his saddle. Then rasped the back of a hand over his bristled jaw and grunted his satisfaction with a thought that had occurred to him.

  Straw had been hallucinating. It was a day and a half since the breed made his sneaky escape and in all that time he could not have eaten or drunk anything. And during the heat of the day and the cold of the night he had certainly not rested. So: weary, hungry and thirsty, his mind had played a trick on him. Maybe he had seen the heat shimmer as being closer than it was, and in it glimpsed some brand of mirage that was vastly more frightening than the prospect of turning to race back into the gun sights of the lawman hunting him. A lawman who desperately wanted to recapture him and bring him to Crater, and who would regard his death as a failure.

  Hackman drew a knife from the opposite side of his gunbelt to where the holstered Remington was hung and, without shifting his cold eyed gaze from Straw, cut a length from a front rigging tie of his saddle.

  ‘You won’t get another chance to run out on me, you murderin’ sonofabitch,’ he snarled softly as he moved close to Straw and squatted at his side.

  The man’s bullet-holed left arm was already behind his back. But Hackman had to roll the limp form over on to his belly to reach for and bring the right arm into a position where he could lash the wrists together.

  Which was when another sound apart from the breathing of two men and two horses reached the Crater sheriffs ears. And he snapped up his head to look across the angle where the southern and western slopes of the head of the valley merged. To see that the sound was made by a slowly moving horse and rider coming toward him.

  ‘So it wasn’t no imaginary -’ Hackman began to rasp as beads of sweat dripped from his eyebrows to blur his vision.

  And Joe Straw, drawing upon his final reserve of strength, made his move. Flinging himself over on to his back, a groan of pain venting from his gritted teeth as his weight was momentarily on his injured arm, he crashed into the squatting lawman and sent him sprawling on to his back with a bellow of rage and alarm.

  The half breed Comanche felt eerily light-headed now. It seemed to his pain wracked mind that his movements and Hackman’s counters to them were enacted in slow motion.

  The right hand which the sheriff had so obligingly placed close to the sheathed knife clawed at the back of the waistcoat, fisted around the knife and drew it.

  Dust motes floated up around Hackman from where his back and the back of his head crashed against the ground.

  Straw rose up on one knee and forced himself into a turn, between the splayed feet of the lawman.

  Hackman struggled to fold his back up from the ground and snatched for the Remington in the holster.

  Straw stretched out his good arm but had no strength to raise it. The sun glinting blade that seemed to be growing out of the heel of his hand hovered for part of a second. He saw each individual bristle on Hackman’s face. And read the despair in his dark eyes.

  The hoofbeats which had distracted the sheriff and given Straw the opportunity to make his move were louder now. But not approaching the scene of the death struggle at a faster rate.

  The Remington was clear of the holster and Hackman was halfway into a sitting posture. One of his booted feet was being drawn back and Straw knew the intention.

  The sheriff did not want to kill him unless it was essential to his own survival. So he was planning to lash a kick at his chest - to send him tumbling over backwards, with a stunning blow that would make it impossible for him to throw the knife with killing power.

  Straw spat out the Comanche word for die and simply fell forward, experiencing excruciating agony as he fended off the kick with his injured arm. But managed to keep his good arm ramrod stiff, until the point of the knife penetrated the fabric of Hackman’s shirt, undershirt and then his skin. To delve deep into the boneless flesh of his belly.

  The lawman gasped at the stabbing impact of the blade. Struggled to sit all the way up, but then vented the shrillest of screams as his back slammed to the ground and his arms were flung wide to the side, the Remington sailing clear of his right hand to thud to the dust far off the trail. This his reaction as Straw, the heel of his hand hard against the other man’s front, flicked his wrist without loosening his grip on the handle of the knife. Which caused the inch wide blade to turn viciously within the entrails of the Crater sheriff.

  Hackman’s entire body convulsed with the bolt of agony that exploded at the source of the injury and was transmitted to every nerve ending.

  Straw, on the very brink of unconsciousness, mistook this violent movement for a counter-attack. He released his grip on the knife and forced himself to roll clear of the flailing limbs of the screaming man.

  For stretched seconds both men were totally detached from their surroundings, each in a private world of pain and the fear of death. One quaking from head to toe and the other needing to struggle desperately simply to suck in and expel the hot, dusty air.

  This until both of them became aware of being shaded from the sun, and forced their eyes open to see what it was that towered between them and the sky. And each recalled when he first saw the stranger who was the root cause of this explosion of violence.

  ‘You fellers mind if I take a hand in this?’ Edge asked flatly, sliding a Winchester out of his forward hung rifle boot.

  ‘You ain’t gonna kill us?’ John Hackman rasped through chattering teeth.

  ‘I ought to put a bullet in him,’ Edge answered, casting a glinting eyed glance at Joe Straw as he pumped the lever action of the repeater to eject a spent shell and jack a fresh one into the breech.

  Through his pain and fear, the half breed Comanche had what was required to direct a challenging glower up at the mounted man. ‘Why me, man? You and me don’t know each other, do we?’

  ‘I know you’re the kind that should never be allowed to ride a horse, feller.’

  Edge raised the rifle stock to his shoulder, raked the barrel around and angled it down: triggered a bullet cleanly between the agony filled eyes of the crippled horse.

  Now Straw even managed an expression that came close to being a grin as he watched the impassive faced man in the saddle slide the Winchester back in the boot. ‘I knowed you was kiddin’, man.’

  ‘Maybe if I was a female, feller.’

  ‘What you talkin’ about?’

  Edge climbed down from the
saddle. ‘A feller mistreats a horse the way you do sure does get my goat.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE half breed Comanche watched the half breed Mexican cross to where John Hackman was sprawled, and attempted to will strength back into his drained and punished body.

  The man he surveyed was big - three inches taller than six feet and weighing close to two hundred pounds. Built on lean lines with no surplus fat on his frame. Dressed Western trail riding style in a grey Stetson with a low crown and wide brim, blue denim shirt and pants, single holstered gunbelt and spurless riding boots. All of this outfit either dusty or sweat stained from a long ride, but not so much that it had lost the stiffness of new fabric and leather.

  Of much older origin was the thong threaded with dull colored beads that encircled his neck, which appeared to be the man’s sole adornment in his otherwise entirely practical style of garb. But then Joe Straw had no way of knowing that attached to the beaded thong at the nape of Edge’s neck was a leather pouch which hung down inside his shirt, in which was carried an open straight razor.

  Unlike Straw, Edge did not go to any great lengths to advertise the mixture of bloods which coursed his veins. Adopted an underplayed Mexican-style moustache which more often than not was barely distinguishable from the matting of bristles that cloaked the flesh of his lower face and neck. But even without this, the structure and coloration of the features of his lean face provided clues enough to his mixed parentage.

  Eyes of ice-blue in permanently narrowed sockets under hooded lids. An aquiline nose with flared nostrils. High cheekbones from which the skin was stretched taut to the firm jawline. A straight, thin-lipped mouth.

  His complexion was stained to a dark brown hue by more than mere exposure to the extremes of the elements, and the hair that framed his face was jet black and worn long enough to brush his shoulders.

  A basically handsome face in the rugged cut of the features, Straw allowed, and yet somehow ugly because of the latent cruelty of the man that was suggested by the thin mouthline and the slitted, hard glinting eyes. The half breed Comanche found it difficult to make an accurate guess at the age of the tall, lean man who now looked down at the doomed John Hackman. For the skin of his face was inscribed with countless lines that were not all put there by the passage of time. Or maybe they were and it was the depth of them that was dictated by the harshness of the time he had lived.