Edge: The Loner

“Finish the bottle,” Forrest said, his voice making it an order. “Night or day, don’t make no difference. We screw these girls into the ground and then we get some more. Maybe from the cantina. I hear those Mex gals can keep it up twenty-four hours a day and still come back for more.”

“We ain’t no beginners,” one of the girls put in with irritation, but Edge was no longer listening. From what he had heard there were just two of Jamie’s murderers upstairs, Billy Seward and one other. It was all he needed to know for now.

The room next to the one he had entered by was empty, and so was the one next door, but when he stepped up to the next one across the hallway he heard sounds. There was a series of sighs, interspaced with grunts of pleasure and the occasional word of breathless endearment. With, in the background, the creaking of a bed that had provided support for too much lust and simulated passion in the past, protested noisily at this latest onslaught. Edge turned the handle, opened the door wide enough, slid inside the room and closed the door behind him in one silent, fluid movement.

Neither Scott nor the girl beneath him were shy, for a candle flickered at each side of the bed, one on the dresser, another on a broken backed chair. The girl was naked, the man dressed in filthy under-vest and pants, opened where it had proved necessary. The girl was staring up at the ceiling, her expression of disinterested acceptance belying the sighs and words of encouragement she whispered. Scott had his face buried in the crook of her shoulder, was breathing like an ancient horse sloughing the last furrow in a long day. He would not have been aware of it had a train thundered through the room but the girl was different and so Edge was careful to hold his silence as he crossed the room in long strides.

He stood for a moment at the foot of the bed, looking at Scott’s thrusting body move between the girl’s spread legs. Then, just as the girl sensed his presence, he leaned the Henry against the bed and sprung forward, withdrawing the razor from its pouch. The girl’s eyes grew wide, her mouth wider as she opened it to scream a warning. But Edge’s free hand, clenched in a white-knuckled fist, caught her on the point of the jaw and her mouth closed with a force sufficient to crunch her teeth together so that the tip of her tongue was hanging over the bottom lip, still attached by a mere sliver of skin.

Scott’s sigh of climax was curtailed into a grunt of pain as Edge’s full weight smashed on to his back. Then Edge rolled off him, on to his back on the bed beside the unconscious girl, dragging Scott bodily off her, across himself and thumping him on to the floor. As he looked up at his attacker surprise became horror and he prepared to shout for help. But the downswing of the razor ended and as he felt the cold edge of the blade below his left ear he killed the words.

“I’d like you to know it’s for Jamie,” Edge said and pressed down and across with the razor. The blade sank deep into the soft flesh and cut a course in a arc beneath the jaw, did not come free until it reached his right ear. Blood oozed out, ran down to start spreading a clean, scarlet stain across the grimed neckline of his under-vest. His dying sound was a sigh more sensuous than those which the girl had been pouring in his ear.

Edge looked down at his crotch, saw Scott had completed his final act in life. “You came out of one,” Edge murmured. “Guess it’s fitting you should die trying to get back into another.”

Then he swung his legs across the supine body of the dead man, stood and retrieved his rifle. He wiped the blood from the razor on a bed blanket and went to the door, first cracked it to peer outside before leaving the room. He found Billy Seward in the room directly across the hall. Exhausted and enjoying a drunken sleep, mouth open, completely naked body stretched across the length and width of the bed. His girl was in the corner of the room washing the area of her body where Seward had spent himself. She gasped when she saw Edge in the doorway but made no further sound when he raised a finger to his lips, and stepped inside. When he had closed the door against the sounds from downstairs he removed the finger from his lips and jerked it at the man on the bed.

“You like him very much?” he asked.

The girl had a face that might have been pretty once, but time and ill-treatment had taken their toll. She looked abused and stupid. Even her nude body had lost any pride that might once have been apparent in the firm, pointed breasts and flared hips. She looked at Seward with abhorrence.

“I hate him,” she whispered. “He hurt me bad.”

“How much did he pay you?” Edge asked.

She spat into the water. “Nothing.”

“I’ll double it if you keep quiet.”

She was as stupid as she looked. She took time to think about the offer, smiled and nodded. “You going to kill him?” Her eyes shone with pleasure.

“I ain’t going to sing him a lullaby,” Edge replied, and went to the bed.