“Come on, amigo,” he said wryly. “Let’s go find us some live ones.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
EDGE had too many other things on his mind to concern himself with the multitude of pleasures which the town of Hoyos had to offer a man. Primarily he wanted what he had come into Mexico for the return of the money the bandits had stolen from him, and revenge against El Matador. But it did not take him long to decide that both these objectives would have to wait. For not all the bandits had accepted their leader’s invitation to relax. Obviously following a standing order, two men lounged outside the cantina, their attitudes of ease made fraudulent by the watchful glints of their eyes. They were the fat Miguel and the pock-marked Torres and as Edge and Luis moved out of the doorway, Torres broke away from the other and started down the side of the cantina, obviously intent upon taking up sentry duty at the rear of the building.
“We going to find some girls?” Luis asked, eyes alight with excited anticipation as he headed towards the street entrance, from which came the sound of laughter and shouting, an occasional feminine scream which could have been of pain or delight.
Edge shook his head. “I hope you find one that’s got everything,” he said.
“Señor?” The wizened face was puckered with bewilderment.
“They ain’t invented a pill for it yet.”
Luis grinned his understanding. “A man’s got to take chances, señor.”
Then he was gone, hurrying towards the sounds of gaiety. Edge nodded to Miguel and got no response, began to pick his way between the dead bodies of the soldiers, towards the center of the plaza where their weapons had been heaped in an untidy pile. But he still had six feet to go when a rifle cracked and dust spurted up just ahead of him. He turned slowly to look back over his shoulder, saw Miguel with his repeater still raised to shoulder level, eye behind the backsight.
“Just looking,” Edge said.
“You are not a cat, señor,” the fat man said evenly. “But curiosity, it can make you just as dead.”
Edge spat. “And I ain’t got but just the one life,” he said reflectively, spun and angled away from the heap of guns, going towards the building in which he and Luis had been held the night before. It was, in fact, a church, but it had been many years since it was used for religious purposes. It still had an altar with a crucifix fixed to the wall above and there were still two rows of pews with a central aisle dividing them. But the scarring of the wall above the altar told of shooting practice with the ornament as the target and a scattering of straw and filthy blankets on the pews and the floor between them indicated that the place served as a dormitory in times when Hoyos was overcrowded.
Edge took this all in with disinterest as he moved quickly down the aisle, went through a door to the right of the altar, found himself in what had been the priest’s robing room. A door on the other side was locked, but the wooden hinges had rotted and fell away within moments as Edge prized at them with the dead soldier’s knife. Outside he stood in a narrow space between the rear of the church and the wall of the town. The sun was well clear of the horizon now, but the area in which Edge stood—no wider than four feet—was in deep shadow. The wall was ten feet high at this point, sheer and smooth, offering no footholds. There was only one way up and Edge took it. He gritted his teeth, pressed his back against the rear of the church, swung one foot up against the town wall and began to push himself aloft.
As Edge was making his bid for escape, Luis Aviles was savoring a forthcoming delight, the like of which he had not experienced for more than forty years. He was leaning against a dresser in a room on the second floor of a bordello, watching with avid eyes as a girl of no more than fourteen began to unbutton a blouse which promised in its drape an upper body developed beyond her years. At first the girl had been terrified as Luis demanded her favors, his drooling mouth spitting words of terrible vengeance from El Matador if she did not go to a room with him.
The woman who ran the house was as fearful as the girl, certain that Luis’ new-found freedom must indicate an agreement with the bandit chief. So she had dragged the girl up the stairs and into the room, warning her of an even more terrible ordeal should the anger of El Matador be turned against the house. But now the girl’s fear of Luis had turned to disgust for him, her plain young face twisted into a sneer. “You will not enjoy me, old man,” she hissed, fingers nimbly unfastening the buttons.
“If you are not good, I will ask El Matador to slice you up like a side of beef,” he returned, not seeing her expression, unable to take his eyes away from the firm swells of her breasts as each button came loose.
But then, just before the girl was about to pull the blouse wide, exhibit to Luis what lay on each side of the deep cleavage he could already see, the door burst open under the crash of a large boot and a drunken bandit swayed in the frame. His name was Alfredo and he was tall and broad enough to almost fill the doorway. His face was scarred and ugly behind the stubble of his beard and he had a twisted mouth and only one eye, the other gouged out in a knife fight. Luis gasped and thought he was the most fearsome man he had ever seen in his life.
“Ah, the hombre who came back from the dead,” he said gleefully, his lips curling back in an awful grin. “First El Matador saved you from the soldiers and then something saved you from El Matador.”
Alfredo lumbered into the room as Luis flattened himself against the wall, as if seeking to become part of it, and the girl cringed on the bed, pulling her blouse around her. The bandit reached the bed in two strides, grasped the blouse and ripped it from the girl’s body, laughed as the breasts came free, young, smooth and firm.
“This is what you want to see, hombre?” he demanded of Luis. “The beautiful secrets of her body. Now you have your wish. I give her to you. But you must tell me your secret.” He shook his head, his single eye fuzzy with too much tequila. “A powerful secret to make El Matador spare your life.”
“I do not know . . .”
“El Matador is interested in one thing only,” Alfredo bore on. “Money. You have told him where there is money. Lots of it, eh?”
“No, I . . .” Luis broke off again as the big bandit approached him, caught hold of his poncho in a bunched fist, lifted him and threw him bodily across the room, so that his body thudded on to that of the girl.
“El Matador, he always keep the money for himself. I, Alfredo, am tired of this. Tell me your powerful secret, hombre, or you die.”
As he finished speaking, Alfredo drew a revolver from its holster on each hip and leveled both weapons. Luis breathing fast with fear, sweat releasing new odors from his filthy body, scrambled to the far side of the girl and cringed behind her. The bandit laughed and fired both guns, the bullets whining over the top of the shaking bodies to thud into the wall as the girl screamed and Luis whimpered.
“The money, hombre?” Alfredo demanded. “Your secret, or take it to hell with you.”
“Tell him, stupid,” the girl cried, trying desperately to wriggle free of Luis’ grip. But Luis found enormous strength in his terror and held her fast, an inadequate shield against the wrath of the big bandit. “He will kill us both.”
“Do as she says,” Alfredo shouted and squeezed the triggers. Then again, and again. Six bullets skimmed across the bed, the rush of air seeming to get closer to the flesh at each report.
“Your secret!” Alfredo yelled in fury and loosed off the last two bullets from each gun, aiming lower, so that they all thudded into the bed in front of the girl’s straining body, sending up a shower of feathers.