Stop Angel! (A Frank Angel Western Book 8) Read online

  ‘Tyrrell, Tyrrell?’ Nix had said. ‘Oh, the Englishman. Yes, he came up here. Angry as hell. Claimed I’d sold guns to the Comanches and they’d killed some of his people. I said there was absolutely no proof that what he said was true. He damned my eyes and said he aimed to get some proof and stick it up my nose!’

  ‘What happened then?’ Angel asked, feeling quite certain that Nix was lying, lying because it was a more interesting way of telling the story rather than for any gain. From other hints in the man’s conversation, Angel was fairly sure Tyrrell had been given the same treatment that was awaiting him. But Nix went on with his embroidered yarn.

  ‘He said he was damned if he wasn’t going to ride over to the Comanche camp and talk to Koh-eet-senko himself. I warned him of the folly of such an action, but he was beyond listening to advice. He went out of here like a bat out of hell, and I never saw him again.’

  ‘You knew he was dead, though.’

  ‘Of course. There is little that happens hereabouts I don’t know of. But I could scarcely be held responsible for what Comanches do to a white man they find skulking about on their land.’

  ‘Land you provide for them.’

  ‘I believe in coexistence, Angel. It suits my convenience, and it is infinitely less wearying than constant war, as well as infinitely less dangerous. I observe their rules; they leave me alone. It is not the best of worlds, but it’s better than living in constant fear.’

  ‘But you do. You’re guarded twenty-four hours a day.’

  ‘I said I believe in coexistence. I didn’t say I was a simpleton. These savages respect only one thing: strength. I show them that I have it.’

  Angel’s route led him across flat scrubland, its grass burned brittle by the sun’s relentless assault. He made a mental note of its expanse. He had another five miles to go, he reckoned. It was already appreciably warmer, the bright copper disc of the sun beginning its long trajectory from east to west across the burning sky. His exposed skin tingled. Later, if he remained in the sun naked, it would start to glow, and by nightfall he would have a bad sunburn. On the second day, it would turn to molten agony.

  Away off to his left he could see the low line of trees behind which lay the Comanche village. Beyond it to the northeast he could just see the faint yellow-white line that indicated the edge of the desert. The whole valley was a jumble of contradictions, trees growing at the edge of desert, swamp at the feet of lava beds. He had asked his captor about that.

  ‘It is simple,’ Nix explained. ‘The basic necessity is, of course, water. Give the land enough water, and things will grow. Starve it, and it turns rapidly to desert. Everything else is merely a matter of degree, is it not? I have provided water in certain areas, controlled in certain ways. I control the environment. I designed it myself. Basically it is a circulating system: the well would not provide enough water for it to do as I wish otherwise. Thus the trees which shade the Comanche camp, the pool which supplies their water, are part of this expensive system. They know it. It is a useful reminder of my power, for I have the ultimate deterrent in my hands. One turn of a tap, and their life-support systems will begin to wither.’

  ‘You enjoy playing God?’ Angel asked bitingly.

  ‘I am not playing, Angel,’ Nix said. ‘As you will discover tomorrow.’

  ‘They ought to put you away,’ Angel said. ‘They ought to lock you up for good in a room with rubber-lined walls. You’re sick, Hecatt. Sick in the head!’

  ‘Ah,’ Nix smiled. ‘You are trying to provoke me again. I’ve told you, it won’t work, Angel. I can wait until morning. Then I will begin to enjoy my revenge. You will be an adversary worthy of the trouble I have taken to prepare this valley. Hunting you down will be a pleasure.’

  ‘Watch out you don’t choke on it.’

  Nix had looked at Angel reflectively for a moment, the way a parent will look at a child to remind it that it may be going too far with a tantrum. Then he smiled a broad smile. ‘Do you know the works of Bacon?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Francis Bacon, 1561 to 1626. A contemporary of Shakespeare.’

  ‘I know that. What about him?’

  ‘It was he who said “Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper”,’ Nix quoted, and Satan himself could not have had a more malicious gleam in his eyes.

  Angel reached his marker.

  He had come into the valley knowing rather more about it than he had told Nix, and prepared for several eventualities, one of which was capture. He made a cache for the weapons he had in his rucksack very early on, burying his weapons in a tarp wrapper lightly wiped with gun oil. He lined up a peak on the eastern horizon with a low-lying butte that projected into the valley from the south, and along that line laid two sets of pebble arrows, the arrowheads pointing at each other, about a hundred yards apart. Between them a whitened stick laid casually across another to make a cross marked the cache, and Angel trotted up to it eagerly.

  As he got nearer he saw something white fluttering in the faint breeze. It was a piece of paper in a cleft stick planted in the ground where the cache had been. The cache itself was gone, weapons, everything. The cleft stick held a piece of paper, and on the paper was scrawled a message from Hercules Nix: DO YOU TAKE ME FOR A FOOL?

  Frank Angel stood in the bright morning sun, his shoulders slumped in defeat. He looked back across the bare valley to where the hacienda lay like a dark smudge at the foot of the folded slopes of the Burros and imagined Nix standing on one of the guard towers, watching through his telescope, smiling like a fox in a chicken coop.

  ‘Bastard!’ Angel shouted. He shook his fist in the direction of the stockade, kicked angrily at the turned earth which had concealed his weapons and hidden food. ‘Double-crossing bastard!’ He made a production out of it, his strung-out curses floating away on the heedless wind. Then, as if coming to a decision, he set off away from his cache toward the northwest, heading for the stand of timber in which the Comanche village lay hidden. He walked slowly, shoulders hunched, his whole bearing that of a man stunned, dejected, defeated. In his mind’s eye, he pictured Nix watching and smiling in triumph.

  He sure as hell hoped he was, anyway.

  Chapter Eight

  Nix led out his men.

  There was a small smile of anticipation on his face in the faint light of the dawn, the expression of a man on his way to see good friends, drink good wine, enjoying good talk. He sat in the silver-mounted California saddle erect and proud, like a Greek warrior off to the wars. His mount was the black thoroughbred, a product of the racing stables of Virginia, and worth more than all the other horses of the men around Nix. Des Elliott and his men had no such pretensions. They were a killing crew and they looked it. Most of them had Texas saddles with the center-fire rig, and their mounts were the indigenous mesteno breed. Mustangs made more sense in this kind of country. They could live off the land, whereas Nix’s fiery steed needed corn to eat, and pampering. Nix’s ten men envied their leader his horse, while concealing their envy beneath a veil of disdain: that kind of horse couldn’t take punishment. They were kitted out for war.

  From Nix’s armory, each man had drawn an almost-new Winchester .44-40, one of the new 1873 models. Nix left the choice of sidearms to the individual, and their choice was as varied and murderous as they were. Here a Smith & Wesson American, there a Schofield, a Remington .44. One of Elliott’s riders sported a clumsy-looking pair of Starr Army double-actions, but most of them carried the first choice of the paid gun, the short-barreled Colt Peacemaker, chambered for the ammunition the Winchesters used. They were ugly but effective guns, although there were plenty of other weapons to back them if need be. Pocket pistols, Derringers, knives—one man even had a Barns boot pistol, stuck into the top of his boot. He boasted that he’d once used it to stop a train: standing in front of the locomotive and firing the gun head-on at it.

  There was little conversation.

  Nix’s men were already well drilled in the rout
ine for scouring the valley. Each took a route angled slightly from the almost due north line that Nix rode, with Des Elliott on his left and Bob Dirs, a tow-haired killer from the High Hoban country, on his right. The skull-faced Hisco kicked his mustang into movement, and Barnfield loped out alongside him. They would ford the river and scour the western side of the valley. The rest followed suit, each angling away from the other, fanning across the width of the valley, and nothing in his mind except locating the quarry and picking up the $500 bonus that Nix paid to the man who first found the prey. Five hundred bucks, plus a month away from the valley—that was the kind of motivation Des Elliott’s bar-scourings understood. You could wear out your balls in San Antone or Fort Worth if you had that much scratch in your jeans. So they moved steadily, carefully, searching each gully or clump of shrubs, each scatter of rock that might conceal a man.

  At each intersection of their chosen paths were rendezvouses. These were rigidly observed, for obvious reasons. If the quarry took out one, or even two of his pursuers soundlessly, their failure to appear at the meeting point would immediately alert the others, and also pinpoint the quarry’s location.

  Hume Cameron was the favorite.

  The predawn briefing had been to the point and succinct. The last sighting of Angel had been inside the segment Cameron would be covering. Now in the bright morning sunlight he reined in his horse on the fold of a long rise. Away off to his right he could see Nige Hollis working toward the San Miguels. Hollis’s paint pony was easy to spot. There was no sign of Mike Hythe. Cameron guessed he was probably checking out the blind canyon. He hitched his hip around on the saddle, stretched his legs in the wooden stirrups. The horse tossed its head and blew through its nose, the bit clunking between its teeth.

  Off to his right, Cameron could see a scatter of rounded boulders beside the trail. None of them looked big enough to hide a man. There wasn’t enough cover for a jackrabbit, he decided, gigging the horse forward. He thought about Margarita, that little filly he’d met up with in the Eldorado Saloon in San Antone. Dark, she was, with scarlet lips and a waist you could span with your hands. He thought of all the days and nights he could spend with her if he had five hundred dollars. He imagined himself lying in a bed, and Margarita leaning over him naked, her soft breasts warm on his chest. It was as good a thought to die on as any.

  Angel didn’t give Cameron the ghost of a chance.

  He had used an old Apache trick. What the Apache did was to lightly oil their bodies and then roll in the dust until they were coated with it all over. Then they put a large stone on the ground and lay across it, so that their back, with its coating of dust and dirt, looked exactly like a rounded rock. Head, hands, feet were buried in soft dirt, the way a child ‘buries’ another in the sand. Ten feet away, they would be invisible. Apaches trained themselves to remain immobile over long periods, still and silent as the stones they were imitating, only their watching eyes moving. When the moment was right, they exploded into killing action.

  Cameron saw the sudden movement and jerked reflexively on his reins, snatching for the six-gun at his side while his bewildered eyes registered that fact that one of the rocks beside him had come to life, but he was as good as dead by then. The unerringly thrown knife blinked once in the sunlight as it turned in flight, and then buried itself with a soft thwack! below the right-hand hinge of Cameron’s jaw.

  The strange, foreign rigidity of steel inside the body is unlike any other hurt. A man can be hit by one, or two or even more bullets, and still manage to continue, to complete his original intention. He can still strike out, still get off his horse, still pull his gun, still fight—bullets or not. Somehow the long, grating slide of the knife blade seems to cut more than flesh, muscle, nerve end, seems to make an aperture out of which the man’s sap flows. He does not fight, doesn’t strike back. Instead, he is paralyzed by the alien steel in him, as Cameron was. His eyes protruded and he tried to scream, his body overreacting in panic, hastening the work of the weapon in his throat. His body lurched backward in the saddle as he plucked at it with flayed hands which welled blood that joined the awful gouting spurt that leaped suddenly from the severed carotid artery. He crashed from the back of the horse, legs kicking high, still plucking at the weapon in his throat. Finally he got it out and when he did an arc of blood leaped six feet from the wound, while Cameron’s body spasmed in the uncaring dust. He was dead in moments, and Frank Angel looked down at the blood already disappearing in the greedy sand, his face without expression. He was not ashamed of the way he’d taken Cameron. He had no qualms about using every dirty trick in the book, and a few that weren’t—as long as they worked.

  He quickly cleaned himself off and dressed. Picking up Cameron’s flat-crowned sombrero, he swung aboard his horse. The animal was still jumpy, shying from the smell of blood, but it quieted as soon as Angel clamped his legs around it. Horses sense very quickly if the rider knows how to control them or not; only inadequate riders get thrown. Now Angel kicked the horse into a walk across the burning land, heading in the direction Cameron had been following before he had taken him off the horse. The two riders who had separated and gone on the northerly tack were almost out of sight, away over toward the line of trees that sheltered the Comanche camp. The one who had headed to Cameron’s southern side was up ahead and to Angel’s right, turning his horse further southward. He had to be going to meet the fourth rider, Angel decided, the one who’d gone into the blind canyon. He scanned the land ahead. At the foot of the San Miguels lay a long finger of rock that poked out on to the flat plain, forming a halfway point between the edge of the burned scrubland and the shaley beginnings of the desert. Here, the effects of Nix’s controlled irrigation petered out, thinned too much to aid growth so that the land became worthless almost immediately. He aimed the horse at the finger of rock. Just move on, he told himself, and see what happens. His guess was that the two riders to his south would move up along the wall of the San Miguels and bisect his path. That way all the land in the arc would have been checked. Mentally, he acknowledged Nix’s methods, the planning behind them. It was only because he had been prepared for the man’s cunning that he still had a chance of survival.

  He was not one of Hercules Nix’s rabbits.

  The quarry Nix had hunted in his valley had been like men in a poker game who don’t know that the tin-horn has marked the cards. Prepared by Welsh Al for the surveillance and the counterchecks, Angel came better prepared, better informed. Knowing he was watched, he had given Nix something to find. He’d buried in the cache that Nix had found a ‘survival kit’ of a Winchester ’73, a Peacemaker with a 4½-inch barrel, ammunition, rough, penciled maps which he had carefully made inaccurate enough. A water bottle and some strips of jerky. A compass, a knife, a loop of rawhide rope. Hercules Nix had located the cache without trouble, of course, it was for that reason that Angel had performed his pantomime at the scene, hoping—feeling pretty certain, actually—that Nix was watching and gloating. That might make Nix a little less careful, and any advantage was one Angel could use. He waited for night before he moved back to the blind canyon through which he had descended into the valley. Here, behind high shoulders of rock screened from the sight of the hacienda, he had left his real survival kit. There was a second set of the black leather pants, a woolen shirt, his own mule-ear boots with the socks stuffed inside them. Belt, holster, ammunition, his own seven-inch barreled Peacemaker, the one he’d bought for seventeen dollars direct from the Colt factory at Paterson, New Jersey. Also in the little trench were one or two other items he had asked the Armorer at the Justice Department to put together for him. That dour individual had scanned Angel’s handwritten list without any expression, sucking at the stem of a battered old briar for a while before commenting.

  ‘Ye’re planning to declare war on someone, then?’ he asked finally.

  ‘You could say that,’ Angel replied, ‘and not be far wrong.’

  ‘Aye,’ the Armorer said. ‘Well, this lot coul
d make it an interestin’ one.’

  He’d done everything Angel had asked, and—as usual—a lot more effectively, and on a smaller scale, than anyone had any right to hope. The Armorer had reduced Angel’s needs to fit a simple miniature rucksack through which a belt threaded. The whole thing was maybe eighteen inches wide, six deep, the same height. It sat comfortably in the small of the back, in no way interfering with Angel’s access to his six-gun. In it were salt tablets, concentrate of chocolate and glucose, a waterskin—more than enough food for a man to survive several days if he had to. Angel had told the Armorer that four days’ provisions would be enough. If he wasn’t out of the hole in four days, he never would be.

  There were some other things in the backpack, things he’d need later if his plans worked. There was a formidable-looking Bowie knife in a sheath which he had strapped onto his own belt. His own throwing knives, made for him by that same armorer a long time ago, were in their hiding place between the inner and outer lining of his boots, their ‘mule-ear’ pull-on loops serving to conceal the slightly protruding hafts. It was one of these Solingen steel blades that had let the life out of Hume Cameron.

  Away off to his right he saw the two Nix riders signal to each other that all was well. They joined up and loped toward a point ahead of Angel, the foot of the long spur of the mountain. He shifted slightly in the saddle and talked Cameron’s horse into a faster walk. He didn’t want to be seen to be moving faster, but he wanted to get to the rocks before the two Nix riders. The horse picked up its feet, ears pricking. Some animals respond to the whip, others to the word. This was one of the latter, and Angel nodded. Looked like he was going to make it there in time. Odds of a dozen to one were great in storybooks, but in real life they were too damned high, and he had to try and whittle them down some. He also had to do it in silence. One shot would bring the rest of the gang lally-hooting to the scene, and he wasn’t quite ready for that yet. Stalking men like an Apache might not be very sporting, but this crew didn’t merit anything better. He had no sympathy for them. He did not give a damn for anything except the knowledge that if he didn’t kill them they would as sure as hell kill him, very dead. Which was no damned option. Sliding Cameron’s Winchester out of its scabbard, he moved toward the rendezvous where Death sat waiting and grinning in anticipation.