Kill Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #6) (12 page)

‘
What
now?’ Vaughan asked.

‘
You go
on ahead,’ Angel told him. ‘I’m going back to take a
look-see.’

‘
Oh,
no,’ Vaughan said. ‘You’re having all the action. I didn’t sign on
to be a nursemaid to this cantankerous old goat.’

‘
You’ll
get all the action you can use before we get out of this country,’
Angel promised him. ‘Ride on to the end of the canyon and wait
there. You too, Pearly. Don’t argue, either of you. I can handle
this alone.’

‘
We
hear shooting, what do we do?’ Gates asked.

‘
Get
the hell out of here,’ Angel told him harshly. ‘I’m going to look,
not to fight. Any sign of life back there and I’ll be hightailing
after you. Now, git!’

Vaughan looked at Gates and Gates looked at
Vaughan and they sort of nodded to each other as Angel swung into
the saddle.

‘
Get
moving,’ he told them.

‘
Sure,
Frank,’ Gates said. ‘Soon as I get this rope coiled,
here.’

Angel nodded and put the
horse
’s nose
towards the south. In a few moments he was around a bend in the
canyon and they were out of sight. Some minutes later he saw the
first signs of fallen rocks, smelled the fresh dust in the air.
Tethering the horse, he moved forward on foot, edging now against
the canyon wall, keeping to the shadowed foot where the blue
darkness was deeper, testing each foothold before he put his weight
on it. There were huge boulders all over the place and he could see
nothing moving. Crouched low, moving as silently as an Apache, he
gained the shelter of one boulder, then eased around it. Another
stood to his right and he slithered across to it. Beyond it a
jumble of rock rose twenty, thirty feet above him, shattered and
creviced from the explosion and the fall. He moved around this
sheltering boulder and then upwards, always keeping the southern
side of the rocks furthest from him, gaining height by Which he
could see down the canyon where the devastation had been the worst.
Suddenly he froze; he heard voices.

‘
Easy,
boy,’ he heard someone say.

‘
I’m
doin’ the best I can,’ someone else said, a whine in his
voice.

‘
That
leg don’t look too good, Mr. Crumm,’ a third voice
added.

‘
Dammit, I know that, Bert!’ snapped the first
voice.

Angel eased a little further
around the sheltering rock. He was about eight or nine feet above
them and to the right of where they were, he reckoned, although it
was difficult to be sure. The
resonances of the canyon wall made fixing
positions extremely difficult. He edged a fraction further forward
and then he could see them.

A huge, fat man sat with his back against a
boulder, his clothing tattered and his jowly face streaked with
sweat and dirt. At his feet knelt a younger man, whose face vaguely
reminded Angel of someone. Of course! One of the Blantine boys,
Burke most likely. But where were the others? There were only four
men down there on the canyon floor. He tried to see further down
the canyon, but hesitated; if he leaned out further and anyone
looked this way, he would be easy to see. The fat man gave a
curse.

‘
Easy,
there, Burke!’ he hissed. ‘That hurts like hell!’

‘
Looks
like you bruk your ankle, Mr. Crumm,’ the man called Bert
said.

‘
Sure
is swelled up bad,’ Blantine said. ‘I’ll try an’ bind it up the
best I can, Olan.’

‘
Here,
use this,’ the fourth man said. He was a rangy man of about thirty,
and he limped forward, favoring his right leg. ‘Funny you got your
ankle busted up like that, Mr. Crumm, an’ me with that danged great
rock fallin’ on me on’y got kinda scraped ... ‘

‘
Damn
funny!’ Crumm snarled. ‘See me laughin’, Henry, see me
laughin’!’

‘
Sorry,
Mr. Crumm,’ the man said. ‘No offence.’

Angel leaned back against the sheltering
rock. Was this all of them? Had the avalanche wiped out eleven men?
He edged forward again as Blantine spoke.

‘
We got
to go on after them,’ he said. ‘More so now than ever.’

‘
Leave
‘em to Hurwitch, Burke,’ the fat man said. ‘We’re sure in no shape
to chase them, even if we had hosses.’

‘
There’s two hosses OK, Mr. Crumm,’ the man called Henry
offered. ‘Me an’ Bert could hold on up here until you was able to
send someone up after us, I reckon.’

‘
Sure
thing,’ said Bert.

Angel frowned in his hideout.
Where were the horses? Perhaps he could pick them off. That would
effectively stop any sort of pursuit behind them. Who was Hurwitch?
What had the fat man meant when he said Blantine could leave
Hurwitch to take care of things? The lines of concentration
deepened between Angel
’s brows and he moved his foot for better purchase
on the thin ledge upon which he was standing. As he did so he felt
the stone break, a piece of soft slate turning beneath his foot and
destroying his balance. The slate clattered down the side of the
bare rock and Angel jumped, out into the open, the four men on the
canyon floor already moving for their guns.

Angel
’s leap took him seven or eight feet,
a clawing, off-balance try for the shelter of a boulder up against
the wall of the canyon. He hit the ground on his hands and knees
rolling headfirst into a somersault, and the first bullet smacked
into the rock above him as Burke Blantine got into
action.

Olan Crumm scuttled with incredible speed
for the rocks behind him as Burke Blantine, crouching in the centre
of the canyon floor, fired again at Angel, cursing as his bullet
once more smashed rock splinters out of the boulder around which
Angel was squirming.

The two other men, Bert and
Henry, reacted instinctively. Pulling their handguns they ran
straight at Angel, firing as they came. He saw them coming and
stopped rolling, moving right and then left in a feinting crouch,
then came up off the ground with the gun in his hand, his left hand
moving back across the hammer once, twice. Bert and Henry were no
more than five feet away from Angel when he fired and his fanned
shots blasted them off their feet as if they were rag dolls. Henry
screamed as he ploughed sideways into the gravel, the wicked stones
tearing at his already lifeless face. The man Bert went backwards
as if he had been kicked over,
his boot soles flashing briefly white, dust-coated
and scuffed, and his body hit the ground with an impact that
scattered dust. Angel was moving sideways even before Henry’s body
stopped falling, and he threw a hasty shot at Burke Blantine, who
was now dashing for the shelter of a boulder. The shot whined off
into infinity, its thin ricocheting scream loud in the gloom. Angel
got the thickness of a huge boulder between himself and Blantine,
and then felt the whole world fall on his head. Olan Crumm, neatly
hidden behind a big rock on Angel’s right, opened up, and his first
shot smacked Angel’s skull lightly in passing, so close that Death
looked around and then passed on. But the stunning force of even a
creasing shot will knock a steer to its knees, and Angel spun
round, the gun flying from his hand. Senses reeling, blood
trickling inside his collar, Angel fought to regain control of his
body but all he could do was to struggle to his knees. His sight
was blurred and he could not see his gun. He did not realize that
he was out in the open, scrabbling blindly in the graveled dust. He
did not know that Burke Blantine was coming out from behind the
rock, the six-gun in his hand leveled. Angel had momentarily lost
track of time and space, and in the moment that his head cleared,
in the moment that the blurring mist went from his eyes, he knew he
was lost. He looked up and saw Burke standing over him. There was
madness and a killing lust in the exulting eyes.

‘
Olan!’
Blantine yelled. ‘Come out here an’ watch me kill this
sonofabitch.’

Angel saw his own gun. It was lying in the
dirt about four feet away. Too far: he had no hope of reaching it.
But he knew he was going to try.

‘
Burke,’ Crumm yelled.

‘
Now,’
Blantine hissed. ‘Now!’ Angel heard the triple click as the gun was
cocked.

‘
Hey!’
called Chris Vaughan from ten feet away.

Burke Blantine whirled
instinctively towards the sound of Vaughan
’s voice
and Vaughan shot him in the heart.
Blantine’s gun went off as he was smashed off his feet by the force
of the bullet and Angel yelled, ‘Chris, get down!’ as Crumm fired
from behind the rocks. Angel saw dust puff off Vaughan’s shirt and
Chris sat down weakly on the rocks as Angel rolled in one
continuous coordinated movement that brought him over his gun and
up with the gun in his hand firing and his two bullets blasting the
triumphant grin off the face of Olan Crumm, splattering the thing
that had been the fat man back against the boulders, headless and
obscene.

Angel stood upright, letting the adrenalin
dissolve, taking one deep breath before turning around and running
across to where Chris sat on the rocks, his hand on his body at the
front, just below the ribcage.

He was smiling foolishly, in shock from the
wound.

‘
Never
learn, Frank,’ he said, lightly. ‘I never learn.’

He fell soundlessly into
Angel
’s arms
and Angel ripped the shirt open. The wound was raw and ragged, and
when Angel put his hand around in back of his friend, it came away
slippery with blood.

‘
You —
idjut,’ he said softly to the unconscious man.

Then Gates came scrambling over the rocks
and took the whole scene in with one comprehending glance. His eyes
fell on Chris Vaughan lying pale and bloody in the deepening gloom
of the canyon. He bent down and picked up the wounded man as gently
and tenderly as if Chris had been a baby and looked at Angel.

Is he gonna
die?
’ he
said.

‘
I
don’t know,’ Angel replied.

‘
Oh,
Jesus,’ Gates said.

‘
They’re waiting for us,’ Gates announced. The first full
strength of the sun was yellowing the sky where they could see it
up beyond the towering walls of the canyon. They had remained in
its safety all night, doing the best they could with Vaughan’s
wound, binding it tightly with strips torn from their shirts and
undershirts, making Chris as comfortable as possible. He had gotten
fevers, tossing and moaning in his sleep, sweat starting from him
like running water. Sometimes he had moaned, a long low cry of
pain. Gates had sat with him all night, not sleeping. At dawn, he
had nodded to Angel, and slid away into the twilight, prowling
along the edges of the canyon towards the place where the rocky
walls fell away, and the canyon opened out on to the falling shale
slope that ran east towards Santa Elizabeta and north into the
malpais. He could see the lights of the town twinkling faintly in
the clear desert air. For all his size, Gates could move like an
Indian when he had to, and he watched immobile in the rocks until
he saw movement, heard the rusty cough of a man who had lain in the
open all night. He saw that man, then spotted another and another.
He projected a line in his head and swung his eyes along it,
grunting each time he spotted something alien that meant the
presence of a man, one behind a boulder, another prone in a gully,
a third hidden under a yucca. There were men bayed all around the
exit of the canyon, waiting for them to come out. There was no
other exit. Behind them, the canyon was blocked. In front, a
murderous ambush awaited. He eased his way out of there and back
along the shadowed walls of the canyon.

‘
How
many?’ Angel said.

‘
Hard
to tell,’ Gates reported. ‘Ten, a dozen, maybe.’

Angel nodded.

With Vaughan wounded there was
no way they could make a run for it, or even make a fight of it.
They were boxed in. Trying to get through the waiting line of men
could only mean death for all of them. He looked at Yancey
Blantine. The old man looked shrunken, very old. The bushy eyebrows
were lowered over the lambent eyes, and the burly shoulders
slumped. The death of his sons had taken all the fire out of the
old man. Burke, the dashing, handsome Burke, had been his
favorite. He did not
know who else was dead: none of them did. But Angel had told him
about the death of Burke and Olan Crumm.

He stood up, his decision made.

‘
Pearly, rig up a ten-minute fuse on the rest of those cans
of blasting powder,’ he said. ‘Then tie them to Blantine’s
horse.’

Gates looked a question, but set
about doing what Angel had told him. There were three cans. He
rigged a
looped truss for them, and dallied it around the cantle of
the saddle behind where the old man would sit. From the saddle-bags
he took a length of fuse, measured it roughly, frowning as he
worked out the measurement, and fixed it inside one of the closely
bound tins. Then he let it drop and turned towards
Angel.