Kill Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #6) (14 page)

‘
My
Gawd!’ one of the riders exclaimed. ‘Will you look at
him?’

‘
Sure
as hell wouldn’t want that on my tail!’ exclaimed his
neighbor.

‘
Right,’ said the first. ‘He scares the shit outa me, an’
he’s on our side!’

They moved on into the sledging heat of the
chiaroscuroed desert.

When they had covered about six miles,
Vaughan fell off his horse. He did not cry out. One moment they
were pushing at a steady canter through the open, burning land,
concentrating upon simply covering ground, knowing their pursuers
must already be moving up behind them. They hit a sharp slope down
into a gully and crossing it, the horses jumped at the far side and
Vaughan went backwards off his horse and lay in the sand, shaking
his head.

In a moment Gates was out of the
saddle and beside him, lifting Vaughan
’s head.

‘
No —
good!’Vaughan managed.

‘
Come
on.’ Gates said. ‘I’ll carry you.’ He put an arm under Vaughan’s
limp body and then cursed. When Angel swung down beside him he
showed him the bloody hand.

‘
Get
out of here,’ Vaughan said weakly. ‘Get — goin’!’

Gates shook his head
stubbornly.
‘I ain’t leavin’ him,’ he said to Angel. His voice was
truculent, as though he would fight about it.

‘
Yes.
Yes — you are!’ Vaughan managed. He made a gesture with his hand
towards his body. ‘All — busted open,’ he managed. ‘No. No —
chance.’ Angel just looked at him. Gates cursed.

‘
Get
out of here,’ Vaughan said. He made a supreme effort of will and
sat up, the colour draining from his face as he did so. The smile
he put on his face wrenched the guts of the two men watching
him.

‘
That
blasting powder,’ he said. ‘Give it to me. And — a —
rifle.’

‘
No!’
Gates shouted.

‘
Goddamn you, Pearly, do like I say!’ Vaughan shouted. His
outburst racked his body with pain, but he forced himself to get to
his knees and then, agony on his face, every muscle screaming with
the pain in his body, he stood up.

‘
Help
me over to that rock,’ he said. The muscles along his jaw line were
bunched like stones and his hair was soaking wet with
perspiration.

‘
Help
me, damn you!’

Gates helped him. Angel stripped
the canisters of blasting powder from Blantine
’s saddle and unsheathed his own
carbine, a .44.40 Winchester. He ran across the arroyo towards
Gates, who was easing Vaughan to the ground in the shelter of a
sloping rock that leaned against the far side of the gully they had
been trying to cross.

‘
Give
me that,’ Vaughan said. He was going on sheer nerves now and they
could see a pulse throbbing in his temple. He took the carbine and
jacked a shell into the breech.

Then he pointed up to the rim of the
gully.

‘
Get me
up there! Behind the rock.’

‘
Goddammit, Chris — ‘ Gates burst out.

‘
Pearly, you argue anymore and so help me I’ll — ‘ Vaughan’s
iron control faltered, and a fit of coughing racked his frame. They
saw blood fleck his lips. Vaughan wiped the bright red spots away
with the back of his hand, and as gently as they could, they lifted
him up behind the rock. Off across the empty desert nothing moved,
but they all knew the pursuers were out there. Vaughan looked back
across the gully at Yancey Blantine, sitting on the ground where
Angel had unceremoniously thrown him as he ran back.

‘
That
old bastard!’ Vaughan said. ‘I’d’ve — liked to see him —
hang.’

They saw his eyes swim and he teetered for a
moment then pulled himself around.

‘
I can.
I — can hold out, Frank,’ he managed. ‘Give you — some runnin’ time
... ‘ Again the wrenching cough seized him and Gates half lifted a
hand, then let it drop. There was agony in his eyes too, but of a
different sort, Angel thought.

‘
The
powder,’ Vaughan said. ‘Toss it out there where — I can see it.’
Gates lobbed the three tins out on to the open sand. One to the
right, one in the middle, one to the left. Vaughan squinted along
the barrel of the carbine. He nodded.

‘
Bueno,’ he said. ‘I can see th — ’ He drew a breath and
then let it out. The pain was burning him up, and his hands were
trembling. He laid the carbine down on the hot rock.

‘
Move
out,’ he said.

When he saw them hesitate he began to curse
them. Every obscenity he had ever learned poured out of him until
they moved, and slid down the rock away from him. Vaughan
nodded.

‘
Chris,’ Angel said, tentatively.

Vaughan shook his head.
‘No,’ he said.
‘There’s no one.’

‘
The
buttermilk and honey girl?’

‘
That’s
a pretty thought,’ Vaughan called. His voice was lighter now, and
the harshness was gone from it. ‘Go on, get the hell out of here!
You’re — wasting time!’

Angel raised a hand. Vaughan
smiled and at that distance, his smile was the heartbreaking,
boyish smile that they remembered. Angel fixed it in his mind and
then turned away. He jerked Yancey Blantine to his feet and pushed
him towards the horse. Blantine clambered up into the hurricane
deck and then looked back across the gully towards Vaughan. He
opened his mouth to speak, a sneer already fixed on his face, and
as he did so he saw Angel
’s eyes.

‘
Say
it,’ Angel said quietly, ‘just say it!’

Yancey Blantine was a renegade.
He had killed men with his own bare hands, in terrible rages and in
the bitterest of cold blood. He had stood by and watched the
carnage his riders had wrought in Stockwood without a tremor but
what he saw now in Angel
’s eyes froze his very marrow. He did not think he
had ever seen the cold lust to kill so naked in a man’s eyes and he
recoiled, his lips trembling.

‘
Go!’
Angel said to Gates.

The big man cast one last despairing glance
at Chris Vaughan and then swung his horse around, riding blindly
ahead of Angel and the tethered Blantine, his eyes misted with a
pain he could not isolate.

They thundered off into the desert, the dust
of their going sifting high and falling. Vaughan could hear it
settle to the ground, a tiny hissing sound that touched the edges
of his heightened consciousness. The pain was now a total entity
below his ribcage. It burned like all the fires of hell inside him,
as tangible as the rock slab he lay upon. The heat of the noon
sunlight was terrible, now, yet he hardly felt it. Strange ghostly
films drifted across his vision and once he lapsed into
unconsciousness, rapping his forehead against the rock then jerking
back to instant alertness, sweat dripping from his face and
spotting the sandstone in front of his eyes.

‘
Come
on,’ he muttered to himself, to the desert, to the pursuing
renegades he could not see. ‘Come on!’

A flicker of movement caught his
eye. A kangaroo rat poked its nose out of its hole about ten feet
in front of him, then wriggled out on to the sand. It moved away
from the hole in its curious,
hitch kicking gait. Vaughan grinned.

‘
You
better get out o’ here, friend,’ he whispered. ‘Gonna get some
noisy shortly.’

The kangaroo rat heard his voice and
scuttled squeaking for the safe shelter of a prickly pear. As it
did, Vaughan heard the jingle of steel touching steel, the sound of
harness, perhaps, or a spur touching a cinch ring. He tightened his
grip on the carbine as the first rider came into view about forty
yards away.

He let them get within twenty yards before
he fired.

His first shot catapulted Dave
Hurwitch out of the saddle and he levered the Winchester as fast as
he could after that, ignoring the deep bite of the pain inside him,
swinging the
carbine around, dropping men from the backs of their horses
with each shot, the sweat dripping off him and now the slow red
pulse of blood brightening the makeshift bandages around his
middle.

He saw now that they had come
forward in a long arc and although he had dropped four of them in
the first blasting volley, they were already moving in on him, bent
low over the necks of their horses, firing as they came. Slugs
whined past him and once he felt the slightest tug on his shirt and
looked down surprised to see that blood was coursing down his arm.
He felt nothing. A feverish exaltation gripped him and he levered
the carbine again and fired, knowing he could not miss, there was
no way he could miss. Again he fired and again and each time he
heard the meaty sound of the slug smacking into the body of a
horse, saw a man spin flailing to the ground. One man rose and ran
for the shelter of a tall
ocotillo, throwing himself behind it and Vaughan
shot him in midair, knowing the man was dead as he hit the ground,
grinning triumphantly to himself at the way he was shooting. The
first wave of the riders came level with the canister of blasting
powder in the centre dead ahead of him and he aimed very casually
and fired and the air filled with the booming flash of the
explosion. Sand and stones boiled up in a huge cloud and he thought
he saw something tattered like a shirt flop to the ground, and then
he waited no longer. They were all there in front of him now and he
fired at the other canister of powder and then the third, the
explosions almost simultaneous, a boom! and then another boom!
There was a thin scream in the roaring hail of dirt and sand, but
he could see nothing except the sifting pall of dirt. His eyes were
unfocusing and he levered the action of the Winchester, swinging
the barrel around seeking anything that moved, a faint smile on his
lips. He never even saw Gregg Blantine rise out of the swirling
dust and level his six-gun. When the remaining men came running
forward they found Blantine standing over Vaughan’s body. Even in
death he was still smiling.

Nothing crossed the land of the Apaches that
the Apache did not see. Scouts had charted the course of the
fugitives, watched the dust of the pursuers. They had told it back
in the village high in the Huachucas: how the huge mountain had
fallen with the noise of many thunders. There were women there with
cut arms mourning the three dead warriors killed in the box
canyon.

The Apaches watched the white
men impassively, biding time. From unseen hiding places, grim-faced
warriors had watched the fight between Vaughan and the pursuers,
and they had told it around the fires, calling him the brave one
with the yellow hair. There was no surprise among them that the
white-eyes killed each other; they had long since stopped being
surprised at anything
the white men did. But like children, they were
intrigued by the chase unfolding across their hunting land. They
who fled seemed to have nothing that they who followed could want.
Unless it was the yellow dust which drove all white men insane.
Yes, they nodded. It could be that.

They watched as the white men plunged
further into the burning sea of sand and rock, past the place that
all Apaches knew, the place from which it was too far to water.

Now the white men could not turn back but
must go forward, and it was time. For the white men had the long
guns that fired many times, Huin-jez-da they called them. Such guns
were great prizes; an Apache would trade many horses to get such a
weapon. Now Yosen had sent them into the desert for the Apaches to
take. Pursuers or pursued: to the Apache it was all the same.

And so they came down out of the
Huachucas, out of the cool heights where the wickiups lay along the
banks
of the
trickling stream and down the scarred arroyos that tumbled towards
the wasteland below. There were ten of them, moving easily behind
their leader whose name in Apache was Ke-a’hchay, he whom the
Mexicans had dubbed Saguarito, a warrior of great experience who
was much respected among Apaches for he had been one of the
Chiricahuas chosen to ride his pony over the grave of the dead
Cochise.

The Apaches came on foot to the
desert. They could cover thirty miles easily in their tireless jog
trot during one day, and be ready at the end of it to fight if they
needed to fight. Saguarito chose to wait until the morning. They
made belly fires in sandy pits and warmed themselves over them
against the chill of the desert night, and drank a little
tiswin.
Saguarito’s plan was
a simple one, as were all Apache fighting plans. They would circle
around behind the pursuers and kill them first. The brave one with
the yellow hair had killed six of them, and wounded another, the
scouts had said. The remaining men would have many guns, some of
them two of the Huin-jez-das. With those guns, Saguarito and his
men would have no trouble with the three others who were
left.

‘
Enju,’
his men grunted in the darkness.