Kill Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #6) (17 page)

‘
Get
over on this side o’ that wall where I can see you!’ snarled
Blantine. He made a vicious gesture with the carbine.

Gates shrugged, as though
humoring a small
boy, and vaulted lithely over the low adobe wall, standing with his
hands on his hips watching the wary renegade. There was a real
change in Yancey Blantine. The eagle look of power was back in the
mad old eyes, and the big frame was erect again, the shoulders
straight and proud. The gun in his hand made all the difference. He
had known the chance would come and
when it had come he had taken
it.

‘
Over
there,’ he said. ‘Behind the stable!’

‘
You
goin’ to shoot us now, Blantine?’ Gates asked mildly.

‘
Right
now!’ snapped Blantine. ‘Move!’

He stepped back and gestured
again with the
gun barrel. They had to walk past him towards the stable
and Yancey Blantine took no chances on either of them coming close
enough to jump him.

Gates turned and started down
the alley, passing Blantine at the same time that Angel came up on
his right and neither of them saw Angel move. A long time ago, when
he had first started to work for the Department of Justice, Angel
had spent three or four hours with the
Armorer in the echoing basement on
the Tenth Street side of the Justice Department building. After
their talk, the Armorer had fashioned a special belt for Angel,
with a clip buckle that became a razor-edged knife, a length of two
feet of piano wire stitched to the inside of it which when
unfastened became a garroting wire. He had also spent some time on
Angel’s boots. On the right hand side of the right boot and the
left hand side of the left boot, between the soft inner leather and
the tougher outer, he had sewn a channel, its opening concealed by
the pull loops; and into that channel on each side he had fitted a
flat handled, flat bladed throwing knife, perfectly balanced and
made from the finest Solingen steel.

It was one of these knives that
whickered past Gates
’ chin as Angel moved, too fast for Gates to know what he
was doing, not quite fast enough to prevent Yancey Blantine yanking
on the trigger as he felt the danger without ever seeing it. The
bullet burned a bright red welt down the length of Angel’s out
flung arm from the wrist to the elbow and he cursed as the pain
seared him, the sound of his oath lost in the screech of pain as
the unerringly thrown Solingen knife turned once gently, slowly,
winking in the sunlight as it drove right through Yancey Blantine’s
upper arm, shearing the bicep and making the old man drop the
carbine as if it had suddenly become a dead-weight of a ton. Yancey
Blantine’s left arm dropped like a wet rag at his side and he
stared in disbelief at the rubber-hilted knife lodged in the bloody
mess of his arm.

He was still staring at it when Gates hit
him.

The big man hit Yancey Blantine
with the cold precision of a butcher taking an axe to a side of
beef and the sound his fist made when it hit the old
man
’s jaw was
almost the same. Blantine’s knees folded and he went down into the
dirt. Angel went over to the horse-trough and plunged his arm into
the water. It turned faintly pink, then pinker, the blood spiraling
and coiling in the clear water like some red and eerie
snake.

‘
All
right?’ Gates said. He had pulled the knife out of Yancey
Blantine’s arm and was staring at it. He shook his
head, then stuck it
in the dirt while he ripped the sleeve from Blantine’s shirt and
bound it tightly around the wounded arm.

‘
He’ll
never use that arm again,’ he said.

‘
He
wouldn’t have been needing it long anyway,’ Angel replied coldly.
‘He’ll hang in Tucson.’

Gates finished his bandaging and
then dragged the old man across the alley into one of the open
stalls. He laid the wounded arm gently in front of Yancey Blantine,
and bound the other firmly and tightly to the thick wooden upright
of stall. Then he found another length of rope and bound
Blantine
’s
feet. He stood up.

Angel had washed the throwing knife and was
stowing it away in the scabbard on the side of his boot.

‘
That’s
some place to keep a knife,’ Gates said. ‘If you got a fork on the
other side, we could go eat.’

They walked together down the
alley as the people of Nogales came slowly
out of doors once more, grouping
around the dead men in the street, and watching the two men
crossing the street towards the cantina as though they were
supernatural.

They crossed the border the next
morning.

While they were in the
cantina
an elderly man in
the conservative grey of a Spanish businessman had come up to them
at their table. With him were two armed men who carried
rifles.

‘
Senores,’
the old man said, ‘I am Don Ricardo Bicaforto, the
alcalde
of Nogales. Those
men are my
alguacils
— how do you say, my sheriffs.’

Angel nodded. He pushed his empty plate away
and Gates followed suit.

They had eaten enough for any four men.

‘
This
fracas in the street,’ the
alcalde
said. ‘I am afraid I must ask you to accompany
me.’

‘
We
fought in self-defense,’ Angel said. ‘I am sure that many saw
it.’

‘
Doubtless,
senor,’
Bicaforto said, ‘but even so ... ’ He spread his hands and
one of the two
alguacils
shifted his weight on his feet and moved the rifle
slightly.

‘
You
will permit me?’ Angel said, gesturing towards his belt.

‘
Of
course,’ the
alcalde
said. ‘But carefully,
senor.
My men are good men, and they will kill you if you
make them.’

Angel reached for a pocket
inside his belt and brought something out which he laid on the
table. It caught the sunlight and glittered dully. The
alcalde
said something
beneath his breath and picked it up. His eyes flickered over the
screaming eagle, the circular seal, and his lips moved as he read
the words: ‘Department of Justice, United States of America.’ He
looked up.

‘
You
are of the Department of Justice of America?’ he said. Angel nodded
and heard Gates mutter, ‘Well, I’ll be damned!’

‘
I have
a prisoner who I am taking back to Tucson for trial,’ Angel said
quietly to the old man. ‘His name is Yancey Blantine.’

Bicaforto
’s eyes narrowed and he hissed
through his teeth.

‘
Blantine?’ he said. ‘I have heard of that one.’

‘
He’s
going to hang,’ Angel told him flatly. ‘He burned a town in
Arizona, killed a lot of men and women up there.’

‘
Yes, I
have heard this, too,’ the
alcalde
said. ‘But the law of the United States does not
extend into Mexico,
senor’

‘
I know
it,’ Angel said. He left the words hanging there and the old man
smiled.

‘
However, if you truly have Yancey Blantine a prisoner ...
?’ he said.

‘
We
have him,’ Angel said.

‘
Then
what you do serves Mexico also, senor, and I would be a fool to
stand in your way. May I ask your name?’

‘
Frank
Angel,’ was the reply.

‘
Angel,’ said the alcalde, smiling.
‘Angel custodio, tal bez.’

‘
In
this instance, yes,’ Angel returned the smile. ‘Guardian angel is
right.’

The old man nodded and gave a signal to his
two sheriffs who stepped back and lowered their guns.

‘
Is
there some way in which I can assist you?’ he said.

They had told him that they
needed horses, and horses were provided, good horses, sound of wind
and with plenty of bottom. They were given food for their journey,
and water in canteens. Don Ricardo had seen to it that they had
ammunition, and that comfortable beds were made up for them in the
rooms above the
juzgado.
Yancey Blantine was lodged below them in the jail under the
baleful gaze of the
alguacils.

Next morning they were on their
way, the
‘Vaya
con Dios’
of Don Ricardo still ringing in their ears. They passed the
stone cairn that marked the line of the border and rode through the
golden morning up along the valley of the Santa Cruz, Keystone
Peak
rearing
six thousand feet ahead of them in the sunshine.

‘
We
should be at Arivaca by noon,’ Angel said. ‘With luck we’ll be in
Tucson tonight.’

‘
That’s
a thought,’ Gates said, smiling. ‘No, Blantine?’

Yancey Blantine scowled and said
nothing. The golden morning meant less than nothing to him.
Everything was gone. His sons were dead, his power shattered once
and for all by this saturnine man on the horse alongside him.
The
alguacils
at Nogales had enjoyed telling him who Angel was, and there
had been an awful finality about the words ‘Department of
Justice.’

‘
You
aiming to go back to Colorado?’ Angel asked Gates.

‘
Not
for me,’ Gates grinned. ‘I been there. Thought I might try San
Francisco. I never been there.’

‘
You
got five thousand dollars reward coming,’ Angel reminded him. ‘You
could buy a spread with that kind of money.’

Gates nodded, his face sobering for a
moment.

‘
I got
to go to Abilene first,’ he said.

‘
The
buttermilk and honey girl?’

‘
Ahuh,’
Gates agreed. ‘Might be she’d want to hear about Chris.’

‘
Could
be,’ Angel said. ‘The thought’s a good one, anyway.’

They crested a ridge and saw the little town
of Arivaca below them by the river. They pushed the horses on down
the hill.

Gregg Blantine got to Nogales more dead than
alive.

He found a doctor on a narrow
street running at right angles to the main plaza and told the man
to patch up his wound. When the man hesitated, Gregg Blantine stuck
his
six-gun
under the doctor’s nose and told him that he would kill him if he
did not. The doctor was an eminently sensible man and did exactly
what he was told. When he had seen the wound in Gregg Blantine’s
side he knew it did not make any difference what he did.

While the doctor dressed the
wound with deft ringers Blantine lapsed into near unconsciousness.
He had killed three horses getting to Nogales, and only the
enormous reserves of strength in his giant body had kept him going
— that and his single-minded, almost
insane determination to catch up with the
man called Angel. In the madness of his fixed idea, it never once
occurred to Gregg Blantine that he had never seen Angel, would not
know the man on sight. Something inside him told him he would know
Angel when the time came. And then he would kill him.

Later the doctor brought him coffee, laced
with tequila, and Blantine sat up. His wound was firmly bound with
fresh bandages that smelled of antiseptic. He felt much better and
said so.

‘
Si,
senor,
of
course,’ the doctor said. ‘But you must go with much care, very
much care.’

‘
I got
to find a man called George Davidson,’ Blantine said. ‘You know
him?’

‘
Davidson?’ The doctor’s voice was nervous, tentative. ‘He
was a friend of yours?’

The words bounced in Gregg
Blantine
’s
head, as though they were echoing. ‘Was?’ he snapped. ‘You sayin’
he’s dead?’

The doctor nodded
unhappily.
‘Alas, yes, senor. He was killed but last night in a
fracas, in the town, two others with him.’

He told Gregg Blantine about the
fight that had happened, the news of which was now all over the
town, gory details being added at each retelling. He told Gregg
Blantine about the miserable old man who had spent the night in
the
juzgado;
laughing, never knowing how close at that moment he was to
violent death as Blantine forced himself to hear it all, his huge
hands clenching and unclenching in his lap. Finally he heard what
he wanted to know: that they had left town that morning, heading
north for Tucson. There was only one way they could go: up the
valley of the Santa Cruz, through Arivaca and past the San Xavier
del Bac mission and into Tucson from the south. He got up, reeling
slightly. His head was light, and faint stars swam behind the
retina of his eyes.