Stop Angel! (A Frank Angel Western Book 8) (8 page)

‘
Phony,
my dear fellow? What can you possibly mean?’

‘
All
this clap-trap about having studied the Comanch’, the honorable
past. You’re justifying yourself selling them guns that they kill
white settlers with. You may be rich, but it’s blood money you’re
rich on.’

‘
It
spends the same as the other kind,’ Nix said, getting up out of his
chair. ‘Come, we are keeping the lady waiting.’

Angel followed him out to the
patio. It was cool now, and Victoria Nix wore a lacy, woolen shawl
around her formerly
bare shoulders.

‘
You’ll
take coffee, Mister Angel?’ she asked. Her voice had the soft lilt
of the South in it, and Angel nodded, smiling. Victoria Nix was
slim and quite tall. Her bare arms were slender and faintly golden
from the sun. The rich glow of her auburn hair made her wide green
eyes seem darker, more somber. Once again, Angel was struck by her
sheer beauty, and the bizarreness of her marriage to Hercules Nix.
He watched as she nervously checked to see if her husband approved
of her speaking, the way her eyes dropped when he smiled blandly at
her.

‘
You’ll
have a brandy, Angel?’ Nix asked.

‘
I
believe I will,’ Angel said, and when Nix handed him a
brandy glass with a generous measure of the golden liquid in it, he
discovered that it was French brandy, and very old. ‘You do
yourself proud,’ he remarked. ‘Isn’t it hard to freight all these
things in?’

‘
Not
hard,’ Nix said. ‘Expensive, certainly. But only that. If you are
prepared to pay for it, everything is obtainable. Without
exception.’

Angel wondered whether he had
imagined Victoria Nix
’s shudder as her husband spoke these words. He certainly
did not imagine the way she smiled at him automatically, anxiously,
as he put his arm around her shoulders and hugged her once, in a
proprietary fashion, or the way she immediately disengaged herself
from his grasp. She sat in a chair immediately opposite Angel and
stared into her coffee cup. After an awkward silence, she looked
up.

‘
Will …
will you be staying long, Mister Angel?’ she asked.

Nix intervened before Angel
could open his mouth.
‘Our guest can only stay the one night, my dear,’
he said. ‘He has to leave at daybreak.’

‘
If I’d
known the company would be this pleasant, I’d have planned a longer
stay,’ Angel said. ‘But I’m afraid I, ah, have no
choice.’

It seemed to him that she
understood what he was saying, although he had been convinced she
had no idea of her husband
’s plans for him on the morrow. Just what was
causing the deep, swimming anxiety in her lovely eyes he could not
fathom. Whatever it was, it demonstrated that there was something
very, very wrong in the relationship between Hercules Nix and his
wife. She was in mortal fear of his very touch.

Now Nix put down his coffee cup with a
decisive movement, and rose to his feet, stretching his arms wide
and yawning ostentatiously. As if on signal, Victoria Nix got up,
putting down her coffee unfinished. Angel stood up, but Nix waved
him back to his chair.

‘
No, no,
my dear fellow,’ he said. ‘Finish your coffee. Victoria and I
always turn in early. You stay here, enjoy the evening. Yat Sen
will bring you another brandy.’ He offered his arm to his wife, who
took it gingerly. ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’ Nix said, and
smiled like a cobra.

They walked toward the door, and as
they reached it, Angel heard Victoria Nix exclaim impatiently. A
moment-later, she came hurrying back.

‘
My
wrap,’ she said loudly. ‘I left it on the chair! Goodnight again,
Mister Angel!’

He was about to echo her words when
she lowered her voice and bent close to him. She smelled of some
fragrant perfume.

‘
For
God’s sake!’ she hissed in an agonized whisper. ‘For God’s sake,
Mister Angel—get me out of this place!’

They turned him loose at dawn.

It was a strange, almost ghostly
scene. Hercules Nix stood like some graven idol, his men bayed
behind him in a half-circle, watching with almost sardonic
amusement as one of them ripped off Angel
’s clothes. When they were done, he
nodded.

‘
You
have a whole day, Angel,’ he said. ‘Don’t waste it.’

No trace of his urbanity of the
previous night remained. He was cold and remorseless, and Angel
clamped his teeth together so that the chill of the dawn
wouldn
’t make
him shiver. The huge wooden gates were thrown back. On the gullied
sides of the burros, light touched the rocks enough to make some of
the darker shadows contrast with others.

‘
Git
movin’, Angel,’ Des Elliott said with a leering grin. ‘Flap your
wings!’

Angel shook his head ruefully,
and spat into the dirt at Nix
’s feet.

‘
You’re
as crazy as a bug in a box,’ he said flatly. Without waiting to see
Nix’s reaction, he turned and loped away from the stockade, his
mind already intent on survival. He had no illusions about dying
bravely, with a quip on his lips as they did in those stiff-upper
lip stories for British boys. If there was any dying to do, he sure
as hell didn’t intend it to be him who did it. He headed north
along the edge of the river. After a while he looked back, but they
were already gone, the gates of the stockade shut. He moved on,
steadily. The gray land beneath the pinking dawn sky was as empty
as the land of Nod before God sent Cain there.

After a while, Angel veered
eastward, keeping up a steady jogtrot that he varied every fifteen
minutes or so by walking
for the same length of time. He had spent much of
the night working out his movements, and until he reached his first
destination, he could let his mind rove over the things he had
learned during his stay in the Nix
hacienda.

The most stunning, the most
unexpected surprise had been the agonized appeal for help from
Victoria Nix. What was behind it, Angel could only guess, but it
reinforced his impression that there was something hugely wrong
with the relationship between the woman and her husband. There had
been no sign of her when Yat Sen had brought him down to the big
living room in the pre-dawn darkness. He imagined she was kept away
from the less savory of Nix
’s activities on purpose. She had certainly given
no indication that she knew what her husband planned for their
guest. Either way, there had been nothing he could do. He could not
even get a message to her, and did not see her again. Her
terror-drowned eyes stayed in his mind all through the night. Now
as he jogged across country he saw them again, and shook his head.
His first priority was his own survival. From what he had been told
by Nix, he would need all his craft and cunning.

‘
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.