Stop Angel! (A Frank Angel Western Book 8) (9 page)

‘
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.

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
routine 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 could 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.