Stop Angel! (A Frank Angel Western Book 8) (22 page)

‘
Frank …
?’ Victoria Nix said hesitantly.

‘
All
right,’ Angel said. ‘A carbine each. No hand guns.’

‘
Deal,’
Holmes said. ‘I’ll get mounted.’

He slouched over to the corral.
Sweddlin and Sanson
walked their horses toward him as he swung up. And Angel
watched all three of them for the slightest hint of
treachery.

It was a damned good job he
did.

As Holmes swung into the saddle,
a sudden sound shattered the soft silence of the approaching dusk.
There was no mistaking what it was
—the insistent clamor of an alarm bell.
Simultaneously, the drum of approaching hoofs became audible.
Someone was coming along the trail through the breaks. Holmes heard
the sound and overreacted, and his action triggered the other two
into treacherous reflex violence.

‘
Bastard!’ Holmes yelled at Angel. ‘You tricked
us!’

He pulled his horse around in a
rearing turn, yanked the carbine in the saddle scabbard out and
levering it one-handed. Sweddlin and Sanson split, Sweddlin diving
out of the saddle with his own carbine, rolling as he thumbed
shells into the magazine, while Sanson swung down and dived in a
desperate attempt to reach the shotgun that Chris Holmes had
dropped in the dust. Angel ignored them, keeping every atom of his
concentration on Holmes. Any man who used his horse as a shield
that way, and that fast, also knew enough to shoot damned well. It
was a smart, killer
’s move—perhaps one man in ten thousand could hit the few
exposed parts of a rider’s body if he reared his horse like that,
under pressure and fast—and Holmes grinned in confident glee as he
pulled his trigger. His last thought was that he’d killed Angel and
then Angel’s unerring six-gun bullet smashed through his mouth and
blew his skull apart in a spraying pink mist of bone and brain.
Holmes’s bullet chunked a spout of earth a foot high out of the
ground near Angel’s foot, but the Justice Department man was
already moving in a crouched right turn, laying the six-gun across
his forearm and putting three bullets in a close cluster below Kit
Sanson’s right armpit as the man closed his hand on the shotgun.
The heavy bullets rolled Sanson over as dead as a brained mackerel,
and Lee Sweddlin, who was just bringing the carbine up to use it,
found himself gaping into the yawning muzzle of Angel’s weapon. He
screamed like a gutted wolf, pants staining with his own terror,
and dropped the carbine, throwing it away from him as he turned and
ran. He was a dead easy target, but Angel did not fire, couldn’t do
it. Sweddlin careered across the face of the breaks, and turned
sharp left into the gap leading to the trail back.

Angel was already running, but
not in pursuit of Sweddlin. He ran up the ladder to the lookout
platform like a squirrel, snatching up the spyglass that lay on the
bench and
focusing on the long, straight, narrow cut between the
close-growing trees. For a moment he could see nothing, and then
all at once his sight was filled with the insane, contorted face of
Hercules Nix. He was quite alone, his arm rising and falling like
an automaton as he relentlessly thrashed the dying horse with his
whip. The animal was covered in blood from withers to chest, hide
stripped by the terrible spurs. Its eyes wept blood and it was all
but dead on its feet.

Angel threw down the spyglass and ran
to the edge of the platform. Victoria was at the foot of the ladder
staring up at him.

‘
Frank?’
she called. ‘Frank, how many of them are there?’

‘
It’s
Nix!’ he shouted. ‘It’s Nix, and he’s by himself!’

‘
Alone?’
she shouted.

He didn
’t answer her. His mind was already
emptied of everything except what he had to do next. He had to get
down to the ground, snatch up the shotgun lying alongside Kit
Sanson’s crumpled corpse, and run to where Nix would come out of
the gap between the breaks. He wanted to be there, shotgun ready,
for Jaime Lorenz, for Tyrrell, for all the men the oncoming madman
had cut down.

He came down the ladder face
forward, like a sailor, and whirled around toward the hut, intent
on the gun. There was no sign of Victoria and he wondered where she
had
gone. As
he snatched up the shotgun he saw a movement inside the hut, and
for a moment he could not believe what he had seen. He ran to the
doorway of the hut and barged in. She was standing by the huge
black lead-acid batteries and her hand was on the H-shaped switch
that would make the mines beneath the trail live.

‘
No!’ he
shouted. ‘Victoria, no!’

‘
Oh,
yes,’ she whispered. Her face was like a death mask. ‘Yes, oh,
yes!’

And she threw the switch.

Angel lay on the bed in
his apartment.

Downstairs, he could hear
Mrs. Rissick
bustling about in her kitchen, and the faint sound of traffic
drifted up from F Street. It was already winter in Washington, cold
and damp in the night, dark before six. Right now there was a weak,
watery sun up in an uncertain sky and it cast long stripes of light
across the carpet of the room. A million dust motes danced in the
beams and Angel let his lassitude drift over him, like warm waves
on a tropic shore. It was an old and familiar feeling, not
unwelcome: the fatigue that always followed the deep physical and
emotional drainage of engagement. It always came when you knew
everything was over, the veins and arteries sutured, the dead
buried, and the ties formed in the copper-smelling heat of action
finally cut. It was a time when he went over his own actions again
and again, reviewing them in his mind, replaying them in slow
motion to see if there had been any alternative open. There were
men in the department who enjoyed the killing, he knew; but he was
not one of them. He never failed to wonder whether it was
justified, and even if it was, what it proved. It didn’t ever prove
a damned thing to kill a man, yet you rarely got any choice. It was
acceptable on that basis. Not delightful, not admirable, not a
thrill, but acceptable. What was unacceptable was where you made a
choice and didn’t know if it had been the right one. Those were the
ones that tore you apart.

‘
Victoria,’ he said aloud, thinking of her.

They had ridden away from the
valley in silence, burying no dead and not looking back. In time
they had come to Madura. It was black dark by the time they reached
the town
’s
only hotel. Angel asked for and got the two largest rooms in the
place. He left Victoria in one of them while he went to the
sheriff’s office. She was calm, compliant, and utterly without
expression. When he told her to, she stood or walked or ate or
drank, acting—to any casual observer -almost completely normal.
Certainly no more abnormal than a lot of folks who were what they
called slow on the uptake. Only someone who had seen her before,
someone who knew her—like Angel—saw the empty deadness behind the
eyes. He knew that whatever dam was holding back the reaction, it
had to burst soon. It had held precariously ever since she had
thrown the switch at the hut outside the entrance to Nix’s valley,
but it wouldn’t hold a hell of a lot longer, and he didn’t want her
to be alone when it did. So he hurried through his conversation
with the sheriff, leaving that worthy greatly worried, sweatily
uneasy, and anything but completely informed about the events that
had taken place in Nix’s kingdom. Angel’s explanations—and his
promise to enlarge upon them the next day—were just this side of
perfunctory, and the string of instructions he left with the
sheriff meant that worthy would have to do without most of his
sleep that night. The sheriff banged his fist on the desk with
anger—but not until his visitor was gone.

When Angel got back to the
hotel, Victoria was still
sitting in the same chair, staring with neither
expression nor interest at the roses-and-rhubarb wallpaper on the
opposite wall. When he told her she must get some sleep, she
nodded, and allowed herself to be led into the bedroom like a
child. He waited until she was in bed, then crept in to check on
her. She was already asleep.

The next day he left the hotel
while Victoria was still asleep and spent most of the morning with
the sheriff. A sheaf of telegraph messages in the
department
’s
simple next-letter code lay on that worthy’s desk, and he pushed
them across to his visitor with a dyspeptic snort.

‘
What’n’the hell is all that mumbo-jumbo, anyways?’ he asked
aggrievedly.

Fine thing when a man
couldn
’t even
find out what was going on and tell his cronies over a beer in the
saloon later. Angel gave him a couple of halfway decent lies to
chew on, and digested the real instructions from the
Attorney-General, who had agreed to his proposal that he stay with
Victoria Nix until she came out of her withdrawn state. A troop of
Texas Rangers was going to check out the valley, and would report
back in due course. Meanwhile, Angel could file a full report when
he got back to Washington, which should not be later than
twenty-one days from today’s date. He smiled at the instruction,
seeing the old man giving it. Then he went back to the
hotel.

Victoria was up and dressed, sitting
in the chair, waiting for nothing in particular.

‘
Victoria,’ he said gently. ‘It’s all over now. I’ve made
arrangements for us to leave tomorrow. Head for San Antonio and
take a train from there to New Orleans. You said your father’s
lawyer was in New Orleans, didn’t you?’

‘
Yes,’
she said without interest. ‘New Orleans.’

‘
Do you
want something to eat?’

‘
Yes.’

That evening, the
sheriff
’s
wife, an apple-faced woman with the bright blue eyes of a child,
brought them a cooked cold chicken and a bottle of dry white
California wine she said she’d been saving for a special
occasion.

‘
P
oor mite,’ she said, looking at Victoria. ‘She looks real
peaked.’

It was obvious she wanted to
stay and ask questions, but after a polite while Angel shooed her
off like a chicken, and asked the desk clerk to lay a table for
them in the dining room. The wine was
sharp tasting and pleasant, and it brought
some of the life back into Victoria’s eyes. She hardly touched any
of the chicken, but absently sipped the wine as Angel kept topping
her glass. When the clerk cleared away the dishes, her eyes were
already cloudy with sleep, and by the time they got upstairs, it
was all she could do to stay awake.

‘
Frank,’
she said unexpectedly. ‘It’s so hard to find words—’

He touched her soft lips with a
gentle forefinger, and shook his head.
‘Then don’t try,’ he said quietly. He
opened the door to her room. ‘Just sleep. It will wait until
tomorrow.’

‘
Yes,’
she said. Her eyes were as wide as a ten-year-old’s on Christmas
Eve. ‘Tomorrow.’ She rose on tiptoe and kissed his cheek, light as
the touch of a snowflake. Then she went into the room and closed
the door. Angel stood for a moment in the corridor, and then went
into his own room. He didn’t give a damn for the conventions of
Madura, or the clucks of its old ladies. If Victoria’s barriers
cracked he wanted to be able to get to her quickly, and he had told
the room clerk to leave the communicating door between the rooms
unlocked.

‘
You
bet, Chief,’ the clerk had grinned, and Angel had restrained the
urge to slap the leer off his pimply face. Instead he went over to
the washstand and when the clerk held out his hand for the expected
tip, Angel put the bar of soap in it.

‘
What’s
this, Chief?’ he asked, puzzled.

‘
Take it
downstairs,’ Angel suggested, ‘and wash your mind out with
it.’

For a moment, the clerk looked
as if he might retort, but then he saw the look in
Angel
’s eyes
and decided to swallow the unspoken jibe. This stranger might be an
ungrateful sonofa, but he also looked like the kind of ungrateful
sonofa who’d kick your ass through your ear hole if you told him
so. He backed out, and Angel smiled as he locked the door behind
the narrow leer. He undressed now, grinning again at the
recollection, and lay on the bed. His mind kept going back to the
last moments in the hut at the mouth of the valley, Victoria with
her hand on the lever, eyes like the vengeance of Kali. The black
batteries had looked like the tombs of some forgotten civilization,
she one of its reincarnated priestesses as she pulled the switch.
There was a long, long silence of perhaps three seconds, and then a
stuttering roll of sound, an interrupted thunder that flattened the
eardrums for a moment and then passed like a soft sighing wind.
Angel had stood, poised for an action there was no point now in
taking, and watched as, slowly, slowly, seeming to shrink inside
herself as she did it, Victoria had released her pent-up
breath.

‘
There,’
she had whispered. ‘There.’