Read Stop Angel! (A Frank Angel Western Book 8) Online

Authors: Frederick H. Christian

Tags: #wild west, #lawmen, #piccadilly publishing, #frederick h christian, #sudden, #frank angel, #western pulp fiction, #old west fiction, #frederick h nolan, #us west

Stop Angel! (A Frank Angel Western Book 8) (23 page)

Angel saw what was happening to her
and he moved across the hut, his hand outstretched, some words of
reassurance forming in his mind. She whirled around like a cat, her
eyes blazing.

‘
Keep
away from me!’ she rasped. ‘Don’t you
touch
me!’

‘
I
wasn’t going to—’

‘
Keep
your consolation!’ she snapped, her voice as tight as a cello
string. ‘I wanted to kill him, do you hear me?’

‘
Yes,’
he said. ‘I hear you. It’s all right.’

‘
I’m
glad,’ she shouted. ‘Glad, glad! I hope his black soul rots forever
in Hell!’

He said no more then. It was as
good an epitaph for
Hercules Nix as any, and probably better than the man had
deserved. He went out of there and got the horses, and when he came
back she was standing staring out the window with the empty look
she had had ever since. Fifteen minutes later they rode away
without a backward glance. Smoke from the fire he had started
belched from the door and windows of the hut. Within an hour it
would be a charred ruin. The desert could have all that was left of
the mad dream of Ernie Hecatt, alias Hercules Nix.

It was warm and close in the
hotel room, but after a while, he slept. Her soft warmth awoke him,
and he opened his eyes as she reached for him in the darkness, her
face wet with tears, body heaving with sobs that would not break.
Almost soundlessly she was saying
‘Oh, oh, oh, oh,’ over and over, and he
knew the dam had finally cracked, knew now that she needed
something strong and warm and solid to hang onto. It could be
anyone, he told his body; it just happens I’m nearest. So he held
her close and he rocked her as he would have rocked a small child
afraid of the bogeyman. And as he did the small crack that had
brought her seeking comfort widened and finally broke and she
sobbed and sobbed as if she had seen the end of the world and had
nobody to tell about it.

She cried like that for almost
an hour, tears coming from her as if from some bottomless salty
source, and then she sniffled, and stopped. She shivered slightly,
and her skin turned cold and clammy to the touch. He reached over
and drew a blanket up around her naked shoulders, folding her into
it, and saying the useless, helpless words a man says to a weeping
woman; there, there, never mind, it
’s all right, there, there now. After a
while she seemed to sleep, and he laid her softly on his pillow,
easing his own body away from her. As if sensing his intent, she
tightened her slender arms around him and muttered a sound that
might have been ‘no.’ He made some more of the gentle shushing
sounds, and lay alongside her on the bed, his body aching from the
long, rhythmic hours of soothing, rocking. A faint paleness in the
sky hinted at the coming dawn, and he felt the coolness of the
desert breeze through the open window. He thought that afterward he
slept a little, but he was never sure. What he remembered was her
awakening slowly, warmth coming from her body, a slow sweet heat
like a mist that enveloped him, and her slim bare arms sliding
around his body as her soft sweet lips touched his face. There was
one long moment of waiting, a moment when he rationalized and told
himself that the affirmation of life is a primal force in all of
us. There are innumerable stories of survivors of some awful
disaster clinging together with a passion that springs from
instinct and not affection, from the very depths of the being. It
might be some kind of compulsion put in us by a knowing Nature to
ensure the survival of the species, or nothing more than a
desperate need to feel all the strong and reassuring thunders of
life, the sharing of the body’s best gifts. It was not love and he
knew it, but the moment came and went and with it went the will to
draw away. After that there was only the long litheness of her, the
sweet, scented depths of her, the quick, half-surprised inhalation
of pleasure as they joined and the rising crescendo of their need
for each other. Up into some dark night beyond the night, totally
present in each other, completely absent from self, lovers and
strangers simultaneously, they lived and then died the long, long
moment that ended in a soft, slow curve of arriving back, silent
and rewarded.

After a while, she started to move as
if leaving, and he caught her arm. She turned her body back toward
him, soft breasts warm and damp against his own moistened
body.

‘
Would
you leave without saying a word?’ he said softly. T want to talk to
you, get to know you now.’

‘
I
t’s—all right,’ she said gently. ‘You don’t—have
to.’

So she stayed and they talked
until the dawn painted the
window pink and then they slept. That day they
smiled a lot as they packed, and rented a buggy to take them to San
Antonio. From there they took a train to New Orleans. Each day they
were there the sadness left her a little, each day she became
stronger, smiled more. There was a bloom on her like a fresh peach,
a lightness in her step, a firmness to the touch of her. She drew
the glances of men in the street, and laughed when Angel glared at
them. They lived in an enclosed spectrum of each other, where
clocks had no meaning and days had no name. They walked through the
world inside a golden haze that excluded everyone else. They found
an old restaurant in the Vieux Carrel with real lace tablecloths,
old oil lamps, fine French cooking. They ate like castaways and
drank chilled Sancerre that tasted of the stones of France. They
walked hand in hand beneath wrought-iron balconies and listened to
the sweet sad sound of the Negro music from the cellars. All their
days were sunny and all their nights were cool and endless. They
swam in the soft warm waters of the Gulf, and joined shameless
bodies whenever it pleased them to do so. And then one day Victoria
told him she was ready to leave New Orleans.

‘
Good,’
he said, grinning. ‘Where are we going?’

‘
No,
Frank,’ she said. ‘I mean alone.’

‘
Ah. You
mean alone.’

What were you supposed to do, he
thought. Kick over the table? Punch one of the attentive waiters?
Weep or wail or gnash your teeth? She leaned across the table and
touched his hand, her fingers like gossamer. He watched the lips
that he remembered in hoyden abandon speak words that seemed
unreal.

‘
Darling,’ Victoria said. ‘You have to let me go
now.’

‘
Why?’
he asked. ‘Would you like to try to tell me why?’

She nodded, and he saw tears
waiting to be spilled behind her eyes, too. She looked up at the
ceiling and drew in a deep breath. Her breasts lifted beneath the
thin cotton
blouse. The long line of her sweet throat was golden brown
from the sun, and somewhere in an echoing empty room in his mind
someone said the words ‘never again.’

‘
I
love you, Frank,’ she whispered, and before he could reply,
she put her fingers softly on his lips. ‘Before you make the
standard required reply, let me say the rest of it. I love you. I
love you very much, my dear, but if I walk away from you now, I
think I can get over it. It will hurt for a while, but I could do
it, and remember you as someone very special, someone I would think
of fondly and who would always be very important to me ... if I go
now. But if I stay—and I will stay if you ask me to—then I want all
of it, Frank. The gold ring and the white dress, the house and the
fat babies, everything. I’m that kind of woman, darling. I want
that kind of man and that kind of life and I won’t settle for less.
Do you understand?’

He nodded.

‘
Then
what is it to be?’

Her gaze was intent and searching, and
there was a faint tremor of anticipation, or perhaps fear, around
the corners of her mouth. He looked at her and she saw the answer
and she smiled.

‘
You are
a goddamned fool, Frank Angel,’ she said softly.

Now in the shaded quiet of his
apartment in the capital city, he heard her voice in the echoing
empty room in his mind. She had left New Orleans the next day, and
refused to allow him to see her off at the railroad depot. He
didn
’t know
where she had gone, or what had happened to her, and he knew he was
going to spend the rest of his life wondering whether he’d somehow
let the right one, the one it was meant to be, get away. Never
again, the voice said.

‘
Shut
up,’ he told it, and went into the other room. He poured himself a
stiff drink from the bottle on the table. The whiskey tasted like
molten gold, but it didn’t lift his dark mood. He turned and caught
sight of himself in a mirror on the wall. He looked at his face for
a long moment and then gave a rueful grin.

‘
You’re
a goddamned fool, Frank Angel,’ he told his reflection. The
reflection didn’t reply. It probably knew that already.

STOP
ANGEL!

ANGEL 8

By Frederick
H. Christian

First
Published by Sphere Books in 1974

Reprinted under the title
Manhunt in
Quemado
in 2007

Published by
Piccadilly Publishing at Smashwords: January 2015.

Names,
characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any
resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons
living or dead is purely coincidental.

This ebook is
licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be
re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share
this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy
for each reader.

This is a
Piccadilly Publishing Book

Series Editor:
Ben Bridges

Text ©
Piccadilly Publishing

Published by
Arrangement with the Author.

The Angel Series:

Find Angel!

Send Angel!

Trap Angel!

Hang Angel!

Hunt Angel!

Kill Angel!

Frame Angel!