Avenging Angel

by Rex Burns

  Zenas was still shooting. The boom of his weapon moved from spot to spot as he darted from window to window. The answering fire thumped solidly against the outside stones or screamed in fragments through the smoky darkness to tear softly into the plaster. From the sound, Wager could tell that they had spread out to surround the farmhouse and wait for the fire to burn them out. Then beneath the blasts he heard a new sound, a low, steady grunting that told him the shock had ebbed from Tice’s wound and the pain was beginning.

  “Tice?” Wager whispered to the slumping figure in the corner. “Tice! Hang on—they should be here soon.”

  “Yeah. Fire. Use rugs…”

  Wager glanced through the dark dining room toward the shattered kitchen door, behind which he thought he heard murmurs. Lunging across the line of fire, he crawled into the parlor to find Zenas crouched between the exploded windows reloading his rifle with dully gleaming cartridges. Wager felt the short, thick nap of carpet and yanked at it as a bullet whacked just over his head and sent plaster chips and a hot, jagged scrap of copper across his back. The fire had burned blue and spread in an oily, flickering ring down one wall and out over the floor, where a draft fed one side. As he watched, the flames turned yellow with fresh life and began to dart higher. He threw the carpet wide, hitting with his hands at the hotness beneath. Zenas, drawing a deep breath as an eddy of fresh air swirled through the broken windows, gasped, “Did Tice call in the deputies?”

  “Radio’s shot.” Wager dragged the smoking carpet over to another section of flame.

  “Lord help us,” muttered Zenas. “I figure it’s been four, maybe five minutes. It’ll take my boys a good fifteen to come up the canyon. Pretty soon Beauchamp’ll guess there’s only a few of us in here.”

  Only four or five minutes since the first, hurried shot. It seemed like years. “We can’t last that long.”

  “I know that.”

  A sudden blast of slugs shocked the air around them and Zenas swung his rifle up to the glass-littered sill. “Here comes another torch,” he called, and fired two quick shots before ducking to avoid the scream of answering bullets.

  Wager heard Tice trying to yell something.

  “What is it?”

  “Kitchen—coming through the kitchen.” His voice choked. “You and Zenas upstairs. Now!”

  “Come on!” Behind him he heard Zenas scuttle through the glass. Tice fired into the kitchen to pin the invaders down as the two men stumbled up the stairs. Zenas leaped ahead, and halfway up Wager stopped to fire a round and call, “Now, Tice, come on up!”

  “Go!” The bulky shape flung an arm at him and fired again. Then the automatic exploded in a solid wall of heat and concussion and hammering slugs that drove Wager up the stairs as the banister disintegrated beneath his hand.

  On the upper landing Zenas was calling into the smoke-filled darkness. “Ezra! Daniel!”

  “They’re in the big bedroom.” Wager coughed. “The one with the rope ladder.”

  “My woman?”

  “Her, too.”

  “Good.” He pointed Wager to his right. “You go down there. I’ll go here. We can put a crossfire at the top of the stairs.”

  Wager quickly felt his way to an open doorway as, below, Tice’s rifle boomed again. The sheriff couldn’t get out of his corner, but no one could get in either. Not without facing that rifle he used so well; not unless the fire worsened and smoked him out. Or they came in through the front. They were still firing steadily at the front, but soon they’d notice no return fire.

  Wager, his skin fried and oily from the gunpowder and smoke, knocked apart a bed frame to pile up a low shelter that angled out into the hallway. If they got past Tice, if they came up those stairs, it would have to be one at a time. Wager and Zenas could hold them off if they tried that, unless Willis’s men just sat back and let the house burn down. That’s what Wager would do in the attackers’ place—let it burn and pick them off one at a time as they fled.

  Outside the rifle fire increased and Wager heard it build to cover a rush toward the front door. The automatic in the kitchen let loose, too, quivering even the masonry walls with its deep, punching blasts. But it sounded different, as though it was turned away from the house. Then Wager realized that the growing rifle fire formed a ring of constant explosions that was closing in on the house quickly and savagely. The deputies—Zenas’s people, somebody—had come, and their gunfire was washing over the attackers from behind, scattering them, shifting their fire, driving them toward the shelter of the smoking, splintered farmhouse that would become their trap, too. Wager ran to the window and saw the circumference of gun flashes move quickly among the trees. Here and there it tangled in close and desperate glare, but steadily it pressed toward the house. Then he heard the front door kicked open and the clatter of boots and an urgent, frightened voice calling orders. A second later the house trembled from the roar of rifles and the stomp of running boots, and through the din Wager heard vague shouts and the sound of heavy feet leaping up the stairs. He steadied his pistol and when the first figure appeared on the landing, red and gigantic in the light from the flames below, he fired. The figure howled shrilly and fell back out of sight, to be immediately replaced by the blazing thunder of the automatic ripping and screaming across his low shelter to mash him against the shivering floor. Two deep explosions roared down the hallway, closing the walls over his head in a shattering rain of gritty dust that stung his eye and filled his mouth with a bitter taste. The automatic fell silent, but the crescendo of gunfire and shouting and stamping boots drowned out any sound from the stairwell. Cautiously, Wager lifted his head above the pile of iron bed rails still hot from the impact of slugs. He felt something dangle on his cheek. The patch. The cloth, still damp from sweat and grimy even in the pale light of the room, hung ripped from his blinking eye, and he tugged it off, feeling the thin glow from the window almost like a cool breeze on his sight.

  Suddenly the downstairs clamor died; the gunfire halted as abruptly as it had started. Boots still moved quickly here and there, loud on the bare floors or crackling through broken glass and splinters. There was a murmur of voices and a half-familiar voice said, “Cover me—I’ll go see.” From outside a voice called, “All right—over here. Line up them sonsofbitches. Over here.” And at the foot of the stairs another called out, “Earl, Sheriff Tice is here. He’s hurt.”

  Wager rocked shakily up to his knees and sucked in a lungful of the smoke- and dust-filled air, and he felt the muscles of his neck and shoulders and arms hang like limp cloth from the bones. It was over.

  Almost over—there was something else he should remember. An important something else.

  But his ears still throbbed from the pummeling concussions, and it was enough right now to kneel here and breathe and not feel the air around him battered into fragments by that automatic.

  Then, like a catch in his breath, he remembered. And at the same time he heard a board squeak on the landing.

  Groping along the shadowy floor, Wager’s fingers found the welcome heft of his pistol. Gingerly, he slid down the wall past the row of beds, ears intent on the cautious sounds in the hallway.

  The board creaked again and a tiny scrape told him a hand was feeling its way across the wall toward him. He crouched in the darkest part of the room, trying to get some of the moonglow against the gaping doorway and the black hall beyond. A quiet creak of shoe leather, and the slithering hiss glided to the edge of the doorway and stopped. Perhaps Wager heard shallow breathing in the blackness; perhaps it was his own. He waited, rigid, the weariness fading in the tension of his listening. Slowly, steadily, leather creaked as a vague part of the gloom seemed to congeal and move into the doorway.

  “Wager?”

  The word was so soft that he wasn’t sure he heard it.

  “Wager? You there?”

  Now things made sense. The pieces of the puzzle that had refused to fit, those unfinished corners and blank spots that he had kept stumbling on, sudde
nly shifted into place as Wager recognized the voice and knew why the man whispered his name.

  “I’m here, Yates.”

  “Jesus! I thought I’d find you dead.” He stepped into the doorway, the glow from the window showing his hands and the pale oval of his face above the dark uniform. A long-barreled shadow was in his right hand. “Where are you?” he asked quietly.

  “Over here.”

  “I can’t see …” The deputy glided into the room, blurry face intent.

  “Stop right there, Yates.” Wager clicked the hammer back on his Star PD, and the tiny sound froze the deputy.

  “What do you mean, Wager? What the hell are you doing?”

  “Seeing things, Yates. Seeing things fall together finally.”

  “Hey, if you can see in this light—”

  “I can see fine. So don’t try a thing.”

  “Try? What are you talking about, man?”

  “Mueller’s death. And Winston’s. Suppose you tell me why you did it, Yates?”

  The man’s rigid form stood motionless; then he took a step closer and whispered angrily, “Listen, you crazy sonofabitch, I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  “Somebody wanted Mueller’s land, Yates. That’s the motive. They wanted his and whoever else’s they could scare into selling out. People around here believe in the avenging angels, and by God so do I now. But it wasn’t the angels who killed Mueller. It was somebody who could get a copy of that angel drawing. Easy enough to do in the sheriff’s office—just reach in the safe, make a copy, and then put back the circular from Pueblo. Then the avenging angels got the blame. The same for Winston. He was killed by somebody who knew he was poking around the courthouse records. By somebody who figured Winston had guessed something when he tried to get in touch with me through the sheriff’s office. It wasn’t Tice or Earl Hodges. I checked the dispatcher’s logs, Yates. When Winston was shot, Earl was chasing a runaway bull east of town, and Tice was in his office. Only you were out of the net—and almost invisible. What’s more natural than seeing a sheriff’s car cruising the back roads? I haven’t looked yet, but I’ll bet that when I was shot at, both Tice and Earl can be accounted for; you’ll be checked out again. It all adds up, Yates; the lost bullet that killed Mueller—you dug it out of the wall and threw it away and then dug more holes, so you could say you searched for it and couldn’t find it. And the use of Carmen Gallegos’s name to buy Mueller’s place … She doesn’t exist, does she? All the state cares about is if that name pays taxes. What’d you do, get Mueller drunk and promise to buy his land? Talk him into signing the papers on an IOU? And then shoot him in the back when he wanted his money? That’s what those figures on the paper were—principal, interest, payments. You were talking money that you knew you didn’t have, and then you shot him.”

  The standing figure said nothing.

  “Then Orrin Winston smelled something. He never really believed the avenging angels killed Mueller. So he poked around the courthouse and you found out about it, didn’t you? Went down to Records and bought that old man a cup of coffee and he was happy to tell you who had been looking through what files. When Orrin tried to reach me through the sheriff’s office, you really got worried. And when he left work that afternoon, you had a good idea where he was going. So you ambushed him. Maybe he knew it was you who killed Mueller; maybe not. But the safest way for you was an ambush; if he did know you couldn’t let him see you. Just like you couldn’t chance letting me see you, in case Orrin had said something to Zenas, and Zenas had told it to me. I’ll bet you had an avenging angel ready to stick in my hand, too; same clue, same suspects. But the m.o. was different, Yates—the clues were the same but the m.o. was different, and that puzzled me.”

  He gave the man a chance to reply, but there was only silence.

  “And finally Orrin’s office—Tice and I scared you off, didn’t we? But you naturally came by to do the fingerprint work. Now,” Wager said, “you’ve come up here to make sure I don’t get out alive.”

  From downstairs came the sound of Tice being rolled, groaning, onto a blanket and dragged gently into the kitchen.

  “What made Mueller’s land so valuable, Yates? I looked at the mineral records for the whole valley—there’s nothing there but rock. What in hell was worth killing two men for?”

  “Water.”

  The deputy’s voice was flat and weary. “Water for oil-shale development. A million, two million dollars’ worth of underground water rights if a man could corner that valley.”

  And that explained Orrin’s final words: it wasn’t a plea against thirst, but the clue that had sent him delving into the county records, the clue he had hoped Wager would understand. But Wager had been too dumb.

  “All right, Yates.” Wager’s voice was just as tired. “It’s over now. Drop your weapon.”

  “Why?”

  Wager tensed. His eyes watched the dark line that was the barrel of the deputy’s .44. “You’re covered, Yates.” Body armor—Wager remembered that the deputy wore body armor. If the man went for it, Wager would have only a head shot. A snap shot at the head in a dark room. “You won’t make it.”

  “Fuck you!” Yates’s weapon fired even as he swung it. The glare and whipping heat slapped at Wager’s eyes. He squeezed the trigger and felt the Star buck against his arm, lift, and fall back on target as Yates and he fired second shots together. Wager’s own shot was lost in the booming flash of Yates’s .44 and the suddenness of a bomb shattered the darkness behind his eyes with a stunning, jolting spray of red and orange that filled his mind as it was plunged into silence.

  He did not know how long he was out. The ache drew him from wherever he had gone, pounding heavily between his temples with every heartbeat and spearing the back of his eyeballs. He tried to move, to pull his arm out from under its hot pressure, his legs from wherever they lay in the blackness. But even the thought of moving sent a pulse of pain across his skull and clenched his stomach with nausea. Gradually, beneath the intense focus of the ache, he sensed something different, a feeling more than a sound: the noises had stopped. Almost stopped. The mutter of voices came from somewhere outside his clenched eyelids, and then silence. Wager turned his head gently, the pain slamming like a bowling ball behind his forehead; his cold, probing fingers brushed through the stickily matted hair along his scalp and against the torn, raised flesh where the bullet had creased him. He pressed gingerly around the throbbing soreness, but that’s all it was, a crease. On his forearm, a tightly wrapped bandage clamped his skin back together, and he could feel the familiar burn of a cut when he bent his wrist. Slowly, as though tugging weakly at strings, he pulled first one leg and then the other back to his body and tried to sit up. He held the swaying floor as still as possible beneath his spread fingers, but nausea drained his strength and he dropped back with a groan.

  “Wager’s coming around.” The voice was clear but distant, and a moment later he heard the mash of boots on the glass-littered floor.

  “Wager? Wager—can you hear me?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It’s me, Earl Hodges. You know me? You know who I am?”

  “I know.” Then, “Where’s Yates?”

  “Dead.”

  A surge of throbbing closed off his breath for a moment. “He killed Mueller. And Orrin.”

  “I know some of it. I was coming up the stairs and heard him tell about the water rights. But I couldn’t get there in time.” Hodges’s boot shuffled stickily in some liquid that had seeped over the kitchen floor. “You’ll have to write it all out as soon as you’re able.”

  “Tice? How’s Tice?”

  “He’s hurt, but he’s a tough old buzzard. We sent him back in the Jeep cussing us all until he passed out. I don’t know if he’ll make it. I sure hope so.”

  Wager felt fingers press against his forehead and a thumb at his eyelids. The gesture brought pain jabbing from ear to ear.

  “Okay—okay, take it easy. You got a bad concussion
and a not-so-bad cut. But I think that’s all. An ambulance is on the way, but it’ll take a few hours. We’ll get you and the others out of here as soon as we can.”

  “Zenas? His boys?” An undertow of blackness started to pull at him and he had to struggle to hear what Hodges answered.

  “He blew hell out of the one with the Thompson submachine gun. Then they come down a rope ladder when we broke in. Left you up there alone.” Hodges sniffed. “Now he’s down the canyon seeing about his people. He said to tell you thanks, but he still thinks they could have done it without any Gentile help. Which is a bunch of crap.”

  Wager could now squint through half-open eyes. Outside someone had set kerosene lanterns in a circle, and the soft light played over a ring of prisoners who were squatting facing away from each other. Around the circle deputies lounged, rifles on arms, and watched.

  “Which one’s Willis?”

  “That one—the one with the long beard.”

  He saw only the profile, a thick nose that jutted out over the mustache and gray-streaked beard, a forehead slanting back from bushy eyebrows. The man’s back was straight and he stared not at the ground like the others, but levelly and unblinking into the night. The blackness pulled at Wager, a swirling feeling, and gave him time for only that glimpse; but as he slid away, it seemed right that such a vision should be brief.

  His room at the county hospital was in the west corridor, and in the afternoons before the nurse came by to turn the blinds against the lowering sun Wager could look across the spray-dotted line of horizon toward a sky whose paleness marked the heat of the benchland. It still took a good deal of effort to overcome the drowsiness that seemed to be a constant state and that made it so difficult to think clearly.

  “It will be a few days, Detective Wager, before you feel normal. You’re lucky you didn’t become comatose. Or worse.” The doctor jotted something on the chart, nodded briskly, and went out, a nurse and an orderly in his wake.

  After another day or two, he could get up without reeling and could stay awake longer, and he even began to get out of bed and walk the few steps down to Tice’s room. He waited until after the midday visiting hours, because the sheriff’s wife sat for every minute of every visiting period and held the man’s thick fingers, so he and Wager couldn’t really talk. In fact, Wager suspected that Tice fell asleep on purpose when his wife’s solicitations grew too long.