Nix was a gunrunner and a killer. He turned Angel’s sidekick loose—naked and unharmed—into the Valley of Death. Nix promised to come after him some time.
Angel’s mission was to find his friend’s killer—but history repeated itself, and it was Angel who was alone in the desert. The hunter became the hunted.
Chapter One
Another mile.
Ernie Hecatt raised a hand to shield his eyes while he squinted up at the sun, cursing its blinding light. Two, maybe three o’clock, he thought. Steadily and monotonously and without any real awareness of what he was saying—or indeed, the fact that he was saying anything—Hecatt cursed the relentless sun, the pitiless desert, his blistered feet, and his burned and wounded body. The effort of doing so was an extra his depleted frame could not afford, and he slumped down on the burning sand, crying—without tears, for his body was already well into the terminal stages of dehydration—in futile rage at his own weakness. Then he thought of the man who had reduced him to this, and as the name formed in his mind, he spat it out as a curse.
‘Angel!’ he coughed, getting to his knees. ‘Frank Angel!’ he croaked, staggering upright. As if the very movement itself released some further strength from a reservoir his body did not know it possessed, Hecatt stumbled forward. Using everything that he had left, he headed for the white scar on the land which he could vaguely see up ahead. His vision was already blurring, and he knew he had no margin for error left. What he saw might be an arroyo. It might be a swathe of gypsum sand. It might be nothing more than an outcropping of mica. Or it might—just might—be a trail.
With shaking legs and reaching hands, Ernie Hecatt stumbled toward his goal. A mumble came from his frayed lips. It would have been meaningless to anyone listening, had there been anyone in the empty wilderness. But there were only the patient buzzards high in the brazen sky above the lurching figure. To Hecatt, however, the mumble was words, and the words were a goad that spurred him on. It was the name that he had spoken before.
‘Frank Angel!’ he muttered. ‘God damn your soul to Hell!’
Two years earlier, Ernie Hecatt had been one of the richest men in the state of Texas. Although he rarely left it, he was known throughout the United States. Big-time politicians and moneymen found it well worthwhile to journey to his palatially sprawling ranch thirty miles outside Uvalde, or to the oak-paneled offices on Texas Street in town. It was said that Hecatt had no more respect for the law than he had to have, and that wasn’t a hell of a lot. But nobody had ever caught him with his pants down. He was known as ‘the man with the Midas touch.’ He knew everybody who was anybody, or seemed to, and what was even more awesome was that he also seemed to know exactly what they were up to, what deals they were into, how thinly their resources were spread, and who was in what with whom. He could break his rivals and he sometimes did, not only financially but physically. He was a liar and a thief and everyone knew it, but nobody had ever told him so, any more than anyone had ever said out loud that Hecatt made a lot of his money ferrying repeating rifles to the Comancheros, who in turn sold them to the marauding Comanch’ and Kiowa. Nobody talked up because Ernie Hecatt was also a cold-blooded killer, one of the mean-streak kind who liked to gut-shoot his victims. They said he was faster with a gun than even Wes Hardin. That might have been an exaggeration, of course, because it was doubtful if the man ever walked the face of the earth who could have outdrawn John Wesley Hardin in his prime. But if it was an exaggeration, it wasn’t much of one, and certainly nothing like enough of one to make many men want to put it to the test. Ernie Hecatt had killed upward of half a dozen who’d tried. He even paid the cost of burying them decently. It was one of his vanities. He said the very least you could do for a man you’d sent to the Pearly Gates was to make sure someone dug a hole and put him in it. Besides, Hecatt would say with the grin of a hunting wolf, corpses tend to lower the tone of a town if they’re left lying around. Macabre, maybe. But damned effective, as Hecatt knew.
There were three things he didn’t let anyone mess with—his possessions, his reputation, and his money. Until Frank Angel turned up in Uvalde nobody had ever dared, but by the time Angel was through—and it didn’t take him long—Hecatt was busted wide open. Angel found weak points nobody had ever dreamed could be there and leaned on them. He not only challenged Hecatt’s domination of the area, he destroyed it. He exposed the trick that held Hecatt’s finances together and wiped him out, everything. Angel faced Hecatt down on every front because he knew that at heart Hecatt was a fraud. He out-thought him, out-maneuvered him, out-foxed him, and finally exposed him. Tempted him into a fool’s play, and when Hecatt fell for it, Angel busted him mercilessly. With a United States Marshal and a posse along as witnesses, Angel arrested Hecatt while Hecatt was personally handing over cases of Winchester ’66 repeaters to Leon Alevantal, the Comanchero whose business was trading arms and armor with the Comanch’. With no place left on earth to go, Hecatt then did the dumbest thing he’d ever done: he went for the gun at his side. In front of all of them: Alevantal and his brigands, the U.S. Marshal, all of them. And Angel let him.
Angel let him get good and started before he even moved his hand. Hecatt had had bad dreams about that moment ever since. He played and replayed it over and over in his mind, tasting the same sick fear as he remembered Angel’s hand blurring faster than he could see, coming up so fast with the gun that he, Hecatt, had simply frozen with fear, his own Remington still only halfway out of the holster. Pride had told him to pull the gun anyway, and die with his head up. The green thing in his belly had made him let go of the revolver butt as if it were red-hot.
From that moment he was through and he knew it. He put up no further fight, and they took him in. The trial, the weeks of humiliation as the law stripped him one by one of all his possessions dissolved into a half-remembered blur. They sentenced him to ten year’s hard labor at Huntsville. It was equivalent to a death sentence and everyone knew it: there was a shocked silence even in that hardened courtroom. Hecatt had gone like a lamb, only half hearing the jeers of men who not six weeks earlier would have curried his slightest favor, indulged his pettiest whim. They took him in a wagon to Huntsville, and there, rolling about in that gritty wagon-bed beneath the basilisk stare of the shotgun-armed deputy-marshals, he had vowed to have his vengeance, to repay every slight, every jeer, every insult tenfold. And most of all, to very slowly kill Frank Angel, Special Investigator of the Department of Justice, the man who had brought him down.
Hecatt was a model prisoner during his first year, and eventually, in keeping with the then-current practice, he was hired out as one of a gang of prisoners who worked as laborers for a subcontractor who was building a stretch of road between Galveston and Nacogdoches. One day, Hecatt’s pickaxe smashed in the skull of the dozing guard nearest him, and he had the fallen rifle before it hit the dirt. He dropped the second guard before that man truly realized what had happened, and then he lit out. He shot the leg irons off and headed for open country, making the long march back.
If they came after him, he never heard them. He was hardened by his time in prison and powered by revenge. He lived off the land like a hunting wolf, working across the wide flat emptiness of Edwards Plateau toward his own querencia, and making good time until he ran into the trio of Comanch’. They ran off his horse and kept him pinned down in a buffalo wallow until most of his ammunition and all of his water was gone. In the course of that long, seemingly endless day and night, he killed one of the Indians and wounded another, which in any circumstances except Ernie Hecatt’s might have been fair exchange for the hole in his left arm the third Comanche had put there wi
th his smoothbore. When the brassy blue Texas morning pushed back the shadows, the Indians were gone, leaving Hecatt alone in the emptiness, without a horse or water, his left arm shot to pieces just above the wrist, and no place to head except out. He had been walking ever since.
Now he saw that the whitish-gray scar he had picked out was indeed a track, and he gave a croak of relief as he stumbled out of the clawing chaparral into the open. It was just a rutted wagon track, but in this wide wilderness it was like a huge sign advertising that help was not far away. If there was a track it led somewhere, came from somewhere else. It could be ten, twenty, thirty miles, but at either end there would be people, water, surcease from the punishment of the merciless sun.
He stood teetering on the edge of the track. Which way? Right, left, which would bring him soonest to deliverance?
Ernie Hecatt decided to go left, and started staggering along the rutted road. He managed maybe a mile, looking for all the world like some weird animated scarecrow that occasionally laughed, weakly and insanely. But he had been on borrowed time before he even saw the trail, and now his legs would carry him no further. He sagged, tottered, and fell again. The world spun in front of his eyes, and a red curtain misted out his foreshortened view of the clump of prickly pear a foot from his face. This time not even the name of the man he hated most in all the world, the man he had sworn to kill, could animate his wasted frame.
‘Angel!’ he croaked once.
Then the curtain in front of his eyes turned from red to black. He was still lying there, nine-tenths dead, when Victoria Stacey found him four hours later.
Chapter Two
‘No!’ said the Attorney-General. ‘And that’s final.’
‘Give me one good reason.’ Angel said.
‘I don’t have to,’ his boss replied with a faint smile. ‘That’s one of the nicer things about being Attorney-General.’
‘All right,’ Angel said. ‘You don’t have to. But give me one anyway. That’s the least you could do.’
‘You’d be somewhat surprised at what the least I can do actually is,’ the older man grinned. He was enjoying this tennis match of words, and his normally austere face was set in an untypically smiling expression this fall day. Outside his windows the drizzle fell relentlessly down upon the muddy mess of Pennsylvania Avenue. Whatever the grand vision of Pierre Charles L’Enfant, architect of the capital city, had been, Angel thought sourly, it had certainly not been the gray and uninspiring view that stretched away toward Union Station from the rickety old building that housed the Department of Justice.
‘However,’ the Attorney-General said, reaching for a cigar, ‘I’ll give you a reason. You’re still not fit.’
‘I’m fine!’ Angel expostulated, as the man behind the big desk lit the long black cigar and puffed huge clouds of smoke upward, patiently relishing the pungent odor. It smelled as if someone was burning a Sumo wrestler’s loincloth, but Angel knew better than to voice his opinion of the Old Man’s cigars. The Attorney-General thought that they were indubitably the best that money could buy—a little strong for some palates, perhaps—and did not know (or perhaps pretended not to know) that there was a mock reward poster stuck on a wall in the basement outside the Armory which offered a thousand dollars to the man who could find the Attorney-General’s cigar maker—and stop him from making any more.
‘Of course,’ the Attorney-General said. ‘That’s why you’re using a stick.’
‘Hell,’ Angel argued. ‘I’m using a stick because your damned quack downstairs insisted I use it.’
‘Hmm,’ said the older man, not really listening.
‘Don’t confuse me with the facts,’ Angel said. ‘I’ve already made up my mind.’
The Attorney-General looked up, as though Angel’s sardonic remark had disturbed a train of thought. Then he nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Lorenz goes.’
Angel shrugged. He knew better than to argue. When the Old Man had made a decision, further discussion was academic. He couldn’t argue with the Old Man’s choice, either. Jaime Lorenz was a good man, one of the best in the department. He also had the advantage of being Spanish-American, which would be a useful plus in certain parts of Texas.
‘When does he leave?’ he asked.
‘Tomorrow.’
‘You mind if I take another look at that report?’
The Attorney-General pushed a slim manila folder across his desk toward Angel. He smiled to himself as he did so. His top Special Investigator might be a fool for trouble, but he was without question the best man in the department.
Even though he was still limping from the wound that the fugitive Magruder had put into his thigh a second before Angel had broken the arm holding the rifle, he was already itching to be back in the field. The Attorney-General knew that prolonged sojourns in the capital held few attractions for the tall man sitting opposite him. He had a fairly shrewd idea what those attractions were, as well, but he didn’t air them. The relationship between his personal private secretary, Amabel Rowe, and his Chief Special Investigator was their own concern—mostly. His own damned trouble was that he liked having Angel around. It was good to talk over your problems with a man you knew you could utterly trust, a man who’d back you all the way down the line. There weren’t many like that in Washington. Damned few anyplace else, come to that, he thought.
Frank Angel read once again the two-page handwritten report of Special Investigator Harker Nettery, who had heard something he felt worth transmitting to his chief in Washington. It might be nothing: a rumor amplified in the telling along the owlhoot trail. On the other hand, it might be true, in which case the department should know and would act. The gist of the report was that there was a place on the Texas-Mexico border, somewhere around the Quemado area, where an endless supply of repeating rifles and other guns was available to bandits, Indian raiders, or Comancheros seeking to do business with both. The strange thing, Nettery said, was that no one would talk about exactly where it was, or who owned it. The Mexicans, he reported, crossed themselves when they spoke of the place, which they said was the home of the Devil himself. They called it Valle del Muerto, the Valley of Death. They said many of their people had died building it. Those who had survived would not speak of it. Rumor had it that anyone who started poking around asking about the place was liable to wind up dead, as was anyone who went searching for it or trying to penetrate the secrets of its owner. Nettery had come up with a name: the Valley of Death was owned by someone called Nix. Nettery added diffidently that he realized it was all hearsay and speculation, two commodities not in high regard at the department. He would have refrained from reporting had it not been for the case of a young Englishman named John Henry Tyrrell. Tyrrell had come to Texas from England, bringing enough money to buy land and stock for a ranch near the town of Madura. He was also planning to build a general store and open a bank there. He made a buying trip to St. Louis and while he was away, Comanches attacked his embryonic ranch, slaughtered his stock, and cut three of the men he’d hired to ribbons. A fourth survived long enough to tell Tyrrell that the Indians had been using Winchester repeaters of the very latest type, and Tyrrell got damned good and mad. He was neither blind nor a fool. Indians could only get that kind of firepower from white men, and Tyrrell swore that as God was his judge he would find the man who was supplying them. He had heard about Nix, and his storied valley, and he went out looking for both. He made no secret of his scorn for such childishness, or for those who feared it; when he left Madura—despite the advice of wiser heads who suggested caution, and the wisdom of waiting until the U.S. Marshal could be called into the case—everyone in the town knew that he was planning to find Nix, stick the barrel of a six-gun up Nix’s nose, and tell him that if he didn’t quit trading with the Comanch’, he, John Henry Tyrrell, was going to spend every penny of his not-inconsiderable family fortune and every ounce of his undeniable energy to ensure that Nix went to prison for the rest of his damned, unnatural life.
Nobody ever saw him again.
The Tyrrell family in England, which was both rich and landed, chose not to accept the verdict of a dirty little town no more than a wide spot in the road that John Henry Tyrrell had bitten off considerably more than he could digest. They wrote to Her Majesty Queen Victoria’s Foreign Secretary, the Right Honorable William Ewart Gladstone, requesting him to stir his Liverpudlian stumps. A request from such as the Tyrrells was as a command from elsewhere, and Gladstone took immediate action, writing to his friend the Secretary of State in Washington. State, knowing a hot potato when it saw one, had passed Gladstone’s letter along to the Attorney-General like a shot. It married up neatly with Nettery’s diffident information, and that was why Jaime Lorenz was packing his bags right now with a ticket in his pocket for the train up to New York, the steamer to Albany, and the Union Pacific to St. Louis. After a brief investigative halt there, he’d head on down to Texas.
‘Funny name,’ Angel mused. ‘Nix.’
‘Dime-novel stuff,’ the Attorney-General snorted. ‘Playacting.’
‘Nix.’ Angel repeated, almost reflectively. ‘Nothing.’
If it was perhaps the dime-novel stuff the Attorney-General said it was, it was damned effective for all that. It was the kind of name that would strike fear into the hearts of simple Mexican peasants, the kind of name that brutish frontier hardcases would remember. Yet it was too striking. Men took an alias to hide their identity, not to flaunt it. A man used another name to lose pursuers, or conceal their tracks, not so that those who heard it would never forget it. He laid down the dossier with a sigh, because it had all the hallmarks of a damned interesting case. He’d have liked to handle it himself, but the Old Man had already vetoed that.
‘What have you got for me, Chief?’ he asked.
‘Ah,’ the Attorney-General said. ‘One of your old cases.’
‘Which one?’
Stop Angel! (A Frank Angel Western Book 8) Page 1
