‘Jesus!’
Jaime Lorenz scrambled backward, flailing away and falling over as he clawed and bucked and wriggled to get away from the alligator on whose back he had just almost stepped. The beast turned idly in its muddy pit and regarded him with one awful, baleful eye. It yawned, showing a terrible set of razor-sharp teeth, and Lorenz shuddered. That mouth could take off a man’s leg at the hip as clean as a wick-trimmer dousing a candle.
He moved away from the ’gator, shaking his head in numbed surprise. Who would have dreamed that madman had put alligators into the swamp? What other nightmares were there? Where there was one there were certain to be more, and it was no damned accident that they were here, any more than it was an accident that the fish in the river were the kind they were, or the jeering signs and the absence of waterholes were accidents. The whole valley was a carefully engineered death trap, designed to kill the unwary quarry as soon as it made its first mistake. If the human quarry avoided mistakes, it made no difference. Nix and his hunting crew killed it anyway. Which came first was only a question of how long it took.
He looked at his torn hands and nodded grimly.
He was damned if he was going to sit around and wait for Hercules Nix to come and get him. Given that decision, the next problem was what he could do to make it more difficult. He decided it was time to stop running and start fighting and the first thing he needed to do that was to make something to fight with. Hercules Nix and his killer crew might be going to kill him, but he was sure as hell going to hurt them while they were doing it. He looked at his hands again and saw that they were trembling slightly. Yes, he thought. The first one will probably have to be with the hands. After that—we’ll see. He sat at the foot of the huge live oak and remembered his favorite line from Cervantes.
‘Well, now,’ he said to himself. ‘There’s a remedy for everything except death.’
Then he got up and went to meet the killers.
Chapter Four
One hundred days to the day of Jaime Lorenz’s death in Nix’s valley—although there was no way he could have known of the macabre anniversary—Frank Angel eased on foot through the high peaks of the empty mountains east of the Valley of Death. Autumn was already in the air, and there had been snow higher up, but at this level it was as hot as the hinges of the gateway to Hell. The sun beat down vertically on the faceless rocks of the high sierra, piling heat into them which they bounced right back into the face and body of the lone figure wending its way through the broken pass. Sweating under the heavy backpack and the exertion in this rarefied air, Angel moved doggedly on.
He had been trying to find a way through the mountains for four days now. There was always a way through, but first you had to find it. Sometimes you could spend more time backtracking out of blind canyons than you did moving forward, but sooner or later, inevitably, a determined man could and would find the defile that climbed up to the higher peaks and then slid alongside them and down to the other side. Angel was determined enough, and patient enough. Even though, in the thin mountain air, it was hard work just breathing, he kept plodding on, exploring, probing the mountain’s defenses, retreating when his path was finally barred, thinking it through and then trying another way. He was going to find a way into the Valley of Death, because whatever it contained had killed Jaime Lorenz, and Jaime Lorenz came from an elite corps of very hard-to-kill men. Which also meant that reconnaissance was necessary for survival as well as reckoning.
They knew Lorenz was dead after sixty days.
They didn’t need any message, any notification, nor was there any. Indeed, it was the very absence of any word that confirmed the fact that Lorenz was dead. All of the department’s investigators had two cutoffs, no more. No matter where you were, whatever you were engaged upon, you reported in as often as possible, but in none but the most extreme cases did you let the period between contacts exceed forty days. In extreme cases, you could extend it to sixty, but no longer. If you did not make contact in sixty days it was presumed—usually correctly—that you were dead. Whereupon appropriate steps would be taken in Washington.
The Attorney-General felt very strongly about having any of his men killed. Very strongly indeed. He took it as a personal affront to himself, as well as a slap in the face for the government he served. In fact, it was said that he felt so strongly about the killing of Lorenz that steam had been observed coming out of his nostrils. It wasn’t true—not quite—but it made the point well. The Attorney-General made it plain that he wanted whoever had killed Lorenz, and he wanted him so badly that he could taste it in his whiskey. He had spent a very long time getting Presidential approval for his special force of thinking killing-machines, even longer finding the right men to train them. He was proud of his investigators: they were a product of a training course that weeded out any but the best, mentally and physically. The men who became Special Investigators for the Department of Justice were not only fully versed in the intricacies of federal and territorial law, but highly skilled practitioners of the martial arts. Physically tireless, matchless riders, superbly trained in the uses of all weapons, they were damned hard men to kill.
Which meant that Jaime Lorenz’s killers were not to be taken on lightly. But taken on they most certainly were to be, and when the Attorney-General sent for Frank Angel, their conversation was not far short of perfunctory. Angel knew what the Old Man wanted, and the Attorney-General knew that Angel would do it. Or die trying to. They discussed what had to be discussed, and Angel rose to leave.
‘Don’t take any chances, Frank,’ the Attorney-General had said as they shook hands. They always shook hands. Neither knew why, but they always did. Angel already had his grip outside the Attorney-General’s office, a hack waiting at the door of the building. He would take the train up to New York, and catch a steamer from there to Galveston. As he told the Attorney-General, he wanted to come up on Nix gradual-like. Which was when the older man proffered his advice.
‘You know me,’ Angel grinned. ‘When did I ever take unnecessary chances?’
‘Get the hell out of here,’ the Attorney-General grinned, ‘before I have Amabel come in and make up a list!’
Amabel Rowe was the Attorney-General’s personal private secretary, and if there had been any message in her usually merry blue eyes as she told him goodbye, Angel hadn’t been able to read it. He wondered what she was doing right now, and then grinned at the thought that she was probably sitting in her office, in Washington, wondering what he was doing. He sent her a telepathic message across the miles between. What I’m doing is sweating, he told her.
Fall is a treacherous time in the Sierras. The nights can freeze you, while during the day the sun will fry off your skin. You have to wear clothes that will at least keep you warm at night, yet not leech the moisture out of you while you are on the move in daylight. Right now, Angel’s woolen shirt and pants clung to him as if he had been hosed down, and the chill of the cool breeze, when it came around the shoulder of the mountain, was like a draft of clear cold water. He picked up his pace, for that slight movement of air could only mean one thing: he had found the way through the mountains. In a short while, he found himself on a rocky ledge looking down into a long valley already filling with the purple shadows of the afternoon. On its far side, the Burro Mountains tumbled along the horizon from the south on his left to the north on his right. Off on the edge of the northern fall of the valley he could see a line of trees, dark greens and browns contrasting with the dun flatness of the scrubland below. Shading his eyes with his hands, he thought he caught sight of a smoke smudge. He closed his eyes and opened them again, and this time he realized that what he could see was the hacienda that Davis had told him about. He could not make out any detail at this distance, but he didn’t really need to. He knew the layout of the house, and to a lesser extent the valley, as though he had a map in front of him.
He’d found Davis in Galveston.
Welsh Al Davis, one-timer master builder, down and ou
t and snoring like a pig in a Houston Street fleabag, just where they’d said he’d be. They’d also said that Al was a hopeless drunk, as dependent on the bottle as a babe on its mother’s milk. The story—which Angel pieced together from two dozen men, a bit at a time—was that Welsh Al had gone down on the border someplace, building a hacienda for some got-rocks rancher. He’d come back with more money than Croesus, and with whatever he’d formerly been using for a backbone quite obviously removed. Welsh Al had a good reputation and a good business before he went down Mexico way, but he came back like a jigsaw with some of the pieces missing. His friends rallied around, tried to help out, but Al would have none of it. In short order he drank his way through his share of the business, his frame house on A Avenue in Galveston, his government bonds, his savings, and finally his loving and much put-upon wife. She ran off with a drummer when Al was so far over the hill that nothing could help him. Whatever it was he was trying to drown, folks said, there sure as hell didn’t seem to be enough whiskey in Texas to do the job. Or maybe, as one wit drily remarked, the damned ghost could swim.
By the time Angel got to him, Welsh Al was seeing little green things on the walls, and he would have sold the veritable body of Christ for the price of a drink. Nevertheless, he was terrified of telling Angel the answers to his questions. He laid a trembling hand on Angel’s forearm and begged him to keep secret the source of his information, begged him never to reveal how he had learned any of the secrets of Hercules Nix. Angel had gravely given his promise, knowing it wasn’t worth a tinker’s curse. As soon as Welsh Al got his belly full of tonsil-paint again, he himself would be telling anyone who’d listen. Angel was not inclined to believe that Hercules Nix had any spies in Galveston, although it mattered less than nothing if he had. He had never used his own name. All Nix would ever learn, if anyone asked, was that someone was poking about, someone talked to Welsh Al. There was no way for Angel to know that within two hours of his leaving Galveston, Welsh Al was found in an alley off Skid Row with his throat cut, or that Hercules Nix knew full well who it was that was asking questions about his hidden valley.
So Angel stood now on the crest of the mountain and gazed with reflective eyes at Hercules Nix’s kingdom. He knew all about the hacienda with its fort-like stockade, its interior defenses. He knew about the chromium steel bars on the windows, made of the same metal that James Eads had specified in the building of the bridge across the Mississippi at St. Louis. He knew about the two-inch-thick doors of solid oak lined with the same metal, and the reinforced concrete walls—faced with soft local stone to mask their harshness—built to the specifications of the German, Wayss. He knew the rough general topography of the valley in which the hacienda lay. He would have been appalled if he had known how little he actually knew but even so, it was a damned sight more than Jaime Lorenz had known. Had Lorenz found the place, or had they taken him and brought him in here? He might find that out soon.
The land below looked dry, burned, barren. He could see no trails. He headed downhill, picking up speed as the heat went out of the sun and the slope ahead of him steepened. Another hour found him on the valley floor, moving northward along the wall of the San Miguels, heading for a long jutting spur of rock that pointed westward toward the sheltering trees he could see on the horizon. He planned to make a base among them, foraying outward to explore the valley, familiarize himself with Nix’s domain. From a distance he looked like some small creature, antlike on the massive scale of the mesas.
In the lookout platform on the northeastern corner of the stockade, Hercules Nix lowered the powerful telescope through which he had been watching Angel’s progress.
‘Looks like he’s heading for the forest,’ Elliott remarked.
‘Yes,’ Nix mused. ‘Are any of The People there?’
‘Mostly women an’ kids,’ Elliott replied. ‘The men are off raidin’. As usual.’
‘Good,’ Nix smiled. ‘We don’t want anything—untoward—happening to our Angel. Not just yet, anyway.’
‘How long you aimin’ to let him run round out thar, anyways?’ Elliott asked. He was puzzled by Nix’s curiously untypical reaction to the appearance of this intruder who had not only found a new way into the valley, but was being given its freedom. Normally, no matter where or how the perimeter had been breached, the appearance of any white or Mexican in the valley was the signal for Elliott and his men to be ordered out. They were not permitted to return to the stockade until the interloper had been run down and captured.
‘As long as he wishes,’ Nix purred.
‘I don’t get it.’
‘The fact that you don’t “get it”, as you so elegantly put it, is a matter of supreme unimportance,’ Nix told his lieutenant. ‘The only important thing is that our little fly eventually finds his way into the spider’s parlor.’
‘You goin’ to sit back, an’ let him come on in here?’
‘Of course.’
‘You don’t want us to go out an’ get him?’
‘No need. He’ll walk right in.’
‘How the hell can you be so sure of that?’ Elliott wanted to know.
‘Ah,’ said Nix, with a smile like Death watching a knife fight. ‘I happen to know the fly.’
And with that enigmatic explanation Elliott had to be content.
Chapter Five
It was a long time since Angel had lived off the land like an Indian, but it had been part of his training and it came back to him fast. Long ago, when they first brought him East to join the department, he had been taken first by train and then on horseback somewhere deep into a swampy wilderness far from any trace of civilization. They blindfolded him and plugged his ears before taking him out into the middle of the wilderness and turning him loose. He had no idea where he was. They gave him nothing, no food, water, or weapon. Somewhere in the wilderness, they said, was a ‘safe’ house. He had to find it. He had a one-hour start over the three men who would try to find and kill him. No other instructions, no other rules. Survive, they said.
He was out for four days.
When he finally found the ‘safe’ house, he was eighteen pounds lighter, and as gaunt as a man who’d been a year in Andersonville. In the process of eluding his pursuers and coming safe home, he had learned many things. How to find water where none seemed to exist, or strain the worst filth out of brackish puddles through the cotton of his tattered shirt. How to trap, skin, and cook small wild things. Which berries were edible, and which would kill you (the birds taught you that). How to make a lair and conceal it as well if not better than any other hunted thing. All this he learned as he learned what they wanted him to know: how to survive. By the third day in the valley, had Nix sent his men out after Angel, he would have been hard to find and take. But Hercules Nix had no need to pursue Angel. He knew his quarry would come to him, and on the fourth night, Angel did.
He had learned a great deal about the valley by this time. Keeping to cover, moving little during the day, using twilight and night for exploration, the sleeping dawn for reconnaissance, he had spied unseen on the Comanche village upon which he had almost stumbled that first night. He assessed its probable strength by the number of teepees, women, and horses. Unseen in the night he watched the listless guards at the crude barrack half-hidden in the fringe of the thornbreaks at the northern end of the valley. He did not need to explore the breaks themselves, for Welsh Al had told him that they stretched over a mile, briars and thorn trees twining around the feet of logwoods and stunted oil palms and forming a barrier of formidable density. God alone knew what lived in there, Davis had shuddered, what reptiles and other horrors.
Angel had skirted the perimeter of the swampy lake, following its outline and testing its shore here and there. He had noted some of its denizens, moved to wonder why Hercules Nix had imported such exotic creatures, and to ponder over the madness that must thread through the man’s brain. He had very soon learned to avoid the river and its savage population waiting for the unwary one who would u
se the dummy fords along its length. Only a sharp-eyed tracker, used to noting the minute marks that might enable him to follow where others could not, would have noticed that on the opposite bank of the river there were no tracks of any kind, no marks, no scarred rocks, nothing.
Now, wary of everything he could not see, Angel made his way along the bank of the man-made river, using the advancing twilight to shield his movements from the guards on the stockade. By the time he had made his way to within striking distance of the hacienda the valley was as black as the inside of Satan’s ovens. Through the tiny gaps between the logs of the fence Angel could see the lights of the house. Above him, the guards exchanged hoarse commonplaces. Just above the stockade on the northern perimeter a meshed gate such as is used in trout farms and fisheries was set between the river banks, and when he saw it Angel allowed himself a sour grin. Hercules Nix had peopled his wilderness with savage creatures, but he wanted none of them to infiltrate his personal domain. Inside the stockade, Angel knew, lay the man-made pool and the crucial well that supplied all the valley’s water. He could hear the soft thump of its machinery as he eased around the edge of the stockade and wormed close to the western wall.
He had long since discarded his mountain clothing. Now he wore a black woolen shirt, black leather pants, soft black moccasins. He worked up a dirty daub with earth and spittle, striping his face with it so he would be harder to see. Then he checked his weapons and eased forward and down into the deep black shadows below the base of the stockade wall. The western side was by far the longest, its guard platforms further apart. From the map that Welsh Al had drawn, Angel had memorized the ground plan inside it.
Stop Angel! (A Frank Angel Western Book 8) Page 3
