‘Pretty soon, old Stacey asked me to look after his interest in the bank. Then they made me manager. Soon after that, I discovered that among the assets were half a million dollars’ worth of twenty-five-year government bonds. They were just sitting in the safe, waiting for the 1890s to roll around when they’d mature. Ready money. Nobody would dream of checking on them for years. It was a perfect opportunity and I took it. I sold them, taking a thirty percent discount on face value, and used the money to buy guns in St. Louis. Then I did some trading with the Comancheros. Within a year I had multiplied my original stake tenfold.’
‘So you put the money back, of course.’
‘Of course—not! I realized there was a fortune waiting to be made, and I went out and made it. I made direct contact with the customer, cut out the middleman. I used my money to make the necessary contacts, entertained royally. And all the while, I was making plans to build this place.’
‘Those deals you made,’ Angel interposed. ‘Where did you go to make them?’
‘I’m not sure, I recall several in New Orleans. A couple of times in Shreveport. Why do you ask?’
‘Abilene, Texas?’
‘It could be. Why?’
‘Indulge me,’ Angel said. ‘I’m just curious.’
Nix shrugged, and Angel grinned to himself. At least he had support for those sightings that had been reported to the department, which could be useful when he got back to Washington. If he ever did. He was some way from doing it right at the moment. He tuned in again to Nix’s monologue.
‘ … told Stacey I was thinking of setting up on my own, and wanted to look around for a ranch. The old fool was pleased. I told him I wanted to marry his daughter. He wasn’t too keen on that, but I managed to persuade him. I pointed out the fact of the missing bonds, and that all the transactions had been countersigned by him as a director of the bank. I said I’d blow the whistle on him if he didn’t do what I wanted. He was no trouble after that.’
‘And his daughter?’
‘I wanted her,’ Nix said, without expression. ‘And so I took her.’
There was a long, empty moment of silence. Nix puffed expansively on his cigar and then waved a regal arm.
‘And this is what I built. The Valley of Death, as they call it.’
‘Impressive,’ Angel said.
‘Indeed it is,’ his host smiled. ‘I wonder if you realize just how impressive?’
‘Tell me,’ Angel suggested.
‘I’ll tell you,’ Nix smiled, his expression as cold as the belly of a water moccasin. ‘I’ll tell you, for instance, that even if, in the farthest reaches of your imagination, you were to think you might escape the stockade, you would be blown to smithereens before you had covered thirty feet outside.’
‘How come?’
‘Simple enough. The perimeter outside the stockade is mined.’
‘But—’
‘You were going to point out that you walked through that perimeter and were not blown up?’ Nix chided. ‘Come, Angel. Use your intelligence.’
‘You knew I was coming, and so—’
‘I switched off the circuit.’
‘You switched … you just lost me again.’
‘I will explain,’ Nix said patiently. ‘The mines are buried explosive devices. Each is linked to the other by a series of copper-sheathed wires. Those wires can carry an electrical current, which can be switched on or off.’
‘Electricity? But how can you produce electricity out here?’
‘Batteries, Angel, batteries. Must I explain it in words of one syllable? I was led to believe you were an educated man, not a dolt. Electricity is not viable on any scale, everyone knows that. No means has yet been found to produce it. Nevertheless, I have followed carefully the experiments conducted by Gaston Plante in 1859 by which a means was manufactured to produce electrical current. It is called a lead-acid battery. Clumsy, and very expensive, but it works. I have the materials to make these batteries here, and they provide power which can be switched on or off at will. For special occasions, of course: I do not keep them on all the time. It is hardly necessary, anyway.’
‘Don’t they discharge anyway, whether you use them or not?’
‘Over a period of time they do go flat, true. It is a laborious and expensive business to replace the plates, but I have money, and I use it to buy what I want. Whatever that may be.’
There was a momentary silence before the big man spoke again.
‘Have you ever been in prison, Angel?’ he asked.
‘Once,’ Angel replied. ‘But not for long.’
‘Then you have no real conception of the reality,’ Nix said. ‘No idea of what it’s like. Have you?’
‘No.’
‘They degrade you, Angel. They depersonalize you. They make you a number, and then they throw you into the filth, the stink, to live and sleep and eat with animals! Animals! Nobody gives a damn whether you live or die. The guards bully and beat you, try to reduce you to a groveling beast. It is hell, Angel. Unadulterated hell. It cannot produce anything except a thirst for vengeance, retribution!’
‘Tell that to the people you robbed,’ Angel said. ‘See how they feel about it.’
‘Pah!’ Nix snorted. ‘If God hadn’t wanted them to be sheared, he wouldn’t have made them sheep!’
‘Twelve of those sheep finally put you into Huntsville, Nix,’ Angel said. ‘Never underestimate them!’
‘No!’ Nix hissed. ‘You put me there, Angel. You! Because of you, I spent a year in that hell on earth. And do you know, there wasn’t a day that I didn’t think of you, curse your name, vow to kill you because of what you’d done.’
‘Very dramatic,’ Angel said flatly. ‘And not a bit convincing. You’re just trying to justify yourself, Nix!’
Again, Hercules Nix released his breath in a long sigh, controlling his burning anger. ‘You may be partly right at that,’ he admitted. ‘Nevertheless, I have prepared for my revenge on you, and tomorrow, I will have it. Tomorrow, at dawn.’
‘Dawn?’ Angel said. ‘Listen, if I oversleep, you just start right in without me.’
Nix smiled. ‘I admire bravery,’ he said, ‘but you are merely cocky. That will not help you much when you are alone in the valley, naked and unarmed.’
‘Naked and unarmed, is it?’ Angel said. ‘I didn’t know about that. But it figured you wouldn’t give a man half a chance if you could avoid doing it.’
‘You will have your half-chance, Angel. It will be twenty-four hours before we come after you. In that time you can prepare yourself any way you wish, go in any direction, hide, run, stand and give battle. Anything you like. Your man Lorenz had no weapons, but he killed four men before he was taken.’
‘Good,’ Angel said. ‘Pity he didn’t get you, Hecatt.’
His captor smiled an Olympian smile. ‘Understand, Angel, I will not be angered, even by your using my—other name. Tomorrow, you will provide a long-awaited diversion, but that is all. You are not important in the ultimate scheme of things. This valley is the important thing. It is already fast becoming the biggest center in the area west of the Mississippi for the sale of arms, and it will become bigger, bigger. With that growth will come power. They will all come to me—Comanche, Apache, Kiowa, Lipan, all of them. And the others, the renegades and the revolutionaries from below the border!’
‘You don’t care that the guns you sell kill innocent women and children? You don’t lose any sleep thinking of that?’
Nix laughed aloud, a short, sharp bark of sound. ‘Are you mad?’ he snapped. ‘I care for nobody, nobody but myself. I learned that in the sink of hell you sent me to, Angel. I learned that only the strong survive, only the rich have power, only the strong and powerful can do as they please. As I can, now. In a few years I will own part of Texas. A few more and Senators, Congressmen will seek my advice, do my bidding as they used to! I will rule this land!’
There was a fanatic glow in the deepest eyes, and Angel knew that in
thought if not in person, his captor was some other place, not here in the room with him. He sought to pop the bubble of Nix’s vainglory.
‘You’re forgetting something,’ he said harshly.
‘What? What’s that?’
‘The Department of Justice,’ Angel said. ‘They know where I am. They know about you. If I go missing, there’ll be another man, and another, and another, and in the end they’ll get you and hang you!’
‘If it pleases you to try to bluff me, Angel, go ahead,’ Nix smiled. ‘However, I happen to know that you made no report to Washington. They do not know where you are. And even if they did, what could they do? Let them send another man. Let them send fifty, a hundred, and they will never enter my valley unless I wish it. My ally Koh-eet-senko will see to that!’
‘Koh-eet-senko? Is that the Comanche leader?’
‘Correct. I notice that you do not make the common error of using the word “chief” as so many people do.’
‘I know something about Indians,’ Angel said. ‘I know something about your friend Koh-eet-senko, too. He’s a bloodthirsty butcher, him and all his tribe. What do they call themselves—?’
‘The Timber People,’ Nix said. ‘You are right. It is they your Department of Justice would face if they attempted to try to take me here. I’d be extremely surprised if any of them survived to repeat the experiment. My allies are, as you know, extremely well-armed.’
‘I know it,’ Angel said. ‘How come you’re so friendly with them?’
‘It was not a problem,’ Nix said. ‘I took the trouble to study their history, their culture, their background. Koh-eet-senko was extremely impressed to meet a white man who could talk with him on almost equal terms about the history of his people.’
‘I imagine he was more impressed to meet a white man who would sell them repeating rifles,’ Angel said drily.
‘There was that,’ Nix smiled. ‘But my study of these savages was psychological as well as historical. I was able to predict their reactions to certain sets of circumstances. They are basically very simple, very child-like.’
‘Sure,’ Angel said. ‘Tell it to Matilda Lockhart.’
‘Who?’
‘Matilda Lockhart. Comanches carried her off in 1838. They took her to their camp and gave her to the men. All the men in the tribe, Nix. When the men were through with her, the women got started. They burned her all over her body with blazing sticks, burned her nose right off her face. They made her a slave. They punched her and kicked her black and blue if she so much as whimpered. She was exactly sixteen years of age.’
‘Pah!’ Nix said, scornfully. ‘You can’t influence my thinking with these horror stories, Angel. The Comanches believe women are just chattel. They treat them accordingly. Anyway, I expect that story was wildly exaggerated. You know how these frontier crones gussy up atrocity stories. That’s how they get their jollies.’
‘You really don’t give a damn, do you?’ Angel said.
‘No, I don’t. I told you already, Angel. I only care about myself. Nothing else matters. I live for the moment from day to day. Right now, you are the top priority in my life. Tomorrow, or whenever we finish our little—game—something else will take your place.’
‘Like your barbarian friends and the guns you sell them.’
‘My barbarian friends, as you call them, have a long and fascinating history. Do you know anything about them?’
‘Yes,’ Angel said. ‘I do.’
‘Then tell me how they got their name.’
‘It was misspelled by some Spaniard who was the first to see any of them. The Comanch’ are really Rocky Mountain Shoshone. They were known to the Utes as Koh-mats, meaning “those who are against us”, or “enemies”. It was the Ute word that the Spaniards misspelled as Komantcid, and which the whites bastardized to Comanche. They are really descendants of the Nermernuh, the Shoshone.’
‘I see you do know about them,’ Nix said. ‘You are an unusual man, Angel.’
‘I’ll bet you tell all the boys that,’ Angel said. ‘You’re a phony, Nix!’
‘Phony, my dear fellow? What can you possibly mean?’
‘All this clap-trap about having studied the Comanch’, the honorable past. You’re justifying yourself selling them guns that they kill white settlers with. You may be rich, but it’s blood money you’re rich on.’
‘It spends the same as the other kind,’ Nix said, getting up out of his chair. ‘Come, we are keeping the lady waiting.’
Angel followed him out to the patio. It was cool now, and Victoria Nix wore a lacy, woolen shawl around her formerly bare shoulders.
‘You’ll take coffee, Mister Angel?’ she asked. Her voice had the soft lilt of the South in it, and Angel nodded, smiling. Victoria Nix was slim and quite tall. Her bare arms were slender and faintly golden from the sun. The rich glow of her auburn hair made her wide green eyes seem darker, more somber. Once again, Angel was struck by her sheer beauty, and the bizarreness of her marriage to Hercules Nix. He watched as she nervously checked to see if her husband approved of her speaking, the way her eyes dropped when he smiled blandly at her.
‘You’ll have a brandy, Angel?’ Nix asked.
‘I believe I will,’ Angel said, and when Nix handed him a brandy glass with a generous measure of the golden liquid in it, he discovered that it was French brandy, and very old. ‘You do yourself proud,’ he remarked. ‘Isn’t it hard to freight all these things in?’
‘Not hard,’ Nix said. ‘Expensive, certainly. But only that. If you are prepared to pay for it, everything is obtainable. Without exception.’
Angel wondered whether he had imagined Victoria Nix’s shudder as her husband spoke these words. He certainly did not imagine the way she smiled at him automatically, anxiously, as he put his arm around her shoulders and hugged her once, in a proprietary fashion, or the way she immediately disengaged herself from his grasp. She sat in a chair immediately opposite Angel and stared into her coffee cup. After an awkward silence, she looked up.
‘Will … will you be staying long, Mister Angel?’ she asked.
Nix intervened before Angel could open his mouth. ‘Our guest can only stay the one night, my dear,’ he said. ‘He has to leave at daybreak.’
‘If I’d known the company would be this pleasant, I’d have planned a longer stay,’ Angel said. ‘But I’m afraid I, ah, have no choice.’
It seemed to him that she understood what he was saying, although he had been convinced she had no idea of her husband’s plans for him on the morrow. Just what was causing the deep, swimming anxiety in her lovely eyes he could not fathom. Whatever it was, it demonstrated that there was something very, very wrong in the relationship between Hercules Nix and his wife. She was in mortal fear of his very touch.
Now Nix put down his coffee cup with a decisive movement, and rose to his feet, stretching his arms wide and yawning ostentatiously. As if on signal, Victoria Nix got up, putting down her coffee unfinished. Angel stood up, but Nix waved him back to his chair.
‘No, no, my dear fellow,’ he said. ‘Finish your coffee. Victoria and I always turn in early. You stay here, enjoy the evening. Yat Sen will bring you another brandy.’ He offered his arm to his wife, who took it gingerly. ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’ Nix said, and smiled like a cobra.
They walked toward the door, and as they reached it, Angel heard Victoria Nix exclaim impatiently. A moment-later, she came hurrying back.
‘My wrap,’ she said loudly. ‘I left it on the chair! Goodnight again, Mister Angel!’
He was about to echo her words when she lowered her voice and bent close to him. She smelled of some fragrant perfume.
‘For God’s sake!’ she hissed in an agonized whisper. ‘For God’s sake, Mister Angel—get me out of this place!’
Chapter Seven
They turned him loose at dawn.
It was a strange, almost ghostly scene. Hercules Nix stood like some graven idol, his men bayed behind him in a half-circle, wa
tching with almost sardonic amusement as one of them ripped off Angel’s clothes. When they were done, he nodded.
‘You have a whole day, Angel,’ he said. ‘Don’t waste it.’
No trace of his urbanity of the previous night remained. He was cold and remorseless, and Angel clamped his teeth together so that the chill of the dawn wouldn’t make him shiver. The huge wooden gates were thrown back. On the gullied sides of the burros, light touched the rocks enough to make some of the darker shadows contrast with others.
‘Git movin’, Angel,’ Des Elliott said with a leering grin. ‘Flap your wings!’
Angel shook his head ruefully, and spat into the dirt at Nix’s feet.
‘You’re as crazy as a bug in a box,’ he said flatly. Without waiting to see Nix’s reaction, he turned and loped away from the stockade, his mind already intent on survival. He had no illusions about dying bravely, with a quip on his lips as they did in those stiff-upper lip stories for British boys. If there was any dying to do, he sure as hell didn’t intend it to be him who did it. He headed north along the edge of the river. After a while he looked back, but they were already gone, the gates of the stockade shut. He moved on, steadily. The gray land beneath the pinking dawn sky was as empty as the land of Nod before God sent Cain there.
After a while, Angel veered eastward, keeping up a steady jogtrot that he varied every fifteen minutes or so by walking for the same length of time. He had spent much of the night working out his movements, and until he reached his first destination, he could let his mind rove over the things he had learned during his stay in the Nix hacienda.
The most stunning, the most unexpected surprise had been the agonized appeal for help from Victoria Nix. What was behind it, Angel could only guess, but it reinforced his impression that there was something hugely wrong with the relationship between the woman and her husband. There had been no sign of her when Yat Sen had brought him down to the big living room in the pre-dawn darkness. He imagined she was kept away from the less savory of Nix’s activities on purpose. She had certainly given no indication that she knew what her husband planned for their guest. Either way, there had been nothing he could do. He could not even get a message to her, and did not see her again. Her terror-drowned eyes stayed in his mind all through the night. Now as he jogged across country he saw them again, and shook his head. His first priority was his own survival. From what he had been told by Nix, he would need all his craft and cunning.
Stop Angel! (A Frank Angel Western Book 8) Page 5
