Stop Angel! (A Frank Angel Western Book 8)

by Frederick H. Christian

  Angel’s sweet movement was too fast. The man had time to drop his boot, register Angel’s presence, and see that Angel had picked up the machete. Then the thick heavy blade sliced his heart in two and pinned the man’s contorted body to the heedless trunk of the tree behind him. The scream turned into a choking gurgle and Angel caught the startled shout of the next man up the line as he heard it. He was out of sight when the first of them came at a lumpy run through the swampy muck, and watched as a second man joined him, eyes bulging at the awful sight of their comrade pinned like some strange insect against the hole of the live oak.

  ‘He’s killed Levi,’ the first man said. Then he shouted the same words at the top of his voice. A voice Angel recognized as Elliott’s bounced back through the trees, flattened by the sound of the rain.

  ‘All right!’ Elliott yelled. ‘Make a half-circle. But don’t bunch up, he’s probably picking a spot to kill you! Make your half-circle, don’t let him get between you!’

  The two men looked at each other in sudden panic, and floundered away in opposite directions, moving back to where they could see the others. They were the touch points in the plan, which was that when the quarry was located, the others would swing out to form a wide half-circle. Somewhere inside it would be Angel. Then they would close in on him. It was a good idea, but Angel put a hole in it by removing one of the touch points. Barnfield, the man who’d discovered the dead Levi, was wishing to God he’d stayed up at the Portal instead of rushing out to try and earn Nix’s five hundred dollar bonus. His nerve was shot to hell from the sight of seeing Levi nailed to that tree, and he was breathing raggedly, hands dank with sweat even in this strange swampy rain. He jumped every time the leaves in front of him moved. He was so much on edge that when Angel stepped out in front of him, Barnfield stopped dead in his tracks, paralyzed with fear.

  He stood like that for perhaps two seconds, but that was enough. Angel was quite ready, his body perfectly set for what he had to do, and even as the croak of alarm was born in Barnfield’s suddenly dry throat, Angel’s right arm was moving in a horizontal arc that brought the toughened outer edge of his right hand across at a speed that defied sight. It struck Barnfield just below his right ear, and the lanky man went down on his knees in the mud, coordination shot to hell, the six-gun dropping from his nerveless fingers with a muddy plop to sink into the mire. Before the mud had even begun to close over the gun, Angel’s body was moving back the way it had turned, his left hand striking Barnfield directly beneath his gathered eyebrows. The force of the blow smashed in the fragile frontal bones of the skull, and Barnfield catapulted back into the bushes, contorted in agony, legs thrashing as a strangulated caw of terror and pain broke from his stunned throat. He thrashed around in the muddy slop like some strange animal with its spine broken, and Angel heard someone shout, then shout again.

  ‘Barney?’ the voice called. It broke nervously on the second syllable. When there was no reply, the man blundered nearer, and as if on signal, the pent-up thunder blasted across the iron-gray sky like the veritable wrath of God. There was the sharp electric click of lightning and then the bright copper smell of ozone. The thunder roared and rolled in one long continuously awesome sound that seemed to shake the very earth, and the rain came down with renewed violence, drawing half-white lines across the darker shadows at an angle of eighty degrees, reducing visibility to almost nil faster than it takes to say it.

  The man who had shouted out to Barnfield was still shouting, but in the immense roar of unleashed nature, his voice was like that of a cat mewling at Niagara. He blundered right past where his comrade was struggling in the mud, half-conscious, trying blindly to get to his feet. Angel let him go five paces and then broke the dry stick in his hands with a decisive crack. His timing was perfect. The man whirled around, six-gun coming up as Barnfield labored to his feet, reeling forward, a muddy apparition making a senseless sound that brought an instant reflex action from his comrade. He fanned back the hammer in a blur of movement that emptied the six-gun in one long stutter of fire, smashing the lanky Barnfield back down into the glutinous mud, riddled, while the man who had killed him gaped in horror at the fallen body. Barnfield’s face was upturned, and the driving rain washed off the mud as the man stood staring at what he had done. He looked from side to side in utter panic.

  ‘Hammond!’ someone shouted. ‘Where the hell are you?’

  ‘Here,’ the thickset one with the gun shouted weakly. Then louder. ‘Here! Here! Over here! Barney’s dead!’

  ‘Heard shots,’ another man panted, splashing into view. He was skeleton-faced, his white hair plastered to his skull. Angel, hidden where he had faded from view as Hammond came on the scene, recognized this one. They called him Hisco.

  ‘D’ya see him?’ Hisco asked Hammond.

  ‘No,’ Hammond lied. ‘Heard the shots, like you. Come a-runnin’, but Barney was dead already.’

  Hisco turned Barnfield’s body slightly with a soggy boot. He grinned, the unfeeling grin of a man who has looked at dead men many times.

  ‘Got enough holes in him to use for a waterin’ can,’ he said.

  ‘Christ, Hisco,’ Hammond said, teeth chattering as if with ague. ‘Ain’t no call for that sort o’ talk!’

  ‘Shit,’ Hisco snapped, ‘he’s just as dead, whatever. Come on, haul your ass!’

  He pushed Hammond roughly, indicating that the dumpy man should lead off to the left. Hisco had his own gun out, a silver-plated, scroll-engraved Smith & Wesson .44 with an ivory grip. Pimp’s gun, Angel thought, as he moved silently back into the inky shadows. The vicious downpour had now eased into a steady torrent, and the constant spatter of the rain upon the broad-leafed trees and bushes drowned any small noises that he might have made. He eased further back. Where was Hercules Nix?

  Almost as if to answer his question, he came upon two more of Nix’s men, squatting in a dry patch beneath a huge tree. Angel drew back into hiding, taking perverse pleasure in watching the men’s misery as they tried to light sodden cigarettes. Eventually they threw down the soaked papers and shredded Durham in disgust.

  ‘Waal, God damn everything to hell-and-go-on,’ one of them drawled with the unmistakable softness of the Southerner. ‘Ya cain’t even git a smoke in thisyere gumbo.’

  ‘Prob’ly just as well,’ the other said. ‘Don’t figger it’s a good idee. Let’s git movin’ in case the boss comes on us.’

  ‘Needn’t worry none, boy,’ the Southerner said. ‘He’s gone on back to the edge o’ the trees. Claims he’s goin’ to see if he can spot this Angel feller from out thar. We up to our asses in liquid shit, an’ he’s done pulled back to drah land.’

  ‘You better not let him hear you talkin’ like that, Mike. He’s gutted men for less.’

  ‘Fust ketch yore possum,’ Mike said with an unrepentant grin. ‘Lissen, Watson, thisyere Angel fella ain’t no pussycat. Anyone kills off seven good men like he’s done don’t hardly do to mess with. I ain’t gittin’ any dinged closer to him than I got to, Mister Hercules Nix or not!’

  ‘What you plannin’ to do, Mike?’ Watson asked.

  ‘Take ’er easy, boy,’ Mike said. Thassall, take ’er easy. Just hang on back aways, don’t be no eager beaver. That Angel feller out thar, he’s plannin’ on killin’ ever’ one of us as gits too close. I figger, what the hell, don’t git too close, raht?’

  ‘Mike,’ Watson grinned. ‘You’re a crafty sonofabitch.’

  ‘Dooley,’ Mike grinned sourly back, ‘ain’t it the awful truth?’

  Giving his comrade a light punch on the shoulder, Watson pushed off into the soaked maze of brush and undergrowth. After a few seconds, the one called Mike shrugged and followed suit. Angel watched them go, counting slowly. When he reached five hundred, he slid off silently in their wake. He was behind them now, and he intended to make the very best use of his advantage. But he reckoned without The Major.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Nobody knew The Major’s real name.


  Nobody, that is, except the man himself, and The Major wasn’t talking. In fact, as any of the men who rode for Hercules Nix would have testified, getting information out of The Major was a bit like collecting the teeth of live sharks: damned interesting, maybe, but the best way there was to get your head bitten off. Since Nix cared nothing about a man’s pedigree, but only his abilities, The Major had never been required to give one. His case-hardened comrades soon grew tired of shouting ‘Hey, you!’ after him, and dubbed him for his ramrod bearing and staccato speech.

  Actually he’d never been more than a Sergeant in the 11th Ohio Cavalry, but if they wanted to think he’d been an officer, let them. He didn’t figure it was any of their business that he’d done three five-year hitches, the first starting when he was so desperate for work that he’d been peeling potatoes in the kitchen of the Grand Union Hotel in Chicago for three cents an hour. He began his second hitch in 1864, not that he was given any damned choice: the country was in the throes of the War. They paid a man sixteen dollars a month, less dockings, for the privilege of sending him out every day, every week, every month for the best part of five years to get his fool head blown off. After the War, to show its deep gratitude to the men who had saved the Union, Congress reduced that to thirteen dollars, and substituted Sioux and Cheyenne for Johnny Rebs. Forty-three cents a day: it wasn’t enough to keep a man in underwear, and he ended his second hitch so deep in debt he had to sign on again. He owned the sutlers and the whores and the off-limits saloons and the loan sharks who’d pay you out ten dollars in midmonth and charge you two dollars a week interest on it, then let it run up so high you ended up being a virtual slave to them. When he made it to Sergeant, The Major put the screws on the enlisted men even tighter than they’d been put on him when he was in the ranks. He bled them all dry, and when he came to the end of his third hitch, he told the Army what it could do with its McClellan saddle and its blue serge and brass buttons, its stinking barracks and its slack-bellied ‘washer-women.’ Taking his hoarded gold and his mustering-out pay, he quit Fort Riley and hit Abilene like a raider. He didn’t draw a sober breath for nearly two weeks, in which time he figured he’d laid every two-dollar whore in town. The Major was interested in quantity, not quality. With what money he had left, he got into a poker game run by an expert. The dandified, ruffle-shirted tinhorn who dealt took The Major for every cent he had. The Major called him a cheat, which he was, and the gambler shook a nasty little Derringer out of his sleeve but he stopped doing that when The Major rammed six inches of cold steel bayonet into the man’s belly and left him squirming on the sawdust floor of the Alamo with black blood coming out of his mouth. The Major quit town before the man’s friends could find him and lynch him, and found out a few weeks later that they’d put out a flyer on him, for murder, offering a reward of a hundred dollars. The man who had been Eric George Anthony, Sergeant of the 11th Ohio Cavalry, dropped from sight, and in his place appeared the nameless, taciturn drifter who was good with knife and gun and for hire—at a price—for anything. He drifted naturally into the orbit of Hercules Nix, and accepted the half-contemptuous sobriquet they gave him. Names were nothing. The Major believed only in staying alive, and he had managed to do so by never taking any chances. He’d learned that the best way of avoiding risk was by out-thinking, out-maneuvering, or out-gunning your opponent. He’d learned how at Bull Run and The Wilderness and Chickamauga, and again on the Powder River and the Bozeman Trail. He knew the best way to kill your enemy was from concealment, without warning, and ignoring such niceties as the ‘even break.’ He planned to go on living by these rules until he was old and rich, and that meant by definition that he was not about to go blundering into the jungly swamp after a proven man killer the way Nix expected, the way the others were doing. They were dolts, anyway. Singlehandedly, Angel had outwitted them and killed half a dozen men mercilessly, yet still they blundered on. Fools! He had no intention of being another notch on Angel’s tally-stick. He hung back, gradually letting the others get ahead of him. Moving in a crisscrossing fashion behind his comrades, stopping often, remaining motionless in dark and shadowed places, watching nothing, seeing everything, The Major was behind Angel when Angel moved out of hiding behind Watson and Mike Cheyney.

  The Major’s lips moved in what might have been a smile. He slithered carefully behind the equally careful Angel, unshipping from the scabbard at his side the twenty-inch bayonet which he had carried since the day he had been issued with it by the Army together with his breech-loading Springfield rifle. He had stolen it when they mustered him out, and worked lovingly on the weapon until it was a terrible killing tool. The long tapering blade was razor-edged on all the corners of its triangular upper section, its thin point honed to needle sharpness. Halfway up the blade, there were a series of serried notches sloping away from the point. When the blade was twisted inside a man and yanked out, it would gut him like a fish, as the tinhorn in Abilene had fatally discovered. Into the fitting normally filled by the rifle barrel, The Major had put a wooden haft that sat in his right hand snugly, securely. He held the bayonet with its needle point up in front of his body, about the level of a man’s breastbone, and eeled silently in the wake of the broad-shouldered figure up ahead of him.

  When Angel stopped, The Major made his move.

  Angel had paused at the edge of a wide clearing perhaps ten yards across and five wide. He seemed to be checking carefully before stepping out into the open, poised to move forward. The Major saw that Angel’s feet were apart, one ahead of the other, his weight on the forward foot and he struck, knowing that even if Angel heard him coming, it would take him a long second, maybe two, to redistribute his weight, turn, meet the assault. And in that long second, The Major would have killed him. The wicked bayonet point winked in a gray light as he drove it at Angel’s back.

  Angel had it timed to the millisecond.

  He had heard the man behind him, placed him by sound, and wondered why he had not used a gun on him. Perhaps they had orders to take him alive, although that seemed unlikely in view of the events of the past day and a half. In which case, it had to be preference. The man behind him preferred to use some other weapon besides a gun: which meant a knife. So Angel took his chance, exposing his back and standing bad-footed, skin crawling against the expected smash of a treacherous bullet. You never heard the one that killed you, they said. Then he heard the sound, the rush of movement, the hiss of breath and he moved. Not as the man behind him would expect, turning to meet the attack, nor to one side or the other, which he might anticipate. Angel went straight forward into a somersault that would take him out of reach of the knife blade, and give him space to turn as the man adjusted and came at him again. He was up off the ground very fast, and ordinarily his ruse would have worked, but The Major was not an ordinary knife fighter, and what he had in his hand was not an ordinary knife. Even as he saw his first lunge miss and realized that Angel had partially outwitted him, The Major fell to the left and turned his forward movement into an upward slash to the right. An ordinary knife would not have even made contact, but The Major’s bayonet was nearly two feet long, and the wicked point went through the outer edge of Angel’s left triceps muscle, the long lifting muscle at the back of the upper arm. Like a rapier. As The Major pulled the weapon back, the serrated teeth ripped a long deep gash in the back of Angel’s left arm, tearing a rasping shout of pain from his mouth as he rolled backward into the miry loam. Almost before he was on the ground, The Major was up and running at him, bayonet extended like a pitchfork aimed at Angel’s belly. Angel rolled instinctively, and pain shot through his body as he lay on the wounded arm. His clothes were already spattered with blood. He swung a side kick that took The Major’s kneecap apart and spilled him sprawling in the muck, his face smeared with it, partially blinding the man. Angel had a moment to get set as The Major pawed the mud from his eyes and came off the ground in a hobbling rush, and in that moment, Angel flicked his long-barreled Colt up out of the holster, earin
g back the hammer. He was very fast, but again he underestimated the long sweep of the bayonet. The Major’s wide-armed swipe slammed the bayonet against the barrel of the Colt and jarred it out of Angel’s mud-slimed grasp. In a lightning-fast movement, The Major whacked the bayonet back through the same arc in reverse. It made a soft noise—whook!—as Angel stumbled backward away from it, the blade missing his sucked-in belly by inches. The Major came after him, shambling on his good leg, slashing with the weapon as though it were a saber, whook! whook! whook! It was all Angel could do to get out of the way of the killing strokes, watching each movement of The Major’s body for a slight change of posture, to be ready when the slash became a lunge. If the mud-smeared maniac pursuing him caught him in a sideways movement and changed that needle-point slash into a lunge, Angel would be wide open. The Major’s eyes were shiny with killing lust, and his breath rasped like a strangling snake. Whook! the bayonet went again, and Angel reeled back. Whook! Whook! Lunge. Whook!

  It was only a matter of time before he made a mistake, and Angel didn’t plan to wait until he made it. Avoiding the slashing cuts and thrusts had brought him around near a big rotting plantain tree, and he eased nearer to it. Many of the tree’s arm-thick branches were dry and dead. Angel judged his distances: he wouldn’t get two chances.

  It was a macabre scene, the mud-smeared, limping figure with the killer’s fixed grin and the glinting two-foot steel weapon pursuing the dodging, wearing quarry, never giving Angel a moment to rest, to counterattack, trying constantly to get him backed up against one of the trees for the stopping stroke, somewhere The Major could cut him up a piece at a time.

  The rain had stopped now, and steam rose from the panting bodies of the circling opponents. Their feet made juicy, sucking sounds in the trampled mud.

  Whook! Whook, whook, whook, whook! The Major pursued his prey relentlessly, and still Angel managed to keep out of reach of the bayonet. Then, in one smooth sweep, he tore off one of the dead branches with his good right arm. The Major paused for a moment and then grinned when he saw what Angel seemed to be planning to use as a weapon. He slithered forward again, confident as ever as Angel broke the branch against the trunk of the tree, leaving himself with a three-foot length in his hand. Holding it in the classic dueling position, he moved forward at The Major, who gave a contemptuous laugh and smashed at the branch with his bayonet. A chunk of the rotted wood flew away into the undergrowth, and splinters of the dried core gleamed whitely on the black mire for a moment before they were trampled underfoot. Now the broken branch was less than two feet long, and Angel’s face registered dismay. The Major hissed with pleasure and smashed at the branch again, almost laughing at the expression of his opponent as another big chunk sailed into the air.