In the northeastern corner of the stockade was a long earthen ramp and squatting at its flattened crest, muzzle poking out and aimed more or less at the site of the Comanche encampment, was a well-kept Army cannon, a twelve-pounder by the look of it. There was a pyramid of shells at one side of it, a powder bucket suspended from the center of the axle. Angel allowed himself a thin smile: Nix had not been jesting when he said he used the Comanches but did not trust them.
He flitted like a ghost across the open space to the lower arm of the L-shaped hacienda. In this short extension to the main house was housed the machinery that supported Hercules Nix’s domain, the pumps and the switches and the controls that sent water down the valley, filled the lake beside the Indian camp, kept the swampy jungle and the muddy lake alive. He thought back to Welsh Al Davies and the fetid fleabag hotel in Galveston. It seemed like years ago.
Like an extension of one of the shadows that sheltered him, Angel moved to the door of the machine room. It was, like all the doors in the building, of solid oak lined with steel. He bent close to examine the locks. Double-action tumbler locks by the look of them. Far too good to be picked, even by a trained man like himself, without tools. In books, people opened doors with little lengths of metal, or a lady’s hairpin. In real life it was a little harder. A man named Joseph Bramah had once patented a lock that took an experienced locksmith over fifty-one hours to pick. That was using all the right tools, and more than ninety years ago. There was a man back East named Linus Yale who had acted as instructor to the Justice Department. He had shown them the secrets of every kind of lock, and designed lock picks for them to open them with. Yet even he had admitted that many locks would simply take too damned long to open, and that the surest way to get into a building quickly was to blow the damned door down. Well, he couldn’t do that. Not just yet, anyway.
First, there was the matter of Yat Sen.
In the cool-shadowed darkness, he slowly stripped off his clothes, leaving only a makeshift loincloth made from the remnants of his shirt. He padded softly around the house to the patio in front of the building, and stood there, mustering himself. When his breathing was deep and controlled, he knew he was as ready as he’d ever be.
‘Yat Sen!’ he shouted. ‘Yat Sen!’
He was about to shout again when a light went on upstairs, then another. He waited, poised on the cold stone floor, the chill breeze raising gooseflesh on his naked body. Light glinted on the knife in his hand. He wanted Yat Sen to see the knife. The curtains of one of the second-story rooms twitched, and he thought he could see the slim shape of Victoria Nix, her eyes dark smudges in the pale blur of her face.
Then Yat Sen loomed in the doorway, his squat body silhouetted against the lighted interior. There was no expression on his face. He looked at Angel and then at the knife in Angel’s hand and nodded.
‘Boss say you plob’ly pletty good. Him dead?’
‘Not yet, Yat Sen,’ Angel said. ‘He’s got to be broken before I kill him.’
‘Ah,’ Yat Sen said, nodding again. ‘Un’stan’ this.’
‘I have to help the woman, Yat Sen,’ Angel said, watching the Oriental like a hawk for any sudden movement. ‘Are you going to try to stop me?’
‘Yes,’ Yat Sen said, as if he had been deliberating. ‘But un’stan’ this also.’
‘Well,’ Angel said, crouching slightly. ‘Get at it.’
Yat Sen came forward, hands weaving, body crouched and tense, legs bent slightly, and the slit eyes almost closed in concentration. He had on only a pair of cotton drawers, and his solid, hard body gleamed like old oiled brass. Then without warning his body arched into a running kick so fast that Angel almost failed to respond. He recovered on the instant and slashed the knife up and across in a whipping arc designed to slit the tendon of one of Yat Sen’s flying heels. Yet he missed, for somehow the Oriental did something Angel had never seen any man do. He modified his flying kick, turning his body and pulling back one foot that rapped hard against the inside of Angel’s forearm, jarring his slash off target. Then Yat Sen had landed in a crouch and was moving again before he stopped turning, a hiss emerging from his compressed mouth as his right hand flickered forward like a striking snake. Angel struck down at it with the knife and as he moved knew he had been fooled. Yat Sen’s feint left his right side exposed, and he just managed to parry a scything blow that would have broken his neck by blocking Yat Sen’s rock-hard forearm with his own left arm. The brutal shock of the collision brought a yell of pain from Angel, and he rolled back and away from Yat Sen before the Oriental could strike again. Up on his feet in an instant, he thought he saw a flare of realization in Yat Sen’s narrowed eyes and cursed the luck. Now Yat Sen would know he was hurt, and he would follow up, punishing him by striking repeatedly at the weak spot. Yat Sen was fighting in the Tai-Chi Chuan fashion, but he had discarded that discipline’s soft and graceful movements for a brutal, killing style. Angel came up out of his crouch and tried again with the knife, but fast as he was, Yat Sen was even faster. His foot slammed into Angel’s wrist, numbing the hand, and simultaneously the Oriental whipped his right hand upward and across, smashing it against the upper part of Angel’s left arm. The knife looped upward, catching a flicker of light from the windows, and disappeared soundlessly into the bushes as Angel felt the warm gush of blood under his wounded arm. He backed away, guard up, and Yat Sen stalked after him, the wicked trace of a smile on his slash of a mouth. He came in fast and struck, one-two, one, one-two, then retreated as quickly. Although Angel struck the man very hard several times with his good right hand, he might as well have been hitting a plank for all the effect it seemed to have on Yat Sen. Yat Sen grinned and came in again, and hit Angel beneath the ribcage with a looping chop that completely defeated Angel’s attempt to parry it. The blow whacked the breath out of the American’s body, and he was stock still for a moment in which Yat Sen hit him hard across the bony protuberance above the right ear. Angel went down on the stone patio with bells ringing in his head and a roaring blackness behind his eyes. Through the mist he saw the squat figure coming at him, and he kicked out upward in sheer desperation, catching Yat Sen’s kneecap and spilling him in a rolling ball. Yat Sen was up and ready for the counter-attack that Angel had been unable to launch, and grinned for real, now. Cat and mouse, Angel thought, as the breath labored back into his lungs. He realized Yat Sen was pulling his blows, playing with him to make the combat take a little longer. The moon face was beaming with the confident knowledge of being able to end the contest whenever Yat Sen wished to do so, and Angel felt a faint, distant feather-touch of fear. The man was impervious to hurt. He had hit him a dozen times with blows that would have stopped any ordinary man in his tracks, dead. They just glanced off the coppery hide.
Yat Sen came in again with his bullet head down, but this time Angel knew it was a feint, The Oriental would never expose his neck like that. He took two rapid steps to the side, his knee moving in a strike as much artifice as was Yat Sen’s, and like a flash the Oriental threw himself to the side, tense ball of right foot moving upward at Angel’s groin in a kick that would have put Angel down, retching like a dog, had it landed. But Angel’s movement was a feint, and Yat Sen was momentarily committed. As Yat Sen lay back and kicked upward, Angel changed his own movement like lightning, and his own right foot came around in a wicked arc. His clenched foot smashed viciously into Yat Sen’s throat and hurled him away, to land hunched over and coughing to get air into his paralyzed windpipe. Now Angel went after him like a striking kestrel, and again his foot moved in that tight, vicious arc. The force of the impact on Yat Sen’s back numbed the trained foot, and Yat Sen’s body lurched over in a rictus of agony as the enormous shock of the kick burst soft organs inside him. He rolled on his back and struck at Angel’s legs with a forearm like a block of mahogany, and Angel went down on one knee, but as he did, he again struck at Yat Sen’s throat with his hand. Yat Sen’s bullet head bounced on the stone patio, but he was already startin
g to get up. Before he could make it, Angel went high over Yat Sen’s body and came down, right heel rigid, stamping with all his weight and strength on the man’s exposed belly. Yat Sen contorted like some obscene rubber doll, and for the first time a moan of agony escaped his clenched lips, followed by an awful gout of thick black slime. Mercilessly, Angel followed up his advantage, turning his body to strike again at the defenseless throat but somehow, suffering agonies that would have long since destroyed another man, Yat Sen parried his blow and rolled to his feet. He was lurching, and his eyes were wild with pain, but he was up, and Angel watched in disbelief as the terrible bleeding thing came at him. Yat Sen was as good as dead and both of them knew it. Imbued with the death-insanity of the Orient, he intended somehow to take his opponent with him. Angel could not hurt him any more: so he came at his enemy like some wounded ape, the front of his body streaked with internal blood and the other awful slime. His weaving arms reached for Angel, who struck them down and moved away. Still Yat Sen came on, and Angel knew he must kill the pursuing thing or it would kill him,. He scooped up a heavy oak stool that lay on its side beneath a bush at the side of the patio, and let Yat Sen get nearer. When he was near enough, he hit the Oriental with the stool. It was a solid, heavy blow, and not even Yat Sen could parry it. It smashed in the side of his skull and he went down on his knees, screeching as lancing lines of light burst through his broken brain. While he was down on his knees, Angel hit him again. Yat Sen somehow reacted, the oak-solid right arm raised to parry the blow, and this time the stool splintered as it struck. The stool was a ruin, but so was Yat Sen’s arm. It flapped down, bone protruding from the battered flesh.
Yat Sen looked up at his conqueror with eyes that were drowning in the acid of death, then astonishingly, from what source Angel could not even imagine, the light and sapience came back into them. Yat Sen came up off his knees much, much faster than anyone as badly hurt as he could have done by any human measurement. But Yat Sen’s strength was superhuman, fanatic, and he beat aside Angel’s blows and clamped his good left hand on Angel’s throat. The two men went down with a crash that seemed to shake the house, and Angel felt the hot sticky pulse of Yat Sen’s blood on his own naked body. With his own good right hand, he used what was left of the stool to hammer at Yat Sen’s elbow, but the man’s arm was too close, and the power was gone from Angel’s arms. Yat Sen was an unbudgeable weight, and his fetid breath burned raggedly on Angel’s face as Angel eeled and humped his body to try to get out from beneath Yat Sen. Yat Sen sensed the movements, and like some dying anaconda, wrapped his mighty legs around Angel’s, the muscle bulging at the desperate urging of his broken brain, nothing left alive in the whole broken frame except the will, the determination to take the thing that had killed it down to hell when it went.
Angel felt his own breathing go ragged, and the clawing fingers tightened spasmodically on his windpipe, relentlessly cutting off the air. There were dark edges on his vision, and red rockets exploded behind his eyes. He beat repeatedly at the clutching hand, the battered arm, but to no avail and steadily more weakly. Darkness was coming up out of the ground and beginning to swallow him.
He knew he had only seconds left.
There is a place in the mind which you can train, a place from which, at the extreme moment of peril, you can summon a special strength. Kee Lai, the little Korean instructor who had first told him of Sh’oo Lin and Tai-Chi Chuan, Ninjitsu and Bando, the method Angel used to fight, called this strength chi. There was no Occidental word for it. It was something of the mind itself, of the spirit and the body combined that on summons becomes all of the self in one moment at one place. Angel stopped struggling for just the moment he needed, and the sudden slackness of his body communicated itself into the red flower of Yat Sen’s pain. Yat Sen’s killing grip lessened for an instant, and in that immeasurable moment, Angel summoned all of himself and moved. He surged upright, lifting the dead weight of Yat Sen as if the Oriental were a clinging child. His hands moved, irresistible. They broke Yat Sen’s grip and he staggered back on his heels. As he did, Angel hit him with a brutal angled hand chop on the left side of the neck. There is medical terminology for the effect of such a blow, names for the things that break beneath its force. But no one has ever charted the actual moment of impact: for no one has ever survived it. Yat Sen went down on his knees like a traitor awaiting the executioner’s ax. Yet still he would not die, still a faint spark flickered in the red madness of his broken brain. Somehow, he found enough strength to raise his head, to grunt something that at first Angel could not fathom.
‘Ugg. Ann,’ Yat Sen Croaked. ‘Egg ugg ann.’ Good man, he was saying. Very good man. It was unbelievable, and Angel stood there unbelieving as the thing on the floor got up. Angel’s hands hung limp at his sides. He had nothing left at all and still Yat Sen was coming at him, like something out of a nightmare, the broken body still trying to find and destroy the enemy that had killed it. Yat Sen lurched forward another step, leaving a bloody footprint where he had trodden, then another. Angel watched, hypnotized, rabbit before cobra. Yat Sen took one more step and then, behind him, Victoria Nix pulled both triggers of the shotgun. It went off with a sound like the ultimate end of the world. The barrels were so close to Yat Sen’s back that the unspread charge almost cut him in two. He was whammed off his feet as if he had been roped by a man on a galloping horse, and went past Angel bowed outward, his belly a burst mass of torn tissue.
The body toppled into the water of the pool with an enormous flat splash that threw water six feet high. Then, after just a moment, the surface began to churn. Victoria Nix looked at the place where Yat Sen’s body had sunk in a cloud of spreading pink. The shaft of light from the house revealed a writhing, shimmering mass of silver.
Angel didn’t bother to look. He took her hand and turned her away from the bright, shuddering, shifting movement in the water. Maybe she didn’t know what it was, but he did.
Chapter Sixteen
The genus is called Characin.
Squat, spiny, ugly little fish. They have terrifying jaws full of tiny barbed teeth and they are without question one of Nature’s most merciless creations. Not many people know them by their real name, but they are more often than not called piranha.
Angel had discovered their presence in Hercules Nix’s man-made river very quickly. He had stopped on his first day to fill his waterskin and the terrible little fish had surged up out of the roiled water as if drawn to his hand by magnets, sending him floundering back out of the shallows in shameless haste. After that, he had used extreme care to take water, dipping in only the clearest, shallowest eddies of the stream. Those dreadful little creatures could take the flesh off a cavalry horse inside an hour and their presence in the river had made him wonder yet again at the mind of the man who had put them there. He wondered how many men had unwittingly waded into the water, relishing its cool touch, until suddenly the myriad slashing rips of the greedy teeth had spilled their blood into the uncaring water, there to bring even larger hordes of the greedy fish. Below the hacienda, Angel had come across a wire-meshed gate that spanned the river. It was pretty much the same kind of contraption that they used in fish farms, constructed from steel and wood and wire mesh, an effective barrier to the little beasts getting inside the enclave. On the bank of the river there had been a small capstan and a metal rod to turn it, and without compunction Angel had winched up the gate so that by now the fish would have found free access to all of Hercules Nix’s waterways. It was Angel’s hope that they would in due course find their way through the system and emerge in the lake alongside the Comanche camp. It appealed to the macabre side of his sense of humor to visualize the first Comanch’ who took a swim in the lake after the fish found their way there.
Now he put his arm around Victoria Nix’s trembling shoulders and led her away from the awful sight of the bubbling feast in the formerly silent pool. A great weariness was coming down on Angel, and as the adrenalin drained from his nervous system
, it seemed as if someone was replacing it with molten lead. Every bone in his body seemed to be squeaking with deadly fatigue, and the ripped wound beneath his arm was throbbing like a child banging a drum. He shook his head to clear it, wondering what would have happened if Victoria Nix had not appeared on the patio.
Actually, the answer was inescapably simple: Yat Sen would have killed him. He recalled his earlier decision to use the deathwatch hours to catch Yat Sen at a low ebb. If that had been the Oriental’s low ebb, it was a damned good job he didn’t try him at high noon. It seemed like a good joke, and he was smiling fatly at it as he slid into a sitting position on the floor of the hall-way into the house. Victoria Nix made a surprised, concerned sound and crouched beside him, trying to lift him up.
‘Try to stand,’ she said, putting her arms around him. ‘I’ll help you.’
He was greasy with sweat and blood, and far away in his mind the thought formed that it was pretty unchivalrous of him to get this lovely woman in her long, soft nightdress all smeared up with blood and sweat and the other mess of combat.
Stop Angel! (A Frank Angel Western Book 8) Page 11
