‘You’d do that, what you said? Go through the breaks with us in front?’ Sweddlin asked, his voice tailing away weakly when he saw the look on Angel’s face.
‘Yes, you would,’ he said. ‘Listen, Kit, tell him. Or I sure as hell will.’
Sanson nodded, and began to explain the system of switches that primed the mined road that ran through the breaks. It was similar to the one back at the hacienda, powered by the same huge, stinking battery.
‘Then there’s a system of signal flags,’ Sanson said. ‘Two flags, one red, one black. Red means whoever is coming through is OK. Black—’
‘I can guess,’ Angel said. ‘What happens then?’
‘When he sees the flag go up the pole, Chris Holmes—that’s the guy at the other end—he hoists a red flag, too. That means he’s switched off at his end. Otherwise, wouldn’t make no difference if we was switched off or not, the mines would still be primed.’
‘He’s got a lookout platform up there,’ Sweddlin added. ‘He can check on who’s comin’ through. He doesn’t like the look of ’em, he can get back inside and throw the switch anyway, blow the road up in your face.’
‘It’s damn near foolproof,’ Sanson said, and Angel nodded, moved in spite of himself to admire the dark brain that had planned all this. He listened as Sweddlin described the steel plate set beneath the dirt of the road that depressed a bell, which told the man at the far side to check on who was coming through. If he did not know them, he challenged them, and if they gave the wrong reply, he simply threw his switch. There was no way they could get to him before he did so. As Sanson had said, it was almost foolproof, and he thanked the instinct which had told him to take these guards alive.
‘All right,’ he told Sweddlin. ‘Get the red flag hoisted. And make sure you do it exactly right.’
‘I’ll do it right,’ Sweddlin said anxiously. ‘Don’t you worry.’
‘Don’t you worry about me worrying,’ Angel said. ‘Get at it’
Sweddlin clambered up a ladder into a sort of loft, and after a moment Angel heard the squeak of rope pulleys. After a moment, Sweddlin appeared in the aperture and beckoned him up. Angel handed a six-gun to Victoria, and picked up Sweddlin’s shotgun.
‘Keep an eye on him,’ he said, gesturing at Sanson. ‘If he blinks, shoot his face off.’
Victoria nodded, trying for a smile that slid off her face before it got a proper grip, but she took the heavy weapon and cocked it. Sanson flinched visibly at the sound.
In the loft Sweddlin handed a spyglass to Angel and pointed off to the north. Through the glass, Angel could see the flutter of a bright square of scarlet from a pole that thrust up above the ragged top of the thornbreaks.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s go. And you boys listen to me—don’t do anything that might prove fatal.’
‘Don’t worry, mister,’ Sweddlin said anxiously. ‘We don’t aim to double-cross you.’
‘I plan to be sure of it,’ Angel said coldly as they climbed onto their horses and moved into the shadowed breaks. The trail curved right and then left, leading between the high stands of faceless chokethorn and briar, eerily cool and dark and silent. Glancing at the narrow strip of sky above his head, Angel estimated it would be dark in maybe two hours. A quick scan of the horizon with Sweddlin’s spyglass had revealed no sign of the pursuers, but he knew they were coming and he knew that if the two mercenaries got as much as an inkling that help was on the way they would turn to treachery as naturally as they opened their eyes in the morning.
They moved at a steady trot through the shadowed trees. Once in a while, they startled some creature in the dark depths of the breaks, and heard it crashing through the tangle in panicked flight. Victoria Nix rode in back, close to Angel, her shoulders hunched as though against a chill, her face set and pale.
It took them fifteen minutes to get to the place where a huge white blaze scarred a fallen log beside the trail. Sweddlin reined in as he got level with it. The trail stretched straight as an arrow ahead of them, and disappeared up ahead around a bend. It was quite wide here, and Angel could see the spidery outlines of a lookout platform in the far high distance. Sweddlin stood up in the stirrups and waved his Stetson around his head three times to the right, and three times to the left.
‘OK,’ he said, and gigged his horse into motion. Ten minutes later, they saw the trail widen and as suddenly as the breaks had closed in on them at the start, they ended. There was a clearing lit by the long rays of the afternoon sun, and in it a barrack hut identical with the one they had just left. As the quartet rode into the open space, a man eased out of the doorway of the hut, a shotgun across his arm. He looked edgy, a little tense, and Angel felt a cold moment of unease.
‘Lee, Sanson,’ the man nodded, not coming nearer to them. ‘What brings you over here? Howdy, Miz Nix, I didn’t see—’
‘It’s all right,’ Victoria said, but her voice cracked, and the man sensed the tension in it. His eyes swung immediately to the only stranger in the setup, and the shotgun followed the movement, twin barrels coming up trained unwaveringly on Angel’s belly.
‘Somebody better tell me what the hell is goin’ on here,’ he growled, ‘or somebody is goin’ to get his brains blowed out.’
The air was still, electric with held violence. It was Victioria Nix who dispersed with a casual sound of irritated impatience. She hitched the head of her horse around so that it was between Holmes and Angel and looked down imperiously at Holmes.
‘Holmes,’ she said, and there was a whip in her voice that brooked no refusal. ‘Help me down.’
Holmes moved automatically to obey. He was a paid gun and there were few things he would balk at doing without so much as batting an eyelid, but he knew a damned sight better than to disobey Hercules Nix’s wife. She might be a hoity-toity bitch who treated everyone like so much dirt, but an insult to her was an insult to Nix and an insult to Nix meant death. He extended his hand, and helped her down from the saddle and he was turning around when Angel stuck the long barrel of his Peacemaker into Holmes’s ear.
‘Don’t even sweat,’ Angel said softly.
‘Aaaah, shit!’ Holmes said, looking at Sweddlin and Sanson as though they had just admitted to assassinating Lincoln. Angel grinned. It was funny the way these empty-minded killers used betrayal and treachery as their everyday coin, yet somehow felt tricked when paid in their own money.
‘Drop the shotgun,’ Angel said. ‘Relax.’
‘Relax, he says,’ Holmes sneered, letting the weapon fall with a soft thud to the ground. ‘What the hell is all this, anyway?’
‘Tell him,’ Angel said to the two Nix riders.
Sweddlin and Sanson nodded, and told Holmes the same story that Angel had told them. If anything, they made it more convincing and bloody than he had done, and when they were through, Holmes looked at Angel in a new way. He shook his head, as though finding it hard to believe.
‘You did all that?’ he asked Angel. ‘Alone?’
‘Would I lie to you?’ Angel said, with a sardonic grin.
‘It’s a possibility,’ Holmes said, just as derisive. ‘Who the hell are you, anyway?’
‘He’s Federal Law, Chris,’ Sweddlin said. ‘Department of Justice.’
‘Oh, beautiful,’ Holmes said, his tone that of a man whose best cards in a high-stakes game are deuces. His face fell further when Angel showed him the badge.
‘Department of Justice,’ Holmes read, dispiritedly. ‘Terrific’
Angel said nothing, just letting the worry build in Holmes’s mind. He was smarter than his two comrades, and knew the consequences of being taken by Federal Law. Holmes had no illusions about what he was: a paid killer, worthless as a citizen, beyond redemption as a human being. He stank of killing for money, but like a buffalo hunter, he had gotten used to the stink. Angel let the man sweat: the manner of Holmes’s eventual death was a predictable as what he would do next. He was expecting Angel to take them in, and he was thinking about y
ears and years in the slammer: ergo, he would try to make some kind of deal.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Sanson an’ Sweddlin, they played along with you. I’m doin’ the same. What’s—?’
‘Forget it!’ Angel said. ‘I’m going to turn you loose.’
Holmes’s face brightened perceptibly, and he looked at the other two. They nodded. ‘That’s what he told us, Chris,’ Sweddlin said.
‘One thing,’ Angel said, the coldness of his voice taking the smile of relief off of Holmes’s face. T want you long gone out of Texas. Keep going until you get someplace where nobody ever heard of the Department of Justice, because if I ever hear you boys are back in circulation, I’m going to come after you and bring you in. And I’ll throw away the key, savvy?’
The three men nodded. It was a better deal than they had any right to hope for and they knew it. In their world, losers got a bullet in the gut or the back of the head. There were no nice guys. This cold-eyed bastard had destroyed Hercules Nix single-handed. By definition he was not the kind of man wanted on his back-trail.
‘All right,’ Holmes said. ‘Can we move out now?’
‘Now’s a good time,’ Angel said. ‘Get your pony.’
‘How about our guns?’
Angel just looked at him, and Holmes got a stubborn look on his face.
‘Lissen, mister, you can’t send us out alone on these plains without a gun of some kind!’ Holmes said. ‘There’s Comanch’ out there. An’ Kiowa! They’d slit our throats soon as look if they saw we didn’t have guns.’
‘No guns,’ Angel said.
‘Well, hell, then shoot us here and be done with it!’ Holmes spat defiantly. ‘You’re killing us sure the other way, and me, I’d as soon die right here on ground I know.’
‘Frank … ?’ Victoria Nix said hesitantly.
‘All right,’ Angel said. ‘A carbine each. No hand guns.’
‘Deal,’ Holmes said. ‘I’ll get mounted.’
He slouched over to the corral. Sweddlin and Sanson walked their horses toward him as he swung up. And Angel watched all three of them for the slightest hint of treachery.
It was a damned good job he did.
As Holmes swung into the saddle, a sudden sound shattered the soft silence of the approaching dusk. There was no mistaking what it was—the insistent clamor of an alarm bell. Simultaneously, the drum of approaching hoofs became audible. Someone was coming along the trail through the breaks. Holmes heard the sound and overreacted, and his action triggered the other two into treacherous reflex violence.
‘Bastard!’ Holmes yelled at Angel. ‘You tricked us!’
He pulled his horse around in a rearing turn, yanked the carbine in the saddle scabbard out and levering it one-handed. Sweddlin and Sanson split, Sweddlin diving out of the saddle with his own carbine, rolling as he thumbed shells into the magazine, while Sanson swung down and dived in a desperate attempt to reach the shotgun that Chris Holmes had dropped in the dust. Angel ignored them, keeping every atom of his concentration on Holmes. Any man who used his horse as a shield that way, and that fast, also knew enough to shoot damned well. It was a smart, killer’s move—perhaps one man in ten thousand could hit the few exposed parts of a rider’s body if he reared his horse like that, under pressure and fast—and Holmes grinned in confident glee as he pulled his trigger. His last thought was that he’d killed Angel and then Angel’s unerring six-gun bullet smashed through his mouth and blew his skull apart in a spraying pink mist of bone and brain. Holmes’s bullet chunked a spout of earth a foot high out of the ground near Angel’s foot, but the Justice Department man was already moving in a crouched right turn, laying the six-gun across his forearm and putting three bullets in a close cluster below Kit Sanson’s right armpit as the man closed his hand on the shotgun. The heavy bullets rolled Sanson over as dead as a brained mackerel, and Lee Sweddlin, who was just bringing the carbine up to use it, found himself gaping into the yawning muzzle of Angel’s weapon. He screamed like a gutted wolf, pants staining with his own terror, and dropped the carbine, throwing it away from him as he turned and ran. He was a dead easy target, but Angel did not fire, couldn’t do it. Sweddlin careered across the face of the breaks, and turned sharp left into the gap leading to the trail back.
Angel was already running, but not in pursuit of Sweddlin. He ran up the ladder to the lookout platform like a squirrel, snatching up the spyglass that lay on the bench and focusing on the long, straight, narrow cut between the close-growing trees. For a moment he could see nothing, and then all at once his sight was filled with the insane, contorted face of Hercules Nix. He was quite alone, his arm rising and falling like an automaton as he relentlessly thrashed the dying horse with his whip. The animal was covered in blood from withers to chest, hide stripped by the terrible spurs. Its eyes wept blood and it was all but dead on its feet.
Angel threw down the spyglass and ran to the edge of the platform. Victoria was at the foot of the ladder staring up at him.
‘Frank?’ she called. ‘Frank, how many of them are there?’
‘It’s Nix!’ he shouted. ‘It’s Nix, and he’s by himself!’
‘Alone?’ she shouted.
He didn’t answer her. His mind was already emptied of everything except what he had to do next. He had to get down to the ground, snatch up the shotgun lying alongside Kit Sanson’s crumpled corpse, and run to where Nix would come out of the gap between the breaks. He wanted to be there, shotgun ready, for Jaime Lorenz, for Tyrrell, for all the men the oncoming madman had cut down.
He came down the ladder face forward, like a sailor, and whirled around toward the hut, intent on the gun. There was no sign of Victoria and he wondered where she had gone. As he snatched up the shotgun he saw a movement inside the hut, and for a moment he could not believe what he had seen. He ran to the doorway of the hut and barged in. She was standing by the huge black lead-acid batteries and her hand was on the H-shaped switch that would make the mines beneath the trail live.
‘No!’ he shouted. ‘Victoria, no!’
‘Oh, yes,’ she whispered. Her face was like a death mask. ‘Yes, oh, yes!’
And she threw the switch.
Chapter Twenty-One
Angel lay on the bed in his apartment.
Downstairs, he could hear Mrs. Rissick bustling about in her kitchen, and the faint sound of traffic drifted up from F Street. It was already winter in Washington, cold and damp in the night, dark before six. Right now there was a weak, watery sun up in an uncertain sky and it cast long stripes of light across the carpet of the room. A million dust motes danced in the beams and Angel let his lassitude drift over him, like warm waves on a tropic shore. It was an old and familiar feeling, not unwelcome: the fatigue that always followed the deep physical and emotional drainage of engagement. It always came when you knew everything was over, the veins and arteries sutured, the dead buried, and the ties formed in the copper-smelling heat of action finally cut. It was a time when he went over his own actions again and again, reviewing them in his mind, replaying them in slow motion to see if there had been any alternative open. There were men in the department who enjoyed the killing, he knew; but he was not one of them. He never failed to wonder whether it was justified, and even if it was, what it proved. It didn’t ever prove a damned thing to kill a man, yet you rarely got any choice. It was acceptable on that basis. Not delightful, not admirable, not a thrill, but acceptable. What was unacceptable was where you made a choice and didn’t know if it had been the right one. Those were the ones that tore you apart.
‘Victoria,’ he said aloud, thinking of her.
They had ridden away from the valley in silence, burying no dead and not looking back. In time they had come to Madura. It was black dark by the time they reached the town’s only hotel. Angel asked for and got the two largest rooms in the place. He left Victoria in one of them while he went to the sheriff’s office. She was calm, compliant, and utterly without expression. When he told her to, she stood or walked
or ate or drank, acting—to any casual observer -almost completely normal. Certainly no more abnormal than a lot of folks who were what they called slow on the uptake. Only someone who had seen her before, someone who knew her—like Angel—saw the empty deadness behind the eyes. He knew that whatever dam was holding back the reaction, it had to burst soon. It had held precariously ever since she had thrown the switch at the hut outside the entrance to Nix’s valley, but it wouldn’t hold a hell of a lot longer, and he didn’t want her to be alone when it did. So he hurried through his conversation with the sheriff, leaving that worthy greatly worried, sweatily uneasy, and anything but completely informed about the events that had taken place in Nix’s kingdom. Angel’s explanations—and his promise to enlarge upon them the next day—were just this side of perfunctory, and the string of instructions he left with the sheriff meant that worthy would have to do without most of his sleep that night. The sheriff banged his fist on the desk with anger—but not until his visitor was gone.
When Angel got back to the hotel, Victoria was still sitting in the same chair, staring with neither expression nor interest at the roses-and-rhubarb wallpaper on the opposite wall. When he told her she must get some sleep, she nodded, and allowed herself to be led into the bedroom like a child. He waited until she was in bed, then crept in to check on her. She was already asleep.
The next day he left the hotel while Victoria was still asleep and spent most of the morning with the sheriff. A sheaf of telegraph messages in the department’s simple next-letter code lay on that worthy’s desk, and he pushed them across to his visitor with a dyspeptic snort.
‘What’n’the hell is all that mumbo-jumbo, anyways?’ he asked aggrievedly.
Fine thing when a man couldn’t even find out what was going on and tell his cronies over a beer in the saloon later. Angel gave him a couple of halfway decent lies to chew on, and digested the real instructions from the Attorney-General, who had agreed to his proposal that he stay with Victoria Nix until she came out of her withdrawn state. A troop of Texas Rangers was going to check out the valley, and would report back in due course. Meanwhile, Angel could file a full report when he got back to Washington, which should not be later than twenty-one days from today’s date. He smiled at the instruction, seeing the old man giving it. Then he went back to the hotel.
Stop Angel! (A Frank Angel Western Book 8) Page 15
