Stop Angel! (A Frank Angel Western Book 8) (20 page)

‘
He
wants a horse,’ Elliott said, suddenly understanding. ‘Everything I
own for a horse!’

He looked at Hercules Nix, and
then at the
hacienda.
He had been inside it a great many times, awed by its
casual riches. Gold, silverware, valuable things. Plenty of money,
too, no doubt, as well as Nix’s collection of fine guns and
pistols. A man could make a killing from what was inside. Greed lit
his eyes like candlelight and he smiled his twisted
smile.

‘
You
heard what the boss said,’ he snapped at Hisco. ‘Catch him up a
horse!’

‘
Uh?’
Hisco said. ‘A horse. For him?’ Nix looked as if he might have
trouble walking.

‘
Horrrrr!’ Nix roared, smashing aside a table with his
broken steel claw. ‘Horrr!’ Then Hisco read the signals in
Elliott’s face and he nodded.

‘
Oh,
sure,’ he said. ‘A horse!’

He ran out to where the horses
were standing ground hitched, their eyes rolling at the pervading
stink of death. He had trouble getting the animal past the piled
corpses in the gateway, but he managed it, and brought it to where
Nix still made his mad circles. Nix looked up and his wild eyes
focused. He snatched the reins out of Hisco
’s hand, knocking the skull-faced man
asprawl.

‘
Horrrr!’ Nix said, clawing clumsily at the horn of the
saddle with his useless artificial hand. Elliott stepped forward
and gave him a boost, and without a look, Nix snatched the animal’s
head around and jammed his spurs into its side. The two men
watching saw that there was a wide gap in the northern side of the
stockade—obviously the one through which Angel and Victoria Nix had
ridden. Nix rocketed through it now, hitting a gallop by the time
he had gone fifty yards. Des Elliott flicked a gob of Nix’s spittle
off his grimy sleeve and looked at Hisco with a grinning
leer.

‘
Well,’
he said. ‘He offered everything he owned, didn’t he?’

Hisco grinned back without need
to answer, and the two of them went into the house. They stood in
the ornate living room, putting a mental price on everything they
could see: the fine collection of rare guns, the antique silver in
its oak cabinet, the rich carpets and valuable furniture. They were
still licking their lips over their booty when the long fuse that
Frank Angel had lit as he and Victoria made their escape reached
the explosives, and blew Hercules Nix
’s
hacienda
to bits.

‘
Not far
now,’ Angel said, trying for a grin.

But it didn
’t fit: he didn’t feel much like
smiling as he pulled the horse to a stop at the crest of a long low
hill. What he felt like was rolling into his blankets and sleeping
around the clock, a bone-deep tiredness that made his long muscles
ache, his eyes gritty, his mouth taste sour. He scanned the land to
the south behind them. A fat black pillar of smoke climbed from the
ruins of Hercules Nix’s stronghold. The
hacienda,
pivot of Nix’s kingdom, was
destroyed, and with its destruction the whole valley would die. The
river would cease to flow, the lake beside what had been the
Comanche camp dry up, the swamp disappear. The wildlife and the
vegetation would depart or perish. Perhaps one day, a thousand
years from now, some roaming archaeologist would find the fossil of
one of the ugly piranha, and rush back to whatever civilization
existed then, proclaiming a new theory of evolution based on
finding fish in the high plateaus of Texas. It wasn’t much to hang
a grin on, but it would have to do.

What of Nix
—was he dead? There was no sign
of the dust of pursuit. After the merciless destruction in the
stockade, was there anyone left to pursue them? There was irony in
the way that Nix’s stronghold had in the end been the instrument of
his destruction. He had built it to be impregnable to every kind of
attack except the one that had finally come about, his premise of
inviolability removed by the simple reversal of position, the
unexpected result of a hunted animal becoming the
hunter.

Bullfighters will tell you that
apart from the normal dangers of their profession, the one they
fear most is one
little known to most spectators. No matter how long, how
successful, how unbroken their string of killings, matadors share
the nightmare that one day a bull will erupt from the
toril
who
has been ‘educated.’
Matadors work on the premise that, all things being equal,
the
lidia
will
end with the predestined death of the bull, just as Nix had
begun his hunt certain of how it would end, improvising only the
means. Matadors fear that bull which has, without their knowledge,
fought a man before. No matter how stringent the precautions of the
breeders, no matter how careful the selection of his
cuadrilla,
sooner or later the
matador is going to get a bull who’s been run by some kid swinging
a coat in a moonlit field. Lots of the kids get hurt, many more
don’t. They have their fun and then hop back over the fence, head
for the
cantina
to boast of their prowess. In a week they have forgotten
the bull, but the bull has forgotten nothing. He learns very fast,
and what he learns he remembers when he faces the matador. Which is
why such an animal is feared. He does not fight by the rules. He
ignores the cape. He goes without warning or mercy for the
man.

Hercules Nix had met such an
animal. Instead of fighting by the rules, it had ignored them, and
destroyed him as mercilessly as the rogue bull guts the
torero.

Masking his exhaustion, Angel
glanced at Victoria Nix. Her face and clothes were as sweat-stained
and dusty as his own, and deep in her eyes he could see the
controlled fear still lingering. Until she knew for sure that Nix
was dead it would remain there, and there was nothing Angel could
do about it. After the carnage in the stockade, Nix ought to be
dead: but that didn
’t offer a guarantee that he was. Again, Angel scanned the
land behind them. He had no way of knowing the full extent of the
destruction he had effected. He only knew what he had done to bring
it about.

He had piled together the mines
dug up from the inside defense perimeter, laying them at strategic
points throughout the
hacienda.
He placed them for maximum compressive effect:
between the stinking acid-filled batteries, inside the casing of
the silent pump, on the shelved walls of the deep well. He found a
big crate of dynamite in the machine room and linked these bundles
to the circuit, placing them beneath the joints of supporting
buttress of floor or ceiling, and at the corners of the walls where
they would do the most damage. From all these he ran a long fuse to
the gap which he had opened in the stockade beside the river. Two
horses, ready-saddled, stood waiting, and as Angel ran across the
stockade that one last time, he shouted Victoria’s name and she lit
the slow-burning fuse. Angel had gauged it for about ten minutes
but it took only eight for the fizzing knot of fire to reach the
detonator and blow the
hacienda
and the men in it to Kingdom Come. Now Angel’s
gaze traversed the blackened, scorched land he had fired earlier.
It was empty, useless now: with the water system destroyed, it
would remain barren. No Comanche tribe would ever use it for a camp
again, no unarmed, naked men run through it seeking sanctuary that
did not exist. Death itself was a just visitation upon what had
been the kingdom of a madman.

‘
Frank!’
Victoria said, all at once, her voice tight with fear. She was
pointing at the land below and behind them and when he saw what she
was pointing at, a long, soft sigh seeped from his lips. Dust rose
in a thin spiral, a long way behind them. The pursuit had begun
again, and if there was pursuit it meant that Nix was not dead. If
he were dead, his bandits would not bother to carry out his
revenge. They would care only for their own survival. Angel cursed
himself for having abandoned Nix’s telescope in the stockade. It
would have been useful to know the strength of the pursuit, but he
had no intention of waiting until it was close enough for him to
count them.

‘
All
right,’ he said. ‘Let’s get going.’

She needed reassurance, but he
wasn
’t going
to lie to her. The fawn-frightened look was back in her eyes for
real now, and he reached over and touched her hand, gently. Her
hair was all blown loose and hung down her back in auburn waves.
Even grimy and a long way from home, she was a beautiful woman. She
smiled, but her heart wasn’t in it.

‘
Good
girl,’ he told her. ‘You’ll be fine.’

Then they headed down the long
slope toward the north, toward the now-visible barrier of the
thornbreaks ahead. In them lay the last remnant of
Nix
’s power,
the guards at the Portal. They would not know what had happened at
the other end of the valley, nor would they believe it unless they
saw it. So there was no margin for error at all.

~*~

The pursuer was Nix, and Nix
alone.

He thundered in pursuit of the
fugitives without true consciousness of his own motivation,
identity, or destination. The delicate links between his reason and
his action centers were destroyed, the brain functioning like a
misfiring engine, synapses gaping. The man pursuing Angel and
Victoria Nix was insane.

Die, die,
they
’ll all
die, I’ll kill them, all of them, both! Slowly without mercy, they
must die and they will die. They will die and I will laugh and they
will see me laughing as they die. They? Two of them. Her.
Especially her. The other one. Him, is it him? He’s the one. They
have to die. It must be. They’ll die, all of them, they’ll all die,
I’ll kill them, all of them.

The thoughts ran through
Nix
’s broken
mind like water, unconsciously impelled, without volition. He
spurred his flagging horse unmercifully, not even aware that he had
raked the animal’s body to bloody tatters with the wicked rowels of
his silver spurs. It would not have made any difference had he
known: the only thing that mattered to the man was pursuit,
movement, revenge. Who, where, why, there were unimportant. They
had destroyed everything. It was finished, all gone. There was
nothing left except vengeance, and the fearful red thing in his
brain goaded him on in quest of it. He thundered up the western
side of the valley, the wind whipping away the spittle from his
drooling lips. Tortured visions of what he would do when he caught
his quarry danced like dervishes behind his eyes. Mad beyond
redemption, Hercules Nix careered northward.

The entrance to the Portal
was a killing ground.

The cabin stood back at the edge of
the thornbreaks, and the area in front of it lay like a table,
empty, denuded of every vestige of shrubbery. Nothing, not even a
gopher, could have moved over it without being seen, and now Angel
was grateful for the time he had spent surveying it earlier. He
told Victoria he wanted to try to take the men in the barrack
alive: he did not know what infernal devices Nix might have planted
along the narrow trail to freedom. Now Victoria Nix rode out of the
trees on his signal and moved up toward the hut. As she came into
sight, a man came out, walking in a slouch toward her horse, his
right hand trailing a shotgun. A cigarette drooped from his lips,
and he looked at Victoria with a puzzled frown.

‘
Miz
Nix,’ he saluted. ‘What you doin’ up here on your
ownsome?’

‘
What is
your name?’ Victoria said frostily, ignoring his question and
regarding the man as if he were some loathsome new species of bug
she’d found in her linen closet. He was no oil painting: his
stubble was at least a week old, and his clothes looked as if he’d
never changed them since the day he put them on.

‘
Sweddlin, ma’am,’ he muttered, scuffing shabby boots. ‘Lee
Sweddlin.’

‘
Are you
alone here? Where is everyone?’

‘
They
done took off to help the Ol’—beg your pardon, the boss, ma’am,’
Sweddlin said. ‘There’s just the two of us here, me an’
Sanson.’

‘
Tell
him to come out here.’

‘
Uh,
ma’am, we got orders not to—’

‘
Do you
defy me, sir?’ Victoria said frigidly, her eyebrows climbing an
astonished inch. ‘Do you dare to defy me?’

‘
Uh, ah,
no, ma’am,’ Sweddlin said hastily. He raised his voice to a cracked
shout. ‘Hey, Kit, c’mon out here, will ya?’

The door of the shack opened and
another man came out. He was meatily built, the body of an athlete
gone to seed. A heavy paunch hung over his belt and like Sweddlin
he looked as if he hadn
’t shaved for a week.

‘
I
can see,’ he said, testily. ‘I can see.’

‘
Good,’
Angel said behind him. ‘Then if you turn around real slow you’ll
see this gun I’m pointing at you.’