Stop Angel! (A Frank Angel Western Book 8) (13 page)

‘
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’l
y 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.

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, earing 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!