Stop Angel! (A Frank Angel Western Book 8) (16 page)

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 starting 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.

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.

‘
Now,’
she said, panting as she tried to move him. ‘Come on.’

‘
On,’ he
said, and somehow got to his feet. He heard her grunt with exertion
and realized that he was putting most of his weight on her. She was
a lot stronger than she looked, he thought. Most women were, he
thought then. He wondered why he was covered in sweat. Her voice
sounded as if it was coming down a long, long tunnel.

Little men inside his head were using
steel drills to get out, timing each twist to the throb of his
heart. He gagged as Victoria Nix poured brandy down his throat, but
the liquid fire that blazed in its wake stifled the throbbing pain.
He decided to sit down and he was unconscious before his back hit
the seat rest of the chair.

~*~

She let him sleep an hour, knowing it
was all they could spare.

He awoke to find her holding a tray
carrying a bowl of soup, some bread, a glass of milk. His mind was
fogged, but his body felt stronger and he realized that she had
dressed his wound, and that his body was clean. She must have
washed him, covered him with the soft blanket.

‘
Well,’
she said. ‘Can you eat something?’

She was dressed in a white man-style
shirt and a divided riding skirt, and she looked efficient. He
wondered whether she had chosen the mannish clothes deliberately,
or whether her subconscious had been at work. She looked like a
nurse, and her appearance removed for both of them any sense of
embarrassment.

‘
How
long was I unconscious?’ he said, swinging his legs to the floor.
His head felt a little light, but it was something he could live
with. He told her to put the food on the table.

‘
Out
near the main gate, behind some bushes, you’ll find my clothes,’ he
said. ‘Would you go and get them for me? And while you’re at it,
find the keys to every lock in the place. Can you do
that?’

She nodded, her eyes large with the
question she wanted to ask him. He knew what it was and he shook
his head.