Stop Angel! (A Frank Angel Western Book 8) (17 page)

‘
No,
Victoria,’ he said. ‘Nix isn’t dead. Come daylight, he’ll be out
there looking for me again. It won’t take him long to narrow it
down to here.’

‘
I
thought,’ she said. ‘I hoped—when you came back last night.
I—watched. I thought, he’s come back. You were the first one that
ever came back.’

‘
The
others never had the chance to, Victoria,’ he said softly. ‘Nix
killed them all. He hunted them down like animals and killed them.
He’s trying to do the same thing to me.’

She frowned as if the concept
were beyond her imagination.
‘All of them?’ she said wonderingly. She didn’t
need his confirming nod, and the shock went out of her eyes to be
replaced with slow realization. She was putting memories together,
seeing them in a new context.

‘
Then he
is a murderer, too,’ she breathed. ‘A murderer, too.’

‘
He
always was,’ Angel said. ‘You must have known.’

‘
No,’
she said softly. ‘He—he was just
there.
I never asked. Couldn’t ask. I wasn’t me.
I was some kind of thing. Something he used.’

‘
Tell
me,’ he said softly, knowing she had to get it out of her or it
would break her completely.

‘
I
can’t,’ she began. There was a long moment’s silence, and
then she began to cry, quite soundlessly, huge tears welling from
her eyes and falling with audible plops to the floor. Angel wanted
to go to her, put his arms around her and hold her until the
trembling stopped, but he knew better. After perhaps two minutes,
she looked at him, and tried for a brave little smile. ‘I can’t
explain it, you’d never understand,’ she faltered.

‘
Try
me.’

‘
It
was just ... I’d never experienced anything. Living with
Daddy, I never—oh, there were boys, of course. But nothing—like
him. He was—brutal. I—tried. He would laugh at me. Tell me what
would happen to Daddy if I wasn’t nice. Nice! Do you know what he
meant by nice? There was no one I could tell. I couldn’t tell Daddy
what he was doing to me. Somehow, I didn’t have the courage to tell
anyone else. I felt so alone, so alone. And he was always there,
always there. After a while I began to forget that there had ever
been a time when he was not there. He was my present and my future,
and he obliterated my past. I didn’t think of him the way I thought
of any other man I knew. He was something bigger, blacker,
stronger. A force I could not—contest. I tried at first. But he was
more cruel if I tried to fight, and in the end I just stopped.
Stopped fighting, resisting, anything. I accepted, and he took me.
And more and more and more of me. Until there was nothing left.
Somehow it had become the most important thing in my life to cook
the food he liked, to wear the clothes he liked, to do—what pleased
him. If he was pleased with me, he was not cruel, He was even kind
to Daddy. Daddy was sick then. If I didn’t do—some of the things he
wanted me to do, he took it out on Daddy. So I obeyed. I became
dependent on him, alert to his moods, watching his eyes to
anticipate his desires. His thing. His tame, willing thing. No use
for anything else.’

Her self-loathing was cold and empty,
her need naked and childlike. He went to her now, put his arm
around her, drew her close to him and patted her gently, soothing
her like a child awakened by thunder.

‘
You
saved my life,’ he said. ‘I never thanked you for that.’

‘
That
man!’ she said her voice muffled against his chest. ‘I hated him. I
hated him.’ Her shudders lessened, and he held her until he felt
her tears drying, her trembling stop. Her breathing became softer,
deeper, and he sensed small shiftings of her body against his own,
the delicate signals of woman to man. He took both her shoulders in
his hands and held her away at arm’s length. Her eyes were
luminous, deep and mysterious and faraway-looking.

‘
Go get
my clothes, Victoria,’ he told her, and she nodded without
speaking, deer-shy. She ran light-footedly out of the room and as
she went Angel damped down a curse of discontent. There were no
corners in his timetable for romantic interludes, and a dependent
woman was a ball and chain if a man was fighting for his life. Yet
after what she had told him, he knew he couldn’t abandon her,
although she had been no part of his plan until the moment she
pulled the triggers of the shotgun behind Yat Sen. He thought about
Hercules Nix, and what was left of his killer band. He thought of
their possible movements, their probable intentions. By the time
Victoria came back with his clothes bundled in front of her, Angel
had decided how to fight Hercules Nix. Then he set about getting
ready to do it.

In war, as in love, timing is
all.

If, along with timing, you are
gifted with luck by the gods, then the odds are in your favor.
Equally, luck withheld alters the odds against you. This day, for
the first time, Hercules Nix felt that his timing was bad, his luck
running sour, and experienced the first faint tendril touches of
apprehension. Prior to this day he had set such doubts scornfully
aside but now, as he led his men out of the Comanche village, he
could do so no longer. In spite of his promises, bribes, cajolings,
in spite of the assurances given by Koh-eet-senko, the Comanches
did not want to go hunting the fugitive white man. They wanted
the
squalid
comfort of their teepees, the agile giggling embraces of their
women, and nothing Nix could say or do would alter their decision.
Comanches, like all Indians, hunted and fought only when the mood
was upon them. They might ride several hundred miles with a raiding
party, only to back away from the skirmish line without warning or
explanation, and turn their pony’s head for home. No Indian
considered such an action either shameful or cowardly, although
many white men found it inexplicable. Indians understood that a man
might suddenly realize his medicine was bad, his luck soured, his
timing off. No tribal law decreed that he should stand and fight
and maybe die if his intuition, his guiding spirit, or some omen he
had spotted told him not to. This day, with their bellies full of
rotgut, bodies sated with sex and food and boasting, teepees
crawling with admiring squaws rummaging with excited jabber through
the plunder, there were few of Koh-eet-senko’s warriors willing to
climb aboard their ponies and slog about the valley, no matter what
the reward. After all, brother, a man can only carry one rifle and
one lance into battle. A man can only bed one woman at a time. A
man can only eat and drink his fill, live in one teepee at a time.
Why go to the trouble of catching up one’s horse, riding out into
the hard flat heat of the day, to do the white man’s work for him?
The whole tribe of
Hoh’ees,
all the Timber People to catch one fugitive white man?
Come, brother, there are the village girls, the tangy taste of
young puppy stew, the black bottles of firewater, and many stories
to tell. We’ll hunt and fight some other day.

So Nix rode out of the village with a
smaller force of warriors than he had bargained for. Koh-eet-senko
had kept his own promise, albeit with much grumbling and demands
for more booty. The Comanches were in vacation mood, laughing and
boasting about their sexual prowess the preceding night.

It took all of
Nix
’s iron
control not to lash out at them, but he knew that to do so would
simply result in their turning back and abandoning him. Right now
he needed them, so he bided his time and bit his tongue. He fed
Koh-eet-senko compliments until his own gorge rose, and after about
an hour of it, Koh-eet-senko dispatched an arrowhead of four
warriors to check along the bank of the river. The larger remnant
he led back to the swamp. The Comanches would check it out in no
time: their tracking skills would lay bare Angel’s tracks as if he
had painted them red. Comanche seek, Comanche find: there is no
escape from the hunters of the
Nermernuh,
Koh-eet-senko declaimed
grandly.

Withal, Nix still felt uneasy, out of
tune with his own confidence. He stifled his anger as the Comanches
raced their horses around, showing off in front of the stone-faced
white men, performing all sorts of incredible feats of
horsemanship, whooping and shouting and managing their animals with
splendid but pointless skill. The fact that they were raising more
dust than a herd of buffalo seemed not to matter to them, and when
Nix remonstrated with Koh-eet-senko, the Comanche leader raised
surprised eyebrows. Was Nix frightened that one man would see them?
What could that one man do, where could he run in the country of
the Comanche? Again Nix swallowed his anger, cursing his bad luck
and his bad timing, determined that in spite of them he would win
anyway. The gods smiled at that.

Nix
’s bad luck was Angel’s good fortune. His
timing was made perfect by the period of grace Nix’s dealings with
the Comanche gave him, and he used it to formidable effect. If good
fortune it was, then good fortune sent a soft soughing breeze into
the valley from the southwest that stirred the drooping trees
beside Nix’s deadly pool, and lifted small spirals of dust that ran
across the open ground like dying ghosts. His strength waxing as
the rest and the food restored it, Angel spent vital hours in the
room full of machinery behind the
hacienda,
familiarizing himself with the functions,
workings, and connections of the machines before he began to make
his alterations. Once he knew the inter-relationship between
machine and pump and huge, clumsy leaden battery, he set diligently
to work rephasing, rewiring, rearranging. His plan had to be
simple, for he did not know how much time he had. It also had to be
effective. Which meant it had to be brutal. When he was done, he
told Victoria to change her clothes and she worked alongside him
with shovel and crowbar until her soft hands were raw and bleeding,
until Angel felt that someone had been working on the base of his
spine with an ax.

Every half hour or so, he
stopped her and sent her to the watchtower to scan the open land to
the north for any sign of movement, a dust cloud, anything. His
purpose was twofold; to give her respite from the
backbreaking labor,
and to ensure that Nix did not run them down while they were out in
the open. There was some desperation in the way he worked, for he
did not know whether he could complete what he had to do, but by
the time the sun started its long slide down the western sky, the
outdoor work was done and there was still no sign of Hercules Nix
and his men. Now the two of them moved into the welcome shade of
the stockade to finish what needed finishing there. They were close
to the end of that when Victoria saw the spiral of dust to the
north.

The hunters were coming.

Now Angel took a five-gallon can
of kerosene and ran with it across the open land, about a quarter
of a mile angling southeast to where the first low spur of the
foothills marked the effective end of the scrubland and sparse, dry
grass. He gauged his own position carefully in relationship to the
smudge of dots beneath the dust on the horizon, and the wide-thrown
gates of the stockade. The wind was not strong, but it was more
than strong enough. He ran back now, splashing the coal oil in a
wide
swath
around him, on greasewood and sage-brush and brittle, brown grass.
Then, when he was back at the stockade gate, he fired the grass. A
low blue flame ran flickering away from his feet, turning to a
noise like the sudden exhalation of a gut shot horse, and all at
once the scrubland was on fire. An oily black cloud of smoke rose
angled to the sky, and the prairie grass and bushes curled, smoked,
sparked, and roared into yellow flame that reached along the ground
toward the north, greedy for more, fed by the steady breeze. Now
the smoke coiled in huge eddies toward the brassy sky, and the fire
advanced in a long line that stretched from the rocky wall of the
mountains on the southern edge of the valley to the reed-shadowed
edges of the man-made river. It sucked oxygen from the air and fed
greedily on it, making a huge, irresistible marching wall of flame
and smoke. Even behind the thick wall of logs, the heat was
unbearable, and Angel pulled Victoria back into the stockade, past
the twelve pounder which he had manhandled into a new position, and
up on the ramp it had formerly occupied. From there, through the
shifting screen of smoke and the rising, eddying blur of the heat
waves from the fire, he could see the hunters reacting to the
oncoming fire. It was not moving very fast, perhaps no more than
the speed of a running man. But it was inexorable, total,
unstoppable.

Ahead of the seeking tongues of fire
ran myriad small creatures: jackrabbit and kangaroo rat, desert fox
and skunk, quail and rattlesnake and owl, fleeing for
survival.

Angel watched the fire without
expression.

If it kept on its present
course, it would march right up to the edge of the wood in which
the Comanche encampment was pitched. It would probably fire the
trees: they would be as dry as tinder at this time of year. It
would certainly drive the Comanches out of their camp, and it might
well be that it would kill women, children, and old people as it
did. So be it. The weapon of the Comanche was total destruction and
ugly death, so they could not complain if it was turned against
them. He felt no pity, no sorrow, nothing. He just stood and
watched the flames and hoped that Nix would do what he wanted him
to do. What happened to the Indians was
irrelevant.