Send Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #2) (4 page)

Besides, there were ranches between him and
there. The frown of concentration deepened between his eyes.
Somewhere ... his eyes flickered across the featureless waste ahead
of him . .. somewhere out there someone was waiting, ready to
ambush him, as soon as he came near the trap. And all Angel could
do was to ride into it. He kicked the horse into movement.

Angel rode south. He moved
alone through the immensity of the wilderness, a tiny speck against
the towering emptiness of the desert, quartering across a line
drawn due south, looking for the bed of the river he knew must be
somewhere in this area, a tributary of the Rio Blanco called the
Ruidoso, the Noisy River. Ahead of him, etched purple and black
against the sky, the Baranquillas tumbled up towards the white sky.
Angel knew that when he got further south he would be able to see
the three peaks that marked the cut between the twin ranges of the
mountains, the river pass through which he could head southeast for
Daranga, along the valley of the Blanco. He let the horse make its
own pace. And always as he rode, the grey eyes moved restlessly,
missing nothing. Jackrabbits hitch-kicked out of the mesquite ahead
of the plodding horse as the animal picked its way around the
cholla. Once the horse brushed its nose against one of the cactus
plants, tossing and snorting as the spines pricked its tender skin.
They called cholla jumping cactus: it seemed sometimes to leap
across the space between an animal and itself, planting those
deadly numbing spines in the skin. Kangaroo rats hopped panicked
from his path. Once he saw a sidewinder, flat head low and seeking,
moving in ungainly loops across a sandy open patch. He watched
especially for birds. Quail gobbled in the safety of sparse bushes,
but he never saw them rise. Sweat ran down his
forehead and into the collar of
his shirt; his body was wet with it, then a moment later as dry as
a bone as the sun leeched the moisture from his skin. He moved
relentlessly on into the wilderness.

The sun moved over in its
zenith, sliding slowly down towards its destiny in the west.
‘Come on,’ Angel
muttered once. His lips were thick and caked with alkali. The
horse’s head was hanging low. Two days without water was as much as
either of them could take, he thought. He pushed the tired animal
up a slight rise and then from the higher ground he saw the dark
line of trees about three or four miles away. The Ruidoso: that
must be it! He shook the reins. The horse pricked up its ears as
well.

‘
Could
be, hoss,’ Angel said. ‘Could be.’

The animal moved more quickly, almost as if
it could scent salvation. Lurching now and then, but moving more
quickly, the man and the animal were conscious now that there might
be water ahead. Even if the river were dry, Angel knew there would
be enough water below the ground to keep him and the horse
alive.

Almost an hour later, he headed
the horse down a shelving bank into the arroyo which in the brief
rainy season would carry the Ruidoso River. He almost fell from the
saddle, scrabbling at the sand with his bare hands, cursing the
stuff as it sifted through his fingers back into the shallow hole
he was digging. The horse snorted once as he dug, but Angel ignored
it, his whole mind focused on the task of getting down to where the
water might be. He was so involved in his task that he did not hear
them until the slight crack of a twig breaking behind him brought
him up on his knees, whirling to face their attack, but in that
moment they were on him and something slammed against his head and
he went down, face forward on the sand. He was not unconscious, and
he half rose to his knees again, his mind whirling with unformed
thoughts, reaching for the blurred figure he could see before his
face. Something smashed down on his forearm and he cried out in
anguish as the arm went completely numb. Once again, something
crashed against his head above the ear and he went
hurtling down into
an endless pit, spiraling, whirling, fluttering down like a leaf
from some very tall tree, never reaching bottom where the ultimate
blackness lay, some freak stubbornness keeping his mind still
clawing for consciousness. There was no pain when he felt the boot
grind his other arm, although he knew somewhere in his mind that he
was being hurt. Although he did not know it, his body obeyed the
frantic signals of his brain and he tried to get up, although he
was out on his feet, and he heard, as from some far place, a
rasping voice he seemed to recognize say: ‘Kill the bastard.’ Death
was very near; he could feel the fluttering of huge wings around
his heart, and yet his brain refused to accept it and his hand
moved again towards the sound. ‘Kill him!’ someone shouted in the
black-red mist of pain and he heard the boom of the shot like a
faraway explosion. Something unbelievable happened in his stomach
and chest and then he saw himself in a mental mirror as clearly as
if shaving, his face a pure skull of agony. The image receded and
he went down and down to the end of the black darkness. He groaned
once and then was still.

‘
Tough
bastard,’ Johnny Boot said, dispassionately. ‘Shore took a lot of
killin’.’

‘
Hold
on, Johnny,’ Mill said. They stood looking at the prone form in the
long-shadowed after-noon. Angel’s mouth opened; he
groaned.

Mill
’s tongue ran nervously along his
lips. He smoothed his pants legs with wet hands, then took a long
pull from a bottle he was holding. ‘I owe you somethin’, friend,’
he whispered.

‘
Let
it be, Willy,’ Boot said. ‘Come on, he’s finished.’

‘
No,’
Mill said. ‘Not quite.’ And with savage and quiet precision he
began to kick Angel’s body, picking the tenderest and most
vulnerable points, aiming carefully, poising his thick body and
striking with all his power. The first couple of times Angel
grunted from the depths of his unconsciousness. Once he opened his
mouth as if to groan, but a trickle of blood was all that emerged.
After that, there was only the ugly thudding sound of Mill’s kicks.
Boot stood to one side, a sickly expression on his face. It was a
long time before the fat man stopped.

There are deep recesses in the
human mind into which the spirit can retreat. Sometimes, if it
retreats too far, the return journey is impossible, and the shell
which the spirit still inhabits is taken somewhere and what it
contains is pronounced insane. Sometimes, in terrible illness, the
pain will cause a similar retreat, for the darkness is safe and
coming back means facing the agony that awaits. In such cases, a
man will often will himself over the black borderline into death;
or the physicians attending him will write on the charts they keep
to show that it is not their fault:
do not resuscitate.
The endless capabilities of the
human body are not measurable. There is a blackness beyond the
darkness of pain and close to death, and men have been there and
returned. Angel was in such a place.

Somewhere in that darkness he felt
something. He knew instinctively what it was and he knew that he
must move back towards the light. In whatever part of his brain the
decision was made, a battery of warnings was flashed by other parts
of his consciousness which warned him to stay where he was in the
safe blackness, quiet and undisturbed. The warnings spoke of the
awaiting pain and yet the faint spark that was life insisted that
he try. He knew that he must try and he came back in terrible fear
for then he knew that he must face the pain.

Even as he came up from where
he was he felt the pain start, but he kept on coming and the pain
came more strongly as he did but now his brain had identified the
sensation he had felt and he opened his eyes to see it, even as his
broken nostrils registered the rank carrion smell of the buzzard
sitting on the ground near his head, beady eyes alert, beak poised
for the first stabbing peck at his eyes. He drew a deep and ragged
breath and the waiting pains came together in a crescendo that made
him scream in agony and spiral back down into the blackness. It was
enough; his trailing scream startled the huge black bird, which
soared upwards in a tight circle, cackling in
panic, swooping to join a
screeching trio of its brothers on the whitened branches of a dead
iron-wood tree.

He felt as if he had been in
the blackness for a long time, but it was only a few minutes before
he opened his eyes again. Once more, the pain came; but this time
he was ready for it, knew it for the enemy it was. A sound emerged
from his mouth that might have been a curse or a prayer. He was
lying face down on the rock-strewn sand, and the sun was
brightening the arroyo. It was not hot. He thought about it for a
long time and then spoke. The word was without meaning, but what he
said was
‘morning.’ Then hearing came, and he heard the myriad buzz
of flies around the patch of sticky, half-dried blood beneath his
body. He heard the steady screech of the buzzards in the ironwood
tree.

Morning. He had lain there all
night. That coyotes had not ripped his body open he could only
attribute to the possibility that even during his deep
unconsciousness he had stirred, or groaned. Any movement at all
would have been enough to keep the cowardly predators away. But
they would not have gone far. He pictured them sitting at a safe
distance, tongues lolling, waiting. The buzzards screeched
monotonously.
‘Yes,’ he said to himself.

Getting his body turned over and levering
himself into a half-sitting position took him the best part of half
an hour, a half hour of the most excruciating agony. Head reeling,
no strength in his arms, he lay gasping on the ground as the sun
climbed up into the molten sky and seared his skin. Slowly he let
the signals come to his brain, noting them as dispassionately as a
surgeon.

His right arm was numb, the
wrist a puffy, swollen mass of purple and black bruises. Flexing
his fingers carefully, he awaited the screeching pain of broken
bone. None came. He nodded. Good. The effort had exhausted him. He
lay down again. Time passed, time without meaning. He hitched his
body around until he lay half curled on the ground and could see
his own body. With the stronger fingers of his left hand he
tore away the
blood-soaked shirt and forced himself to look at the wound in his
middle. He was afraid and he knew it. To be gunshot meant days of
blinding agony even if a man were near help. Out here ... he shut
his mind to that. It would have been easy then to lie back and let
the whole world slide away, let death rise in him like water at a
dam, slowly, lapping him in cold oblivion. All he had to do was let
go. Then the memory of the voice that he had heard come back to him
and he knew he remembered it. Johnny Boot! He thought carefully of
the man’s face, fixing it in his mind, sorting out the features the
way a drunken man will go through a bunch of keys. He saw Boot’s
face clearly; visualized him pulling the trigger, saying ‘Tough
bastard.’ Then he let the hatred seep slowly into him, growing,
tunneling along his veins, building to a force that made him move
deliberately for the first time. And then he knew that he wanted to
live. He would live to kill Boot He nodded idiotically as if
someone had spoken the words to him, and the feral smile of a wolf
touched his broken mouth. Yes, he told himself. He would live. Then
he started to work out what he had to do.

He lay quietly for another five
or ten minutes, although he had no real conception of time. He
closed his eyes and ears to everything else. Then he sat up again,
moving very slowly and carefully, testing himself against the
pains, moving only against the ones he knew he could control. He
took a longer look at the wound in his middle, forcing himself to
accept whatever he found. The bullet wound was low on the right
side, just below the ribcage and about three inches in. It had torn
through his body. He reached behind himself with the good left
hand, fingers finding the mush of the ragged exit hole. He traced
its
outlines; about the size of a spur rowel, slick with blood
but as far as he could tell not pumping blood steadily. A clean
wound. He was weak from loss of blood, but the bullet had gone
through him. He nodded, and looked around. Something moved in the
clumped ocotillo, and he went cold with fear. But then he saw the
grey black pelt and knew it was a coyote. The buzzards still
watched. He shook his head. ‘Not me, you don’t,’ the movement said.
His horse was gone. They had stripped him of his gunbelt and empty
gun, and taken his boots.
They?
Two of them ? What did he remember? Something.
There must have
been two of them. And that meant Mill was the other one.
Boot and
Mill. Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Blackstone had called
them. Yes.

He swung his legs around and
nearly blacked out again from the surge of pain that racked his
frame. Ribs, he thought. He moved both shoulders up and down, very
easily. Nothing grated, although the pain was intense. Maybe
nothing
’s
busted. He sure as hell hoped not. The thought of a broken rib end
spearing into his lung . . . no, he would not think about that,
either. His glance moved all around him. They had left nothing. He
was barefoot, a long way from anywhere, weaponless, without water,
busted up. He had not drunk anything for almost two days. He knew
there was little hope of surviving another. Only his iron
constitution had brought him through as far as this. Then he
remembered where he was. The arroyo! He turned on his left side and
began to scoop at the sand with his good hand. The pain raced
through him like liquid fire, but he ignored it, scooping away with
bleeding fingers at the gritty desert sand, widening the hole, the
earth beneath gradually becoming firmer, then after a while a shade
darker. He kept on with the intense determination of the totally
insane.

After more than an hour of
this, every drop of moisture in his body had been leeched out, and
he felt the soft dribble of blood from the wound in his side. But
in that moment, he felt the trickle of water on his fingers, and
into the hole he had dug a brown liquid seeped, about an inch
deep,
settling, even as he looked, back into the sand. He
scrabbled at the wet sand, pawing it up and away from him and the
water seeped slowly back. Ripping off his shirt he pushed it into
the hole and clamped the wet rags to his broken lips. The relief it
brought was almost sexual. He swabbed at his side with the wet
shirt, wiping away the blood, cleaning the entrance wound and the
larger exit hole. Then he padded the shirt and wedged it in his
belt so that the damp part was against the wound at the back. His
whole body and mind alert and refreshed by the few drops of liquid,
he resumed his digging. In another half hour, he had a
respectable-sized pool of brackish water. He drank sparingly. Too
much water now could kill him. He washed himself all over, soaking
as much of his clothing as he could with water, trying in the most
elementary way to replace the body fluids he had yielded to the
merciless sun. By late afternoon he was sitting up without trouble,
eased of the terrifying dryness which had made his tongue cleave to
the roof of his mouth, swollen and immovable.

‘
Now,’
he said to himself. You’re a big, tough man, Angel. Whip your
weight in wildcats. Strong men grow pale when you walk into the
room. OK, let’s see you stand up.’

When he was on his feet the
world reeled for a few moments and then his vision cleared. He had
felt something like a slick internal ball bearing moving, and knew
his wound had opened up again, and a moment later the soft trickle
of blood tickled his skin. He shrugged fatalistically. The bleeding
wasn
’t
heavy: he could stand it. How much blood had he lost altogether? No
way of knowing. What difference anyway? He might die if he started
traveling. He was dead for sure if he didn’t.

He tottered a few weak steps. God, he could
hardly walk! The sharp stones cut his feet through the socks. The
heat was terrible. The throbbing, continuous pain was as bad as it
had ever been. He found he was on his knees with no recollection of
having fallen. The buzzards sat in the ironwood tree and waited and
watched. They had all the time in the world.

Angel had a few things going
for him that Mill and Boot had not known. His years as the Justice
Department
’s
special investigator had taught him a thing or two about being left
weaponless. After his first few assignments he had visited the
Armorer in the echoing basement on the Tenth Street side of the
Justice building and explained his needs. It had taken a while to
get what he wanted made up, but the Armorer had been enthused with
the whole idea and had come up with one or two refinements of his
own. Inside Angel’s belt he had made a channel, and into that
channel threaded a yard of piano wire with two ordinary flat wooden
pegs at each end. Angel unthreaded the wire now, dangling it from
his good left arm. He then unclipped the belt buckle, which split
into two halves; between them was a wafer-thin metal square with
two razor sharp edges, made of Solingen steel. He found a fallen
branch about three feet long beneath the ironwood tree which was
more or less straight. Slitting it with the square of steel and
then putting the square into the slit, one corner pointing
outwards, he bound the wire around the neck of what was now his
makeshift spear. If he had had his boots, he would also have had
the pair of fine flat throwing knives which were stitched into the
sides. He felt better with some kind of weapon, even one as
primitive as the makeshift spear.

Using the spearhead he sliced strips from
his leather vest and made rough pads for his feet, tying them
tightly across the instep. He had no way to carry water. He scooped
down to the wetness in his waterhole and drank as much as he could
without feeling sick. It would have to do. He took a sighting on
the sun and struck out towards the south, following the course of
the Ruidoso.

Every step was painful. He disregarded the
pain. If it came so strong that it became a warning which he could
not disregard, then he would stop. Until then he would forget it,
forget everything like a wounded wolf which will kill itself to get
back to its lair. He knew something about the capability of the
human body: he had learned that in training with the Department. It
could go on a lot longer than the brain would admit. The brain
would suggest, persuade, seduce the body into believing it had
nothing more to give, but there was always more. Angel was
traveling on that now.

He went well for a while. But
the sun was still his enemy. It seared his skin, blistering his
unprotected shoulders and back. It leeched the water he had drunk
out of his system. The terrain conspired with the sun to tax him.
His feet dragged in the sandy dirt. Across the empty wilderness
Angel staggered on, repeating to himself in a maddened mumble the
name that kept him going, left foot and then right, left and right,
left right, Johnny Boot, Johnny Boot. The sun swung over and
started to slide down towards the mountains and still he went on at
his
wounded
snail’s pace. The leather which had protected his feet was ribboned
by the glass-edged sand, and his feet were torn and bleeding. He
needed food, water. He would have to stop soon. Sundown, he told
himself. Stop at sundown.

The shadow he cast grew
steadily longer and he knew it was time to start hunting. He left
the open desert and moved down into the dry arroyo of the Ruidoso,
seeking a certain kind of rock formation. His swollen eyes soon
found what he was seeking: a weather-scored, many-creviced pile of
rock on the far bank, with a flat and sandy patch around it. He
waited there, slumped and motionless, until the sun began to sink.
Soon, as he had expected, a sidewinder edged out from one of the
cracks and moved onto the sandy patch, setting out from the
coolness of its lair to hunt for its supper. It was about four feet
long and as thick as his wrist around the body. He let it get out
into the open and then moved between the snake and its rocky home.
The snake saw him and kept moving towards a clump of mesquite and
thin sagebrush, heading for shelter as he came after it He jabbed
the makeshift spear at it and missed; the sidewinder ignored the
weapon, moving steadily for the bushes. He lurched after it; if it
reached the bush it would coil and he would not be able to get in
close enough. He struck again and the razor-edged buckle sheared
off the snake
’s head. When it had stopped slashing about and lay still
he skinned the body, using the buckle. He knew how to make a fire
Indian fashion. It took him ten or fifteen minutes, but he soon had
the dried leaves smoldering and a puff brought the flame to life.
He piled more dried sage and ocotillo on the flame: it burned
strongly, making no smoke. The snake he speared on a sharpened
stick and cooked it, eating as much as his water-starved mouth
could manage. It was hard to salivate. The snake tasted a little
bit like tough chicken. It was food. He had eaten it before. A man
could always survive in the desert if he knew how. The Apaches
lived there. They had lived there long before the Spaniards came
with guns, horses, and the means to make fire. A man could learn if
he was willing to. Angel blessed the old Chiricahua scout who had
taught him these things. The food gave him strength. He went to the
river bed and tried again for water. He dug for a long time without
luck. Too many trees, he thought. He would try further downstream
in the morning. The fatigue rose in him like a black curtain and he
found a notch high up in the rocks where no snakes could climb, and
slept there. The night came, and with it the desert chill. He
shivered, teeth chattering like castanets, as the soft desert wind
scoured his unprotected skin. The sickness of his body came on him
in waves. His feet throbbed, the raw cuts shrieking for relief as
much as his blistered back and shoulders.