Stop Angel! (A Frank Angel Western Book 8) (4 page)

‘
Jesus!’

Jaime Lorenz scrambled backward,
flailing away and falling over as he clawed and bucked and wriggled
to get away from the alligator on whose back he had just almost
stepped. The beast turned idly in its muddy pit and regarded him
with one awful, baleful eye. It yawned, showing a terrible set of
razor-sharp teeth, and Lorenz shuddered. That mouth could take off
a man
’s leg
at the hip as clean as a wick-trimmer dousing a candle.

He moved away from the
’gator, shaking his
head in numbed surprise. Who would have dreamed that madman had put
alligators into the swamp? What other nightmares were there? Where
there was one there were certain to be more, and it was no damned
accident that they were here, any more than it was an accident that
the fish in the river were the kind they were, or the jeering signs
and the absence of waterholes were accidents. The whole valley was
a carefully engineered death trap, designed to kill the unwary
quarry as soon as it made its first mistake. If the human quarry
avoided mistakes, it made no difference. Nix and his hunting crew
killed it anyway. Which came first was only a question of how long
it took.

He looked at his torn hands and nodded
grimly.

He was damned if he was going to
sit around and wait for Hercules Nix to come and get him. Given
that decision, the next problem was what he could do to make it
more difficult. He decided it was time to stop running and start
fighting and the first thing he needed to do that was to make
something to fight with. Hercules Nix and his killer crew might be
going to kill him, but he was sure as hell going to hurt them while
they were doing it. He looked at his hands again and saw that they
were trembling slightly. Yes, he thought. The first one will
probably have to be with the hands. After that
—we’ll see. He sat at the foot
of the huge live oak and remembered his favorite line from
Cervantes.

‘
Well,
now,’ he said to himself. ‘There’s a remedy for everything except
death.’

Then he got up and went to meet the
killers.

One hundred days to the day of Jaime
Lorenz
’s
death in Nix’s valley—although there was no way he could have known
of the macabre anniversary—Frank Angel eased on foot through the
high peaks of the empty mountains east of the Valley of Death.
Autumn was already in the air, and there had been snow higher up,
but at this level it was as hot as the hinges of the gateway to
Hell. The sun beat down vertically on the faceless rocks of the
high sierra, piling heat into them which they bounced right back
into the face and body of the lone figure wending its way through
the broken pass. Sweating under the heavy backpack and the exertion
in this rarefied air, Angel moved doggedly on.

He had been trying to find a way
through the mountains for four days now. There was always a way
through, but first you had to find it. Sometimes you could spend
more time backtracking out of blind canyons than you did moving
forward, but sooner or later, inevitably, a determined man could
and would find the defile that climbed up to the higher peaks and
then slid alongside them and down to the other side. Angel was
determined enough, and patient enough. Even though, in the thin
mountain air, it was hard work just breathing, he kept plodding on,
exploring, probing the mountain
’s defenses, retreating when his path was finally
barred, thinking it through and then trying another way. He was
going to find a way into the Valley of Death, because whatever it
contained had killed Jaime Lorenz, and Jaime Lorenz came from an
elite corps of very hard-to-kill men. Which also meant that
reconnaissance was necessary for survival as well as
reckoning.

They knew Lorenz was dead after sixty
days.

They didn
’t need any message, any
notification, nor was there any. Indeed, it was the very absence of
any word that confirmed the fact that Lorenz was dead. All of the
department’s investigators had two cutoffs, no more. No matter
where you were, whatever you were engaged upon, you reported in as
often as possible, but in none but the most extreme cases did you
let the period between contacts exceed forty days. In extreme
cases, you could extend it to sixty, but no longer. If you did not
make contact in sixty days it was presumed—usually correctly—that
you were dead. Whereupon appropriate steps would be taken in
Washington.

The Attorney-General felt very
strongly about having any of his men killed. Very strongly indeed.
He took it as a personal affront to himself, as well as a slap in
the face for the government he served. In fact, it was said that he
felt so strongly about the killing of Lorenz that steam had been
observed coming out of his nostrils. It wasn
’t true—not quite—but it made the
point well. The Attorney-General made it plain that he wanted
whoever had killed Lorenz, and he wanted him so badly that he could
taste it in his whiskey. He had spent a very long time getting
Presidential approval for his special force of thinking
killing-machines, even longer finding the right men to train them.
He was proud of his investigators: they were a product of a
training course that weeded out any but the best, mentally and
physically. The men who became Special Investigators for the
Department of Justice were not only fully versed in the intricacies
of federal and territorial law, but highly skilled practitioners of
the martial arts. Physically tireless, matchless riders, superbly
trained in the uses of all weapons, they were damned hard men to
kill.

Which meant that Jaime
Lorenz
’s
killers were not to be taken on lightly. But taken on they most
certainly were to be, and when the Attorney-General sent for Frank
Angel, their conversation was not far short of perfunctory. Angel
knew what the Old Man wanted, and the Attorney-General knew that
Angel would do it. Or die trying to. They discussed what had to be
discussed, and Angel rose to leave.

‘
Don’t
take any chances, Frank,’ the Attorney-General had said as they
shook hands. They always shook hands. Neither knew why, but they
always did. Angel already had his grip outside the
Attorney-General’s office, a hack waiting at the door of the
building. He would take the train up to New York, and catch a
steamer from there to Galveston. As he told the Attorney-General,
he wanted to come up on Nix gradual-like. Which was when the older
man proffered his advice.

‘
You
know me,’ Angel grinned. ‘When did I ever take unnecessary
chances?’

‘
Get the
hell out of here,’ the Attorney-General grinned, ‘before I have
Amabel come in and make up a list!’

Amabel Rowe was the
Attorney-General
’s personal private secretary, and if there had been any
message in her usually merry blue eyes as she told him goodbye,
Angel hadn’t been able to read it. He wondered what she was doing
right now, and then grinned at the thought that she was probably
sitting in her office, in Washington, wondering what he was doing.
He sent her a telepathic message across the miles between. What I’m
doing is sweating, he told her.

Fall is a treacherous time in
the Sierras. The nights can freeze you, while during the day the
sun will fry off your skin. You have to wear clothes that will at
least keep you warm at night, yet not leech the moisture out of you
while you are on the move in daylight. Right now,
Angel
’s
woolen shirt and pants clung to him as if he had been hosed down,
and the chill of the cool breeze, when it came around the shoulder
of the mountain, was like a draft of clear cold water. He picked up
his pace, for that slight movement of air could only mean one
thing: he had found the way through the mountains. In a short
while, he found himself on a rocky ledge looking down into a long
valley already filling with the purple shadows of the afternoon. On
its far side, the Burro Mountains tumbled along the horizon from
the south on his left to the north on his right. Off on the edge of
the northern fall of the valley he could see a line of trees, dark
greens and browns contrasting with the dun flatness of the
scrubland below. Shading his eyes with his hands, he thought he
caught sight of a smoke smudge. He closed his eyes and opened them
again, and this time he realized that what he could see was
the
hacienda
that Davis had told him about. He could not make out any
detail at this distance, but he didn’t really need to. He knew the
layout of the house, and to a lesser extent the valley, as though
he had a map in front of him.

He
’d found Davis in Galveston.

Welsh Al Davis, one-timer master
builder, down and out and snoring like a pig in a Houston Street
fleabag, just where they
’d said he’d be. They’d also said that Al was a
hopeless drunk, as dependent on the bottle as a babe on its
mother’s milk. The story—which Angel pieced together from two dozen
men, a bit at a time—was that Welsh Al had gone down on the border
someplace, building a
hacienda
for some got-rocks rancher. He’d come back with
more money than Croesus, and with whatever he’d formerly been using
for a backbone quite obviously removed. Welsh Al had a good
reputation and a good business before he went down Mexico way, but
he came back like a jigsaw with some of the pieces missing. His
friends rallied around, tried to help out, but Al would have none
of it. In short order he drank his way through his share of the
business, his frame house on A Avenue in Galveston, his government
bonds, his savings, and finally his loving and much put-upon wife.
She ran off with a drummer when Al was so far over the hill that
nothing could help him. Whatever it was he was trying to drown,
folks said, there sure as hell didn’t seem to be enough whiskey in
Texas to do the job. Or maybe, as one wit drily remarked, the
damned ghost could swim.

By the time Angel got to him,
Welsh Al was seeing little green things on the walls, and he would
have sold the veritable body of Christ for the price of a drink.
Nevertheless, he was terrified of telling Angel the answers to his
questions. He laid a trembling hand on Angel
’s forearm and begged him to keep
secret the source of his information, begged him never to reveal
how he had learned any of the secrets of Hercules Nix. Angel had
gravely given his promise, knowing it wasn’t worth a tinker’s
curse. As soon as Welsh Al got his belly full of tonsil-paint
again, he himself would be telling anyone who’d listen. Angel was
not inclined to believe that Hercules Nix had any spies in
Galveston, although it mattered less than nothing if he had. He had
never used his own name. All Nix would ever learn, if anyone asked,
was that someone was poking about, someone talked to Welsh Al.
There was no way for Angel to know that within two hours of his
leaving Galveston, Welsh Al was found in an alley off Skid Row with
his throat cut, or that Hercules Nix knew full well who it was that
was asking questions about his hidden valley.

So Angel stood now on the crest
of the mountain and gazed with reflective eyes at Hercules
Nix
’s
kingdom. He knew all about the
hacienda
with its fort-like stockade, its interior
defenses. He knew about the chromium steel bars on the windows,
made of the same metal that James Eads had specified in the
building of the bridge across the Mississippi at St. Louis. He knew
about the two-inch-thick doors of solid oak lined with the same
metal, and the reinforced concrete walls—faced with soft local
stone to mask their harshness—built to the specifications of the
German, Wayss. He knew the rough general topography of the valley
in which the
hacienda
lay. He would have been appalled if he had known how little
he actually knew but even so, it was a damned sight more than Jaime
Lorenz had known. Had Lorenz found the place, or had they taken him
and brought him in here? He might find that out soon.

The land below looked dry,
burned, barren. He could see no trails. He headed downhill, picking
up speed as the heat went out of the sun and the slope ahead of him
steepened. Another hour found him on the valley floor, moving
northward along the wall of the San Miguels, heading for a long
jutting spur of rock that pointed westward toward the sheltering
trees he could see on the horizon. He planned to make a base among
them, foraying outward to explore the valley, familiarize himself
with Nix
’s
domain. From a distance he looked like some small creature, antlike
on the massive scale of the mesas.

In the lookout platform on the
northeastern corner of the stockade, Hercules Nix lowered the
powerful telescope through which he had been watching
Angel
’s
progress.

‘
Looks
like he’s heading for the forest,’ Elliott remarked.

‘
Yes,’
Nix mused. ‘Are any of The People there?’

‘
Mostly
women an’ kids,’ Elliott replied. ‘The men are off raidin’. As
usual.’

‘
Good,’
Nix smiled. ‘We don’t want anything—untoward—happening to our
Angel. Not just yet, anyway.’

‘
How
long you aimin’ to let him run round out thar, anyways?’ Elliott
asked. He was puzzled by Nix’s curiously untypical reaction to the
appearance of this intruder who had not only found a new way into
the valley, but was being given its freedom. Normally, no matter
where or how the perimeter had been breached, the appearance of any
white or Mexican in the valley was the signal for Elliott and his
men to be ordered out. They were not permitted to return to the
stockade until the interloper had been run down and
captured.