Avenging Angel

by Rex Burns

  Zenas led them silently through the house and out the front door toward their Jeep. He stood casually in the softening light, a clear target for any sniper who might be working toward them from one of the surrounding cliffs. “When you come back, come up the back way past the outhouse. I’ll have the dogs penned up, but don’t try to come in until you get an answer to your signal.”

  “All right,” said Tice. “Be about an hour, hour and a half.”

  “I’ll be here,” he said laconically, and without another word turned back to the house, whose windows glowed more brightly in the dusk that rose from the canyon floor.

  “Did he tell you where his family’s hidden?” Wager asked.

  “No. But I can guess.” Tice steered over a rough ledge of rock lifting like a spine across the dirt road. “There’s three or four big canyons downriver a couple miles. My guess is he’s got them scattered out there.” He added, “That’s probably Willis’s guess, too, if this little trick don’t fool him. I hope to God this trick works.”

  “Those two kids,” said Wager, “they make it look real. But they sure are young.”

  “They can pull a trigger if they have to. Things work out, they won’t have to.”

  Wager looked over his shoulder at the ranch below, a cluster of pale lights in the dark bank of trees. A plume of smoke rose from the chimney against the clear green of the desert evening. The wind had hesitated again and the smoke stood like a ghostly flagpole against the sky. “Did he leave his oldest sons on guard there?”

  “Yes. And I didn’t try to talk him out of that. If they hear shooting up here most of them are supposed to move upriver and close off the west side. If the shooting starts down there we run like sonsafbitches and try to save whoever we can.”

  “How far away is it?”

  “About a half hour if you walk.”

  A lot of people could be killed in a half hour. “How many guns does he have down there?”

  “Six.”

  So if Willis didn’t split his people he would outnumber either group of defenders. “It’s got to work,” said Wager.

  “Yep,” said Tice.

  Gradually, the headlights became stronger, picking out boulders tumbled at the roadside and then gliding past them to fall away into the dark above the sandy track. The main road swung into the headlights, leading uphill as the Jeep ground and lurched through the sand. To the south a faint orange glow stuttered a moment, then turned black again as a thunderstorm built up over the mountains a hundred miles distant. A minute or two later another flicker, silent as distant artillery, answered from a different corner of the horizon.

  “Late moon tonight. Won’t be up before twelve, one o’clock.”

  In Vietnam, when the patrols had rotated around to his platoon, Sergeant Wager had felt this same sense of suspension, as if he were cut off from both past and future. That’s how it had been when everything was ready and there was nothing to do except wait: a feeling like the one he had now—separate, tightly held, curiously relaxed.

  “I reckon this is far enough.” Tice flipped off the lights and drove a hundred or so more yards down the gray track before turning from the road. “We can hide the Jeep in this ravine. It’ll be pretty much out of sight come light.”

  “Fine.”

  The desert air, cooling quickly, was especially sharp after the searing heat of the day. Wager pulled on the dark brown uniform jacket he had been loaned and snapped the cuffs. Without wasting words, the two men took their rifles out of the Jeep and began to trudge back down the road into the black reaches of the canyon.

  CHAPTER 11

  THEY HEARD THE music before the farmhouse lights winked through the notch. Following the calm of the long, green twilight, the awakened breeze’s restless shiftings carried the thin wail of a fiddle first from one corner of the rocky canyon, then from another.

  “That noise doesn’t soothe any savage beast I know of,” murmured Wager.

  Tice grunted. “Mormons like their music. Zenas is probably doing what they do every night—having some music, praying, and then going to bed.”

  “Beats watching television.”

  “It does that. Especially if you don’t have electricity.”

  Tice led away from the road and along a trail of dirt that glimmered between dark sandstone blocks tumbled from the cliffs above. They gradually worked their way into the shelter of the black trees bordering the river and then toward the rear of the farmhouse. By the time they drew near, the music had stopped. One by one, the glowing windows darkened until only the back of the house showed any lights. Pausing a stone’s throw away, the sheriff folded his hands into a hollow fist and blew softly on his bent thumbs; the furry whistle, like the call of an owl, echoed through the rustling leaves around them.

  He blew a second time.

  The kitchen lights went out; a single window upstairs gleamed yellow behind breeze-ruffled curtains.

  Wager heard it first, a faint hissing between clamped teeth, then he saw the stubby shadow dart and pause and dart again from the bulky shape of the house.

  “Over here,” he whispered.

  The boy, panting lightly with excitement, sprinted to them. “Pa says follow me. Stay low.”

  They moved cautiously in a zigzag pattern from shadow to bush, finally gliding along the rough stone walls to a dim corner where a window stood open.

  “Pa says come in this way,” the boy whispered, and slithered quickly up to the flat sill.

  Wager followed, the stones warm beneath his gripping fingers. Tice handed him the rifles, and, stifling a heavy grunt, hauled himself over the ledge with a relieved sigh, then rested a moment in the dark room to catch his breath. “Where’s your pa?” he asked softly.

  “He’s upstairs. Seeing to Aunt Miriam.”

  “Seeing to her?”

  The boy’s grin could be sensed in the dark. “It’s her turn,” he whispered. “She told him she was the first and if the Lord willed that she be the last, it was up to Pa to abide the Lord’s will.”

  Tice muttered something indecipherable.

  “Where’s your brother?” asked Wager.

  “Taking stuff out to the root cellar. Pictures and stuff. You really think the Antichrist is coming tonight?”

  “There’s a good chance,” Wager said.

  “Gol’!”

  After a while they heard a creak on the stair and Zenas’s hushed voice followed from somewhere in the black house. “Daniel? You, Daniel!”

  “Here, Pa. I got them.”

  “All right. You let the dogs loose, and then you and Ezra go upstairs. You remember where you’re supposed to stay?”

  “Yes, Pa.”

  “Good, son. The Lord’s blessing and mine are with you both.”

  “Thank you, Pa.” The short shadow scurried excitedly through the dark room to the corner window and in a blink dropped out of sight. A moment later the men heard the thumping patter of animal feet and a happy snuffling in the outside night.

  “There’s apple juice and bread set out if you want it.”

  “I am thirsty,” Tice told him. “I reckon you ought to be, too.”

  Zenas did not answer, and they settled down to wait in the dark, silent house.

  As the sheriff had said, the moon came up between midnight and one. It wasn’t Wager’s watch, but he lay awake on a blanket folded on the bare floor of the dining room and looked at the pale light grow stronger through the restless trees to the west. After uncountable minutes the moon cleared the eastern lip of the canyon and reflected brightly off the rock walls behind the trees. But the canyon shadow still sheltered the house and the grove, and the glow made the darkness covering them seem even thicker.

  In the quiet of the rooms, the sense of suspension returned to Wager. Reaching a finger under the pad of gauze, he gently pressed the wounded eye to feel for soreness. There was an answering pulse to the weight of his finger, a reminder of the flesh. It brought Wager back to the puzzling question of the diff
erences between the angel deaths in Denver and those in Loma Vista. But despite the different circumstances or causes, the same angel appeared. An exact copy of the angel of death. Of vengeance. Of righteous murder. Yet why Mueller and his worthless land that Carmen Gallegos had paid so much for?

  Sleepless, he lay and turned the different parts over in his mind. Mueller’s ranch, and that Carmen Louisa Gallegos that nobody could find. Kruse’s family disappearing, and probably here at Zenas’s farm. The break-in at Orrin’s office. The slaughtered Beauchamps. It had to make sense. Somehow it had to make sense.

  Sometime after two, when he had slid into that floating area between sleep and waking, Wager heard a board creak beneath his head, and an instant later a hand pressed his shoulder.

  “I’m awake,” he whispered.

  Tice’s lurching breath whispered back. “Zenas heard something around the outbuildings. He says the goats are getting upset about something.”

  Wager rolled to his feet and went quickly to the window in the kitchen. Beyond the rusty screen the windy night was filled with the sounds of motion: the rattle and hiss of leaves, the toss of the shallow river over its rocky bed, the hum of insects. But that was all he heard. The moonlight had dimmed and had dropped lower down the far wall, and he strained his good eye for any movement against its glow. “Is he out there?” Wager murmured.

  “No. He’s over by the front door.”

  Through the dry rustle of the leaves he heard the leaden clank of an animal’s bell. The dogs were still silent; Wager didn’t see how anyone could creep up to the farmhouse without waking one of those dogs into hysterical yapping. Behind him he sensed more than heard Tice’s figure glide away through the dark house to peer and listen at one of the other windows. Then Wager thought he saw something. Blinking his eye, he pressed against the screen and shifted his gaze slightly from side to side to make the best use of his off-center vision. It was a little trick he’d learned along the DMZ and it had later saved his tail more than once in Vietnam. He hoped it worked with just one eye. Holding his breath, he peered intently at the humanlike shadows of trees and shrubs dim in the moonglow.

  There.

  Wager saw it this time.

  A black, humped shadow sprinted half a dozen steps across a background of moonlit river, then silently blended with the frayed blackness of the bushes.

  “Tice!” Wager eased back from the window and hissed the man’s name as loudly as he dared. “Tice—they’re coming in!”

  No answer.

  Wager groped through the unfamiliar room toward the parlor where Zenas was supposed to be. But before he reached it, he heard a scratching at the kitchen door, then a metallic click and the dry slide of the lock’s metal tongue. Then he saw the pale square of the door slowly begin to swing open.

  Stifling his breath, Wager eased the safety off his Star PD and knelt to brace his arm across his thigh. The door swung back steadily to show an empty square of moonglow. He leveled the pistol and waited. The sound came before he saw anything: the cautious slipping of a body across the low sill, the hesitant silence of an invisible hand probing ahead in the dark. Then he saw the darkness at the bottom of the doorway move, and the ill-formed shadow of a figure crawled in. The shape paused and listened, and Wager hoped that his kneeling outline, not ten feet from the peering man, blended into the other shadows like one more chair. The shape rose slowly beside the open door, and Wager could make out the outline of a head and shoulders. He heard a slight rustle and a moment later the tiny, sharp gleam of a pen-light winked twice toward the trees.

  It took maybe five seconds. Through the wind came the muffled thud of heels, and a line of dark figures too blurred to count crossed the small patch of moonlight just beyond the kitchen. He let the first two or three enter, their panting breath stifled and movements clumsily cautious in the dark. Then he squeezed the trigger and dove for the doorway leading to the dining room.

  The muzzle flash stripped the shadows from a half-dozen men crowding into the room and gleamed orange against their bulging eyes. Wager clearly saw the nearest one, a figure with a mud-smeared face and a chest-length gray beard. The figure started to swing a long-barreled revolver even as the shock of the pistol round jerked his mouth open into a startled gape. Then a shotgun exploded in the close room, its blast hot and deafening, and he felt the wind from a heavy lead plug whip across the back of his neck as he dove. Kicking the door shut and blinking frantically to clear the muzzle glare from his eyes, Wager rolled into a tangle of chairs as the shotgun’s second barrel blasted through the wood panels to send splinters whining across the table over his head. He fired two quick rounds low at the door and rolled again, banging his head on the table leg to escape an answering volley that filled the length of the black room with the thudding crackle of slugs. Somewhere behind him he heard Tice’s voice shout something, and a rifle, numbingly loud, boomed from the hallway toward the kitchen. Wager’s rifle had been sent spinning from his side, but he had no time to grope for it now. The close muzzle blasts were like a furious wind that pressed him flat against the wooden floor behind the thin shelter of the overturned table.

  “Outside!” Tice was shouting, “Outside!” And then Wager heard it, the clump of sprinting boots and the crash of breaking glass as men ran from the kitchen to circle around through the windows. One shadow bobbed just over Wager’s head and he snapped a quick shot at it with his pistol. The blast and shattering glass almost covered the man’s howl. A flicker of orange rifle fire lit the front parlor and Zenas’s rifle boomed an answer. Wager emptied his clip into the splintered kitchen door, ripping it off its hinges as bullets from an automatic thundered past him, and he scuttled and rolled frantically toward the stairs. Trying to dodge among the flickering shadows, he fumbled for a new clip to jam into his pistol while he yanked himself around a door frame and lay gasping and suddenly cold in his own sweat.

  Beside him a rifle fired-pumped-fired-pumped-fired as Tice, his bulk wedged into a corner of the hallway, covered Wager’s desperate, sprinting crawl.

  Then silence.

  It felt like silence—his ears still roared and tingled, but the hot concussions of the automatic weapon did not punch against his flesh, and the sting of burning powder no longer seared his weeping eye.

  “You okay Wager?” panted Tice. “Wager?”

  “Yeah. You?”

  “Gut shot.”

  Wager crawled to the shadow looming in the corner. “How bad?”

  “Can’t tell. I’m still numb.”

  Zenas’s rifle suddenly fired again and, from outside, an answering barrage from several rifles splattered slugs against the groaning stones of the house. A shatter and a flash lit the parlor; Zenas yelled “Fire,” and a voice in the dark howled, “That’s him—the Judas-devil!—get him!” Then gunfire blasted over the voices.

  “Call in the deputies!”

  “Can’t.” Tice pushed the radio across the floor to Wager. “Broke—shot.”

  “Goddamn!” Running blindly, Wager took the stairs two at a time, calling out “Don’t shoot—I’m the cop!” toward the two frightened boys he knew to be huddled somewhere in the blackness of the second floor, their shotguns aimed toward the sound of his shoes. Below, the firing had started again, this time with less frantic intensity. It settled into measured explosions designed to keep them pinned down until the flames did their work or the people coming in through the kitchen could hunt them down one by one. Smoke followed Wager, unseen but stinging in his nose, and he fumbled through the unfamiliar hall for a door that would lead to a window. His fingers brushed the panels and found a knob. He twisted and pushed, but it was locked. And no doubt one of the boys—or maybe the woman—crouched across the room with a gun, ready to blow away the first figure who broke through. He slid down the wall to the next door, finding it open and seeing the pale rectangle of window in the far side. Banging his shins against the crowded bedsteads, he fumbled to the window and stood aside to aim his pistol at the stars. H
e hoped to hell the deputies would guess what he meant. He squeezed off three measured rounds. The weak sound of his pistol made mild pops against the heavier rifle fire, and from the trees below came the red flash and scattered crackle of buckshot aimed up at his window. Wager groped his way back toward the stairs through the thickening smoke of the hallway, where now a dim and pulsing glow began to tint the walls.

  “Ezra?” Wager hissed. “David … where in hell are you?”

  “It’s Daniel,” answered a shaking whisper. “They’re shooting down our whole house! It’s awful—they’re shooting down our whole house—where’s Pa?”

  “He’s all right—he’s okay. Where in hell’s your brother?”

  “Down here. He’s crying. You shouldn’t cuss. God won’t like it.” The voice trembled again. “God won’t like it and we need Him!”

  Praying wouldn’t help either. “It’ll be all right, Daniel. You’re a big boy—you look after your brother. Tell him your pa’s all right. Listen: Is there a way out of here? Can you get down some way?”

  “Yessir.” The voice steadied a bit. “Pa put a rope ladder in the big bedroom. In case of fire.”

  “Good. You get your brother and your mother and go in there. Stay there until you can’t stay any longer, and then get out—fast. By that time the deputies ought to be here.” Maybe. At least it was a chance. A better chance than the Beauchamp kids had against that blood-smeared toilet bowl.

  “She’s not our ma, she’s our aunt.”

  “Just do it, damn it!”

  “Yessir.” The figure ran to the locked door and knocked softly.

  Wager started down the dimly lit stairwell, blinking against the acrid smoke and feeling his way along the smooth wall, pistol flicking back and forth in front of him.