‘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.
‘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.
Chapter Seventeen
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 c
an 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.
Koh-eet-senko and his warriors were the first to see the smoke and recognize its source. Every prairie-savvy rider knows that the only way to fight a running prairie fire is to get the hell away from it, and there are no more prairie-savvy riders than the Comanches. They knew, even if Nix’s men did not, that a slight increase in the strength of the wind would send those flames searing across the land at the speed of a galloping horse. They were far too much realists to take the chance of that. Forgetting the promised rewards, forgetting the fugitive whose tracks they had found, forgetting everything except the need to get their families and their possessions out of the path of the fire, the Comanche warriors racked the heads of their ponies around and streamed away in the direction of the encampment. Behind them, in front of Nix and his deserted riders, the long line of flames marched on.
Nix stilled his frightened, curveting horse, cursing the fleeing Indians, cursing the advancing flames and his own luck until he ran out of curses and stopped, realizing the folly of cursing what was beyond his or any man’s control. This fire was no accident. It was Angel, and that meant Angel had seen them and knew they were coming. It meant other things, too. It meant the man had somehow gained access to the stockade. How he had done so without being killed by Yat Sen, Hercules Nix could not imagine. Yet it looked as if there was no other explanation, which in turn meant that somehow, Angel had killed the Oriental, for Nix knew that Yat Sen would never have let the American live.
‘Boss?’ Des Elliott said anxiously. ‘That fire is gettin’ awful damned close.’
Nix looke
d up, shaking off thoughts of doom. Elliott was right. The flames were noticeably nearer, and the sky was filled with tiny floating bits of burned grass that fell like black snow. The flames were already close to the tree line below the Comanche camp, and Nix thought he could see moving dots amid the billowing smoke as the Indians fled the relentless fire. He mantled himself with determination. If Angel had thought the firing of the land a masterstroke, he might yet find it a two-edged one. He turned to Dooley Watson.
‘You!’ he snapped. ‘Get over there, to the Comanche camp. Find Koh-eet-senko. Tell him that the man who started the fire is at the stockade. Tell him I said if he wants vengeance, to meet me across the river at the dry ford. Tell him I said if we take the man, he can have him. He can do whatever he likes with him. Tell him that!’
‘You think he’ll listen?’ Watson asked dubiously.
‘He’ll listen!’ Nix shouted, putting on a confident face he didn’t truly believe in. ‘He’ll be as mad as a hornet. His horses will all be stampeded. He’s lost his camp, his possessions, all his plunder from the raid. Probably a few of his people as well. He’ll want revenge for that, so we’ll tell him he can have our Angel!’
‘But I thought you—?’ Elliott said.
‘Of course,’ Nix said. ‘But we won’t tell that black-faced bastard that, will we?’
Elliott grinned and as he did, Nix slapped Watson’s horse across the haunch. The animal jumped into a run, and thundered off at a tangent toward the Comanche camp. Nix nodded, as if satisfied.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘We’ll pull back across the river. Wait for Koh-eet-senko. Then with him, or without him, we hit the hacienda. With everything we’ve got!’
‘You what?’ Elliott said, surprised. ‘Hit the hacienda?’
‘Yes!’ Nix said, his voice rising to a shout. ‘That’s where he is, so that’s where we’ll take him. This time we’re not going to mess it up! This time we’re going to stop Angel—dead!’
Stop Angel! (A Frank Angel Western Book 8) Page 12