Victoria was up and dressed, sitting in the chair, waiting for nothing in particular.
‘Victoria,’ he said gently. ‘It’s all over now. I’ve made arrangements for us to leave tomorrow. Head for San Antonio and take a train from there to New Orleans. You said your father’s lawyer was in New Orleans, didn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ she said without interest. ‘New Orleans.’
‘Do you want something to eat?’
‘Yes.’
That evening, the sheriff’s wife, an apple-faced woman with the bright blue eyes of a child, brought them a cooked cold chicken and a bottle of dry white California wine she said she’d been saving for a special occasion.
‘Poor mite,’ she said, looking at Victoria. ‘She looks real peaked.’
It was obvious she wanted to stay and ask questions, but after a polite while Angel shooed her off like a chicken, and asked the desk clerk to lay a table for them in the dining room. The wine was sharp tasting and pleasant, and it brought some of the life back into Victoria’s eyes. She hardly touched any of the chicken, but absently sipped the wine as Angel kept topping her glass. When the clerk cleared away the dishes, her eyes were already cloudy with sleep, and by the time they got upstairs, it was all she could do to stay awake.
‘Frank,’ she said unexpectedly. ‘It’s so hard to find words—’
He touched her soft lips with a gentle forefinger, and shook his head. ‘Then don’t try,’ he said quietly. He opened the door to her room. ‘Just sleep. It will wait until tomorrow.’
‘Yes,’ she said. Her eyes were as wide as a ten-year-old’s on Christmas Eve. ‘Tomorrow.’ She rose on tiptoe and kissed his cheek, light as the touch of a snowflake. Then she went into the room and closed the door. Angel stood for a moment in the corridor, and then went into his own room. He didn’t give a damn for the conventions of Madura, or the clucks of its old ladies. If Victoria’s barriers cracked he wanted to be able to get to her quickly, and he had told the room clerk to leave the communicating door between the rooms unlocked.
‘You bet, Chief,’ the clerk had grinned, and Angel had restrained the urge to slap the leer off his pimply face. Instead he went over to the washstand and when the clerk held out his hand for the expected tip, Angel put the bar of soap in it.
‘What’s this, Chief?’ he asked, puzzled.
‘Take it downstairs,’ Angel suggested, ‘and wash your mind out with it.’
For a moment, the clerk looked as if he might retort, but then he saw the look in Angel’s eyes and decided to swallow the unspoken jibe. This stranger might be an ungrateful sonofa, but he also looked like the kind of ungrateful sonofa who’d kick your ass through your ear hole if you told him so. He backed out, and Angel smiled as he locked the door behind the narrow leer. He undressed now, grinning again at the recollection, and lay on the bed. His mind kept going back to the last moments in the hut at the mouth of the valley, Victoria with her hand on the lever, eyes like the vengeance of Kali. The black batteries had looked like the tombs of some forgotten civilization, she one of its reincarnated priestesses as she pulled the switch. There was a long, long silence of perhaps three seconds, and then a stuttering roll of sound, an interrupted thunder that flattened the eardrums for a moment and then passed like a soft sighing wind. Angel had stood, poised for an action there was no point now in taking, and watched as, slowly, slowly, seeming to shrink inside herself as she did it, Victoria had released her pent-up breath.
‘There,’ she had whispered. ‘There.’
Angel saw what was happening to her and he moved across the hut, his hand outstretched, some words of reassurance forming in his mind. She whirled around like a cat, her eyes blazing.
‘Keep away from me!’ she rasped. ‘Don’t you touch me!’
‘I wasn’t going to—’
‘Keep your consolation!’ she snapped, her voice as tight as a cello string. ‘I wanted to kill him, do you hear me?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I hear you. It’s all right.’
‘I’m glad,’ she shouted. ‘Glad, glad! I hope his black soul rots forever in Hell!’
He said no more then. It was as good an epitaph for Hercules Nix as any, and probably better than the man had deserved. He went out of there and got the horses, and when he came back she was standing staring out the window with the empty look she had had ever since. Fifteen minutes later they rode away without a backward glance. Smoke from the fire he had started belched from the door and windows of the hut. Within an hour it would be a charred ruin. The desert could have all that was left of the mad dream of Ernie Hecatt, alias Hercules Nix.
It was warm and close in the hotel room, but after a while, he slept. Her soft warmth awoke him, and he opened his eyes as she reached for him in the darkness, her face wet with tears, body heaving with sobs that would not break. Almost soundlessly she was saying ‘Oh, oh, oh, oh,’ over and over, and he knew the dam had finally cracked, knew now that she needed something strong and warm and solid to hang onto. It could be anyone, he told his body; it just happens I’m nearest. So he held her close and he rocked her as he would have rocked a small child afraid of the bogeyman. And as he did the small crack that had brought her seeking comfort widened and finally broke and she sobbed and sobbed as if she had seen the end of the world and had nobody to tell about it.
She cried like that for almost an hour, tears coming from her as if from some bottomless salty source, and then she sniffled, and stopped. She shivered slightly, and her skin turned cold and clammy to the touch. He reached over and drew a blanket up around her naked shoulders, folding her into it, and saying the useless, helpless words a man says to a weeping woman; there, there, never mind, it’s all right, there, there now. After a while she seemed to sleep, and he laid her softly on his pillow, easing his own body away from her. As if sensing his intent, she tightened her slender arms around him and muttered a sound that might have been ‘no.’ He made some more of the gentle shushing sounds, and lay alongside her on the bed, his body aching from the long, rhythmic hours of soothing, rocking. A faint paleness in the sky hinted at the coming dawn, and he felt the coolness of the desert breeze through the open window. He thought that afterward he slept a little, but he was never sure. What he remembered was her awakening slowly, warmth coming from her body, a slow sweet heat like a mist that enveloped him, and her slim bare arms sliding around his body as her soft sweet lips touched his face. There was one long moment of waiting, a moment when he rationalized and told himself that the affirmation of life is a primal force in all of us. There are innumerable stories of survivors of some awful disaster clinging together with a passion that springs from instinct and not affection, from the very depths of the being. It might be some kind of compulsion put in us by a knowing Nature to ensure the survival of the species, or nothing more than a desperate need to feel all the strong and reassuring thunders of life, the sharing of the body’s best gifts. It was not love and he knew it, but the moment came and went and with it went the will to draw away. After that there was only the long litheness of her, the sweet, scented depths of her, the quick, half-surprised inhalation of pleasure as they joined and the rising crescendo of their need for each other. Up into some dark night beyond the night, totally present in each other, completely absent from self, lovers and strangers simultaneously, they lived and then died the long, long moment that ended in a soft, slow curve of arriving back, silent and rewarded.
After a while, she started to move as if leaving, and he caught her arm. She turned her body back toward him, soft breasts warm and damp against his own moistened body.
‘Would you leave without saying a word?’ he said softly. T want to talk to you, get to know you now.’
‘It’s—all right,’ she said gently. ‘You don’t—have to.’
So she stayed and they talked until the dawn painted the window pink and then they slept. That day they smiled a lot as they packed, and rented a buggy to take them to San Antonio. From there they took a train to
New Orleans. Each day they were there the sadness left her a little, each day she became stronger, smiled more. There was a bloom on her like a fresh peach, a lightness in her step, a firmness to the touch of her. She drew the glances of men in the street, and laughed when Angel glared at them. They lived in an enclosed spectrum of each other, where clocks had no meaning and days had no name. They walked through the world inside a golden haze that excluded everyone else. They found an old restaurant in the Vieux Carrel with real lace tablecloths, old oil lamps, fine French cooking. They ate like castaways and drank chilled Sancerre that tasted of the stones of France. They walked hand in hand beneath wrought-iron balconies and listened to the sweet sad sound of the Negro music from the cellars. All their days were sunny and all their nights were cool and endless. They swam in the soft warm waters of the Gulf, and joined shameless bodies whenever it pleased them to do so. And then one day Victoria told him she was ready to leave New Orleans.
‘Good,’ he said, grinning. ‘Where are we going?’
‘No, Frank,’ she said. ‘I mean alone.’
‘Ah. You mean alone.’
What were you supposed to do, he thought. Kick over the table? Punch one of the attentive waiters? Weep or wail or gnash your teeth? She leaned across the table and touched his hand, her fingers like gossamer. He watched the lips that he remembered in hoyden abandon speak words that seemed unreal.
‘Darling,’ Victoria said. ‘You have to let me go now.’
‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Would you like to try to tell me why?’
She nodded, and he saw tears waiting to be spilled behind her eyes, too. She looked up at the ceiling and drew in a deep breath. Her breasts lifted beneath the thin cotton blouse. The long line of her sweet throat was golden brown from the sun, and somewhere in an echoing empty room in his mind someone said the words ‘never again.’
‘I love you, Frank,’ she whispered, and before he could reply, she put her fingers softly on his lips. ‘Before you make the standard required reply, let me say the rest of it. I love you. I love you very much, my dear, but if I walk away from you now, I think I can get over it. It will hurt for a while, but I could do it, and remember you as someone very special, someone I would think of fondly and who would always be very important to me ... if I go now. But if I stay—and I will stay if you ask me to—then I want all of it, Frank. The gold ring and the white dress, the house and the fat babies, everything. I’m that kind of woman, darling. I want that kind of man and that kind of life and I won’t settle for less. Do you understand?’
He nodded.
‘Then what is it to be?’
Her gaze was intent and searching, and there was a faint tremor of anticipation, or perhaps fear, around the corners of her mouth. He looked at her and she saw the answer and she smiled.
‘You are a goddamned fool, Frank Angel,’ she said softly.
Now in the shaded quiet of his apartment in the capital city, he heard her voice in the echoing empty room in his mind. She had left New Orleans the next day, and refused to allow him to see her off at the railroad depot. He didn’t know where she had gone, or what had happened to her, and he knew he was going to spend the rest of his life wondering whether he’d somehow let the right one, the one it was meant to be, get away. Never again, the voice said.
‘Shut up,’ he told it, and went into the other room. He poured himself a stiff drink from the bottle on the table. The whiskey tasted like molten gold, but it didn’t lift his dark mood. He turned and caught sight of himself in a mirror on the wall. He looked at his face for a long moment and then gave a rueful grin.
‘You’re a goddamned fool, Frank Angel,’ he told his reflection. The reflection didn’t reply. It probably knew that already.
STOP ANGEL!
ANGEL 8
By Frederick H. Christian
First Published by Sphere Books in 1974
Reprinted under the title Manhunt in Quemado in 2007
Copyright © 1974, 2007 by Frederick Nolan
Published by Piccadilly Publishing at Smashwords: January 2015.
Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader.
This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book
Series Editor: Ben Bridges
Text © Piccadilly Publishing
Published by Arrangement with the Author.
The Angel Series:
Find Angel!
Send Angel!
Trap Angel!
Hang Angel!
Hunt Angel!
Kill Angel!
Frame Angel!
Stop Angel!
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Stop Angel! (A Frank Angel Western Book 8) Page 16