Stop Angel! (A Frank Angel Western Book 8) (2 page)

‘
Of
course,’ the Attorney-General said. ‘That’s why you’re using a
stick.’

‘
Hell,’
Angel argued. ‘I’m using a stick because your damned quack
downstairs insisted I use it.’

‘
Hmm,’
said the older man, not really listening.

‘
Don’t
confuse me with the facts,’ Angel said. ‘I’ve already made up my
mind.’

The Attorney-General looked up,
as though Angel
’s sardonic remark had disturbed a train of thought. Then
he nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Lorenz goes.’

Angel shrugged. He knew better
than to argue. When the Old Man had made a decision, further
discussion was academic. He couldn
’t argue with the Old Man’s choice,
either. Jaime Lorenz was a good man, one of the best in the
department. He also had the advantage of being Spanish-American,
which would be a useful plus in certain parts of Texas.

‘
When
does he leave?’ he asked.

‘
Tomorrow.’

‘
You
mind if I take another look at that report?’

The Attorney-General pushed a slim
manila folder across his desk toward Angel. He smiled to himself as
he did so. His top Special Investigator might be a fool for
trouble, but he was without question the best man in the
department.

Even though he was still limping
from the wound that the fugitive Magruder had put into his thigh a
second before Angel had broken the arm holding the rifle, he was
already itching to be back in the field. The Attorney-General knew
that prolonged sojourns in the capital held few attractions for the
tall man sitting opposite him. He had a fairly shrewd idea what
those attractions were, as well, but he didn
’t air them. The relationship between
his personal private secretary, Amabel Rowe, and his Chief Special
Investigator was their own concern—mostly. His own damned trouble
was that he liked having Angel around. It was good to talk over
your problems with a man you knew you could utterly trust, a man
who’d back you all the way down the line. There weren’t many like
that in Washington. Damned few anyplace else, come to that, he
thought.

Frank Angel read once again the
two-page
handwritten report of Special Investigator Harker Nettery,
who had heard something he felt worth transmitting to his chief in
Washington. It might be nothing: a rumor amplified in the telling
along the owlhoot trail. On the other hand, it might be true, in
which case the department should know and would act. The gist of
the report was that there was a place on the Texas-Mexico border,
somewhere around the Quemado area, where an endless supply of
repeating rifles and other guns was available to bandits, Indian
raiders, or
Comancheros
seeking to do business with both. The strange thing,
Nettery said, was that no one would talk about exactly where it
was, or who owned it. The Mexicans, he reported, crossed themselves
when they spoke of the place, which they said was the home of the
Devil himself. They called it
Valle del Muerto,
the Valley of Death. They said many of
their people had died building it. Those who had survived would not
speak of it. Rumor had it that anyone who started poking around
asking about the place was liable to wind up dead, as was anyone
who went searching for it or trying to penetrate the secrets of its
owner. Nettery had come up with a name: the Valley of Death was
owned by someone called Nix. Nettery added diffidently that he
realized it was all hearsay and speculation, two commodities not in
high regard at the department. He would have refrained from
reporting had it not been for the case of a young Englishman named
John Henry Tyrrell. Tyrrell had come to Texas from England,
bringing enough money to buy land and stock for a ranch near the
town of Madura. He was also planning to build a general store and
open a bank there. He made a buying trip to St. Louis and while he
was away, Comanches attacked his embryonic ranch, slaughtered his
stock, and cut three of the men he’d hired to ribbons. A fourth
survived long enough to tell Tyrrell that the Indians had been
using Winchester repeaters of the very latest type, and Tyrrell got
damned good and mad. He was neither blind nor a fool. Indians could
only get that kind of firepower from white men, and Tyrrell swore
that as God was his judge he would find the man who was supplying
them. He had heard about Nix, and his storied valley, and he went
out looking for both. He made no secret of his scorn for such
childishness, or for those who feared it; when he left
Madura—despite the advice of wiser heads who suggested caution, and
the wisdom of waiting until the U.S. Marshal could be called into
the case—everyone in the town knew that he was planning to find
Nix, stick the barrel of a six-gun up Nix’s nose, and tell him that
if he didn’t quit trading with the Comanch’, he, John Henry
Tyrrell, was going to spend every penny of his not-inconsiderable
family fortune and every ounce of his undeniable energy to ensure
that Nix went to prison for the rest of his damned, unnatural
life.

Nobody ever saw him again.

The Tyrrell family in England,
which was both rich and landed, chose not to accept the verdict of
a dirty little town no more than a wide spot in the road that John
Henry Tyrrell had bitten off considerably more than he could
digest. They wrote
to Her Majesty Queen Victoria’s Foreign Secretary, the Right
Honorable William Ewart Gladstone, requesting him to stir his
Liverpudlian stumps. A request from such as the Tyrrells was as a
command from elsewhere, and Gladstone took immediate action,
writing to his friend the Secretary of State in Washington. State,
knowing a hot potato when it saw one, had passed Gladstone’s letter
along to the Attorney-General like a shot. It married up neatly
with Nettery’s diffident information, and that was why Jaime Lorenz
was packing his bags right now with a ticket in his pocket for the
train up to New York, the steamer to Albany, and the Union Pacific
to St. Louis. After a brief investigative halt there, he’d head on
down to Texas.

‘
Funny
name,’ Angel mused. ‘Nix.’

‘
Dime-novel stuff,’ the Attorney-General snorted.
‘Playacting.’

‘
Nix.’
Angel repeated, almost reflectively. ‘Nothing.’

If it was perhaps the dime-novel
stuff the Attorney-General said it was, it was damned effective for
all that. It was the kind of name that would strike fear into the
hearts of simple Mexican peasants, the kind of name that brutish
frontier hardcases would remember. Yet it was too striking. Men
took an alias to hide their identity, not to flaunt it. A man used
another name to lose pursuers, or conceal their tracks, not so that
those who heard it would never forget it. He laid down the dossier
with a sigh, because it had all the hallmarks of a damned
interesting case. He
’d have liked to handle it himself, but the Old Man had
already vetoed that.

‘
What
have you got for me, Chief?’ he asked.

‘
Ah,’
the Attorney-General said. ‘One of your old cases.’

‘
Which
one?’

‘
Ernie
Hecatt. Remember him?’

‘
He’d be
hard to forget.’

‘
He
escaped from Huntsville.’

‘
I
know. About two and a half, three years ago.
Disappeared.’

‘
That’s
it.’

‘
And?’

‘
There
have been some sightings.’

‘
I
know. I correlated them. Men who knew Hecatt. Said they’d
seen him, called his name as he walked close by them, but he either
didn’t hear or ignored them. Walked on past as if he was
deaf.’

‘
What do
you think?’

‘
Mistaken identity, maybe.’

‘
Maybe,’
the Attorney-General said. ‘But you know my motto,
Frank.’

Angel nodded. The
Attorney-General committed his department to action on a very
simple set of precepts.
Once,
he was fond of stating,
is mere happenstance. Twice, perhaps,
is coincidence. But three times? Three times, gentlemen, means the
bastards are doing it on purpose. And I want to know
why!

‘
How
many sightings altogether?’ he asked Angel now.

‘
Four.
Five, if you count a “maybe”,’ was the reply. ‘One in New Orleans.
One in Jackson, Mississippi. One in Shreveport, Louisiana, and
another in St. Louis. The maybe was in Abilene. Abilene, Texas, not
the Kansas one.’

‘
That’s
a pretty big area,’ the Attorney-General observed.

‘
What I
thought.’

‘
Check
it anyway,’ was the order, and Angel shrugged his agreement. The
Old Man was handing him a nice easy number until he worked off the
last lingering stiffness in his leg, giving him time to ease back
into action rather than tossing him in, ready or not. It was damned
thoughtful of the Attorney-General, but Angel wished to hell he
wouldn’t bother.

‘
Checking on Hecatt’ll only take me a couple of days,’ he
offered. ‘What do you want me to do then?’

The
Attorney-General
’s smile showed he’d been hoping for Angel to say just what
he’d said. ‘Report to Kee Lai,’ he said. ‘For fitness
tests.’

Angel gave a theatrical groan and got
out of there.

The man known as Nix reined in the beautiful
thoroughbred stallion and surveyed his kingdom. From Diablo Point,
where he now stood, the tumbling land stretched away to the north,
blurring to blue-gray on the horizons. It would not have mattered
had it been pitch dark: Nix knew the country spread before him as
he knew the contours of his own face, the shape of his own body.
Better, perhaps, for he had created this place, which the Mexicans
called
Valle
del Muerto.

It was well named.

To Nix
’s left, tumbling along the western
edge of the land like gigantic rocks strewn carelessly by some
Olympian god, lay the Burrow Mountains, thrusting their bare,
jagged peaks eight, ten, sometimes twelve thousand feet into the
empty sky. At their foothills lay the jagged black basalt of the
lava beds, endless serried rank after endless wicked row. Neither
man nor horse could negotiate them: they would cripple the larger
animal in an hour, reduce the stoutest boots to ribbons in another,
and the feet of a man to bloody ruin in half that time.

Below Diablo Point, which jutted
out from the base of the mountains skirting the southern end of the
valley, a long way below in the man-made clearing lay the
hacienda.
The land had been
leveled, the L-shaped house built by thousands of sweating
peons
brought across the
Rio Bravo for the paltry few dollars their labor commanded. They
had been ferried back across the river when their work was done,
unsure of where they had been, and warned never to speak of what
they had created in the valley. One or two had: they had died ugly
deaths that silenced all the others.

The house would not have shamed
a wealthy landowner in Virginia, but there was a major difference:
this was not only a house but a fortress, a castle. Around it stood
a ten-foot-high stockade of pointed foot-thick logs, and at each
side of the heavy wooden gates were high wooden guard platforms,
duplicates of the ones at three of the four corners of the
stockade. Guards manned the platforms at all times when Nix was
there. Inside the stockade, a man-made miniature lake lapped at the
edge of a stone patio which fronted the northern side of the house,
sited for shade and coolness, refuge from the relentless sun. From
the house a man-channeled river ran northward, falling gradually
away with the natural slope of the valley, widening as it went. It
had not been there when Nix came to this valley, any more than the
virtually impassable barrier of choke thorn, briar, bramble, and
creeper that lay like a mile-wide caterpillar across the northern
edge of the valley. He had seeded the breaks and watered them,
adding and adding and adding until the rioting bushes formed a
tangled barrier through which even the hardy
javelinas,
the native wild pigs, could
scarcely force a path. Nix said no man could get through the
breaks, and no man had proved him wrong.

He turned now to the right,
where broken cliffs backed by the plateaus that preceded the
soaring San Miguel range lined the eastern skyline. Below them lay
open prairie and scrubland
—jackrabbit country, as one of his men had dubbed
it—and to the north, desert as empty as the far side of the moon.
Nothing good lived there: there was no water hole, no life support
of any kind. Only at its southern edge did the land miraculously
bloom, between prairie and desert. Almost in the dead center of the
valley, between river and San Miguels, between desert and
hacienda,
a small wood stood.
Beech, elm, some smaller deciduous trees and shrubbery clustered
together, watered by a man-made tributary of the river which
stemmed from the artesian well sited inside the stockade. Inside
the little forest was a lake, around which Nix permitted the
raiding Comanches who regularly visited his valley to camp. They
came in through the narrow gap between the breaks and the San
Miguels, empty desert that their own scouts constantly patrolled.
No white man could have gone twenty yards in that country without
being seen by the Indians. Nothing moves in the land of the
Comanche that they do not see.