Hunt Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #5) (15 page)

He had decided exactly what he was going to do, and
now he did it. He left Sherry Hardin at the hotel, and told Landy
to stay close so that the woman got no wild ideas about going back
up the street to see what was happening to Angel. He had to admit
surprise: she was much more woman than he recalled, and his
admiration for her had increased tenfold during this short
reacquaintance. At one time during the day, watching the proud
lithe movements of her body, he had felt the throb of lust for her,
imagined her in the moist warmth of a soft bed. Now he had decided
that he wanted her, that he would lay siege to her. With a woman
like this at his side, there was nothing he could not achieve in
politics, in the capital, anywhere. She would be the toast of
Washington. He would dress her in the finest silks, the costliest
jewels, the most sumptuous settings. He would put a fine house at
her disposal, servants, carriages, all a woman could want. He was
still a young enough man to sire children, still handsome enough to
win a woman on whom he had set his mind. Typically, it never
entered Larry Hugess’s mind that Sherry Hardin might not concur
with his decisions. And so he had dreamed, in the morning before he
had drawn Angel’s teeth with his bloodless ruse. Now all that was
left was to show this cowed and empty town that Larry Hugess was
its king, its emperor, its law, its reason for existence.

He had one of the riders bring up a horse for Burt,
and mounted his own fine stallion. Together, they paraded up and
down the street for a time, he did not check how long, curvetting
on the horses, letting people see them unafraid and unstoppable in
the street. When they had had enough of that, Larry Hugess reined
in his horse outside the Palace and stalked in. A nervous,
stammering Johnny Gardner came up from below the bar, watching
their eyes warily.

‘
Your best champagne, Johnny,’
Hugess boomed. ‘You’ve got champagne, haven’t you?’

‘
Yessir,’ Gardner said, anxious to
please. ‘Yes, I do, Mister Hugess, sir. Real French champagne.
Imported from France.’

‘
And cold, Johnny,’ Hugess said,
not emphasizing anything but striking fear into the saloonkeeper’s
heart by the very gentleness of his speech. ‘Make sure it’s
cold.’

‘
Oh, yes, sir, Mister Hugess, sir,’
Gardner said sweating. ‘Oh, yes, sir.’

‘
You see,’ Hugess said almost
dreamily, ‘it’s kind of a special day. My little brother Burt is
coming home today, aren’t you, Burt?’

Burt Hugess beamed. ‘That’s right, Larry,’ he said.
‘Comin’ home.’

He wasn’t prepared for the way his
brother’s face changed, the way the contempt twisted Larry’s mouth,
the way the eyes looked at him as if he was some filth his brother
had found on his dinner plate.

‘
You don’t even know what it cost,
do you?’ Larry Hugess asked softly. His riders watched him warily,
ready to get out of the way of whatever might happen. They had seen
Larry Hugess’s soft-spoken rages before, and they preferred
hydrophobic skunks on a rampage.

‘Listen, Larry,’ Burt Hugess said
placatingly. ‘I never meant no harm!—’

The flat crack as Larry Hugess hit his brother
contemptuously with the back of his hand sounded stunningly loud in
the silence. Burt cried out, reeling slightly; bright blood
trickled from a split lip. It had not been a hard blow, only a
stinging one, but the contempt in it weighed heavier than if he had
been struck by lightning.

‘
Johnny,’ Larry Hugess said, his
voice still as soft as swansdown. ‘Pour the champagne. Gently now.’
He nodded with satisfaction as Gardner filled the stemmed glasses,
watching the way the wine frothed and subsided with visible
pleasure.

‘
Aw, listen, Larry,’ Burt Hugess
said. ‘Listen.’

‘
Drink your champagne, Burt,’ Larry
Hugess said. ‘And shut your face.’

Four of them.

It could have been worse, Angel thought. Hugess could
have sent all seven of his riders down to administer the coup de
grace. Then there would have been no chance at all. As it was, he
knew that if the guards now prodding them down toward the scarred
clay banks of Cat Creek up behind the graveyard knew his thoughts,
they would have laughed aloud. Yet Angel, for all his slumped
shoulders and air of defeat, was working out just exactly how to
take them.

‘
Down there?’ one of the guards
said.

‘
Yeah,’ Finstatt told him. ‘Then we
can just cave some of this cut bank over them.’ He might have been
discussing where to plant cabbage.

They were approaching the high banks of the creek,
which were sharply edged and fell away almost perpendicularly to
the stony, dry bed of the stream below - about seven feet, Angel
reckoned. The creek-bed was littered with boulders and stones, some
of them four or five feet high, rolled downhill slowly with the
years of flash flooding, breaking up the dry ground alongside the
creek, scouring it with gullies where the roots of sagebrush and
greasewood protruded like the buried legs of strange prehistoric
birds. He checked the position of the four guards from beneath
veiled lids. Two close together nearer him. The others to the left
and right of Sheridan and Howie Cade. Too far away to jump.

‘
Get on down there!’ Ken Finstatt
snapped.

‘
Go to hell,’ Angel said
pleasantly.

‘I said get on down!’ Finstatt
snarled. ‘Unless you want it in the belly now.’

‘
Just as soon,’ Angel said,
standing in an almost relaxed slouch that made Howie Cade gape at
him as if he had turned into a giraffe.

‘
All right,’ Finstatt said. He came
forward and prodded the barrel of his carbine into Angel’s belly,
and that was all Angel had been waiting for.

‘Down!'
he
yelled, hoping to God Sheridan and Cade would hit the dirt as fast
as they could. In the same moment, he grasped the barrel of the
carbine, leading it away from his body as Finstatt pulled the
trigger. The heat of the muzzle blast burned across Angel’s ribs
but Finstatt was coming at him now as Angel’s hand moved upward,
the heel of his palm forward and his whole forearm braced for the
impact. He hit Finstatt under the jaw, snapping the man’s head back
and stopping him dead in his tracks, brain jarred into
insensibility by the brutal shock of the blow. In the same
movement, Angel hit Finstatt just below the heart with his right
hand, all his strength and poised weight behind the blow. Finstatt
went down as if he had been pole axed, which, to all intents and
purposes he had been, and even as the Flying H man folded to the
ground Angel had lifted the carbine out of the nerveless hands and
was swinging it in a killing arc that ended alongside the head of
the guard in the red shirt who had been closest to Ken
Finstatt.

The rifle stock split with a loud crack that blended
with the softer, mushier sound of Red-Shirt’s skull bursting, a
sound almost the same as the one made when someone drops an
overripe pumpkin two stories down onto a concrete slab. Red-Shirt
catapulted over the edge of the creek bed without a sound, his head
an awful, bloody tatter of splintered bone and oozing brain.

The third guard, a stocky Texan, had time only to
turn and face Angel before Angel was on him like a tiger. The Texan
had his gun up and was ready to fire, but the sight of Angel coming
at him as no man he had ever seen coming at him unnerved the Texan
and he hesitated that fraction of a second it took Angel to go up
off the ground with his feet high, legs cocked like coiled-steel
springs that unleashed as fast as the fangs of a striking snake.
Both Angel’s boot-heels smashed into the stocky Texan’s face like
striking thunderbolts, pulping the astonished visage into a rictus
of pain that froze as the man’s neck snapped like a dried grass
stalk.

Angel hit the ground on his haunches, rolling to one
side and kicking at the dusty clay to scare up a cloud of dust that
confused the aim of the fourth guard just enough. His first shot
whacked up a gout of earth three feet high not six inches from
Angel’s elbow as the unarmed man came suddenly up off the ground.
The Flying H man saw the knife and tried desperately to line up for
a second shot, but he was a second too late.

Long ago, soon after he’d finished his training with
the Department of Justice, Frank Angel had gone to see the Armorer,
Charlie Brady, a dour, generally unsmiling man. But there wasn’t
anyone anywhere, they said, who knew more about weapons. There
wasn’t anyone anywhere who could come up with a way to conceal a
weapon that Charlie Brady hadn’t already thought of and, more than
likely, discarded as impractical. No weapon Charlie Brady couldn’t
strip and reassemble in the time it took lesser men to identify the
maker. He was the Armorer for the Department and he’d listened
without comment to Angel’s request. Then he had nodded. Not new,
he’d said. But adequate. If Angel wanted weapons that would give
him a fighting chance for survival in a situation where he had
already been disarmed, weapons that would have been overlooked in a
reasonably careful search, it would have to be knives. Only fools
missed the bulk of a gun in searching a man, and Angel could not
rely on Providence pitting him against fools all the time.

‘
See what we can do,’ the Armorer
had told him.

He’d come up with a couple of ideas that had suited
Angel down to the ground. One of them was the twin, flat-bladed,
Solingen steel throwing knives that nestled snugly in their special
sheaths set between the inner and outer leather of Angel’s
otherwise unremarkable mule-ear boots. Both were honed to slit-hair
sharpness and it was one of them that now came up in a tight and
remorseless arc, gutting the guard like a trout. He gave a scream
like a pig in a slaughterhouse and went over backward, legs kicking
high in agony that ended almost at once. Angel stood, his hands on
his knees, bent forward, breath coming harsh and hard, the blood of
the men he had killed splattered all over him.

‘Jesus, Angel!’ Howie Cade
said.

He and Sheridan were on their feet now, and they
looked around them wide-eyed. The whole thing could not have taken
more than two or three minutes, minutes that in the watching had
seemed like an eternity. It was like a dream, possible while you
were in it, impossible when you woke to think about it carefully.
Yet there scattered around them were the dead men and there in
front of them was Angel with blood on his hands.

A soft breeze soughed through the
greasewood, and despite himself Howie Cade shivered. He watched
Angel straighten up, pull in a huge breath, as if preparing himself
for some ordeal.

‘
All right,’ Angel said. ‘We’d
better get moving.’

‘
What about him?’ Sheridan asked,
pointing with his chin at the form of Ken Finstatt, huddled in the
dusty dirt at the edge of the creek.

‘
He won’t bother us for a while,’
Angel said. ‘If ever.’ He had cleaned the knife with which he had
killed the guard and now slid it back into the scabbard at the side
of his boot. He picked up one of the carbines. Howie and Sheridan
picked up one each.

‘
Come on,’ Angel said, leading the
way across the flat ground, quartering in the direction of the
plank bridge at the end of Texas Street, and the rear of the corral
behind the general store.

‘
Where the hell we going?’ wheezed
Howie Cade.

‘Are you kidding?’ Angel snapped.
‘Where the hell do you think?’ He moved on at a wolf like lope
across the empty ground, his eyes on the bayed wagons in the empty
corral ahead.