Kill Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #6) (2 page)

‘
Knowin’ you, I never thought nothin’ else, son,’ the old
man replied. ‘But from what they tell about Yancey Blantine I doubt
he’s goin’ to reckon that’s got much to do with anything.’ Gould
nodded again. ‘You could ... drift, mebbe.’ Thistle said it very
gently, and swiftly raised his hands palms outward as the younger
man swung around, eyes blazing.

‘
On’y a
suggestion, boy,’ he went on.
‘Don’t take offence. It might be
smart.’

‘
Smart!’ spat Gould.
‘Smart!’

‘
Yep.
Not heroic, mebbe. But smart.’

‘
Oscar,
will you quit that!’ snapped Gould. ‘You know I’d never get a job
anyplace if I ran out on this thing.’

‘
Not as
no town-tamer, sure,’ Thistle agreed. ‘So what? Ain’t sure I
wouldn’t ruther be a live anonymous than a dead somebody even
so.’

‘
No,’
Gould said. ‘This is what I do.’ His jaw was set in a firm line and
Thistle had seen that look before. He argued no more.

‘
It’s
what I do,’ Gould said again, as if confirming a thought in his own
head. He got up and went to the door. Opening it, he looked out on
to the busy street. On Saturday, Stockwood was always lively. They
could hear some of the girls singing in the cribs down at the south
end of the street. A cowboy went by, reeling in the
saddle.

‘
It’s
my town,’ Gould said to no one in particular, then hitched his gun
belt around his lean hips and went out into the boisterous street,
heading for Doc Tannenbaum’s, a good man doing his job.

Stockwood slept.

It lay like a scattered set of
child
’s
building blocks on the flat scrubland, south of Tucson, east of
Nogales and no damned further from the border than it had to be. To
the south the Huachuca Mountains reared eight thousand feet, sharp
and ugly against the blazing white vault of the sky. East, west and
north lay only the emptiness of the Apache desert.

Stockwood was a kind of
unofficial staging post, temporary accommodation for drifters and
long riders with a wary eye over their shoulder for the kind
of
dust
clouds a posse might make, tank town for Mexican bandits to buy
ammunition and supplies, for rustlers to be separated from some of
their plunder, for enlisted men from Fort Huachuca to get laid, for
the miners of Santa Rosa to drink away their money. Stockwood was
an unlovely huddle of shacks, dugouts, adobes, saloons and cribs
good for nothing except what you could buy in it or sell in it. It
had been a wide-open hell town until Al Davies, who ran the general
store and had a sizeable sideline in stolen US Army guns and
ammunition, and the owners of the two saloons, Pitt and Kingham,
had put their heads together and employed a town tamer. They had
told him straight: they wanted the town kept on the rails but not
closed down. If Stockwood got religion then they were out of
business, so it was all a matter of degree. They wanted just enough
law to make it unnecessary for the Territorial Legislature to feel
it incumbent upon themselves to send in a real lawman. Private law
was best, Davies and his cronies felt. You could reason with
private law.

So Stockwood was kept in line:
just. Dick Gould was a man who knew instinctively
when a firm hand was
needed. His reputation helped: there were plenty of men in this
part of the world who had seen him or heard of his exploits in Hays
and with Oscar Thistle backing him up trouble tended to fizzle out
rather than blow up in Stockwood. For themselves, Gould and Thistle
had a vaguely formulated notion that one of these days they were
going to take all the pay they had saved in Stockwood and buy a
spread somewhere up in the Jackson Hole country, where rivers ran
all year round and a man could see about three hundred miles of
green, green grass in every direction. It was something to hold on
to when you had to step into the middle of a fracas that could
erupt into the mindless smash of sudden death.

Stockwood was no beauty spot. At
dawn, no lights showed at the windows of any of the buildings along
its one wide street. Only mangy cats prowled after packrats in the
unlovely piles of refuse scattered haphazardly between the larger
buildings. Slowly the rising
sun touched the half-gray sky with pinkening
fingers, and a blush of light touched the scarred faces of the
Huachucas, turning the black shadows at their base to pools of
deepest purple. The thin twitter of wakening birds began in the
sage-stippled hills and somewhere a lark began its trilling ascent
towards the morning. A big old jackrabbit hitch-kicked across the
edge of the trail to the south of town as a band of men rode
towards Stockwood. They rode on horses darker than the dawn, giant
like in the changing light, silent in the hock deep dust. Eight of
them, ten, a dozen, twenty, they sifted up the single street and
took up positions clearly preplanned, on porches, behind walls,
some even climbing in snakelike silence up on to the flat roofs of
the buildings. The first probing rays of the strengthening sun
touched metal, glinting on the barrels of carbines, etching
highlights on bandoliers of ammunition. No word was spoken. The
horses were led silently away from the street and all the men at
their posts waited, heads up, as if for a signal.

In the first full light of the
morning sun, Yancey Blantine raised his arm and jerked it up and
down, the old cavalry signal for
‘forward’. Pale in the sunlight, flame
flared on torches made of dried reeds as the men along the street
methodically and with expressionless faces set fire to the houses
and the saloons and the stores and the cribs. They moved about
their work in total silence, an eerie and uncanny grimness in their
movements. The hesitant flames touched the tinder-dry wood and bit,
then flickered as if with joy, biting deep and hungrily into the
timbers, dancing and leaping joyfully, spreading like liquid
fingers, smoke starting to coil upwards in the still morning
air.

Still the silent men went on,
setting torches to other parts of already burning buildings,
tossing the blazing brands upwards on to the roofs with smooth and
deadly precision. Now as
the flames really caught the men fell back away
from the searing heat, grouping in the center of the street, others
behind and around the sides of buildings, carbines ported, six-guns
loosened in their holsters, squinting into the flames which now
lanced dancing upwards ten, twenty feet high, hurtling a great
black oily cloud of smoke into the uncaring vault of the sky. It
was very noisy now in the street. The flames roared as a bright
morning breeze touched them, encouraged them to greater efforts;
the sudden yells, the screams of alarm which came from inside the
houses caused no reaction from the narrow-eyed men in the street
except for one, one man alone on horseback whose stallion curveted
anxiously in front of the flickering flames.

‘
Fire!’

The cry was heard, repeated,
shouted, screamed, cursed.
‘Fire!’

In the street the waiting men
heard the shouts and the screams and the
curses impassively. Men yelling in
fear, bellowing in pain, screaming in panic, women whimpering in
terror, and always, always, the dreaded word, the terrifying
enemy
‘Fire!’

People were boiling out of the burning
buildings. The saloon was an inferno, flames leaping thirty feet
high above its roof.

The man on the black stallion
drew his
six-gun and cruelly yanked the head of his horse around. He
thundered up the street at a flat gallop, his six-gun barking in
staccato rhythm. A man standing in the street in his nightshirt
watched the rider coming towards him in complete astonishment and
the man on the black horse shot him down as if he was a target. A
woman ran screaming into the street towards the fallen man and
shouted something after the rider but he did not turn for now the
men who had started the fires had levered the shells into their
carbines and they were firing too, a steady and withering hail of
lead that sliced into everything that moved, every man and woman
who came out of any of the blazing buildings.

Al Davies came out of the shack
in which he slept down at the south end of town and ran up the
street, seeing only the fire and hearing the shots. He was
shortsighted and did not recognize the men in the street until he
was very close to them and then he tried to turn and run but one of
them shot him in the back. Davies was smashed flat on his face in
the dust of the street and tried to crawl away but the same man
carefully aimed his carbine again and this time his bullet blew the
back of Davies
’ head to bloody smithereens. Man after man after man ran
into the scything, murderous rain of death in the street. There was
nowhere to run. Not a building remained that was not afire, and so
the men died helpless, puzzled, astonished, shocked, terrified,
defenseless against the granite indifference of the killers in the
streets of Stockwood. Dead and half dead littered the smoldering
sidewalks and the killers stalked among them, killing anything,
anyone who moved, merciless and inhuman, showing not the faintest
sign of humanity, of pity or of sorrow.

On and on and on the killing went, into the
morning. Over the pit of virulent hell that had been Stockwood a
huge pall of smoke hung like a waiting shroud as the executioners
went about their work, eyes lit by the dying red flames, the
barrels of their guns hot from their ceaseless killing work.

Then, at one point, perhaps twenty minutes,
perhaps more after the first terrible hail of lead had scythed down
the first victims, a terrible yell of triumph went up from the
killers, and they dragged before their leader the battered,
half-conscious bodies of two men.

They had grabbed Gould and
Thistle as they came out of their office into the satanic light of
that terrible morning. Thistle had been felled by a smashing blow
from the stock of a Winchester
carbine, but Dick Gould was not let off so
lightly. Him they had neatly ambushed, one to each side of the
door, big men, specially chosen for this task. They had smashed him
down, picked him up, smashed him into each other’s arms, then again
and again and again and again, punishing his brittle face bones
with hands as big as hams, smashing and grinding and cutting the
defenseless man. Then when he was crawling in broken agony on the
ground they had used their boots on him, and the wicked spikes of
their Mexican rowels, raking the body of the screaming marshal,
raising welts of flesh which spurted bright red blood into the
unheeding dust.

Just before the point at which they would
have killed him they stopped, and one of them brought a bucket of
water and threw it over Gould. Then they dragged him in front of
the man on the black stallion.

Gould fell on his knees. He
could not stand, and only vaguely see. He looked
up. The sun was
right behind the head of the man on the horse. He looked immense.
The bright light lanced into Gould’s eyes and he wept
unashamedly.

‘
What
... what in the name of God ... ?’ he managed, brokenly.

‘
You
use the name of God, you vile animal?’ screamed the man on the
horse. ‘Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be
shed!’

Gould shook his head, pawing the
dirt and blood and tears from his eyes. He looked up again. The man
on horseback was a huge man, sixty or more years of age. His great
bristling eyebrows jutted out over
deep-set and burning eyes, eyes that
burned with a great inner fire, a madness of conviction that
nothing but death would shake.

‘
Blantine?’ Gould said.

‘
I am
he,’ the man shouted. ‘I am he whose eldest son you
murdered!’

‘
But
this ... ’ Gould turned his head towards the blazing town.
‘This?’

‘
Aye,
this!’ screamed Blantine. ‘This sink of pestilence, this pile of
ordure — I will destroy it. This place will stand in death as my
son’s monument!’

‘
You’re
crazy!’ Gould shouted. ‘Crazy! You can’t —’

Blantine had a heavy quirt dangling from his
wrist. The short whip had a lead-loaded stock. He hit Gould in the
mouth with it. The marshal reeled backwards, the lower part of his
face a sudden mask of bright blood. Blantine whirled his stallion
around.

‘
Finish
it!’ he screamed. ‘Burn it! Burn everything! Every stick and stone
of it! Leave nothing standing! Nothing, you hear me?’

His executioners licked their
lips and went about their deadly work. They moved among the ruins
and put to the gun anything that moved. Now and then there would be
a shout as someone found a woman whimpering in hiding behind a
broken wall, down a makeshift cellar. The killers did what they
wanted with the women before they killed them. Someone somewhere
found some cans of kerosene and they
threw the volatile liquid into the
smoldering ruins, yelling with coarse delight as the black oily
flames leaped high again, roaring upwards. Then they gathered
grimly around Yancey Blantine and watched as the old man put Gould
very slowly to death.