The entrance to the Portal was a killing ground.
The cabin stood back at the edge of the thornbreaks, and the area in front of it lay like a table, empty, denuded of every vestige of shrubbery. Nothing, not even a gopher, could have moved over it without being seen, and now Angel was grateful for the time he had spent surveying it earlier. He told Victoria he wanted to try to take the men in the barrack alive: he did not know what infernal devices Nix might have planted along the narrow trail to freedom. Now Victoria Nix rode out of the trees on his signal and moved up toward the hut. As she came into sight, a man came out, walking in a slouch toward her horse, his right hand trailing a shotgun. A cigarette drooped from his lips, and he looked at Victoria with a puzzled frown.
‘Miz Nix,’ he saluted. ‘What you doin’ up here on your ownsome?’
‘What is your name?’ Victoria said frostily, ignoring his question and regarding the man as if he were some loathsome new species of bug she’d found in her linen closet. He was no oil painting: his stubble was at least a week old, and his clothes looked as if he’d never changed them since the day he put them on.
‘Sweddlin, ma’am,’ he muttered, scuffing shabby boots. ‘Lee Sweddlin.’
‘Are you alone here? Where is everyone?’
‘They done took off to help the Ol’—beg your pardon, the boss, ma’am,’ Sweddlin said. ‘There’s just the two of us here, me an’ Sanson.’
‘Tell him to come out here.’
‘Uh, ma’am, we got orders not to—’
‘Do you defy me, sir?’ Victoria said frigidly, her eyebrows climbing an astonished inch. ‘Do you dare to defy me?’
‘Uh, ah, no, ma’am,’ Sweddlin said hastily. He raised his voice to a cracked shout. ‘Hey, Kit, c’mon out here, will ya?’
The door of the shack opened and another man came out. He was meatily built, the body of an athlete gone to seed. A heavy paunch hung over his belt and like Sweddlin he looked as if he hadn’t shaved for a week.
‘I can see,’ he said, testily. ‘I can see.’
‘Good,’ Angel said behind him. ‘Then if you turn around real slow you’ll see this gun I’m pointing at you.’
Sweddlin tensed slightly, staring at Victoria as if she had committed an unutterable blasphemy. She saw him think about using the shotgun still held at trail in his right hand.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Don’t do that. We don’t want to kill you.’
Sweddlin nodded and as if coming to a much-considered decision, let go of the shotgun, and slowly raised his hands. He wasn’t the type to buck odds. Not life-or-death odds, anyway. He’d stayed alive this long by knowing when not to fight, and he wasn’t about to spoil a perfect track record now. Behind him Sanson nodded and spat into the dirt. But he raised his hands as well, turning slowly to face Angel.
It was the work of only moments to disarm them, and of minutes to tell them what had happened in the valley. Angel used short, explicit words and brief graphic sentences. He told them how many men were dead for certain, and the names of those he knew. He told them how those men had died and why. He told them about the slaughter in the stockade, and what he had done to destroy it. He told it very convincingly and they believed him. Maybe they weren’t convinced by the details of his outline. Maybe what convinced them was that he was here, and that Victoria Nix was with him. Sweddlin and Sanson both knew that Nix never allowed her to leave the hacienda alone. Either Nix accompanied her personally, or she was shadowed by the deadly Oriental, Yat Sen. When Angel capped his story by showing them his belt-hidden badge, with its screaming eagle encircled by the legend Department of Justice, any fight they might have had in them drained out like bathwater. Sanson was foxier than his partner: he tried for a bargain.
‘Lissen, Angel,’ he said. ‘We go along, tell you how to get out, what’s in it for us?’
‘I turn you loose when we get clear,’ Angel said. ‘Forget I ever saw you.’
‘And if we don’t?’
‘I’d say that would be … inadvisable,’ Angel said, almost reflectively. ‘Because what I’d do would be to herd you two in front of me all the way through the breaks so that whatever happened, you’d be the first ones it happened to.’
The two of them looked at him for a long, long moment.
‘You could be bluffin’,’ Sanson said.
‘That’s right.’
‘You’d do that, what you said? Go through the breaks with us in front?’ Sweddlin asked, his voice tailing away weakly when he saw the look on Angel’s face.
‘Yes, you would,’ he said. ‘Listen, Kit, tell him. Or I sure as hell will.’
Sanson nodded, and began to explain the system of switches that primed the mined road that ran through the breaks. It was similar to the one back at the hacienda, powered by the same huge, stinking battery.
‘Then there’s a system of signal flags,’ Sanson said. ‘Two flags, one red, one black. Red means whoever is coming through is OK. Black—’
‘I can guess,’ Angel said. ‘What happens then?’
‘When he sees the flag go up the pole, Chris Holmes—that’s the guy at the other end—he hoists a red flag, too. That means he’s switched off at his end. Otherwise, wouldn’t make no difference if we was switched off or not, the mines would still be primed.’
‘He’s got a lookout platform up there,’ Sweddlin added. ‘He can check on who’s comin’ through. He doesn’t like the look of ’em, he can get back inside and throw the switch anyway, blow the road up in your face.’
‘It’s damn near foolproof,’ Sanson said, and Angel nodded, moved in spite of himself to admire the dark brain that had planned all this. He listened as Sweddlin described the steel plate set beneath the dirt of the road that depressed a bell, which told the man at the far side to check on who was coming through. If he did not know them, he challenged them, and if they gave the wrong reply, he simply threw his switch. There was no way they could get to him before he did so. As Sanson had said, it was almost foolproof, and he thanked the instinct which had told him to take these guards alive.
‘All right,’ he told Sweddlin. ‘Get the red flag hoisted. And make sure you do it exactly right.’
‘I’ll do it right,’ Sweddlin said anxiously. ‘Don’t you worry.’
‘Don’t you worry about me worrying,’ Angel said. ‘Get at it’
Sweddlin clambered up a ladder into a sort of loft, and after a moment Angel heard the squeak of rope pulleys. After a moment, Sweddlin appeared in the aperture and beckoned him up. Angel handed a six-gun to Victoria, and picked up Sweddlin’s shotgun.
‘Keep an eye on him,’ he said, gesturing at Sanson. ‘If he blinks, shoot his face off.’
Victoria nodded, trying for a smile that slid off her face before it got a proper grip, but she took the heavy weapon and cocked it. Sanson flinched visibly at the sound.
In the loft Sweddlin handed a spyglass to Angel and pointed off to the north. Through the glass, Angel could see the flutter of a bright square of scarlet from a pole that thrust up above the ragged top of the thornbreaks.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s go. And you boys listen to me—don’t do anything that might prove fatal.’
‘Don’t worry, mister,’ Sweddlin said anxiously. ‘We don’t aim to double-cross you.’
‘I plan to be sure of it,’ Angel said coldly as they climbed onto their horses and moved into the shadowed breaks. The trail curved right and then left, leading between the high stands of faceless chokethorn and briar, eerily cool and dark and silent. Glancing at the narrow strip of sky above his head, Angel estimated it would be dark in maybe two hours. A quick scan of the horizon with Sweddlin’s spyglass had revealed no sign of the pursuers, but he knew they were coming and he knew that if the two mercenaries got as much as an inkling that help was on the way they would turn to treachery as naturally as they opened their eyes in the morning.
They moved at a steady trot through the shadowed trees. Once in a while, they startled some creature in the dark depths of the breaks, and heard it crashing through the tangle in panicked flight. Victoria Nix rode in back, close to Angel, her shoulders hunched as though against a chill, her face set and pale.
It took them fifteen minutes to get to the place where a huge white blaze scarred a fallen log beside the trail. Sweddlin reined in as he got level with it. The trail stretched straight as an arrow ahead of them, and disappeared up ahead around a bend. It was quite wide here, and Angel could see the spidery outlines of a lookout platform in the far high distance. Sweddlin stood up in the stirrups and waved his Stetson around his head three times to the right, and three times to the left.
‘OK,’ he said, and gigged his horse into motion. Ten minutes later, they saw the trail widen and as suddenly as the breaks had closed in on them at the start, they ended. There was a clearing lit by the long rays of the afternoon sun, and in it a barrack hut identical with the one they had just left. As the quartet rode into the open space, a man eased out of the doorway of the hut, a shotgun across his arm. He looked edgy, a little tense, and Angel felt a cold moment of unease.
‘Lee, Sanson,’ the man nodded, not coming nearer to them. ‘What brings you over here? Howdy, Miz Nix, I didn’t see—’
‘It’s all right,’ Victoria said, but her voice cracked, and the man sensed the tension in it. His eyes swung immediately to the only stranger in the setup, and the shotgun followed the movement, twin barrels coming up trained unwaveringly on Angel’s belly.
‘Somebody better tell me what the hell is goin’ on here,’ he growled, ‘or somebody is goin’ to get his brains blowed out.’
The air was still, electric with held violence. It was Victioria Nix who dispersed with a casual sound of irritated impatience. She hitched the head of her horse around so that it was between Holmes and Angel and looked down imperiously at Holmes.
‘Holmes,’ she said, and there was a whip in her voice that brooked no refusal. ‘Help me down.’
Holmes moved automatically to obey. He was a paid gun and there were few things he would balk at doing without so much as batting an eyelid, but he knew a damned sight better than to disobey Hercules Nix’s wife. She might be a hoity-toity bitch who treated everyone like so much dirt, but an insult to her was an insult to Nix and an insult to Nix meant death. He extended his hand, and helped her down from the saddle and he was turning around when Angel stuck the long barrel of his Peacemaker into Holmes’s ear.
‘Don’t even sweat,’ Angel said softly.
‘Aaaah, shit!’ Holmes said, looking at Sweddlin and Sanson as though they had just admitted to assassinating Lincoln. Angel grinned. It was funny the way these empty-minded killers used betrayal and treachery as their everyday coin, yet somehow felt tricked when paid in their own money.
‘Drop the shotgun,’ Angel said. ‘Relax.’
‘Relax, he says,’ Holmes sneered, letting the weapon fall with a soft thud to the ground. ‘What the hell is all this, anyway?’
‘Tell him,’ Angel said to the two Nix riders.
Sweddlin and Sanson nodded, and told Holmes the same story that Angel had told them. If anything, they made it more convincing and bloody than he had done, and when they were through, Holmes looked at Angel in a new way. He shook his head, as though finding it hard to believe.
‘You did all that?’ he asked Angel. ‘Alone?’
‘Would I lie to you?’ Angel said, with a sardonic grin.
‘It’s a possibility,’ Holmes said, just as derisive. ‘Who the hell are you, anyway?’
‘He’s Federal Law, Chris,’ Sweddlin said. ‘Department of Justice.’
‘Oh, beautiful,’ Holmes said, his tone that of a man whose best cards in a high-stakes game are deuces. His face fell further when Angel showed him the badge.
‘Department of Justice,’ Holmes read, dispiritedly. ‘Terrific’
Angel said nothing, just letting the worry build in Holmes’s mind. He was smarter than his two comrades, and knew the consequences of being taken by Federal Law. Holmes had no illusions about what he was: a paid killer, worthless as a citizen, beyond redemption as a human being. He stank of killing for money, but like a buffalo hunter, he had gotten used to the stink. Angel let the man sweat: the manner of Holmes’s eventual death was a predictable as what he would do next. He was expecting Angel to take them in, and he was thinking about years and years in the slammer: ergo, he would try to make some kind of deal.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Sanson an’ Sweddlin, they played along with you. I’m doin’ the same. What’s—?’
‘Forget it!’ Angel said. ‘I’m going to turn you loose.’
Holmes’s face brightened perceptibly, and he looked at the other two. They nodded. ‘That’s what he told us, Chris,’ Sweddlin said.
‘One thing,’ Angel said, the coldness of his voice taking the smile of relief off of Holmes’s face. T want you long gone out of Texas. Keep going until you get someplace where nobody ever heard of the Department of Justice, because if I ever hear you boys are back in circulation, I’m going to come after you and bring you in. And I’ll throw away the key, savvy?’
The three men nodded. It was a better deal than they had any right to hope for and they knew it. In their world, losers got a bullet in the gut or the back of the head. There were no nice guys. This cold-eyed bastard had destroyed Hercules Nix single-handed. By definition he was not the kind of man wanted on his back-trail.
‘All right,’ Holmes said. ‘Can we move out now?’
‘Now’s a good time,’ Angel said. ‘Get your pony.’
‘How about our guns?’
Angel just looked at him, and Holmes got a stubborn look on his face.
‘Lissen, mister, you can’t send us out alone on these plains without a gun of some kind!’ Holmes said. ‘There’s Comanch’ out there. An’ Kiowa! They’d slit our throats soon as look if they saw we didn’t have guns.’
‘No guns,’ Angel said.
‘Well, hell, then shoot us here and be done with it!’ Holmes spat defiantly. ‘You’re killing us sure the other way, and me, I’d as soon die right here on ground I know.’
‘Frank … ?’ Victoria Nix said hesitantly.
‘All right,’ Angel said. ‘A carbine each. No hand guns.’
‘Deal,’ Holmes said. ‘I’ll get mounted.’
He slouched over to the corral. Sweddlin and Sanson walked their horses toward him as he swung up. And Angel watched all three of them for the slightest hint of treachery.
It was a damned good job he did.
As Holmes swung into the saddle, a sudden sound shattered the soft silence of the approaching dusk. There was no mistaking what it was—the insistent clamor of an alarm bell. Simultaneously, the drum of approaching hoofs became audible. Someone was coming along the trail through the breaks. Holmes heard the sound and overreacted, and his action triggered the other two into treacherous reflex violence.
‘Bastard!’ Holmes yelled at Angel. ‘You tricked us!’
He pulled his horse around in a rearing turn, yanked the carbine in the saddle scabbard out and levering it one-handed. Sweddlin and Sanson split, Sweddlin diving out of the saddle with his own carbine, rolling as he thumbed shells into the magazine, while Sanson swung down and dived in a desperate attempt to reach the shotgun that Chris Holmes had dropped in the dust. Angel ignored them, keeping every atom of his concentration on Holmes. Any man who used his horse as a shield that way, and that fast, also knew enough to shoot damned well. It was a smart, killer’s move—perhaps one man in ten thousand could hit the few exposed parts of a rider’s body if he reared his horse like that, under pressure and fast—and Holmes grinned in confident glee as he pulled his trigger. His last thought was that he’d killed Angel and then Angel’s unerring six-gun bullet smashed through his mouth and blew his skull apart in a spraying pink mist of bone and brain. Holmes’s bullet chunked a spout of earth a foot high out of the ground near Angel’s foot, but the Justice Department man was already moving in a crouched right turn, laying the six-gun across his forearm and putting three bullets in a close cluster below Kit Sanson’s right armpit as the man closed his hand on the shotgun. The heavy bullets rolled Sanson over as dead as a brained mackerel, and Lee Sweddlin, who was just bringing the carbine up to use it, found himself gaping into the yawning muzzle of Angel’s weapon. He screamed like a gutted wolf, pants staining with his own terror, and dropped the carbine, throwing it away from him as he turned and ran. He was a dead easy target, but Angel did not fire, couldn’t do it. Sweddlin careered across the face of the breaks, and turned sharp left into the gap leading to the trail back.
Angel was already running, but not in pursuit of Sweddlin. He ran up the ladder to the lookout platform like a squirrel, snatching up the spyglass that lay on the bench and focusing on the long, straight, narrow cut between the close-growing trees. For a moment he could see nothing, and then all at once his sight was filled with the insane, contorted face of Hercules Nix. He was quite alone, his arm rising and falling like an automaton as he relentlessly thrashed the dying horse with his whip. The animal was covered in blood from withers to chest, hide stripped by the terrible spurs. Its eyes wept blood and it was all but dead on its feet.
Angel threw down the spyglass and ran to the edge of the platform. Victoria was at the foot of the ladder staring up at him.
‘Frank?’ she called. ‘Frank, how many of them are there?’
‘It’s Nix!’ he shouted. ‘It’s Nix, and he’s by himself!’
‘Alone?’ she shouted.
He didn’t answer her. His mind was already emptied of everything except what he had to do next. He had to get down to the ground, snatch up the shotgun lying alongside Kit Sanson’s crumpled corpse, and run to where Nix would come out of the gap between the breaks. He wanted to be there, shotgun ready, for Jaime Lorenz, for Tyrrell, for all the men the oncoming madman had cut down.
He came down the ladder face forward, like a sailor, and whirled around toward the hut, intent on the gun. There was no sign of Victoria and he wondered where she had gone. As he snatched up the shotgun he saw a movement inside the hut, and for a moment he could not believe what he had seen. He ran to the doorway of the hut and barged in. She was standing by the huge black lead-acid batteries and her hand was on the H-shaped switch that would make the mines beneath the trail live.
‘No!’ he shouted. ‘Victoria, no!’
‘Oh, yes,’ she whispered. Her face was like a death mask. ‘Yes, oh, yes!’
And she threw the switch.