Free Stop Angel! (A Frank Angel Western Book 8) by Frederick H. Christian Page A

the $500 bonus that Nix paid to the man who
first found the prey. Five hundred bucks, plus a month away from
the valley—that was the kind of motivation Des Elliott’s
bar-scourings understood. You could wear out your balls in San
Antone or Fort Worth if you had that much scratch in your jeans. So
they moved steadily, carefully, searching each gully or clump of
shrubs, each scatter of rock that might conceal a man.
    At each intersection of their
chosen paths were rendezvouses. These were rigidly observed, for
obvious reasons. If the quarry took out one, or even two of his
pursuers soundlessly, their failure to appear at the meeting point
would immediately alert the others, and also pinpoint the
quarry ’s
location.
    Hume Cameron was the
favorite.
    The predawn briefing had been to
the point and succinct. The last sighting of Angel had been inside
the segment Cameron would be covering. Now in the bright morning
sunlight he reined in his horse on the fold of a long rise. Away
off to his right he could see Nige Hollis working toward the San
Miguels. Hollis ’s paint pony was easy to spot. There was no sign of Mike
Hythe. Cameron guessed he was probably checking out the blind
canyon. He hitched his hip around on the saddle, stretched his legs
in the wooden stirrups. The horse tossed its head and blew through
its nose, the bit clunking between its teeth.
    Off to his right, Cameron could
see a scatter of rounded boulders beside the trail. None of them
looked big enough to hide a man. There wasn ’t enough cover for a jackrabbit, he
decided, gigging the horse forward. He thought about Margarita,
that little filly he’d met up with in the Eldorado Saloon in San
Antone. Dark, she was, with scarlet lips and a waist you could span
with your hands. He thought of all the days and nights he could
spend with her if he had five hundred dollars. He imagined himself
lying in a bed, and Margarita leaning over him naked, her soft
breasts warm on his chest. It was as good a thought to die on as
any.
    Angel didn ’t give Cameron the ghost of a
chance.
    He had used an old Apache trick.
What the Apache did was to lightly oil their bodies and then roll
in the dust until they were coated with it all over. Then they put
a large stone on the ground and lay across it, so that their back,
with its coating of dust and dirt, looked exactly like a rounded
rock. Head, hands, feet were buried in soft dirt, the way a
child ‘buries’ another in the sand. Ten feet away, they would be
invisible. Apaches trained themselves to remain immobile over long
periods, still and silent as the stones they were imitating, only
their watching eyes moving. When the moment was right, they
exploded into killing action.
    Cameron saw the sudden movement
and jerked reflexively on his reins, snatching for the six-gun at
his side while his bewildered eyes registered that fact that one of
the rocks beside him had come to life, but he was as good as dead
by then. The
unerringly thrown knife blinked once in the sunlight as it turned
in flight, and then buried itself with a soft thwack! below the right-hand hinge of
Cameron’s jaw.
    The strange, foreign rigidity of
steel inside the body is unlike any other hurt. A man can be hit by
one, or two or even more bullets, and still manage to continue, to
complete his
original intention. He can still strike out, still get off his
horse, still pull his gun, still fight—bullets or not. Somehow the
long, grating slide of the knife blade seems to cut more than
flesh, muscle, nerve end, seems to make an aperture out of which
the man’s sap flows. He does not fight, doesn’t strike back.
Instead, he is paralyzed by the alien steel in him, as Cameron was.
His eyes protruded and he tried to scream, his body overreacting in
panic, hastening the work of the weapon in his throat. His body
lurched backward in the saddle as he plucked at it with flayed
hands which welled blood that joined the awful gouting spurt that
leaped suddenly from the