Find Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #1) (10 page)

Angel
got to Silver City late in the afternoon of the day following
Torelli’s arrival. Climbing in long loops over the crest of the
Black Range, the ten thousand feet of Hillsboro Peak looming up to
the north, he dropped down from Emory Pass into the canyons and
mountain trails to Santa Rita with its huge opencast copper pit and
on into Silver City’s Main Street. The clamor and bustle of the
place were enormous. Huge freight wagons with teams of a dozen oxen
churned the street dust twenty feet high, coating the one- and
two-storey business buildings with an overall cast of grey. Up on
Chloride Flats above the town the constant chatter of mining
machinery throbbed against the empty desert sky. As he came up the
street he passed an express office and saw stacks of numbered
bricks of silver on the sidewalk outside, unguarded. He checked off
the names of the places he would call in on later: the Red Onion,
the Blue Goose, the Southern Hotel, the Bullard House. They were
all bursting with people: miners, freighters, teamsters, soldiers
from Camp Grant and Fort Union, drifting punchers trying their luck
in the mines, even a few surly tame Apaches loitering around the
entrances to the drinking halls, hoping for a handout. Angel let
his eyes drift easily across the faces on the crowded sidewalks,
not looking for anyone particular, hoping always to see a face he
knew, or would recognize. There wasn’t much chance Torelli would be
here, but he would check it out. He left his horse in a corral at
the edge of town and walked back up the street, wrinkling his nose
in disgust at his own smell. A bath, a shave, a change of clothing
would be a good idea, too, he thought. Loosening the Army Colt in
its holster he set out purposefully to scout the saloons and hotels
he had checked off earlier in his mind. A burly man with a broken
nose got up off a chair in the shade of the porch outside the Star
Hotel as Angel went past, falling in step behind him on the crowded
sidewalk.

A
little further up the street there was a gap between two buildings.
Behind it lay a jumble of tipped rubbish and an empty lot
stretching back to a pile of tailings looking like a landslide on
the bare slope reaching up towards Chloride Flats. Behind Angel the
man with the broken nose pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and
mopped his face ostentatiously. Then they let the dog see the
rabbit. Torelli came out of the Red Onion saloon and walked towards
Angel, timing it so that he reached the gap between the buildings
at the same moment that Angel saw him. He let Angel’s eyes meet his
and then gave a yelp of fear, turning on his heel and running flat
out up the alley, scrambling over the rubbish and off towards a
gully that ran down towards San Vicente creek.

There
was some scrub and sage down there, but the only cover was a pile
of raw timber that had been freighted in and dumped temporarily at
the rear of one of the stores.

Torelli ran towards it as Angel came pounding up the alley
after him, the Army Colt up and out in his hand. He saw Torelli
duck behind the lumber pile and hastily threw a shot at the man.
The bullet tore a huge sliver of pine from one of the planks and
Torelli pulled his own gun and fired back. His bullet whined off
way above Angel’s head and Angel smiled grimly, running crouched
low across the space between him and the pile of timber, eyes fixed
on the place he had seen Torelli last, oblivious to everything
else. He was about four yards from the timber when two men he had
never seen before stepped out into the open. One of them was a
lanky man with tow hair that flopped into his eyes and the other
was older, thickset, his shoulders broad and heavy, the bull neck
corded with anticipation. They had guns in their hands and the guns
were fully cocked. Angel skidded to a stop, steeling in a wary
crouch. He knew who they were.

‘
So
this is our little Angel,’ the man with the tow hair said. There
was a feral grin on his face. ‘Howdy, Angel. You lookin’ for
someone?’

Angel
said nothing. Looking into those eyes, he knew he was very close to
death. There was nothing he could do but the best he could. In
another second, another minute he would be dead. It was only a
question of whether he could take Cravetts before he went. A
flicker of movement to his left caught his eye, and he saw Frank
Torelli step out from the other side of the pile of timber, gun
ready. Torelli’s face was a mask of hatred.

He
felt, rather than heard, the slight sound and let the hammer of the
gun go, firing even as Vister, coming up behind him, smashed him to
the ground with the barrel of his six-gun.

Angel’s bullet had been meant for Cravetts but it went a long
way wide. He was down on his knees, fighting to stay conscious,
knowing that they were coming at him.

The
gun lay on the ground in front of him. His eyes focused momentarily
and he tried to pick the gun up. A boot stomped down on his hand
and he felt the raw red flame of pain as the bones went. Then he
was yanked to his feet and thrown back against the pile of lumber,
jarring the breath from his body.

‘
Let
me!’ he heard a voice yell. ‘I owe him this!’

‘
Wait!’ another voice said. It had a tone of command, a
sureness that it would be obeyed. Cravetts, he thought.

‘
Hold
him,’ the same voice said. Rough hands propped him upright. He
tried to will strength into his legs but they would not take his
weight. There was a long roaring sound in his head, like the sound
a train makes in a tunnel.

‘
Who
are you, boy?’ Cravetts rasped.

Angel
shook his head, wincing at the pain.

‘
Why
you doggin’ Torelli, heah?’ another voice interjected.

Angel
started to shake his head again when Cravetts hit him in the belly.
They held him while he retched like a gut-shot dog, faces like
stone. There was a terrible mushrooming agony in Angel’s body and
he could not breathe.

‘
Answer, boy!’ the voice said. It came from a long way away.
He tried to shake his head. This time the blow was to the face. He
knew it because there was the feeling of an explosion, but his
brain was not linked to the feeling and there was no pain, just a
dull astonished feeling of knowledge that he must be badly hurt.
The four men looked at him. Cravetts was splattered with blood from
Angel’s smashed face. He looked at the others.

‘
Let
me,’ Torelli begged. ‘Let me at the sonofabitch!’

Cravetts shrugged and stepped aside and Torelli came and stood
in front of the sagging wreck that was Angel.

He
lifted the broken face with a grimy forefinger.

‘
Angel,’ he hissed. ‘You hear me?’ When Angel did not reply,
Torelli slapped his face as hard as he could, then repeated the
question. He kept on doing it for perhaps five minutes, his blows
tearing the skin off the defenseless man’s face, his inexorable
questions boring into the dark where that tiny flicker of
consciousness left to Angel lay hiding. Angel groaned and tried to
nod.

‘
Who
sent you after me, Angel? Torelli screeched.

There
was no way Angel could reply. He wanted to tell them. He would have
told them anything if only to stop the awful hurt that was
happening inside him. He wanted to tell them about the Gibbons
ranch and Sharp and Kamins in the darkened street in Las Vegas, he
wanted to tell them all of it but the question he could hear like a
thin singing somewhere on the far side of his mind had no answer,
for nobody had sent him. He tried to say it, tried to tell the man
that nobody had sent him but it came out as ‘no’, the only syllable
the smashed mouth could form.

The
refusal drove Torrelli past the point of no return.

He
drew back, then drove his fist with every ounce of strength he had
into the sagging Angel’s belly. This time Angel felt something
different, something slipping sweet and loose inside him like an
oiled bearing, shifting to another place that felt vague and wrong.
Blood came out of his gaping mouth and the two men holding him let
him go, startled. Angel slumped to the ground and Torelli kicked
him and kicked him once more, savagely and punishingly. There were
only the faintest flickers of awareness in the cringing thing on
the ground now, but it tried to squirm away from the punishment, a
ragged wheezing sound coming from it. Angel could only just think
now and what he was thinking was that this was dying, that you just
went over into the dark without a chance. He did not feel the pain
any more, and he did not know when Cravetts finally stopped
Torelli.

‘
That’s enough,’ the big man said.

‘
You
— you — ain’t gonna — leave him?’ Torelli panted.

‘
He’s
finished,’ Cravetts said shortly. ‘Why not?’

Torelli shook his head. ‘No, Dick,’ he said. ‘No. No. Finish
him off. I’m going to.’

‘
All
right,’ Cravetts said. ‘But strip him, clean him out good. Not a
thing on him to show who he is, you understand? We don’t want any
posse on our tail when we hit out for Lordsburg.’

‘
You
still aimin’ there, Dick?’ Monsher said.

Cravetts nodded. ‘We pick up Milt and Howie,’ he said. ‘Then
we head for California. That was the plan, and I’m sticking to
it.’

‘
You
don’t figger mebbe this one—’ Monsher jerked his head at the
terribly still form of Angel ‘— told anyone else about
us?’

Cravetts shook his head.

‘
A
loner,’ he said flatly. ‘Like Torelli said, a crazy. He’d never
tell anyone anything.’

Monsher nodded. ‘I’ll buy that,’ he said.
‘Johnnie?’

Vister nodded his own agreement with their
assessment.

‘
Let’s get away from here,’ Cravetts said harshly. Then he
turned to Frank Torelli, who was standing looking down at the
broken, bleeding thing on the ground that was Frank
Angel.

‘
He’s
all yours,’ Cravetts said.