Frame Angel! (A Frank Angel Western) #7 (10 page)

He
cursed himself for not having been on his
guard, for now he was not sure from which direction the shot had
come. Was the ambusher above and ahead of him? Or above and
behind?

He moved out fast from the rock overhang,
pumping the lever of the Winchester as he ran down the trail and
around the second bend and skidded into a turning fall, the rifle
barrel coming up ready to fire at anything behind him.

Nothing. He eased himself upright, skirting
the corner of the boulder which formed the shoulder of the bend he
had just come around. As he delicately edged forward, his rifle
ready for rapid fire, his eyes scanned the faceless jumble of rock
and cliff above and around him.

Nothing.

He tried to put himself into the shoes of
the ambusher. What would he do? Sit tight. No way his prey could
see him until he moved or fired. Yet he could probably see Angel
clean and clear the whole time. He could wait.

If he wanted to kill me, Angel thought.

But if he only wanted to kill Briggs?

Then he
’d fade back into the screening
timber, moving softly and without haste until he came to wherever
he had tied his horse. And he would be gone without Angel ever
knowing where he’d been.

If.

Why just Briggs?

There could only be one reason:
to cut the connection between him and Angel. Alone, Angel would not
know Lawrence, would not be able to convince either him or Hainin
that he had been Briggs
’s rescuer, helper, and partner. Kind of a rough
justice, Angel thought wryly. I never was any of those, anyway.
Then the second part of the equation occurred to him, and he knew
that Briggs had died for another reason, just as he knew with
reasonable certainty what he would discover in El Rito.

Lawrence had not had the money,
but he had known where Hainin was. So Briggs and Lawrence had
become
liabilities. And no doubt Jamesie Lawrence was as dead as
Briggs, poor Briggs who would never fondle the flesh of the San
Francisco whores he had so coveted, who instead lay broken and dead
with half of his head gone, at the bottom of a brush-choked canyon
a hundred miles from nowhere.

For some obscure reason, the thought angered
him. He stepped out into the open, throwing his head back
challenging whoever was out there.

‘
Come
on!’ he shouted. ‘Let me see your face!’

The echoes bounced back off the
mountainside, but nothing happened. Nothing moved. Angel shook his
head, angry with himself, surprised at his folly. Dick Briggs had
been a two-bit paid bandit, and there was no point in grieving for
him.

He caught up with his horse and moved on
down into El Rito, not looking once into the shadowed gully where
Briggs would lie until coyotes and the buzzards arrived.

El Rito wasn
’t much more than a wide place
in the trail.

A huddle of unlovely adobes, maybe a dozen
in all, scattered the crossroads. The people were all Mexicans, and
women with opaque eyes holding impassive babies watched as he rode
past the street, then came down into the trail behind him, joining
the small children who gathered around his horse and looked up at
him with shamelessly hostile curiosity. Not many Anglos came up
here, Angel figured, and those who did were not welcome.

Especially now, he amended his thoughts.
Especially now.

He did not need to ask for the
house of Abrana Gutierrez, because it was plain that it was the
two-room adobe at the end of the street, where a small crowd
was gathered.
Immobile and offering no help, the men, women, and children all
watched the sobbing woman in the doorway, cradling in her arms the
bloody head of a man.

Jamesie Lawrence.

Angel swung down from the saddle and pushed
his way through the knot of people. They made way for him sullenly,
unwillingly, resentful of his intrusion. The woman looked up at him
with streaming eyes. Her face was swollen, knotted with grief, and
he detested himself for what he had to do.

‘
Abrana?’ he asked. ‘Abrana Gutierrez?’

‘
Si,’
she nodded, her voice broken and old. ‘Si.’

‘
Soy
Ricardo Briggs, un amigo
de Jaime,’ he told her, biting on the lie that he
was either a friend of the dead man or Dick Briggs in
person.

‘
Yes,’
she said in Spanish. ‘Much good it will do him.’

‘
Will
you tell me what happened?’

‘
I will
tell you later,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow. Go away now. Come back
tomorrow.’

‘
Yes,’
an old woman standing to one side said. ‘Go away. Come back
tomorrow. Can’t you leave us alone, you murderers?’

There was a mutter of angry agreement from
the men.

‘
Abrana,’ Angel said gently, stooping beside the weeping
woman. ‘Let me help you. He’s dead. There’s nothing more you can do
for him.’

She lifted her face to him again
and saw something in his eyes, something that made her nod
wordlessly and release the dead man
’s cradled head. Jamesie Lawrence’s
sightless eyes stared up at the unheeding sky. He had been shot at
point-blank range through the heart, Angel noted almost
dispassionately; there were powder burns on the woolen shirt, and
the bullet hole was sharp and black-edged. Then a coup de grace in
the back of the head. The Easterner was a professional, who took no
chances, Angel thought. No chances at all.

He motioned to one of the
Mexicans,
taking hold of Lawrence’s body beneath the arms. The man
reluctantly took Lawrence’s feet, and they carried him into the
bedroom and put him on the bed. Angel straightened up and thanked
the Mexican, who crossed himself and left the room without
speaking. The place was a shambles. Cupboards had been torn open,
shelves had been ripped off the walls, and the mattress itself was
slashed and cut in several places. Each piece of furniture looked
as if it had been savagely, methodically attacked, broken, and
discarded. He went into the other room, where if anything the
wreckage was worse. Broken china strewed the floor, crunching
beneath his feet as he entered. Abrana Gutierrez sat in a wooden
chair, weeping softly, her face cradled in her hands.

‘
Tell me
what happened,’ he asked her. ‘Maybe I can help.’

‘
You can
bring him back to life, perhaps?’ she asked bitterly. ‘You can give
me back my man?’

‘
Tell
me,’ he said again. ‘Tell me who did this.’

‘
I do
not know,’ she confessed. ‘Jaime ... we were in the fields. There
was much work to do. Corn to mill. We came back to the house, and
Jaime went in. The man must have been waiting inside. I heard them
talking. Then they started to argue, and I heard Jaime shouting the
words ‘cheat’ and ‘liar.’ Then the other man said, ‘Where is he?’
and Jaime told him to go to hell. They started to fight and I ran
in. The man reached into his pocket, here—’ She indicated her left
hip, ‘—and there was a gun. He shot. He shot …’ Her voice broke and
she started sobbing again.

Angel let her cry. If
she
’d seen
Jamesie Lawrence shot that close, it would be many years before she
forgot it, and it was better that she weep and weep and weep than
that she started to think about what it might have felt like for
him, smashed backward against the adobe wall with his heart
literally blown apart.

‘
Tell me
about the man,’ he said, after a while.

‘
A big
man,’ she said, wiping her eyes. ‘Almost as big as you. Perhaps the
same. I could not see his face very well. Cruel, a sharp face. He
wore black clothes. A cape, like a matador.’

‘
You see
what color his eyes were, or his hair? Anything like
that?’

‘
No,
señor
. After he – when I saw Jaime fall, I ran at this man with
my hands to kill him. He hit me hard with something, here—’ She
turned her head, and he saw the dark bruise under the hairline
above her right ear. ‘When I woke up, he was gone. And the house
was like this.’

‘
Do you
know why he came here, Abrana?’

‘
Si
,’
she nodded dully. ‘The money. It was the money, no?’

Angel nodded.
‘It was the
money.’

‘
I told
them to send it back. It was too much. That much money is alive, it
is evil, I said. It can destroy you. Pedro was here. He
laughed.’

‘
You
mean Pete Hainin?’

‘
Si,
she answered.

‘
You
know where he is now?’

Her eyes went opaque.

‘
You do
know,’ Angel said. ‘Tell me, then, if you will not say where he is
– did Jamesie know?’ She nodded.

‘
Did he
have it written down someplace?’

Her eyes flickered involuntarily toward the
mantel and widened as she realized something, She hesitated for a
moment, then rose, moving swiftly across the room. She rummaged in
the debris on the floor and finally found, a splintered cigar box.
Its lid hung loose. It was empty.

‘
He has
it,’ she said, defeat in her voice.

Then it all came out. Lawrence
and Hainin had obviously decided to play it safe once they knew for
sure that Dick Briggs wouldn
’t be joining them. They had put the money in a
locked suitcase and checked it aboard a train out of Santa Fe. The
suitcase would be held at the depot in Trinidad for collection.
Then they had ceremonially divided the claim check into two halves.
Hainin had taken one half, Jamesie Lawrence the other. They had cut
across the printed number on the check so that one half was useless
without its mate. Then Hainin had gone, leaving his whereabouts
scribbled on the back of Lawrence’s half of the claim
check.

‘
A
hotel,’ Abrana Gutierrez said. ‘In Santa Fe. The name … the name
…?’

Angel told her the names of three he knew,
but it was none of those.

‘
It was
an unusual name,’ she said. ‘It sounded like what Anglos say, good
day, how are you?’

‘
It
doesn’t matter,’ he told her. ‘Abrana, I have to try to get to Pete
Hainin before the man who was here does, or he will kill him. You
understand this?’

‘
Si
,’
she said, her voice that of a woman who has been told many lies. No
longer young, no longer pretty, Abrana Gutierrez had lost her whole
world when Jamesie Lawrence had put up a fight for his one hope to
make it into the big money. The easterner wasn’t the kind you could
back off with hard talk. And he had a damned fine head start to
Santa Fe that Angel would be very lucky to reduce. He glanced out
of the little window. The sky was a dirty gray above the mountains,
and there was a fresh wind springing up.

‘
Abrana,
I must go,’ he said. ‘But I would wish to bury Jamesie properly.
And to care for you as well as I may. This is the gift of a friend.
You will honor me by accepting it.’

He held out the bundle of notes
which he
’d
picked up back at the La Fonda, and she looked at them and then
into his eyes and then back at the money.

‘
Take
it,’ he said, thrusting it into her hand. He went out of the house
and beneath the hating glances of the people standing outside,
crossed the street to his horse. Then Abrana Gutierrez came to the
door. ‘Briggs!’ she shouted.

For a moment he failed to react, and then he
turned.

‘
Helloes,’ she said. ‘That was it – helloes.’

He lifted a hand;
Herlow
’s was
a ratbag hotel on San Francisco Street – the kind of place you
stayed in when your money was really tight. It figured Hainin would
be somewhere like that. He only hoped he had half a chance of
getting there before the Easterner did.

He rode out of El Rito in a silence you
could touch.

Burro Alley, they called it, a
thoroughfare of hock-deep dust and ramshackle one-story adobes,
which were dilapidated and run-down. There were mules tethered
everywhere: most of the freighting outfits had some kind of an
office on Burro Alley, hence its nickname. As his horse picked its
way through the litter, discarded tin cans, rain-sodden copies of
the
New
Mexican,
and
the broken wooden crates tossed out of the nearest window and left
to rot where they fell, the sun broke through the heavy cloud on
the horizon and Angel felt the warmth of a copper sun. It was still
cool – the Royal City of the Holy Faith of St Francis of Assisi was
built on a plateau of the Sangre de Cristos, a good seven thousand
feet above sea level. But now the gray storm clouds, which had
threatened to burst since leaving El Rito, were sliding off to the
east, leaving the sky a deep cerulean blue. The streets gave off
the dank odor of evaporating rainwater, a visible moisture rising
from the pitted, ordured dust. A slouching man came out of the door
of a
cantina,
and the sour smell of stale liquor spread in the humid air.
La Paloma, the place was called. Then another
cantina
, Cielo Azul, and another, La
Golondrina. There were shuttered windows on many of the huddled
adobes, but the doors were open. Inside he could see the women
yawning. Burro Alley was a place of the night, not fit to be seen
by day.