Frame Angel! (A Frank Angel Western) #7 (4 page)

Briggs glanced back at the third
member of the party.
‘How you comin’, Jamesie?’ he asked.

‘
Fine as snake
hair,
’
Lawrence answered.

‘
You
take care o’ that nag o’ yours,’ Briggs said. ‘He’s worth his
weight in gold!’

Jim Lawrence grinned. What
Briggs said wasn
’t far short of the truth. They had taken time out along
the way to burst open the slatted crate holding the money and to
pack the wadded bundles into two big
alforjas,
which were now slung across the cantle of
Lawrence’s saddle.

Lawrence was about to say
something when he heard Hainin shout. Looking up, he saw three
horsemen swing into view around the bend in the logging trail
ahead. He cursed in startled panic. Who were they? What the hell?
He didn
’t
have to formulate the question. The lead rider in the trio ahead
reached down and hoisted a carbine out of the saddle holster under
his right leg. The gun metal caught sunlight as the man swung the
gun up and kicked his horse into a run, but the three raiders were
already on the move. Long before they had come to this place, they
had discussed what they would do if pursued, if the law got on
their trail. They had discussed it not two hours before, when they
were repacking the bundles of money, only half-joking about any one
of them getting away and taking off with the whole haul – and about
the other two being as certain as Sunday to track down the one
who’d run with the money and kill him like a bug. They had made
their plans., set their rendezvous, and planned their routes for
just such an eventuality.

‘
Scatter!’ Hainin yelled. ‘Get the hell out of
here!’

There was little or no cover
right or left. On the left the ground rose steeply, and greasewood
and sage tangled with briars, bramble, and scree underfoot
– difficult ground
for any horse to cover fast. Hainin rocketed off to the right,
digging in his spurs until blood spurted from the horse’s side and
the animal was galloping flat out with head stretched low, ears
back, and eyes rolling wildly. He steered the horse straight for
the sloping brow that sharpened into a sliding shale runoff and
went down steeply to the canyon floor below, where the timber was
dark and thicker.

Briggs took the left-hand side
but quartered back across to a spot where a
shale runoff gave his laboring horse
a halfway decent chance of making it to the crest before any
pursuer could duplicate his running rush at the slope. Lashing his
horse like a man demented, the reins raising welts on the
chestnut’s withers, Briggs galloped up the bare, rocky hillside
while Jim Lawrence, without hesitation, reined his own horse around
and tore downhill. The horse went down the uncertain ground too
fast to be able to see where he was putting his feet, and Lawrence
had all he could do to stay on the back of the kicking, flailing
animal. They went down into the Bonito Canyon like a bat out of
hell, much too erratic a target for anyone above to hit and much
too recklessly for anyone to follow the same path. Even as he
fought the animal upright, sliding it on its haunches down a broken
cut bank, Lawrence was figuring his route. He’d have to get across
to South Fork and turn north toward Capitan, then cut through
Capitan Pass on to the old military road that went down toward
Chisum’s and the open, sloping plains on the eastern edge of the
endless mountains. Taking that route, a good rider could make
enough ground to lose any pursuer.

Behind him Lawrence thought he
heard shots. Maybe a Winchester; he couldn
’t be sure because of the wind in his
ears. He wondered whether Hainin and Briggs had gotten
away.

Not that it made any difference.
They
’d been
told the job was worth sixty thousand. If three of them turned up
to collect, that was twenty each. If only two, thirty each. The
slope leveled out, and he patted the horse’s neck, moving him at a
canter toward the gap in the trees that led to the South Fork
crossing.

Briggs wasn
’t anything like as lucky. His
horse panicked, shying and bucking, unable to master the sliding
shale that moved every time it got its hoofs set. Briggs panicked
even more than his steed, and he screamed at it, larruping the
unfortunate beast with the long reins, which only increased its
fright. The horse buck-jumped one more time and then stopped with
its head down, lungs bellowing. In that moment Tony Coyle shot the
beast out from between Briggs’s legs. Briggs’s horse went down in a
floundering welter of legs and thrashing head, and Briggs was
thrown, bundled and awkward, against a sharp-edged rock that caught
him below the center of the spine, numbing his legs as he fell. He
rolled down the shale slope, face and hands ripped by the
chattering slate he dislodged, tumbling into a heavy thicket of
greasewood that stopped him sharp, breaking his fall. Slightly
bruised and shaken, Briggs was still fast and good, and he was
halfway to his knees drawing his six-gun out of his holster when he
saw the bony, high cheekboned face of Sheriff Curtis and then the
Cavalry model Colt .45 leveled unwaveringly at his
belly.

‘
Don’t
you go and do anythin’ fatal, now,’ Curtis advised him.

‘
Well,’
the attorney general said, ‘we’ve got one of them.’

‘
But
that’s all we’ve got,’ Wells added.

They were sitting in the
attorney general
’s office on the first floor of the Justice Department
headquarters; Wells in the same leather chair he usually occupied,
the attorney general leaning forward across his desk. The second
armchair was occupied by a third man, younger than both the others,
broad-shouldered and rangy, the kind of man you knew would be very
tall when he stood, no matter how he might scrunch down into an
armchair. His dark gray suit was well-tailored, but he seemed
constrained by it, as though he might prefer something much more
practical and comfortable. His face was tanned, the cheekbones not
quite high enough to hint at mixed blood but giving his face a
flat, planed look, which together with level gray eyes,
sun-bleached hair, and the tapering hands and fingers of an artist,
made him look like some kind of an executive for a company whose
business was mostly out of doors. And in a manner of speaking, that
was what he was. His name was Frank Angel, and he was a special
investigator: Angus Wells’ discovery and his top
trouble-shooter.

Wells knew what others did not
know about Frank Angel. He knew about the bullet scars in both of
Angel
’s legs
and the longer one in his belly, and he knew how they had gotten
there. He knew that if you checked Angel’s hands more carefully,
you would find the outer edges calloused, for the man was well
trained in the martial arts of the Orient. He knew that if you put
any kind of gun into Angel’s hands, Angel could kill with it; and
he knew the other things you could not see about Angel – the
concealed throwing knives he could use so unerringly, the
razor-edged buckle clipped behind the ornate one he usually wore,
the peg-ended wire garrote looped inside the wide leather belt. He
knew all about Frank Angel because he had taught Angel a great deal
of it and had been there to see that Angel had been taught all the
rest. He also knew that he owed Angel his life, but neither of them
had ever spoken of that.

‘
Goddamn
it, they can’t have just vanished off the face of the earth!’ the
attorney general said. ‘Two men with a quarter of a million dollars
don’t just disappear!’

‘
I don’t
know,’ Wells mused. ‘I’d have said that with that kind of money,
anyone could disappear. Buy a new name, a new country
even.’

‘
In ten
days? Hardly!’ snorted the attorney general.

‘
Where’s
Briggs now?’

It was the first time Frank
Angel had spoken since he
’d come into the room. He’d listened to the
theories. Wells had several. The old man had a few of his own. The
robbers were lying low, waiting until pursuit died down before they
spent their loot. Or they weren’t and were papering one of the big
cities with federal money, and nobody had even noticed. Or they had
split up and were awaiting word from Briggs. Or they weren’t. He
shrugged mentally. Made no difference. Ten days had passed since
they took Dick Briggs, and nothing else had turned up.

He
’d read the reports. Engineer Pat Seele:
Southern Pacific Railroad employee for eighteen years, married,
four kids, living in a small frame house on the outskirts of
Trinidad, Colorado. Exemplary record, unlikeliest of unlikely
candidates to have been implicated in the robbery, unless you
counted the Negro stoker with the magnificent name – Moses
Glorification Washington. All they’d been able to say about the man
who’d held them at gunpoint was that he was about five feet nine,
had sallow skin and green eyes. At least, they thought they were
green. The other two they’d seen only from a distance. One thickset
and stocky, the other tall with long dark hair – not much more help
than the descriptions given by the two Pinkerton men.

Sheriff George Curtis had also
put in a report on the men he
’d seen. The one riding a chestnut had been tall
with long dark hair (he’d lost a hat in his flight, but the hat was
old, sweat-stained, and indistinguishable from a thousand other
hats), and the other man had been so far away that he could only
make out a dark blue shirt and pants and his excellent riding.
Curtis had the feeling that the trio knew the area well, and it was
possible that they’d been involved in the Lincoln troubles a year
or two before. Which, Angel reflected, cut the number of
possibilities down to seven or eight hundred.

The only positive lead was Briggs.

‘
He’s in
the territorial penitentiary at Folsom,’ Wells replied.
‘Why?’

‘
He’s no
use to us there,’ Angel said.

‘
Take
your point, Frank,’ Wells said.

‘
But we
can’t risk losing him if we turn him loose. Even the best shagger
in the business would run a fair chance of either being spotted and
taken or dodged without too much trouble. And we don’t know if his
sidekicks aren’t watching out for just such a dodge.’

‘
Hardly
likely,’ Angel suggested.

‘
Too
chancy,’ was the firm reply.

Angel just shrugged.

The attorney general reached for
the box on the right-hand side of his desk and took out one of his
evil-smelling cigars. He raised an eyebrow at the two men, who
politely but firmly shook their heads in refusal. With a shrug that
almost said that they were out of their heads, the attorney general
lit his cigar with a wooden match, inhaling with deep pleasure.
Wells looked at Frank Angel, and although their faces showed
nothing, each knew what the other was thinking.
They
’d both,
at one time or another, accepted the old man’s offer – but only
once. After choking politely for what seemed like interminable
hours, both had vowed never to touch the cigars again under any
circumstance. They privately agreed that the attorney general
probably had the cigars manufactured in a South American banana
republic by very fat, very sweaty peons who created the unique
flavor and bouquet by using a mixture of horse manure and wet
newspaper to roll the stogies and stored them in the outhouse of
the town brothel to mature.

‘
Well
Angus, Frank,’ the attorney general said, puffing happily on the
glowing cigar, his head wreathed in pungent smoke. ‘Those Treasury
boys want some answers, and they want them fast. We’re in trouble
if we don’t come up with them.’

‘
There
is a way,’ Angel said.

Both men turned to look at him,
and Angel grinned. When the old man said
‘we’ were in trouble, what he meant
was ‘you’ were – and up to your eyebrows in it. If there was
trouble, he wasn’t in it. No way.

‘
Let’s
hear it,’ the attorney general said. He sat down in his big leather
chair, spreading his hands on the polished desk and looking
expectantly at Frank Angel. Wells, too, eased himself into his
chair, watching carefully, as though Angel were going to ask a
conundrum he might have to answer.

‘
Frame
me,’ Angel said.

‘
What?’

‘
Rig a
robbery, something fairly heavy. Something involving a lot of money
– gold, perhaps. Something that might impress a man who can lay his
hands on a one-third share of a quarter of a million
dollars.’

‘
Yes,’
Wells said. ‘I’m with you. You get pulled in for this job, whatever
it is. Thrown into the pen. But it won’t get you
anywhere.’

‘
Why
not?’ Angel asked.

‘
Briggs
won’t cough,’ Wells told him. ‘He’s like a rock. I’ve had three men
in there working on him. Tried every trick in the book. Told him
we’d taken the other two, he might as well spill. He laughed in
their faces. Told him the money had been recovered, his pals had
run for it leaving him holding the baby. Not a peep. Either he
really doesn’t know anything, or he knows he’s
fireproof.’