Hunt Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #5) (13 page)

One more day,
Larry Hugess told himself.

He sat in the big, sprawling living
room of his ranch, face set in a heavy scowl, and faced the
unalterable fact that he had totally underestimated his opposition.
It wasn’t easy for him to admit that a crippled marshal, a reformed
drunk, and a government snooper had not only faced, but overcome
the very best men he could put up against them. But Larry Hugess
was not a stupid man. Bull-headed, obstinate, full of pride, he was
all of those and knew it. But not stupid. He realized now that he
had been using a sledgehammer to kill an ant, and it had cost him
dear, very dear. If he did not now use his brain instead of his
strength it would cost him the rest of what he owned and he was not
about to let that happen. He slouched in the heavy chair, legs
stretched out in front of him, a hunting dog asleep with its head
on his burnished leather boots, a big man rendered powerless by
insignificant enemies, as powerless as is the dog to make war on
the flea.

They had brought him the news of his
setbacks, of the death of good men, hesitantly, perhaps
instinctively knowing the fate of bearers of bad tidings. Larry
Hugess had heard them out impassively. The death of such as Johns,
Evans, even Johnston, moved him no more than the death of one of
his steers. They took the money, therefore they knew the risk.
Losing them was a setback, but nothing vital. There were plenty of
men willing to sell their guns to a man who paid well. If only he
had more time!

He reflected again upon the
unassailable fact that time was running out. The train would arrive
and unless Burt was freed by then, he was through. Not even Larry
Hugess could take on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad.
He had considered, and rejected, the idea of mounting all his men,
taking over the town, and daring Sheridan to walk down the street
to the depot with his prisoner. Sheridan, with Angel alongside him,
would do just that, forcing Larry Hugess to kill him out in the
open where the whole town could see it done. Angel, too, would have
to be killed, and Larry Hugess wanted no witness who could inform
the Department of Justice of the circumstances of the government
man’s death. Life was too short and too precious to spend every
hour of it looking over one’s shoulder for another pursuer from the
Justice Department. Yet the equation remained, no matter how he
approached it, no matter how he turned it over in his mind. The
cement holding together the barrier to realizing his intent was
Frank Angel. Remove Angel from the equation and it collapsed:
Sheridan was a good man, but he couldn’t fight one-handed. Cade
wasn’t even worth wasting time thinking about. So it came
ineluctably back each time to the same solution: Angel must die. If
Angel did not die, then Larry Hugess had no future, and he could
not, would not face that possibility. He had worked too hard for
the things he had.

He looked around the room in which
he sat, as if seeing it for the first time. It was a fine, high
room, painted white and styled in the Spanish fashion, with arched
doorways and black fretted ironwork at the windows. A massive oil
painting of himself hung above the fireplace and dominated the
room: Larry Hugess with imperious stance and haughty eyes, dressed
in the long white coat and low-crowned hat of a Mississippi
plantation owner, head thrown back, hand on holstered hip, looking
out across some spacious vista, confident, unassailable, strong.
The fireplace itself was big enough to roast half a steer, although
it had been many years since the blackened cooking pots had been
used, the carefully arranged logs set afire. A fine imported carpet
covered the red-tiled floor, and the furniture was good, hand-hewed
oak that sat solid and dependable around the room. The table was
huge, like one you might see in a refectory; it had seated twenty
many times, for when Larry Hugess entertained he did so royally and
without stint. One wall of the room was filled with shelves of
books in fine tooled-leather bindings. Huge oil lamps hung from the
beamed ceiling. At night, they picked glinting highlights from good
silver and fine crystal. By day, the big windows let in the burning
sunlight to fill the room with molten gold. Larry Hugess loved this
room, this house. He had worked all his life to own what it
contained and what it represented. He had sweated and he had lied,
he had worked and he had cheated, fixed what needed fixing and paid
whatever prices had to be paid, and he had come to where he was now
because he was strong and ruthless, lavishly generous when
necessary, his table rich, his wines impeccably selected, his guest
book filled with all the right names. Before very much longer this
territory was going to send someone to the Congress of the United
States and when it did, that man was going to be Larry Hugess. It
would be the fruition, the realization of everything he had worked
for, the reward for all the years of doing favors, of wheeling,
dealing, fixing -yes, and even killing, he thought - that had
passed since he had planted his marker on this land and begun to
build the Flying H with little more behind him than a milch cow and
a bellyful of guts. He had put his life, his wealth, his sweat, his
blood into this thing and he would have his reward. But not if
Angel lived.

One more day.

He admitted to just the faintest
sense of unease. He took great care to conceal any sign of it, but
it was there just the same. He dare not show weakness in front of
such men as rode for him these days: they were rats with an
extra-sensory perception for weakness, who would run from a sinking
ship as cold-bloodedly as they knew he would abandon them if he had
to. He got up and paced the floor, lighting a thick Havana cigar
from a humidor on a Florentine table beside his chair. The dog
rolled back and looked at him, realized he wasn’t going out, and
went back to sleep.

‘Good boy,’ Hugess said
automatically.

He looked at the whiskey decanter
and then shook his head, angry at himself. There weren’t any
solutions to the problem in there. Afterward, he told himself,
afterward he would get monumentally, roaring drunk in celebration.
But not now: time was short and he had to come up with some way of
defusing Frank Angel.

There was something: something one
of the men had told him. He had laid it aside, the way a man will
lay aside a useful tool in case he cannot do what he wants to do
with his hands. He went over the surly monosyllabic reports from
his riders, trying to remember what they had said, word for word,
when they had brought him the news that Angel had eluded the trap
at the Oriental and caused the death of two more men.

Ken Finstatt had stood in the middle
of the room, beneath the portrait of his master, turning his
Stetson around in his hands, putting into mumbling words the latest
catastrophe. Hugess had heard him through in silence: the Justice
Department man coming out of the Hardin place, the decoy shot and
Angel’s unexpectedly accurate return shot that had clipped Stu
Bennick’s arm badly enough to put him out of any further action. He
heard how Harvey Macrae and Gene Sanchez had been stampeded out
into the alley by Angel and cut down by the blasting shotguns of
Ken Finstatt and his sidekicks.

‘We skedaddled out of that alley,’
Finstatt had told him, ‘round to the jail, ready to make our play
with Angel dead. You can imagine how we was dumbstruck when he come
out of the Oriental large as life an’ twice as ugly.’

‘And then?’ Hugess had
asked.

‘Well,’ Finstatt told him,
‘nothin’ much. Angel went on back up to the hotel. Sheridan an’
Cade was back in the jail. We was stuck.’

Hugess nodded. They never took any initiative, men
like Finstatt. You told them what they had to do and they tried to
do it. If it worked, they came back like children with a puzzle
solved. If it did not, they came back so you could tell them what
to do next.

‘Of course,’ Hugess had said,
silkily sardonic, ‘it never occurred to you to finish Angel off in
the street, did it?’

‘Sure it did!’ Finstatt protested.
‘Exceptin’ your orders was that if we got Angel, it didn’t have to
look too . . . too. . . .’

‘Blatant was the word I used,’
Hugess said. ‘Although how you could be less blatant than to lie in
ambush with three shotguns I fail to see.’

‘Yeah,’ Finstatt said, either
missing the sarcasm or avoiding it. ‘Well, if we’d’ve gone for
Angel, we’d’ve had to kill that Hardin woman, too.’

‘Sherry Hardin?’

‘Right! She was walkin’ up the
street to the hotel with Angel, right close, cozy as two cats in a
basket.’

That was it!

Larry Hugess slapped his thigh, and
the hound looked up at him reproachfully. Hugess didn’t even see
it. He knew he had the lever for which he had been looking in his
mind, knowing he had laid it aside there for possible
use.

‘And what is that supposed to
mean?’ he had asked Finstatt.

‘Well,’ Finstatt said uneasily. He
put the first bits of a leer on his face, as though needing
permission to add the rest. Finstatt was aware that Larry Hugess
knew and perhaps even had ideas about Sherry Hardin.

‘Well?’ Hugess had snapped,
knowing why Finstatt hesitated and implicitly giving him permission
to continue. He felt like a pimp for encouraging the man, sensing
what Finstatt would imply. It was true: Sherry Hardin was a
handsome woman, and he had often thought how well she would look at
his side. An intelligent, beautiful woman could be a great
advantage to a man setting out on a political career. He had set
aside his intention to let her know of his interest for an
appropriate time which had never come. But he was aware of her. and
knew she had been aware of him.

‘Well,’ Finstatt said, letting the
rest of the leer write itself around his mouth and eyes, ‘I’d say
the widder Flardin’s got the hots for our Mister Angel!’

For a moment, he was afraid he’d
gone too far: Hugess’s eyes blazed with anger, but the big man
quickly got control of his emotions. ‘Guesswork, or fact?’ he’d
forced himself to say.

‘Fact,’ Finstatt said, openly
smiling now. He’ll nudge me in the ribs with his elbow next, Hugess
thought, repelled. ‘One o’ the boys sez he snuck up on the porch o’
the hotel. Seen that Angel carryin’ her up the stairs.’

There was another question, but
Hugess couldn’t bring himself to answer it. It didn’t matter; what
mattered was the fact that there was an emotional tie between
Sherry Hardin and Frank Angel. How strong it was he would have to
find out, gamble on. The more he thought about it, though, the
likelier it all seemed. The Hardin girl had always been a
stand-off, even Sheridan hadn’t got really close to her, and it
wasn’t too hard to figure he’d tried. She was pleasant to everyone
- Hugess included - but never really unbent to anyone. Maybe Angel
had touched the trigger that no other man had been able to find. It
was more than possible and that was enough for Larry Hugess.
Emotion drained out of him now and decision rushed to fill the
vacuum. He gave a great shout of triumph that brought his Mexican
housekeeper running into the room, wide-eyed with alarm.

‘Oh,
Senor
Hugess!’ she exclaimed. ‘You
frighten’ me bad!’

Larry Hugess was smiling with
pleasure and anticipation and he slapped her on her ample
rump.
‘Es nada,
Maria,
nada,'
he chortled. ‘Bring me some coffee. Finstatt, get in here!’
This last he yelled out of the open window; Ken Finstatt, working
in the corral across the wide open space in front of the house,
looked up and shambled into a run.

‘Somethin’ wrong?’ he said as he
came into the house.