Hunt Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #5) (16 page)

‘
Time to go,’ Larry Hugess told his
men.

He permitted himself a smile at the expression of
relief that flooded Johnny Gardner’s face and which the
saloonkeeper quickly stifled in fear. Gardner’s reaction was his
testing of the town’s temperature: they would always be relieved to
hear that he was going, never dare to challenge his desire to stay.
Madison was his town again. The knowledge gave him a strong, warm
feeling in his belly. The whole thing was over. These sheep
wouldn’t give him any trouble.

He led the way out into the afternoon sunshine, and
his brother stepped up into the saddle of the horse that had been
brought for him. Larry Hugess grabbed the pommel of his ornate
saddle and swung aboard the gray. His six riders followed suit.

‘
I don’t see Ken Finstatt no
place,’ Burt Hugess offered.

‘
Probably waiting for us up by the
warehouse,’ his brother replied. He kneed the horse into movement
and led the cavalcade across the T-junction at Front and Texas, the
Oriental on their right, their shadows long and black on the
hoof-pocked street.

Howie Cade stepped into the street: he had a carbine
canted across his hip and the barrel of it was pointed straight at
Larry Hugess. ‘Leavin’ so soon?’ Howie asked.

The eight men had reined in their horses in
astonishment when he appeared. Larry Hugess stared at the deputy as
if he truly were a ghost. Before he could speak, a dry cough from
behind the group made him swivel his head around. There, in the
middle of the street behind them, was Dan Sheridan. He had a
six-gun in his left hand It was cocked and pointed at the Flying H
men.

‘
What the hell?’ hissed Burt
Hugess.

‘I’ll count five,’ Howie Cade was
saying. ‘By that time I want all your guns and belts in the dirt.
One.’

Larry Hugess’s mind was as busy as a rat in a maze.
He had already considered and rejected half a dozen ploys, asked
himself and answered as many questions when Howie counted out the
second number.

‘
All right,’ he said.

‘
Three,’ Howie said. ‘Let it be
nice and easy now.’

‘All right,’ Larry Hugess said.
Then he rolled out of the saddle his hand yanking out the gun in
the holster at his side. The gray, suddenly tortured by the
wrenching pull on the
chileno
bit, screamed shrilly and reared up, spooking the
other horses into a milling bunch that was galvanized into a flat
gallop by the simultaneous explosions of Larry Hugess’s and Howie
Cade’s guns. Howie’s shot whacked the rider who’d been immediately
behind Larry Hugess out of the saddle in a windmilling pile. At the
same time Larry Hugess’s shot hit Howie’s right hand, smashing
through it and into his hip, hurling him in a bundle against the
solid upright of the hitching rail outside the Oriental.

Burt Hugess and three of the Flying H riders were
already moving hard up the street toward the safety of the Hugess
warehouse as behind them Dan Sheridan turned loose with the
handgun. His four rapidly fired shots sounded flat and undangerous
in the open sunlight but one of them tore Stu Bennick out of his
saddle, dead before he even hit the ground, and another bored an
ugly hole in the leg of Jim Landy before bursting through the
leather fenders of his saddle and gut-shooting the roan mare he was
riding, knocking the animal into a slewed heap in the street. It
lay kicking and whinnying as Landy rolled off the horse and thumbed
a shot at Sheridan, who was out in the middle of the T-junction and
running forward, a movement that probably saved the marshal’s life.
Landy’s hasty shot tipped the right-hand side of the frontal bulge
of Sheridan’s forehead, cutting a searing burn in his skin and
knocking the lawman off his feet, momentarily stunned. In that same
moment, Larry Hugess tried for him from the porch of the hotel, and
his aimed slug whined viciously through the space that moments ago
Sheridan had been filling.

On one knee, Sheridan pawed away a trickle of blood
from his right eye and thumbed back the hammer. His placed shot hit
Landy just as the Flying H man was getting clear of the thrashing
roan, driving Landy down flat into the unheeding dust. Then as
Sheridan whirled toward where Larry Hugess lay prone alongside the
boardwalk around the front of the hotel, he was knocked off his
feet as the whole world went up in the air and came down again.

Frank Angel had planned hastily but effectively. With
Sheridan at the back, Howie in the center, the only direction in
which the Flying H boys could break would be toward the depot, and
he had anticipated that by running flat out across the open ground
behind the saloon and the houses on the eastern edge of Front.
Where the pathway down from the church led to Front Street he
skidded to a stop. It wasn’t more than ten yards from where old
Nate Ridlow had been bushwhacked, and Angel’s lips curled into a
grim smile at the savage irony of what he was going to do. He fired
the short fuse on the three sticks of dynamite just as Burt Hugess
and the three Flying H riders burst into their desperate gallop
toward the safety of the Hugess warehouse. In one smooth sweet
movement, Angel lobbed the dynamite he’d taken from Ridlow’s wagons
beneath the feet of the oncoming riders and went forward on his
belly, the carbine cocked, placing his shot squarely through the
forehead of Burt Hugess’s horse. In that same moment Ed Barth and
Bill Wessel yanked their horses back on their haunches, stabbing
hands toward the guns at their side and even getting them out in
the long, empty moment when it seemed to Angel that the world was
holding its breath awaiting the explosion.

The dynamite went off with a solid, heavy, flat bang,
and a fountain of dirt and dust erupted forty feet into the air in
the center of Front Street. The air was full of whickering pieces
of gravel and softer, wetter things which splattered against the
walls of the houses and the hotel. Every window on the street for
twenty-five yards in either direction bulged outward and then
smashed inward in flying smithereens a thousandth of a second
later, filling the air with the jangling clatter of falling glass.
Angel could see a man floundering about on hands and knees in the
dirt, blood streaking his face and hands. The dust hung like a
pall, drifting slowly eastward across the street, shadowing the
sun. As it cleared, Angel could see Burt Hugess off to one side,
lying flat on his back not far from the dead body of his horse,
which had dropped like a stone on the spot where Angel had shot it.
Bill Wessel, blinded by the explosion, was groping around for
something familiar to touch not two yards from the flayed corpse of
his horse which lay across the tattered remnants of Ed Barth’s
body. Of the third man, Jack Coltrane, there was no sign at
all.

As Angel came running across the street, Bill Wessel
pawed enough dirt from his eyes to see the moving figure, and
cursing mindlessly, tried to scrabble toward the six-gun he had
dropped in the dirt. He had almost closed his fingers around the
butt when Frank Angel was on him like a tiger, and the savage
sideswipe of the carbine barrel stretched Wessel flat in the dirt,
his right leg kicking in reflex, a bright new trace of blood across
his broken forehead.

Angel moved fast to where Burt Hugess lay in the
dusty street, his hand quickly checking the soft point in the
carotid artery. Nodding, he looked around with narrowed eyes for
Burt’s brother, but of Larry Hugess he could see no sign.

The street looked like a battlefield.

There were two dead men slumped in
inhumanly twisted shapes between where Angel crouched alongside the
unconscious form of Burt Hugess and the Palace Saloon. Three dead
horses. He shook his head: in those few terrible minutes, the proud
strength of the Flying H had been broken like a butterfly by an
iron wagon wheel. Where the hell was Larry Hugess?

He saw Sheridan coming up the street on lagging feet,
noted the trickle of blood at the marshal’s temple. Sheridan looked
exhausted. Angel gave him a wave: OK, it said. The marshal
acknowledged it and instead of coming the rest of the way, veered
across toward the steps in front of the entrance to the Oriental,
where Howie Cade was now sitting up, holding his belly with hands
slick with blood. The last traces of the dust shifted away and the
sun was strong again. When Angel looked up, Larry Hugess was there
on the porch of the hotel and Sherry Hardin was tight close against
him, her right arm jerked up high behind her back, her face twisted
in a mixture of pain, fear, and chagrin. Larry Hugess had a six-gun
barrel jammed into the soft pad of flesh below the girls chin and
the gun was fully cocked.

‘
Angel!’ Larry Hugess
hissed.

Frank Angel rose, very slowly, very warily. He kept
his hands away from the gun at his side. The carbine he had laid on
the ground caught a shaft of sunlight and winked at him
mockingly.

‘
Get away from my brother!’ Larry
Hugess shouted. ‘Get back away!’

Angel nodded. Hands up away from his body, he walked
backward six or seven paces, then ten. He saw Dan Sheridan start to
move toward him from outside the Oriental, and he made a signal
with his left hand: stay. Sheridan stood stock still, like a kid
playing statues. His eyes moved from Hugess to Angel, back again,
weighing the danger, the odds, ready for action.,

‘
He’s not dead, Hugess,’ Angel
said, his voice level and matter-of-fact.

‘
Not dead?’ Larry Hugess’ face was
a study in disbelief.

‘
Not dead,’ Angel said. ‘He’s out
cold.’

‘
Uh,’ Larry Hugess said, digesting
what this meant. Angel smiled coldly.

‘
That’s right, Hugess,’ he said.
‘He’ll stand trial. There’s no way you can stop it now. You’ve
lost. Put down the gun and turn Miss Hardin loose.’

‘Ha!’ Hugess said, jerking Sherry
back closer against him. ‘You’d like that, Mister Smartass Angel,
wouldn’t you? Well, I’m not through yet, not by a long
chalk.’

‘
You’re through, Hugess,’ Angel
informed him coldly. ‘It’s only a matter of whether you want to
live long enough to be tried and hung or whether you want to die
right here now.’

‘
Yes?’ Hugess said. ‘There’s just
one thing.’ He jerked his chin at his prisoner. ‘The
girl.’

‘
What about her?’ Angel said
tonelessly.

‘
We do a deal,’ Hugess said. ‘You
let me ride out of here, take Burt. When I’m clear of town, I turn
the girl loose.’

‘
And if I say no?’ Angel said,
noting the flicker of movement behind Hugess but not showing that
he had done so by even so much as the lift of an
eyebrow.

‘
Then I kill her here in front of
you,’ snarled Hugess. ‘I mean it, Angel.’

‘
Your fight’s with me, Hugess,’
Angel challenged him. ‘Not with the girl. Turn her loose. You’ve
got a cocked gun in your hand. Step away from her - or are you too
gutless to take me on even when you’ve got the drop?’

Anger flared in Larry Hugess’s eyes, and for a moment
Angel thought he’d do it, but then Hugess shook his head. ‘Oh, no,’
he said. ‘Burt? Burt!’

Burt Hugess was shaking his head from side to side.
He began to sit up, his face bewildered like the face of a child
who awakens in a different bed from the one he went to sleep in. He
heard his brother’s voice and turned out of habit toward it.

‘
Get on your feet!’ Larry Hugess
snapped at him. ‘Go and get two horses! Now move, damn your
eyes!’

Burt Hugess had gotten to his feet, and his eyes were
wide with the horror of a sleeper wakened from a nightmare to find
it real. His eyes flicked from one dead body to another, and then
to Angel.

‘
You?’ he said eventually.
‘You?’

‘
Goddamn you, Burt—’ Larry Hugess
said, but that was as far as he got with whatever he was going to
say because at that moment the flicker of movement which Angel had
detected in the doorway of the hotel turned into the reality of the
little Chinaman, Chen. Chen had a nine-inch butcher knife in his
right hand and he slid it with deft certainty and macabre precision
between Larry Hugess’s ribs just below the right shoulder blade.
Larry Hugess’s eyes bulged out like the eyes of a throttled horse,
and he went up on his toes, abandoning his grip on Sherry Hardin,
who jerked to one side and away. Larry Hugess went down the two
steps from the porch into the street on the very tips of his toes,
his mouth working and his eyes looking at something that might have
been a million miles distant. He tried to lift the gun and point it
at Frank Angel while Angel and Burt Hugess stood and watched his
marionette approach. Then the spell broke.

A gout of black blood boiled from the rancher’s mouth
and he pitched forward into the dust. In the same instant, Burt
Hugess snatched at the gun in his holster, his burning eyes fixed
on the man he desired to destroy with a hatred that was
all-consuming: Frank Angel. He was lifting the pistol out of the
holster before Angel began to move and the wicked grin of vengeful
triumph was already forming on Burt’s mouth. Then somehow,
astonishingly, inexplicably, he was staring into the barrel of
Angel’s six-gun before he had eared back the hammer of his own. He
stood there with the gun in his hand and knew he was a dead man. He
waited for the blasting shock of the bullet but it did not
come.

‘
Go ahead, you mother!’ he
screeched. ‘Do it!’

He tried desperately to will himself to ear back the
hammer of the gun in his hand: every nerve in his body screamed
with the need to kill the man in front of him. But there was no way
he could do it. He stood there in the street, paralyzed by his own
cowardice, and offered no resistance at all when Angel stepped
forward and took the gun out of his hand.