Hunt Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #5) (2 page)

‘
Hey,’ Burt,’ he said, light as a
feather, ‘take it easy, Burt.’

‘
Sure,’ Burt grinned. ‘Here,
filth!’

He had a dollar in his hand, a
silver dollar that caught the light from the lamps as Hugess
flipped it up and then caught it. Then he flipped the coin again,
and this time he made no attempt to catch it, and it thudded into
the damp, bespittled sawdust on the floor. Howie Cade went on his
knees, clawing for it, scrabbling to get it. The scream he gave
when Burt Hugess stood on his hand made everyone jump. All the big
man’s weight was on his right foot for a very long moment while
Howie looked up at him with eyes aching with agony. Then Burt
Hugess stepped back with pantomimed contrition, making a gesture of
apology.

‘
Aw,’ hell, Howie,’ he said, ‘did
I stand on your fingers? I’m sorry, boy, it’s just I never expected
to find a man down there on the floor grovelin’ in the dirt like
some poxed-up half-breed.’

Howie Cade looked at his scraped
right hand and then at Hugess. He put the hand under his left arm,
holding it gently for a moment, looking up at the big man with
tears in his eyes. There was pain in them, too, and defeat, but way
on back behind all of that there was something else, something
Howie Cade hadn’t felt for a long time - anger. The surge of the
adrenalin was quite unexpected, and he was moving before he
realized it, coming up to his feet squealing like a cat with
inarticulate rage. His sudden movement caught Burt Hugess
momentarily off guard, but only for a moment. Then the huge paws
moved, clamping Howie’s purposelessly clawing hands. Almost
casually Burt Hugess moved Howie’s hands so that he could hold them
one-handed, and then with the other hand, the right hand, he
slapped Howie across the face, lightly, chastisingly at first, and
then harder and then harder until Howie’s face was rocked right and
then left and then right and then left, and then Burt Hugess shoved
him away against the surrounding ring of his men, and then they
shoved Howie back at Burt, jeering at him, and Burt slapped him
back into their arms, and they pushed him back again. Howie’s face
was cut to ribbons, his mouth a bloody tatter, eyes closing
rapidly. All he could hear was the jeering and the flat meaty sound
Burt Hugess’s hand made when it hit him.

‘
Leave him be, Burt!’

Howie sank to the floor, stunned,
hardly able to see but recognizing the voice as that of Dan
Sheridan’s deputy, the man who had taken his place, Clell Black. He
couldn’t see Clell, only the legs of the Flying H riders and Burt
Hugess’s huge bulk in front of him.

‘
Get away from him, boys!’ he
heard Clell say. The deputy’s voice was even, unhurried, not
excited. Oh, Howie thought, and then he saw the gun in Burt
Hugess’s hand almost right in front of his eyes, and the red flame
blossomed from the barrel, the thunder of the shot deafening him.
The Flying H men had moved, and Howie could see Clell Black, across
the room near the door. The deputy hadn’t even drawn his gun. He
was looking down at the spreading stain on his chest with wide
astonished eyes. Then all at once he seemed to deflate, to shrink.
He slid almost noiselessly to the sawdusted floor.

‘
Jesus, Burt!’ Danny Johnston
breathed.

Hugess said nothing, although he
grunted like a man who had just picked up a heavy load. Howie Cade
stayed very, very still, afraid to even move lest he remind Burt
Hugess of his presence. The gun hung limp at Burt’s side, gunsmoke
curling from the barrel. There was a smell of cordite.

‘
Jesus, Burt,’ Johnston said
again. ‘He never even went for his gun!’

‘
Sure he did,’ Hugess said, and
there was a snarl in his voice as he said it. He looked at Danny
Johnston, at all of them, just holding their eyes with his burning
gaze. ‘Sure he did.’

‘
Well,’ Johnston said.

‘
Give me a drink,’ Hugess snapped.
He turned to face the petrified Johnny Gardner, who had not taken
his eyes off the bleeding body of Deputy Black since it had stopped
moving. He jumped when Hugess spoke and slopped whiskey all over
the mahogany before he got Burt’s glass filled. There was a silence
in the saloon that slices could have been cut off. Burt Hugess
upended the whiskey glass and poured the fiery stuff down his
throat as if it were so much water. Then he went out through the
batwing doors and never even so much as looked at the sprawled body
on the floor.

He got off the train at Hays. He was
a tall man, built big and rangy, his wide shoulders straining the
seams of the dusty gray suit. He had no luggage: just a bedroll and
a good, if well-used saddle. He might have been a middling-well-off
rancher returning from the East, or a cattle buyer from one of the
St Louis packing plants, had it not been for a certain look around
the eyes that said he was something other than these. Hays City
wasn’t a curious town, however; nobody paid any attention to the
stranger, whose name was Frank Angel, or asked him what his line of
work was. In fact, he was a special investigator for the United
States Department of Justice, but that wouldn’t have meant anything
to anyone in Hays. If you weren’t something to do with cattle,
wheat, or the military, nobody in Hays had anything to talk to you
about.

He’d come on the Kansas Pacific as
far as Hays, which was as good a jumping-off place as any. In his
heart of hearts Angel knew that he was avoiding the possibility of
opening old wounds, disinterring old memories that would be revived
by seeing Abilene or Fort Larned, memories of the bloody events of
long ago in which he had participated.

He dickered with the man who ran the
livery stable for perhaps an hour and came out of the discussion
with a rangy roan, a solid horse with a deep chest and sturdy legs
that carried its head high and wasn’t rope-shy.

Two hours later he was well away from Hays, riding
south as the sun climbed to its highest point in the brassy vault
of the sky, not pushing the horse, letting it make a steady pace
due south toward the faint smudge of purple on the far horizon that
was the Wichitas. It was a long ride to Fort Griffin on the Brazos,
but that was the last place anyone had seen Magruder, and so that
was where he was going to have to start.

Angel had been in Chicago when he
got word from the attorney general’s office of his assignment. The
Department of Justice wanted Magruder. They wanted him very badly.
There was the question of his ferrying repeating rifles out of New
Orleans and across to the Llano Estacado to trade with the
Comancheros. There was the question of his connection with the
Italian secret society, the
Stoppaghera,
who controlled the New
Orleans waterfront. But most of all there was the question of a
dead Justice Department investigator who’d been sent to bring
Magruder in and who’d been killed in a saloon brawl in Fort
Griffin, Texas. By Magruder.

The fact that Magruder could be
anywhere in the Southwest, that he had not less than a million
uncharted square miles to move around in, was not mentioned, any
more than the fact that the department had no photograph of the man
they were looking for, no really worthwhile physical data at all.
Angel knew better than to complain. If he’d been sitting in the
big, high-ceilinged room in Washington where the attorney general
had his office, he would have just nodded and got up and gone about
trying to find Magruder. As if the attorney general were speaking,
he heard the familiar, rasping voice.

‘
If we had that much information,
we wouldn’t need special investigators to get it, would
we?’

Angel nodded to himself, smiling
grimly. There was a saying at the rickety old building on
Pennsylvania Avenue that housed the Justice Department: if it’s
sympathy you’re looking for, you’ll find it in the dictionary -
just after shit and just before syphilis.

He came down the side of a long draw
and let the horse pick its way to the crest on the far side. As the
brown, baking plains below him, shimmering in the heat, came into
full view, he saw the wagon train up ahead in the distance: five of
them, moving across the empty land like strange insects. He jogged
the horse forward. It would be pleasant to drink coffee in company
instead of alone on the bare plains. Angel wasn’t a gregarious man,
but the soft sighing emptiness of the endless wind that keened
across Kansas summer, winter, spring and fall depressed him, made
him relive old dreams, fight forgotten wars again.

He came up on the wagons easy,
letting them see him for a good long while as he drew closer. The
lead wagon was being driven by a burly, red-faced man with a walrus
mustache at least two sizes too big for him. He had a hefty wedge
of chaw tobacco working away in his right cheek, making him look
like he had a gumboil. Every once in a while he’d spit at the
mules, the gobbet
splacking
off the haunch of the unheeding animal in a
glinting spray.

‘
That’s a name musta given you
trouble at school, sonny,’ he roared.

‘
Did for a while,’ Angel admitted,
‘Till I got my growth.’

‘
Haw!’ the wagon master shouted.
‘Name’s Ridlow. Nathan Stewart Lester Edward Ridlow. Nate when ya
gits ta know me. Haw!’

He was from Fort Worth, he told Angel, and he made
this trip four times a year - hauling supplies for the Fort Worth
Mining Company from Hays, hauling copper ingots back up to the
railroad.

‘
Be goddamned happier when they
gits that new line a-builded,’ he roared. ‘Cut four days off of ma’
journey, haw!’

Angel suggested that it was a pretty
monotonous trip to make four times a year: there wasn’t enough
scenery in the country between Fort Worth and Independence,
Missouri, to paint on a postage stamp.

‘
Wal,’ Ridlow said, firing another
great gobbet of tobacco juice that went
splack!
and splottered just like all
the others before it on the rump of the offside mule. ‘Haw! Wal, it
keeps a feller busy,’ Ridlow said. ‘Also don’t see no more o’ my
old lady than I got to, haw!’

They camped that night on the open prairie.

Ridlow’s drivers made a square out
of the wagons, and a rope corral was erected for the mules, which
were also ground-hobbled. There wasn’t too much likelihood of
Indians, but the frontiersman’s first rule was ‘take no
chances.’

After they had eaten, Angel asked
the old wagon-master about the sign they had passed as they crossed
the dried-out ford at Bluff Creek. It had been a square of white
boards, on which was painted in uncompromising capitals
THIS IS FLYING H LAND. KEEP IT IN
MIND.

‘
The Hugess ranch,’ Ridlow told
him. ‘Biggest spread ’n these parts, bar none. Stretches clear on
down to the Cimarron, on into Injun Territory. Take a man on a good
horse two days to ride across ’er from east t’west, they
say.’

In answer to Angel’s next question,
he frowned.

‘
Never met Larry Hugess, so can’t
say. Met his brother, though. Burt. Big sonofabitch. One o’ them
pizen drunks. Makes a habit o’ gettin’ in deep trouble and then
squawkin’ for Larry, his brother, to come bail him out.’

‘
And does he?’

‘
Bail him out? Every damn time, by
cracky. Haw!’

‘
He must have a lot of clout in
these parts.’

‘
Bet y’r ass,’ Ridlow grinned
toothlessly. ‘He wrote the book. Haw!’

He started to rise, and then turned to the younger
man.

‘
Welcome to ride with us
tomorrow,’ he said. ‘All the damned way, come to that.’

‘
Kind of you,’ Angel demurred,
‘but I better push on. I can make slightly better time of it on my
own. Thanks all the same.’

‘
Guess you’re right,’ Ridlow said,
a trace of ruefulness in his voice. ‘Been nice to talk to someone
for a change ’stead o’ starin’ at them mules’ asses for another
week. Haw!’

He got up and stamped his feet. The night air was
already chill, and there was a dampness in the wind that was
unexpected.

‘
Goddamned country!’ the old man
complained. ‘Well. You’ll stick with us till we get to town, I
imagine.’

‘
Town?’ Angel asked.

‘
Tomorrow,’ Ridlow explained
patiently. ‘We could have us a drink, mebbe. Haw!’

‘
Maybe we could at that,’ Angel
said. ‘What’s the name of this town?’

‘
Hugess boys own ’er,’ Ridlow
said. ‘She’s called Madison.’

Burt Hugess walked down Front Street like a prowling
lion.

He felt a strange elation, a
Christmas Eve sort of feeling of anticipation, something coming. He
felt ten feet tall and sexually aroused: he needed a drink and a
girl, and he could get both in Fat Mary’s. He went down the street
toward the depot with his head high and a proud contained smile
touching his mouth, People on the boarded sidewalks got out of his
way, parting before him like water before the thrusting prow of a
ship, as if they could feel some emanation, some aura about him.
Word of the killing had preceded him down the street; nobody wanted
to bump into Burt Hugess when he was killing drunk.

He went across the tracks and down
the rutted path to Fat Mary’s place. It was surrounded by an
unlovely pile of trash, and half-clean clothing hung on a sagging
line above the chickens foraging in the dirt. One long, low box of
adobe: he went through the door into the cool darkness of a sort of
hall, the earth damped down with sprinkled water. Facing the door
was a bar of sorts: Fat Mary served only
tequila.
Off to each side were
curtained apertures, through which you could walk down the corridor
to one of the four cribs on each side. There were a couple of girls
sitting around, idly fanning themselves, their Mother Hubbards
hiked up high on their thighs. A young Spanish-looking fellow was
playing a guitar softly, but he stopped abruptly as Burt weaved in
and pounded the bar.