Hunt Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #5)

by Frederick H. Christian

  Issuing classic fiction from Yesterday and Today!

  When Frank Angel arrived in Madison, the town was abuzz with the news of Marshal Sheridan’s arrest of Burt Hugess, with everyone agreeing that Sheridan was in for a rough ride in bringing him to justice. Angel wanted no part in the impending dangers, but when the Department of Justice ordered him not to leave town he knew he was already involved.

  With Larry Hugess locking the town up tight to stop word getting out to the US Marshal, Angel would have to team up with Sheridan. And that meant nothing but bad news for the outlaw.

  HUNT ANGEL!

  ANGEL 5

  By Frederick H. Christian

  First published by Sphere Books in 1975

  Copyright © 1975, 2006 by Frederick Nolan

  Published by Piccadilly Publishing at Smashwords: February 2014

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader.

  Cover image © 2014 by Westworld Designs

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Published by Arrangement with the Author.

  For André

  Chapter One

  In a way it was Cade’s fault.

  You couldn’t blame him, of course, the poor sad bastard. It was getting so the Flying H boys couldn’t come into town, but Howie would stumble across their path, and sure as chickens lay eggs, they’d feel obliged to roust him up some. Not that it mattered; the Flying H boys had their fun but in the end they bought Howie the drinks he wanted, and so maybe each needed the other in some peculiar way. No harm done, usually, except that on this particularly hot dusty Saturday night, Burt Hugess rode in with the boys, and he got to drinking like a man who meant to get drunk. Those citizens of Madison who’d seen Burt Hugess poison drunk - and that meant about everyone - quietly finished off their drinks and found good reasons to be elsewhere than the ornate precincts of Johnny Gardner’s Palace Saloon. The Flying H boys soon had the place to themselves, which was just jim-dandy with them: as men a-horseback they had little enough time for the stiff-collared creeps who lived in town and ran the stores anyway.

  He was a big man, Burt Hugess: barrel-chested and powerful, shoulders like one of the fighting bulls you saw down in old Mexico. Bull-like, yes: everything about him. The way his head swung from side to side, the way his eyes had that red light behind them when he was mad, the thrusting, loping way he moved, all of them were bull-like, powerful. Yet it wasn’t the sheer physical bulk of the man which alone made Johnny Gardner cringe as Burt Hugess’s flat-hand pounded the mahogany bar for another drink. Lowering and ugly though Burt might be, there was a second reason to walk a big circle around him, and that was the fact that he was the brother of Larry Hugess and that Larry Hugess owned this piece of Indian Territory as effectively as if he had branded every square foot of it personally with his Flying H iron.

  The boys had been quiet enough to start with: Hugess and Danny Johnston and Johnny Evans and a couple of the Flying H wranglers, in off the dusty range for a Saturday night dust-cutting session. They were rowdy and they were rough, but they spent freely, and Johnny Gardner wasn’t about to turn his patrician nose up at their cash money, not when so many of his customers seemed to think he could carry their slate indefinitely. Besides, he told himself, the boys never do any real harm, when you get right down to it. A few broken glasses, maybe. Once in a while a window shattered, someone scared shitless by an exuberantly emptied six-gun. There was no malice in them, Gardner told himself, knowing as he did so that he was a bigger liar than Baron Munchausen.

  When Howie Cade came in through the rear door, there was a jeering shout of welcome from Ken Finstatt, who was standing alongside Burt Hugess.

  ‘Well, looky here!’ he yelled. ‘If it ain’t Deppity Cade!’

  That gave them a big laugh. Howie Cade had once been Marshal Dan Sheridan’s deputy, and a damned good one, too. Fast with a gun. A reliable man to have alongside you in a tight corner. But that had been in the days BL - Before Lily.

  Lily had arrived in Madison the preceding fall on her way - she said - to open up a dressmaking business in Winslow. Well, if that was what she wanted to pretend, Madison really didn’t mind. As to believing it, well, that was something else again, because Lily was quite obviously what she was, and if she’d been wearing a sign painted in red letters around her neck, it couldn’t have been any damned plainer, and there wasn’t a man in town who didn’t know it. Correction: there was one man who didn’t know it, didn’t want to know it, and couldn’t be told, and that man was Howie Cade. He thought that Lily Elliott was just about the best thing that had happened to mankind since the invention of the wheel. He fell for Lily with a bang that could have been heard in four counties.

  Now there were things a friend could do in situations like this, and Dan Sheridan, to his credit did them all. He hinted a little; asked one or two of the right questions; pointed out - very gently because he had no real desire to get into a fistfight with Howie - the discrepancies in Lily’s story; but to no avail. After that he shrugged and gave up. Everyone had the right to go to hell in their own beautifully fashioned hand-basket, at least in Dan Sheridan’s book. He had few enough friends as it was: telling Howie the naked truth was a sure way of losing another. Which meant, inevitably, that Howie found out the hard way.

  Lily, as everyone expected, ran exactly true to form. She took Howie for every cent he’d saved in four years of keeping the law in Madison, and then, like the Arabs, she folded her tent and departed. All of which would have been normal, understandable, unremarkable. They happened, such things. But Howie took it hard, very hard.

  He started finding solace at the bottom of a glass, and then at the bottom of a bottle, and finally the bottle had him, and he didn’t give a damn. Sheridan figured it wasn’t one of those how-could-she-do-a-thing-like-that-to-me cases, but a how-could-I-make-such-a-damned-fool-of-myself one. Howie was burying his shame, and at first Sheridan had figured he’d climb out of it, but Howie went deeper down and, in the end, Sheridan had to take the star off him because Howie was getting to be a liability. He gave his former deputy a job as a sort of caretaker in the jailhouse, sweeping the place out; paying Howie a few bucks a week for his efforts. He’d have cut his throat before he’d have admitted that he was paying the money out of his own pocket: he figured Howie’s pride was battered enough. Not that it mattered: the money was never in Howie’s jeans longer that the time it took him to drink it away, so for the rest of each week Howie hustled for a drink anyway he could. Which was how he came inevitably into the orbit of the Flying H boys.

  ‘Well, Howie,’ Burt Hugess said, with silken contempt, ‘you look like a man needs a drink.’

  A light kindled in Howie’s eyes: part hope, part disbelief. Maybe Burt was in a good mood. Maybe the boys wouldn’t roust him this time. It wasn’t likely, but it was possible. He licked his lips, tasting the smoky burn of the whiskey already. The need was like dull aching fire in a void, a dying star imprisoned in his belly. Oh, God, he thought, Let it be all right. He slouched across to where Hugess was standing with his elbows on the bar, heel hooked in the brass rail.

  ‘Jesus!’ Hugess exclaimed, making a big production out of wrinkling his nose. ‘Howie, you stink, you know that?’

  The Flying H boys grouped around him laughed dutifully.

  ‘Comes from sleepin�
�� in the stable ever’ night,’ Johnny Evans grinned.

  ‘Hell,’ another said, ‘I ain’t never met no horse smelled that bad.’

  ‘’Ceptin’ a dead one,’ Danny Johnston shouted, slapping his leg.

  Burt Hugess sloshed more whiskey into his glass, letting Howie see him do it, taunting him with it. He drank greedily, feeling Howie’s eyes on his bobbing Adam’s apple, strength and a sense of power surging into him. The banked fires behind his eyes flared momentarily brighter, then died again. Some men drank and then sang. Others drank and slept or drank and laughed or drank and found themselves a puta; but not Burt Hugess. Burt was a mean drunk. Liquor fed a seething hot blackness inside him, raising its temperature slowly, inexorably, irresistibly. He looked at his huge hands, clenching them, flexing them. I could smash anything with them, he thought. It made him feel good.

  ‘How about a drink, huh, Burt?’ Howie whined. ‘Just a small one, huh, Burt, just the one, lissen, I got a th—’

  He had reached out a trembling hand toward Burt’s bottle, his fingers almost touching it when the big man’s hand clamped down on his skinny forearm like a vise, bringing a small shout of pain from Howie.

  ‘Keep your smelly paws off my whiskey!’ Burt snapped.

  ‘Aw, Burt,’ Howie wheedled. ‘Lissen, just the one, lissen.’

  ‘Get away,’ Burt said, no anger in his voice. He knew just what he was doing. He turned his back on the cringing Howie and drew the bottle and glass toward him. Slowly, as if with loving care, he poured a generous drink. Then he picked up the glass, lifted it until the flaring light of the kerosene lamps was behind it, looking at the liquor with pursed lips like a wine buyer judging a vintage. He let Howie look at it, too, and then, thirstily and with obvious enjoyment, Burt drank the whiskey down. He acted as though Howie wasn’t there, as though he couldn’t see his misery.

  ‘Aw, Burt,’ Howie begged. He put a hand on Hugess’ forearm.

  ‘Get your stinking paw off of me!’ Burt said. There was that first faint thin thread of ugliness in the sound of his voice, and Danny Johnston, recognizing it, looked up quickly, his eyes narrowing. Everyone steered well clear of Burt when he was off on a mean drunk. Yet he still showed no sign of the fires raging below the surface. Johnston relaxed.

  ‘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.

  Chapter Two

  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 pu
rple 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.