Hunt Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #5)

by Frederick H. Christian

  Angel looked up. There was nothing in his eyes at all. They were empty and cold, as if the man was gone to prepare some killing ground a long way away.

  ‘Frank,’ Sheridan said again. ‘It’s five before two. Time to move out.’

  Howie Cade nodded and moved over to the door. He threw it wide, as if contemptuous of what might be outside. The sunlight flooded in, and Burt Hugess drew himself up, ready to walk out proud and tall. Sheridan laid his shotgun on one of the desks, unsheathed his handgun and laid it alongside the Greener. Howie Cade followed suit. Both men stood on the threshold of the jail and looked at Frank Angel. After what seemed like a very long time, Angel lifted the six-gun from his holster and put it down on the desk. Then he looked at the marshal.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

  The four of them stepped out into the naked sunlight.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ‘Here they come,’ Ken Finstatt said.

  He’d followed Larry Hugess’s orders to the letter, and he had to admit that it was going sweet as wild honey. He had a man on each of the northern walls of the buildings between the jail and the depot on Front Street. As Burt Hugess and the three lawmen passed them, these men fell into step behind, guns trained on the backs of the group. Frank Angel counted them as they stepped out of the shadows into the dusty sunlight: two, three, four, seven. He shook his head in a signal to Sheridan. Too many by far, he was saying. Sheridan gave an almost imperceptible nod: damned right, he was agreeing. By the time they passed the livery stable, there was no question that the three lawmen were the prisoners and Burt Hugess their captor. He strode ahead of them, head back, as if daring someone in one of the houses to make a face, shout an epithet. Nobody did. The street was as empty as if there had been a plague.

  ‘Larry!’ Burt Hugess shouted.

  Larry Hugess stepped out onto the street. He opened his arms wide, like a proud parent does with a kid coming out of school. Burt Hugess threw his arms around his older brother, and they beamed into each other’s face, pounding away at each other’s shoulders as if they had been parted for years. Angel, Sheridan and Cade stood in the brassy sunlight under the guns of the Flying H men and watched the performance. Then, finally, the brothers stepped apart.

  ‘What do we do with these three, boys?’ Ken Finstatt called.

  Burt Hugess’s face darkened.

  ‘Give me a gun,’ he hissed. ‘Give me a gun, somebody!’ He glared at Frank Angel as he spoke.

  ‘Don’t be a fool, Burt!’ his brother snapped. ‘Stop that!’

  Burt Hugess scowled, but he stood for it. Whatever else, he obeyed his older brother, Angel saw.

  ‘Hugess,’ he said. ‘We handed over your brother. Now you hand over Miss Hardin.’

  Larry Hugess turned, inspecting him thoroughly, walking around him the way a man buying a horse will walk around, weighing up its good and bad points.

  ‘So you’re Angel,’ he said, a soft sneer in his voice. ‘You don’t look so much.’

  ‘What about Miss Hardin, Hugess?’ Dan Sheridan said.

  ‘She’s all right, Marshal,’ Hugess told him silkily. ‘You don’t really believe I planned to hurt her, do you?’

  ‘I’d believe just about anything anybody told me about you,’ Sheridan replied evenly, noting with satisfaction that his shaft had struck home. Larry Hugess’s face darkened with anger, but he controlled it. He turned to Finstatt.

  ‘Bring the girl out her,’ he said. ‘We’ll escort her back to the hotel.’

  ‘Larry?’ Burt Hugess said, disbelief in his voice. ‘You going to turn these three loose?’

  ‘Wait,’ his brother said, noncommittally. They stood in the street while Ken Finstatt went into the warehouse and came out with Sherry Hardin. She shook his hand off as he touched her, plain disgust written all across her face. Her copper hair was like fire in the sunshine. She saw the three men standing in the center of the ring of armed guards and ran toward them. Larry Hugess nodded to one of his men: a rifle-barrel came up, barring her way. Sherry Hardin looked at Larry Hugess and said something very unladylike. If it bothered the rancher, he didn’t show it.

  ‘Sherry,’ Frank Angel said. ‘You all right? They didn’t hurt you?’

  ‘No,’ she said. There was a faint puzzlement in her voice. ‘Did they tell you they were going to?’

  ‘Something like that,’ Angel admitted.

  ‘You should have told them to go to hell,’ she blazed, and in spite of their predicament the three lawmen smiled.

  ‘Maybe you’re right at that,’ Sheridan said.

  ‘I’m sorry to interrupt this touching little scene,’ Larry Hugess interposed smoothly. ‘But we must see Miss Hardin back to the hotel.’

  ‘Why don’t we come with you?’ Howie Cade offered. ‘Be no trouble’

  Larry Hugess regarded him bleakly. ‘I’m glad to see liquor hasn’t ruined your macabre sense of humor, Cade,’ he said. ‘I trust you’ll still be seeing the funny side of things a few hours from now.’ He turned to Sherry Hardin and, with a slight bow, indicated that she should start to walk toward the hotel. Sherry Hardin’s head came up: defiance was written all over her face as she tossed her coppery hair.

  ‘I’m not moving until you turn Frank - until you turn these men loose.’

  ‘Ah, my dear girl,’ Hugess said urbanely. ‘No, no. You see, until Burt and I leave town, the marshal and his helpmates are our guarantee of safe passage. If I turn them loose, they will feel impelled to try and arrest my brother again. Perhaps myself also. Isn’t that true, Marshal?’

  ‘You bet your ass it’s true!’ Sheridan growled.

  You see, Miss Hardin,’ Hugess said, spreading his hands as if apologizing for Sheridan’s rudeness. ‘I’m powerless. So I merely wish to see that you get safely to your door. Then,’ he turned toward his brother as he spoke, ‘my brother and I are going home!’

  ‘Tell her the rest, Hugess,’ Angel said. The rancher whirled around at the sound of Angel’s sardonic tone, anger building behind his eyes again.

  ‘The rest of what?’ he snapped.

  ‘Tell her why you and your brother want to parade down the center of Front Street,’ Angel rasped. ‘Tell her you want to show this town once and for all who’s the master. Tell her you’re putting on a parade and she’s only one of the clowns. I’m right, aren’t I?’

  Larry Hugess permitted himself a smile. A wintry smile, perhaps; but a smile for all that ‘Mister Angel,’ he said, with a nod of acknowledgment. ‘You’re shrewd. And you’re right, of course. I want Madison to see the Hugess brothers walking down the middle of its main street free. I want these people to see, to realize that the only Law here is my law. As they will. They will. And now, Miss Hardin?’

  Sherry Hardin looked at Frank Angel. She was ready to dig in her heels, to stand alone there against Hugess and all his guns and fight for the three men. He shook his head.

  ‘Go on, Sherry,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing you can do here.’

  ‘But Frank—’ she began.

  ‘Go!’ he snapped. Sherry Hardin recoiled from the anger in his eyes, and for a visible moment struggled with tears. Then her head came up again, and without a word she started down the center of Front Street toward the hotel. Burt Hugess strode alongside her, his gun back in its holster, a challenging scowl on his dark face.

  Larry Hugess spoke to Finstatt without even turning his head. ‘Take them,’ he said. ‘Somewhere nobody can hear. Then kill them.’ Without a glance at the three captives, he started off at a leisurely pace down Front Street. Larry Hugess was back in control and it showed in every line of his body.

  He had decided exactly what he was going to do, and now he did it. He left Sherry Hardin at the hotel, and told Landy to stay close so that the woman got no wild ideas about going back up the street to see what was happening to Angel. He had to admit surprise: she was much more woman than he recalled, and his admiration for her had increased tenfold during this short reacquaintance. At one t
ime during the day, watching the proud lithe movements of her body, he had felt the throb of lust for her, imagined her in the moist warmth of a soft bed. Now he had decided that he wanted her, that he would lay siege to her. With a woman like this at his side, there was nothing he could not achieve in politics, in the capital, anywhere. She would be the toast of Washington. He would dress her in the finest silks, the costliest jewels, the most sumptuous settings. He would put a fine house at her disposal, servants, carriages, all a woman could want. He was still a young enough man to sire children, still handsome enough to win a woman on whom he had set his mind. Typically, it never entered Larry Hugess’s mind that Sherry Hardin might not concur with his decisions. And so he had dreamed, in the morning before he had drawn Angel’s teeth with his bloodless ruse. Now all that was left was to show this cowed and empty town that Larry Hugess was its king, its emperor, its law, its reason for existence.

  He had one of the riders bring up a horse for Burt, and mounted his own fine stallion. Together, they paraded up and down the street for a time, he did not check how long, curvetting on the horses, letting people see them unafraid and unstoppable in the street. When they had had enough of that, Larry Hugess reined in his horse outside the Palace and stalked in. A nervous, stammering Johnny Gardner came up from below the bar, watching their eyes warily.

  ‘Your best champagne, Johnny,’ Hugess boomed. ‘You’ve got champagne, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yessir,’ Gardner said, anxious to please. ‘Yes, I do, Mister Hugess, sir. Real French champagne. Imported from France.’

  ‘And cold, Johnny,’ Hugess said, not emphasizing anything but striking fear into the saloonkeeper’s heart by the very gentleness of his speech. ‘Make sure it’s cold.’

  ‘Oh, yes, sir, Mister Hugess, sir,’ Gardner said sweating. ‘Oh, yes, sir.’

  ‘You see,’ Hugess said almost dreamily, ‘it’s kind of a special day. My little brother Burt is coming home today, aren’t you, Burt?’

  Burt Hugess beamed. ‘That’s right, Larry,’ he said. ‘Comin’ home.’

  He wasn’t prepared for the way his brother’s face changed, the way the contempt twisted Larry’s mouth, the way the eyes looked at him as if he was some filth his brother had found on his dinner plate.

  ‘You don’t even know what it cost, do you?’ Larry Hugess asked softly. His riders watched him warily, ready to get out of the way of whatever might happen. They had seen Larry Hugess’s soft-spoken rages before, and they preferred hydrophobic skunks on a rampage.

  ‘Listen, Larry,’ Burt Hugess said placatingly. ‘I never meant no harm!—’

  The flat crack as Larry Hugess hit his brother contemptuously with the back of his hand sounded stunningly loud in the silence. Burt cried out, reeling slightly; bright blood trickled from a split lip. It had not been a hard blow, only a stinging one, but the contempt in it weighed heavier than if he had been struck by lightning.

  ‘Johnny,’ Larry Hugess said, his voice still as soft as swansdown. ‘Pour the champagne. Gently now.’ He nodded with satisfaction as Gardner filled the stemmed glasses, watching the way the wine frothed and subsided with visible pleasure.

  ‘Aw, listen, Larry,’ Burt Hugess said. ‘Listen.’

  ‘Drink your champagne, Burt,’ Larry Hugess said. ‘And shut your face.’

  Four of them.

  It could have been worse, Angel thought. Hugess could have sent all seven of his riders down to administer the coup de grace. Then there would have been no chance at all. As it was, he knew that if the guards now prodding them down toward the scarred clay banks of Cat Creek up behind the graveyard knew his thoughts, they would have laughed aloud. Yet Angel, for all his slumped shoulders and air of defeat, was working out just exactly how to take them.

  ‘Down there?’ one of the guards said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Finstatt told him. ‘Then we can just cave some of this cut bank over them.’ He might have been discussing where to plant cabbage.

  They were approaching the high banks of the creek, which were sharply edged and fell away almost perpendicularly to the stony, dry bed of the stream below - about seven feet, Angel reckoned. The creek-bed was littered with boulders and stones, some of them four or five feet high, rolled downhill slowly with the years of flash flooding, breaking up the dry ground alongside the creek, scouring it with gullies where the roots of sagebrush and greasewood protruded like the buried legs of strange prehistoric birds. He checked the position of the four guards from beneath veiled lids. Two close together nearer him. The others to the left and right of Sheridan and Howie Cade. Too far away to jump.

  ‘Get on down there!’ Ken Finstatt snapped.

  ‘Go to hell,’ Angel said pleasantly.

  ‘I said get on down!’ Finstatt snarled. ‘Unless you want it in the belly now.’

  ‘Just as soon,’ Angel said, standing in an almost relaxed slouch that made Howie Cade gape at him as if he had turned into a giraffe.

  ‘All right,’ Finstatt said. He came forward and prodded the barrel of his carbine into Angel’s belly, and that was all Angel had been waiting for.

  ‘Down!' he yelled, hoping to God Sheridan and Cade would hit the dirt as fast as they could. In the same moment, he grasped the barrel of the carbine, leading it away from his body as Finstatt pulled the trigger. The heat of the muzzle blast burned across Angel’s ribs but Finstatt was coming at him now as Angel’s hand moved upward, the heel of his palm forward and his whole forearm braced for the impact. He hit Finstatt under the jaw, snapping the man’s head back and stopping him dead in his tracks, brain jarred into insensibility by the brutal shock of the blow. In the same movement, Angel hit Finstatt just below the heart with his right hand, all his strength and poised weight behind the blow. Finstatt went down as if he had been pole axed, which, to all intents and purposes he had been, and even as the Flying H man folded to the ground Angel had lifted the carbine out of the nerveless hands and was swinging it in a killing arc that ended alongside the head of the guard in the red shirt who had been closest to Ken Finstatt.

  The rifle stock split with a loud crack that blended with the softer, mushier sound of Red-Shirt’s skull bursting, a sound almost the same as the one made when someone drops an overripe pumpkin two stories down onto a concrete slab. Red-Shirt catapulted over the edge of the creek bed without a sound, his head an awful, bloody tatter of splintered bone and oozing brain.

  The third guard, a stocky Texan, had time only to turn and face Angel before Angel was on him like a tiger. The Texan had his gun up and was ready to fire, but the sight of Angel coming at him as no man he had ever seen coming at him unnerved the Texan and he hesitated that fraction of a second it took Angel to go up off the ground with his feet high, legs cocked like coiled-steel springs that unleashed as fast as the fangs of a striking snake. Both Angel’s boot-heels smashed into the stocky Texan’s face like striking thunderbolts, pulping the astonished visage into a rictus of pain that froze as the man’s neck snapped like a dried grass stalk.

  Angel hit the ground on his haunches, rolling to one side and kicking at the dusty clay to scare up a cloud of dust that confused the aim of the fourth guard just enough. His first shot whacked up a gout of earth three feet high not six inches from Angel’s elbow as the unarmed man came suddenly up off the ground. The Flying H man saw the knife and tried desperately to line up for a second shot, but he was a second too late.

  Long ago, soon after he’d finished his training with the Department of Justice, Frank Angel had gone to see the Armorer, Charlie Brady, a dour, generally unsmiling man. But there wasn’t anyone anywhere, they said, who knew more about weapons. There wasn’t anyone anywhere who could come up with a way to conceal a weapon that Charlie Brady hadn’t already thought of and, more than likely, discarded as impractical. No weapon Charlie Brady couldn’t strip and reassemble in the time it took lesser men to identify the maker. He was the Armorer for the Department and he’d listened without comment to Angel’s request. Then he had nodded. Not
new, he’d said. But adequate. If Angel wanted weapons that would give him a fighting chance for survival in a situation where he had already been disarmed, weapons that would have been overlooked in a reasonably careful search, it would have to be knives. Only fools missed the bulk of a gun in searching a man, and Angel could not rely on Providence pitting him against fools all the time.

  ‘See what we can do,’ the Armorer had told him.

  He’d come up with a couple of ideas that had suited Angel down to the ground. One of them was the twin, flat-bladed, Solingen steel throwing knives that nestled snugly in their special sheaths set between the inner and outer leather of Angel’s otherwise unremarkable mule-ear boots. Both were honed to slit-hair sharpness and it was one of them that now came up in a tight and remorseless arc, gutting the guard like a trout. He gave a scream like a pig in a slaughterhouse and went over backward, legs kicking high in agony that ended almost at once. Angel stood, his hands on his knees, bent forward, breath coming harsh and hard, the blood of the men he had killed splattered all over him.

  ‘Jesus, Angel!’ Howie Cade said.

  He and Sheridan were on their feet now, and they looked around them wide-eyed. The whole thing could not have taken more than two or three minutes, minutes that in the watching had seemed like an eternity. It was like a dream, possible while you were in it, impossible when you woke to think about it carefully. Yet there scattered around them were the dead men and there in front of them was Angel with blood on his hands.

  A soft breeze soughed through the greasewood, and despite himself Howie Cade shivered. He watched Angel straighten up, pull in a huge breath, as if preparing himself for some ordeal.

  ‘All right,’ Angel said. ‘We’d better get moving.’

  ‘What about him?’ Sheridan asked, pointing with his chin at the form of Ken Finstatt, huddled in the dusty dirt at the edge of the creek.

  ‘He won’t bother us for a while,’ Angel said. ‘If ever.’ He had cleaned the knife with which he had killed the guard and now slid it back into the scabbard at the side of his boot. He picked up one of the carbines. Howie and Sheridan picked up one each.