Frame Angel! (A Frank Angel Western) #7

by Frederick H. Christian

  ‘The feller in Santa Fe. The one come to us with the proposition.’

  ‘Oh,’ Angel said, feigning only mild interest. The name, the name; he willed Briggs to say it.

  ‘Got talkin’ to him on the veranda outside La Fonda. You know it?’ Angel nodded. Most of the business done among the Anglos – and not a few of the Spanish-Americans – who lived in Santa Fe was done over a drink after dinner on the porch of the rambling old hacienda which had become the capital’s largest hotel. Most nights, you could go there and meet a man with sheep, cattle, or land to sell, find a man who wanted to buy any or all, and team up with someone who wanted company on a trip north, south, east, or west. Just as the Indian women sold their blankets and silver jewelry beneath the cool arches of the Palace of the Governors, so did the businessmen sell theirs on the lamp lit La Fonda veranda.

  ‘We adjourned somewhere more private. Some cantina down on the Alameda,’ Briggs went on. ‘Said he was lookin’ for three or four men to do a dangerous job. They had to know the Tularosa country like the back of their own hands, he said. But if they did what he told them, they could make twenty thousand dollars each, clear. Shit, Angel,’ he added, ‘he might as well of said a million. Twenty grand is big money.’

  ‘Right,’ Angel said. The name, man, the name.

  ‘Anyways, he sort of flamboozled around the subject for a while, an’ then told us he’d like to ask around. Wanted to check on us, I reckoned. Pete reckoned the same. So we figured we’d check on him same time.’

  ‘Pete?’

  ‘Pete Hainin – him an’ me an’ Jamesie Lawrence pulled the job, remember?’

  ‘You never told me their second names,’ Angel said.

  ‘Oh,’ Briggs said. ‘Thought I did. Well, anyhow …’ He took another sizable gulp out of the almost-empty bottle, then held it up in the firelight, squinting ruefully at the level of the whiskey.

  ‘Shit, I’m plumb sorry,’ he said. ‘Here, you—’

  ‘No, finish it,’ Angel said.

  ‘Right,’ Briggs said. He nodded wisely.

  ‘You figured you’d check on the dude,’ Angel reminded him,

  ‘Oh. Yeah. Well, we couldn’t find nothin’ out about him. We asked all around town, only nobody’d ever heard of him.’

  ‘What was his name?’ Angel asked, idly.

  ‘Never found that out, neither,’ Briggs said. ‘Asked him, next night when he looked us up in the cantina. Said we didn’t need to know that.’

  ‘But you knew he was from the East.’

  ‘Hell, yeah. You ever see a westerner wearin’ flat-heeled boots?’

  He made it sound like a sexual abnormality, and Angel grinned. Briggs ought to try tramping around the concrete pavements of New York for a few hours in the high-heeled riding boots he was wearing now. After an hour of it, he’d feel as if his spine was about three inches shorter.

  ‘What was he, a big feller?’

  ‘Big enough,’ Briggs said. ‘We never see him in really good light, you know? He allus sat in dark corners. In the cantina he allus had his hat down over his face. Allus made us leave after he did.’

  ‘So he told you about the shipment,’ Angel encouraged him.

  ‘Right. Knowed all about it. Where the money was, how many men on the train. Told us exactly where we had to pull the job, how to do it. Told us the route we had to take over the White Mountains and up to Santa Fe. If we was chased, we was to split up. If we split up, we had three days to get to old Fort Sumner, Beaver Smith’s saloon. If it looked like any one of us had been taken, the other two was to move on, nice an’ quiet. Stash the money away until it cooled, he said.’

  ‘He told you the money was hot?’

  ‘Right. He said we’d have to hide it away for a couple of months. Then we’d get our cut.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Said it didn’t matter. He’d know where we were, and so he’d always be able to find the money.’

  ‘Wasn’t he scared you’d take off with the whole bundle?’

  ‘Didn’t act like it, I’ll tell you that. He said if we crossed him, he’d spend the rest of his life huntin’ us down, an’ makin’ sure all of us rotted in jail the rest of our days.’

  ‘An’ you believed that?’

  ‘Sure, we did. Why the hell not? He was the kind you believe, and you can tie to that! Besides, we was happy enough to be gettin’ a crack at twenty thousand each.’

  ‘But you don’t have it,’ Angel said.

  ‘No, but I ain’t afeared,’ Briggs said. ‘Pete an’ Jamesie wouldn’t double-deal on me.’

  ‘Beautiful,’ Angel told him. ‘All you got to do now is find them. And the money,’

  ‘Hell, that’s not gonna be so hard,’ Briggs said. ‘I figger I know where Jamesie’ll be. An’ he’ll know where Pete is.’

  ‘Pete’s got the money?’

  ‘He had it when I was took,’ Briggs answered. ‘Don’t worry, he’ll keep it safe.’

  ‘Briggs,’ Angel said flatly. ‘You’re a fool.’ Briggs looked up quickly, bewildered at Angel’s harsh words. ‘What?’ he asked. ‘What?’

  ‘Ain’t it occurred to you that your dude is prob’ly lookin’ for that money, too?’

  ‘Well … hell, Angel, what you gettin’ at?’

  ‘Just this,’ Angel told him. ‘If the feller that hired you to pull that job can get to Lawrence and then to Hainin, he’s only got to kill both o’ them, an’ he’s free as a bird with the whole bundle in his pockets. What would you do – take him to court an’ sue him for it?’

  Briggs just sat there and looked at Angel, his mouth open. Angel watched the wheels turn in Briggs’s head as the raider figured and added in his fuddled brain the implications of what Angel had just said. No matter which way he tried it, it came out looking like he might end up with a handful of nothing for robbing the Southern Pacific, for being on the wrong end of a territory-wide manhunt, and for the likelihood of a life sentence in Folsom if he was taken. Hainin, Jamesie, Lawrence, they were clean. Nobody knew about them.

  ‘Jesus H. Christ, Angel,’ he said, clambering to his feet in panic. ‘Do somethin’! Contact them big mucky-muck friends o’ yours an’ get ’em lookin’ for Pete an’ Jamesie! We got to find them quick, afore that bastard dude does!’

  ‘Saddle up,’ Angel told him. ‘We ride all night, we can be in Las Vegas before the telegraph office opens.’

  Chapter Nine

  They’d known right from the start that Angel wouldn’t be able to get word direct to Washington. Not with Briggs breathing over his shoulder while he wrote his message in a telegraph office. So they’d decided on a very simple code which Angel could do in his head, without appearing to work it out, without needing a decoding log to set it up. All you had to do was to use the letter of the alphabet next to the actual one – so ‘Angel’ would read BOHFM.

  ‘What the hell is all that?’ Briggs asked wonderingly, as Angel printed slowly on the telegraph form.

  ‘Code,’ Angel said truthfully.

  ‘The address, too?’

  ‘Sure,’ Angel said. ‘My people are mighty careful about who reads their mail.’ He tapped the side of his nose and looked mysterious.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Briggs said. ‘What’s it say?’

  ‘Says I got something needs doin’, an’ I want some walkin’ money and good horses waitin’ in Santa Fe. They can take it out of my account, I say. If they know anythin’ about the present whereabouts of Pete Hainin or Jamesie Lawrence, to leave word.’

  ‘That’s great, Angel,’ Briggs said. ‘Listen, we get our mitts on that money, you’re on a bonus. Ten grand each, OK?’

  ‘That’s big o’ you, Dick,’ Angel said, putting a warmth into his voice that he was far from feeling. ‘OK, Jack,’ he said to the telegrapher. ‘Can you get this off right away?’

  ‘Sure thing, mister,’ the clerk said. ‘What kind o’ gobbledygook is this, anyway?’

  ‘It’s the kind that keeps telegrapher’s clerks from
readin’ private messages,’ Angel answered him coldly. ‘What do I owe you?’

  ‘Dollar ninety,’ the clerk said, and when Angel told him to keep the change, he tossed the small coins onto the counter with a sneer.

  ‘No thanks,’ he said. ‘I got too many private messages to read.’

  He turned his back on the two men as they went out of the office and into the street where their horses stood. Watching impassively, he waited until they had moved off down the street toward the old town end, heading for the Glorieta road. When they were out of sight, he pulled down the blinds and scuttled out of the door, locking it behind him and trotting as fast as he could go up the Plaza Hotel in the square. Nodding to the desk clerk, he went up to the first floor and knocked on one of the doors. A voice told him to enter.

  The big man sitting on the bed looked at him along the barrel of the leveled six-gun. Startled, the clerk recoiled, his hands moving involuntarily upward.

  ‘Relax,’ the man on the bed told him. ‘Just cleaning it.’

  There were no cleaning tools or oil or rags anywhere, but the telegraph clerk decided not to mention it.

  ‘He … them fellers came in, just like you said,’ he told the man on the bed. ‘They wanted me to send thisyere stuff out. Don’t make no sense no how to me.’

  ‘Don’t let it worry you,’ the big man said. He took the printed form and read it carefully, his lips moving as he figured out what it said:

  HAVE BRIGGS CONFIDENCE STOP OTHERS INVOLVED PETE HAININ AND JAMES LAWRENCE STOP ALL THREE KNOWN STOP LINCOLN COUNTY SHOULD HAVE RECORDS SOME KIND HEADING VIA SANTA FE FOR RIO CHAMA COUNTRY WHERE LAWRENCE HAS WOMAN ON PLACE NEAR EL RITO STOP WHEREABOUTS HAININ WHEREABOUTS MONEY UNKNOWN AS YET STOP HAVE HORSES MONEY READY AT LA FONDA LEAVE WORD IF FIND ANYTHING USEFUL ABOUT HAININ OR LAWRENCE NAME OF MAN WHO HIRED THEM ROB TRAIN UNKNOWN BUT BRIGG SAYS EASTERNER, SIX FEET OR OVER, WELL DRESSED, FLAT HEELED SHOES, BOSTON ACCENT

  The message was addressed to Post Box 34, Santa Fe. The man in the hotel room knew that Post Box 34 was the address of John T. Sherman, United States Marshal for the Territory of New Mexico. It would be Sherman’s job to transmit the information in the telegraph back to the Department of Justice in Washington. He smiled, and without the clerk noticing, switched Angel’s message for one he had written earlier. Handing this to the clerk, he flipped a twenty dollar gold piece out of his coat pocket toward the man, who caught it deftly. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Send it off.’

  ‘Thanks, mister,’ the clerk said, a twenty-dollar smile on his face. ‘Thanks a lot!’

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ the man said. ‘And I want you to know that I mean just that: do not mention it.’

  The clerk nodded, swallowing hastily. There was a look in the cold eyes of the man sitting on the bed that told him very, very clearly what would happen if he did mention it.

  ‘Sure, sure thing, mister,’ he said, backing out of the room.

  The man watched him go with a thin smile and then picked up the Gladstone bag by the side of the drooping bed on which he’d spent the night with a Mexican whore. He slid the Frontier Model into a specially constructed pocket just forward of the hipbone on the left leg of his pants. The pocket was lined with leather and fitted with a strong spring at the bottom. The moment the hand touched the pistol butt, the spring clip was released, and the draw was rendered that fraction of a second faster. He had not had to use it yet; but the man who had made it for him was a master gunsmith, and he had no doubt that should the occasion arise, it would give him the edge he needed.

  He paid his bill and hurried out across the plaza with its regimented shade oaks and ornate cast-iron bandstand, jostling heedless groups of indolent housewives gossiping in the shade. On the far side of the plaza, ready and waiting for him, was a buckboard with a fine span of thoroughbred bays. He had paid the youngster dozing in the driver’s seat a peso to watch the team.

  ‘Vamos, compadrito!’ the big man said, slapping the youngster’s leg. The kid jumped down, liquid eyes dancing, and watched as the big man popped the whip across the glossy haunches of the matched bays. They jumped into motion, moving around the square and down the long, wide main street toward the rutted ford across the river at the southern edge of town. It would take Briggs and Angel the better part of two days to get to Santa Fe: their horses were no longer fresh and had not been the best in the first place. By using the mountain cutoff, which took ten miles off the Glorieta route, and by pushing his horses to the limit, the big man knew he could be in the capitol in half that time. A day ahead of Angel the whole way. He smiled; not a smile of warmth and pleasure, but the smile of a cougar scenting its prey. A day would give him all the time he needed.

  Briggs said he liked it up in the mountains.

  You had to admit it was beautiful. Awe-inspiring, even. Way up above Espanola the trail was little more than a rutted track winding up into the mountains toward El Rito. The towering mountains on both sides of them thrust bald stone peaks up over the timberline. They had been steadily climbing most of the morning. The horses had been waiting, and there had been money in an unmarked envelope at the desk of the La Fonda. But nothing else. No word from Washington, nothing to warn Angel what might lie ahead. He had shrugged fatalistically. All he could do was go on with Briggs, pushing forward with the hope that Lawrence or Hainin might have the key to the mystery of who had hired them, a key which Briggs patently did not possess.

  The trail moved steadily upward along the flank of the mountain now. Bright blue flowers grew in the broken earth on their left where it fell away in tumbling rocks, wooded slides, and open patches where weeds and buttercups mingled in riotous yellows, greens, and oranges. The pines were thinner up here, and they sighed constantly in the ever-present mountain wind. The trail was covered in a blanket of pine needles dropped through the years, a springy, muffling mat on which the horses’ hoofs made hardly any noise. When they crossed a rocky patch, the clatter of the animals’ feet sounded startlingly loud and echoed slightly against the face of the mountain. As they climbed on upward, the trail leveled out on a plateau gouged into the flank of the slope, rising sharply to one side of them and falling away to the other. Far below, they could follow the boulder-strewn course of a dried-up mountain stream, choked with summer weeds and shrubs. Once in a while they caught sight of deer flickering off on silent feet into deeper forest cover. Squirrels chattered in the trees, whose tops were almost level with their feet. The track often bent around on itself, serpentine in its course up the steepening face of the mountain. Now the trees were thinning behind them, and ahead they could see the end of the tree-line, where jumbled rock and black boulders had been shifted by some primeval glacial upthrust and small patches of unhealthy-looking grassy moss clung to the downhill sides. The trail constantly twisted back on itself as they climbed. Finally they were on the divide and could see El Rito down below them in the valley.

  ‘You figure he’ll be there?’ Briggs asked. ‘What you think, Angel?’

  ‘Damned if I know,’ Angel told him. ‘He’s your sidekick. You tell me. You said he’s got a woman up here?’

  ‘Yeah, Mex girl he met down in Lincoln county. Her folks moved up here durin’ the troubles. Jamesie often useta ride all the way up here to see her. He was talkin’ about marryin’ her, one time.’

  ‘She got her own place, or what?’

  ‘I don’t know, an’ that’s Gospel,’ Briggs replied. ‘I never seen her. All I know is Jamesie allus useta say, any time you want me an’ don’t know where I’m at, you find Abrana Gutierrez – an’ like as not you’ll find me too.’

  ‘Let’s hope you’re right,’ Angel said, concentrating on the trail as it sloped down into the shadowed trees and turned around on itself in a tight S-curve followed farther down by another.

  ‘What you figure to do with the money, Angel?’ Briggs asked, as they negotiated the second part of the first bend. He leaned back in the saddle, his head turned toward Angel, who was riding behind him.


  ‘Spend it,’ Angel said shortly. He had no time at all for people who dreamed what they would do with money they were never going to have.

  ‘Yeah,’ Briggs said, drawing the word out into breathy anticipation. ‘Me, I’m gonna head for California, rent me a fancy house overlookin’ San Francisco Bay. Stock the cellar full o’ French brandy, imported cigars. Have me a time with the ladies. Live the way a man’s supposed to live.’

  Angel said nothing. He never ceased to be surprised at how modest the ambitions of most criminals were. Boiled down to essentials, they usually amounted to plenty of food, plenty of booze, and plenty of women – although not necessarily in that order. He couldn’t concentrate properly on Briggs’s prattling, anyway. His mind was busy with the possible options that lay ahead. Briggs had swallowed Angel’s story whole, but that didn’t mean Lawrence and Hainin would. He felt an impending sense of disaster, which he could not rationalize, which he felt might have been prompted by the sight of the old plaza in Las Vegas, where not too many years before, he had killed Milt Sharp and Howie Kamins and sat in the room at the hotel afterward trembling like a leaf because he had become a murderer. He had rationalized all that long since: Kamins and Sharp had been frontier vermin of the most pernicious type, and if he hadn’t killed them, someone else undoubtedly would have. But the sight of the place and the memory of that night had somehow depressed him. He wondered if Angus Wells, in all his years with the department, had ever felt that way. He acted like a man who had never had a moment’s doubt about his right to dispense justice.

  ‘ ... got some mighty handsome women in San Francisco,’ Briggs was saying, smiling to himself at the thought of all those lovely pleasures waiting for him in the city by the bay. It was a nice thought to die on, and die he did – the booming thunder of the shot from somewhere up above the first bend of the second S-curve startled Angel’s horse, which shied back as Dick Briggs fell out of his saddle as if someone had hit him alongside the head with a huge, invisible club. His horse staggered on the lip of the trail, its feet skittering dirt and stones downward as it fought not to go over after the man who had been shot off its back. Briggs’s body fell straight down for about forty feet and then it bounced sickeningly, the broken thud carrying clearly up toward Angel. He was already out of his saddle and flat against the frowning wall on the mountain side of the trail, lifted Winchester in his hands, ears tensely tuned for the sound of movement.