Frame Angel! (A Frank Angel Western) #7

by Frederick H. Christian

  ‘Frank,’ he said. ‘I’m going to stand up.’

  ‘Do it slowly,’ Angel advised. A woman in the opposite seat had seen the gun and was staring at it.

  ‘Listen to me,’ Wells said. ‘I’m going to stand up and walk off this train.’

  ‘No,’ Angel said. ‘No you’re not.’

  ‘You’ve got my gun, Frank,’ Wells said. His smile was tentative, but it stayed on this time, grew bolder.

  ‘Don’t,’ Angel pleaded with him. ‘Please, Angus.’

  ‘It’ll have to be in the back, Frank,’ Wells said. He got up very, very slowly, and Frank Angel watched him. ‘If you can do it.’

  ‘Don’t make me,’ the younger man said. His voice was urgent now.

  ‘If you do it, do it right,’ Wells said. He turned around quickly and for a long, long moment he waited for the sound of the hammer of the six-gun. Then he stepped forward and walked, without haste, down the length of the carriage.

  ‘Wells!’ Angel shouted.

  Without turning, Angus Wells stepped off the train and onto the platform. As he did so, a man with a star gleaming on his coat came out of the doorway of the baggage room. His gun was in his holster, but his hand was on it. There was puzzlement on his face. He looked inside the carriage and saw Angel standing alone in the middle of the aisle with the six-gun in his hand, and then he turned toward Wells, pulling the gun, but he was much, much too late.

  The little derringer that Wells had shaken from his sleeve holster boomed, a bright yellow flower of flame blossoming from the stubby barrel. The sheriff was slammed back into the doors of the baggage room, smashing them open, the glass on one side shivering into fragments that clamored on the stone platform as they fell. A woman was screaming, and the young man who had been behind the counter came out through the doors with a cocked gun in his hand, staring wildly left and right. He saw Wells running at the far end of the platform and threw a shot without aiming that fragmented one of the glass globes on the oil lamps lighting the platform.

  The young man was the son and deputy of the Trinidad sheriff, who lay dying in a spreading pool of black blood on the floor of the baggage room. He ran fast toward the end of the platform from which Wells had jumped as Angel swung down from the train. There was a commotion inside the carriage, and people were pulling down windows to try and see what was happening.

  ‘Get back inside!’ Angel yelled, running along the platform after the shirt-sleeved deputy. He heard the six-gun boom as the young man jumped from the end of the platform, and then he was behind the deputy, who whirled with the six-gun. He was panting as if he had run several hundred yards uphill, his breath wheezing in his throat. The hand holding the six-gun was trembling, and Angel gently pushed it aside.

  ‘He … ’ the young man sobbed. ‘He …’

  ‘I know,’ Angel said. ‘I saw it.’

  ‘You … ’ The deputy looked at him with eyes full of disgust. ‘You … saw it! You … you let him walk off that train and … and kill my … father!’

  ‘No,’ Angel said, meaning, no it wasn’t like that at all. He wanted the young man to know why he hadn’t been able to shoot Angus Wells in the back, but he said no more because there was no way he could tell the boy.

  He didn’t even know himself.

  He touched the deputy’s arm.

  ‘Tell them to hold the train,’ he said. ‘I’m going to look for him.’

  The deputy looked at him with lackluster eyes. The reaction was hitting him now. Later, he would be brave again and tell them how he’d chased the killer. ‘Tell them,’ Angel said. ‘And get that suitcase off the train. It’s got a quarter of a million dollars in it.’

  The youngster nodded. He looked at the six-gun in his hand as if he had never seen it before and then jammed it into the waistband of his pants. He climbed back up onto the rough stone platform, and Angel watched him walk back toward the pools of light in the center of the depot where the train stood.

  Now, he thought. Where? Where would he go? Where would I go if I were him? He stood there and thought the way he had been taught to think, the way he knew that Wells had been taught to think, because Wells had taught him.

  When you want to hide something, hide it openly. Someone searching for what you have hidden, someone at least as intelligent as you, will look in all the places you can invent and others you have not thought of. So hide whatever you must hide as if it were useless, valueless, worthless. And the seeker will often overlook it. Not always. But often. If you are pursued, your pursuer expects one thing – that you will run. The pursuer will be looking for you ahead of him, for that is where he expects you to be. If he is an intelligent hunter, he will anticipate your doubling and bisect the circle you are trying to make, thus ending the hunt. So you must play not fox, but human fox. The one place the hunter knows the fox will not go while he is being hunted is his lair, the place he most wants to protect. If you will outwit the hunter, go where he is sure you will not be and where he will not think to seek you.

  Of course.

  He got back on the platform and went toward the knot of men standing beneath the lamps in the center and outside the shattered doors of the baggage room. They had carried the sheriff’s body away. There was a dusty black smear on the stone.

  ‘Lost him,’ Angel told them, his voice emotionless. ‘Can’t see a damned thing out there.’

  The men on the platform just looked at him and said nothing. One of them had the leather suitcase in his hand.

  ‘Better let the train go,’ Angel told the stationmaster. ‘No point in holdin’ these folks up any longer.’ He pointed to the valise. ‘Put that somewhere safe.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ the man said. The station-master slipped a watch out of his waistcoat pocket and looked at it and then at Angel, as though saying he hoped Angel realized that he was responsible for how late the train was. Then he went over to the trolley standing by the wall and picked up the flickering bulls-eye lantern.

  ‘Board!’ he shouted. His voice sounded strange, thin, and ghostly. There was a faint hint of mist from the hidden mountains off to the west, and the stationmaster’s breath billowed like smoke as he shouted. ‘Denver train, stoppin’ at Pueblo and Colorado Springs.’

  The conductor stepped down from the caboose and swung his lantern in reply to the stationmaster’s. They waved at each other, and then the conductor turned his lamp around so that the green light flared in the darkness. The engineer pulled his whistle cord and the big engine shun-shun-shun-shunned, trembling perceptibly as the huge drive wheels bit against the steel rails.

  The train was moving gently, easily, and quickly forward now, and Angel placed his bet, swinging up onto the rear observation platform as the caboose swung by, the conductor watching his lithe maneuver with startled eyes.

  ‘Uh – what the hell?’ he began, his chin coming up.

  ‘You a betting man?’ Angel asked, his grin mirthless and taut. He was taking a damned long chance, and he knew it.

  ‘Uh, what?’ the conductor asked. ‘Uh, nope, cain’t say as I am.’

  ‘Pity,’ Angel said. ‘Or I’d have bet you I wasn’t the last one who was going to swing onto here tonight.’

  ‘Uh?’ the conductor said.

  ‘Forget it,’ Angel told him. ‘It wasn’t much of a joke, anyway.’

  ‘Sure,’ the conductor said, humoring him. He opened the door leading into the caboose and went inside. The train moved across the rails toward the main line spur at the northern edge of town. Angel waited.

  Chapter Sixteen

  ‘Well, well,’ Frank Angel said to no one in particular.

  They had only come perhaps four or five hundred yards when the train started to slow down noticeably. Angel tried to recall the layout of Trinidad in the filing index of his memory, the long S of the street with the opera house at its center, the looping curve in the road at the southern edge of town which seemed to have been put there as an introduction to the snaking twists of the Raton Pass that la
y ahead. The northern edge, the northern edge! Was there a bridge over the tracks? There was. He remembered it. The trail rose from the valley of the Picketwire, as local people called the Purgatoire River, and turned right over a solid, rumbling wooden bridge. Off to the right the Y-shaped switch with its centrally located box turned the oncoming trains left for Denver or right for La junta.

  The train was almost at walking pace now as they came up the deep cutting that lay to the west of the town. Leaning carefully out, he saw the looming bulk of the big bridge above the train, its blackness more solid, more real than the blackness of the night. The engineer applied his brakes, and the train came to a slowing halt. The engineer waited until his wheels picked up the switch before he opened his throttle again. Calicka-calack went the wheels. Calicka-calack.

  Then he saw the running figure, and Angel knew he had been right.

  Wells came away from the deeper shadows of the cutting wall, quartering across the tracks toward the center of the train. His limp was very pronounced, and for a brief second, Angel felt a touch of sorrow, of pity for the running man. Then he called his name.

  Angus Wells came to a startled stop in the middle of the open space on the far side of the switch box, exposed by the light of the lamps burning above him. He saw Angel as Angel swung down to the ground and moved toward him, and he gave a roar of anger. Angel kept coming with his six-gun up and let Wells have a chance to run. But Wells wasn’t running. All of his frustrated rage swelled into one pulsating roar of killing lust, blanking out his animal cunning, his instinct to survive, leaving nothing but the need to kill the man in front of him. He came at Angel hard, low, and fast, his head down. Angel waited, with the gun ready, poised on the balls of his feet, unable to believe Wells was this stupid. Still the big man came on at him, and Angel eared back the hammer of the six-gun. Then Wells was level with a high pile of block gravel left for grading work by the gandy dancers, and he threw himself behind it in a veering, arching leap, the derringer in his hand spurting flame as he went over the shoulder of the gravel pile and rolled out of sight behind it. It was a brilliant maneuver, and if he had been using a six-gun instead of the tiny pocket pistol, whose effective range was no more than a few yards, he would have probably killed Frank Angel there and then. But the unrifled ball whistled a good two feet away from its target. Angel was already moving forward now in a running crouch, the gun deadly and level, with no thought of hesitation. If he saw Wells now, he would kill him. Wells knew it now too, and when Angel came skittering around the gravel pile with the six-gun ready, Wells had a two-handed grip on the shovel that had been lying on the pile. Wells swung it in a whistling, biting arch into Angels right side, and Angel yelled a shout of agony as the heavy metal blade glanced off his tensed right arm and smashed into his wounded side. The blow took Angel off his feet as if he had been roped from a running horse, whacking him sideways, his six-gun flipping out of his hand and landing with a soft thud somewhere in the darkness. He cried out as he hit the ground, feeling the soft tearing pain as the stitches in his side burst apart. Warm wetness spread along his side, and for a moment he was a child again in a warm bed, his senses dislocated. Wells came at him again now with the shovel upraised and the edge turned this time to cut, smashing it down at Angel, who desperately arched his body away. The shovel clanged on the railway line, and the force of the impact twisted the shovel out of Wells’ grasp. Angel was on his feet now, and he struck at Wells with his right hand. He might as well have tried to knock the man down with a wet rag – his arm would not respond to his brain’s commands, and he saw Well’s left hand move up and across from the right shoulder. He turned himself desperately to parry the blow that would kill him if it landed. The edge of Wells’ hand, hardened to the toughness of a brick, glanced off Angel’s shoulder and against his forehead, jarring his head back. Angel reeled away, almost falling again, his right hand banging almost useless at his side.

  ‘Come on!’ Wells said. ‘Come on, Angel!’ Come and be killed, he meant.

  Angel shook his head to clear it. His side was slippery with fresh blood, and he could feel the swaying dizziness which precedes a blackout. You might keel over at the worst possible moment – for you, he could hear the doctor in Sante Fe say.

  Wells came at him again, hard this time, and Angel had no time to do more than parry. He stopped the chopping blow and skipped back. Wells hissed with frustration.

  Survive! The first rule they taught you. It doesn’t matter how. There are no rules other than the first rule: survive! He slid his left hand down to the secret scabbard in his boots between the outer leather and the inner lining. Inside it, concealed from casual search by the mule-ear straps, nestled a flat-bladed Solingen steel throwing knife, mate to the one on the right-hand side. They had been specially made for him, as had the boots which concealed them, by the armorer at the Justice Department. And they were his last chance. Wells saw his movement, and came in again, grinning like a wolf pulling down a baby calf. His right leg lashed out, and the knife flickered away into the darkness.

  ‘What now, Angel?’ he jeered. ‘The belt buckle?’

  Then he reached up behind his neck, and from a scabbard which hung on a loop around his throat, he slid a knife, long and two-edged, its needle point a wicked diamond glinting in the thin light of the switch box lamps. Wells palmed the knife like an expert – flat on his hand, the blade lying between forefinger and thumb – lightly holding it like a sword. Angel watched him weave and sway, his eyes always on the hand with the knife in it, never leaving it, forcing himself to concentrate on it.

  Suddenly, Wells slashed at him, the knife whipping audibly through the air, inches from Angel’s belly as he sprang back. Again Wells slashed and then suddenly back again. Angel felt the beaded sweat on his forehead cold in the night air and knew he was afraid. If he tried to get the other knife from his boot on the right, Wells would kill him while he was trying for it. If he did not, Wells would kill him anyway.

  There wasn’t much of anything left. In a few more moments Angel knew his eyesight would start to blur, and he would see Wells move too late, and he would be dead on the dirty sand. If you are pursued your pursuer expects one thing: that you will run.

  He stopped and forced his breathing inward, directing all of himself to this place, at this moment, perhaps for this last time. In his mind’s eye he saw the slanting eyes of Kee Lai. He summoned that inner power the Korean had called ch’i until he felt the strength come into him, flow through him, warm his genitals.

  ‘All right,’ he said brokenly. ‘All right. Finish it.’

  Wells’ head came up, and he peered at Angel. Angel let his head hang, and he saw the flickering feint with the knife, waiting, watching Wells from beneath his eyebrows. Another flickering feint. This time the blade drew blood from his unprotected arm. Wells giggled, sure now.

  ‘Angel?’ he said.

  Wells came closer to get a better look, and Angel put all of himself into the terrible movement of his foot. The kick came up off the ground with every ounce of strength he had left in him and buried itself in Wells’ groin with a cracking thud. Wells screamed like a pig in a slaughterhouse, a mangled, banshee shriek that bounced off the stone walls of the railway cutting and echoed back as he went over on his face, his hands buried in his mangled crotch, back arching against the agony of what was broken inside him. Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion now, and Angel watched Wells go down as if he was underwater, legs flailing, mouth distended in one long continuous scream that went on and on and on until Angel slid the second knife out of his boot with blood-slippery fingers and stopped it.

  Chapter Seventeen

  ‘I still can’t believe it,’ the attorney general said.

  ‘No, sir,’ Frank Angel replied dutifully.

  He was fit again now. Tomorrow he would be going to the hospital to have the second lot of stitches taken out of his side, which had healed well – no damned thanks to him, the surgeon had said, tutting and fussing o
ver the ragged wound.

  ‘What made him think he could get away with it?’ the man behind the desk asked of nobody in particular. His voice was full of grief.

  ‘I asked him that,’ Angel said. ‘He never did say.’

  ‘But why?’ the older man persisted. ‘Why, in God’s name, why?’

  ‘I think I can answer that, sir,’ Angel said. ‘A man like Angus Wells, he’d bitterly resent being put out to pasture. He knew he was as good a man with one arm and one leg as most other men are with two. As I damned well found out.’

  ‘But the medical report … ‘

  ‘Medical reports don’t stretch to cover a man’s pride,’ Angel said quietly.

  ‘It was Wells’ pride that was hurt, and when he realized he had a way to steal a quarter of a million dollars of the government’s money, it must have seemed like a delightful irony. Irresistible. Especially when he could cover himself so well. Who would suspect the Justice Department’s chief investigator if he asked for details about the shipment? Who would question his appearing anywhere, asking whatever he wanted to know, doing whatever he wanted to do?’

  ‘Like intercepting your telegraph messages, you mean?’

  ‘For one thing,’ Angel agreed. ‘By the way, I’ve attended to that clerk in Las Vegas. He’ll have plenty of time to think over what he did while he’s in prison.’

  ‘As long as we didn’t know where you were, then we wouldn’t try to contact you.’

  ‘And by definition, I wouldn’t know that Wells was not in Washington. I thought I saw him when we made the break out of the penitentiary, but I wasn’t sure, even when I was nicked by a bullet. I’d asked them to make it look good. I reckon Wells was trying to make it look even better.’