He’d left Curtis on a high bluff overlooking the trail up the canyon of the Arkansas with a pair of good army field-glasses and the best of the horses. He and McLennon pushed on ahead into Buena Vista to get some supplies, rest the horses, maybe grab a couple of quick drinks.
So now, as they headed on up the mountain trail out of Buena Vista, Falco turned the options over in his mind, unhappy with the picture they presented. It was bad enough that Angel was still coming, but worse news that he had taken Kuden prisoner.
That would mean Kuden had spilled, Falco thought. No point hoping otherwise: act on the premise that the worst has happened. That means he knows what Kuden knows, the original plan. He grinned like a wolf. Nobody knew he’d changed that some. Angel would also know the route they planned to take, and he could do one of two things. Change the route, or take the one Kuden would have told Angel about, and then turn that knowledge against Angel. He decided on the latter.
By now, however, he had a healthy respect for Mister Frank Angel, and when he explained his plan to the others, he set up everything so that once more, his bet on survival was coppered.
In Buena Vista, he’d made himself conspicuous, so that a dozen people or more around town would remember him. He’d gone bareheaded so that the men he’d jostled in front of in the store would recall him. He had criticized the quality of the liquor in the Lucky Strike. He had suggested some particularly vile sexual activities to one of the saloon girls. He smiled in remembering that: no way she would forget him. All in all, he laid a trail that an infant would have had trouble missing, knowing that it would bring Angel out after them, hell bent into the flat emptinesses of South Park. The trail led ever upward into the mountains, cresting at Trout Creek. At Trout Creek Pass they would kill Angel.
Chapter Eleven
When the weather turns bad in the mountains, it does so very fast.
The horse blew great gusts of wind through its nostrils, which were caked with a rim of frost despite the muffler that Angel had wrapped around the animal’s head. They moved steadily upward into the rocky wilderness, heading for Trout Creek Pass. It was quite low—only nine and a half thousand feet as compared to some of the others. Up above Idaho Springs way there were passes well over two miles high, and the wind that cut through them blew from the Arctic to the Antarctic with nothing to stop it but one or two mountain peaks.
The preceding night a wind of hurricane force had sprung up. The night had been alive with the sound of shutters banging, corrugated tin roofs blowing off and banging away down the canyon, whirled up and down the heedless rocks by the whipping wind. Later, the wind showed its teeth, and lashed the canyon of the Arkansas with hailstones the size of prairie oysters, smacking against the thin wooden walls of the shacks down the street of Buena Vista like Gatling gunfire. The muddy street quickly turned to a gloppy morass, which froze like iron as the night advanced, and the temperature dropped like a stone. A moon glared like a baleful eye through the heaving clouds, and beneath it the mountains emerged, shining ghost-white with their mantling of fresh snow, only to be eclipsed by another sudden storm. Angel had sat by the window of the Lucky Strike, where Hedley had fixed for him to rent a room. It was too noisy to sleep, and he watched the incredible struggle of the elements, thinking of the men he was pursuing up there somewhere in the wilderness. Once in the night he heard the long wail of a wolf, driven down from the heights by the cold. For some reason, the sound reminded him of a time he had been in the mountains just before snow, when a lake had glowed an unearthly orange in the strange twilight, yet reflected the mountains above it deep blue. Somewhere around the middle of the night the storm broke, and he slept. He dreamed formless dreams and rose before dawn, still weary.
Up ahead of him now the mountains glittered and waited. The sun was sharp and bright, and the wind was bitingly, bone-achingly cold. The air was brittle and tasted dry, but he wasn’t tempted to take the woolen kerchief away from his face. He’d bought it and a heavy plaid blanket coat, together with a pair of seal-skin pants the preceding night. They just about kept the wind off. At this altitude, it could take off a layer of your flesh with less effort than a good skinner with a cutthroat razor.
The road, the vegetation, the trees on back away from the trail all lay under a glittering mantle of fresh powder snow that sparkled like the enchanted garden in a fairy tale, as if someone had sprinkled finely ground diamonds on the snow. There was no real trail visible, but it was easy enough to keep where the trail should be by following the innumerable tiny tracks of gophers and small birds that marched downhill toward the warmer places in the canyon. After an hour, Angel had to dismount and lead the horse, because the snow had balled so badly in its feet that the animal could hardly walk. Using his hunting knife and a heavy stone, he was able to chip most of it away, but he walked the bay for about another half hour before he got on him again.
Imperceptibly, the light changed, became somehow flat. It created a strange phenomenon: the ground ahead and behind seemed to become completely featureless, the rolls and crests and bumps ironed out to a flat and unbroken expanse wherever he looked by the strange bright mountain light. Nothing moved in the entire empty wasteland: no bird, no beast, no man other than himself. The sky above the looming peaks off to the north was turning a dirty fish belly gray-white, and he felt the wind freshening. The smell of snow was in the air and the bay shivered, as if he could already feel it.
Up ahead was the pass: a narrow aperture between two red stone buttes towering four hundred feet or more on either side. The impenetrable carpet of pine trees lying on both sides of the pass looked like frosted buffalo fur. Here and there on the floor of the pass lay enormous shattered lumps of stone, some sixty or seventy feet high, others immense, with bright striations of color dulled by the strange flat light that threw no shadows. The wind keened across this vast amphitheater like a dirge. Snow flurries stung his eyes, and he thought it looked like the last place God made. He saw the bay’s ears come up too late.
McLennon had had plenty of time to line up the shot and even in this strange, bright light, there was no way he could have blown it. Fired from no more than forty yards, the .44/40 carbine slug smashed Angel’s bay down sideward in a kicking welter of dying reflexes, spilling the rider out of the saddle to hit the icy ground with enough force to knock the wind out of him. He automatically kicked his feet out of the stirrups and rolled clear of the horse. The animal was thrashing in its death throes, its bright blood staining the virgin whiteness of the snow. Angel kept rolling, and then came up on one knee, hearing the whisper of slugs as the flat hard smack of the guns opened up, the dull pock as they smashed into the snow, his eyes searching for cover, any cover. There wasn’t any: they’d picked a spot where the nearest boulder was fifty yards away, where he was out in a wide open space of flat clean snow, as easy to see as a spider on a whitewashed wall. Through the keening wind, be heard the flat blat of a carbine, felt the slow tug of a bullet that ripped through his heavy blanket coat as if it were paper, turning him slightly off balance for a moment. Again and again the carbines banged, and he was moving, rolling, weaving, ducking, running, covered in snow, breath already ragged as the seeking slugs whipped gouts of powder snow glinting into the air. It sifted down on him as he slid to a heaving stop, orienting himself for the last nothing-to-lose dash. He knew that it was a miracle he hadn’t already been cut down, that only the strange flat light was saving him. He came up off his knees and ran now, not dodging anymore, dismissing from his mind any fear of being hit, forgetting everything except his one single, supreme effort to reach the big boulder perhaps a hundred feet away. He had no thought of anything except his intention and his destination. He ran like the wind and he was ten yards from safety when Curtis stepped out from behind the rock toward which he was running and levered the action of the Winchester, smiling a smile that would have made Satan envious.
‘Hello, sucker,’ he said, and pulled the trigger.
~*~
O
n the night of October 12, the night that Frank Angel watched the storm from his window in Buena Vista, George Willowfield broke jail. In doing so he not only killed John Henderson’s deputy Steve Jackman, not only stole a wagon and team worth—according to its aggrieved owner—a good thousand dollars, but also changed the scenario that he had given Falco out of all recognition.
Willowfield was many things, not all of them either nice or acceptable in decent society, but one of the things he was not was a fool. While he had languished in jail, he had considered and reconsidered every aspect of the triple cross he had so carefully planned. The holdup of the Freedom Train had been simple and uncomplicated. The robbery of the Special carrying the ransom equally straight forward. The setting of the hound upon the hares, and the security of knowing whichever killed which, it would make not one thin dime’s worth of difference to George Montefiore Willowfield.
The planned ambush of himself and his escort somewhere above Fort Morgan would not take place, even if Falco and the others made it there on schedule, for one very simple reason: Willowfield would not be going under escort back to Julesburg. To repeat: he was not a fool. He knew exactly what kind of man Chris Falco was, and had no intention of delivering himself like a lamb to Falco’s slaughter. By the time Falco discovered he had been duped—if he ever discovered it—Willowfield would have recovered the ransom money and disappeared to New Orleans—perhaps even Europe. He had always wanted to visit the Uffizi in Florence. He allowed himself the faintest, the very faintest touch of regret over Buddy, who had been a most winning young man, but he shrugged it away. The world was full of winning young men like Buddy and they were all drawn ineluctably by the sweet green smell of money. He smiled fatly in the silence of his cell.
He’d been a model prisoner. Henderson and his men had thoroughly enjoyed the fat man’s eye-openers about the places he had been, the souks of the Middle East, the Casbah in Algiers, the steamy Marseille waterfront, the jeweled waters of Positano, the gilded mansions of the rich back East—even if they weren’t true, they made a damned pleasant change from talk of horses, crops, and weather. Nobody enjoyed them more than Deputy Steve Jackman, who had asked for and gotten permission to play chess with the fat man. There was no danger of Willowfield making a break: even Henderson realized the truth of that. Why, the man couldn’t get four blocks before he’d fall down, winded, beached like some great soft whale. Willowfield was no damned trouble at all, not even complaining about the rotten food, and Henderson knew just how lousy it was. What he didn’t know was how persuasive the fat man’s honeyed tongue could be, and what he simply couldn’t know was exactly how coldblooded Willowfield actually was. One day they’d joked about the date the escort was due to arrive: October thirteenth.
‘Not your lucky day, Colonel,’ Henderson had said. Everyone called the fat man ‘Colonel.’ It seemed suitable, somehow.
‘Well, sir,’ Willowfield had breathed. ‘There are those, you know, who would tell you that luck, or chance, or whatever you care to call it, is worth about what a cat can lick off its backside. It is the man who relies on himself, and not on luck, who makes his mark on the world. Don’t you agree, sir?’
Henderson had laughingly agreed, and he was to recall that remark much later, and remember too that the fat man had not been laughing. He put it out of his mind and went about his chores. At eight, Jackman took over the night swing, and Henderson walked down Larimer Street to the Denver Queen for a couple of drinks before he turned in for the night.
Nobody ever found out where Willowfield had gotten the knife. It was surmised that he must have had it on him someplace all the time, although Marshal Henderson, whose efficiency and reputation were at stake, stoutly refused to accept that Willowfield could have concealed a knife from his search. Not that it made any damned odds at all: Steve Jackman was just as dead. From the way they found the place, they figured that what must have happened was that Jackman had set up the chessboard—the pieces were scattered all over the floor—and that somehow, incredibly, Willowfield had persuaded Steve to open up the cell door. As soon as he did, Willowfield had slid about nine inches of steel between Jackman’s ribs as callously and professionally as a paid ladrone.
Old Enoch Gordon’s wagon and team were hitched outside a store next to the ‘Floradora’ about six blocks down and two across from the jail. Enoch was inside cutting the dust, and when he came out and found his transportation missing, the manure hit the fan. Someone said later that he’d seen a hell of a fat guy climbing into the wagon. He remembered it especially because of the way the springs had squeezed down almost flat with the man’s weight, and how the horses had thrown themselves against their collars to get rolling. The man said he had stood and watched as Willowfield tooled the rig north along Larimer, heading—he supposed—for the Fort Collins road, and due north toward Cheyenne. It had never occurred to him that Willowfield was not only a fugitive, but also a thief, and by the time Enoch Gordon came out of the saloon and raised a yell, Willowfield had the kind of start that no posse was going to make up. Henderson went through the motions, but his heart wasn’t in it. Willowfield might have headed anywhere, north, south, east, west or any point of the compass in between. There wasn’t a cat in hell’s chance of catching him. The fat man was free as a bird.
Chapter Twelve
Anyone else would have been dead.
When Angel saw Gil Curtis step out from behind the sheltering rock, the carbine leveled at his hip, he instinctively changed direction, doing the only thing he was able to do in the instant of time he had before the flame blossomed from the muzzle of the Winchester. There was precious damned hope that Curtis would miss, but that was no reason at all to stand there and let him make a killing shot. Angel went down and forward in the snow and as he did so, he corkscrewed his body to the right, kicking up a flurry of snow with his legs to try to confuse Curtis’s aim.
The bullet smacked him as he rolled, dragging a shout of pain from him as it burned a wicked furrow five inches long across his bunched back muscle. Now, as Curtis levered the action of the Winchester, he had a second, not more, and in that second he had thrown the knife. A long time back, when he had first started working for the Justice Department, Angel had drawn up a set of requirements: he wanted weapons that fitted a particular specification. First, a man should be able to kill with them. Second, they should not be firearms. Third, they should be as difficult for a man looking for weapons to find as possible, and fourth, they should not be heavy. He had spent hours and hours with the Armorer in his workshop below ground on the Tenth Street side of the department building. Among the fruits of their discussions had been a specially made pair of boots of the type called ‘mule-ears’—on account of the pull-on tabs stitched to their sides—whose outer and inner leather was separated slightly on the exterior side. Into the aperture the Armorer had stitched special sheaths. Inside those sheaths nestled twin flat-bladed Solingen steel throwing knives honed to razor sharpness. It was one of these knives that now glinted dully in the graying light and thudded into Curtis’ body, just below the breastbone. Curtis’ eyes bulged outward. His hands abandoned the half-cocked Winchester and moved, hesitantly, toward the thing in his chest. His hands plucked halfheartedly at the quivering rubber-covered shaft of the knife, and his head sank slowly, as if the man was afraid to confront himself with visual confirmation of the weapon, afraid to let the brain receive the message that the rigid sliver of steel had already sliced his heart open.
His eyes came up to look at Frank Angel, and then a dreadful thick gout of blood gushed from his sagging mouth and he went down face first into the snow, as silent as some unseen tree in some undiscovered forest. Angel had scooped up the Winchester and was behind the rock before Curtis had even stopped twitching. He wasted no time on the fallen man: from the moment he had released his hold on the knife, Angel had known that Curtis was a dead man. Eyes narrowed, he tried now to see across the glooming gray space to the rocks on the far side of the trail from which th
e shot which had killed the bay had come. Falco? McLennon? Which of them was over there? Were both of them over there? And where were the horses?
He took stock of his situation. Curtis’s bullet had cut across his back, and he could feel the sticky warmth of congealing blood, but there was no way he could check how bad the wound was. The fact that he could move both arms without discomfort was an indication that it wasn’t serious, although that was whistling past the graveyard. He had a rifle and a sixgun, and enough ammunition. There was food in the saddlebags of his dead horse. If the weather held, he could probably last out. The sky was still clear, although it was dull now, and there was a soft gray mistiness in the lower valley. He was behind a huge rock, perhaps twenty feet high and nearly twice as many wide. It stood like a sentinel on the right hand side of the almost-invisible trail he had been following. Up the trail, to Angel’s right, and perhaps three hundred yards away, another even larger one loomed. To the left lay the twin buttes guarding the entrance to the pass through which he had come. Behind him, the snow-covered open ground rose sharply to the face of a cliff striated with snow and jagged lines. In front of him was the bare expanse of snow on which the dead bay lay, its body already lightly frosted with windblown snow. Beyond it, about another fifty yards away, was a huddle of huge boulders like the one Angel was using for shelter. Two great chunks of stone were in the center, and three smaller ones were scattered nearby. One of them at least had to be there, he thought; that was where the shot that killed the horse came from. The other? Up the trail, behind the big rock?
‘Falco!’ he yelled. The effort of shouting sent a lightning-flash of pain down the wound in his back. He worked his right arm. No stiffness. Yet, he reminded himself.
Warn Angel! (A Frank Angel Western--Book 9) Page 10
