Warn Angel! (A Frank Angel Western--Book 9)

by Frederick H. Christian

  His old clothes, while still serviceable, he no longer required, and he dropped them into a dustbin near the railroad station, knowing that some bum would hustle them off the moment night fell. Entering the same terminal he had quit not two hours before, Willowfield bought himself a first class ticket for San Francisco, and within another hour was thundering back along the route he had so recently traversed.

  On his lap lay the carpetbag with the better part of a quarter of a million in it—his wardrobe had scarcely dented the pile. On the rack overhead was his traveling case. In the baggage car was his big case containing his clothes. And nestling in his inside pocket, in an oilskin wrapper, was the crackling parchment that half the law officers in the United States were looking for. He allowed himself another smile.

  Well, the United States should have its Declaration of Independence back, in good time. He had not yet decided how much they should pay for it, nor exactly how he would handle the ploy. That could all wait until he reached journey’s end. He recited the route ahead with loving relish: Cheyenne, Laramie, Rock Springs, Salt Lake City, Elko, Winnemucca, Reno, Sacramento, and finally, the lovely city on the bay: San Francisco.

  The train was slowing on the descent into Cheyenne and he debated whether to get out and stretch his legs for five minutes, then decided against it. He leaned his head back against the plush velvet cushions of his seat, stretched his legs, and sighed, a smile of contented amusement on his face.

  Catch me if you can, he thought.

  ~*~

  ‘You’ll live,’ Doctor Hussey said.

  He watched impassively as Frank Angel put back on his clothes. He had stitched up the long, raw wound, bound it as tightly as good sense dictated, and there wasn’t much else he could do that nature couldn’t do as well, if not better. He had tried half a dozen times to dissuade his patient from making the long ride he planned through the mountains, but to all his advice Angel had remained quite immune.

  ‘It’s got to be done,’ was all he would say.

  He had brought Falco down from the cabin in the mountains and reached Fairplay as night was falling. A cold wind had been sweeping down from the snowy crests to the west, but the weather was staying clear and they were able to make decent time. Angel had lodged Falco with the sheriff of Park County, whose office was in the two-story red sandstone courthouse in the center of town. Falco had been silent throughout the whole journey, nursing his ruined arm like an Indian squaw keening over her fallen brave. His eyes had no life in them at all. Angel had taken one look at the man and known he was finished. It wouldn’t make any difference what happened to Falco from here on in: something inside him had broken, snapped, given way.

  The doctor came to do what he could for the prisoner’s arm and when he was through, Angel walked back with him to his house, a white frame shack next door to the Presbyterian church. On the way he told Hussey that he had to make Denver by the following afternoon, nightfall at the latest.

  ‘You’ll need damned good animals,’ Hussey said. ‘That’s a hard run.’

  ‘I know it,’ Angel replied. ‘The sheriff’s lining them up for me, right now.’

  While he was examining the wound on Angel’s back, the doctor asked a question, and Angel slid the throwing knife out of his boot.

  ‘I used this,’ he said.

  Hussey tested the edge of the blade with a tentative thumb.

  ‘I thought it must be something out of the ordinary,’ he said. ‘The way the muscles were sheared through.’

  ‘I didn’t have a hell of a lot of choice, Doc,’ Angel said, sensing the implied censure. ‘He had a cocked sixgun in his hand.’

  Hussey shook his head.

  ‘It’s none of my damned business, I know,’ he said gruffly. ‘I just hate waste, and when I see a man with a right arm that’s going to be about as much use to him from here on in as a piece of string, I … ’

  ‘Don’t you worry none,’ Angel had assured him harshly. ‘Falco’s not going to live long enough to notice.’

  His cold pronouncement had startled Dick Hussey, who was still young enough and idealistic enough to believe that there was innate good in even the worst of men. As a doctor, in a town as tough as Fairplay could be, he’d seen his share of mayhem and its results. He still didn’t believe in the theory of a man all bad, nor was he ready for anyone who seemed to be as callous about maiming another human being as Frank Angel was, and he said so.

  ‘It’s not callousness, doc,’ Angel said. ‘My business is survival. I’m no damned use to the Department dead.’

  ‘The Department,’ Hussey nodded, saying it the way you’d say the name of a partner who cheated you. ‘It must be quite an organization.’

  ‘Doc,’ Angel told him with a frosty smile, ‘it is.’

  He left then to walk down the street to the Hand Hotel, where Sheriff Graham was waiting for him. He had four horses saddled and ready, the best, he said, he could find in town.

  ‘You won’t get far at night,’ he warned. ‘That’s a poor road up toward Silverheels.’

  ‘Every mile gets me nearer Denver, Sheriff,’ Angel said. ‘And that’s what I’m after.’

  ‘You must want this Willowfield feller powerful bad,’ Graham said. ‘What’s he done?’

  ‘Well for one thing,’ Angel said, swinging up into the saddle, ‘He’s lived too long.’ Then he kicked the horses into a run and headed up the hill.

  ~*~

  ‘All aboard!’

  Willowfield heard the shouts up at the far end of the train, then the thundering shudder of the drive wheels making their first grinding turns for grip on the shining tracks. The engine exhaled deeply as she moved the train slowly out of the Cheyenne depot, and the engineer gave the town a farewell blast with his whistle as she shun-nashunnashunn’ed westward. People were resuming the seats they had vacated during the ten-minute stop and Willowfield turned his head away, watching through the window as the dun land sped past beneath the clacketing wheels of the train.

  Laramie, he recited to himself: Rock Springs, Salt Lake City, Elko, Reno, Sacramento. And San Francisco. He leaned back in the soft seat and closed his eyes. In his mind he saw himself in a darkened, paneled room. A log fire was burning, and crystal glasses caught the flickers of the flames and turned them to diamonds. He was wearing a velvet jacket with piped lapels and cuffs, soft lamb’s wool lined slippers, thin silk pantaloons of almost oriental design. There was incense in the air, a faint perfume. Or was it the boy? Moving across the room toward him was a fair-haired youth, twenty perhaps, adoration in his eyes, submission in his posture. His voice would be fluting, breathy. Then he would …

  ‘Colonel?’

  He opened his eyes and Frank Angel was sitting opposite him. Willowfield’s eyes widened and he came upright in the seat, head turning this way and that. The conductor was standing at Angel’s right elbow, and now the fat man noticed that the train was slowing down.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, nodding his great head. ‘Ah, yes. Mr. Angel. We meet again, sir.’

  ‘Indeed we do,’ Frank Angel said. ‘Indeed we do. Here, let me take that bag. I’m sure you must be tired of carrying it.’

  The fat man smiled as Angel lifted the carpetbag off his knees and handed it to the conductor. His eyes followed the bag, which contained all his dreams, as if attached to it with string.

  ‘Well, sir,’ he said, at last, bringing his eyes back to stare at Angel. ‘You seem to have outwitted me.’

  ‘It would look like that,’ Angel said. ‘We’ll be back in Cheyenne in about ten minutes. There’s a military escort waiting for you.’

  ‘You are efficient, sir,’ Willowfleld sighed. ‘I always suspected it. Am I to assume from your presence here that Falco and the others are dead?’

  ‘No,’ Angel said. ‘Falco’s not dead. Nor Kuden. The others are, though.’

  ‘Pity,’ Willowfield said, and Angel did not know whether he meant that it was a pity the others were dead or that it was a pity Falco and Kud
en were still alive.

  Willowfield gave a long, deep sigh.

  ‘Tell me, Mr. Angel,’ he said. ‘Tell me, please. How did you find me? How did you do it?’

  ‘It was easy,’ Angel said, stepping hard on the fat man’s ego. ‘You made it easy.’

  ‘No, sir,’ Willowfield gusted, temper mottling his face. ‘No, I did not. I took every precaution. Every precaution.’

  ‘You sure did,’ Angel replied. ‘You laid a trail a ten-year-old kid could have followed, Willowfield. And that was your mistake.’

  ‘Mistake, sir? How was it a mistake?’

  ‘Because I knew you were a thief and I knew you were a killer and I knew you were a man who’d have double-crossed his mother for the price of a cigar, Willowfield, but I also knew something else: you were not a fool. So if you were laying a trail for me, then you had a trick up your sleeve. I just didn’t know what it was, and I had damned little time to find out.’

  He remembered how it had been, coming through the mountains, finally seeing the smoky haze above Denver on the plain below, every muscle in his body aching from the pounding ride, and two of the horses dead of exhaustion on the trail in back of him. All the way to Denver, whenever he could isolate his mind from the job of guiding his mount, he had tried to read the mind of his quarry: When the fox runs, he will always lead away from his den.

  When he piled into the marshal’s office, Henderson had confirmed everything that Angel had suspected and guessed about the fat man. They went over to the express office, and once more commandeered the telegraph.

  Messages chattered across the wires between Washington and Denver well into the night, as Frank Angel gave full reports of his own activities, and information was fed back to him of departmental investigations into Willowfield’s movements.

  ‘He was seen boarding a train in Julesburg,’ Angel told Henderson, ‘and the porter recalls him leaving it at Council Bluffs. Our men found a hobo wearing a coat with Willowfield’s name stitched into it, which suggested he’d either been killed, or fitted himself out with new clothes. The hobo was clean, no reason to suppose he’d killed Willowfield, so our people checked the clothing stores. They found the fat man had bought a whole new outfit. We got a complete description of everything.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then he disappeared. Gone. Phfffft!’

  ‘Headed east, probably,’ Henderson said. ‘You’ll have the hell of a job to pick his trail up if he has.’

  ‘That’s what’s bothering me,’ Angel said, softly. ‘He laid such a dead easy trail for us to pick up as far as Council Bluffs. Then suddenly he vanishes. If he wanted to vanish, why leave a trail at all? If he didn’t give a damn, how come the trail runs out?’

  ‘Beats me,’ Henderson admitted. When the fox runs, he will always lead away from his den. You have to let him run until he believes he is no longer pursued. Then, and only then, will you see him turn for home. Then, and not before, can you take him.

  All at once he knew what to do, playing his hunch boldly, strong with the certainty of it. He had special instructions issued to all Union Pacific personnel working the transcontinental route anywhere between Kansas City and Sacramento, California, and a very special one given to every conductor: that there was a reward of $1,000 to the man who spotted the fat man and telegraphed the information to him in care of the U.S. marshal at Denver, Colorado.

  It had been that simple: the one man who saw every passenger on every train moving across the rails of America was the train’s conductor. Armed with information about Willowfield’s clothes, his appearance, it would be a shortsighted man indeed who could not spot the fat man, and Geoffrey Marshall was certainly not that. He nailed Willowfield the first time he went through the train, and when the Transcontinental stopped at Grand Island, he ran to the telegrapher with his news.

  Ten minutes later, Frank Angel and John Henderson were at the depot in Denver, stamping their feet impatiently as the engineer got steam up on the special loco that was going to run them up to Cheyenne to intercept the UP train.

  ‘It was that simple,’ Angel said.

  ‘I see,’ Willowfield said, slowly, softly, like a man afraid to let out the words. ‘Alas, Mr. Angel. I fear I badly underestimated you. I shall not do so again.’

  ‘You aren’t likely to get the chance,’ Angel said. ‘We’re puffing into Cheyenne.’

  Willowfield’s face was ashen, and there was a faint greasy sheen of unhealthy sweat on his forehead and upper lip. His eyes were those of a hunted animal and he jumped when Angel spoke.

  ‘What?’ he said. ‘I beg your pardon, sir. What did you say?’

  ‘I said would you like to hand over the Declaration of Independence now?’

  Willowfield drew in a deep, deep breath. His gross body hardened, and something like decision came into the hunted eyes.

  ‘Of course, sir,’ he said. ‘How stupid of me.’

  He reached for his inside pocket in the most natural way in the world and with the Derringer he whipped from beneath his arm he shot Frank Angel point blank in the body. The heavy slug smashed Angel back against the seat and his eyes went up in his head showing only the white. Willowfleld, with a surprisingly fast movement for a man so gross, rose from his seat, and in one movement of his huge arm, smashed the conductor across the carriage. A man leaped to his feet opposite, and a woman screamed as he tried to stop Willowfield, who was lurching toward the door. Snatching up the fallen carpetbag, Willowfield fended off the passenger as if he had been a small child, and wrenched open the door of the Pullman coach, stepping out on to the platform at the rear. The eddying gunsmoke whipped through after him as he swung down from the rapidly slowing train and jumped from the platform to the ground. He almost spilled over, but regained his balance, looking wildly about him for direction. He saw the scattered outbuildings of the lumber company behind the depot, and outside them, tethered horses. He started to run toward them and had gone perhaps twenty paces when he heard his name shouted.

  Caution was gone now, everything gone. The buildings were so tantalizingly close, the horses so near. He ignored the shout and kept running, running to escape, and he went to hell still thinking he was going to make it.

  Frank Angel, blossoming blood high on the right-hand side of his body, had staggered off the halted train and was standing, his sixgun held in a rigidly leveled right hand clasped in turn around the wrist by his left. In this viselike grip the gun was as steady as he could hold it, and he tried very hard to hit Willowfield below the thigh, to bring him down like a running animal but not to kill him. But Frank Angel was already in shock and his hand was unsteady. The two bullets he fired fast one after the other hit George Willowfield just above the base of the spine, and the fat man went down face forward in the soft wet earth, dead before the huge body had ceased quivering.

  Frank Angel holstered his sixgun and started out toward the fallen renegade. He made it exactly ten steps before he, too, fell.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The attorney general looked out at Pennsylvania Avenue.

  The wide, muddy thoroughfare was packed with traffic: carriages, wagons, horsemen riding through the November drizzle, their faces like wads of dough beneath the flaring lamps. The Justice Department building was at the corner of Tenth Street, his own office on the first floor. It was a big, square room with high ceilings and French windows which opened on to an imitation balcony, unmistakably a man’s room and a working room. The bookshelves were crammed with books, some lying flat, others face forward, jumbled every which way but tidy. There were law books and books on criminology, natural history, sociology, criminal jurisprudence, psychology and rehabilitation, none of them new, all of them often used for what they were, containers of information necessary to the work of the man whose office it was—the man who had prosecuted the unfortunate Andrew Johnson and secured his impeachment, and had become the chief legal adviser to the President of the United States of America.

  He turned as
the door to the office was opened, and his personal private secretary came in from the ante-room.

  She was a tall, lissom girl with wide blue eyes and honey blonde hair tied back with a bright red ribbon. She wore a white silk blouse and a long black skirt and she had a smile like a desert sunrise. The attorney general, who was a most happily married man, was nevertheless somewhat gratified to hear that in the Justice building, Miss Rowe was sometimes referred to as ‘the fair Miss Hard to Get.’

  ‘Yes, Amabel?’ he said.

  ‘Mr. Angel is here, sir,’ she told him. ‘Shall I send him in?’

  The attorney general nodded and she stood back against the door as Frank Angel came in. He looked drawn and the deep tan on his skin looked yellowish. There were dark circles beneath his eyes, and his clothes seemed to be hanging loosely on his tall frame.

  ‘Frank,’ the attorney general said. ‘Good to see you up and about. How are you feeling?’

  ‘Pretty lousy, sir,’ Angel said.

  ‘You look like it,’ his chief replied. ‘Chest healing?’

  ‘Sir,’ Angel confirmed. He moved over to the leather armchair opposite the attorney general’s desk, and sat down in it, lowering himself down like an old man who has been to the edge of the grave, peered in, and drawn back sharply—which, in truth was what Frank Angel had done. It was only by the merest chance that the army escort which had come to Cheyenne to take George Willowfield off the train had brought an ambulance, the still unlikelier chance that when they had rushed the severely wounded Angel across country to Fort Laramie he had arrived there in time to be treated by the surgeon general of the United States army himself. He was on an inspection tour of the Department of the Platte, Military Division of the Missouri, and he had his beautifully cut uniform off and his instruments unpacked in ten minutes flat. The operation to remove the bullet from Frank Angel’s lung had been successful—a rarity in Army operations, most of which were conducted with the most primitive instruments and usually in the field—and he had been sent back east by train to convalesce. It had been a slow process. The deadly little Derringer bullet had bored through Angel’s chest, burned its way through his right lung, glanced upward off a rib and fractured the scapula, lodging against that blade of bone. The surgeon general cursed even harder than he had done when he first saw Frank Angel’s chest and was informed that the long, raw burn of puckered flesh on the unconscious man’s back was an earlier wound and not the one he was supposed to treat.