Hunt Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #5)

by Frederick H. Christian

  Frank Angel was fast, too, and his six-gun thundered a fractional fatal fragment of a second ahead of the gunman’s weapons. Both of Willie’s guns exploded wildly, the triggers jerked by reflex action as Angel’s unerring bullet hit him about an inch to the right of the median line of his forehead and half that distance above the left eyebrow. It lifted Johns off his feet and hurled him backward as if he had been swatted by some enormous invisible giant wielding a bat, smashing Johns across the room and against the wall of the saloon with a crash that set bottles rattling on Johnny Gardner’s shelves. The saloonkeeper watched, his mouth a wide ‘O’ as Willie Johns slid down the wall like a broken doll, leaving a thick smear of something oozing in a long half-circle on the painted surface before falling sideways into the clotted sawdust.

  ‘Je-zuss,’ Gardner whispered. He’d kept saloons in a lot of hard towns, seen plenty of tough men fight. But never anything like this, never. He let out the breath he hadn’t known he was holding in a long quavering ;sigh as Dan Sheridan and Howie Cade burst in through the batwings, guns up. They looked at Angel and they looked at what was left of Willie Johns. There was a lot of blood now.

  ‘Frank!’ Sheridan said, coming across the saloon. ‘You all right?’

  Angel frowned slightly, and then the light came back into his eyes. It was as if some part of his soul had gone to a far place, and Sheridan recognized what it was and waited, just putting his hand on Angel’s shoulder.

  ‘Fine,’ Angel said, pasting on a smile that he didn’t think fitted too damned well. Howie Cade was shooing people away from the batwings. They all wanted to come in now and see what had happened.

  ‘A question,’ Angel said to Sheridan.

  ‘Shoot.’

  ‘Who’s guarding Burt Hugess?’ Angel asked.

  Howie Cade heard what he said, and he spat out a disgusted curse. He shoved his way through the people on the boardwalk outside and ran across the street, every line of him showing his own self-disgust. Angel’s smile changed from a forced to a genuine one. He looked at Sheridan, who nodded and then turned with him toward the door.

  ‘Here,’ Johnny Gardner said, coming to the end of the bar. ‘Here, what am I supposed to do with him?’ He jerked his head at the sprawled body of Willie Johns. Angel nodded and pursed his lip: question deeply. Then his face cleared and he looked up.

  ‘Why don’t you have him stuffed?’ he said.

  Chapter Ten

  Howie Cade stood in front of the long mirror in the Hardin House and scowled at his reflection. Damned if he didn’t look like a meal ticket Indian on a run-down reservation. His eyes were red-rimmed, bloodshot. He had something that might have been a long stubble or a short beard, but wasn’t either; he couldn’t recall the last time he’d had a proper shave or for that matter put saddle soap or polish anywhere near his boots, which were cracked and down-at-heel. Jesus, he thought, I need a bath.

  ‘Sherry?’ he said.

  Sherry Hardin looked up from the table at the window where she was sitting watching Frank Angel make a hole in the meal she’d cooked for him and Howie. They sat at the window so that Angel could keep an eye on the jail while Sheridan was in there alone with Burt. Later Sheridan would come eat, changing places with Angel. Howie would be cover for both of them.

  ‘You ever cut a man’s hair?’ Howie asked, and Sherry grinned.

  ‘Once or twice,’ she said. ‘Once or twice.’

  ‘I hate to ask you this,’ Howie said.

  Sherry looked at Angel, and Angel grinned.

  ‘He sure as hell needs all the help he can get,’ Angel said. ‘He’s no oil painting and that’s for sure.’

  ‘The wreck of the schooner Hesperus would be more like it,’ the girl said. ‘Sit down in that chair, Howie.’

  ‘That chair?’ Howie said.

  ‘Don’t hedge,’ Sherry told him. ‘You want a shave and a haircut. I’m going to give you one.’

  ‘Listen,’ Howie said nervously. ‘I was thinking maybe I’d leave it for now. You know. Do it later. Tomorrow, maybe.’

  ‘Sit there,’ Sherry said firmly. She led him to the chair and put her hands on his shoulders and pushed him into the seat. Then she rummaged in a drawer and came up with some long-bladed scissors.

  ‘Listen, Sherry,’ Howie said.’ Angel, listen.’

  ‘Quiet,’ the girl mock-growled, and started in on his greasy locks. She held her lower lip in her teeth as she concentrated, and Angel watched her working, enjoying the movements of her body and how she was taking the job so seriously. Howie sat like a circus elephant as she cropped away, pausing only once to bang on the wall and shout to the Chinaman back there to fill a bath with hot water pronto! Howie opened his mouth to protest, thought better of it, closed it again and set his face like a bear-trap. His expression was that of a man who’d ought to have known better in the first place than to put himself in the hands of a woman.

  ‘You know, Howie,’ Sherry said, judiciously squinting at the results of her handiwork. ‘That’s not a half-bad face you had hidden under all that foliage.’

  ‘Arrrgh,’ Howie said, turning bright pink.

  ‘Bath leddy,’ the Chinaman said, poking his head around the doorway of the kitchen.

  ‘Off you go, my boy,’ Sherry told Howie, slapping him into action. ‘Be good and scrub your neck now. And give me a call if you want your back rubbed.’

  ‘Aw, hell, Sherry,’ Howie said. He didn’t know where the devil to put his expression, so he pasted on a scowl and stumbled out into the kitchen. Sherry Hardin turned toward Angel, who had gotten up from the table and was strapping on his gunbelt preparatory to going out into the street. She put her hand gently on his arm.

  ‘You want me to wait for him?’ he grinned.

  ‘No,’ she said softly. Her coppery hair caught the sunlight from the window. ‘Howie’s all right. I’ll find him some of Hal’s clothes: they were about the same size. He’ll be fine. It’s you I’m worried about. I heard about Willie Johns.’

  ‘Howie should learn to keep his tall tales to himself,’ Frank Angel said. ‘Scaring children like that.’

  ‘Children yourself!’ she reacted. ‘I’m not a child, Angel. Never think that.’

  They looked at each other for a long moment, and he sighed.

  ‘Lady,’ he said. ‘Haul off.’

  They both smiled together. Sherry Hardin put a finger against his chest.

  ‘I’ll get you yet,’ she said.

  ‘Who’s running?’ he replied.

  He got his hat and went toward the door. She came with him and laid the same gentle-touching hand on his forearm again.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’ll take care.’

  She put on a look of mock exasperation. ‘Will you quit reading my mind, sir?’

  ‘Deal,’ he said. ‘As long as you never try reading mine.’

  He went out into the street and she watched him go, a tall, confident man, assured, self-contained. For some reason the sight made her sad, and she tossed her head in that special way she had, turning on her heel and hurrying upstairs to find Howie Cade some clean clothes. If anything was bothering her by the time Dan Sheridan came across to eat his dinner, it wasn’t showing on her face.

  When Sheridan came back to the jail, Angel was sitting at the smaller desk with his six-gun disassembled on the flat top in the front of him and his fingers smeared with cleaning oil. He’d taken another gun down from the rack and put it in his holster. He didn’t plan to be the first Department of Justice troubleshooter to go into the big black book they kept at Headquarters with the epitaph ‘Died while cleaning his gun.’

  ‘Where’s Howie?’ Angel asked.

  ‘He’ll be right along,’ Sheridan said. ‘He just had to take one sashay through town in his new outfit.’ He shook his head. ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes,’ he confessed. ‘He looked like the old Howie again.’

  ‘You give him his guns?’

  ‘Yep,’ Sheridan nodded.

  ‘That w
as a nice thing you did, Dan,’ Angel said. Sheridan had told him he had Howie’s guns. He’d hocked them to Johnny Gardner for booze a long time back. Sheridan had paid Howie’s tab and redeemed the guns. He’d showed them to Angel: a buscadero belt with two fitted holsters, the fine soft leather cut, tailored for one man and one man only. The twin, ivory handled Peacemakers had consecutive serial numbers and showed all the signs of good care and sensible use. There wasn’t as much as a tiny pit on the metal, and the chambers had clicked softly and smoothly when he rolled them on the palm of his hand with the hammer on the second notch. Sheridan had taken them over to the Hardin House when he went for his meal and handed them without comment to his deputy. Howie had taken the belt and guns out of Sheridan’s hands with the care a new mother accepts her baby from the doctor, the same light of wonder shining in his eyes.

  ‘Hey,’ he had said, softly. ‘Hey, Dan.’

  Nobody looked at him while he blinked and sniffed around, shuffling his feet, ducking his head, getting hold of it all. Then he strapped the gunbelt on. He looked like something now. He had on an old shirt of Hal Hardin’s faded blue but still in good condition, dark trousers with a faint pinstripe in them. Even the boots Sherry had found had turned out to be a good fit. The only thing Howie was shy was a hat, and he’d told Dan he was going to go across to Mahoney’s and get himself one on the way back to the jailhouse.

  Sheridan went on ahead down the street, while Howie got himself just so in front of the long mirror he’d used earlier. When he was all set, Sherry took his face in her hands and planted a kiss on his surprised face. Howie managed to fire off a four-alarm blush and stumbled out of the Hardin House into the street, a grin plastered across his face about half as wide as the Cimarron River. He still had it on when the three men jumped him from the alley alongside the Oriental.

  It was very smooth, very neat, very quick.

  A man Howie had never seen before stood in his path as he came off the sidewalk to cross the alley. The man was tall, gangling. Howie noted the prominent Adam’s apple and the scrawny throat like a turkey cock’s.

  ‘Howie,’ the man said. ‘You got a minnit?’

  Howie frowned momentarily, but he was feeling too good with the world to react the way he should have done. He stopped to talk to the man and as he did the rope that had been covered with sand and dust and into whose loop he had stepped was pulled and he went down into the dirt with a thud that jarred the breath out of his body. Cursing, spluttering to get the dust out of his mouth, Howie clawed for the guns at his side and as he did the man on the horse kicked the animal into a jumping run. The rope tightened with a twang and Howie’s body was whipped off the ground and then hit it bounding jarring him almost unconscious, rolling him in front of a doorway in which stood the shadowed form of Danny Johnston. Johnston stepped out of concealment, his arm rose and fell, and the drawn six-gun in his hand glinted in the sunlight. The barrel slammed against the unprotected head of the deputy, who had scrabbled to one knee, flattening him face down in the dust. When Howie tried once more to get off the ground, Danny Johnston’s arm rose and fell again. This time Howie went down and stayed there, blood trickling quietly from the gash in his scalp into the heedless ground.

  They dragged the unconscious form into a tumbledown wooden hut that stood to the rear of the Oriental and somewhat to the north on open ground that stretched across to the broken edges of the bluffs above Cat Creek. When they had him out of sight they stripped him of his new clothes; Johnny Evans, the rider who’d done the roping, was about Howie’s size, and he pulled them on.

  When he was ready, he slid Howie’s guns out of their tooled leather holsters and checked them. Both had five shells in the chambers, and Johnny Evans cocked one of them and pointed it at Howie Cade’s unconscious head. Danny Johnston stopped him with a cursed command.

  Tut that away, you goddamned fool,’ he snapped. ‘You want to queer the whole deal?’

  Johnny Evans nodded slowly, once, twice, three times, drawing in his breath deeply. ‘Later,’ he promised. ‘I owe him.’

  ‘All right, later,’ Johnston said, his temper short. ‘Later.’

  He checked the door: there wasn’t a human being in sight. He could see Nate Ridlow’s wagons still parked in their neat row in the corral behind Mahoney’s. A woman was crossing the bridge on Texas with a shopping basket in her hand. The sagebrush-speckled flat between where Johnston stood and the creek was deserted.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘He trussed good?’

  ‘Like a turkey,’ the third man, the one with the Adam’s apple, told him.

  ‘Bueno,’ said Johnston.

  They went out of there and down the alley to the street. They crossed without haste and went into the livery stable. Their horses were there. Nobody took any notice of them. It was three o’clock.

  ‘Where the hell is he?’

  Dan Sheridan’s voice wasn’t so much worried as exasperated.

  Angel got to his feet. He’d had time to put the six-gun back together without hurrying, which meant Howie had been at least ten, maybe even fifteen minutes. Not enough to worry about. But enough. He looked at Sheridan, and Sheridan held up a hand in the ‘halt’ sign,

  ‘I’ll take a look,’ he said. ‘You just set and take it easy.’

  Angel sat back against the edge of the desk, while Sheridan took a hitch at his belt with his left hand, picked up the Greener, and went out into the bright sunlight, muttering something about popinjays. The marshal walked out to the middle of the dusty street where Texas met Front and checked all three directions. Up toward the livery stable, Howie Cade was standing in front of two riders who were handing down their gunbelts to him. Howie walked over and hitched them over the rail outside the stable, then waved the riders on. Sheridan moved back toward the jail, leaning against the hitch rail and was watching the two men come toward him. They had the dust of long travel on their clothes. Then he saw one of them was Danny Johnston, he didn’t know the scrawny one with the bobbing Adam’s apple.

  ‘Johnston,’ he said. ‘You back again?’

  ‘Come to parley, Marshal,’ Johnston said.

  ‘Talk away,’ Sheridan said. He put the Greener down, stock first on the ground with the barrel resting against his leg, fishing in his pocket for a cigarette. When he looked up Danny Johnston had a six-gun in his hand and so did his companion. Both held them low, on the side of the high saddle pommels. No one in the street would even see them. They looked like two men passing the time of day with the marshal. Danny Johnston smiled.

  ‘No Sheridan,’ he said. ‘Howie didn’t turn his coat. That ain’t him.’

  The man dressed in Howie Cade’s clothes was coming down the street, walking easily and without haste in the center of Front, hands never far from the matched six-guns. Sheridan looked at him and then at Johnston. His good left hand inched toward the barrels of the Greener, and Johnston showed his teeth, ‘You’d never make it, Sheridan,’ he said.

  Sheridan’s eyes were bleak. But he didn’t try for the shotgun.

  Inside the jail, Angel moved idly across to the window. He’d heard the voices outside. They were ordinary, the sound of desultory conversation. He glanced out of the window at the marshal, facing the two horsemen whose faces were concealed from his line of sight by the ramada roof around the jail. But the tableau was wrong, and the figure of Howie Cade walking down the middle of the street was wrong. Sheridan was tensed, his left hand stiff and close to the shotgun at his left side, his shoulder down as though he had frozen in a movement. Then one of the horses shifted slightly, rearranging its feet, and he caught the wink of metal from one of the low-held six-guns.

  ‘Where’s Howie?’ he heard Sheridan ask, and he could hear the control Sheridan was having to exercise on his voice to keep the sheer anger out of it.

  ‘In a safe place,’ one of the riders said.

  ‘What do you want?’ Sheridan said.

  ‘You go lay that shotgun against the wall, Daniel,’ the
hidden rider said. ‘Nice and easy. Then step out here into the street.’

  Sheridan shrugged; there was nothing he could do but obey.

  ‘Easy does it, Marshal,’ one of the riders said. He backed his horse up slightly and Angel saw that it was Danny Johnston. That was all he needed to know. He moved on feet as silent as an Indian’s toward the door, and eeled into the corridor. Burt Hugess watched him with wide eyes.

  ‘What the hell. . . ?’ he began, but he was addressing the air. Angel was already out of the door and on the dark-shadowed eastern side of the squat building. He moved easily to the corner. He could hear Danny Johnston speaking.

  ‘—gets here, you and me will go into the jail nice and quiet and let Burt out. You do that, and maybe you’ll live through this. Try anything else, and you won’t. Sabe?’

  Angel got down flat on the ground and eased an eye around the corner of the building: a man who looks around the edge of a building at his own height will attract the attention of another by being caught in the other’s peripheral vision. Nobody ever expects anyone to peek around corners at ground level. He got their positions fixed in his mind. The man in Howie Cade’s clothes was just coming past the Oriental, and Angel knew it had to be now. His fingers fastened on the tattered horse blanket he’d snatched up as he came out into the corral. He pulled in his breath, long and deep, and then he stepped out into the open, already moving fast, the blanket flapping as he whirled it around his head and whooped like a drunken Arapaho.