Hang Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #4)

by Frederick H. Christian

  “And Mike?”

  “Mike’s the muscle, the blunt instrument. If Ed wants somebody leaned on, somebody roughed up, somebody warned off, Mike does it. He’s not as big as Ed, not as tall I mean—but he’s built like an adobe outhouse and you couldn’t break his skull with a double-bitted axe.”

  “That makes Joe the runt of the litter.”

  “Runt’s not the word I’d use, although it’s near,” Dick Webb said vehemently.

  “He wouldn’t be tolerated by anyone in these parts for a second if he wasn’t a Fischer. He runs up bills he never pays, borrows stuff he has no intention of returning, drinks like a fish. Just a waster—never done an honest day’s work in his life.”

  “How come you took out after him?”

  “Personal matter,” was the succinct reply, and Angel didn’t push. The boy would tell him when he was ready to. Not before.

  “The town’s named for the family, of course,” he hazarded.

  “Right,” Webb said. “Old Michael J. He settled this valley back in the ‘sixties, right after the War Between the States. Built up one of the biggest spreads in the Territory—nearly as big as Chisum’s down in Lincoln County. Got his beef from Charlie Goodnight himself. Built up trade with the Army. Used to be an Army post about sixty miles north: old Camp Elliott. Knew every man jack there—from bugle-boy to commanding officer. Sold them all their beef, horses too. Then he built a saloon down here, far enough away to keep it respectable, still nearer than anything else. Got all their trade, all their leave money. Soldiers would come down here, stay up at the Flying Fish, drink at the Silver King, go back to Camp Elliott busted—but happy.”

  “Smart operator,” Angel commented.

  “Sure he was. They broke the mold after they made Michael Joseph Fischer. He pretty near built this town single-handed. General store, saloon, this jail we’re in. Livery stable across the street. He was planning a hotel when he died.”

  “When was that?”

  “Same year the Army abandoned Camp Elliott—’seventy-four. Like he didn’t want to be around anymore. The town had grown up around him; he didn’t want to see it decline and blow away.”

  “It didn’t quite do that,” Angel pointed out.

  “Not quite,” Webb said. “But there aren’t many people left here now. Old Luskam, who runs the Silver King, the Williamses at the north end of the street, couple of dozen men who one way and another owe their livelihood to the Fischers. Three or four small ranches way on south of town. And that’s about it. Fischer’s Crossing is sort of the center of the universe to them: which tends to mean they don’t figure to cross the Fischers.”

  “And you?”

  “My old man had a small place up in the hills, maybe ten miles east of town on the Rio Abajo. There are two rivers. The Rio Arriba runs almost due southwest. The Flying Fish is on the Rio Arriba, fifteen miles north of town. The two rivers meet just outside town.”

  “Hence Fischer’s Crossing?”

  “Correct. When my old man died, a couple of years ago, he left the ranch to me and my sister. Susie’s just a kid, eighteen. We do the best we can, but making the place pay isn’t easy. I have to drive the cattle down to the Panhandle or over the hellangone to Clayton to get a decent price. Or do like the sheep around here and hand them over to the Fischers at whatever price they’re prepared to pay me.”

  “How come?”

  “They’ve got the beef contract for the Reservation—that’s why Ed’s so thick with the politicos in the Capital. It’s the only major beef market this side of the Sierra.”

  “You the only one drives his own beef to market ?”

  “Uhuh. Everyone else just buckles under to Big Ed. The extra profit doesn’t run to enough to warrant the risk.”

  “Risk?”

  “Nobody could prove this, of course,” Dick Webb said. “But old Gus Parrack who’s got a ranch southwest of town once decided to run a herd down as far as Fort Union, try his luck. Took three men with him. One night their herd was stampeded. One of the riders was killed— could have been an accident, of course. Took them three days to round up the steers. While they were out hunting them up, old Gus was beaten half to death back in the camp. Never would say who did it. Just got back on his pony and headed uphill to here. Damned near dead when he got back. He never even talked about it again.”

  “You figure it was the Fischers?”

  “Damned sure of it,” Webb said hotly. “Who the hell else would it be?”

  “Good question,” Angel said. “Except for one thing: why haven’t they hit you ?”

  “Two reasons, I guess. One is—was, rather—that my old man and Michael J were friends. So there’s a kind of amnesty thing. Besides I don’t run enough head for it to make much difference. The second reason is my sister.”

  Angel raised his eyebrows, but said nothing; the expression on the boy’s face indicated that the sister was close to whatever had caused him to come looking for Joe Fischer with blood in his eye.

  “Old Michael J always hoped that when Susie grew up she’d marry one of his boys, unite the two ranches into one huge one. Well,” he ended grimly, “that’s over now too.”

  “You want to tell me about it, kid?”

  “No,” Dick Webb said. “I don’t want to get into that. Not for awhile.”

  His face was stony, eyes far off again, and Angel got to his feet, stretching his arms until they creaked.

  “God, I’m as stiff as a gun barrel,” he said. His outstretched fingers just brushed the ceiling of their cell. There wasn’t any more room in it than there had to be, he thought. The walls were just far enough apart to allow room for two cots with a walking space between them. A bucket stood in one corner: the complete sanitary arrangements. The walls were of unpainted adobe, solid and thick. The door was of oak and bound with thick strips of heavy steel. Short of dynamiting their way out, there was no likelihood of their escaping.

  He sat down again, his thoughts somber. Stumbling into Fischer’s Crossing he had encountered a situation which was hardly unique out West. The man who controlled the Army’s beef contracts, or the supply of beef to Reservation Indians, or both, controlled the only real money there was these days after the big depression of ‘73. Local commerce depended on him. He was the machine. And because he was, he took two bites of everything: once when it was sold, once when it was bought. You sold your stock to the machine for the price it arbitrarily decided to pay. Since without the contract, you couldn’t sell the stock yourself, you had to take their price. Now nominally, you had money to buy enough supplies to keep you in business for another year. But the only place you could buy it was in the store controlled or owned by the machine. At their prices. Of course, you could always get into a wagon and drive a couple of hundred miles to a town where the prices might just be a few cents cheaper. It would mean neglecting your work for the best part of a week, though. So who had the time, let alone the inclination? It was easier to go along with the machine, which never squeezed you quite hard enough to kill. Old Michael J. Fischer had known what he was about, Angel thought. He’d picked his location perfectly.

  “Anybody ever bucked the Fischers this hard before ?” Angel asked the boy.

  “Nope,” Webb said. “Soon after old Michael J died, Ed brought in Trev Rawley. He came up here from Texas—Fort Griffin, I heard— and settled in as town marshal.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought there was that much for him to do ?”

  “He keeps the town in line. Also makes sure that any unwelcome drifters keep drifting. He may do other—work for the Fischers. I don’t know. All I know is he’s sudden death.” “Figured that,” Angel said softly. “Oh, one or two of the folks in town don’t back off from him, or the Fischers,” Dick Webb said. “But it’s token defiance. Old Billy Luskam, who runs the Silver King. Doc Day. Bry Leavey that runs the store. Now and again they’re inclined to speak up and be damned to the Fischers. But they’re pretty powerless.”

  “Which make
s you the exception again,” Angel pointed out.

  “Well, I had damned good reason to be the exception,” growled Dick Webb. “Hell, Angel, I reckon if anyone’s entitled to know about it, you are. You wanted to know why I came in after Joe Fischer. All right, I’ll tell you. I was out on the range all night, slept at one of the line camps. My sister was supposed to ride out around midday, bring me some food. She didn’t turn up. Around two, I forked my pony and got on back to the ranch in case there was something wrong. I got back about four o’clock. Shouted for Susie but there was no answer. You know how you get that prickle on the back of your neck that tells you something is wrong? Really bad wrong?”

  Angel nodded. He knew the feeling, all right. He’d been fourteen when he first experienced it, hiding in a tree while the Union soldiers who had killed his father went into the house after his screaming mother. Just as he’d experienced the sudden absence of any sense of reality or fear as he had gone into the house and killed the soldier on the top of the stairs who was grinning as he fastened his pants, then gone into the bedroom and killed the other one who was holding his mother down.

  “There was only the four of us out there,” he heard the boy continue. “Susie an’ me, an old Mexican woman who cooks for us, and her son Pedro to look after the horses, mend fences. Just a kid, fifteen, but he does a man’s work. Anyway, I rode up, there was no sign of anyone. Pedro usually comes out front to get the horses. Nobody around. I ran into the house. You—you should have seen ...”

  His voice broke for a moment and he swallowed noisily, looking up at the ceiling and stretching his face to keep the angry tears out of his eyes.

  “The old woman was in the living room with Pedro dead in her arms. She’d carried him inside. She was sitting there alone, rocking the dead kid in her arms, tier eyes were as empty as the pits of hell. She didn’t even see me. I ran around, kicking the doors open. Then I found Susie. She was—oh, God damn that sonofabitch!”

  He pounded an ineffective fist into the mattress of the cot. Angel got up slowly, touching Webb’s arm lightly, just a small hint of sympathy for he knew that too much would open up floodgates Dick Webb was trying desperately to keep closed. He went towards the door, examining it minutely for long minutes, as if it were some rare, newly discovered manuscript in an exotic, long-forgotten language, and stayed there until the kid had a chance to get hold of himself again.

  “He beat her, Mister Angel,” the boy said softly. “He beat her like a cut nose squaw and then he ripped the clothes off her and took her on the floor like an animal. He killed a fifteen-year old kid who came running to help her. Susie told me. She was in poor shape, but she told me what had happened. She tried to fight him off, screamed, kicked, scratched. But he hit her. He, hit her with his fists, man! Pedro came running through the doorway with his old gun in his hand. An old Dragoon Colt that would’ve knocked him down if he’d tried to fire it. Fischer shot him down like, a coyote.”

  He trembled as he spoke, the anger burning up in him again as he relived his experience.

  “I don’t even remember getting Susie and Deluvina into the wagon, but I must have done it. I was just so blind mad.”

  “Where’d you send them?” Angel asked.

  “Over to our nearest neighbors, Gus Par-rack’s place down to the south of the Rio Abajo. There wasn’t anything I could do for either of them. Except what I did. I got on my horse and I came after Joe Fischer. I couldn’t think of anything except wanting to kill him and I wanted that so badly I could taste it.”

  “Which is where I came in,” Angel said. “Your sister going to be all right?”

  “I don’t know. I guess so, but I don’t know. Dorothy Parrack’s a good woman. And Deluvina. They’ll look after her.”

  “Maybe we can get someone to send the doctor out there,” Angel said. “When and if our friend the marshal ever shows up. Wonder what he’s got in store for us ?”

  “Nothing good, you can bet on that,” Dick Webb said. “But he’ll have to check with Big Ed first. It’s Big Ed’s town. He’ll decide what happens.”

  Angel nodded, but said nothing. He’d not really been asking a question, just making soothing noises. He knew damned well that it was Ed Fischer’s town, and he wasn’t at all sanguine about his or the boy’s prospects in the immediate future. Whatever, it wouldn’t be good news. So he prowled the cramped confines of their prison, .tapping the walls, testing the door by putting his weight against it, checking the barred window. Nothing moved, nothing sagged, nothing crumbled. The place was built like a blockhouse, and even though Frank Angel had one or two weapons hidden about his person that only the most thorough of searches would have revealed, they were not designed to make holes in solid oak doors or three-foot-thick adobe walls. They might give him a fighting chance in other ways, but here they were worse than useless. There wasn’t even a Judas window on the door.

  “I could’ve told you not to bother,” Dick Webb said, as Angel sat down on his cot. “Those walls were built to stand up to anything. Even the window’s too small for a man to crawl through, supposin’ he could pry all the bars loose.”

  “Just making sure,” Angel said.

  “Uhuh,” Webb replied. “The only place built stronger than the jail is the Flyin’ Fish ranch-house itself.” He tapped the unpainted wall with a knuckle.

  “Remember what I told you about old Camp Elliott? This is some of it.”

  Angel shrugged, but before he could make any verbal reply, they heard the sound of heavy footsteps outside their cell door, and the jangling of keys. The lock rattled, and then the door swung outwards to reveal Trev Rawley standing in the hallway, arms akimbo, a faint smile touching his saturnine face. Behind him stood two burly men, both armed with riot guns. Angel’s eyes automatically checked the weapons off: twin-barrel Greeners, sawn off at eight inches, butts shortened to pistol grips and taped for comfort and steady hold. Each barrel would be holding a cartridge with nine heavy buckshot slugs—blue whistlers, as they were called—which could quite literally cut a man’s body in half at this kind of range. Rawley saw his glance and smiled like a shark.

  “You’re right,” he said. “So no tricks. Let’s go.”

  “Go where?” Angel asked.

  “You’ll see, my impetuous friend,” Rawley told him. “And this time, don’t do anything as silly as you tried in the Silver King. My two boys here are the twitchy-fingered sort. They pull them triggers, it’s liable to make your eyes water some.”

  “You got your orders from Big Ed, then, Trev,” Dick Webb commented flatly. If the menacing barrels of the riot guns fazed him, he gave no sign of it, his chin thrust out angrily towards the marshal. Rawley didn’t bite at Webb’s bait, though.

  “You might say,” was his only, reply.

  “What you got in mind, Rawley ?” Angel asked.

  “Get on out here and you’ll be on your way to finding out,” Rawley said, jerking his head to emphasize the words. “Head on over to the saloon.” The two men looked at each other and shrugged. Angel led the way out into the corridor, and Rawley preceded them into the outer office, the two deputies bringing up the rear.

  “Should be an interestin’ trial,” Rawley commented, throwing away the comment. Dick Webb stopped in his tracks, mouth open, ignoring the prodding barrel that the deputy stuck into his kidneys.

  “Trial?” he shouted. “What the hell trial you talking about, Rawley?”

  “Oh,” Rawley said, turning slowly, a thin smile forming around his mouth. “Couple of smart old boys like you oughta be able to figure that one out.”

  “Fischer, you mean?” Angel said. “You’re trying Joe Fischer?”

  Rawley put a look of studied surprise on his face.

  “Joe?” he said. “What would we want to try Joe for?”

  “Killing Pedro Martinez out at my place, that’s what!” Dick Webb snapped. “An’—”

  “Hold on there!” Rawley said sharply, raising a hand in the stop signal. “You off your h
ead or something, Webb?”

  “Goddammit, you know I’m not, Rawley!” Dick Webb said.

  Rawley shook his head.

  “Then quit actin’ as if you are, son,” he told the youngster. “Joe Fischer hasn’t even been out of town for three days. And there’s half a dozen men willing to swear to it.”

  The sardonic smile returned as he saw Dick Webb’s anger turn to speechless disgust.

  “So the trial’s for us?” Angel asked softly.

  “Right you are,” Rawley said.

  “I’ve seen some cheap imitations of lawmen in my day, Rawley,” Angel said, a cutting edge of contempt in his voice that brought high spots of color to the lawman’s cheekbones, “but you’re something else.”

  For a moment Rawley fought with the urge to retaliate, hit back physically. His hand clawed over the six-gun butt at his hip, but then he took a deep breath and relaxed, his hand unclenching.

  “Sticks and stones, Angel,” he said, making himself grin. “On your way!”

  Chapter Four

  There were plenty of people on the street now.

  During the night and morning of their incarceration, the word had spread around town like wildfire that Dickie Webb and the stranger had tried to take on the Fischer boys and been smacked into the slammer. Everyone wanted to take a look at them, and everyone wanted to see the trial they’d heard was going to take place. Might be that the two prisoners were foolhardy brave, might be it was about time somebody went up against the Fischers, might be that most decent men would be glad to see them toppled: but what could anyone do on his own? So they clustered outside the jail in the flat sunshine, up and down the boardwalks on both sides of the street, a strange silence holding them, making the bright morning seem somehow ominous.

  None of the men watching met the contemptuous eyes of young Dick Webb, Angel noted. Himself they favored with the curious stare of people confronted by an unknown species of animal.

  He ignored them, getting his first proper look at the town. When he’d first ridden ,in to Fisher’s Crossing it had just been another wide spot in the trail, another town like all the other towns along the way. You tended to get so you didn’t see them. They all had the same shanty false fronts, the same curlicued lettering and ornate woodwork concealing the shacks behind them. And Fischer’s Crossing was no lovelier than it had to be.