Hang Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #4)

by Frederick H. Christian

  Luskam shook his head.

  “Listen, Angel,” he said. “The Fischers have been sucking my blood for years. Fifty percent of every dollar I made in this place has gone to them all the years I been here. Fifty percent! They’ve taken every damned thing except my blood. Well . . .” He patted the riot gun lying on the polished bar, his mouth hardening with determination. “Let’s see how bad they want that!”

  “All right,” Angel said. Nothing more. He was glad to have Luskam with him.

  “Well,” Doc Day said, stretching his arms. “Now what, Frank?”

  “Hell,” Angel said. “That’s easy. We wait.”

  Chapter Seven

  They didn’t have long to wait.

  By the next day, the town had a curious, empty, unreal appearance sharply at odds with its normal bustle. The wide main street was deserted, the hitch rails lacking their usual half dozen or more hipshot horses standing outside the store, the saloon, the livery stable. The townspeople had taken Angel’s advice, and there had been sounds of furious hammering throughout the evening, stopped now. Everyone was locked securely in his home, his shutters closed or his windows boarded. Over the empty street hung an unnatural silence: no sounds of children playing in the dust, of wagons grinding up or down, of horses clop-ping by, no chatter of conversing housewives on the boardwalks, no clump of feet as men went about their daily business. Fischer’s Crossing looked like a ghost town, and above it hung a cloud of apprehension almost visible to the naked eye.

  Inside the houses scattered along the single street, people waited and watched. Always waiting and watching the northern edge of town, the trail down from the Arabelas. That was where the Fischers would first be seen.

  Angel had made his plans.

  They were pretty sketchy, largely based on hunch, mostly no more than contingency plans —the best he could do in the circumstances.

  Despite Dick’s most vehement protests, he had packed the youngster off with certain instructions, assuring him that his contribution might be the most valuable of all. The kid hadn’t wanted to leave what he was sure would be the main arena, but Angel had convinced him that his task was dangerous and vital, and in the end Dick had gone, riding out of town with Bry Leavey and heading south across the wooden bridge. Angel had watched them go with some, but not many misgivings. He was figuring what he might do if he were Fischer, and he didn’t want to leave the man any openings. There was a good chance that if Dick got everything right, he could do what he had to do. Angel hoped he was right.

  After the kid and the old storekeeper had gone, he made his deployments in town. It didn’t take long. Billy Luskam he stationed up on the roof of the store, with a plentiful supply of shells for his riot gun. Doc Day he placed on the roof of the jail, reached via a trapdoor in the roof of the outer office. Once on the top of the jail, Doc was surrounded by a foot-high parapet and had a commanding view of the whole street, his field of fire almost a complete circle. With Luskam on top of the store further up the street, Angel felt reasonably confident that nothing could happen in front of the jail without one of them being able to do something about it. Doc insisted on taking his old Sharps up on the roof with him.

  “I’m used to handling it,” he told Angel. “If I’ve got to hit anything, I’m a hell of a sight likelier to do it with my own gun than anything else.”

  Frank Angel sensed the doctor’s reluctance to consider deeply the likelihood that he would have to take human life. He knew that it must be against every tenet the man believed in, and yet he had to rely on Day being there when it counted, ready to use the gun without hesitating, for hesitation might mean Angel’s own death. Without anything showing on his face he touched the man on the shoulder. He’d know soon enough, and he was a fatalist to the extent that what he had no means of changing he was ready to accept.

  “What about you, Frank?” Day asked. “What do you aim to do?”

  “Me?” asked Angel, raising his eyebrows in mock surprise. “Why I’ll be right across the street on the porch of the Silver King. Just a-sittin’ an’ a-rockin’.”

  “Whaaat?”

  Angel grinned, a genuine one this time.

  “No use setting a mousetrap without putting cheese in it, Doc,” he said. “I can keep an eye on things nicely from over there. And I’m sort of relying on you not to let the mouse eat the cheese.”

  “You have any idea what they’ll do, Frank?” the doctor asked.

  “Not really,” Angel said. “I’m betting they won’t try a frontal attack right off. Fischer’s the tricky kind. He’ll want to see what he’s up against. See if there’s no way to do what he wants to do without unnecessary force.”

  “Unnecessary force,” Doc Day smiled wryly. “That’d be about four men, wouldn’t it?”

  “Aw, come on, Doc,” Angel said. “Don’t put yourself down like that. You’re as good as any three Fischer riders, aren’t you?”

  “Sure.” Day said, holding out his hand. His fingers shook visibly. “Nerves like steel. See? A real man of iron!”

  “You’ll do,” Angel said.

  “I hope to hell you’re right, Angel,” was the reply. “If you’re wrong, it’s going to get very, very lonely out there in the street.”

  “It is, anyway,” Frank Angel told him. “So keep your eyes skinned. Watch the alleyways, the corners of buildings, no matter what happens on the street. Roofs, backs of buildings.”

  “Got it, Day said.

  They shook hands gravely, as if sealing some kind of bargain, and Angel went down the ladder. By the time Day had locked the jail door and regained his perch, Angel was already in his rocking chair on the porch of the Silver King. His feet were up on the rail, and he rocked himself gently, hat tilted forward over his eyes, looking for all the world like someone with a day to waste and nothing to waste it on, a man without a care waiting for the saloon to open so he could pour down the first dust cutter of the day.

  If the town hadn’t been totally deserted; if the windows of all the houses hadn’t been barred and shuttered; if Day couldn’t have seen Billy Luskam crouched up on the roof of the store with his riot gun ready; if the wide dusty street hadn’t been completely empty except for the random scavenging chicken, Angel would have looked so ordinary that you wouldn’t have even noticed he was there.

  As it was, he stuck out like a black widow spider on a whitewashed wall.

  Mike Fischer grinned like a wolf.

  He kneed his horse into motion, cantering down the bluff and back onto the trail, moving into the fringes of town, down the main street. He hardly saw the place, the shacks, adobes, dugouts. If he noticed that the windows were boarded up, he didn’t show it. If he saw the slight movements that revealed people were watching from behind them, he didn’t show that either. He rode easily down the center of the street, the big store on his left, coming up to the Silver King with the makeshift flag of truce—a square of linen torn from one of the bed sheets up at the ranch—with a confident smile on his face. He saw Angel on the porch of the saloon. Angel sat gently rocking in the chair, his eyes wary.

  “Angel!” Mike Fischer shouted, loud enough so that people would be able to hear. “Come on out where I can see you!”

  “You can see me,” Angel said levelly. “And I can see your flag of truce. What do you want?”

  “I come into town without no gun, Angel,” Mike Fischer said. “To see if you’re any kind of a man at all.”

  “The connection escapes me, but I’m sure you’ll explain,” Angel replied.

  “Us Fischers don’t want no gun trouble, not in our own town,” Fischer shouted. “We don’t want none of our people hurt.”

  “Good enough,” Angel said. “Ride out, and there won’t be any trouble.”

  Mike Fischer threw back his head, a gigantic bellow of forced laughter exploding from him.

  “Hear him?” he shouted aloud. His voice bounced off the empty walls, echoed slightly. “You skulkin’ diaper-changers? Your guardian Angel don�
�t want no trouble!”

  He slid off the back of the pony and slapped it across the rump, sending the animal skittering away until it was halted, ground-hitched, by the trailing reins. He tossed the makeshift flag of truce aside with a sweep of his arm.

  “Now hear me!” he shouted, turning his head towards the blank windows and closed shutters. “Hear what the Fischers want! I’m goin’ to take your little Angel apart with my bare hands, but afore I do it, every one of you take notice—I got no gun. No knife. Nothin’ but bare hands. Us Fischers don’t think your Angel’s even worth wastin’ a bullet on. Now, o’course, he can shoot me down if I go after him. But that’ll be cold murder, and I don’t figger your Angel can pull that!” He whirled now, his shoulders hunching, forehead creasing into a belligerent scowl as he faced Angel, who was rising from the rocking chair and stepping down into the street.

  “All right, Angel!” he shouted, flexing his huge paws. “Fight or die, you motherfucker!”

  Francey King and the two deputies, Eddy Lamb and Bob Wight, had sifted along the dried-out bed of the Rio Arriba, moving downstream until they were beneath the bridge by the time that Mike Fischer pushed his horse into movement on the bluff at the northern edge of town. Now they moved, crouched low, through the coarse scrub growing on the open ground between the river bank and the rear of the houses on the street. The riot of thorn and twisted sagebrush was almost chest high, and tangled densely to within twenty or thirty feet of the southern side of the jail building. Their timing was almost perfect—they made their run for the rear door of the jail in exactly the same moment that Mike Fischer, a hard, excited light in his squinting eyes, lurched into movement, his paws reaching out for Frank Angel.

  Frank Angel stood, his weight neatly poised on the balls of his feet, ready for Mike Fischer’s bull-like charge. When he saw the flicker of movement in the open space to the left and rear of the jail, he made a split-second decision that cost Mike Fischer his life. Angel had been prepared, preparing, to handle Mike Fischer the way that he had been taught to handle any man who physically outmatched him. The rule the Justice Department taught was: survive. Fair play had little to do with it. He would have simply buffaloed the big man and dragged him into the jail; but that was before he saw the men moving to attack the jail which Doc Day was holding alone, and he knew he could take no chance, no chance at all, with Mike Fischer. Into his mind’s eye came the picture of the featureless gymnasium in the draughty old building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, the little man watching him, the slanting eyes wary, the carefully held hands always moving, constantly weaving. Kee Lai, the Korean, had taught him that there was a force, which was called ch’i, which he must learn to summon and control at will. It was the sum of the whole man, everything, his essence, brought instantly to one place for one moment and then used, without mercy.

  So he stood now with his hands held in a certain way, swaying lightly on the balls of his feet, perfectly balanced as Mike Fischer came at him like a Miura from the toril. The big man’s rush was blind and clumsy, brute strength without brain. Angel let Fischer get within reach and then he hit him once with his right hand. The first three fingers were folded so that the central knuckles protruded and the little finger was folded away beneath them. His hand moved no more than six inches but it stopped Mike Fischer as if he had run into a steel door. Even as he coughed blood from his shattered larynx, his huge frame paralyzed by the shocking blow which had cut off his air supply, Angel’s left hand, held almost exactly as was his right, came up and into a half circle. It drive with terrible accuracy into the soft spot directly to the right and just below the ribcage, rupturing Mike Fischer’s diaphragm as if it had been wet tissue paper. The man lurched over, his body folding. Angel could have let him fall, to writhe in agony on the dusty street until he died. No doctor could have done anything to save Mike Fischer: practically speaking, dead from the moment Angel had made his decision three seconds earlier. Now as the big man’s head came down, Angel hit Mike Fischer for the third time.

  There are seven very delicate vertebrae at the base of the skull. The weakest point in this chain is the place where the seventh vertebrae meets and joins the eighth, which in turn is part of the rigid bone structure of the shoulders. All of Angel’s strength, all of his weight, and all of the long and careful training he had been given were behind the awful chopping blow which he delivered with the hardened edge of his right hand precisely to that place. It broke Mike Fischer’s spine with a sound almost exactly like the one that is made when a dead branch is snapped off a tree and the big man was dead when he hit the ground, face down.

  Even as Mike Fischer’s body drove into the ground, fluffing up a small cloud of dust, Frank Angel was in motion, knowing without having to glance at the man’s body that Fischer was dead—that nothing human could have survived the things he had done.

  Francey King and his two men were still no more than halfway across the clearing between the edge of the brush and the rear of the jail when Angel’s gun came up, his first shot tearing a wicked furrow through the upper thigh of the thickset deputy, Lamb, whacking the man off his feet in a welter of arms and legs with a mewling screech of agony, bright blood staining the ground.

  King whirled, astonished, eyes widening at the sight of Angel moving forward in a fast running crouch, the curiously flattened body of Mike Fischer inert in the dusty street behind him. The gunman was very good, and he reacted fast to the realization that it had taken Angel less than five seconds to dispose of the big man. Catlike, he whirled for the shelter of the jail wall as he saw Angel go down in the middle of the street on one knee, the six-gun resting across his own left forearm, sighting deliberately. King grinned with satanic triumph, knowing as he moved that he would be faster than Angel, more accurate. His two .38s would outgun Angel, who was isolated and without cover. He screeched at Bob Wight to come around over to the right to distract Angel. Wight got up and started to run and Francey King flipped up his .38s, pink eyes red with wild rage. He saw Angel’s face clear and clean and then there was an awful black snap as if the world had come off its hinges and he could taste dirt in his mouth and then nothing.

  Angel’s carefully aimed shot lifted Bob Wight up off the ground and tossed the man backward like a discarded coat, the rising bullet arcing through his body and tearing his heart to pieces. In exactly the same moment Doc Day’s Sharps .50 belched fire, its terrible whanging slam from the roof of the jail flattening all the other sounds, the heavy slug smashing down into the back of Francey King’s neck at an acute angle and the blowing away the front of the gunman’s body, killing him almost instantly. Francey King never knew who had shot him down.

  Now Eddy Lamb came scrambling out from behind the jail, where he had rolled into a shallow runoff. His clothes were covered in dust and blood, and his eyes were wide with panic and pain. He emptied the gun in his hand wildly, as if the bullets might erect some shield between him and the awful scything death which had claimed his comrades in what seemed like only the space of several heartbeats. He turned away around the rear of the jail, and then staggered out into the street, lurching towards the store, his eyes bulging and his only conscious thought to try to get somewhere where he could not be killed. But his wounded leg wouldn’t carry him and he sank to the ground, crying like a child, as Billy Luskam came scrambling out of the doorway of the store and stood over him with his riot gun trained on the cringing figure.

  Angel went over there and kicked the six-gun out of Lamb’s nerveless fingers, holstering his own gun at the same time. Smoke and dust drifted in a sliding veil across a patch of sunlight and then became invisible in the darker shadows next to it.

  It was all over.

  The man on the ground groaned and tried to sit up, waves of pain washing the color from his face. He turned pleading eyes toward Frank Angel, but whatever he saw on Angel’s face was enough to make him shield his own as if he feared being struck.

  “Get up, if you can!” Angel told him, harshly.r />
  “Oh, God, please, don’t, please, God, Angel, don’t, please . . .” Lamb babbled. Luskam and Angel ignored him, watching as Doc Day poked his head outside the jail door, looked right and left up and down the street, and then came out. He ran across to where the others stood.

  “Great God in Heaven, Angel,” he said. “Did you... did we?”

  He gestured towards the sprawled figures in the street.

  “It’s all over,” Angel said. “For the moment, anyway.”

  “Sweet angels of mercy,” Day said. “What did you hit Fischer with ?”

  “No matter,” was the harsh reply. “He’s just as dead.”

  Day looked up, sharply, seeing something in the other’s eyes that he had not expected, a sort of regret.

  “What about this one, Frank?” Billy Luskam wanted to know. “We throw him in with Joe?”

  Eddy Lamb’s eyes shuttled anxiously from Angel’s face to Day’s, from Day’s to Billy Luskam’s, and then back to Angel’s. When the latter turned to look down at him, Lamb cringed, tense with fear.

  “This is twice you’ve crossed my path,” Angel said to him softly. “Once as Rawley’s deputy, once now.”

  “Listen, Mister Angel . . .” Lamb began haltingly.

  “Listen nothing!” Angel snapped. “You’re lucky they’re not taking you out of here in a bag of sand. Cross my tracks a third time and they will. Hear me?”

  “I hear you,” Eddy Lamb said. “I hear you.”

  “Right,” Angel said. “Now you get on your horse and go tell Ed Fischer what happened down here. Tell him his brother and his freak killer are dead, and then keep riding. If I ever see your face again, I’ll shoot it off. Savvy?”

  “You bet,” Lamb said, anxiously getting up, helped by Day and the saloonkeeper. “You bet, Angel. Don’t you worry. I’ll git. You’ll never see me again, don’t you worry.”