Send Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #2)

by Frederick H. Christian

  ‘Been a few of ‘em,’ Birch said. ‘The Man got on to ‘em because of his contacts back in Washin’ton. That Jasper Maclntyre that was sniffin’ round the Land Office in Tucson. Freeman—’

  ‘Hell, he was just some surveyor or somethin’,’ Reynolds said.

  ‘Federal man, all the same,’ Birch insisted. ‘And what about Stevens in San Pat?’

  ‘Boys found nothin’ on him,’ Reynolds pointed out.

  ‘He was as kin’ lots of questions about sales of beef to the Reservation, just the same. You know what I say, Jace.’

  T know: once is accident, twice is coincidence, three times you better do something.’

  ‘Damned right,’ growled Birch, relighting the butt of his cigar.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Now this Angel,’ Birch continued. ‘I don’t like it.’

  ‘Explain,’ Reynolds said patiently. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘It ties our hands a mite. The Man sent word; we got to play it different, that’s all.’

  ‘Different? How? We can’t pull out of this now,’ Reynolds said, a trace of anger entering his tone.

  ‘Agreed,’ Birch nodded. ‘But the old man says he wants us to be in the clear when we make our move.’

  ‘That what he said?’ Reynolds remarked. ‘He’s gettin’ soft in his old age, ain’t he?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Birch admitted. ‘But this has gotta go as fine as snake hair, Jace. Johnny Boot and Willy Mill got to ease off. Or it’ll get out of hand.’

  ‘Mmmm,’ Reynolds said. ‘Might be wise. We need opposition now like a hole in the head. The whole thing could blow up in our faces if we play it wrong.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ Birch said. ‘Told the old man as much, an’ he agreed. So he’s sendin’ his own man in.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Said he was goin’ to bring things to a head his own way, an’ we was to make sure we had good alibis when his man went to work.’

  ‘He tell you what he had in mind?’

  Birch told him and Reynolds’ eyebrows rose.

  ‘God,’ he said, sucking on the stem of the briar pipe, ‘he’s goin’ for broke. Who’s the gun?’

  ‘Larkin,’ Birch said, leaning back to enjoy the effect his pronouncement had.

  The effect was electric: Reynolds sat up in his chair, leaning forward.

  ‘Larkin!’ he ejaculated. ‘But he’s—’

  ‘I know, I know,’ Birch waved his words down. ‘A paid killer. Hired gun. Which is what we need right now. The old man is right. No more mysterious disappearances to bring in the law. No more o’ that business of ever’body reckonin’ it was Johnny or Willy but sittin’ tight on account o’ they couldn’t do nothin’ about provin’ it. We’ll be in the clear, all of us. Larkin will ride in and take care of things, and then be on his way. He’s what the old man called his catalyst.’

  ‘Catalyst is right,’ breathed Reynolds. ‘How come he’s in such a hurry?’

  ‘Somethin’ to do with politics,’ Birch explained. ‘The old man reckons if we ain’t got ever’thin’ tied up neat by the end of summer, the word will be out an’ we’ll be left at the startin’ post.’

  ‘Perish the thought,’ said Reynolds. Birch balked at his partner’s ironic comment. Always some smartass remark, always that pretended intellectual superiority that he detested. One of these days ... he choked back the bile in his throat and forced himself to smile.

  ‘He’ll be in on the stage,’ he announced. Reynolds nodded.

  ‘We’d better throw a dinner party or somethin’. Your place or mine?’

  ‘Yours, I guess. Get Austin out there. Send somebody over to bring Sim Bott up from South Ranch - everybody knows he ain’t mixed up in things up here. Make sure Johnny brings Mill with him. We don’t want nobody wonderin’ where any of us was.’

  ‘Or the night after that?’ queried Reynolds.

  ‘As long as it takes,’ Birch told him. ‘Until Larkin has done what he’s comin’ here to do, we’re gonna act like a Sunday school picnic’

  ‘That’ll be the day,’ Reynolds told him, and uncoiled his lanky frame from the bentwood chair, heading out of the Alhambra and into the sunlit street.

  The lurching Concord careened into the plaza at about five, with the usual welter of noise and excitement, dust piling up as the ribbon shaker hauled the horses back on their haunches and yelled out his announcement. Only three passengers alighted into the street in front of the Alhambra. One was a whiskey drummer, clutching his precious sample bag and fanning his rotund face with a dust coated derby. The second was a woman who was met by a trio of angular ladies who led her across the street to the boarding house, their voices trailing behind them like starlings on the wing. Those townspeople who looked upon the arrival of the stage as the highlight of their day watched all these activities with keen interest The third passenger to alight was a man of medium height, thickset and mild in appearance, dressed in a dark business suit. Only his wide brimmed Stetson and range boots indicated his association with this country. His hair was a dark reddish color and his eyes were the palest of pale blues, almost colorless. He wore a white shirt and carried a small carpetbag. Those watching had noticed he tipped his hat to the ladies, and as he crossed the street towards the boarding house they summed him up.

  ‘Cattleman in town to buy stock?’

  ‘Don’t hardly figger. Them ain’t cowman’s hands.’

  One of the watchers, sharper-eyed than his fellows, had noted the thin, pale hands with their neatly trimmed fingernails. They were not the hands of a man who spends his life among cattle or for that matter the hands of a man used to hard physical labor.

  ‘A drummer, mebbe?’ opined another.

  ‘No sample bag,’ was the simple means of destroying that theory.

  ‘Some business deal with Reynolds and Birch?’ guessed another.

  ‘Could be, could be.’ The man had gone into the boarding house and their interest evaporated. Only one man at the plaza recognized the newcomer. Jacey Reynolds had been idly leaning against the south wall of the Alhambra, away from the knot of spectators watching the arrival of the stagecoach, his hat tipped forward low over his eyes. After a moment he hastened into the Alhambra.

  ‘He’s here,’ he announced sibilantly.

  ‘Good,’ Birch said. ‘Where’d he go?’

  ‘Over to the hotel,’ Reynolds said.

  Birch nodded. ‘Just fine,’ he said. ‘Set that dinner up.’

  Chapter Ten

  Nobody saw Larkin leave town. He had been told before he left Tucson that a horse would be left saddled behind the livery stable, and he swung into the saddle and moved the animal slowly away from Daranga, heading into the foothills of the mountains north of town. He had changed his clothes, and was now dressed in a dark brown shirt and pants, his scuffed boots showing no reflection of the early morning sun. The butt of the six-gun nestled in a cutaway holster at his side was matt black, and the Henry rifle in the saddle scabbard had been treated so that the nickel plating had no shine either. When Larkin moved against the landscape, the unpretentious brown of his clothes blended with the dun-dusty configurations of the land.

  He headed up across the Twin Peaks and down the northern side of the hills, his destination firmly fixed in his mind. He had no feelings about the job ahead of him. The man who hired him had been succinct and specific. He had described the man Larkin was to kill with care and detail, and explained the man’s work habits and patterns thoroughly. Together he and his employer had gone over the details of the trails, the topography, the pitfalls. He had never been in the Rio Blanco country but he knew it like a book. Larkin was a professional: he never got into anything without careful preparation. This one looked easy. Most of them did. Most of them were. It was when a man started thinking he didn’t have to take pains that the trouble started. Larkin wasn’t looking for any trouble. A nice clean job, the Man had said. One thousand now, another thousand when you come back and tell me it’s done.
Larkin grinned. A man could have a hell of a time in Nogales with a couple of thousand American dollars.

  He found a stand of timber which overlooked the trail he wanted, and he staked the horse some way back where it could not be seen from either below or above. He watched the house below. It was a fine, well-built ranch. It had that solid, settled appearance of a place built to last by a man who intended to stay, and he knew from his briefing that George Perry was that kind of man, and could have built no other kind of house. He stretched out on the ground and watched the trail through a small pair of binoculars he had once won in a gambling joint from a 6th Cavalry officer. They were good field glasses. He could see everything he wanted to see. He watched Walt Clare ride in from the northeast, and from time to time during the evening, as the lights came on in the windows, he could hear laughter in the house below. He saw Clare and Perry and another man he did not know come out onto the porch. He waited, breathing easily like a cat waiting for prey. He saw Clare with the young woman whom he knew must be Kate Perry walk away from the house, and after a while he heard Clare making his goodbyes.

  Larkin moved easily now, across the slope, quartering to the place he had picked out earlier in the day, his Henry rifle in his hand. He slid behind the fallen tree, easing the rifle up to his shoulder, and he waited in the darkness and heard the sound of Clare’s horse on the slope below. Even in the darkness, the young man loomed huge. He was a big man. That much easier, thought Larkin. The looming bulk came into the sights and he followed it along the trail for a moment before he squeezed the trigger. He waited a moment, blinded by the gun flash, and cursed as a shot exploded down below. He saw the flame. Reflex action, his mind told him, I hit him right in the center and he went down. Larkin knew his shot had been a killing shot but he took absolutely no chances. He was already twenty feet away from the place where he had lain in ambush and he could see Clare on the trail, the skittish horse spooked by the gunfire but ground hitched by the trailing reins, too well trained to break and run. Clare was on his knees, and Larkin could hear the man’s agonized coughing attempts to get breath into his shattered chest. There was not an ounce of pity in Larkin, no trace of feeling. He raised the rifle and took up the classic stance for firing. The bulky blob of Clare’s body floated into the sights and Larkin breathed in deeply, then exhaled and squeezed the trigger. Again he moved, soft-footed as an Apache, twenty or thirty feet to the left, downhill. He was about ten feet from the fallen man. There was no sound, no movement. He cat footed across the intervening space and turned Clare over with the toe of his boot.

  Larkin nodded. The man was stone dead. He ran lightly up the slope, moving into the timberline and back to where he had left his horse. He led the animal up to where the rim rock began and then mounted, letting the horse pick its way among the rocks, not urging it to speed until he had covered perhaps half a mile. He thought he heard the sound of horses back on the trail below, but by that time it did not matter: the man was not born who could trail him across those rocks. Larkin touched his spurs to the horse and moved off into the night. There was no satisfaction on his face, no smile. His eyes were empty as the night he rode through.

  Chapter Eleven

  Sheriff Nick Austin wasn’t a good man or a bad one. He never thought of himself in those terms anyway. He was a man who held a political office which had been arranged by men more attuned to the nuances of necessity in politics than himself. He had a large family; he was not an athletic man, and he was long past the age when he could earn a living on a ranch for his beefy wife and their brood. When Al Birch had proposed that he run for sheriff, Nick Austin had been surprised and finally flattered into accepting. It was an easy job. Hard cases found Daranga a discouraging place; the presence of Johnny Boot and Willy Mill was enough to convince most of them that to move on was the better part of valor. So Nick Austin became sheriff and his office was, if not revered by the townspeople, at least tolerated. He didn’t bother anybody overmuch and by and large that was how folks in Daranga liked their sheriffs. In turn, Austin repaid his benefactors by never asking awkward questions. He did what they told him to do and never did anything they told him not to do. In his years of office, Austin had grown steadily more corpulent and more lethargic; right now he was cursing steadily beneath his breath the fact that Birch had sent word to him that he had to attend Walt Clare’s funeral. The lambent gaze of the high chaparral ranchers across the open grave burned into his tallow heart, and Austin shivered at what they might be thinking.

  They buried Big Walt beneath the cottonwood he had planted himself to make shade on the ranch house. It was an overcast day, and a cold wind whipped away the muttered words George Perry was reading from an old leather-bound Bible as they lowered the rough pine coffin into the ground. When they were done they went into the house. One of Clare’s riders took Kate Perry home; she had stood dry-eyed through the sad rite, her eyes dark with pain, welted shadows beneath them making her look haunted. No one had known what to say to her.

  The men formed a rough half circle around Nick Austin and he looked from face to face, a sheen of sweat on his brow.

  ‘Well, Nick,’ George Perry grated. ‘What you aimin’ to do about this?’

  ‘I ... uh ... I don’t .. . ah, you said yourself there was no tracks, George,’ the sheriff stuttered. ‘What can I do? I could take a posse out an’ scour around for days, an’ mebbe then find nothin’.’

  ‘Shit, man,’ said John Oliver, Clare’s foreman. ‘You know well as we do who done this.’

  ‘No, I don’t know no such thing, John,’ Austin said stoutly. ‘I don’t know no such thing.’

  ‘Let me spell it out for you then,’ Oliver growled. ‘It was prob’ly Johnny Boot, or mebbe Willy Mill, or mebbe both o’ them. Al Birch sent them up here night afore last and they laid for Walt an’ shot him down like a dawg. Then they skedaddled back to Daranga. That’s what happened, Sheriff. Now what you goin’ to do about it?’

  Austin drew himself up, his belly protruding above his belt, his face stiff with comical dignity.

  ‘Now see here, John, I know you’re lathered up about Walt’s death, an’ rightly so, but I happen to know that this time you got your reins crossed. It couldn’t have been any o’ Birch’s men.’

  George Perry pushed forward and faced the sheriff, arms akimbo.

  ‘You fat impersonation,’ he snapped. ‘You askin’ us to swaller that kind o’ crap?’ The sheriff retreated from the pure venom in Perry’s gaze and the growls of anger which came from the assembled men. Angel got to his feet. He had been sitting to one side of the room, favoring his side, the dull throb of pain against the tightly wadded bandages a constant reminder that he was still some way from fully recovered.

  ‘Hold it a moment, men,’ he said, holding up a hand. He turned to face Austin.

  ‘You sayin’ you can show none of Birch’s men could’ve done this?’

  ‘I am,’ said Austin flatly. ‘An’ who the hell might you be?’

  ‘I might be Abraham Lincoln, but I ain’t,’ snapped Angel. ‘Speak your piece.’

  The sheriff drew himself up as if to bluster and then his eyes met the cold gray gaze of the stranger, and a chill touched the sheriff’s spine. He had seen eyes like that before, and the man who had been their owner had been one of the coldest killers he had ever seen, a man in a jail in Yuma whom they’d told him had fought seven armed men with only a knife and come out of the fight on his feet with every one of the others dead. He had looked into the man’s cell and the man had turned his head and looked at Austin and the sheriff had recoiled as if from the gaze of Satan himself. He did the same thing now.

  ‘Uh . .. mm, ah, no offense, mister,’ he managed. ‘It’s just ... well, I happen to know there was a big party out at the Birch place the night Walt was shot. I was out there myself. Johnny Boot was there, and Mill. Birch, Jacey Reynolds, they were there. The colonel from the Fort an’ some of his officers. Some bigwig political fellers from over Phoenix way. A whole swo
dge of people. There was a big dinner, went on all night. Hell, I’d’ve knowed if any o’ them had been missin’ long enough to ride up here, kill Walt, an’ come back. It couldn’t ‘a’ been done.’

  ‘Nick, you better not be lyin’ to us,’ ground out Perry. ‘You better be tellin’ me the truth, you hear?’

  ‘In God’s name, George,’ Austin cried, ‘half the town was there. You c’n ask anybody. I’m tellin’ you: they couldn’t’a’ done it!’

  Perry looked stunned. He pushed through the rank of men around Austin and sat down, his expression revealing his total bewilderment.

  ‘I don’t figger it,’ he said finally, shaking his head slowly from side to side.

  ‘John?’ He looked towards Clare’s foreman as if he might be able to say something which would explain everything, but Oliver shrugged.

  ‘I’m plumb bamboozled, George,’ was his remark.

  Perry got to his feet, stamping about the room angrily.

  ‘But it’s gotta be them,’ he muttered. ‘Who else would want him dead?’

  Finally he stopped his pacing, and turned to face Austin again.

  ‘Sheriff,’ he said, ‘I’m comin’ to Daranga with you.’

  Austin’s eyes widened. ‘There ain’t no call for you to do that, George,’ he expostulated. ‘You can believe me. Why would I tell you somethin’ you could check in ten minutes if it warn’t true?’

  Perry put a hand on the fat man’s shoulder. ‘No, man,’ he said. ‘I believe you. I got to go into town anyway. We need some supplies. Might as well go now, get it done. John, will you get a couple o’ the boys saddled up an’ ride in with me?’ Oliver nodded and touched a couple of his men on the shoulder, leading them out of the room. Angel got to his feet.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ he said.

  Perry shook his head. ‘No need, boy,’ he said. His voice was old and very tired. ‘I ain’t on the warpath. I might just ask a few questions around, but I ain’t huntin’ trouble. Besides, you better give that wound a rest. You ain’t goin’ to do it no good comin’ with me. Anyways I’d be obliged if you’d ... sort of look after Katy while I’m in town.’