Frame Angel! (A Frank Angel Western) #7

by Frederick H. Christian

  ‘Scatter!’ Hainin yelled. ‘Get the hell out of here!’

  There was little or no cover right or left. On the left the ground rose steeply, and greasewood and sage tangled with briars, bramble, and scree underfoot – difficult ground for any horse to cover fast. Hainin rocketed off to the right, digging in his spurs until blood spurted from the horse’s side and the animal was galloping flat out with head stretched low, ears back, and eyes rolling wildly. He steered the horse straight for the sloping brow that sharpened into a sliding shale runoff and went down steeply to the canyon floor below, where the timber was dark and thicker.

  Briggs took the left-hand side but quartered back across to a spot where a shale runoff gave his laboring horse a halfway decent chance of making it to the crest before any pursuer could duplicate his running rush at the slope. Lashing his horse like a man demented, the reins raising welts on the chestnut’s withers, Briggs galloped up the bare, rocky hillside while Jim Lawrence, without hesitation, reined his own horse around and tore downhill. The horse went down the uncertain ground too fast to be able to see where he was putting his feet, and Lawrence had all he could do to stay on the back of the kicking, flailing animal. They went down into the Bonito Canyon like a bat out of hell, much too erratic a target for anyone above to hit and much too recklessly for anyone to follow the same path. Even as he fought the animal upright, sliding it on its haunches down a broken cut bank, Lawrence was figuring his route. He’d have to get across to South Fork and turn north toward Capitan, then cut through Capitan Pass on to the old military road that went down toward Chisum’s and the open, sloping plains on the eastern edge of the endless mountains. Taking that route, a good rider could make enough ground to lose any pursuer.

  Behind him Lawrence thought he heard shots. Maybe a Winchester; he couldn’t be sure because of the wind in his ears. He wondered whether Hainin and Briggs had gotten away.

  Not that it made any difference. They’d been told the job was worth sixty thousand. If three of them turned up to collect, that was twenty each. If only two, thirty each. The slope leveled out, and he patted the horse’s neck, moving him at a canter toward the gap in the trees that led to the South Fork crossing.

  Briggs wasn’t anything like as lucky. His horse panicked, shying and bucking, unable to master the sliding shale that moved every time it got its hoofs set. Briggs panicked even more than his steed, and he screamed at it, larruping the unfortunate beast with the long reins, which only increased its fright. The horse buck-jumped one more time and then stopped with its head down, lungs bellowing. In that moment Tony Coyle shot the beast out from between Briggs’s legs. Briggs’s horse went down in a floundering welter of legs and thrashing head, and Briggs was thrown, bundled and awkward, against a sharp-edged rock that caught him below the center of the spine, numbing his legs as he fell. He rolled down the shale slope, face and hands ripped by the chattering slate he dislodged, tumbling into a heavy thicket of greasewood that stopped him sharp, breaking his fall. Slightly bruised and shaken, Briggs was still fast and good, and he was halfway to his knees drawing his six-gun out of his holster when he saw the bony, high cheekboned face of Sheriff Curtis and then the Cavalry model Colt .45 leveled unwaveringly at his belly.

  ‘Don’t you go and do anythin’ fatal, now,’ Curtis advised him.

  Chapter Five

  ‘Well,’ the attorney general said, ‘we’ve got one of them.’

  ‘But that’s all we’ve got,’ Wells added.

  They were sitting in the attorney general’s office on the first floor of the Justice Department headquarters; Wells in the same leather chair he usually occupied, the attorney general leaning forward across his desk. The second armchair was occupied by a third man, younger than both the others, broad-shouldered and rangy, the kind of man you knew would be very tall when he stood, no matter how he might scrunch down into an armchair. His dark gray suit was well-tailored, but he seemed constrained by it, as though he might prefer something much more practical and comfortable. His face was tanned, the cheekbones not quite high enough to hint at mixed blood but giving his face a flat, planed look, which together with level gray eyes, sun-bleached hair, and the tapering hands and fingers of an artist, made him look like some kind of an executive for a company whose business was mostly out of doors. And in a manner of speaking, that was what he was. His name was Frank Angel, and he was a special investigator: Angus Wells’ discovery and his top trouble-shooter.

  Wells knew what others did not know about Frank Angel. He knew about the bullet scars in both of Angel’s legs and the longer one in his belly, and he knew how they had gotten there. He knew that if you checked Angel’s hands more carefully, you would find the outer edges calloused, for the man was well trained in the martial arts of the Orient. He knew that if you put any kind of gun into Angel’s hands, Angel could kill with it; and he knew the other things you could not see about Angel – the concealed throwing knives he could use so unerringly, the razor-edged buckle clipped behind the ornate one he usually wore, the peg-ended wire garrote looped inside the wide leather belt. He knew all about Frank Angel because he had taught Angel a great deal of it and had been there to see that Angel had been taught all the rest. He also knew that he owed Angel his life, but neither of them had ever spoken of that.

  ‘Goddamn it, they can’t have just vanished off the face of the earth!’ the attorney general said. ‘Two men with a quarter of a million dollars don’t just disappear!’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Wells mused. ‘I’d have said that with that kind of money, anyone could disappear. Buy a new name, a new country even.’

  ‘In ten days? Hardly!’ snorted the attorney general.

  ‘Where’s Briggs now?’

  It was the first time Frank Angel had spoken since he’d come into the room. He’d listened to the theories. Wells had several. The old man had a few of his own. The robbers were lying low, waiting until pursuit died down before they spent their loot. Or they weren’t and were papering one of the big cities with federal money, and nobody had even noticed. Or they had split up and were awaiting word from Briggs. Or they weren’t. He shrugged mentally. Made no difference. Ten days had passed since they took Dick Briggs, and nothing else had turned up.

  He’d read the reports. Engineer Pat Seele: Southern Pacific Railroad employee for eighteen years, married, four kids, living in a small frame house on the outskirts of Trinidad, Colorado. Exemplary record, unlikeliest of unlikely candidates to have been implicated in the robbery, unless you counted the Negro stoker with the magnificent name – Moses Glorification Washington. All they’d been able to say about the man who’d held them at gunpoint was that he was about five feet nine, had sallow skin and green eyes. At least, they thought they were green. The other two they’d seen only from a distance. One thickset and stocky, the other tall with long dark hair – not much more help than the descriptions given by the two Pinkerton men.

  Sheriff George Curtis had also put in a report on the men he’d seen. The one riding a chestnut had been tall with long dark hair (he’d lost a hat in his flight, but the hat was old, sweat-stained, and indistinguishable from a thousand other hats), and the other man had been so far away that he could only make out a dark blue shirt and pants and his excellent riding. Curtis had the feeling that the trio knew the area well, and it was possible that they’d been involved in the Lincoln troubles a year or two before. Which, Angel reflected, cut the number of possibilities down to seven or eight hundred.

  The only positive lead was Briggs.

  ‘He’s in the territorial penitentiary at Folsom,’ Wells replied. ‘Why?’

  ‘He’s no use to us there,’ Angel said.

  ‘Take your point, Frank,’ Wells said.

  ‘But we can’t risk losing him if we turn him loose. Even the best shagger in the business would run a fair chance of either being spotted and taken or dodged without too much trouble. And we don’t know if his sidekicks aren’t watching out for just such a dodge.’ />
  ‘Hardly likely,’ Angel suggested.

  ‘Too chancy,’ was the firm reply.

  Angel just shrugged.

  The attorney general reached for the box on the right-hand side of his desk and took out one of his evil-smelling cigars. He raised an eyebrow at the two men, who politely but firmly shook their heads in refusal. With a shrug that almost said that they were out of their heads, the attorney general lit his cigar with a wooden match, inhaling with deep pleasure. Wells looked at Frank Angel, and although their faces showed nothing, each knew what the other was thinking. They’d both, at one time or another, accepted the old man’s offer – but only once. After choking politely for what seemed like interminable hours, both had vowed never to touch the cigars again under any circumstance. They privately agreed that the attorney general probably had the cigars manufactured in a South American banana republic by very fat, very sweaty peons who created the unique flavor and bouquet by using a mixture of horse manure and wet newspaper to roll the stogies and stored them in the outhouse of the town brothel to mature.

  ‘Well Angus, Frank,’ the attorney general said, puffing happily on the glowing cigar, his head wreathed in pungent smoke. ‘Those Treasury boys want some answers, and they want them fast. We’re in trouble if we don’t come up with them.’

  ‘There is a way,’ Angel said.

  Both men turned to look at him, and Angel grinned. When the old man said ‘we’ were in trouble, what he meant was ‘you’ were – and up to your eyebrows in it. If there was trouble, he wasn’t in it. No way.

  ‘Let’s hear it,’ the attorney general said. He sat down in his big leather chair, spreading his hands on the polished desk and looking expectantly at Frank Angel. Wells, too, eased himself into his chair, watching carefully, as though Angel were going to ask a conundrum he might have to answer.

  ‘Frame me,’ Angel said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Rig a robbery, something fairly heavy. Something involving a lot of money – gold, perhaps. Something that might impress a man who can lay his hands on a one-third share of a quarter of a million dollars.’

  ‘Yes,’ Wells said. ‘I’m with you. You get pulled in for this job, whatever it is. Thrown into the pen. But it won’t get you anywhere.’

  ‘Why not?’ Angel asked.

  ‘Briggs won’t cough,’ Wells told him. ‘He’s like a rock. I’ve had three men in there working on him. Tried every trick in the book. Told him we’d taken the other two, he might as well spill. He laughed in their faces. Told him the money had been recovered, his pals had run for it leaving him holding the baby. Not a peep. Either he really doesn’t know anything, or he knows he’s fireproof.’

  ‘Which do you think it is?’ Angel asked.

  ‘Fireproof,’ Wells answered.

  ‘There’s something else, though,’ Angel put in thoughtfully. ‘Something we could try.’

  Wells leaned back in his chair, eyes narrowing slightly. He took a deep breath as the attorney general nodded for Angel to continue.

  ‘Put me in with Briggs. Let me see if I can win his confidence. Three days at the most. If I do, I’ll pass a signal. Then you fix it, Angus – fix it so we can escape, crash out.’

  ‘Are you out of your head?’ Wells said harshly. ‘You think the territorial penitentiary will stand for having its reputation ruined?’

  Angel looked at the attorney general, who was frowning.

  ‘The territorial penitentiary will do what it is damned well told to do, Angus,’ the old man said, ‘if I’m the one that tells it.’

  ‘It’s only a chance,’ Angel said, ‘but it might work.’

  ‘You might also get your throat cut,’ Wells pointed out. ‘This Briggs might get on to you.’

  ‘He might,’ Angel admitted. ‘It’s worth trying, If we got together – as sidekicks – he might lead me to the others. Or the money. Or both.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Wells said. ‘It’s a damned long shot, Frank.’

  ‘Name another we can try,’ Angel said flatly.

  There was a silence. If Wells had any other thoughts on the idea, he kept them to himself. The attorney general fell silent, too, tapping his teeth with a pen.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, finally, decisively. ‘I think we’ll try it.’

  Angel didn’t smile. He wasn’t being rewarded. It was just a good idea. It might work, and it might not. It depended on how good they could make the escape look and if he could swing Briggs’ friendship. He said as much.

  ‘Oh,’ Wells said softly. ‘I think we can make it look good, all right. That is, if you can break Briggs.’

  ‘There’ll be a way,’ Angel said. ‘There always is.’

  ‘All right,’ the attorney general said. ‘That’s it. Angus, I leave the details to you. Get on to it and make it look good. Frame Angel so he only just avoids being hung!’

  He smiled to take the sting out of his words. ‘Good luck, boy,’ he said to Angel.

  ‘Thanks,’ Angel said. He figured he was going to need it.

  Chapter Six

  There wasn’t much you could say about the cells in Folsom. There wasn’t a hell of a lot more you could say about the whole damned place. It sat like some kind of monstrous concrete fortress on a bluff just south of the Cimarron, where the road from Raton to Clayton bisected the monotony of the sage-stippled plain. The ground between the sloping walls and the river was bare and featureless, with hardly enough cover to protect the gophers from the wheeling hawks. To the south the Sierra Grande rose eight and a half thousand feet in the sky, dominating the mesas beneath it.

  The prison itself was simple but not makeshift. A ten-foot-high wire fence separated the prison from a twenty-foot-wide no-man’s-land, patrolled by armed guards. The outer walls were octagonal, and on every angled corner there was a guard post manned by two armed guards who had almost a 180-degree coverage of both the ground outside their stations and the exercise yards inside. The walls were made of huge square blocks of limestone quarried down south near Carlsbad and freighted up to this desolate corner of the territory by ox-teams. The prison buildings were gray and featureless, the windows tiny and barred. From the corners of the square central administration block, two stories high, radiated the cell blocks, each of them exactly the same except for an identifying letter: A, B, C or D. On each block were eight cells on a central corridor patrolled regularly by armed guards. In each cell were two prisoners.

  Armed guards were stationed at the perimeter fence, and they checked everything carefully before opening the padlocked gate and letting the wagon through. The heavy steel-studded, metal-plated gates grated and squalled as they swung back, allowing the wagon carrying Angel, whose arms and legs were chained together, onto the grounds. Again the business with the documents. The closing gates, clanging behind with an awful finality, cut off the sunlight, and Angel shivered in a shadowed chill of the triangular, cobbled yard. He was helped out of the wagon none too gently, and they marched him across to yet another guarded gateway, the doors made of what looked like steel-reinforced oak. After his papers were checked, they were admitted into a concrete corridor; and escorted – again by armed guards – to the left. A right angle turn – Angel assumed from the light coming in from windows high above his head that the corridor was on the outside of the square administration building – and through another door. Beyond it were stone stairs rising in a wide half-circle. A corridor at the top, and then another solid oak door with metal straps and bolts reinforcing it.

  They registered him, measured him, doused his hair with delousing powder, stripped him, and examined him medically. They confiscated all his clothes and issued him a shapeless tunic and pants of yellow and black hooped stripes, a soft forage cap, and boots without laces. He began to understand how prison depersonalizes men when they gave him a board with the number 4855, told him to hold the board in front of his chest, and the photographer took his picture, firing the flash powder with a fizzing whoomphf that made the guards flinch.r />
  Then he was hurriedly marched down the stairs and through the sliding barred gates that led to Cell Block A.

  ‘Number twelve for you, forty-eight-fifty-five!’ the guard snapped.

  ‘On yer right, hup-hi, look alive now!’

  Sliding clang of steel door moving aside. Two cots. Stinking bucket in the corner. Formless shape on the right-hand cot ignoring his arrival. Whitewashed limestone walls dripping with condensation. A chilly dampness in the air.

  And silence.

  Tangible, a humming silence that told him he had been watched, measured, weighed, assessed by every prisoner in the block.

  Heavy footsteps as the guards paced up and down the corridor.

  No way to measure time.

  ‘What you in for?’

  Angel lay on his cot looking at the ceiling. He had seen Briggs get up off his cot and sized the man up without actually appearing to look at him. About five nine or ten, he figured. Hundred and eighty pounds or so – the build of a wrestler, a professional brawler. Bullet head with cropped dark blond hair, a flattened pug’s nose. Sloping, powerful shoulders that even the shapeless convict’s suit couldn’t hide. Pale, almost green eyes beneath protruding eyebrows that gave the man’s face a foxy, cunning look. He ignored the question.