Frame Angel! (A Frank Angel Western) #7

by Frederick H. Christian

‘I said, what you in for?’

  Angel sprang off the cot like a tiger. His forearm came across Briggs’s throat like a bar of steel, and he smashed the man back against the seeping wall, causing Briggs’s eyes to pop with fear that burned with surging anger. He could feel Briggs’s mounting resistance; and with the knuckles of his right hand, he delivered a short, hurting blow that hardly seemed to have any power behind it. Briggs collapsed, his heart momentarily stunned by the driving force of Angel’s hand, his mouth falling open as he gasped for oxygen.

  ‘Uccchhh,’ Briggs managed.

  ‘Stay the hell away from me, you punk!’ Angel rasped. He yanked Briggs around and thrust him away from him. Briggs’s legs hit the edge of his cot, and he collapsed on it. He held up his hands in surrender, and Angel turned away. Then he stretched out on his cot and stared at the ceiling again, listening to Briggs gradually bring his breathing under control and fall silent. Neither man spoke again all day.

  Food was brought to them after what Angel figured must have been five or six hours. Suppertime, he thought? Six, seven?

  He got up and tipped the food into the slop bucket in the corner. Briggs watched him in astonishment, mouth full of food falling open.

  ‘Hey,’ he began, then shut his mouth quickly as Angel wheeled around threateningly to face him.

  End of day one.

  Bells clanging, clanging, clanging, woke Angel. He couldn’t remember having fallen asleep. He was stiff and cold and uncomfortable. Briggs was moving about the cell, a grubby towel looped across his forearm, finally coming to a stop by the cell door with a bright, expectant look. There was a lot of movement in the corridor outside. Angel swung his feet down to the floor as the cell door was slid back. A burly, red-faced guard came in, swinging his billy.

  ‘On your feet, you!’ he snapped, flicking the club over. It rapped on the side of Angel’s head, stunning him momentarily. He lurched to his feet, hands reaching automatically for the man, who took a skipping, trained step backward and hit him again with the club. Angel went down on his knees, still reaching for the guard, who blew his whistle. Briggs cowered in the corner of the cell by the open doorway. Two more guards came running in and saw Angel on his knees in the middle of the cell. They hauled him to his feet and dragged him out into the corridor. All the other prisoners were lined up there, and they watched impassively as Angel was dragged, feet trailing, the length of the cell block. The two guards dumped him into a stone trough of cold water at the end of the corridor, and when he recoiled, spluttering, trying to climb out, they jeered at him and pushed him in again with their feet. Drenched and choking from the fetid water he had swallowed, Angel was yanked out of the trough and dumped onto the floor. Before he could get up, one of the guards sank a boot into his ribs. He felt a sharp, sweet pain in his rib cage.

  ‘Get your ass off the floor, pig!’ shouted the burly guard who had first come into the cell. ‘I’ll let you off light because you’re new here! No breakfast for you – just forty times around the yard with the log!’

  There was a murmur from the watching prisoners. Nothing more, just a sibilant murmur stilled instantly by roared threats from the guards. They dragged Angel outside, one of them holding each arm, hustling him quickly along. Lying on the floor was a foot-thick log, perhaps three feet long, greasy with dirt and mold.

  ‘Pick it up!’ the guard snapped. ‘On your shoulders! Smart now! Hup-hi!’

  Angel grabbed the two metal cleats on the log and hoisted it onto his shoulders. They made him run around the exercise yard while the other prisoners watched. It wasn’t more than fifty yards each time, but they made him carry the log until his shoulders were totally numb, his legs like molten rubber, and his back a solid mass of shooting pain so complete that he felt as if he were on another plane of existence. The guards watched his reeling figure from above as it staggered around the cobbled yard, falling, cursing, weeping, getting up, and staggering on, endlessly, endlessly, until finally they had had their sport with him and he was dragged back into the cell and thrown on the cot.

  ‘Next time, on your feet sharp and ready for ablutions!’ yelled the red-faced guard. ‘Got me?’

  Frank Angel tried to spit into the glaring face, thrust within feet of his own, but his mouth was bone dry and his lips bloody and cracked where he had bitten them. He tried to straighten out his back on the cot. The pain made him cry out loud. Eventually he lapsed into unconsciousness.

  It was so black when he opened his eyes that he thought for one terrible moment he had gone blind. Then he realized that it was not the total, empty black of sightlessness but the ordinary darkness of night. Something had awakened him, and after a while he realized it was Briggs standing above him with a wet rag in his hand. He had bathed Angel’s parched mouth with it and was about to do so again when Angel moved in the darkness. His hand grasped Briggs’s throat, forcing the man backward. Briggs reacted quickly, and his strength was far greater than Angel’s. He knocked Angel’s hand away and pinned him down on the cot, breathing heavily. ‘For Christ’s sake, man, I’m tryin’ to help you!’ he hissed.

  ‘Fuck you!’ Angel gritted, trying – not very hard – to push Briggs off him. ‘I don’t want no help from you or nobody else!’

  Briggs made an angry sound. With the palm of his hand he slammed Angel back flat against the top of the cot. ‘You’ll last about ten minutes in this place, you carry on like that, friend!’ he hissed. ‘Keep your voice down or you’ll have every guard in the damn place in here beatin’ on your thick skull!’

  Angel relaxed, lying back and showing Briggs that he was not resisting.

  Briggs nodded. ‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘Here, wipe your face.’ He handed Angel the rag, and half-warm though it was, it brought blessed relief to the bruises and cuts.

  ‘What you tryin’ to do, anyway?’ Briggs asked. ‘Take on the whole goddamn prison?’

  ‘Motherfuckers!’ Angel rasped. ‘Pig screwin’ sadists!’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Briggs said. ‘That’ll get you a long way in here!’

  ‘Shit,’ Angel said. ‘I won’t be in here for long.’

  ‘Sure,’ Briggs said.

  ‘You can bet on it,’ Angel told him. ‘I’m gettin’ out, an’ the first throat I’m cuttin’ on the way is that bastard who worked me over!’

  ‘You aim to talk him to death?’ Briggs sneered.

  ‘Not hardly,’ Angel said, and showed him the knife.

  End of day two.

  ‘You could take me out with you,’ Briggs said. ‘I could help you.’

  ‘Sure,’ Angel said.

  ‘You know this country?’ Briggs asked.

  ‘What difference does it make?’

  ‘You wouldn’t get five miles,’ Briggs told him. ‘If you had someone with you who knows the country …’

  ‘Sure,’ Angel said. ‘Listen, Briggs, no offense. But amateurs just screw everything up.’

  ‘Amateurs?’ Briggs spat. ‘What you talkin’ about, amateurs?’

  ‘You, Briggs. What you in for, anyway? Knockin’ off a few head of cattle? Changin’ someone’s brand on a good horse? Shit, man, you’re like the rest of these misfits in here – too dumb to steal anythin’ big, too gutless to get into the big time.’

  ‘Like you, huh?’ Briggs retorted, stung by Angel’s words. ‘You’re so A-OK like you say, how come you’re slung into the pokey, big man?’

  ‘Shit, you can’t count poor luck,’ Angel said. ‘Poor luck don’t count.’

  ‘What you in for, then?’

  ‘Tried to kill Tom Catron,’ Frank Angel answered. ‘You prob’ly don’t even know who I’m talkin’ about.’

  Briggs looked at him with his mouth open. Thomas Benton Catron was probably the most powerful man in New Mexico, and rumor had it that most of the men who crossed his path from left to right tended to have a hell of a lot of bad luck afterward – real bad luck.

  ‘You tried to kill Tom Catron?’

  ‘Yeah. Just poor luck I didn�
�t swing it. The sonofabitch bent down to tie his shoe just as I cut loose. If I’d hit the trail right on afterward, no one’d ever’ve known. But I’m a pro, see. I tried for a second shot. An’ they took me.’

  ‘Christ, man,’ Briggs said. ‘How come they didn’t hang you right there an’ then?’

  ‘Oh, I got a few friends o’ my own. Catron might run most o’ the politics around here, but he don’t run all of them.’

  ‘What the hell you want to shoot him for, anyways?’ Briggs demanded.

  ‘Money – what else?’ Angel snapped. ‘What the hell else?’

  ‘Someone paid you to knock off Tom Catron?’ whispered Briggs. ‘Who?’

  Angel looked at him with utmost contempt. ‘Jesus H. Christ, you are dumb!’ he said, shaking his head. ‘No wonder you’re rottin’ in this pesthole. Well, rot away, Briggs. You’re a nice guy, but you’re not in my class. An’ that’s not vanity, either.’

  ‘That’s what you think,’ Briggs said.

  ‘Whatever it is, the hell with you, big shot!’

  ‘All right,’ Angel said wearily. ‘Go ahead, convince me. You’re a mastermind, right? What you did was to knock off some grocery store in a placita fifty miles from no place, huh? Or was it bigger than that? Maybe you got away with a couple o’ hundred bucks from some drunken trail driver someplace or held up a county bank and made off with the life savings of three Mormon farmers. Boy, Briggs, I can’t wait to hear it!’

  ‘Me an’ two other guys,’ Briggs began, ‘we…’ He hesitated and then fell silent, biting his lip. ‘Forget it,’ he said roughly. ‘You just forget it.’

  ‘Go on, big man,’ Angel said roughly, pushing him now, knowing that if he didn’t get Briggs to say it right now, he’d never say it at all. ‘Tell me what you and these two other guys did that was so stupendous. I ain’t had a good laugh since I come in here, anyway.’

  ‘We knocked off a train,’ Briggs said.

  ‘With a quarter of a million dollars on board!’

  Angel just looked at him. He didn’t say a word, but the look on his face told Briggs what Angel was thinking.

  ‘Goddamn it, it’s true!’ Briggs said, trying to keep the note of pleading out of his voice.

  ‘Sure,’ Angel said. ‘I read all about it in the papers. Headlines a foot high. About how the train was robbed and all that money took. In a pig’s eye! What you take me for, Briggs – some kind of idiot?’

  ‘I’m tellin’ you the truth,’ Briggs said hotly. ‘If it wasn’t in the papers, it’s ’cause they wanted to keep it hushed up. Figured maybe I’d crack, give them a lead to the others. Well, I never. Not a word.’

  ‘That’s some story,’ Angel said. ‘I’ll give you that.’

  ‘Goddamn it—’ Briggs started again, but Angel held up his hand.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s say I believe you.’

  ‘You believe me?’

  ‘Let’s say I do.’

  ‘Then let me make the break with you.’

  ‘Why you want out, Briggs?’

  ‘I want my share o’ that robbery – what else?’

  ‘Fine. What I mean is – why should I help you?’

  ‘Jesus, we’d be helping each other, wouldn’t we?’

  ‘I’m the one with the knife,’ Angel pointed out. ‘I can get out o’ here alone slick as snake oil. Why should I give you a hand? You got nothin’ I need.’

  ‘I got twenty thousand dollars waitin’ for me outside,’ Briggs said. ‘You help me get out o’ here, five thousand of it’s yours.’

  ‘I thought you said you got a quarter of a million?’

  ‘Five thousand,’ Briggs repeated, ignoring his question.

  ‘Seventy-five hundred,’ Angel said.

  ‘Done,’ Briggs replied. ‘When do we go?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Angel said. ‘Right after exercises.’

  End of day three, and he had him.

  Much, much later, he lay awake on his cot, thinking back over what Briggs had told him. There had been three of them; he knew that was the truth. Briggs hadn’t lied about that nor the total amount taken from the train. So there was no reason to doubt that he had $20,000 waiting for him. But if his share was only $20,000, did that mean the other two were taking $115,000 each, and if so why?

  He kept going back to his own theory about the robbery. He had contacted Larry James, a district attorney’s man in San Francisco, and James did some discreet checking on the banks that had made up the shipment and on the personnel in those banks who had known about it. They all came up smelling of roses. The Pinkerton Detective Agency was happy to let someone from the Justice Department check out any of their people, and Angel personally looked over the dossiers of Leaven and Ruzzin. As far as he could tell, they were clean too, and when the bearded Mr. Pinkerton told him that both men were checking their own back trail through Arizona and New Mexico, he was convinced of it. Pinkerton told him that Leaven and Ruzzin were as anxious to lay hands on the other two robbers as he was; if anything, more anxious, because the robbery reflected upon the Pinkerton Agency and by definition upon Leaven and Ruzzin personally.

  Yet Angel felt strongly that the robbers were nothing more than that – especially if Briggs was a sample. Good men, cool, resourceful maybe. With local knowledge certainly. But not the kind of men who’d know about a shipment of that size, of that kind. Which led to another piece of the puzzle.

  Suppose Briggs’s $20,000 share was the same as that of the other two? A total of $60,000. Why would they accept so little when they had a quarter of a million in their hands – unless they didn’t know that the money couldn’t be traced? Which meant that they had been told it was. And that in turn meant that someone had told them about the shipment, how to take it, and where to take it. Planned every move of the whole robbery: only to be thwarted by Briggs’s capture and Sheriff Curtis’s pursuit. It had put the others to flight. Now they were hiding out, awaiting – what? Further instructions? Briggs knew. Briggs was the key.

  These thoughts and many others twirled around and around in his head until finally he went to sleep. In his dreams a dark shape pursued him through mist. He could see where the mist ended and knew that when he reached that point someone would be waiting to kill him. He was not afraid of being killed. But he was afraid of finding out who was waiting. When he came to the place where the mist ended, he woke up. The bells were clanging, and it was morning.

  Chapter Seven

  The arrangements Angel had made through Wells with the warden of Folsom Penitentiary were simple to the point of imbecility. Since, as Angel had put it, he had no knowledge of the warden’s intellectual powers, the best thing to do was avoid any chance of straining them. In actual fact, Warden Harry Abrams was a model penologist who loathed the conditions in which he had to keep his prisoners and was constantly campaigning through the Territorial Legislature, the Prison Board, and newspapers for funds with which to alleviate Folsom’s problems. He was a short man, middle-aged, and running to florid fat as a result of the many formal lunches he had to attend or speak at. But he was shrewd and intelligent. He had listened to Wells carefully, made one or two pencil notes on a pad by his side, and nodded briskly when Wells had finished speaking. ‘No problem with any of that,’ he had said. ‘How many others do you want let in on this?’

  ‘The fewer the better,’ Wells said. ‘Let’s work out the minimums.’

  Abrams had been not only helpful but sensible. They had realized that Angel might receive same bad treatment (although neither man had any idea of exactly what the guards did to some of the prisoners, and since neither guards nor prisoners were likely to tell them, they had no way of preventing or changing it). But they decided against letting the guards in Cell Block A or in the main administration building in on the fact that the escape was rigged.

  ‘It’s got to look damned real,’ Wells told him. ‘Or Briggs will smell a rat.’

  ‘I have to tell the guards in the wall sentinels,’ Abrams told h
im. ‘They’re picked men, crack shots. They could pick both men off like flies from up there.’

  ‘All right,’ Wells said. ‘But only the guards who are likely to see Angel – the others, no.’

  That agreed, they settled down to more mundane details – clothes, horses, weapons.

  ‘I don’t think Briggs will wonder too much about the clothes and horses and guns,’ Wells assured him. ‘Angel will have told him about his powerful friends on the outside. He ought to swallow it. He’s swallowed all the rest.’

  Abrams nodded in agreement. ‘I suppose so,’ he said. ‘Then all we have to do now is wait for Angel’s signal.’

  Wells nodded. The signal was a simple one. Angel would ask to see the warden before the exercise period. The request would be brought upstairs as a matter of course. The warden would deny the request. But he would know that Angel was ready, and Angel, when told the warden’s decision, would know that the warden was.

  So the request had been made and denied, and the wheels were in motion.

  Angel hoped they were rolling smoothly while he and his fellow convicts were double-timed out of their cells and across to the dining hall, which with the kitchen took up the entire ground floor of the administration block. After breakfast the steel doors separating the four triangular yards were opened so that the prisoners could trot around the entire perimeter of the building – Warden Abrams’s one concession against security, born of his feeling that prisoners should have, even in this most minimal of ways, a change of scenery at least once a day. There was little or no danger. On each of the sentinels in the eight corners of the octagonal wall, two sentries watched the shuffling prisoners with sharp eyes, ready for trouble, Winchester repeaters in their cradled hands. The heavy doors were locked, barred, and guarded. And all the way along the long crocodile of shuffling prisoners, every five or six yards, a prison guard marched, baton swinging, left hand on holstered pistol.

  ‘Hup-hi, hup-hi, hup-hi!’ the guards shouted their cadences, their breath a steamy fog in the chilly morning air. ‘Hup-hi, hup-hi!’