Frame Angel! (A Frank Angel Western) #7 (6 page)

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.

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 him.
‘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.