Frame Angel! (A Frank Angel Western) #7 (9 page)

Briggs just sat there and looked
at Angel, his mouth open. Angel watched the wheels turn in
Briggs
’s head
as the raider figured and added in his fuddled brain the
implications of what Angel had just said. No matter which way he
tried it, it came out looking like he might end up with a handful
of nothing for robbing the Southern Pacific, for being on the wrong
end of a territory-wide manhunt, and for the likelihood of a life
sentence in Folsom if he was taken. Hainin, Jamesie, Lawrence, they
were clean. Nobody knew about them.

‘
Jesus
H. Christ, Angel,’ he said, clambering to his feet in panic. ‘Do
somethin’! Contact them big mucky-muck friends o’ yours an’ get ’em
lookin’ for Pete an’ Jamesie! We got to find them quick, afore that
bastard dude does!’

‘
Saddle
up,’ Angel told him. ‘We ride all night, we can be in Las Vegas
before the telegraph office opens.’

They
’d known right from the start that
Angel wouldn’t be able to get word direct to Washington. Not with
Briggs breathing over his shoulder while he wrote his message in a
telegraph office. So they’d decided on a very simple code which
Angel could do in his head, without appearing to work it out,
without needing a decoding log to set it up. All you had to do was
to use the letter of the alphabet next to the actual one – so
‘Angel’ would read BOHFM.

‘
What
the hell is all that?’ Briggs asked wonderingly, as Angel printed
slowly on the telegraph form.

‘
Code,’
Angel said truthfully.

‘
The
address, too?’

‘
Sure,’
Angel said. ‘My people are mighty careful about who reads their
mail.’ He tapped the side of his nose and looked
mysterious.

‘
Uh-huh,’ Briggs said. ‘What’s it say?’

‘
Says I
got something needs doin’, an’ I want some walkin’ money and good
horses waitin’ in Santa Fe. They can take it out of my account, I
say. If they know anythin’ about the present whereabouts of Pete
Hainin or Jamesie Lawrence, to leave word.’

‘
That’s
great, Angel,’ Briggs said. ‘Listen, we get our mitts on that
money, you’re on a bonus. Ten grand each, OK?’

‘
That’s
big o’ you, Dick,’ Angel said, putting a warmth into his voice that
he was far from feeling. ‘OK, Jack,’ he said to the telegrapher.
‘Can you get this off right away?’

‘
Sure
thing, mister,’ the clerk said. ‘What kind o’ gobbledygook is this,
anyway?’

‘
It’s
the kind that keeps telegrapher’s clerks from readin’ private
messages,’ Angel answered him coldly. ‘What do I owe
you?’

‘
Dollar
ninety,’ the clerk said, and when Angel told him to keep the
change, he tossed the small coins onto the counter with a
sneer.

‘
No
thanks,’ he said. ‘I got too many private messages to
read.’

He turned his back on the two men as they
went out of the office and into the street where their horses
stood. Watching impassively, he waited until they had moved off
down the street toward the old town end, heading for the Glorieta
road. When they were out of sight, he pulled down the blinds and
scuttled out of the door, locking it behind him and trotting as
fast as he could go up the Plaza Hotel in the square. Nodding to
the desk clerk, he went up to the first floor and knocked on one of
the doors. A voice told him to enter.

The big man sitting on the bed looked at him
along the barrel of the leveled six-gun. Startled, the clerk
recoiled, his hands moving involuntarily upward.

‘
Relax,’
the man on the bed told him. ‘Just cleaning it.’

There were no cleaning tools or
oil or
rags
anywhere, but the telegraph clerk decided not to mention
it.

‘
He …
them fellers came in, just like you said,’ he told the man on the
bed. ‘They wanted me to send thisyere stuff out. Don’t make no
sense no how to me.’

‘
Don’t
let it worry you,’ the big man said. He took the printed form and
read it carefully, his lips moving as he figured out what it
said:

HAVE BRIGGS CONFIDENCE STOP
OTHERS INVOLVED PETE HAININ AND JAMES LAWRENCE STOP ALL THREE KNOWN
STOP LINCOLN COUNTY SHOULD HAVE RECORDS SOME KIND HEADING VIA SANTA
FE FOR RIO CHAMA COUNTRY WHERE LAWRENCE HAS WOMAN ON PLACE NEAR EL
RITO STOP WHEREABOUTS HAININ WHEREABOUTS MONEY UNKNOWN AS YET STOP
HAVE HORSES MONEY READY AT LA FONDA LEAVE WORD IF FIND ANYTHING
USEFUL ABOUT HAININ OR
LAWRENCE NAME OF MAN WHO HIRED THEM ROB TRAIN
UNKNOWN BUT BRIGG SAYS EASTERNER, SIX FEET OR OVER, WELL DRESSED,
FLAT HEELED SHOES, BOSTON ACCENT

The message was addressed to
Post Box 34, Santa Fe. The man in the hotel room knew that Post Box
34 was the address of John T. Sherman, United States Marshal for
the Territory of New Mexico. It would be Sherman
’s job to transmit the
information in the telegraph back to the Department of Justice in
Washington. He smiled, and without the clerk noticing, switched
Angel’s message for one he had written earlier. Handing this to the
clerk, he flipped a twenty dollar gold piece out of his coat pocket
toward the man, who caught it deftly. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Send
it off.’

‘
Thanks,
mister,’ the clerk said, a twenty-dollar smile on his face. ‘Thanks
a lot!’

‘
Don’t
mention it,’ the man said. ‘And I want you to know that I mean just
that: do not mention it.’

The clerk nodded, swallowing hastily. There
was a look in the cold eyes of the man sitting on the bed that told
him very, very clearly what would happen if he did mention it.

‘
Sure,
sure thing, mister,’ he said, backing out of the room.

The man watched him go with a
thin smile and then picked up the Gladstone bag by the side of the
drooping bed on which he
’d spent the night with a Mexican whore. He slid
the Frontier Model into a specially constructed pocket just forward
of the hipbone on the left leg of his pants. The pocket was lined
with leather and fitted with a strong spring at the bottom. The
moment the hand touched the pistol butt, the spring clip was
released, and the draw was rendered that fraction of a second
faster. He had not had to use it yet; but the man who had made it
for him was a master gunsmith, and he had no doubt that should the
occasion arise, it would give him the edge he needed.

He paid his bill and hurried out
across the plaza with its regimented shade oaks and ornate
cast-iron bandstand, jostling heedless groups of indolent
housewives gossiping in the shade. On the far side of the plaza,
ready and waiting for him, was a buckboard with a fine span of
thoroughbred bays. He had paid the youngster dozing in the
driver
’s seat
a peso to watch the team.

‘
Vamos
,
compadrito!’
the big man said, slapping the youngster’s leg. The kid
jumped down, liquid eyes dancing, and watched as the big man popped
the whip across the glossy haunches of the matched bays. They
jumped into motion, moving around the square and down the long,
wide main street toward the rutted ford across the river at the
southern edge of town. It would take Briggs and Angel the better
part of two days to get to Santa Fe: their horses were no longer
fresh and had not been the best in the first place. By using the
mountain cutoff, which took ten miles off the Glorieta route, and
by pushing his horses to the limit, the big man knew he could be in
the capitol in half that time. A day ahead of Angel the whole way.
He smiled; not a smile of warmth and pleasure, but the smile of a
cougar scenting its prey. A day would give him all the time he
needed.

Briggs said he liked it up in the
mountains.

You had to admit it was
beautiful. Awe-inspiring, even. Way up above Espanola the trail was
little more than a rutted track winding up into the mountains
toward El Rito. The towering mountains on both sides of them thrust
bald stone peaks up over the timberline. They had been steadily
climbing most of the morning. The horses had been waiting, and
there had been money in an unmarked envelope
at the desk of the La Fonda. But
nothing else. No word from Washington, nothing to warn Angel what
might lie ahead. He had shrugged fatalistically. All he could do
was go on with Briggs, pushing forward with the hope that Lawrence
or Hainin might have the key to the mystery of who had hired them,
a key which Briggs patently did not possess.

The trail moved steadily upward
along the flank of the mountain now. Bright blue flowers grew in
the broken earth on their left where it fell away in tumbling
rocks, wooded slides, and open patches where weeds and buttercups
mingled in riotous yellows, greens, and oranges. The pines were
thinner up here, and they sighed constantly in the ever-present
mountain wind. The trail was covered in a blanket of pine needles
dropped through the years, a springy, muffling mat on which the
horses
’ hoofs
made hardly any noise. When they crossed a rocky patch, the clatter
of the animals’ feet sounded startlingly loud and echoed slightly
against the face of the mountain. As they climbed on upward, the
trail leveled out on a plateau gouged into the flank of the slope,
rising sharply to one side of them and falling away to the other.
Far below, they could follow the boulder-strewn course of a
dried-up mountain stream, choked with summer weeds and shrubs. Once
in a while they caught sight of deer flickering off on silent feet
into deeper forest cover. Squirrels chattered in the trees, whose
tops were almost level with their feet. The track often bent around
on itself, serpentine in its course up the steepening face of the
mountain. Now the trees were thinning behind them, and ahead they
could see the end of the tree-line, where jumbled rock and black
boulders had been shifted by some primeval glacial upthrust and
small patches of unhealthy-looking grassy moss clung to the
downhill sides. The trail constantly twisted back on itself as they
climbed. Finally they were on the divide and could see El Rito down
below them in the valley.

‘
You
figure he’ll be there?’ Briggs asked. ‘What you think,
Angel?’

‘
Damned
if I know,’ Angel told him. ‘He’s your sidekick. You tell me. You
said he’s got a woman up here?’

‘
Yeah,
Mex girl he met down in Lincoln county. Her folks moved up here
durin’ the troubles. Jamesie often useta ride all the way up here
to see her. He was talkin’ about marryin’ her, one
time.’

‘
She got
her own place, or what?’

‘
I don’t
know, an’ that’s Gospel,’ Briggs replied. ‘I never seen her. All I
know is Jamesie allus useta say, any time you want me an’ don’t
know where I’m at, you find Abrana Gutierrez – an’ like as not
you’ll find me too.’

‘
Let’s
hope you’re right,’ Angel said, concentrating on the trail as it
sloped down into the shadowed trees and turned around on itself in
a tight S-curve followed farther down by another.

‘
What
you figure to do with the money, Angel?’ Briggs asked, as they
negotiated the second part of the first bend. He leaned back in the
saddle, his head turned toward Angel, who was riding behind
him.

‘
Spend
it,’ Angel said shortly. He had no time at all for people who
dreamed what they would do with money they were never going to
have.

‘
Yeah,’
Briggs said, drawing the word out into breathy anticipation. ‘Me,
I’m gonna head for California, rent me a fancy house overlookin’
San Francisco Bay. Stock the cellar full o’ French brandy, imported
cigars. Have me a time with the ladies. Live the way a man’s
supposed to live.’

Angel said nothing. He never
ceased to be surprised at how modest the ambitions of most
criminals were. Boiled down to essentials, they usually amounted to
plenty of food, plenty of booze, and plenty of women
– although not
necessarily in that order. He couldn’t concentrate properly on
Briggs’s prattling, anyway. His mind was busy with the possible
options that lay ahead. Briggs had swallowed Angel’s story whole,
but that didn’t mean Lawrence and Hainin would. He felt an
impending sense of disaster, which he could not rationalize, which
he felt might have been prompted by the sight of the old plaza in
Las Vegas, where not too many years before, he had killed Milt
Sharp and Howie Kamins and sat in the room at the hotel afterward
trembling like a leaf because he had become a murderer. He had
rationalized all that long since: Kamins and Sharp had been
frontier vermin of the most pernicious type, and if he hadn’t
killed them, someone else undoubtedly would have. But the sight of
the place and the memory of that night had somehow depressed him.
He wondered if Angus Wells, in all his years with the department,
had ever felt that way. He acted like a man who had never had a
moment’s doubt about his right to dispense justice.

‘
... got some mighty handsome women in San
Francisco,’ Briggs was saying, smiling to himself at the thought of
all those lovely pleasures waiting for him in the city by the bay.
It was a nice thought to die on, and die he did – the booming
thunder of the shot from somewhere up above the first bend of the
second S-curve startled Angel’s horse, which shied back as Dick
Briggs fell out of his saddle as if someone had hit him alongside
the head with a huge, invisible club. His horse staggered on the
lip of the trail, its feet skittering dirt and stones downward as
it fought not to go over after the man who had been shot off its
back. Briggs’s body fell straight down for about forty feet and
then it bounced sickeningly, the broken thud carrying clearly up
toward Angel. He was already out of his saddle and flat against the
frowning wall on the mountain side of the trail, lifted Winchester
in his hands, ears tensely tuned for the sound of
movement.