Warn Angel! (A Frank Angel Western--Book 9) (12 page)

‘
Here’s how it happened, Kuden,’ Angel
said. ‘Near as I can figure. Your boss Willowfield knew nobody
could derail a train, rip off a quarter of a million dollars, kill
Federal agents, and not have the law on his back trail before you
could say “holdup.” Maybe he was surprised I turned up so
quick—there wasn’t any way he could have known I’d survived the
train wreck—but it made no difference to the plan. He told Falco
and the rest of you to hole up and wait for the word. As soon as
the law turned up, he’d sit there and be taken like a pigeon, quiet
as a mouse. Tell the law where Falco and the rest of you were
heading. And let whoever it was ride straight into your guns. By
the time anyone got on your trail again, you’d be long
gone.’

‘
Very clever, Mr. Angel,’ the German
sneered.

‘
I went to college,’ Angel said. Kuden
spat in the fire, his face contemptuous. ‘However, the plan to blow
me up didn’t work. So I killed Livermoor and put a hole in your
leg. Falco had to do some improvising. And you were it. What did he
tell you—hang back, kill me, and he’d meet up with you
someplace?’

He nodded as he saw Kuden’s look.

‘
And you fell for it,’ he sneered.
‘Falco couldn’t lose, could he? You killed me, he was home free. I
cut you down, ditto. He probably had you down as a write-off
anyway, with that leg.’

Kuden’s face was now a study in bottled
rage, but he still disciplined himself not to rise to the
baiting.

‘
So—the big question. I’d say Falco’s
on his way back to Denver, where the idea is to spring the fat man
somewhere. The only thing I don’t know is which route they’re
taking. And where they plan to attack the escort and spring
Willowfield.’

Kuden repeated his earlier invitation,
putting the whole conversation back to square one. Angel regarded
his prisoner sadly, putting onto his face the exasperated
expression of a teacher with a clever child who won’t try.

‘
Ah, well,’ he said at last. ‘I ought
to have known you’d want to do it the hard way.’

For the first time, he caught the alarm in
Kuden’s eyes. It was quickly concealed, but it was there. Angel
unrolled Kuden’s bedroll on the floor of the cave, and told him to
lie on it, face up.

‘
What for?’ Kuden demanded.

‘
Do it!’ Angel snapped, emphasizing
the command by pulling out his sixgun and jamming it against
Kuden’s chin, forcing the German’s head back.

The man jumped visibly when Angel cocked the
gun, and shifted himself quickly to the bedroll, where he lay,
glaring up at his tormentor.

‘
Comfortable?’ Angel said. ‘Then we’ll
begin.’

He tipped Kuden’s ammunition
pouch upside down, and twenty or so .44/40 cartridges fell to the
floor, gleaming dully in the flickering firelight. One by one,
Angel extracted the leaden bullets from the brass cases, until he
had a line of six beheaded cartridges. He stood them in a line on a
thin shelf of rock on the cave wall. Then he emptied three of them,
with measured movements, so that there was a thick line of
gunpowder perhaps four inches long a foot away from Kuden’s head
but well within the man’s line of vision. Then he struck a match
and lit one end of the line of powder. It burned with a fizzing,
smoking
buwwwwwwwffff,
and Kuden coughed as the fumes caught at his
throat. He looked at Angel as if Angel had gone insane.

‘
So?’ he said defiantly.

‘
So,’ Angel replied. ‘We
begin.’

He bent down and started to unbutton Kuden’s
shirt, peeling it back so that the man’s naked belly and chest were
exposed. Then he unbuckled the German’s heavy belt, unfastened his
pants, pulling them down. Kuden cursed and struggled, but with his
arms and feet as neatly bound as they were, there was little he
could do to protest. Now Frank Angel picked up the three cartridges
from the rock shelf and Kuden’s eyes went round with realization.
Angel sprinkled the same kind of thick line of powder from the
man’s navel to his genitals and then stood back. He took the
matches from his pocket.

‘
Nein,
nein!’
Kuden shrieked,
‘Nein, nein, nein!’

He arched his back, thrashing around,
rolling his body to try to dislodge the powder, but his own sweat
kept most of it where it had been sprinkled. Then he subsided in
cold gut-wrenched fear as Angel snapped a match alight with his
thumbnail. Kuden looked up. There wasn’t any hint of compassion in
Angel’s face. It looked as if it had been carved from stone.

‘
Wait,’ Kuden said, his nerve snapping
visibly. ‘God, wait!’

‘
Time’s up, Kuden,’ Angel snapped.
‘Sing. Or fry.’ His tone made it abundantly clear that he didn’t
give a good wholesome goddamn which one Kuden chose.

‘
All right,’ the German sobbed. ‘All
right.’

‘
Talk,’ Angel said,
relentlessly.

Kuden talked.

Buena Vista was little more than a serried
double row of scattered shacks interspersed with the occasional
stone building paralleling a wide, muddy street that rose sharply
toward the north. It hardly lived up to its name. The sidewalks and
the street itself were crowded, and outside every store great
bundles of wash pans, shovels, picks, ropes, and other necessaries
of the mining life rattled like dented cowbells in the soft
afternoon breeze. Over the whole place hung the suppressed clamor
of a dozen different accents and the indefinable hum, the almost
tangible fever, that is never very far from a gold camp.

Up every canyon, along every dribbling creek
and runoff that fed the Arkansas, otherwise sane men grubbed in the
filthy mud for as many hours a day as there was light, more than
happy if those backbreaking hours yielded them an ounce of glinting
particles of worthless metal—but worthless metal for which men
would willingly kill, gladly cheat, happily lie, cheerfully steal,
recklessly die. And if those same backbreaking hours yielded them
nothing but rotted boots and rheumatic limbs, why, they buckled to
and grinned and bore it, and got down to the same job again the
next day, dreaming, as they all dreamed of The Big Strike. They
sustained the bleakness of their everyday lives with
legends—legends in which Striking It Heavy was the happy ending,
legends born in a millrace on the south fork of the American River
in California, risen again a hundred times in different forms in
Arizona and New Mexico and Utah and Nevada and right here in
Colorado. The legends survived defeat, despair, disappointment.
Someone, somewhere was going to Strike It Heavy sometime. Nobody
ever remembered that James Marshall never made a cent out of the
gold field he discovered. Men who were not bitten by the gold lust
never understood it.

Angel found the office of the town marshal
at the northern end of the town, a simple frame cabin with a
shingle outside that proclaimed its function. He led Kuden in, and
the German stood sullenly behind him, head down as the marshal, a
short, rotund man of perhaps fifty, got up from behind a littered
roll top desk, pushed the swing door in the low railing which
divided the room in half, and came forward with an inquiring look
on his face. ‘Well, boys,’ he said, ‘What’s your trouble?’

‘
No trouble, Marshal,’ Angel said. The
marshal’s handshake was firm, and belied his apparently soft
appearance. Angel never made the mistake of equating the fact of a
man’s stoutness with sloppiness or flabbiness: one of the toughest
fist fights he’d ever been in his life was with a short, tubby man
who’d worn steel-rimmed spectacles and who had fought with a
ferocity and strength that was all the more effective because it
had been so unexpected. This marshal could well be another such, he
thought: policing a town as tough as Buena Vista was likely to be
on a Saturday night, even though the real tide of violence had now
swept on to newer, rawer camps, would not be a cakewalk. He gave
his name to the lawman, and showed him his
identification.

‘
Department of Justice, is it?’ the
marshal said. ‘Well now.’

He looked at Kuden, who was looking at Frank
Angel, with a new light in his eyes.

‘
Well, bucko,’ the marshal said to
Kuden. ‘You got mixed up with the right bunch this time, didn’t
you?’ He turned to give Angel back the badge and the commission.
‘My name’s Hedley,’ he announced. ‘Gwyn Hedley.’

‘
From Wales?’ Angel
guessed.

‘
Originally,’ Hedley
admitted.

‘
You been up here long?’

‘
Long enough, boyo,’ Hedley said.
‘Long enough. Now, what do you need?’

‘
Two things,’ Angel said. ‘One, I want
this character put away someplace and kept there until he’s well
enough to travel.’

‘
No problem,’ Hedley said. ‘What’s
number two?’

‘
I’m looking for three men who
probably went through town late last night or very early this
morning,’ Angel said. ‘The names are Chris Falco, Gil Curtis, and
Buddy McLennon. Falco’s a big man, well-built, with gray hair on
both sides of his head that looks like it’s been painted on. Curtis
is medium height, dark-haired. McLennon’s slim, almost
girlish-looking. It’s just faintly possible they’re still in town,
but I doubt it.’

‘
It won’t take us long to check,’
Hedley said firmly. ‘You want to wait here?’

‘
No,’ Angel said. ‘If you can take the
prisoner off my hands, I might go get a hot meal. I haven’t eaten
properly for a couple of days.’

‘
I’ll do better than that, boyo,’
Hedley said. ‘Come with me while I tuck your little baby away safe,
and I’ll show you a good place to eat. We can check on your three
others at the same time.’

‘
Bueno,’ Angel said. ‘Where’s your
hoosegow?’

‘
Right on down the street, next to the
Lucky Strike,’ Hedley said. ‘You must’ve passed it as you came on
up.’

Angel nodded, remembering the solid-looking
stone building on the left hand side of the street. He gave Kuden a
shove to get the man started, and Kuden limped out on to the
sidewalk. He had no fight left in him: Angel’s gunpowder ploy had
removed the starch, and he had told his tormentor everything he
wanted to know. Kuden had nothing left to fight for, and even less
to fight with. They trooped down the hill.

‘
What’s the charge on this one?’
Hedley asked on the way.

‘
Murder, first degree,’ Angel
said.

‘
And his name?’

‘
Kuden, Hans Kuden.’ Angel spelled it
for the marshal who crossed the street now and banged on the heavy
wooden door of the squat stone building next to the saloon. His
deputy, a dour-looking individual with a drooping mustache, a
slat-thin, stooped body, and a face that looked as if it had never
smiled since infancy, opened up with much sliding of bolts and
rattling of keys.

‘
Who you expectin’, Ike?’ Hedley said.
‘Quantrill’s Raiders?’

‘
Never know,’ Ike said lugubriously.
‘No point takin’ chances.’

‘
Brung you a prisoner,’ Hedley said,
motioning Angel to follow him inside.

‘
Jim-dandy,’ Ike said, with the tone
of someone discovering he has just lost his wallet.

‘
You speak German?’ Angel asked Ike.
The deputy looked at him as if Angel had asked whether he made a
habit of molesting small girls.

‘
You what?’ he barked.

‘
Just wondered,’ Angel said, and stood
back as Ike pushed Kuden none too gently through a heavy steel door
and into a corridor, along which were set four barred cells. He
swung the door of one of them open, and Kuden slunk in like a
whipped dog.

‘
I’ll arrange for an escort to come
collect him,’ Angel told Hedley. ‘In the meanwhile, he could use a
doctor to look at his leg.’

‘
What happened to him?’ Hedley
asked.

‘
He got shot,’ Angel said, and Hedley
let the matter be. It didn’t seem like Angel had any intention of
discussing the matter further.

‘
I’ll get the doctor to call over and
tend to him,’ he promised. ‘Ike, I’m going to grab a bite to
eat.’

‘
Fine,’ Ike said, sliding
back into his bentwood chair and picking up his
Police
Gazette.

‘
I’ll be back in about an hour,’
Hedley continued. ‘Spell you then.’

‘
Fine,’ Ike said, without lifting his
eyes from the magazine.

‘
By the way, I just heard the world’s
comin’ to an end at midnight,’ Hedley remarked casually, with a
grin at Angel.

‘
Fine,’ Ike said.

They walked back up the street
together. Several times, Hedley stopped to talk to people: some
miners he met coming out of a saloon, a storekeeper sweeping the
dust out of his place on to the sidewalk whence it would blow back
in again, a man sitting on a bench outside a cabin. He stopped and
asked questions of a trio of spangled saloon girls switching their
rumps along the sidewalk on their way to work in the Lucky Strike.
They giggled as they answered, their eyes on the tall figure of
Frank Angel. By the time they had reached the top of the street,
Angel reckoned Hedley had talked with eight or nine separate sets
of people. They all treated him with deference, Angel noted. Now
they were back almost opposite the marshal’s office, and Hedley
jerked a thumb at a frame building, one-story, and as long as a
barn, upon the apex of whose roof was a sign that read:
Home Cooking.
Steaks a specialty. Home Cooking.