Frame Angel! (A Frank Angel Western) #7 Read online

  Reissuing classic fiction from Yesterday and Today!

  The big man knew that with no one left who could connect him with the train robbery, he was almost clear. No one, that is, except Frank Angel, special investigator for the US Justice Department. And Hainin realized that there was no stopping the lawman’s pursuit. He might get away clear with the money, but Angel would never quit looking for him … never forget. It was a pity. But if Hainin was to ever know peace, Angel had to die!

  FRAME ANGEL!

  ANGEL 7

  By Frederick H. Christian

  First Published by Sphere Books in 1974

  Reprinted under the title Showdown in Trinidad in 2007

  Copyright © 1974, 2007 by Frederick Nolan

  Published by Piccadilly Publishing at Smashwords: October 2014

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader.

  Series Editor: Ben Bridges

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with the Author.

  For pore ol’ Angus

  Chapter One

  The train was carrying $250,000, and the three raiders got away with every cent of it.

  Not that it was difficult.

  She was a big old hayburner, belching a cloud of smoke that rose ten feet above the fluted stack and spitting sparks that smoldered in the thin grass alongside the tracks. You could hear her coming for ten miles or more in the slowly rising foothills to the south of Tularosa, her plume of smoke rolling back behind her like a billowing banner and wisping off to the west, where the long, yellow-white streak of the White Sands lay like strange water in the shadows of the San Andres Mountains.

  The engineer braced his feet firmly on the cleated iron floor of the cab and leaned out on the right to see the long curve ahead that eased away from the black, basalt jumble of the malpais toward Carrizozo, which was still hidden in the folding foothills of the Jicarillas ahead. The rushing wind cooled his skin heated dry by the blast furnace warmth of the open boiler, into which his stoker moved cord after cord of bundled wood, his black skin oiled with sweat, his muscles moving smoothly with the rhythm of his paced movement. Then the engineer ducked back in, cursing the stoker for not keeping the pressure – which had dropped infinitesimally on the huge clock dial in front of the engineer’s face – up to its required level. The stoker took absolutely no notice at all of the steady stream of curses that the engineer was raining upon his unheeding head. His job was to put the wood in the boiler, and he was puttin’ the wood in the boiler, and all the cussin’ and yellin’ in the world wasn’t goin’ to get the wood into the boiler no faster. Anyways, the engineer was like all the Southern Pacific’s engineers, they cursed if the pressure was up, and they cursed if the pressure was down; and if it wasn’t up and it wasn’t down – why, they cursed just as loudly about that. A man might as well shake his fist at the rain, and Moses Glorification Washington wasn’t fool enough to do that. So he kept up his steady rhythm, swinging the wood forward from the tender and onto the footplate, where it would dry out quickly before the open furnace, then sweeping it into the roaring hole with the long-handled shovel.

  It was a short train, a special, just the loco, tender, and a caboose, with the two Pinkerton men guarding their not particularly special cargo. Not very special because, although the flimsy slatted box on the floor in the corner of the caboose contained a quarter of a million dollars, it didn’t somehow seem like real money. It wasn’t gold nor even silver bullion – not even fresh-minted greenbacks smelling of printing ink and secret desires. It was ruined money, tattered money, greasy, dirty, torn money on its way to the main branch of the First National Bank in Santa Fe to be burned. Standard procedure, although naturally enough, the banks didn’t make a public relations exercise out of it. But federal greenbacks just couldn’t take for very long the kind of treatment they got west of the Mississippi; They got creased, folded, wadded, and scrawled on – the result of being kept in the toes of boots rarely taken off and in belts frequently soaked with muddy river water. They got sewn into long johns, which could probably have stood by their owners’ beds unaided, and stuffed into sweatbands of Stetsons worn by men who spent most of their waking hours under a sun which could fry eggs on a flat stone. So every six months or so the government told the banks to call in old currency and replace it over the counter with new currency. The beaten, tired, limp, worn-out paper was then shipped to a specified head bank and destroyed under supervision.

  In between, it was treated like trash, roughly bundled and packed into wooden crates such as chickens are often shipped in. It was guarded, if that was the right word, by some deputy marshal who fancied a train ride or, as in the case of this shipment, by two Pinkerton detectives returning east who didn’t mind picking up an extra job and playing some penny-ante poker en route The slatted box they were guarding was, to them, worthless paper and would have still been so even if they had known that the banks had no record of even one serial number from any of the bundled notes nor any tally of where any of the bills had originated. They were just bundles of paper.

  At least, they were until the raiders hit the train.

  They took her in a gully just south of Carrizozo, using the time-honored technique invented by the Reno brothers and perfected by the James boys. A section of rail was unbolted, a lariat was looped under it, and the rail was yanked off the right-of-way – preferably, as in this case, just around a curve that would hide the damage until the engineer had only about three minutes to see the gap and slam on every ounce of brake he had.

  And it worked like a charm.

  The big old locomotive came bundling down the track, snorting like a fussy old buffalo during the mating season, and as the curve straightened, the engineer saw the missing rail and grabbed the huge brake lever, hauling it down with all his strength, hanging on to it and shouting curses at his Negro helper.

  By the time Moses Glorification Washington knew what was wrong, the engineer, whose name was Pat Seele and who had been working for the Southern Pacific since he was twenty-four years old, had brought the train to a shuddering, screeching, panting halt, the drive wheels red-hot from the friction of the rails that had sent great showers of sparks leaping from under the locomotive. The wide cowcatcher was not more than ten feet from the place where the rail ran out, and Pat was halfway down the metal steps, cursing whatever blasted stupidity it was that had brought about this near-disaster when – as if from nowhere – a masked man came around the front of the train and stuck a Starr & Adams .38 under Pat’s nose, his demeanor indicating that this was a bad day for heroics. Pat Seele took one squinting look at the pistol and then one at the cold eyes of the man holding it, and his hands went up as if someone had pulled strings attached to them.

  ‘Who dat?’ Moses shouted, coming to the side of the cab. ‘Who dat down dere?’

  ‘Shut your face and keep it shut!’ snapped the man with the gun.

  Moses nodded rapidly three times and backed up to let Seele climb into the cab. His eyes were wide, and his mouth hung open, but he made no overt move. The man with the Starr & Adams smiled beneath the neckerchief covering his sallow face.

  Almost before the train had come to a stop., two men had swung aboard the platform at the rear of the caboose, bursting open the door simply by kicking it hard. Since it had not been loc
ked, the door smashed back lopsided on its hinges, and the two Pinkerton detectives, sprawled on the floor in the wreckage of their makeshift poker table by the sudden jerking halt of the train, looked up into the threatening muzzles of two short-barreled Colt revolvers, realized that their own coats – and pistols – were hanging on a hook behind the ruined door, and raised their hands as meekly as had the engineer.

  ‘Up, up, up,’ snapped the bigger of the two intruders. He was dressed in ordinary work clothes, blue denim pants, and woolen shirt. His hat was well pulled down to conceal his hair, and a bandanna across his face concealed everything else. The second man hustled the two Pinkertons to their feet and pushed them away, nearer to the big man, as he bent down to examine the slatted crate with the money in it.

  ‘It’s here,’ he said, his voice muffled by the bandanna like that of his partner.

  ‘Good,’ nodded the first raider, and very quickly, quite ruthlessly, he knocked down the nearest of the two Pinkerton men with a vicious blow on the head from the barrel of his revolver. The second detective shrank back instinctively, making it that much easier for the second raider to drop him in precisely the same manner.

  ‘Can you lift it?’ the bigger man asked.

  The other tested the weight of the crate, then swung it up. ‘Just about,’ he answered.

  ‘Let me, then,’ the first man said. ‘Get down outside.’

  As his partner swung down to the ground, he thrust his Colt into its holster and took hold of the crate with both hands. Muscles coiled visibly beneath the cheap work shirt, and he swung the heavy box easily around, walking through the broken door with it to the platform outside.

  ‘Ready?’

  ‘Ready.’

  The man on the ground took the weight, and the other swung down beside him. He lifted the crate as the other man ran swiftly to the brush bordering the track and came back leading a pack mule. They lashed the crate very efficiently, very fast, onto the crosstrees on the animal’s back, and then the shorter one gave a sharp, fluted whistle.

  The man in the driving cab heard the whistle and gestured with the gun. Pat Seele and his stoker got warily down from the cab, their eyes on the gun, fear showing.

  ‘It’s all right,’ the man said. They could see him grinning beneath the mask. ‘I ain’t gonna shoot you.’

  ‘Yessir,’ Pat Seele said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Me an’ my buddies are heading west,’ the man said meaningfully. ‘Understand?’

  ‘Yessir,’ Seele said again.

  ‘Be sure you do,’ the man said and spun on his heel, running to where the other two were already mounted on good-looking horses. He vaulted into the saddle of his horse already on the run, and the three of them turned across the tracks behind the train and moved off without haste toward the malpais, which lay like a cicatrix on the earth perhaps four miles away. In fifteen minutes they were out of sight; Pat Seele didn’t move until then.

  ‘All right, boyo,’ he said to Moses. ‘Let’s see what we can do for those Pinkerton fellers. Then we’ll go find help.’

  ‘Yassuh,’ Moses said. ‘Which way we go, find help?’

  ‘Which way them bad men go, Moses?’

  Moses looked at the sun for a moment and then counted on his ringers. ‘They went west, boss,’ he responded.

  ‘Which way you reckon we ought to go, then?’

  Moses’ smile was big and broad and warm and beautiful. ‘East, maybe?’

  ‘You bet your black ass!’ answered Pat Seele.

  Chapter Two

  The Department of Justice occupied a big old building on Pennsylvania Avenue at the corner of Tenth Street in Washington, D.C. It was far too small for the department’s needs – something like a hundred and fifty people worked on the four floors it was allocated, although the use of the basement as an armory and facilities shared with the army’s gymnasium helped a little. The attorney general, the man whose responsibility was the management of all aspects of the enforcement of law and order in the United States, had an office on the first floor, looking out over the bustling traffic on the wide avenue below. It was a spacious, high-ceilinged room with an anteroom outside for the attorney general’s personal, private secretary, Miss Rowe, a honey blonde girl who only a few minutes before had shown Angus Wells, the chief investigator for the department, into the attorney general’s office.

  Wells now sat in the deep leather armchair opposite his chief, examining the room which was so much a reflection of the man and yet not really seeing it at all. It was as if he knew everything in it, as though each item were his own property and not that of the older man behind the desk. The shelves full of books, stacked every which way but tidy – upright and flat, spine out or face forward, books on law, criminology, on psychology, natural history, sociology, criminal jurisprudence, foreign law, land law, international law, all of them showing the wear of frequent use and the inability of their owner to treat them as anything but what they were: tools with which he did his work. The huge desk dominated the right-hand corner of the room, and two leather armchairs – one of which Wells occupied – were placed before it. The only other furniture was a heavy oak cupboard and an old-fashioned iron safe with a decorative brass scroll on the door. On the wall behind the desk and between the two floor-to-ceiling windows which looked out on the avenue was the circular seal of the department and the American flag.

  ‘Angus,’ the attorney general said, ‘I don’t know how I’m ever going to get started saying what I have to say.’

  ‘Let me say it for you, then,’ Wells said, his voice harsh. ‘You want me to retire from active duty.’

  He was a big man, Angus Wells, wide across the shoulders, athletically built. His face was tanned and healthy from outdoor living, and his blue eyes were as bright and inquisitive as a boy’s. But when he stood, he no longer stood straight and tall. When he moved, he no longer moved with the cat-like speed and certainty that he once had. His once dark blond hair was now almost white, and his mustache, speckled with salt and pepper, made him look much older than the forty-eight years that were recorded in the manila personal dossier that now lay on the attorney general’s desk.

  ‘Well, Angus …’ The attorney general spread his hands, seeking a way to say the right thing to this man, whom he liked so much and whose pride he could find no way to avoid hurting.

  ‘Say it,’ Wells said flatly. ‘I’m not some sniveling kid!’

  ‘All right, Angus,’ the man behind the desk said. ‘I had to look at your medical report. Standard procedure, you know that.’

  ‘I know it,’ was the unhelpful reply.

  ‘Every six months,’ the attorney general went on. ‘It’s not my rule.’

  ‘I know that, too.’

  ‘I was rough on you as it was, sending you down into New Mexico again so soon after the Cravetts business,’ the attorney general said. ‘But the medicos told me you’d made such a great comeback, I let it go. You did a little pushing yourself, as I recall.’ He tried to make it lighter, tried for a smile. Wells wasn’t having any of that.

  ‘Now this,’ the AG said, tapping the folder in front of him. ‘They couldn’t take out the bullet you took in the back. It’s lodged near your spine, and if you continue to engage in – oh, hell!’ he ended, hopelessly, tossing the folder aside. ‘Angus, they won’t be responsible for what happens if you go on active service again. So there’s nothing I can … I have to ask you to step down as chief investigator. Take yourself off the active roster.’

  ‘Got any ideas what I can do?’ Wells asked. ‘Sell matches on street corners, maybe? Buy a wheelchair and get some pretty nurse to push me around?’

  ‘Come on, man, you’re being childish,’ snapped the attorney general. ‘You know damned well we need you in the department. You’ll just have to take a desk job, that’s all there is to it.’

  ‘I don’t want a desk job,’ Angus Wells said.

  ‘You don’t have any choice, Angus.’

  ‘Wrong. Sir
.’

  The attorney general looked up, a frown knitting his brows. He had hired Angus Wells himself, watched the man as he had proved his worth time and time again, meriting every commendation, every promotion, to his present rank as chief investigator. He had until now looked upon Angus Wells as a friend and confidant as well as an employee, and he hesitated to ask the next question because he knew and feared and did not wish to hear the answer. He asked anyway. ‘Tell me why I’m wrong.’

  ‘I can retire,’ Angus Wells said.

  ‘Yes,’ nodded the attorney general, sighing. ‘I have no way to stop you doing that. But I wish you would reconsider. I need you, Angus. I need your expertise – this blasted robbery in New Mexico, a quarter of a million dollars stolen! I ... I ask you, as an old friend, as a personal favor to me – stay on.’

  Wells let a chill smile touch his lips, and the attorney general was shocked to see contempt and dislike written plainly in the younger man’s face. ‘Let me ask you, as an old friend, as a personal favor,’ Wells said, ‘to keep me on active duty while I look into the New Mexico thing.’

  The attorney general smacked a hand flat on the desk and got up from his chair, striding angrily across to the windows overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue, glaring down at the pedestrians and carriages without really seeing any of them. ‘You know I can’t, Angus,’ he said.

  ‘And you know I can’t, either, Charles,’ Wells replied softly, and for the first time his voice was touched with regret.

  The attorney general nodded, sucked in his breath, and let it out as a long sigh. ‘I suppose not,’ he said. ‘I suppose not.’ He sat down, his shoulders slumping wearily. Absently he reached for the cigar-box to his right, taking one of the long black cigars and lighting it with a wooden match. His head wreathed in smoke, eyes crinkled to avoid flinching, he leaned back in the chair. ‘When will you go?’