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

  ‘Statutory four weeks,’ Wells said. ‘I suppose.’

  ‘You’ll not help with this New Mexico thing?’

  ‘If I can,’ Wells answered. ‘But—’

  ‘I know, I know,’ the attorney general said, holding up a hand to forestall being told yet again. He didn’t want to start thinking yet about how he was going to replace Angus Well’s experience, wisdom, knowledge, and plain guts. He didn’t want to start thinking, either, about what was wrong with a set of rules that declared a man a cripple and therefore unemployable in certain jobs when he had been crippled carrying out those jobs. He didn’t want to give too much thought to how deep Angus Well’s bitterness might go and whether – damn all political life! – his going meant the loss of another good friend.

  ‘Could we at least talk about it?’ he asked humbly.

  ‘Sure,’ Wells said. He didn’t sound the least bit interested.

  Chapter Three

  Morty Leaven had been with the Pinkerton Detective Agency for almost ten years, and he resented having been taken like an amateur. His partner, Ned Ruzzin, didn’t feel any differently, and being a more vindictive man than his partner, was looking forward to laying hands on the cat who had laid the six-gun barrel alongside his skull, which was still throbbing as if someone were boiling water inside it.

  Ruzzin was a big man, a burly man, well over six feet tall, with shoulders like oak beams and hands like hams. Leaven was shorter, squatter, older, smarter. Together, they were a pretty good team, highly thought of at the regional office in Denver.

  After Moses Glorification Washington and Pat Seele had revived them by bathing their heads with tepid water from the engine, the two men held a council of war, which the engineer and his stoker had watched with wide eyes and puzzled expressions. They could not understand why Leaven and his partner clambered up on top of the caboose, looking from beneath eye-shading hands at the empty vastness around them. Leaven and Ruzzin didn’t explain at first, either. They made their decisions, came to their conclusions, and discussed what they figured to do about both before they so much as even looked at the engineer and his helper.

  Morty Leaven looked out across the lava beds with pursed lips, his eyes narrowed, thoughts busy. He knew this wild land, knew the bleak San Andres Mountains – and what lay beyond them.

  ‘It doesn’t figure,’ he said to Ruzzin. ‘Why would they head west? There’s nothing out there for two hundred miles – and every mile of it Chiricahua country.’

  Ruzzin nodded. Beyond the malpais, the lava beds, lay the empty San Andres Mountains and beyond them, the Jornada del Muerto, the wicked, bleached, lifeless area that the conquistadores had called the Death March. Arid, supporting no life, providing no water, containing no habitation, the Jornada was a place to be avoided like the plague.

  ‘South’d be just as bad,’ he put in, and Leaven nodded.

  ‘White Sands down there,’ he muttered, referring to the forty-mile-long stretch of dazzling white powdered gypsum and sand, where a horse would founder in drifts of shifting sand that blew like snow, scouring the skin off a man in a couple of hours if the wind came up and caught him out in the open. Sure, they could skirt the White Sands, climb the San Agustin, and drop down into Las Cruces, and then the Mexican border. But what for? Nobody knew who they were. The money they had stolen was untraceable. The way they had pulled the job meant that they knew both of those things. So they would not be trying to jump the border, and there was no reason for them to make a man-killing run across some of the most hostile country in the Southwest.

  ‘Well over hundred and fifty miles to Santa Fe,’ Ruzzin commented.

  ‘And nothing to spend your money on when you get there,’ Leaven replied.

  He knew Santa Fe. That was the place the natives called the Americans burros – donkeys – and there wasn’t a girl over ten that didn’t have some kind of pox. The streets were nothing more than muddy alleys littered with the droppings of goats and chickens, and the only drink a man could buy was tequila. And between this point and Santa Fe – nothing. Literally, nothing. Oh, you could say there were a few villages, if you wanted to count huddled jacales like Belen as a village. You could say there were a few saloons, if you wanted to count the kind of deadfalls you’d find in Socorro. But that was all; everything else was empty, rolling land, climbing mesas, falling canyons, dried-out runoffs, and bunch grass that would just barely support the herds of goats the Mexicans kept on it.

  Leaven pursed his lips again. These are smart boys, he told himself. They knew enough to pick a train carrying untraceable money – which might mean inside information. They knew enough not to talk any more than they had to. They knew enough to lay a false trail. Maybe they’d know enough to realize that any Pink worth his pay would expect them to do that and plump for the most likely route – which was north, ever north, keeping Gallinas Peak on your right, north past El Cuervo and Lamy, then up into Santa Fe. You could pick up Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe, you could hitch up with a wagon train returning empty across the Raton, you could head west to Arizona, north to Utah or Colorado, east into Texas, all comfortable distances from the territorial capital. Yes, Santa Fe was the obvious place for them to go, and they were smart enough to know that he’d know that.

  ‘I’m betting they headed east,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t—’ Ruzzin began.

  ‘Oh, they’ll swing north for Santa Fe, all right,’ Leaven said. ‘But they won’t go the way we expect. I’m goin’ to put my money on them taking a run up into the Mescalero Reservation, across Lincoln County to the Pecos, follow the Pecos all the way on up to Glorieta if they like. It’s easy country once you get across the mountains.’

  ‘You could be right,’ Ruzzin admitted. ‘You could be awful wrong, too.’

  ‘Hell, we just lost a quarter of a million dollars, Ned!’ Leaven said. ‘We sure as hell can’t be any wronger than that!’

  Ruzzin nodded ruefully.

  ‘OK, Morty,’ he said. ‘Play her as she lays.’

  ‘We’ll head down track,’ Leaven said. ‘See if we can pick up some horses at Oscuro. Then head up into the mountains. Hey, you, engineer!’

  Pat Seele came over, and Morty Leaven told him about the conclusions he and his partner had reached and what they were going to do.

  ‘It’s about ten miles, give or take, down to Oscuro,’ Leaven said. ‘Ought to take us two, maybe three, hours. I’d say Carrizozo isn’t more than half that far, so you ought to be there in half the time. When you get there, find the sheriff. Tell him what we’ve done and why. Tell him to get some men out here to fix that rail, and tell him to get word to the U.S. marshal in Santa Fe.’

  ‘You betcha,’ Pat Seele said. ‘Come on, Moses!’

  ‘One other thing,’ Leaven added. ‘Tell him we’re going to try going over Bonito Lake and then down toward the Ruidoso. He may want to cut east through Capitan an’ head us off.’

  ‘I’ll tell him,’ Seele promised, and something like two and a half hours later, footsore, weary, and parched, he sat in the blessed, dark coolness of the sheriff’s office in the Carrizozo Court House.

  Sheriff George Curtis was a slat-thin, cadaverous-looking man of about thirty. He wore his gun like a farmer, high on his belt, and fastened to it with a thong looped around the spur hammer of the .45. His bucolic appearance had misled a number of would-be badmen, for Curtis was neither stupid nor slow; there weren’t more than a dozen men in the county who could shoot as well as he could – perhaps only two could shoot better. George Curtis was also phlegmatically deliberate. He listened very carefully to what Pat Seele told him, then carefully checked what Seele had told him with the stoker – with a natural courtesy that took no regard of the color of Moses’ skin. From there he got a picture of the three raiders and a fairly concise idea of the two Pinkerton men as well. Satisfied that the Pinks wouldn’t cause him more trouble than the fugitives by getting themselves lost in one of the thousands of box canyons striating the western slope
s of the White Mountains, he went out and got his posse together.

  Sheriff Curtis’ posse wasn’t what you might have expected. There were none of the swaggering buckskin-clad pistoleros, who had been common in Lincoln County not many years before. It had no imported toughs from Seven Rivers or the Texas Panhandle, who could do things with brands that had to be seen to be believed and who could also, when necessary, turn their skillful hands to cold-blooded murder, arson, or rape. There were no hawk-eyed Apache trackers who could follow birds through the air or fish through the water. A man didn’t need any of that dime-novel stuff in this part of the country.

  Curtis rousted out old Nicky Cantilles, seventy years old if he was a day, an old Spanish-American settler from ‘way on back when the stoutest building in the county had been the Torreon in Lincoln, or Placka as they’d called it then. Old Nick was built of whang leather and chewing tobacco, and he could still fork a mountain mule for longer than most youngsters could ride in a wagon. He also knew every inch of every draw, every runoff, and every canyon between White Oaks and the Tularosa and clear off the way across to South Spring on the Pecos.

  The second member of Curtis’ posse was a half-breed Mescalero named Jim-Bob Panther. And there was a very sound reason for having Jim-Bob along – he was a kind of insurance policy. If they ran into any Mescaleros there in the deeper recesses of the forests that clad the rolling hills of the reservation, like as not there wouldn’t be any trouble. But if the Apaches had happened on some money and used that money to buy liquor at Murphy’s old brewery above the fort or at Dowlin’s, they’d like as not slit the throat of any white-eye they came across for the coins in his pocket or the clothes on his back. Also, Jim-Bob was no mean shakes as a tracker, given half a break. From what Seele had told him the Pinkerton men said, Sheriff Curtis didn’t reckon to get many of those.

  Finally, he rousted out his own deputy, Tony Coyle. Tony was a lazy-looking farmer’s son, long-legged and sleepy-eyed, but he could shoot the eye out of a quail in flight.

  ‘Well, Nick,’ Curtis asked the old man. ‘That’s the picture. What you reckon?’

  ‘I reckon any man’s a damn fool rides all the hellangone across the White Mountains an’ down to the Pecos to git to Santy Fe,’ Cantilles told him. ‘But I reckon them eastern dudes might be half-right, at that.’

  ‘Given they’ve turned east, not headed up north,’ Curtis said, ‘which way you reckon they might head?’

  ‘Ain’t all that many options, y’ask me,’ Tony Coyle drawled.

  He was right. There weren’t. You could head uphill into the Little Cub Mountains – not mountains at all, really, but pretty big for hills. There was a pass of sorts between Nogal Peak and Church Mountain, after which you could pick up Nogal Canyon and come down alongside the lake and then swing north toward Capitan. But that was hard going for horses. Mules could do it. Nick Cantilles discarded as unlikely the trail through Nogal Canyon.

  ‘How about cutting back off Spring Canyon and down into Turkey Canyon?’ Curtis asked. ‘There’s a trail around Bonito Lake that leads down to the main trail between Capitan and Ruidoso. Or we could pick up the old logging road.’

  ‘I know the one,’ Nick Cantilles snapped, as though his professional reputation had been challenged. ‘Goes up through the hills to Fort Stanton. I’da thought them old boys was keen to stay away from anyplace they was soldiers.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re right,’ Curtis admitted.

  ‘They could cut south,’ Tony Coyle said.

  ‘South? South?’ Nick snapped. ‘What d’ye mean, south?’

  ‘That ol’ loggin’ road you’s talkin’ ’bout,’ Coyle answered. ‘Turns south just a coupla miles short o’ Fort Stanton.’

  ‘Right, b’God!’ wheezed Nick, as though exasperated and pleased at the same time. ‘Damn near forgot! Goes right on down Eagle Crick an’ brings you out on the Ruidoso just above San Pat!’

  San Patricio was a huddle of Mexican adobes, most of them owned or part-owned by the Sedillo family, which stood on the Rio Ruidoso – the Noisy River – a mile or two above its confluence with the Bonito, where they both became the Hondo.

  ‘And from San Pat,’ Curtis mused. ‘Nothin’ but a barbed wire fence between there and the Arctic Circle!’

  ‘Sounds like a good bet to me – if n your train-robbers know this country,’ Coyle said, getting to his feet.

  ‘They know it,’ Curtis said, with a certainty in his voice he could not have justified if asked.

  He led them out of the room, leaving Pat Seele and Moses Glorification Washington to their own devices. They limped to the door to see the sheriff swing into the saddle and whirl his horse around onto the trail leading due east into the hills.

  ‘Hey! Sheriff!’ Seele shouted. ‘What about us?’

  Curtis frowned, his expression that of a man reminded of his manners.

  ‘Oh, sorry!’ he shouted. ‘Damn near forgot! Thanks!’

  He was gone in a boiling cloud of dust, with Coyle and the old Mexican on his heels. The sheriff thundered off up the trail toward Capitan, and Pat Seele took off his engineer’s cap and slammed it to the ground with a curse that could have broken windows.

  Chapter Four

  The three train-robbers knew the country, all right. They had gotten to know it very well while they’d been riding with the Seven Rivers boys during the ‘troubles’ – what people were now starting to call the Lincoln County War. A stupid name, as though those latest troubles were isolated and a once-only thing. Shee-heet, man, there’d been wars of one kind or another in Lincoln County since the day it was set up, and it had been men like Pete Hainin, Dick Briggs, and Jim Lawrence who’d done the dirtiest fighting in them.

  Those had been good days, well-paid days, days when you could pick up a few dozen of old Uncle John Chisum’s steers and haze them over the hills to Lincoln, blotting their brands along the way. The ‘House’ would always see you right, either with cash or (more likely) credit at the store. You could play pool or billiards there with the army officers over from Stanton, play cards in the Masonic Rooms, or drink in the bar below. There was bailes, Mexican dances, where you could always find a plump little señorita to swing around and maybe meet in the darkness later.

  But that had all changed after the big fight up in Lincoln the preceding July. They’d burned out the lawyer and the dregs that were left of the Regulators and taken everything that wasn’t nailed down out of the Englishman’s store. But that was the end of the pickings. Most of the ‘boys’ had taken advantage of the governor’s amnesty, but not these three. These three were professionals, and they wanted no man’s charity. So when they’d been approached to pull the holdup of the Southern Pacific and told there was twenty thousand in it for each of them, they had needed no second invitation.

  Yes, they knew the country, and they knew how to get lost in it.

  Yes, they knew how to take orders.

  Yes, they knew how to throw dust in any pursuer’s eyes.

  Three of them.

  Hainin, the leader, was a tall, well-built man in his thirties. Hatless, his long hair curling well below the open collar of his woolen shirt, his drooping mustache concealed a mouth that looked like a wound. His faded blue eyes were constantly on the move, scanning the open country around them as they rode.

  ‘Take it easy, Pete,’ the man beside him said softly. ‘Relax. You’re wound up like a trod-on sidewinder.’

  Dick Briggs was a head shorter than Hainin, and everything about him looked blunted – short arms, stubby-fingered hands, and a bullet head with a flattened, fighter’s nose. But his shoulders were sloped and powerful, his eyes beneath protruding brows not so much shrewd as foxy. He had tightly curled dark blond hair cut very short, so that pink scalp showed through on top.

  ‘I’ll relax when we’re spendin’ our winnings,’ Hainin said. ‘You keep your eyes skinned as well, Dick.’

  Briggs nodded, though there wasn’t much to keep your eyes occupied. They’d co
me up through the White Mountains just about the way that Sheriff Curtis and old Nick Cantilles had figured they would, the way men who knew enough about the country and how steep a hill their horses could climb would come. They had climbed up the slanting steep track along the southern slope of the canyon, at the bottom of which the Rio Bonito – the Pretty River – trickled and died, submerging beneath swathes of bleaching sand or burrowing beneath huge snow-shifted boulders. Its cut bank edges were a sharp brown against the dullness of the surrounding countryside. The Bonito ran off northeast toward Lincoln, but the three men crossed the divide, moving southeast, and were edging down onto the logging track – hardly more than rutted scars torn into the spongy, springy grass by the Mescaleros who came up there to fell trees for old Dowlin on the Ruidoso or Blazer up near the Indian agency. It looped between the sage-stuccoed shoulders of two long low hills that fell away into shallow canyons north and south. They were riding along a flat hogback, fairly high up, toward the curve in the logging track that would lead them down in snaking curves to Eagle Creek, which they would then follow south toward the Ruidoso Valley.

  Briggs glanced back at the third member of the party. ‘How you comin’, Jamesie?’ he asked.

  ‘Fine as snake hair,’ Lawrence answered.

  ‘You take care o’ that nag o’ yours,’ Briggs said. ‘He’s worth his weight in gold!’

  Jim Lawrence grinned. What Briggs said wasn’t far short of the truth. They had taken time out along the way to burst open the slatted crate holding the money and to pack the wadded bundles into two big alforjas, which were now slung across the cantle of Lawrence’s saddle.

  Lawrence was about to say something when he heard Hainin shout. Looking up, he saw three horsemen swing into view around the bend in the logging trail ahead. He cursed in startled panic. Who were they? What the hell? He didn’t have to formulate the question. The lead rider in the trio ahead reached down and hoisted a carbine out of the saddle holster under his right leg. The gun metal caught sunlight as the man swung the gun up and kicked his horse into a run, but the three raiders were already on the move. Long before they had come to this place, they had discussed what they would do if pursued, if the law got on their trail. They had discussed it not two hours before, when they were repacking the bundles of money, only half-joking about any one of them getting away and taking off with the whole haul – and about the other two being as certain as Sunday to track down the one who’d run with the money and kill him like a bug. They had made their plans., set their rendezvous, and planned their routes for just such an eventuality.