Hang Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #4) Read online

  Fischer’s eyes widened in real panic now.

  There was no question that the kid meant what he said and the triple click as the gun was cocked sounded like thunder in the silence of the room. Nobody moved: it was like some strange tableau, the long empty wooden bar with Fischer at the end, the tables and the seated men on his right, every face fixed on the boy standing in the center of a sawdusted floor, his eyes as cold as the inside of an iceberg. A chair scraped softly as someone sitting towards the rear of the saloon shifted uneasily, conscious of being close to the possible line of fire. All the kid had to do was lift his thumb and Joe Fischer was dead as Moses.

  “Webb!”

  The voice was flat, harsh, peremptory, used to being obeyed. Everyone in the Silver King recognized it, and so did the kid. He froze: not turning his head, not moving his eyes from the cringing figure before him whose naked fear was falling away to be replaced with an expression of almost incredulous relief. The people in the saloon still watched Webb. They could see him thinking about what to do next as clearly as if there was a window in his skull. If he lifted his thumb Joe Fischer would die. But so would he: because the man who had spoken his name would kill him without hesitation or compunction.

  Tall, thin, gray-haired, dressed in a spotless white shirt, dark pants and vest, soft shining leather boots without spurs, and no hat, Trev Rawley, the town marshal stood in the doorway of the Silver King with a cocked Colt’s .44-40 in his hand. His face was tired, deep-etched by lines of experience indicating he had lived a life in which he’d done most things, seen most things—and cared for practically nothing. There was a silver star on the left lapel of his vest, its dull shine complemented by the glinting nickel-plated six-gun which caught the slanting dust-mote-filled beams of sunlight from the window as Trev Rawley gestured with it.

  “Ease that hammer down about as slow as you can, Webb,” he said harshly. “Or I’ll put out your light.”

  There wasn’t any threat in his voice. He said it like someone remarking on the weather, but that didn’t mean the kid had any options. Trev Rawley would lay him out cold enough to skate on without a second’s thought and there wasn’t a man in the room didn’t know it—including Dick Webb. His shoulders slumped, and the gun barrel dropped downwards, pointing at the floor, as he eased the hammer down. He just stood there, head hanging, like a kid caught in a lie, face defiant, stance uncertain, watching Trev Rawley come around in front of him, light-footed, never near enough to be reached by a suddenly-thrown blow or to be caught off-guard by a hideaway gun. Rawley stopped midway between Webb and his intended victim.

  “Just let it drop, son,” he said. “Nice an’ easy.”

  Webb stood there for a moment, not doing it, not moving, not intending to, and the air went heavy with tension as Rawley cocked his head slightly to one side as much as to say, silently, “Are you going to try?” Then young Webb abruptly opened his fingers and the gun clunked on the raw pine floor. The concerted sigh as a dozen men let the air out of their lungs was faintly audible.

  “Step away from it,” Rawley said. His voice. was still completely without any shade of emphasis, as if he’d done this so many times that all it could be was boring. But there was no boredom in his eyes, his stance: he was ready for anything he might have to do. He nodded as the boy took three steps back and to the side, coming up against the bar, head hanging with frustrated shame at being taken so easily.

  “All right,” Rawley said harshly. “What’s it all about ?”

  “Ask him.” Dick Webb jerked his chin at Joe Fischer, who was smiling now, the triumphant smile of a protected bully.

  “I asked you,” Rawley said softly. “And you’d do well to answer me.”

  “He’s off his head!” Joe Fischer put in hotly, coming forward and standing beside Rawley. “He came in here and—”

  “Shut up.” Rawley’s voice was soft, almost caressing. Joe Fischer closed his mouth as if someone had thrown a switch, his face scarlet at this further humiliation. “Webb, I’m waiting.”

  Dick Webb shrugged. There was something in the way he stood, the expression on his face, the way he looked at the marshal, which told the onlookers that the boy figured anything he said now wouldn’t matter a hoot in hell.

  “You give a damn, Rawley?” he asked. “You figure Big Ed’ll give a damn?”

  “Better let me decide that,” was the reply. Rawley gestured with the nickel-plated six-gun. “I’m still waiting, kid. Spit it out!”

  “Okay,” the boy said, wearily, as though he was a parent indulging the persistent marshal. “Suppose I tell you this . . . this poison toad here is a woman-molester? Suppose I tell you he killed a kid in cold blood? What’ll you do, Rawley? Lock him up? Lock up Big Ed Fischer’s kid brother?” Webb let out a mirthless laugh.

  “Those are pretty serious charges,” Rawley observed. “You saying Joe here killed someone? That he attacked a woman someplace?”

  “I’m sayin’ just that,” snapped Dick Webb. “Look at his goddamned ugly face—what more proof do you wa—”

  That was as far as he got. While he had been speaking, Joe Fischer edged closer, coming around on Rawley’s left side. Now with a scream of inarticulate rage he moved, his cocked fist coming around in a looping haymaker that the youngster had absolutely no chance of ducking. It hit Webb high on the cheekbone near the temple, slamming him against the heavy bar. Eyes sightless, Dick Webb slid down in a disorganized jumble of arms and legs, a slow trickle of bright blood staining the floor beneath his face. Joe Fischer stood over him, legs spraddled wide, fists clenched, waiting. Rawley did nothing; he watched, saying nothing, as Dick Webb shook his head and got unsteadily to his feet. He still had one knee on the ground when Joe Fischer hit him again, square in the face this time, and the boy went back against Rawley’s legs, bouncing off on to the sawdusted floor, his face a bright mask of blood from his broken lips. Fischer started forward after the kid, and Webb rolled away instinctively. As he did, his body rolled on to the discarded Navy Colt and his hand closed on it.

  Trev Rawley smiled, the smile of a cat that hears the mouse coming, a tight, merciless expectant grin, letting Webb think he had some kind of chance to use the gun. Rawley’s own gun was already cocked and lined up to fire and in another half second Dick Webb would have been dead with a bullet through his brain had it not been for the fact that at precisely the moment Rawley’s gun came level a shot smashed out from the corner of the room.

  The bullet ripped the gun out of Rawley’s hand, spinning it away across the bar. It hit the wall and fell to the ground, still cocked. He whirled to face the threat even as Joe Fischer’s hand darted in almost reflex action towards his own holstered gun.

  “Don’t, you!”

  The tall man who held the smoking gun didn’t raise his voice, but there was something in the tone, the way the words were spoken, that touched a secret place in Fischer and made him jerk his hand away from the gun as if it had suddenly become poisonous. A look of puzzlement instantaneously touched his face, as if realizing how pronounced his reaction had been, he could not understand why. He glared at the intruder, who now stepped clear of the crowd, coming around towards Fischer and Rawley. The latter watched imperturbably, kneading his numbed fingers with his right hand.

  He saw a big, tall man, wide-shouldered and cold-eyed, tanned as dark as an Indian, the long brown hair streaked and sun bleached, dressed in conventional range clothes: dark, well-worn Levi’s, a decent wool shirt, good quality boots. A stranger, passing through, Rawley thought. Obviously doesn’t know what he’s getting into. But, he warned himself, he can shoot. Any man who can shoot a six-gun accurately enough to smack a gun out of another man’s hand twenty feet away is no pilgrim.

  “And who the hell might you be?” Fischer was asking, getting a sneer into his voice as he came to the same conclusion as Rawley—without the inbuilt caution of the lawman.

  “Might be the Queen of Sheba,” was the cold reply. “But I’m not. Name’s Angel. Fra
nk Angel.”

  “Angel?” Rawley said, frowning, trying to place it. He knew most of them. But he’d never heard the name of Frank Angel before. So: not a notch-cutter.

  “Angel!” Joe Fischer overreacted. “Well, that’s rich. An’ pretty apt—about what you’re li’ble to end up if you don’t put up that gun!”

  He turned to the bartender, who had risen from his hideout below the bar when the six-gun had skittered to a fully-cocked stop not six inches from his trembling toes. “Tell him what he’s pokin’ his nose into, Luskam!”

  The bartender, Luskam—actually the nominal owner of the Silver King—was a wiry, mustached, white-haired man with the smooth skin and clear eyes of a teetotaler. He nodded eagerly.

  “He’s right, mister,” he affirmed. “It’s—”

  “Trouble,” Angel said. “Don’t tell me; it always is.”

  “Listen,” Luskam said, nervously. “You’re a stranger in town. You don’t . . . You know who this is?” He nodded towards Joe Fischer.

  “You give the snakes names in these parts?” Angel asked coldly. His eyes flicked to Rawley, who was still watching, assessing, waiting. “What kind of lawman are you, anyway? You were going to shoot down the boy without giving him any sort of chance at all!”

  Rawley lifted his shoulders and let them down, as though that were answer enough. Then he lifted his chin.

  “Listen, friend,” he said. “Luskam’s giving you it straight. You’ve gotten into deep water here.”

  “I can swim,” Angel said shortly. “And I’m not your friend.”

  Rawley sighed, as though dealing with a stubborn child to whom he would give one more chance before his patience was exhausted.

  “Listen. Listen to me, now. Step out of this while you can. My advice—”

  “Is probably about the same quality as your peace-officering,” Angel said.

  “You, kid—” this to Dick Webb. “You’re not saying much.”

  “Not much to say,” Webb replied. “Except thanks.”

  “Save it,” Angel said. “You want to step around behind me and sort of get by the door there?”

  Dick Webb nodded, sidling around behind Rawley and waiting there as Angel lifted the gun from Joe Fischer’s holster and flipped it over behind the bar. It smacked against a wooden crate with a solid thud as Angel stepped around Rawley and moved towards the door. Never got anywhere near where he could be struck or jumped, never once took his eyes off either of us, never once let the six-gun barrel waver an inch: no, certainly not a pilgrim, Rawley thought. Lawman? Professional gun? No matter: bad news whatever he was.

  “You better get long gone out of here, friend,” he said to Angel, letting no trace of threat come into his tone, making it a statement of simple fact. “You’ll be in bad trouble if you don’t. And I mean bad.”

  “I’ll bet you do,” Angel said levelly. “Do I have to keep reminding you I’m not your friend?”

  Over his shoulder he asked Dick Webb a question. The youngster nodded.

  “Outside,” Webb said. “At the hitch rail.”

  “Good,” Angel said. “Mine’s the line back dun with the bedroll. Get on yours and unhitch mine ready. I’ll be right along.”

  He turned to face Rawley and Joe Fischer.

  “Some advice to you, friend: stay put!”

  “There’s no place for you to run, Webb!” Joe Fischer screeched. “My brothers will take you both apart in strips. You hear me? Strips!”

  Angel looked at Rawley and shook his head sadly.

  “Why is it always the ones with the least guts who make the most noise?” he asked rhetorically, certainly not expecting the lawman to answer. Then he gave Dick Webb a nod, and the younger man backed through the batwings as Angel stepped back.

  As he did so, a hugely built man who had been standing just to one side of the doorway swept his ham like hand in a brutal felling chop. The six-gun clenched in it hit Dick Webb behind the ear with a sound like an ax biting into a log, and the boy went out off the porch, driving into the dirt of the street face down even as Angel, alerted by the sudden change of Rawley’s expression, the bright grinning anticipation of Joe Fischer’s face, whirled to meet the threat. He was too late and he knew it, but he kept on going anyway. The big man with the gun in his hand had everything going for him. Superior weight, height, reach, added to the head-start offered by the advantage of surprise against Angel’s superb reflexes. The barrel of the six-gun smacked across Angel’s temple and he went careening backwards into the saloon, lurching into one of the tables, off which he bounced to the floor face down. Even half conscious he was instinctively moving to protect himself as he tried to get up but Rawley was already beside him, both hands clenched together. He swung them up to the left behind his shoulder, the way a man hefts an ax, and then brought them clubbing down with all his strength on the base of Angel’s neck. Angel went flat hard smashing down on the grubby sawdusted floor with a crash that shook the room and set bottles jingling on the shelves behind the bar. Then Rawley looked up at the big man who had come inside the saloon now and was standing spraddle legged, hands on his hips, staring down at the supine form of Frank Angel, a frown knitting his heavy brows. Then he looked up at the marshal, and an ugly grin formed on his beefy face.

  “Rawley,” he said. “That’s a drink you owe me!”

  Trev Rawley grinned like a shark, and gestured with the fallen Angel’s six-gun at two men standing nearby.

  “Get Doug Boyd and George Aitken at the jail. Give them a hand. Get this—” he kicked Angel’s unconscious form “—and the other one across there. Lock ‘em up. I’ll be by presently.”

  The two men hastened to do Rawley’s bidding, and within a couple of minutes the two deputies had manhandled Angel’s inert form out of the place, dragging the unconscious man by the heels like a sack of potatoes. When the batwings had stopped flapping, Trev Rawley bellied up to the bar, rapping on its surface with a coin. As if it were a signal, conversation burst from the men in the room, each of them watching the trio at the bar warily and careful of every word. There was no sound of sympathy for Dick Webb or the mysterious stranger who’d helped him. Anyone who went up against the Fischers had it coming to him; everyone knew that.

  “Name your poison, Ed,” Trev Rawley grinned.

  Big Ed Fischer, oldest, smartest and hardest of the trio, smiled back and slapped the marshal on the shoulder.

  “I’ll take a whiskey,” he said loudly. “And I’ll take a big one!”

  Chapter Three

  The Department of Justice had a rule: never get into anything you can’t get out of. Everyone who worked in the big, echoing old building in Washington knew it and observed it for a very simple reason—it was a damned sensible rule. Frank Angel reflected ruefully on this as he surveyed the cramped cell in which he was now painfully sitting up. After all his training, all the experience they had pumped into him, he should have known better than to walk straight into a whipsawing that had first, nothing to do with him and second, even less to do with the Justice Department. He didn’t even know the rights and wrongs—if any—of the matter. He had just jumped in blind, and now he was stuck in this sweltering box with a head that was throbbing as if there were small men inside with rubber hammers. Serves me right, he thought. I shouldn’t have been here at all. If his horse had not thrown a shoe as he came up along the road leading north towards Raton, he would have passed Fischer’s Crossing without even seeing it.

  He was on his way back to Washington, passing through, going home with a job finished and—no doubt—another one waiting. He’d left the Department’s senior Special Investigator and his own superior, Angus Wells, lying convalescent in the military hospital at Fort Union. The mad schemes of Rob Dennis-ton which had brought them both out to New Mexico lay buried forever with the madman who had conceived them.

  Still, he consoled himself, there was no way—given that he had to be in that saloon taking a drink at that precise moment—that he could have sat s
till and watched the cold-eyed Rawley cut down the kid in cold blood. What he hadn’t yet figured out was why the rest of the people in the saloon had been willing to sit still and watch their marshal cold-cock the kid. He raised his head and looked across at Dick Webb, who was sitting on the edge of the cot on the other side of the cell, face empty, thoughts a thousand miles away.

  “Dick,” Angel said gravely. “You look pretty much about the way I feel.”

  “Mister Angel,” Webb said, coming out of his reverie. “You’re no oil painting yourself.”

  He was right. Angel’s scalp was torn and bloody behind his ear, where the wicked force of Big Ed Fischer’s ripping six-gun barrel had hit it. His shirt collar was stiff and matted with dried blood, while his face was dusty and scratched. The front of his body was relatively clean, but from hip to shoulder at the back his clothes were covered with street dirt and horse droppings, rubbed and torn against his shoulder blades.

  “Looks like we were dragged in here by the feet,” Angel commented. “You feeling all right?”

  “I guess so,” Dick Webb said doubtfully.

  “You see who it was hit us ?”

  “Yeah,” Dick said. “Big Ed. Big Ed Fischer. The oldest of the Fischer boys. You met the youngest one in the Silver King.”

  “And took no pleasure from it,” Angel said. “How come this town is so buffaloed, kid?”

  “That’s the Fischers too,” Webb told him.

  “Tell me,” suggested Angel, leaning back against the wall. He winced as his skinned shoulders touched the raw surface of the adobe.

  “Not much to tell,” Webb shrugged. “There are three of them. Ed, Mike, and Joe. Ed’s the oldest, the biggest, and the meanest. He runs things: the ranch up in the Arabelas—the Flyin’ Fish—gives the orders. Spends a lot of his time in Santa Fe, hobnobbin’ with the politicians down there. Folks around here seem to think he might run for Governor one day.”