Warn Angel! (A Frank Angel Western--Book 9) Read online

  So schedules were altered, switches thrown, trains diverted, stations closed, passengers discommoded, and a large number of Union Pacific personnel given unpleasant tasks at unholy hours in uncomfortable places. There were curses and complaints, there were threats and brandished fists, and later there were a couple of hundred very irate letters. But the train went through. The two Justice Department men got to Council Bluffs on time, and ten minutes after their arrival, the Special shunted out of the maze of yards, across the river, and away down the line on the start of its six hundred mile run toward the far mountains.

  At Frank Angel’s request, the Union Pacific had ferried Pat O’Connor eastward to meet their train, and the engineer, complaining every mile of the way at being taken away from his responsibilities, answered their questions as the Special bucketed down the line toward Cheyenne.

  ‘Sure, it’d be hard to say how many men he had,’ O’Connor said, replying to one of Bob Little’s questions. ‘I never seen more than four or five. How many he had up on the top of the Cut, I’d only be able to guess.’

  ‘Did you hear any names used?’ Angel asked him.

  ‘Never a one,’ O’Connor said. ‘They weren’t much on talking.’

  He surveyed his inquisitors with wary suspicion. He’d heard that the Justice Department was sending out two of its men with the ransom for the Freedom Train—that much was already common railroad gossip. If you wanted the truth of it, it was also common railroad gossip that the Justice Department was off its head: what was needed for those barefaced thieves in Sweetwater Cut was a squadron of cavalry with a Gatling gun. Sending two men, however capable-looking they might be, was another indication that politicians back east had no real conception of conditions out west, or just how tough a gang of cold-blooded killers like Willowfield’s bunch could be.

  This Angel, now, O’Connor thought. (Angel! That was a name for a fighting man, b’God!) Tall, he was, with eyes that would make a man think twice about making any jokes on the subject of angels. Broad in the shoulders and narrow at the hip, Angel had the contained, capable look of a trained athlete. He wore a dark blue shirt, corduroy pants tucked into the tops of mule-ear boots that, even if they were well kept, had seen better days. A cord coat in the same brown as the pants, a snug-fitting holster with a Frontier Colt. Face tanned, the cheekbones high enough to give Angel’s face an angular look. Hair streaked, sun-bleached blond, cut fashionably long but not ostentatiously long like the self-styled frontiersmen O’Connor had seen strutting around the squares of midwestern cities, the type who got all their verisimilitude from dime novels. Angel looked like he might be some sort of engineer, a man who worked outdoors but not with his hands. The other one, Little, had the same kind of look. Except that where Angel spoke with a soft, clear drawl, Little’s voice was slurred with the treacly vowels of the South. O’Connor, prideful of his ability to assess a man from his looks, tabbed Bob Little as one of those men who do well in all sorts of sport, who make the school or college athletic team, whose big, beefy handsomeness inspires hero-worship in all the other kids, and long sighs among the young ladies. The type was peculiarly American: they all had the same regular white teeth, the same ready boyish smile, the same ambling amiability. They usually ended up, O’Connor thought, with a small man’s satisfaction, with the same hanging gut, the same false-hearty slap-on-the-back lifestyle, and the same sweet, small shrewish wife. Little didn’t look like he was that far down the road yet, but he had all the outward appearances of the all-American boy.

  O’Connor was about as wrong as a man could get.

  Bob Little was, in fact, one of the three special investigators working for the Justice Department in whom the attorney general reposed complete trust. His amiable exterior concealed reflexes like a cobra’s and he had a brilliant mind. He spoke four languages, was a champion swimmer, and like Frank Angel, he was used to being sent into trouble spots without back-up and often without even a briefing, his instructions brutally simple: clean it up.

  There was a famous story about the Justice Department’s investigators (later appropriated by the Texas Rangers) originating at a time when the attorney general had sent one of his men down to Lincoln county in New Mexico, where all the signs pointed to the outbreak of a civil war between the Anglos and the Spanish-American population. Later to be known as the Harrell War, it was, in 1873, just another of those headaches that frequently landed on the big desk in the echoing old building on Pennsylvania Avenue—the headquarters of the Department of Justice. On the documentation had been the presidential squiggle which meant: take care of this.

  The attorney general had done what he always did: sent one of his special investigators down to the New Mexico Territory. He so reported to the president.

  ‘What?’ Grant had exploded. ‘You did what?’

  The attorney general repeated his statement that he’d sent one of his men down to look into the affair.

  ‘You only sent one man?’ Grant asked, aghast.

  ‘Why, yes, sir,’ the attorney general said, his eyebrows rising a centimeter higher. ‘They only have one war, don’t they?’

  Justice Department investigators were a breed apart. Their existence was not advertised, nor did the attorney general supply the General Services Administration with a detailed breakdown in his departmental budget of what the expenses listed as ‘Training of Special Staff’ actually covered. They were picked men, trained to the peak of performance by a series of courses designed to create what the attorney general had envisaged: a thinking killing-machine.

  No man who bore the title special investigator was allowed out into the field until he passed the battery of tests devised by the dour Armorer, himself one of the finest shots in the United States, a man who had forgotten more about weaponry than most others would ever learn. After him, trainees were passed along to the little Korean, Kee Lai, who taught unarmed combat and the martial arts of the Orient. He taught them how to kill with the edge of the hand, the way to find and paralyze the nervous centers of the human body, and how to survive the unexpected assassin. After that there were long hours with the man they called ‘the Indian,’ who was said to be good enough with a knife to take on armed men and come through alive. He taught them how to look after their weapons, how to heft them and throw them, how to place them hard into the human body so that no bone would deflect their thrust and they would kill the first time every time.

  There was other training, too. Survival training, tracking, fieldwork. And more cerebral pursuits: a full and thorough basic grounding in law, the taking and presentation of testimony, the composition, duties and responsibilities of grand juries, military courts-martial and much more. The attorney general had wanted thinking killing-machines. When the training was complete he had them.

  Put a gun, a knife, a club in the hands of one of these men and they could use them, better than most. Given the additional quality of intelligence and training, they also knew a much more important thing: when not to. They were taught one basic rule: survive.

  Of course, there was no way that Pat O’Connor could have known all this. To him, Frank Angel and Bob Little were a couple of well-built civil servants and if he let his impatience with these city boys show through once in awhile, it was only understandable. He explained, all over again, how the train had been held up. How Willowfield had sent him in to Cheyenne with the letter to be handed to the U.S. marshal. And how he’d been told to be sure and tell the marshal not to do anything hasty until the letter had been transmitted east.

  ‘This Willowfield,’ Little asked. ‘How does he speak?’

  ‘Jeez an’ I must have told that twenty times already,’ O’Connor said. ‘Have you boys got any idea at all how many times I’ve been asked all this?’

  ‘Tell us anyway,’ Angel said.

  ‘Jehosophat!’ O’Connor said, exasperation plain in his voice.

  ‘Son of Asa,’ Little recited. ‘King of Judah. Defeated by the Moabites, Ammonites, and Edomites about 900
B.C.’

  Pat O’Connor looked at the big man as though he had just turned into a giraffe. Little grinned.

  ‘Sure, it’s a Bible scholar yez are,’ O’Connor said, his face setting. ‘Now that’ll go well on a job like this.’

  ‘Patrick,’ Angel said gently. ‘Your prejudice is showing.’

  ‘Aye, so it is,’ O’Connor said. ‘But all the same … ’

  ‘The way of his speaking,’ Little reminded him.

  ‘I know it, I know it,’ O’Connor flared. ‘Sure an’ I’ll tell yez if ye’ll give me but a moment.’

  They gave him his moment and he used it to pull out a blackened clay pipe from the pocket of his navy-blue donkey jacket. ‘English, it was,’ he said, as he unrolled a yellow oilskin tobacco pouch and stuffed dark, oily looking shag into the bowl of the pipe.

  ‘You mean British English, Pat?’ Angel asked.

  ‘Now, then,’ O’Connor said, puffing furiously away at the pipe, which emitted great clouds of pungent smoke. ‘Is there another kind?’

  ‘An Englishman,’ Little said, thoughtfully.

  ‘Well, now and I never said that,’ O’Connor said. ‘I said the way of his speakin’ ’twas English. As if he’d maybe come from there. But I’d not swear to even that.’

  ‘Maybe English-born,’ Angel said. ‘But raised here.’

  ‘Could be,’ Little said. He asked O’Connor another question.

  ‘Me tobacco?’ O’Connor said, surprised. ‘Sure, I buy it in Kansas City. By the pound. Why?’

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ Little grinned. ‘We just wondered if someone we know gets his cigars from the same place.’

  ‘Sure as hell smells like it,’ Angel smiled back.

  O’Connor stared at them, as if finally convinced that they were quite mad. He had no way of appreciating their private joke about the attorney general’s famous cigars, and the Department story that he had them specially made from yak droppings laced with skunk-juice.

  They heard the steady thunder of the driving wheels change rhythm slightly and the lurch as they went into a long bend. There was a deep rolling continuous boom of sound from beneath them. They looked at O’Connor.

  ‘North Platte,’ he said. ‘We’re making damned good time.’

  The Justice Department men didn’t need to comment. Both of them knew this part of the country well, and knew, just as if they were looking at a map, that the UP tracks described a figure like an elongated S lying face down, Omaha to Grand Island to North Platte, where the rails crossed the wide northern fork of the Platte River—half a mile wide, and half an inch deep, as the old wagon masters had used to say—over a long wooden trestle bridge. They also knew that they were already a good two-thirds of the way to their destination. Ahead lay Ogallala and Julesburg, one or two tank towns: nothing much before Cheyenne.

  Pat O’Connor looked at the big railroad watch he’d taken from his vest pocket and nodded, yawning ostentatiously.

  ‘What time is it?’ Angel asked him.

  ‘Five,’ O’Connor said, and then again as if realizing what he had said and doubting his own good sense, ‘five a.m.’

  ‘Might get a couple of hours shut-eye,’ Angel said.

  ‘Aye,’ O’Connor said. ‘We’ll be in Cheyenne by ten. I think I’ll just get me head down awhile.’

  They were the last words he ever spoke. He hunched himself down in the hard cot rigged along the wall of the caboose, and he was still there, trying to snatch a half-sleep, when Willowfield and his men blew the Special right off the tracks about forty miles on the far side of Julesburg.

  Chapter Four

  Willowfield’s plan had been simple.

  He didn’t want the Freedom Train, nor anything in it. What could a man do with such dross—worthless souvenirs of a pointless history? No, the Freedom Train had served its purpose, and once he had secured presidential agreement that the ransom would be paid, he had abandoned it. He had recruited a band of drifters, helter-skelter rogues who knew nothing of the ransom or the other part of his plan. Once the hold-up had been effected, he had paid them off and they had dispersed. Around him Willowfield kept only the men he had picked as the core of his operation, the ones he had gathered together after he had decided to stop the Freedom Train.

  They had left fires burning on the rim of Sweetwater Cut, dummies propped up on sticks guarding the beleaguered train. The boy-soldiers had been disarmed and suitably impressed with the necessity of doing nothing which would provoke the destruction of the Freedom Train. Then, laughing among themselves, Willowfield and his men had sifted out, moving down the long timbered slopes eastward toward Julesburg. It didn’t matter anymore whether the soldiers discovered the ruse or not. There was nowhere they could go, no action they could take that would interfere with the completion of Willowfield’s plan, and he led his men eastward without haste.

  They were all good men, but not too good. He had his own reasons for wanting them to be just good enough. Willowfield was a fair judge of a man’s reactions to given stimuli, and he’d picked them on that basis: his ‘lieutenant,’ Falco, Davy Livermoor, Hank Kuden, Gil Curtis, and even Buddy McLennon. Buddy was a rather more special choice, but the rule still applied: Willowfield never let sentiment interfere with business.

  Chris Falco, the first of his recruits, he’d found guarding a tinhorn monte dealer in a Wichita deadfall, a tall, good-looking man with wings of gray hair alongside his head that made him look older, more distinguished than a paid gun had any right to look. Davy Livermoor had come up from Texas with a herd of longhorns which he’d sold to a buyer from the East for a good price. He’d joined up with Willowfield rather than go back and face the man whose herd it was and explain how he’d spent the money on Kansas City whores, lavish hotel suites, hand-cut suits, and hand-rolled cigars—a half year of riotous living that was coming to its inglorious end when Willowfield ran across him. Kuden, born Kudenheim in Stuttgart, Germany, was a former mercenary who’d emigrated to America a jump and a half ahead of the German police (who wanted to question him about a duel in which the young son of a noble Graf had died). His cropped head and scarred cheeks proclaimed his nationality, and six years in America had hardly softened the edge of his accent. He was a ruthless and unquestioning killer. Gil Curtis was one of Falco’s finds. Falco had said Curtis was tops with explosives, and if Falco vouched for Curtis then that was all right with Willowfield. After all, Falco accepted his recommendations without question. Falco even tolerated Buddy McLennon, whom Willowfield had introduced as his traveling companion. Neither he nor any of the others talked with the boy, who in turn kept apart from them. He was just there, like one of the horses. As long as Willowfield paid the freight, they reckoned, they could turn a blind eye to his private life.

  And Willowfield paid lavishly. He had learned a long time ago that in life everything had to be paid for. You paid in money, or blood, or sweat, or time; but you paid. The easiest way was money. With money you could get anything you needed out of life. When he needed information, he simply bought it. He had never encountered a man who could not be bought, one way or another. Some wanted dollars in their hands; others wanted what the dollars would buy: baubles, or women, or property. The loot, which he had salted away during his years of plundering during War, was more than enough to finance and support his contention, and to pay the small price needed to ensure the loyalty of such as Falco and the rest. He needed little himself, and that little was also easily bought.

  A lifetime study of criminals had convinced Willowfield that their most besetting fault was a lack of imagination. They simply did not think big enough. You never made any sort of a killing if you tried to pinch pennies on the setup. But if you were prepared to think on a really grand scale, there was no limit to what you could do. Thus it was that when he had first heard of the plans for the Freedom Train—a small item in a newspaper in San Francisco—he had realized, as if it had been preordained, that here was his opportunity, here the means of effecting, in one fell swo
op, a coup that would provide him with the kind of money that few people even so much as see during an entire lifetime—enough money for the rest of his life. He went about his planning with a diligence and zeal that would have exhausted a man twenty years his junior. He plotted and planned, bribed and bought, hired and stole when and as he needed. He invested all of his time, all of his not-inconsiderable intelligence, all of his abilities to learning everything there was to about the Freedom Train: its routes, its history, its composition, its personnel. Then he set about learning the various ways in which, given the appropriate stimulus, the Union Pacific Railroad could, and would, respond to an emergency of the kind he had in mind.

  Then, knowing what he knew, it became child’s play to forecast with reasonable assurance the probable arrival time of the special train which would be used to send the ransom money to Cheyenne. It was easy to establish that the money would be in the charge of two men from the Department of Justice, that one of the engineers from the Freedom Train had been sped east to join them and—no doubt—to brief them upon the robbery and its perpetrators. All exactly as he had expected. Officialdom is by definition stupid, slow moving, since its brain is a collective one. One man alone, ready to make rapid decisions and to act upon them immediately, must always be superior to officialdom, can always outwit it—since he can move faster, think faster and best of all, disappear faster. Even after he paid each of his men, he would still have enough to provide him with a good life for the remainder of his days. New Orleans, perhaps. Even Europe. He smiled his wounded smile and gave the order to destroy the Special.