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

  Chapter Seven

  Willowfield sang like a bird.

  Angel identified himself to the United States marshal for Colorado, a tall, rangy man with the deep chest and sturdy legs of the mountain-born, and delivered the fat man into his custody. The marshal, whose name was John Henderson, was only too happy to assist the Justice Department by promising to keep Willowfield on ice until an escort could be sent out to take him back to Kansas City. Then Henderson commandeered the telegraph office, and stood by as Angel made his long initial report over the wires, ending it with the information that he had taken Willowfield and asking for an escort to take him east. It would be a while before a reply came through, and he spent the time talking to Willowfield, filling out the picture that the fat man had given him of the whole robbery and the men who had taken part in it.

  Willowfield was more than willing to talk. He explained how he had dreamed up the idea of ransoming the Freedom Train, how he had worked out the ideal locale to stop the train, how he had recruited the men to effect his dream. He’d found Chris Falco bodyguarding a tinhorn whose dealing was no better than it had to be. A killer, Falco was, but he’d gotten away with a self-defense plea on the two occasions when the law had been involved. Gil Curtis, whom Falco had found, was a wizard with any kind of explosive. He’d learned his trade with the UP as it blasted its way through the Rockies, but decided to put his knowledge to more practical use. Curtis had blown safes in seven different parts of the States, and nobody had ever so much as lost a finger. Hank Kuden, whose real name was Hans Kudenheim, Willowfield had met back East: a dissatisfied soldier with a genius for timetabling and planning. Kuden could reduce any operation to a series of simple instructions that even a rabble of Mongolian peasants could understand and execute. Davy Livermoor had been recruited for two reasons: first, he was a fine tracker, but second, and more important, he still had ‘respectable’ bank accounts in Kansas City, and in Sedalia, Missouri. So not only was Davy their expert guide to every good and bad trail in the endless expanse between the Missouri and the Rio Grande, he was also a means through which the ransom money, if it was marked or recorded by serial number, could be ‘laundered.’ All they would have to do to check it out was to deposit some of the money in one of Davy’s accounts, wait long enough for it to set off alarms, then send a mug in to withdraw some money. If he was taken, they would know the money was ‘hot.’ If not, they were home free.

  Angel had asked where McLennon fit in.

  ‘Ah, sir,’ Willowfield had said, as if with huge regret. ‘You choose to wound me with reminders of my own folly. I cherished that boy. Looked after him as if he were my own son. Gave him everything: the clothes on his back, the horse he rode, money to spend. You see how I am repaid for my generosity.’

  He made a gesture that encompassed all the treachery of mankind, and once again, Angel felt the small warning of disbelief touch his mind. It was all just too damned cut and dried, but he couldn’t find a flaw in it. He had checked everything.

  The messages started to come through from Washington, and not one of them had good news in it.

  ANGEL. CARE U.S. MARSHAL, DENVER, COLO. SPECIAL CREW DISPATCHED SCENE WRECK. STOP. SEARCH OF FREEDOM TRAIN REVEALS APPARENT THEFT DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE STOP IMPERATIVE QUESTION WILLOWFIELD REGARDING THIS. SQUEEZE HIM UNTIL HE SQUAWKS BUT GET ANSWERS URGENT STOP. NEED NOT TELL YOU DOCUMENT PRICELESS AND MUST UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCE BE PUT AT RISK REPEAT NO CIRCUMSTANCE STOP TELEGRAPH REPORT EARLIEST STOP ATTORNEY GENERAL

  Back, two hours later, went the reply.

  ATTORNEY GENERAL. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE. WASHINGTON D.C. WILLOWFIELD DENIES ANY KNOWLEDGE THEFT OF DOCUMENT OR ANYTHING ELSE FROM FREEDOM TRAIN STOP SAYS HIS ORDERS EXPLICITLY FORBADE ANY THEFT HISTORICAL ARTIFACTS WHICH WERE QUOTE WORTHLESS UNQUOTE STOP HE SUGGESTS AND I CONCUR THAT FALCO MIGHT HAVE DECIDED TAKE SOMETHING AS QUOTE ACE IN THE HOLE UNQUOTE STOP HAVE YOU ANYTHING IN OUR RECORDS ON FIVE MEN NAMED MY FIRST REPORT STOP ANGEL

  He waited in the express office for perhaps an hour, drinking coffee he didn’t want, before the key began to chatter again, stuttering out its coded message as if venting some kind of mechanical spite. The telegrapher scrawled the words down as fast as they came through and handed the transcript to Angel. It looked like gobbledy-gook to the telegrapher, but Angel could read it almost without effort. The Department of Justice used a very simple one-letter-up code for telegraph transmissions. In it ‘a’ became ‘b’ and ‘b’ became ‘c’; thus, the word ‘cat’ for instance was rendered ‘dbu.’ It prevented casual eyes from being privy to Department secrets. Angel read the message quickly.

  ANGEL. CARE U.S. MARSHAL, DENVER, COLO. NO RECORD YOUR MEN HERE STOP ON BASIS YOUR REPORT MAKE URGENT PRIORITY PURSUIT AND CAPTURE NOT KILLING REPEAT NOT KILLING OF ANY OR ALL OF MEN INVOLVED IN ROBBERY STOP AGAIN REPEAT DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES PUT DOCUMENT AT RISK STOP ESCORT ARRANGED ARRIVING DENVER OCTOBER THIRTEENTH STOP NOTHING TO PREVENT YOUR IMMEDIATE COMMENCEMENT PURSUIT STOP STRESS ONCE MORE PARAMOUNT IMPORTANCE RECOVERY DOCUMENT UNHARMED STOP GOOD LUCK STOP ATTORNEY GENERAL

  ‘Well, thanks,’ Angel said. ‘Thanks a lot.’

  ~*~

  It was really pretty country but he had no eyes for it. He pushed the horse hard, wanting only to get the last stage of the journey out of the way. He’d ridden a special train that Henderson had organized with the local manager of the D & RG, and run through the inky mountain night to Colorado Springs, where the engineer had slapped him on the back and wished him well as he led the roan down the slanting walkway out of the freight car and climbed into the saddle.

  ‘Did they give you any hint of which way they were planning to go?’ he’d asked Willowfield. The fat man had looked him straight in the eye and said no.

  ‘I wish to God I knew,’ he’d said fervently. ‘I really do.’

  ‘That’s bad,’ Angel said. ‘They could be heading anywhere.’ He got up to leave. There wasn’t anything left to talk to Willowfield about. He’d have to take the chance that they’d headed south, and hope he could pick up a trace of them along the road. It was a thin chance at best.

  ‘Wait,’ the fat man said.

  Angel stopped in the open doorway of the cell. The deputy, whose name was Jackman, stood with the keys in his hand, waiting to lock the door.

  ‘I remember,’ Willowfield said. His face puckered with the effort to recall the exact words he had heard. ‘Falco,’ he said. ‘Mentioned getting fresh horses. At Canon City. Is there somewhere called Canon City?’

  There was—and Angel was heading for it now. He figured he might have cut some time off their lead by commandeering the special train to the Springs. If they were planning to change horses in Canon City, they must be heading west for Durango, crossing the Sangre de Cristos mountains at Poncha Pass and dropping down the long valley to Alamosa, where they could track the Rio Grande up into the San Juans, climb up to and over Wolf Creek Pass, and head on to Durango. It was a long, tough ride and they wouldn’t be moving fast. Not for the first time, he wondered why they were making it.

  So now he moved southward along the flanks of the mountains, his eyes assailed from every direction by riotous autumnal colors. The bright, bold green of cottonwood tress, the paler gold of the aspens, the sharp lemon yellow of wild grape vines heightened by the crimson spray of Virginia creeper and the dark glossy green of laurel, all set against the shattered face of the grim granite shoulders going up and up toward the invisible summit of Pike’s Peak. Up there, fantastic jumbles of gargantuan boulders were lined and splashed with every conceivable hue: carmine, vermilion, brown, red, blue, gray, yellow, green ochre, a spectrum which would have defied duplication from the brush of a great artist—a dazzling chiaroscuro that awed the senses. As he bore toward the southwest, the scenery changed slowly. He was still climbing, imperceptibly, but gradually getting higher up to where the scenery became grimmer. Now the heavy dark blue shadows of pines lay upon the pale mountain grass, and the horse moved silently over a centuries-deep
carpet of pine needles. The mountains soared in bare and lonely beauty away and away and beyond away, a vista of such grandeur that it made the breath catch in awe, reduced the puny mind and soul of man to insignificance. By nightfall, Angel was on a curving crest that curled away toward the west, with a long open plain sloping downward from it toward a meandering creek. On the far side of the creek was an unlovely huddle of buildings scattered along a single street. One or two lights were already making squares of yellow against the darkness. Far off in the blue twilight the huge black bulk of Pike’s Peak lay like a sentient shadow against the night. Somewhere he could hear a coyote yelping. It was already very cool.

  ‘Canon City,’ he told the horse. ‘Garden spot of Colorado.’

  He gigged the roan into a trot, and the animal pricked up his ears, anticipating the warm stable, food, and water. Splashing through the shallow creek, Angel came up the slope from the ford to where the straggling street began, heading toward the biggest building he could see. He just had time to make out the words Eldorado Saloon on the lighted signboard above the porch before a blasting hail of bullets smashed from the black maw of the alley on his right.

  Chapter Eight

  He went over the side and hit the dirt.

  Through the thunder of the shots he heard a high shrieking screech that went on and on as he rolled over and over through the roiling dust toward the partial shelter of a water trough outside one of the buildings on the left hand side of the street. The roan was on its back in the dust, arching its spine upward, legs flailing as it died in agony. Angel was already coming up on one knee with a gun in his hand. There was a numbness in his left hip that he had no time to try to identify, for now three men were coming out of the alley running, silhouetted briefly against the yellow lights, their guns snapping at him.

  He heard a hoarse shout from somewhere up the street, the startled scream of a woman as he emptied his sixgun at the darker knot of movement where he calculated the running men would be, and he heard a sharp shout of sudden pain.

  Desperately he thumbed shells through the loading gate of the Colt, eyes wary as a cornered cat, listening to the fading thump of running feet. There were no more shots and for a long minute the silence was immense. He could hear the kicked-up dust sifting sibilantly back to earth. The roan was already dead, a bulky blackness in the dark street. He thought he could see a small dark huddled shape beyond the horse, but he did not move, staying hunched down, the sixgun tilted and cocked ready, watching and watching.

  There was commotion up the street and now he could see a group of men coming forward into the street from the well-lit porch of the saloon. One of them was a tall, heavily built man wearing a dark business suit with the pants tucked into high English-style riding boots. As the man strode down the street, light from a window glinted on the star pinned to the lapel of his coat. He holstered his sixgun and rose slowly from behind the water trough and, as he did, the man with the star whirled to face him, his hand coming up full of gun. Angel froze solid.

  ‘Hold it right there, sonny,’ the marshal snapped. There was a frayed edge of tension in his voice, and Angel tried very hard not to move a muscle. This middle-aged man with the drooping walrus mustache was strung up tighter than a banjo. If someone coughed he might pull the trigger of that enormous looking Navy Colt.

  ‘Andy, you git that feller’s gun!’ the marshal said. One of the men behind him sidled toward Angel. The others fanned out in a half circle.

  ‘Take it easy there, marshal,’ Angel called. ‘I’m the one got bushwhacked!’

  ‘As to that,’ the lawman retorted, ‘we’ll see. Andy, you hustle him over to my office. Two of you men bring that other feller. Easy with him, now. He ain’t dead yet by the look of him. Somebody send for the Doc.’

  The one called Andy was a short, weedy man with wispy blond hair and a weak mouth with cupid-bow lips that he licked nervously as he came up behind Angel. He wore ordinary blue denim pants and a dark shirt and he hefted the sawed-off shotgun he was holding like a man who’d love to be given an excuse to use it.

  ‘All right,’ he said sibilantly. ‘Unbuckle the gun belt. Then step away from it.’

  Angel did as he was bid. There was no percentage in bucking a man with a riot gun. Without taking his eyes off Angel, Andy scooped the belt and gun up off the ground, and gestured with the shotgun.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Jest walk on up ahead o’ me, nice an’ quiet-like.’

  ‘Listen,’ Angel said.

  ‘Walk, boy,’ Andy said, and prodded him with the shotgun.

  Angel shrugged and led the way up the street. People were spilling out of the saloons and the eating-houses. They lined the sidewalk, gawking at him as he went by, then at the group of men headed by the marshal, whose two helpers were carrying the wounded man on a makeshift stretcher. ‘Who got shot?’ they shouted.

  ‘What the hell happened down there, Ray?’ they called.

  ‘Who’s the big feller, Andy?’ they yelled.

  The marshal ignored them. He walked up the center of the littered street looking neither to the right nor to the left, and turned into the frame shack that was his office. Andy brought in Angel, and lifted his right buttock onto a corner of the marshal’s desk, covering the prisoner with the shotgun in a hostile, angry attitude. The marshal slid into his chair and regarded the prisoner with disfavor.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s hear your story.’

  ‘No story,’ Angel said. ‘Marshal—?’

  ‘Name’s Compton, son,’ the marshal said. He was not a young man, and he had the self-satisfied look of a small businessman who has done rather well for himself in an unspectacular way. Angel put his age at around fifty, and understood now the marshal’s nervous tension out in the street. Probably never expected to have to pull a gun in anger, he thought, and it came as a shock to him when he had to.

  ‘I was just riding in,’ he told the lawman. ‘I got level with the alley down the street there, and the next thing I knew my horse was gut-shot and three men were trying to kill me.’

  ‘For no particular reason, of course,’ Compton said heavily. ‘Just didn’t like the way you sat in the saddle, I suppose?’

  ‘Look, Marshal,’ Angel said patiently, ‘I was never here before in my life. Don’t know a soul in town. Listen, how about letting me see the wounded man. Maybe he can throw some light on this.’

  ‘Ain’t likely,’ Compton said. ‘He croaked halfway up the street an’ no wonder—you put three bullets through his belly.’

  ‘I was trying to stay alive,’ Angel said reasonably. ‘Can I see him?’

  ‘No hurry,’ Compton said. ‘He ain’t going no place.’

  ‘No,’ Angel said, sensing what was coming. ‘But I am.’

  ‘As to that,’ Compton said, ‘we’ll see. First you answer a few o’ my questions.’ He looked up from beneath his heavy eyebrows and put an edge on his voice. ‘An’ answer me straight, boy,’ he added. ‘I been known to keep fellers who lied to me locked up months at a time.’

  The deputy, Andy, sniggered.

  ‘Months at a time, boy,’ he parroted.

  Angel felt his temper surge and checked it before it showed. A show of temper was just what Compton wanted, so he could show his authority, kick his prisoner into the hoosegow, and forget him until he was prepared to eat dirt. No one knew Angel was here, so no one would come looking for him if he got himself thrown into Canon City’s undoubtedly unpleasant jail. He could rot in this wide spot in the road while Falco and his men got clear out of Colorado Territory. Easy, he told himself, take it easy.

  ‘Name?’ Compton asked, licking on the stub of a pencil.

  ‘Frank Angel,’ Angel replied. He had already set his mind to work on the problem of who had tried to assassinate him. The only obvious answer was Falco and his men. Except for one thing: there was no way they could have known he was coming to Canon City. Unless …

  ‘You say Angel?’ Compton said, incredulously.
r />   ‘Holy shee-hit!’ Andy added.

  ‘Angel,’ the prisoner repeated. ‘Frank Angel. And I’ve heard all the jokes about wings and haloes and heaven, Marshal.’

  ‘Angel,’ Compton repeated. ‘Well, I’ll be damned.’

  Angel’s attention wasn’t even on him; the prisoner was still busy on the problem he had set himself. There was just one way Falco and his men could have known he was coming. And if it was true …

  ‘Marshal,’ he said, urgency in his voice now. ‘Is there a telegraph office in town?’

  ‘Why, sure thing,’ Compton said, the sarcasm larding his tone. ‘Not to mention the Turkish baths an’ the Japanese massoosies an’ them two duchesses workin’ in the cathouse.’

  ‘Haw, haw, haw,’ Andy said, without an ounce of humor in his voice.

  ‘Listen, Marshal, I’m serious,’ Angel said.

  ‘Me, too, sonny,’ Compton said. ‘Now what part o’ the country you from? You sure as hell ain’t from ’round here.’

  ‘Washington,’ Angel said. Without thinking he reached for the secret pocket in his belt and as he did so Andy came off the corner of the desk in a fast, ugly movement, jamming the wicked double mouth of the shotgun into Angel’s belly hard enough to make his teeth click.

  ‘You better take it right easy, sonny,’ Compton said, leaning back in his chair. ‘Or Andy thar’s liable to blow you forty ways to Sunday.’

  ‘Bet your ass!’ hissed the deputy.

  ‘Listen,’ Angel said, looking past Andy at the marshal. ‘In my belt is a badge. I want to show it to you.’

  ‘Let him get his badge, Andy,’ the marshal said. Reluctantly, the deputy eased back on the pressure, and Angel took out the silver badge. It made a bright, ringing sound as he tossed it on to the marshal’s desk. Compton looked at the screaming eagle, the circular seal with the words Department of Justice, and pushed it away with one finger, unimpressed.