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

  He cursed himself for not having been on his guard, for now he was not sure from which direction the shot had come. Was the ambusher above and ahead of him? Or above and behind?

  He moved out fast from the rock overhang, pumping the lever of the Winchester as he ran down the trail and around the second bend and skidded into a turning fall, the rifle barrel coming up ready to fire at anything behind him.

  Nothing. He eased himself upright, skirting the corner of the boulder which formed the shoulder of the bend he had just come around. As he delicately edged forward, his rifle ready for rapid fire, his eyes scanned the faceless jumble of rock and cliff above and around him.

  Nothing.

  He tried to put himself into the shoes of the ambusher. What would he do? Sit tight. No way his prey could see him until he moved or fired. Yet he could probably see Angel clean and clear the whole time. He could wait.

  If he wanted to kill me, Angel thought.

  But if he only wanted to kill Briggs?

  Then he’d fade back into the screening timber, moving softly and without haste until he came to wherever he had tied his horse. And he would be gone without Angel ever knowing where he’d been.

  If.

  Why just Briggs?

  There could only be one reason: to cut the connection between him and Angel. Alone, Angel would not know Lawrence, would not be able to convince either him or Hainin that he had been Briggs’s rescuer, helper, and partner. Kind of a rough justice, Angel thought wryly. I never was any of those, anyway. Then the second part of the equation occurred to him, and he knew that Briggs had died for another reason, just as he knew with reasonable certainty what he would discover in El Rito.

  Lawrence had not had the money, but he had known where Hainin was. So Briggs and Lawrence had become liabilities. And no doubt Jamesie Lawrence was as dead as Briggs, poor Briggs who would never fondle the flesh of the San Francisco whores he had so coveted, who instead lay broken and dead with half of his head gone, at the bottom of a brush-choked canyon a hundred miles from nowhere.

  For some obscure reason, the thought angered him. He stepped out into the open, throwing his head back challenging whoever was out there.

  ‘Come on!’ he shouted. ‘Let me see your face!’

  The echoes bounced back off the mountainside, but nothing happened. Nothing moved. Angel shook his head, angry with himself, surprised at his folly. Dick Briggs had been a two-bit paid bandit, and there was no point in grieving for him.

  He caught up with his horse and moved on down into El Rito, not looking once into the shadowed gully where Briggs would lie until coyotes and the buzzards arrived.

  Chapter Ten

  El Rito wasn’t much more than a wide place in the trail.

  A huddle of unlovely adobes, maybe a dozen in all, scattered the crossroads. The people were all Mexicans, and women with opaque eyes holding impassive babies watched as he rode past the street, then came down into the trail behind him, joining the small children who gathered around his horse and looked up at him with shamelessly hostile curiosity. Not many Anglos came up here, Angel figured, and those who did were not welcome.

  Especially now, he amended his thoughts. Especially now.

  He did not need to ask for the house of Abrana Gutierrez, because it was plain that it was the two-room adobe at the end of the street, where a small crowd was gathered. Immobile and offering no help, the men, women, and children all watched the sobbing woman in the doorway, cradling in her arms the bloody head of a man.

  Jamesie Lawrence.

  Angel swung down from the saddle and pushed his way through the knot of people. They made way for him sullenly, unwillingly, resentful of his intrusion. The woman looked up at him with streaming eyes. Her face was swollen, knotted with grief, and he detested himself for what he had to do.

  ‘Abrana?’ he asked. ‘Abrana Gutierrez?’

  ‘Si,’ she nodded, her voice broken and old. ‘Si.’

  ‘Soy Ricardo Briggs, un amigo de Jaime,’ he told her, biting on the lie that he was either a friend of the dead man or Dick Briggs in person.

  ‘Yes,’ she said in Spanish. ‘Much good it will do him.’

  ‘Will you tell me what happened?’

  ‘I will tell you later,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow. Go away now. Come back tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes,’ an old woman standing to one side said. ‘Go away. Come back tomorrow. Can’t you leave us alone, you murderers?’

  There was a mutter of angry agreement from the men.

  ‘Abrana,’ Angel said gently, stooping beside the weeping woman. ‘Let me help you. He’s dead. There’s nothing more you can do for him.’

  She lifted her face to him again and saw something in his eyes, something that made her nod wordlessly and release the dead man’s cradled head. Jamesie Lawrence’s sightless eyes stared up at the unheeding sky. He had been shot at point-blank range through the heart, Angel noted almost dispassionately; there were powder burns on the woolen shirt, and the bullet hole was sharp and black-edged. Then a coup de grace in the back of the head. The Easterner was a professional, who took no chances, Angel thought. No chances at all.

  He motioned to one of the Mexicans, taking hold of Lawrence’s body beneath the arms. The man reluctantly took Lawrence’s feet, and they carried him into the bedroom and put him on the bed. Angel straightened up and thanked the Mexican, who crossed himself and left the room without speaking. The place was a shambles. Cupboards had been torn open, shelves had been ripped off the walls, and the mattress itself was slashed and cut in several places. Each piece of furniture looked as if it had been savagely, methodically attacked, broken, and discarded. He went into the other room, where if anything the wreckage was worse. Broken china strewed the floor, crunching beneath his feet as he entered. Abrana Gutierrez sat in a wooden chair, weeping softly, her face cradled in her hands.

  ‘Tell me what happened,’ he asked her. ‘Maybe I can help.’

  ‘You can bring him back to life, perhaps?’ she asked bitterly. ‘You can give me back my man?’

  ‘Tell me,’ he said again. ‘Tell me who did this.’

  ‘I do not know,’ she confessed. ‘Jaime ... we were in the fields. There was much work to do. Corn to mill. We came back to the house, and Jaime went in. The man must have been waiting inside. I heard them talking. Then they started to argue, and I heard Jaime shouting the words ‘cheat’ and ‘liar.’ Then the other man said, ‘Where is he?’ and Jaime told him to go to hell. They started to fight and I ran in. The man reached into his pocket, here—’ She indicated her left hip, ‘—and there was a gun. He shot. He shot …’ Her voice broke and she started sobbing again.

  Angel let her cry. If she’d seen Jamesie Lawrence shot that close, it would be many years before she forgot it, and it was better that she weep and weep and weep than that she started to think about what it might have felt like for him, smashed backward against the adobe wall with his heart literally blown apart.

  ‘Tell me about the man,’ he said, after a while.

  ‘A big man,’ she said, wiping her eyes. ‘Almost as big as you. Perhaps the same. I could not see his face very well. Cruel, a sharp face. He wore black clothes. A cape, like a matador.’

  ‘You see what color his eyes were, or his hair? Anything like that?’

  ‘No, señor. After he – when I saw Jaime fall, I ran at this man with my hands to kill him. He hit me hard with something, here—’ She turned her head, and he saw the dark bruise under the hairline above her right ear. ‘When I woke up, he was gone. And the house was like this.’

  ‘Do you know why he came here, Abrana?’

  ‘Si,’ she nodded dully. ‘The money. It was the money, no?’

  Angel nodded. ‘It was the money.’

  ‘I told them to send it back. It was too much. That much money is alive, it is evil, I said. It can destroy you. Pedro was here. He laughed.’

  ‘You mean Pete Hainin?’

  ‘Si, she answered.

&
nbsp; ‘You know where he is now?’

  Her eyes went opaque.

  ‘You do know,’ Angel said. ‘Tell me, then, if you will not say where he is – did Jamesie know?’ She nodded.

  ‘Did he have it written down someplace?’

  Her eyes flickered involuntarily toward the mantel and widened as she realized something, She hesitated for a moment, then rose, moving swiftly across the room. She rummaged in the debris on the floor and finally found, a splintered cigar box. Its lid hung loose. It was empty.

  ‘He has it,’ she said, defeat in her voice.

  Then it all came out. Lawrence and Hainin had obviously decided to play it safe once they knew for sure that Dick Briggs wouldn’t be joining them. They had put the money in a locked suitcase and checked it aboard a train out of Santa Fe. The suitcase would be held at the depot in Trinidad for collection. Then they had ceremonially divided the claim check into two halves. Hainin had taken one half, Jamesie Lawrence the other. They had cut across the printed number on the check so that one half was useless without its mate. Then Hainin had gone, leaving his whereabouts scribbled on the back of Lawrence’s half of the claim check.

  ‘A hotel,’ Abrana Gutierrez said. ‘In Santa Fe. The name … the name …?’

  Angel told her the names of three he knew, but it was none of those.

  ‘It was an unusual name,’ she said. ‘It sounded like what Anglos say, good day, how are you?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he told her. ‘Abrana, I have to try to get to Pete Hainin before the man who was here does, or he will kill him. You understand this?’

  ‘Si,’ she said, her voice that of a woman who has been told many lies. No longer young, no longer pretty, Abrana Gutierrez had lost her whole world when Jamesie Lawrence had put up a fight for his one hope to make it into the big money. The easterner wasn’t the kind you could back off with hard talk. And he had a damned fine head start to Santa Fe that Angel would be very lucky to reduce. He glanced out of the little window. The sky was a dirty gray above the mountains, and there was a fresh wind springing up.

  ‘Abrana, I must go,’ he said. ‘But I would wish to bury Jamesie properly. And to care for you as well as I may. This is the gift of a friend. You will honor me by accepting it.’

  He held out the bundle of notes which he’d picked up back at the La Fonda, and she looked at them and then into his eyes and then back at the money.

  ‘Take it,’ he said, thrusting it into her hand. He went out of the house and beneath the hating glances of the people standing outside, crossed the street to his horse. Then Abrana Gutierrez came to the door. ‘Briggs!’ she shouted.

  For a moment he failed to react, and then he turned.

  ‘Helloes,’ she said. ‘That was it – helloes.’

  He lifted a hand; Herlow’s was a ratbag hotel on San Francisco Street – the kind of place you stayed in when your money was really tight. It figured Hainin would be somewhere like that. He only hoped he had half a chance of getting there before the Easterner did.

  He rode out of El Rito in a silence you could touch.

  Chapter Eleven

  Burro Alley, they called it, a thoroughfare of hock-deep dust and ramshackle one-story adobes, which were dilapidated and run-down. There were mules tethered everywhere: most of the freighting outfits had some kind of an office on Burro Alley, hence its nickname. As his horse picked its way through the litter, discarded tin cans, rain-sodden copies of the New Mexican, and the broken wooden crates tossed out of the nearest window and left to rot where they fell, the sun broke through the heavy cloud on the horizon and Angel felt the warmth of a copper sun. It was still cool – the Royal City of the Holy Faith of St Francis of Assisi was built on a plateau of the Sangre de Cristos, a good seven thousand feet above sea level. But now the gray storm clouds, which had threatened to burst since leaving El Rito, were sliding off to the east, leaving the sky a deep cerulean blue. The streets gave off the dank odor of evaporating rainwater, a visible moisture rising from the pitted, ordured dust. A slouching man came out of the door of a cantina, and the sour smell of stale liquor spread in the humid air. La Paloma, the place was called. Then another cantina, Cielo Azul, and another, La Golondrina. There were shuttered windows on many of the huddled adobes, but the doors were open. Inside he could see the women yawning. Burro Alley was a place of the night, not fit to be seen by day.

  He turned south between two of the crack-faced adobes and came out onto San Francisco Street. He saw the sign almost immediately: ‘P. F. HERLOW – ROOMS DAILY OR WEEKLY RATES.’ He slid off his horse outside and gratefully stretched his cramped legs. It had been a long ride.

  It was dark and cool inside the rambling adobe. There was a rough deal counter on one side of the doorway built across what had perhaps been an alcove. A corridor lay straight ahead, curtained off. Angel could see the doors of rooms on each side of it.

  The man at the counter watched him with unabashed curiosity. He was a thick-faced, square-jawed man with the shrewd eyes of a pimp. He spoke with a German accent, rasping a reflective thumb across a three day stubble when he heard the name of the person Angel was asking for.

  ‘Hainin, Hainin,’ he said, aloud. ‘Dot’s his name?’

  ‘Come on,’ Angel said. ‘I don’t have all day.’

  ‘Hainin,’ the man said again, reflectively.

  Angel didn’t have time to waste, and he lost his temper. He grabbed the front of the man’s shirt and hauled him half over the counter. ‘What room is he in, damn you?’

  Bug-eyed and astonished, the clerk wriggled and struggled in vain against Angel’s grip. ‘Zeven,’ he gasped. ‘Zeven.’

  Angel let him go, and the man’s boots thumped back on the packed, earthen floor.

  He was slapping the tatty curtain aside and going into the hallway as the man called, ‘Ze ozzer man said don’t—’

  Angel wheeled around and came back to the desk. ‘Other man?’ he rasped. ‘What other man?’

  ‘Ze ozzer American,’ faltered the man behind the counter. ‘He came earlier. Iss still zere, I sink.’

  Angel slid the gun from his holster, and the man’s eyes bugged again. He looked as if he expected the gun in Angel’s hand to attack him on its own.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Angel asked.

  ‘Herlow,’ the man told him. ‘Peter Herlow. This my place.’

  ‘All right, Herlow,’ Angel said tersely. ‘Here’s what you do. Run as if your life depended on it. Get the sheriff or the marshal. Tell them there’s been a murder here.’

  ‘Murder?’ Herlow managed. ‘Here?’

  ‘Go on,’ Angel said. ‘Get going!’

  Herlow looked at Angel’s face, and what he saw seemed to convince him that the most sensible place he could be was outside his own hotel and on his way to the sheriff. This cold-eyed American who spoke of murder didn’t give the impression of being a man who’d joke about such things. He lifted the hinged counter uneasily and slid beneath it, his eyes never leaving Angel’s revolver. Then he nodded nervously once, twice and bolted for the doorway.

  Angel slid cat-footed into the hallway, moving along the rush matting on light feet until he came to the door with a rough figure seven painted on it. Edging up close to the wall, he cocked his ears for any sound coming from the room. Nothing but silence and the far-off sound of a woman laughing in another house down the street.

  He kicked the door open and went in on one knee, the Colt cocked and only his thumb holding the hammer back.

  The place was empty, featureless. A typical adobe cell: a sagging bed with a mud-colored blanket; a commode beside it with a sooty-chimneyed oil lamp standing on top; a cupboard in the corner of the room built into the wall, its green door slightly ajar. Nothing else.

  He was across the room in two strides. He pulled the cupboard door open. Hainin was jammed inside, his head between his knees, his arms at his sides, in the position an exhausted runner sometimes takes when he falls out of a grueling race. Hainin had fa
llen out of the most grueling race of all.

  Grunting with exertion, Angel manhandled the body out of the cupboard and managed to sling the dead robber face downward on the protesting bed. There was blood on Angel’s hands, and he wiped them clean on the dead man’s shirt, swiftly checking Hainin’s pockets, knowing he would find nothing.

  He turned the man over. Hainin’s face still bore an expression of faint surprise, as though he had not been quite prepared for death. He had been killed professionally, Angel noted; there was only the one thick-lipped knife wound just to the right of and below the sternum. A long-bladed knife would have slid into Hainin’s heart as smoothly as if oiled, its wicked inner rigidity razoring the astonished heart to instant silence. Hainin hadn’t even bled a lot, although there was a thick coagulating puddle on the floor of the cupboard.

  Angel turned quickly and checked the drawer of the commode – an empty Durham sack, some matches, an oilskin wallet containing money, about thirty dollars, and a photograph of a long-haired woman in a bell-shaped dress, standing with one hand resting on the arm of a sofa. The legend below the photograph read ‘Gainsborough Studios, El Paso.’ Angel looked under the bed and found an army duffle bag with Hainin’s clothes clumsily stuffed into it – Hainin’s killer had obviously checked that. Something gleamed. He stretched beneath the bed, and his fingers touched metal. It was a straight-bladed dirk, what they called a Mexican knife. The blade was seven inches long and as sharp as a razor. Around the hilt were the sticky traces of Hainin’s blood. Angel stood with it in his hand, knowing it would tell him nothing – you could buy a knife like this in any hardware store in the southwest for a couple of dollars. With a gesture of disgust he hefted the knife and threw it down, driving its point deep into the top of the commode. The knife spanged shivering into the wood. It was still quivering when the deep voice at the door told Angel to stand very, very still.