Warn Angel! (A Frank Angel Western--Book 9) (14 page)

McLennon had had plenty of time
to line up the shot and even in this strange, bright light, there
was no way he could have blown it. Fired from no more than forty
yards, the .44/40 carbine slug smashed Angel’s bay down sideward in
a kicking welter of dying reflexes, spilling the rider out of the
saddle to hit the icy ground with enough force to knock the wind
out of him. He automatically kicked his feet out of the stirrups
and rolled clear of the horse. The animal was thrashing in its
death throes, its bright blood staining the virgin whiteness of the
snow. Angel kept rolling, and then came up on one knee, hearing the
whisper of slugs as the flat hard smack of the guns opened up, the
dull
pock
as they smashed into the snow, his eyes searching for
cover, any cover. There wasn’t any: they’d picked a spot where the
nearest boulder was fifty yards away, where he was out in a wide
open space of flat clean snow, as easy to see as a spider on a
whitewashed wall. Through the keening wind, be heard the
flat
blat
of a carbine, felt the slow tug of a bullet that ripped
through his heavy blanket coat as if it were paper, turning him
slightly off balance for a moment. Again and again the carbines
banged, and he was moving, rolling, weaving, ducking, running,
covered in snow, breath already ragged as the seeking slugs whipped
gouts of powder snow glinting into the air. It sifted down on him
as he slid to a heaving stop, orienting himself for the last
nothing-to-lose dash. He knew that it was a miracle he hadn’t
already been cut down, that only the strange flat light was saving
him. He came up off his knees and ran now, not dodging anymore,
dismissing from his mind any fear of being hit, forgetting
everything except his one single, supreme effort to reach the big
boulder perhaps a hundred feet away. He had no thought of anything
except his intention and his destination. He ran like the wind and
he was ten yards from safety when Curtis stepped out from behind
the rock toward which he was running and levered the action of the
Winchester, smiling a smile that would have made Satan
envious.

‘
Hello, sucker,’ he said, and pulled
the trigger.

~*~

On the night of October 12, the night that
Frank Angel watched the storm from his window in Buena Vista,
George Willowfield broke jail. In doing so he not only killed John
Henderson’s deputy Steve Jackman, not only stole a wagon and team
worth—according to its aggrieved owner—a good thousand dollars, but
also changed the scenario that he had given Falco out of all
recognition.

Willowfield was many things, not all of them
either nice or acceptable in decent society, but one of the things
he was not was a fool. While he had languished in jail, he had
considered and reconsidered every aspect of the triple cross he had
so carefully planned. The holdup of the Freedom Train had been
simple and uncomplicated. The robbery of the Special carrying the
ransom equally straight forward. The setting of the hound upon the
hares, and the security of knowing whichever killed which, it would
make not one thin dime’s worth of difference to George Montefiore
Willowfield.

The planned ambush of himself and his escort
somewhere above Fort Morgan would not take place, even if Falco and
the others made it there on schedule, for one very simple reason:
Willowfield would not be going under escort back to Julesburg. To
repeat: he was not a fool. He knew exactly what kind of man Chris
Falco was, and had no intention of delivering himself like a lamb
to Falco’s slaughter. By the time Falco discovered he had been
duped—if he ever discovered it—Willowfield would have recovered the
ransom money and disappeared to New Orleans—perhaps even Europe. He
had always wanted to visit the Uffizi in Florence. He allowed
himself the faintest, the very faintest touch of regret over Buddy,
who had been a most winning young man, but he shrugged it away. The
world was full of winning young men like Buddy and they were all
drawn ineluctably by the sweet green smell of money. He smiled
fatly in the silence of his cell.

He’d been a model prisoner.
Henderson and his men had thoroughly enjoyed the fat man’s
eye-openers about the places he had been, the
souks
of the Middle East, the Casbah in
Algiers, the steamy Marseille waterfront, the jeweled waters of
Positano, the gilded mansions of the rich back East—even if they
weren’t true, they made a damned pleasant change from talk of
horses, crops, and weather. Nobody enjoyed them more than Deputy
Steve Jackman, who had asked for and gotten permission to play
chess with the fat man. There was no danger of Willowfield making a
break: even Henderson realized the truth of that. Why, the man
couldn’t get four blocks before he’d fall down, winded, beached
like some great soft whale. Willowfield was no damned trouble at
all, not even complaining about the rotten food, and Henderson knew
just how lousy it was. What he didn’t know was how persuasive the
fat man’s honeyed tongue could be, and what he simply couldn’t know
was exactly how coldblooded Willowfield actually was. One day
they’d joked about the date the escort was due to arrive: October
thirteenth.

‘
Not your lucky day, Colonel,’
Henderson had said. Everyone called the fat man ‘Colonel.’ It
seemed suitable, somehow.

‘
Well, sir,’ Willowfield had breathed.
‘There are those, you know, who would tell you that luck, or
chance, or whatever you care to call it, is worth about what a cat
can lick off its backside. It is the man who relies on himself, and
not on luck, who makes his mark on the world. Don’t you agree,
sir?’

Henderson had laughingly agreed, and he was
to recall that remark much later, and remember too that the fat man
had not been laughing. He put it out of his mind and went about his
chores. At eight, Jackman took over the night swing, and Henderson
walked down Larimer Street to the Denver Queen for a couple of
drinks before he turned in for the night.

Nobody ever found out where Willowfield had
gotten the knife. It was surmised that he must have had it on him
someplace all the time, although Marshal Henderson, whose
efficiency and reputation were at stake, stoutly refused to accept
that Willowfield could have concealed a knife from his search. Not
that it made any damned odds at all: Steve Jackman was just as
dead. From the way they found the place, they figured that what
must have happened was that Jackman had set up the chessboard—the
pieces were scattered all over the floor—and that somehow,
incredibly, Willowfield had persuaded Steve to open up the cell
door. As soon as he did, Willowfield had slid about nine inches of
steel between Jackman’s ribs as callously and professionally as a
paid ladrone.

Old Enoch Gordon’s wagon and team were
hitched outside a store next to the ‘Floradora’ about six blocks
down and two across from the jail. Enoch was inside cutting the
dust, and when he came out and found his transportation missing,
the manure hit the fan. Someone said later that he’d seen a hell of
a fat guy climbing into the wagon. He remembered it especially
because of the way the springs had squeezed down almost flat with
the man’s weight, and how the horses had thrown themselves against
their collars to get rolling. The man said he had stood and watched
as Willowfield tooled the rig north along Larimer, heading—he
supposed—for the Fort Collins road, and due north toward Cheyenne.
It had never occurred to him that Willowfield was not only a
fugitive, but also a thief, and by the time Enoch Gordon came out
of the saloon and raised a yell, Willowfield had the kind of start
that no posse was going to make up. Henderson went through the
motions, but his heart wasn’t in it. Willowfield might have headed
anywhere, north, south, east, west or any point of the compass in
between. There wasn’t a cat in hell’s chance of catching him. The
fat man was free as a bird.

Anyone else would have been dead.

When Angel saw Gil Curtis step out from
behind the sheltering rock, the carbine leveled at his hip, he
instinctively changed direction, doing the only thing he was able
to do in the instant of time he had before the flame blossomed from
the muzzle of the Winchester. There was precious damned hope that
Curtis would miss, but that was no reason at all to stand there and
let him make a killing shot. Angel went down and forward in the
snow and as he did so, he corkscrewed his body to the right,
kicking up a flurry of snow with his legs to try to confuse
Curtis’s aim.

The bullet smacked him as he rolled,
dragging a shout of pain from him as it burned a wicked furrow five
inches long across his bunched back muscle. Now, as Curtis levered
the action of the Winchester, he had a second, not more, and in
that second he had thrown the knife. A long time back, when he had
first started working for the Justice Department, Angel had drawn
up a set of requirements: he wanted weapons that fitted a
particular specification. First, a man should be able to kill with
them. Second, they should not be firearms. Third, they should be as
difficult for a man looking for weapons to find as possible, and
fourth, they should not be heavy. He had spent hours and hours with
the Armorer in his workshop below ground on the Tenth Street side
of the department building. Among the fruits of their discussions
had been a specially made pair of boots of the type called
‘mule-ears’—on account of the pull-on tabs stitched to their
sides—whose outer and inner leather was separated slightly on the
exterior side. Into the aperture the Armorer had stitched special
sheaths. Inside those sheaths nestled twin flat-bladed Solingen
steel throwing knives honed to razor sharpness. It was one of these
knives that now glinted dully in the graying light and thudded into
Curtis’ body, just below the breastbone. Curtis’ eyes bulged
outward. His hands abandoned the half-cocked Winchester and moved,
hesitantly, toward the thing in his chest. His hands plucked
halfheartedly at the quivering rubber-covered shaft of the knife,
and his head sank slowly, as if the man was afraid to confront
himself with visual confirmation of the weapon, afraid to let the
brain receive the message that the rigid sliver of steel had
already sliced his heart open.

His eyes came up to look at Frank Angel, and
then a dreadful thick gout of blood gushed from his sagging mouth
and he went down face first into the snow, as silent as some unseen
tree in some undiscovered forest. Angel had scooped up the
Winchester and was behind the rock before Curtis had even stopped
twitching. He wasted no time on the fallen man: from the moment he
had released his hold on the knife, Angel had known that Curtis was
a dead man. Eyes narrowed, he tried now to see across the glooming
gray space to the rocks on the far side of the trail from which the
shot which had killed the bay had come. Falco? McLennon? Which of
them was over there? Were both of them over there? And where were
the horses?

He took stock of his situation. Curtis’s
bullet had cut across his back, and he could feel the sticky warmth
of congealing blood, but there was no way he could check how bad
the wound was. The fact that he could move both arms without
discomfort was an indication that it wasn’t serious, although that
was whistling past the graveyard. He had a rifle and a sixgun, and
enough ammunition. There was food in the saddlebags of his dead
horse. If the weather held, he could probably last out. The sky was
still clear, although it was dull now, and there was a soft gray
mistiness in the lower valley. He was behind a huge rock, perhaps
twenty feet high and nearly twice as many wide. It stood like a
sentinel on the right hand side of the almost-invisible trail he
had been following. Up the trail, to Angel’s right, and perhaps
three hundred yards away, another even larger one loomed. To the
left lay the twin buttes guarding the entrance to the pass through
which he had come. Behind him, the snow-covered open ground rose
sharply to the face of a cliff striated with snow and jagged lines.
In front of him was the bare expanse of snow on which the dead bay
lay, its body already lightly frosted with windblown snow. Beyond
it, about another fifty yards away, was a huddle of huge boulders
like the one Angel was using for shelter. Two great chunks of stone
were in the center, and three smaller ones were scattered nearby.
One of them at least had to be there, he thought; that was where
the shot that killed the horse came from. The other? Up the trail,
behind the big rock?

‘
Falco!’ he yelled. The effort of
shouting sent a lightning-flash of pain down the wound in his back.
He worked his right arm. No stiffness. Yet, he reminded
himself.

‘
Falco!’ he shouted again.

His voice bounced around the open space, but
neither sound nor movement greeted it. He looked up at the sky. The
gray dullness was softening, turning pearly. Visibility was
decreasing rapidly. He gauged the distances: the rocks opposite
were maybe a hundred and fifty yards away. The big rock up the
trail, perhaps twice that. He gave himself a moment, knowing what
he had to do now.

To use the time, he slid the
knife out of Curtis’ body and methodically cleaned it, not thinking
about what he was doing, emptying his mind of reaction or regret.
His breathing rate slowed, softened, as he concentrated upon the
very center of himself, the
chi
that Kee Lai had taught him. When he was quite
ready, he stepped out into the open, crouched and wary, and moved
across the whiteness toward the rocks opposite.

Buddy McLennon saw Angel come
out from behind the rock on the far side of the trail and couldn’t
believe his eyes. Angel looked like some strange bug against the
changing whitenesses, and McLennon cuddled the stock of his carbine
to his cheek, taking plenty of time to pick up the target squarely
in the notched backsight. Slow, he told himself, easy, watching the
little black bug that was Angel. Squeeze,
squeeze.
The Winchester bucked and the moaning
wind whipped away the smoke in a flurry of fine snow. The little
black bug was still moving, coming nearer. How the hell could he
have missed? McLennon cursed. He lined up the carbine again,
wondering why Falco didn’t take a poke at Angel from where he was
up the trail, and pulled off another shot at the weaving, dodging
figure. Again he missed, and he fired twice more in rapid
succession as the icy fingers of panic touched his heart. Was the
man unkillable? The flurry of shots had told the dodging Angel what
he wanted to know. The one behind the rock
was McLennon. Falco would have known
after the first shot that the light, which was deteriorating at a
very rapid rate, was making him miss. The fact that Falco had not
pitched in with a try for the target Angel had made of himself
showed that Falco knew only too well that this strange light would
foreshorten distance to such an extent that accurate long-range
shooting would be difficult for a cool-headed expert, and nearly
hopeless for anyone who panicked as easily as the kid. Short range,
however, was something else again. He kept moving, and prayed that
McLennon didn’t know about that either.