Warn Angel! (A Frank Angel Western--Book 9) (17 page)

Angel eeled desperately to one side as
Falco’s thrusting fingers pawed his neck. Then Falco’s knees, with
all his weight on them, slammed into Angel’s belly, doubling him up
retching, the wind whacked out of him. Falco scrambled to his feet
and kicked the writhing man hard in the left side and drew his foot
back for another kick. Angel saw it coming and rolled first to the
right and then the left, avoiding Falco’s stomping boots. The soft
warmth of fresh-flowing blood spread beneath his clothes. His eyes
were still not properly focused but he came up on to his knees and
saw that Falco was diving for the nickel-plated Colt hanging
holstered on the wall peg, snatching it out and whirling, his eyes
as malevolent as those of a stoat loose in a rabbit hole. He was
earing back the hammer and his mouth was twisted with the lust to
kill. Angel’s knife was already in flight.

It flicked across the space
between the two men just as Falco completed his turn. It sheared
through the
flexor capri radialis
of his right arm as if that solid forearm muscle
were butter, and pinned it to the log wall like some bizarre
trophy. Falco screamed with undiluted pain, his sixgun dropping
from a hand whose controlling tendons no longer worked. His eyes
bugged as he looked at the pinned arm and then his head turned to
face Angel, but in that moment Angel had moved across the room at
Falco, his right arm drawn back, with the edge of his hand held
level like a machete. He smashed it horizontally against Falco’s
forehead, and the gray-winged head went back against the log wall
with a sound like someone hitting a fence post with a wooden
mallet. Falco’s eyes rolled up in his head and his knees
wilted.

As the man started to fall, Angel plucked
the knife clear of the wall and Falco slid off the blade and down
to the blood-spattered floor. His right arm lay askew, like a
broken wing.

Angel knelt quickly and checked Falco’s
pulse: the throb of the carotid artery was strong. He rose to his
full height, shaking his head.

‘
This “capture not kill” game’ll be
the death of me yet,’ he sighed, as he scouted around for material
to use for bandaging Falco’s arm. When he had done this, he tore up
a blanket from the bunk in the corner of the room and used it to
bind Falco’s arm to his body, and then his good arm to the ruined
one. Using the deadly ‘Chink’s knot’ which ensures strangulation if
the one so bound struggles against them, he tied Falco’s feet to
his arms to his neck.

‘
So,’ he said, at last.

He put some water on to boil and then went
across to where the iron pot that had contained the beans lay on
its side. There was still enough in it for one man. He looked
around at the rest, splattered on the table and the walls and the
floor, and grinned as he spooned what was left on to a plate. After
he had eaten, he would clean up his own wound as best he could, and
then head for Fairplay with Falco. He didn’t think the man would
give him any more trouble. Even if he tried, it would be easy
enough to handle if Falco gave off as many signals as he had before
he tried the one with the bean pot. Falco could go in the slammer
at Fairplay until someone could come out and bring him to
Leavenworth to be hung. He settled down to eat.

‘
My compliments to the chef,’ he said
to the unconscious Falco.

It had all been so childishly easy.

George Willowfield looked out of the window
of the train and smiled at the featureless prairie rushing past.
Beautiful, he thought. He turned his attention to the plush
interior of the Pullman car in which he was riding, thinking what a
fine railroad the Union Pacific was, how comfortable, and—so
important—how reliable. These Pullman sleeping cars were said to
cost $20,000 apiece, and it didn’t surprise him in the least. The
fittings and hoods and lamps and rails all looked to be
silver-plated, and the upholsteries and carpets were all first
class. The very paneling looked to be walnut, b’God. Behind this
carriage rolled an equally luxurious restaurant car in which,
earlier, Willowfield had eaten a most ample and satisfying meal.
Yes, this was the way to travel: first class all the way. He knew,
as anyone who had ever traveled by rail knew, that the emigrant
coaches would be full of noisy, dirty travelers with even noisier
and dirtier brats whom they fed at all hours of the day or night
with no regard to common decency, while great stinking Indians
smoked foul tobacco or drank rum until they passed out.

No, he thought, never again. From here on,
first class all the way for you, my dear George. He sighed with
pleasure, his fingers softly stroking the velvet carpetbag on his
lap, as if it were a living thing. He wondered what that attractive
young man he’d taken a smile with in the depot at Ogallala would
have thought had he known what was in the carpetbag, then chided
himself upon such thoughts. There would be time enough for that
when he reached his destination. He smiled again, the smile of the
fox who knows the hounds will never catch him.

The conductor came through the car, calling,
‘Next stop Cheyenne. Cheyenne in twenty-eight minutes!’

Willowfield nodded. The Union Pacific
Railroad was as reliable as ever. He looked out of the window at
the mountains like clouds on the long horizon, remembering.

He had driven the stolen wagon to the
junction of the trail south of old Fort Collins, then veered east
to follow the road that led down alongside a rushing torrent whose
name he did not know. At the point where it joined the north fork
of the Platte, he forded the bigger river and worked his way
northeasterly, using a compass he had bought in a ship’s chandler
in St. Joseph, Missouri, long before all of this had started, even
when he did not know the outcome for sure. Planning, he thought,
smiling. Everything is planning, as any good cook will tell you. He
rode well clear of settlements, stopping only at one gritty,
flea-bitten wayside cluster of shacks to buy a canvas sack from a
general store that looked as if it had just survived an
earthquake.

By the late afternoon of the following day
he was digging up the buried money in its oilskin packs, and then
to Julesburg in time to buy a ticket for the eastbound train.

He had passed the place where the train
carrying the money had been wrecked, and heard the sound of steam
engines and hammers, of men working down in the gully and he
smiled. It might have been a million years ago. He wondered briefly
who had killed whom, and whether Falco or any of them were left
alive. It mattered not a damn. They would never find him, for he
had one trick left in his bag, and he set it in motion at
Julesburg.

It was a risk, he knew, but a calculated
one. The U.S. marshal at Denver might have telegraphed the fact of
his surprise escape to his colleagues in other states, even to the
police in the big cities, certainly to the Justice Department in
Washington. It was highly unlikely that anything had sifted down to
the level of a station manager at a godforsaken hole like
Julesburg, which was hardly more than a clutter of houses. Hyar,
they said, was the California Crossing of the South Platte; over
thar, the old Pony Express station house with its outbuildings and
stables and blacksmith shop made of cedar logs; just a-down yonder
Jack Slade killed Jules Beni. They seemed proud of the place, and
Willowfield let them see the contempt of a gentleman for it, so
that they would remember him. His insistence on clean crockery and
cutlery when he drank a cup of the muddy coffee they served in the
refreshment room, and his lordly announcement of his name when he
bought his ticket, all would be remembered when questions were
asked later—as he was sure they would. The train came—on time, he
recalled with pleasure—and he stepped aboard, tipping the porter,
who carried his case into the carriage, a dollar to prompt his
memory when the time for remembering came. He tipped the man again
when he alighted from the train in Council Bluffs, making no secret
of the fact that his destination was New York. The porter wished
him a safe journey, as did the engineer Willowfield congratulated
on a punctual arrival.

The fat man then left the
station and hurried in a horse cab to the largest men’s clothing
emporium in the town, James &
Laurence, on the corner of Front and River
Streets, where he purchased a suitcase, large enough for several
suits of clothing, and then outfitted himself in the manner of a
man setting out on a long journey. Which, he reminded himself with
a smile, he undoubtedly was.

His old clothes, while still serviceable, he
no longer required, and he dropped them into a dustbin near the
railroad station, knowing that some bum would hustle them off the
moment night fell. Entering the same terminal he had quit not two
hours before, Willowfield bought himself a first class ticket for
San Francisco, and within another hour was thundering back along
the route he had so recently traversed.

On his lap lay the carpetbag with the better
part of a quarter of a million in it—his wardrobe had scarcely
dented the pile. On the rack overhead was his traveling case. In
the baggage car was his big case containing his clothes. And
nestling in his inside pocket, in an oilskin wrapper, was the
crackling parchment that half the law officers in the United States
were looking for. He allowed himself another smile.

Well, the United States should have its
Declaration of Independence back, in good time. He had not yet
decided how much they should pay for it, nor exactly how he would
handle the ploy. That could all wait until he reached journey’s
end. He recited the route ahead with loving relish: Cheyenne,
Laramie, Rock Springs, Salt Lake City, Elko, Winnemucca, Reno,
Sacramento, and finally, the lovely city on the bay: San
Francisco.

The train was slowing on the descent into
Cheyenne and he debated whether to get out and stretch his legs for
five minutes, then decided against it. He leaned his head back
against the plush velvet cushions of his seat, stretched his legs,
and sighed, a smile of contented amusement on his face.

Catch me if you can, he thought.

~*~

‘
You’ll live,’ Doctor Hussey
said.

He watched impassively as Frank Angel put
back on his clothes. He had stitched up the long, raw wound, bound
it as tightly as good sense dictated, and there wasn’t much else he
could do that nature couldn’t do as well, if not better. He had
tried half a dozen times to dissuade his patient from making the
long ride he planned through the mountains, but to all his advice
Angel had remained quite immune.

‘
It’s got to be done,’ was all he
would say.

He had brought Falco down from the cabin in
the mountains and reached Fairplay as night was falling. A cold
wind had been sweeping down from the snowy crests to the west, but
the weather was staying clear and they were able to make decent
time. Angel had lodged Falco with the sheriff of Park County, whose
office was in the two-story red sandstone courthouse in the center
of town. Falco had been silent throughout the whole journey,
nursing his ruined arm like an Indian squaw keening over her fallen
brave. His eyes had no life in them at all. Angel had taken one
look at the man and known he was finished. It wouldn’t make any
difference what happened to Falco from here on in: something inside
him had broken, snapped, given way.

The doctor came to do what he could for the
prisoner’s arm and when he was through, Angel walked back with him
to his house, a white frame shack next door to the Presbyterian
church. On the way he told Hussey that he had to make Denver by the
following afternoon, nightfall at the latest.

‘
You’ll need damned good animals,’
Hussey said. ‘That’s a hard run.’

‘
I know it,’ Angel replied. ‘The
sheriff’s lining them up for me, right now.’

While he was examining the wound on Angel’s
back, the doctor asked a question, and Angel slid the throwing
knife out of his boot.

‘
I used this,’ he said.

Hussey tested the edge of the blade with a
tentative thumb.

‘
I thought it must be something out of
the ordinary,’ he said. ‘The way the muscles were sheared
through.’

‘
I didn’t have a hell of a lot of
choice, Doc,’ Angel said, sensing the implied censure. ‘He had a
cocked sixgun in his hand.’

Hussey shook his head.

‘
It’s none of my damned business, I
know,’ he said gruffly. ‘I just hate waste, and when I see a man
with a right arm that’s going to be about as much use to him from
here on in as a piece of string, I … ’

‘
Don’t you worry none,’ Angel had
assured him harshly. ‘Falco’s not going to live long enough to
notice.’

His cold pronouncement had startled Dick
Hussey, who was still young enough and idealistic enough to believe
that there was innate good in even the worst of men. As a doctor,
in a town as tough as Fairplay could be, he’d seen his share of
mayhem and its results. He still didn’t believe in the theory of a
man all bad, nor was he ready for anyone who seemed to be as
callous about maiming another human being as Frank Angel was, and
he said so.

‘
It’s not callousness, doc,’ Angel
said. ‘My business is survival. I’m no damned use to the Department
dead.’

‘
The Department,’ Hussey nodded,
saying it the way you’d say the name of a partner who cheated you.
‘It must be quite an organization.’

‘
Doc,’ Angel told him with a frosty
smile, ‘it is.’

He left then to walk down the street to the
Hand Hotel, where Sheriff Graham was waiting for him. He had four
horses saddled and ready, the best, he said, he could find in
town.