Frame Angel! (A Frank Angel Western) #7 (16 page)

‘
Wells!’
Angel shouted.

Without turning, Angus Wells
stepped off the train and onto the platform. As he did so, a man
with a star gleaming on his coat came out of the doorway of
the
baggage
room. His gun was in his holster, but his hand was on it. There was
puzzlement on his face. He looked inside the carriage and saw Angel
standing alone in the middle of the aisle with the six-gun in his
hand, and then he turned toward Wells, pulling the gun, but he was
much, much too late.

The little derringer that Wells had shaken
from his sleeve holster boomed, a bright yellow flower of flame
blossoming from the stubby barrel. The sheriff was slammed back
into the doors of the baggage room, smashing them open, the glass
on one side shivering into fragments that clamored on the stone
platform as they fell. A woman was screaming, and the young man who
had been behind the counter came out through the doors with a
cocked gun in his hand, staring wildly left and right. He saw Wells
running at the far end of the platform and threw a shot without
aiming that fragmented one of the glass globes on the oil lamps
lighting the platform.

The young man was the son and deputy of the
Trinidad sheriff, who lay dying in a spreading pool of black blood
on the floor of the baggage room. He ran fast toward the end of the
platform from which Wells had jumped as Angel swung down from the
train. There was a commotion inside the carriage, and people were
pulling down windows to try and see what was happening.

‘
Get
back inside!’ Angel yelled, running along the platform after the
shirt-sleeved deputy. He heard the six-gun boom as the young man
jumped from the end of the platform, and then he was behind the
deputy, who whirled with the six-gun. He was panting as if he had
run several hundred yards uphill, his breath wheezing in his
throat. The hand holding the six-gun was trembling, and Angel
gently pushed it aside.

‘
He … ’
the young man sobbed. ‘He …’

‘
I
know,’ Angel said. ‘I saw it.’

‘
You … ’
The deputy looked at him with eyes full of disgust. ‘You … saw it!
You … you let him walk off that train and … and kill my …
father!’

‘
No,’
Angel said, meaning, no it wasn’t like that at all. He wanted the
young man to know why he hadn’t been able to shoot Angus Wells in
the back, but he said no more because there was no way he could
tell the boy.

He didn
’t even know himself.

He touched the
deputy
’s
arm.

‘
Tell
them to hold the train,’ he said. ‘I’m going to look for
him.’

The deputy looked at him
with
lackluster eyes. The reaction was hitting him now. Later,
he would be brave again and tell them how he’d chased the killer.
‘Tell them,’ Angel said. ‘And get that suitcase off the train. It’s
got a quarter of a million dollars in it.’

The youngster nodded. He looked
at the six-gun in his hand as if he had never seen it before and
then jammed it into the waistband of his pants. He climbed back up
onto the rough stone
platform, and Angel watched him walk back toward the pools
of light in the center of the depot where the train
stood.

Now, he thought. Where? Where would he go?
Where would I go if I were him? He stood there and thought the way
he had been taught to think, the way he knew that Wells had been
taught to think, because Wells had taught him.

When
you want to hide something, hide it
openly. Someone searching for what you have hidden, someone at
least as intelligent as you, will look in all the places you can
invent and others you have not thought
of. So
hide whatever you must hide as if it were
useless, valueless, worthless. And the seeker will often overlook
it. Not always. But often. If you are pursued, your pursuer expects
one thing
–
that you
will run. The pursuer will be looking for you ahead of him,
for that is where he expects you to be. If he is an intelligent
hunter, he will anticipate
your
doubling and bisect the circle you are trying to
make, thus ending the hunt. So you must play not fox, but human
fox. The one place the hunter knows the fox will not go while he is
being hunted is his lair, the place he most wants to protect. If
you will outwit the hunter, go where he is sure you will not be
and
where
he will not think to seek you.

Of course.

He got back on the platform and
went toward the knot of men standing beneath the lamps in the
center and outside the shattered doors of the baggage room. They
had carried the
sheriff’s body away. There was a dusty black smear on the
stone.

‘
Lost
him,’ Angel told them, his voice emotionless. ‘Can’t see a damned
thing out there.’

The men on the platform just looked at him
and said nothing. One of them had the leather suitcase in his
hand.

‘
Better
let the train go,’ Angel told the stationmaster. ‘No point in
holdin’ these folks up any longer.’ He pointed to the valise. ‘Put
that somewhere safe.’

‘
Uh-huh,’ the man said. The station-master slipped a watch
out of his waistcoat pocket and looked at it and then at Angel, as
though saying he hoped Angel realized that he was responsible for
how late the train was. Then he went over to the trolley standing
by the wall and picked up the flickering bulls-eye
lantern.

‘
Board!’
he shouted. His voice sounded strange, thin, and ghostly. There was
a faint hint of mist from the hidden mountains off to the west, and
the stationmaster’s breath billowed like smoke as he shouted.
‘Denver train, stoppin’ at Pueblo and Colorado Springs.’

The conductor stepped down from
the caboose and swung his lantern in reply to the
stationmaster
’s. They waved at each other, and then the conductor turned
his lamp around so that the green light flared in the darkness. The
engineer pulled his whistle cord and the big engine
shun-shun-shun-shunned,
trembling perceptibly as the huge drive
wheels bit against the steel rails.

The train was moving gently, easily, and
quickly forward now, and Angel placed his bet, swinging up onto the
rear observation platform as the caboose swung by, the conductor
watching his lithe maneuver with startled eyes.

‘
Uh –
what the hell?’ he began, his chin coming up.

‘
You a
betting man?’ Angel asked, his grin mirthless and taut. He was
taking a damned long chance, and he knew it.

‘
Uh,
what?’ the conductor asked. ‘Uh, nope, cain’t say as I
am.’

‘
Pity,’
Angel said. ‘Or I’d have bet you I wasn’t the last one who was
going to swing onto here tonight.’

‘
Uh?’
the conductor said.

‘
Forget
it,’ Angel told him. ‘It wasn’t much of a joke, anyway.’

‘
Sure,’
the conductor said, humoring him. He opened the door leading into
the caboose and went inside. The train moved across the rails
toward the main line spur at the northern edge of town. Angel
waited.

‘
Well,
well,’ Frank Angel said to no one in particular.

They had only come perhaps four
or five hundred yards when the train started to slow down
noticeably. Angel tried to recall the layout of Trinidad in the
filing index of his memory, the long S of the street with the opera
house at its center, the looping curve in the road at the southern
edge of town which seemed to have been put there as an introduction
to the snaking twists of the Raton Pass that lay ahead. The
northern edge, the northern edge! Was there a bridge over the
tracks? There was. He remembered it. The trail rose from the valley
of the Picketwire, as local people called the Purgatoire River, and
turned right over a solid, rumbling wooden bridge. Off to the right
the Y-shaped
switch with its centrally located box turned the oncoming
trains left for Denver or right for La junta.

The train was almost at walking
pace now as they came up the deep cutting that lay to the west of
the town. Leaning carefully out, he saw the looming bulk of the big
bridge above the train, its blackness more solid, more real than
the blackness of the night. The engineer applied his brakes, and
the train came to a slowing halt. The engineer waited until his
wheels picked up the switch before he opened his throttle
again.
Calicka-calack
went the wheels.
Calicka-calack.

Then he saw the running figure, and Angel
knew he had been right.

Wells came away from the deeper shadows of
the cutting wall, quartering across the tracks toward the center of
the train. His limp was very pronounced, and for a brief second,
Angel felt a touch of sorrow, of pity for the running man. Then he
called his name.

Angus Wells came to a startled
stop in the middle of the open space on the
far side of the switch box, exposed
by the light of the lamps burning above him. He saw Angel as Angel
swung down to the ground and moved toward him, and he gave a roar
of anger. Angel kept coming with his six-gun up and let Wells have
a chance to run. But Wells wasn’t running. All of his frustrated
rage swelled into one pulsating roar of killing lust, blanking out
his animal cunning, his instinct to survive, leaving nothing but
the need to kill the man in front of him. He came at Angel hard,
low, and fast, his head down. Angel waited, with the gun ready,
poised on the balls of his feet, unable to believe Wells was this
stupid. Still the big man came on at him, and Angel eared back the
hammer of the six-gun. Then Wells was level with a high pile of
block gravel left for grading work by the gandy dancers, and he
threw himself behind it in a veering, arching leap, the derringer
in his hand spurting flame as he went over the shoulder of the
gravel pile and rolled out of sight behind it. It was a brilliant
maneuver, and if he had been using a six-gun instead of the tiny
pocket pistol, whose effective range was no more than a few yards,
he would have probably killed Frank Angel there and then. But the
unrifled ball whistled a good two feet away from its target. Angel
was already moving forward now in a running crouch, the gun deadly
and level, with no thought of hesitation. If he saw Wells now, he
would kill him. Wells knew it now too, and when Angel came
skittering around the gravel pile with the six-gun ready, Wells had
a two-handed grip on the shovel that had been lying on the pile.
Wells swung it in a whistling, biting arch into Angels right side,
and Angel yelled a shout of agony as the heavy metal blade glanced
off his tensed right arm and smashed into his wounded side. The
blow took Angel off his feet as if he had been roped from a running
horse, whacking him sideways, his six-gun flipping out of his hand
and landing with a soft thud somewhere in the darkness. He cried
out as he hit the ground, feeling the soft tearing pain as the
stitches in his side burst apart. Warm wetness spread along his
side, and for a moment he was a child again in a warm bed, his
senses dislocated. Wells came at him again now with the shovel
upraised and the edge turned this time to cut, smashing it down at
Angel, who desperately arched his body away. The shovel clanged on
the railway line, and the force of the impact twisted the shovel
out of Wells’ grasp. Angel was on his feet now, and he struck at
Wells with his right hand. He might as well have tried to knock the
man down with a wet rag – his arm would not respond to his brain’s
commands, and he saw Well’s left hand move up and across from the
right shoulder. He turned himself desperately to parry the blow
that would kill him if it landed. The edge of Wells’ hand, hardened
to the toughness of a brick, glanced off Angel’s shoulder and
against his forehead, jarring his head back. Angel reeled away,
almost falling again, his right hand banging almost useless at his
side.

‘
Come
on!’ Wells said. ‘Come on, Angel!’ Come and be killed, he
meant.

Angel shook his head to clear
it. His side was slippery with fresh blood, and he could feel the
swaying dizziness which precedes a blackout.
You might keel over at the
worst possible moment
–
for you,
he could hear the doctor in Sante Fe say.

Wells came at him again, hard this time, and
Angel had no time to do more than parry. He stopped the chopping
blow and skipped back. Wells hissed with frustration.

Survive
!
The first rule they taught you. It doesn’t
matter how. There are no rules other than the first rule: survive!
He slid his left hand down to the secret scabbard in his boots
between the outer leather and the inner lining. Inside it,
concealed from casual search by the mule-ear straps, nestled a
flat-bladed Solingen steel throwing knife, mate to the one on the
right-hand side. They had been specially made for him, as had the
boots which concealed them, by the armorer at the Justice
Department. And they were his last chance. Wells saw his movement,
and came in again, grinning like a wolf pulling down a baby calf.
His right leg lashed out, and the knife flickered away into the
darkness.