Frame Angel! (A Frank Angel Western) #7 (2 page)

The man in the driving cab heard the whistle
and gestured with the gun. Pat Seele and his stoker got warily down
from the cab, their eyes on the gun, fear showing.

‘
It’s
all right,’ the man said. They could see him grinning beneath the
mask. ‘I ain’t gonna shoot you.’

‘
Yessir,’ Pat Seele said. ‘Thank you.’

‘
Me an’
my buddies are heading west,’ the man said meaningfully.
‘Understand?’

‘
Yessir,’ Seele said again.

‘
Be sure
you do,’ the man said and spun on his heel, running to where the
other two were already mounted on good-looking horses. He vaulted
into the saddle of his horse already on the run, and the three of
them turned across the tracks behind the train and moved off
without haste toward the
malpais,
which lay like a cicatrix on the earth perhaps
four miles away. In fifteen minutes they were out of sight; Pat
Seele didn’t move until then.

‘
All
right, boyo,’ he said to Moses. ‘Let’s see what we can do for those
Pinkerton fellers. Then we’ll go find help.’

‘
Yassuh,’ Moses said. ‘Which way we go, find
help?’

‘
Which
way them bad men go, Moses?’

Moses looked at the sun for a
moment
and
then counted on his ringers. ‘They went west, boss,’ he
responded.

‘
Which
way you reckon we ought to go, then?’

Moses
’ smile was big and broad and warm
and beautiful. ‘East, maybe?’

‘
You bet
your black ass!’ answered Pat Seele.

The Department of Justice
occupied a big old building on Pennsylvania Avenue at the corner of
Tenth Street in Washington, D.C. It was far too small for the
department
’s
needs – something like a hundred and fifty people worked on the
four floors it was allocated, although the use of the basement as
an armory and facilities shared with the army’s gymnasium helped a
little. The attorney general, the man whose responsibility was the
management of all aspects of the enforcement of law and order in
the United States, had an office on the first floor, looking out
over the bustling traffic on the wide avenue below. It was a
spacious, high-ceilinged room with an anteroom outside for the
attorney general’s personal, private secretary, Miss Rowe, a honey
blonde girl who only a few minutes before had shown Angus Wells,
the chief investigator for the department, into the attorney
general’s office.

Wells now sat in the deep
leather armchair opposite his chief, examining the room which was
so much a reflection of the man and yet not really seeing it at
all. It was as if he knew everything in it, as though each item
were his own property and not that of the older man behind the
desk. The shelves full of books, stacked every which way but
tidy
–
upright and flat, spine out or face forward, books on law,
criminology, on psychology, natural history, sociology, criminal
jurisprudence, foreign law, land law, international law, all of
them showing the wear of frequent use and the inability of their
owner to treat them as anything but what they were: tools with
which he did his work. The huge desk dominated the right-hand
corner of the room, and two leather armchairs – one of which Wells
occupied – were placed before it. The only other furniture was a
heavy oak cupboard and an old-fashioned iron safe with a decorative
brass scroll on the door. On the wall behind the desk and between
the two floor-to-ceiling windows which looked out on the avenue was
the circular seal of the department and the American
flag.

‘
Angus,’
the attorney general said, ‘I don’t know how I’m ever going to get
started saying what I have to say.’

‘
Let me
say it for you, then,’ Wells said, his voice harsh. ‘You want me to
retire from active duty.’

He was a big man, Angus Wells,
wide across the shoulders, athletically built. His face was tanned
and healthy from outdoor living, and his blue eyes were as bright
and inquisitive as a boy
’s. But when he stood, he no longer stood straight
and tall. When he moved, he no longer moved with the cat-like speed
and certainty that he once had. His once dark blond hair was now
almost white, and his mustache, speckled with salt and pepper, made
him look much older than the forty-eight years that were recorded
in the manila personal dossier that now lay on the attorney
general’s desk.

‘
Well,
Angus …’ The attorney general spread his hands, seeking a way to
say the right thing to this man, whom he liked so much and whose
pride he could find no way to avoid hurting.

‘
Say
it,’ Wells said flatly. ‘I’m not some sniveling kid!’

‘
All
right, Angus,’ the man behind the desk said. ‘I had to look at your
medical report. Standard procedure, you know that.’

‘
I know
it,’ was the unhelpful reply.

‘
Every
six months,’ the attorney general went on. ‘It’s not my
rule.’

‘
I know
that, too.’

‘
I was
rough on you as it was, sending you down into New Mexico again so
soon after the Cravetts business,’ the attorney general said. ‘But
the medicos told me you’d made such a great comeback, I let it go.
You did a little pushing yourself, as I recall.’ He tried to make
it lighter, tried for a smile. Wells wasn’t having any of
that.

‘
Now
this,’ the AG said, tapping the folder in front of him. ‘They
couldn’t take out the bullet you took in the back. It’s lodged near
your spine, and if you continue to engage in – oh, hell!’ he ended,
hopelessly, tossing the folder aside. ‘Angus, they won’t be
responsible for what happens if you go on active service again. So
there’s nothing I can … I have to ask you to step down as chief
investigator. Take yourself off the active roster.’

‘
Got any
ideas what I can do?’ Wells asked. ‘Sell matches on street corners,
maybe? Buy a wheelchair and get some pretty nurse to push me
around?’

‘
Come
on, man, you’re being childish,’ snapped the attorney general. ‘You
know damned well we need you in the department. You’ll just have to
take a desk job, that’s all there is to it.’

‘
I don’t
want a desk job,’ Angus Wells said.

‘
You
don’t have any choice, Angus.’

‘
Wrong.
Sir.’

The attorney general looked up,
a frown knitting his brows. He had hired Angus Wells himself,
watched the man as he had proved his worth time and time again,
meriting every commendation, every promotion, to his present rank
as chief investigator. He had until now looked upon Angus Wells as
a friend and confidant as well as an employee, and he hesitated to
ask the next question because he knew and feared and did not wish
to hear the answer. He asked anyway.
‘Tell me why I’m wrong.’

‘
I can
retire,’ Angus Wells said.

‘
Yes,’
nodded the attorney general, sighing. ‘I have no way to stop you
doing that. But I wish you would reconsider. I need you, Angus. I
need your expertise – this blasted robbery in New Mexico, a quarter
of a million dollars stolen! I ... I ask you, as an old friend, as
a personal favor to me – stay on.’

Wells let a chill smile touch
his lips, and the attorney general was shocked to see contempt and
dislike written plainly in the younger man
’s face. ‘Let me ask you, as an old
friend, as a personal favor,’ Wells said, ‘to keep me on active
duty while I look into the New Mexico thing.’

The attorney general smacked a
hand flat on the desk and got up from his chair, striding angrily
across to the windows overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue, glaring down
at the pedestrians and carriages without really seeing any of
them.
‘You
know I can’t, Angus,’ he said.

‘
And you
know I can’t, either, Charles,’ Wells replied softly, and for the
first time his voice was touched with regret.

The attorney general nodded,
sucked in his breath, and let it out as a long sigh.
‘I suppose not,’ he
said. ‘I suppose not.’ He sat down, his shoulders slumping wearily.
Absently he reached for the cigar-box to his right, taking one of
the long black cigars and lighting it with a wooden match. His head
wreathed in smoke, eyes crinkled to avoid flinching, he leaned back
in the chair. ‘When will you go?’

‘
Statutory four weeks,’ Wells said. ‘I suppose.’

‘
You’ll
not help with this New Mexico thing?’

‘
If I
can,’ Wells answered. ‘But—’

‘
I know,
I know,’ the attorney general said, holding up a hand to forestall
being told yet again. He didn’t want to start thinking yet about
how he was going to replace Angus Well’s experience, wisdom,
knowledge, and plain guts. He didn’t want to start thinking,
either, about what was wrong with a set of rules that declared a
man a cripple and therefore unemployable in certain jobs when he
had been crippled carrying out those jobs. He didn’t want to give
too much thought to how deep Angus Well’s bitterness might go and
whether – damn all political life! – his going meant the loss of
another good friend.

‘
Could
we at least talk about it?’ he asked humbly.

‘
Sure,’
Wells said. He didn’t sound the least bit interested.

Morty Leaven had been with the
Pinkerton Detective Agency for almost ten years, and he resented
having been taken like an amateur. His partner, Ned Ruzzin,
didn
’t feel
any differently, and being a more vindictive man than his partner,
was looking forward to laying hands on the cat who had laid the
six-gun barrel alongside his skull, which was still throbbing as if
someone were boiling water inside it.

Ruzzin was a big man, a burly man, well over
six feet tall, with shoulders like oak beams and hands like hams.
Leaven was shorter, squatter, older, smarter. Together, they were a
pretty good team, highly thought of at the regional office in
Denver.

After Moses Glorification
Washington and Pat Seele had revived them by bathing their heads
with
tepid
water from the engine, the two men held a council of war, which the
engineer and his stoker had watched with wide eyes and puzzled
expressions. They could not understand why Leaven and his partner
clambered up on top of the caboose, looking from beneath
eye-shading hands at the empty vastness around them. Leaven and
Ruzzin didn’t explain at first, either. They made their decisions,
came to their conclusions, and discussed what they figured to do
about both before they so much as even looked at the engineer and
his helper.

Morty Leaven looked out across
the lava beds with pursed lips, his eyes narrowed, thoughts busy.
He knew this wild land, knew the bleak San Andres Mountains
– and what lay
beyond them.

‘
It
doesn’t figure,’ he said to Ruzzin. ‘Why would they head west?
There’s nothing out there for two hundred miles – and every mile of
it Chiricahua country.’

Ruzzin nodded.
Beyond the
malpais,
the lava beds, lay
the empty San Andres Mountains and beyond them, the Jornada del
Muerto, the wicked, bleached, lifeless area that the conquistadores
had called the Death March. Arid, supporting no life, providing no
water, containing no habitation, the Jornada was a place to be
avoided like the plague.

‘
South’d
be just as bad,’ he put in, and Leaven nodded.

‘
White
Sands down there,’ he muttered, referring to the forty-mile-long
stretch of dazzling white powdered gypsum and sand, where a horse
would founder in drifts of shifting sand that blew like snow,
scouring the skin off a man in a couple of hours if the wind came
up and caught him out in the open. Sure, they could skirt the White
Sands, climb the San Agustin, and drop down into Las Cruces, and
then the Mexican border. But what for? Nobody knew who they were.
The money they had stolen was untraceable. The way they had pulled
the job meant that they knew both of those things. So they would
not be trying to jump the border, and there was no reason for them
to make a man-killing run across some of the most hostile country
in the Southwest.

‘
Well
over hundred and fifty miles to Santa Fe,’ Ruzzin
commented.

‘
And
nothing to spend your money on when you get there,’ Leaven
replied.

He knew Santa Fe. That was the
place the natives called the Americans
burros
– donkeys – and there wasn’t a girl over
ten that didn’t have some kind of pox. The streets were nothing
more than muddy alleys littered with the droppings of goats and
chickens, and the only drink a man could buy was tequila. And
between this point and Santa Fe – nothing. Literally, nothing. Oh,
you could say there were a few villages, if you wanted to count
huddled
jacales
like Belen as a village. You could say there were a few
saloons, if you wanted to count the kind of deadfalls you’d find in
Socorro. But that was all; everything else was empty, rolling land,
climbing mesas, falling canyons, dried-out runoffs, and bunch grass
that would just barely support the herds of goats the Mexicans kept
on it.