Frame Angel! (A Frank Angel Western) #7 (8 page)

‘
This is
the place!’ Angel said. He slapped Briggs’s back. ‘This is
it!’

Briggs looked at him as if he
had gone mad. The sounds of pursuit were growing louder behind
them, and Angel was acting like a man who
’d just been dealt a full
house.

Angel grabbed his arm and pulled him around
behind the rock. There was a low stand of greasewood there.
Tethered to one of the bushes were two saddled horses. Across the
saddles were shirts, pants, and boots. And gunbelts. Briggs ran
over to them, touching them like a kid on Christmas morning.

‘
Jesus!’
he said, wonderingly. ‘Jesus, Angel!’

‘
We got
about ten minutes to get out of here!’ Angel snapped. ‘Come on,
Briggs!’

He hoped to God he had the timing right.

He
’d told them to make it look good, and
they did. Almost too damned good.

He and Briggs swung into the
saddle and kicked the horses into a gallop just as the guards burst
through the screening bushes into the clearing. Whacking away over
the broken ground, Angel thought for a moment that he saw Angus
Wells among the pursuers, but that wasn
’t possible. Then he put his body
down low along his horse’s neck and concentrated on getting the
hell out of there.

Behind him and to one side at
least a dozen guards opened up with their Winchesters, the slugs
whickering past the fleeing horsemen, smashing branches off the
greasewood bushes, tearing leaping spouts of darkened sandy earth
from the ground around, beside, and ahead of them.
Interspersed
amid the rattling cracks of the carbines was the
duller
gbbbooomffl
of the riot guns, which were about as effective at the kind
of range they were now being used over as throwing snowballs would
have been.

Racing flat out away from the
firing, Angel felt something touch his upper left arm. It was like
someone lightly slapping a child, not in anger so much as in mild
playfulness. He reeled sideways in the saddle, bright blood
staining his arm, a gritted curse escaping his tensed lips.
Goddamn, he
’d
told them to make it look good, but this was taking it too far!
Straightening slightly in the saddle, he swiveled his arm around to
look at it. It was a clean, burned rip, and it had done little more
than take off a couple of layers of skin. Fool for luck, he told
himself. If that bullet had gone an inch to the right, he’d be
nursing a shattered left arm, about as much use in the game he was
planning to play as a wooden-legged clown. If it had gone six
inches to the right . . .

Well, no use thinking about that, he told
himself as he reined his horse around. They were traversing a
rising bluff that crested and sloped away down to Carrizozo Creek.
There was enough water for them to ride in it for a while, and
Angel headed down, signaling Briggs to follow.

‘
Where
we headin’?’ Briggs shouted.

‘
Further
downstream there’s a ford,’ Angel told him. ‘The old Santa Fe Trail
crosses this crick.’

‘
The
Cimarron cutoff?’

‘
That’s
right. We can follow the trail right on over to Las
Vegas.’

‘
What’s
in Las Vegas?’

‘
Two
things,’ Angel told him, as they moved the horses at a walk down to
the edge of the creek. ‘One, a lot o’ people who don’t know who we
are, an’ what’s more, don’t care. Two, a telegraph
office.’

‘
Telegraph office?’ Briggs frowned. ‘What the hell you need
a telegraph office for?’

‘
Let my
people know it all went well,’ Angel said. ‘An’ where I’m headin’
next. They’ll maybe want me … available.’

Briggs nodded. He was very conscious of the
fact that he had allied himself with a professional killer, and one
who, if the evidence of the last few hours was anything to go by,
had pretty powerful connections.

‘
Where
would you be headin’ next?’ he asked cautiously.

‘
Why,
Briggs, that’s entirely up to you,’ Angel said, with a wide grin.
‘You tell me where that money you’re gonna pay me for springin’ you
is, an ‘we’ll go fetch it. You pay me my seventy-five hundred, an’
from there on in, you’re on your own. Right?’

‘
Well,’
Briggs hesitated.

‘
Now
Briggs,’ Angel said, very gently. ‘You wouldn’t go back on our
deal, would you?’

‘
Hell,
no, Angel,’ Briggs said. ‘It’s … well, it’s a bit more complicated
than that.’

‘
It
better not be too complicated, man,’ Angel said, just the faint
edge of warning anger making itself heard in his voice. Briggs
caught the tone and held up a hand.

‘
No,’ he
said. ‘I told you, though. There’s others involved?’

‘
You can
tell me all about it later, when we make camp,’ Angel told him.
‘For now, let’s concentrate on puttin’ some miles between us an’
that stinkin’ prison!’

‘
You
figger they’ll put a posse out after us, Angel?’

‘
Ain’t
figgerin’ nothin’,’ Angel answered. ‘Nor hangin’ around waitin’ to
find out. Let’s go, Briggs!’

He kicked his horse into a canter and
splashed down into Carrizozo Creek.

‘
There
was three of us,’ Briggs began.

‘
You
told me that,’ Angel replied.

They had made a camp on the
warm, southern side of a long sloping
draw that ran slanting south-west toward
the Canadian River. There was jerky and a flat bottle of whiskey in
one of the
alforjas
slung behind the saddle and two cans of beans in the other.
It wasn’t Parisian cooking, but after the prison food it tasted
like the purest nectar. Angel let Briggs drink most of the whiskey,
contenting himself with a good slug to keep out the chill of the
night. They foraged for enough wood to make a small fire in a
sandpit, Apache style.

When the food was gone, Angel
leaned back and invited Briggs to tell him the whole story.
‘Who told you about
the shipment?’ he asked.

‘
Uh …
listen, Angel, how’d you know about that?’ Briggs asked, peering at
him suspiciously in the fire-light.

‘
Shit,
Briggs,’ Angel said. ‘You ain’t the type’d know things like that.
I’m figurin’ your sidekicks didn’t either.’

‘
No,
they didn’t,’ Briggs muttered. ‘You’re right. Pete an’ Jamesie,
they’re like me. Y’know – hired hands. He wanted good men who knew
the country.’

‘
He?’

‘
The
feller in Santa Fe. The one come to us with the
proposition.’

‘
Oh,’
Angel said, feigning only mild interest.
The name, the name;
he willed Briggs to
say it.

‘
Got
talkin’ to him on the veranda outside La Fonda. You know it?’ Angel
nodded. Most of the business done among the Anglos – and not a few
of the Spanish-Americans – who lived in Santa Fe was done over a
drink after dinner on the porch of the rambling old hacienda which
had become the capital’s largest hotel. Most nights, you could go
there and meet a man with sheep, cattle, or land to sell, find a
man who wanted to buy any or all, and team up with someone who
wanted company on a trip north, south, east, or west. Just as the
Indian women sold their blankets and silver jewelry beneath the
cool arches of the Palace of the Governors, so did the businessmen
sell theirs on the lamp lit La Fonda veranda.

‘
We
adjourned somewhere more private. Some cantina down on the
Alameda,’ Briggs went on. ‘Said he was lookin’ for three or four
men to do a dangerous job. They had to know the Tularosa country
like the back of their own hands, he said. But if they did what he
told them, they could make twenty thousand dollars each, clear.
Shit, Angel,’ he added, ‘he might as well of said a million. Twenty
grand is big money.’

‘
Right,’
Angel said.
The name, man, the name.

‘
Anyways, he sort of flamboozled around the subject for a
while, an’ then told us he’d like to ask around. Wanted to check on
us, I reckoned. Pete reckoned the same. So we figured we’d check on
him same time.’

‘
Pete?’

‘
Pete
Hainin – him an’ me an’ Jamesie Lawrence pulled the job,
remember?’

‘
You
never told me their second names,’ Angel said.

‘
Oh,’
Briggs said. ‘Thought I did. Well, anyhow …’ He took another
sizable gulp out of the almost-empty bottle, then held it up in the
firelight, squinting ruefully at the level of the
whiskey.

‘
Shit,
I’m plumb sorry,’ he said. ‘Here, you—’

‘
No,
finish it,’ Angel said.

‘
Right,’
Briggs said. He nodded wisely.

‘
You
figured you’d check on the dude,’ Angel reminded him,

‘
Oh.
Yeah. Well, we couldn’t find nothin’ out about him. We asked all
around town, only nobody’d ever heard of him.’

‘
What
was his name?’ Angel asked, idly.

‘
Never
found that out, neither,’ Briggs said. ‘Asked him, next night when
he looked us up in the
cantina.
Said we didn’t need to know that.’

‘
But you
knew he was from the East.’

‘
Hell,
yeah. You ever see a westerner wearin’ flat-heeled
boots?’

He made it sound like a sexual
abnormality, and Angel grinned. Briggs ought to try tramping around
the concrete pavements of New York for a few hours in the
high-heeled riding boots he was wearing now. After an hour of it,
he
’d feel as
if his spine was about three inches shorter.

‘
What
was he, a big feller?’

‘
Big
enough,’ Briggs said. ‘We never see him in really good light, you
know? He allus sat in dark corners. In the cantina he allus had his
hat down over his face. Allus made us leave after he
did.’

‘
So he
told you about the shipment,’ Angel encouraged him.

‘
Right.
Knowed all about it. Where the money was, how many men on the
train. Told us exactly where we had to pull the job, how to do it.
Told us the route we had to take over the White Mountains and up to
Santa Fe. If we was chased, we was to split up. If we split up, we
had three days to get to old Fort Sumner, Beaver Smith’s saloon. If
it looked like any one of us had been taken, the other two was to
move on, nice an’ quiet. Stash the money away until it cooled, he
said.’

‘
He told
you the money was hot?’

‘
Right.
He said we’d have to hide it away for a couple of months. Then we’d
get our cut.’

‘
Where?’

‘
Said it
didn’t matter. He’d know where we were, and so he’d always be able
to find the money.’

‘
Wasn’t
he scared you’d take off with the whole bundle?’

‘
Didn’t
act like it, I’ll tell you that. He said if we crossed him, he’d
spend the rest of his life huntin’ us down, an’ makin’ sure all of
us rotted in jail the rest of our days.’

‘
An’ you
believed that?’

‘
Sure,
we did. Why the hell not? He was the kind you believe, and you can
tie to that! Besides, we was happy enough to be gettin’ a crack at
twenty thousand each.’

‘
But you
don’t have it,’ Angel said.

‘
No, but
I ain’t afeared,’ Briggs said. ‘Pete an’ Jamesie wouldn’t
double-deal on me.’

‘
Beautiful,’ Angel told him. ‘All you got to do now is find
them. And the money,’

‘
Hell,
that’s not gonna be so hard,’ Briggs said. ‘I figger I know where
Jamesie’ll be. An’ he’ll know where Pete is.’

‘
Pete’s
got the money?’

‘
He had
it when I was took,’ Briggs answered. ‘Don’t worry, he’ll keep it
safe.’

‘
Briggs,’ Angel said flatly. ‘You’re a fool.’ Briggs looked
up quickly, bewildered at Angel’s harsh words. ‘What?’ he asked.
‘What?’

‘
Ain’t
it occurred to you that your dude is prob’ly lookin’ for that
money, too?’

‘
Well …
hell, Angel, what you gettin’ at?’

‘
Just
this,’ Angel told him. ‘If the feller that hired you to pull that
job can get to Lawrence and then to Hainin, he’s only got to kill
both o’ them, an’ he’s free as a bird with the whole bundle in his
pockets. What would you do – take him to court an’ sue him for
it?’