Warn Angel! (A Frank Angel Western--Book 9) (13 page)

‘
Place is run by a guy called Home,
Bill Home,’ Hedley explained. ‘We never minded the pun much, but we
give him a bad time every now and then about his
spelling.’

The place was half-empty. It was still a
little early for the crowds who’d fill the place after dark. There
was a smell of fresh bread, coffee, food cooking, and the
inescapable mining-town smell of sweaty feet. The waitress was a
buxom woman with bright red cheeks and an Irish accent.

‘
We’ll have a couple of your best
steaks, Maggie,’ Hedley said.

‘
Coffee?’

‘
You bet.’

‘
Want the coffee now?’

‘
Sure.’

‘
Comin’ up,’ Maggie said, bustling
away.

‘
Nice kid,’ Hedley said, startling
Angel for a moment. Maggie was some way past being a kid, but then
he realized that Hedley was old enough to call most people kids.
Maggie pushed through the swing doors into the kitchen in back.
Cooking smells wafted in.

‘
Now as to your men,’ Hedley said.
Angel leaned forward.

‘
They’re here?’

‘
No such luck,’ Hedley said. They left
around mid-morning, far as I can make out.’

‘
Damn!’ Angel ground out. Six or seven
hours start would put them already on the far side of Trout Creek
Pass, well on the way to South Park. He said as much, but Hedley
shook his head.

‘
Not likely, boyo,’ he said. ‘I talked
to some miners just came down from Fairplay. They tell me it’s
raining like hell higher up, might even snow before morning. That
being the case, I’d say they was probably already hunkered down
someplace doing their best not to freeze solid. It’s sartin sure
they won’t be making over four or five miles an hour even if
they’re on the move. I’d hazard a guess they might make it up to
Fairplay, then stick it out there until it’s fit to
travel.’

‘
You reckon I might catch up on
them?’

‘
Could be, you set out tomorrow
morning with fine weather, you’ll make it twice as fast up there as
they did.’

Just at that moment, Maggie came bustling up
with their coffee, and before they were halfway through the
steaming brew, brought their meals. On each plate, completely
concealing the ‘Willow Pattern’ design, was an inch-thick steak, a
fried egg sitting on it. At one side of the steak was a heap of
pan-browned potatoes and on the other a helping of canned beans.
After the manner of men who spend much of their time outdoors, the
marshal and his visitor wasted no more time talking, but fell to
with a will. Hungry as he was, however, Hedley was still eating
when Angel pushed away his emptied plate with a sigh and leaned
back in the ladderback chair.

‘
Peaches or pie?’ Maggie said as she
picked up the plates.

They both chose pie, and Angel asked the
marshal a question.

‘
Fairplay?’ he replied. ‘It’s up above
Trout Creek Pass. Lies at about ten thousand feet, and cold as a
witch’s tit this time of the year. Used to be a camp up there in
’59 called Tarryall. Miners there ran off anyone who tried to join
them, so the newcomers told ’em they oughta rechristen the place
Graball. They pushed on up the South Platte and found gold in the
gravel bars up there. Town just growed up alongside the river.
Settled, now. They got a nice little white Presbyterian church, a
two-story courthouse made out of red sandstone. You going up there
after this Falco?’

‘
You better believe it,’ Angel told
him. ‘It would be kind of nice to catch up with them in
Fairplay.’

‘
How come?’ Hadley wanted to
know.

‘
Well,’ Angel said. ‘It has a nice
ironic ring to it.’

~*~

Chris Falco had stayed alive the best part
of forty years by always making sure all his bets were coppered. A
man who coppered his bets was one who bet on every horse,
calculating the odds so that there were precious few ways he could
lose—and Falco had learned early in a colorful life that it was the
best way to ensure survival. And survival was his strongest suit.
He’d come west with his father, an incurable optimist who always
believed he was going to find gold where everyone else had already
looked, a beat-up, half-starved, rootless old prospector, but as
tough as whang leather. Chris Falco had taken every beating the old
man gave him—and there were plenty—without a whimper until he was
sixteen and grown tall and broad. Then Carter Falco took a switch
to his son once too often, and Chris damned near killed him. He lit
out fast from his home near Springfield and ended up in St. Louis,
Missouri, where he got a job as a bouncer in a Clark Street
bordello. The madam had taken a fancy to him, dressed him well, and
given him money to spend. She introduced him to some of her more
important clients, one of whom was Danny Johnson, a ward boss in
the Seventh District. Pretty soon Chris had a well-paid job as
Danny’s bodyguard and enforcer, and Falco did a hell of a job.
Nobody ever got charges against him that would stick and on the few
occasions he was busted, Danny Johnson put the fix in and Chris was
back on the street. Then one day somebody laid for Danny Johnson as
he was coming out of the Golden Slipper on the corner of Maple and
Divine, blowing him up with cool precision, leaving Falco crawling
around in a pool of his own blood. The style of the execution left
nobody in any doubt about who was behind it, and Falco knew better
than to take on the Italians for anything as futile as revenge. He
moved across the river, where he had a few connections, heading
into Kansas. There were plenty of things for a sharp guy to get
into. The herds were coming up from Texas, and there was a demand
for men who knew all the tricks Chris had learned. He did some work
with the cards, one of the easiest ways there was to strip marks;
hustled a little, doing some pimping when things got slack—anything
for a dishonest buck. His business became one of surviving, of
being around, waiting for the big one to walk in through the door,
fly over the transom, drop out of a pocket. Willowfield saw him and
offered him what he wanted on a plate. All he’d ever hoped for was
to get next to one big heist, and just as he had always known it
would, it walked in through the door. He had no intention of
letting it walk out.

Just the same, he mistrusted complicated
plans like the one the fat man had cooked up to deal with the law.
It relied on too many imponderables, and there was no way of
coppering the bets, as he had already found out. This Angel, for
instance—nobody had expected anything like him. The kind of law
they had expected, not to say counted on, was the kind the U.S.
marshals dished out. U.S. marshals were usually fiftyish, slowed-up
hangers-on of whatever political machine was in power. They tended
to be beer drinkers with hanging guts who had long since grown
averse to hard riding in rough backcountry. When the occasion or
the necessity to do so arose, they hired ‘deputies’ who were
usually down-at-heel bounty hunters or would-be gunfighters anxious
to carve a notch on their carbine butt. Nobody mourned when a
bounty hunter was missing, or some gun nut wound up face down in
some nameless gully. That had been the caliber of pursuit they had
expected, not a man who could ride straight under the sights of
three carbines and not only come out alive but take out two of his
ambushers.

Falco had no intention of letting Angel run
him to earth. He didn’t really figure that Kuden would have a
snowball’s chance in hell of stopping Angel, and he made his plans
on that basis. It came as no surprise at all to him when Curtis
galloped into Buena Vista on a lathered horse and confirmed it.

He’d left Curtis on a high bluff overlooking
the trail up the canyon of the Arkansas with a pair of good army
field-glasses and the best of the horses. He and McLennon pushed on
ahead into Buena Vista to get some supplies, rest the horses, maybe
grab a couple of quick drinks.

So now, as they headed on up the mountain
trail out of Buena Vista, Falco turned the options over in his
mind, unhappy with the picture they presented. It was bad enough
that Angel was still coming, but worse news that he had taken Kuden
prisoner.

That would mean Kuden had spilled, Falco
thought. No point hoping otherwise: act on the premise that the
worst has happened. That means he knows what Kuden knows, the
original plan. He grinned like a wolf. Nobody knew he’d changed
that some. Angel would also know the route they planned to take,
and he could do one of two things. Change the route, or take the
one Kuden would have told Angel about, and then turn that knowledge
against Angel. He decided on the latter.

By now, however, he had a healthy respect
for Mister Frank Angel, and when he explained his plan to the
others, he set up everything so that once more, his bet on survival
was coppered.

In Buena Vista, he’d made himself
conspicuous, so that a dozen people or more around town would
remember him. He’d gone bareheaded so that the men he’d jostled in
front of in the store would recall him. He had criticized the
quality of the liquor in the Lucky Strike. He had suggested some
particularly vile sexual activities to one of the saloon girls. He
smiled in remembering that: no way she would forget him. All in
all, he laid a trail that an infant would have had trouble missing,
knowing that it would bring Angel out after them, hell bent into
the flat emptinesses of South Park. The trail led ever upward into
the mountains, cresting at Trout Creek. At Trout Creek Pass they
would kill Angel.

When the weather turns bad in the mountains,
it does so very fast.

The horse blew great gusts of wind through
its nostrils, which were caked with a rim of frost despite the
muffler that Angel had wrapped around the animal’s head. They moved
steadily upward into the rocky wilderness, heading for Trout Creek
Pass. It was quite low—only nine and a half thousand feet as
compared to some of the others. Up above Idaho Springs way there
were passes well over two miles high, and the wind that cut through
them blew from the Arctic to the Antarctic with nothing to stop it
but one or two mountain peaks.

The preceding night a wind of
hurricane force had sprung up. The night had been alive with the
sound of shutters banging, corrugated tin roofs blowing off and
banging away down the canyon, whirled up and down the heedless
rocks by the whipping wind. Later, the wind showed its teeth, and
lashed the canyon of the Arkansas with hailstones the size of
prairie oysters, smacking against the thin wooden walls of the
shacks down the street of Buena Vista like Gatling gunfire. The
muddy street quickly turned to a gloppy morass, which froze like
iron as the night advanced, and the temperature dropped like
a
stone. A
moon glared like a baleful eye through the heaving clouds, and
beneath it the mountains emerged, shining ghost-white with their
mantling of fresh snow, only to be eclipsed by another sudden
storm. Angel had sat by the window of the Lucky Strike, where
Hedley had fixed for him to rent a room. It was too noisy to sleep,
and he watched the incredible struggle of the elements, thinking of
the men he was pursuing up there somewhere in the wilderness. Once
in the night he heard the long wail of a wolf, driven down from the
heights by the cold. For some reason, the sound reminded him of a
time he had been in the mountains just before snow, when a lake had
glowed an unearthly orange in the strange twilight, yet reflected
the mountains above it deep blue. Somewhere around the middle of
the night the storm broke, and he slept. He dreamed formless dreams
and rose before dawn, still weary.

Up ahead of him now the mountains glittered
and waited. The sun was sharp and bright, and the wind was
bitingly, bone-achingly cold. The air was brittle and tasted dry,
but he wasn’t tempted to take the woolen kerchief away from his
face. He’d bought it and a heavy plaid blanket coat, together with
a pair of seal-skin pants the preceding night. They just about kept
the wind off. At this altitude, it could take off a layer of your
flesh with less effort than a good skinner with a cutthroat
razor.

The road, the vegetation, the trees on back
away from the trail all lay under a glittering mantle of fresh
powder snow that sparkled like the enchanted garden in a fairy
tale, as if someone had sprinkled finely ground diamonds on the
snow. There was no real trail visible, but it was easy enough to
keep where the trail should be by following the innumerable tiny
tracks of gophers and small birds that marched downhill toward the
warmer places in the canyon. After an hour, Angel had to dismount
and lead the horse, because the snow had balled so badly in its
feet that the animal could hardly walk. Using his hunting knife and
a heavy stone, he was able to chip most of it away, but he walked
the bay for about another half hour before he got on him again.

Imperceptibly, the light changed, became
somehow flat. It created a strange phenomenon: the ground ahead and
behind seemed to become completely featureless, the rolls and
crests and bumps ironed out to a flat and unbroken expanse wherever
he looked by the strange bright mountain light. Nothing moved in
the entire empty wasteland: no bird, no beast, no man other than
himself. The sky above the looming peaks off to the north was
turning a dirty fish belly gray-white, and he felt the wind
freshening. The smell of snow was in the air and the bay shivered,
as if he could already feel it.

Up ahead was the pass: a narrow aperture
between two red stone buttes towering four hundred feet or more on
either side. The impenetrable carpet of pine trees lying on both
sides of the pass looked like frosted buffalo fur. Here and there
on the floor of the pass lay enormous shattered lumps of stone,
some sixty or seventy feet high, others immense, with bright
striations of color dulled by the strange flat light that threw no
shadows. The wind keened across this vast amphitheater like a
dirge. Snow flurries stung his eyes, and he thought it looked like
the last place God made. He saw the bay’s ears come up too
late.