Warn Angel! (A Frank Angel Western--Book 9) (18 page)

‘
You won’t get far at night,’ he
warned. ‘That’s a poor road up toward Silverheels.’

‘
Every mile gets me nearer Denver,
Sheriff,’ Angel said. ‘And that’s what I’m after.’

‘
You must want this Willowfield feller
powerful bad,’ Graham said. ‘What’s he done?’

‘
Well for one thing,’ Angel said,
swinging up into the saddle, ‘He’s lived too long.’ Then he kicked
the horses into a run and headed up the hill.

~*~

‘
All aboard!’

Willowfield heard the shouts up
at the far end of the train, then the thundering shudder of the
drive wheels making their first grinding turns for grip on the
shining tracks. The engine exhaled deeply as she moved the train
slowly out of the Cheyenne depot, and the engineer gave the town a
farewell blast with his whistle as she
shun-nashunnashunn’ed
westward. People
were resuming the seats they had vacated during the ten-minute stop
and Willowfield turned his head away, watching through the window
as the dun land sped past beneath the clacketing wheels of the
train.

Laramie, he recited to himself: Rock
Springs, Salt Lake City, Elko, Reno, Sacramento. And San Francisco.
He leaned back in the soft seat and closed his eyes. In his mind he
saw himself in a darkened, paneled room. A log fire was burning,
and crystal glasses caught the flickers of the flames and turned
them to diamonds. He was wearing a velvet jacket with piped lapels
and cuffs, soft lamb’s wool lined slippers, thin silk pantaloons of
almost oriental design. There was incense in the air, a faint
perfume. Or was it the boy? Moving across the room toward him was a
fair-haired youth, twenty perhaps, adoration in his eyes,
submission in his posture. His voice would be fluting, breathy.
Then he would …

‘
Colonel?’

He opened his eyes and Frank Angel was
sitting opposite him. Willowfield’s eyes widened and he came
upright in the seat, head turning this way and that. The conductor
was standing at Angel’s right elbow, and now the fat man noticed
that the train was slowing down.

‘
Ah,’ he said, nodding his great head.
‘Ah, yes. Mr. Angel. We meet again, sir.’

‘
Indeed we do,’ Frank Angel said.
‘Indeed we do. Here, let me take that bag. I’m sure you must be
tired of carrying it.’

The fat man smiled as Angel lifted the
carpetbag off his knees and handed it to the conductor. His eyes
followed the bag, which contained all his dreams, as if attached to
it with string.

‘
Well, sir,’ he said, at last,
bringing his eyes back to stare at Angel. ‘You seem to have
outwitted me.’

‘
It would look like that,’ Angel said.
‘We’ll be back in Cheyenne in about ten minutes. There’s a military
escort waiting for you.’

‘
You are efficient, sir,’ Willowfleld
sighed. ‘I always suspected it. Am I to assume from your presence
here that Falco and the others are dead?’

‘
No,’ Angel said. ‘Falco’s not dead.
Nor Kuden. The others are, though.’

‘
Pity,’ Willowfield said, and Angel
did not know whether he meant that it was a pity the others were
dead or that it was a pity Falco and Kuden were still
alive.

Willowfield gave a long, deep sigh.

‘
Tell me, Mr. Angel,’ he said. ‘Tell
me, please. How did you find me? How did you do it?’

‘
It was easy,’ Angel said, stepping
hard on the fat man’s ego. ‘You made it easy.’

‘
No, sir,’ Willowfield gusted, temper
mottling his face. ‘No, I did not. I took every precaution. Every
precaution.’

‘
You sure did,’ Angel replied. ‘You
laid a trail a ten-year-old kid could have followed, Willowfield.
And that was your mistake.’

‘
Mistake, sir? How was it a
mistake?’

‘
Because I knew you were a thief and I
knew you were a killer and I knew you were a man who’d have
double-crossed his mother for the price of a cigar, Willowfield,
but I also knew something else: you were not a fool. So if you were
laying a trail for me, then you had a trick up your sleeve. I just
didn’t know what it was, and I had damned little time to find
out.’

He remembered how it had been,
coming through the mountains, finally seeing the smoky haze above
Denver on the plain below, every muscle in his body aching from the
pounding ride, and two of the horses dead of exhaustion on the
trail in back of him. All the way to Denver, whenever he could
isolate his mind from the job of guiding his mount, he had tried to
read the mind of his quarry:
When the fox runs, he will always lead away from
his den.

When he piled into the marshal’s office,
Henderson had confirmed everything that Angel had suspected and
guessed about the fat man. They went over to the express office,
and once more commandeered the telegraph.

Messages chattered across the wires between
Washington and Denver well into the night, as Frank Angel gave full
reports of his own activities, and information was fed back to him
of departmental investigations into Willowfield’s movements.

‘
He was seen boarding a train in
Julesburg,’ Angel told Henderson, ‘and the porter recalls him
leaving it at Council Bluffs. Our men found a hobo wearing a coat
with Willowfield’s name stitched into it, which suggested he’d
either been killed, or fitted himself out with new clothes. The
hobo was clean, no reason to suppose he’d killed Willowfield, so
our people checked the clothing stores. They found the fat man had
bought a whole new outfit. We got a complete description of
everything.’

‘
And then?’

‘
And then he disappeared. Gone.
Phfffft!’

‘
Headed east, probably,’ Henderson
said. ‘You’ll have the hell of a job to pick his trail up if he
has.’

‘
That’s what’s bothering me,’ Angel
said, softly. ‘He laid such a dead easy trail for us to pick up as
far as Council Bluffs. Then suddenly he vanishes. If he wanted to
vanish, why leave a trail at all? If he didn’t give a damn, how
come the trail runs out?’

‘
Beats me,’ Henderson
admitted.
When the fox runs, he will always lead away from his den.
You have to let him run until he believes he is no longer pursued.
Then, and only then, will you see him turn for home. Then, and not
before, can you take him.

All at once he knew what to do, playing his
hunch boldly, strong with the certainty of it. He had special
instructions issued to all Union Pacific personnel working the
transcontinental route anywhere between Kansas City and Sacramento,
California, and a very special one given to every conductor: that
there was a reward of $1,000 to the man who spotted the fat man and
telegraphed the information to him in care of the U.S. marshal at
Denver, Colorado.

It had been that simple: the one man who saw
every passenger on every train moving across the rails of America
was the train’s conductor. Armed with information about
Willowfield’s clothes, his appearance, it would be a shortsighted
man indeed who could not spot the fat man, and Geoffrey Marshall
was certainly not that. He nailed Willowfield the first time he
went through the train, and when the Transcontinental stopped at
Grand Island, he ran to the telegrapher with his news.

Ten minutes later, Frank Angel and John
Henderson were at the depot in Denver, stamping their feet
impatiently as the engineer got steam up on the special loco that
was going to run them up to Cheyenne to intercept the UP train.

‘
It was that simple,’ Angel
said.

‘
I see,’ Willowfield said, slowly,
softly, like a man afraid to let out the words. ‘Alas, Mr. Angel. I
fear I badly underestimated you. I shall not do so
again.’

‘
You aren’t likely to get the chance,’
Angel said. ‘We’re puffing into Cheyenne.’

Willowfield’s face was ashen, and there was
a faint greasy sheen of unhealthy sweat on his forehead and upper
lip. His eyes were those of a hunted animal and he jumped when
Angel spoke.

‘
What?’ he said. ‘I beg your pardon,
sir. What did you say?’

‘
I said would you like to hand over
the Declaration of Independence now?’

Willowfield drew in a deep, deep breath. His
gross body hardened, and something like decision came into the
hunted eyes.

‘
Of course, sir,’ he said. ‘How stupid
of me.’

He reached for his inside pocket in the most
natural way in the world and with the Derringer he whipped from
beneath his arm he shot Frank Angel point blank in the body. The
heavy slug smashed Angel back against the seat and his eyes went up
in his head showing only the white. Willowfleld, with a
surprisingly fast movement for a man so gross, rose from his seat,
and in one movement of his huge arm, smashed the conductor across
the carriage. A man leaped to his feet opposite, and a woman
screamed as he tried to stop Willowfield, who was lurching toward
the door. Snatching up the fallen carpetbag, Willowfield fended off
the passenger as if he had been a small child, and wrenched open
the door of the Pullman coach, stepping out on to the platform at
the rear. The eddying gunsmoke whipped through after him as he
swung down from the rapidly slowing train and jumped from the
platform to the ground. He almost spilled over, but regained his
balance, looking wildly about him for direction. He saw the
scattered outbuildings of the lumber company behind the depot, and
outside them, tethered horses. He started to run toward them and
had gone perhaps twenty paces when he heard his name shouted.

Caution was gone now, everything gone. The
buildings were so tantalizingly close, the horses so near. He
ignored the shout and kept running, running to escape, and he went
to hell still thinking he was going to make it.

Frank Angel, blossoming blood high on the
right-hand side of his body, had staggered off the halted train and
was standing, his sixgun held in a rigidly leveled right hand
clasped in turn around the wrist by his left. In this viselike grip
the gun was as steady as he could hold it, and he tried very hard
to hit Willowfield below the thigh, to bring him down like a
running animal but not to kill him. But Frank Angel was already in
shock and his hand was unsteady. The two bullets he fired fast one
after the other hit George Willowfield just above the base of the
spine, and the fat man went down face forward in the soft wet
earth, dead before the huge body had ceased quivering.

Frank Angel holstered his sixgun and started
out toward the fallen renegade. He made it exactly ten steps before
he, too, fell.

The attorney general looked out at
Pennsylvania Avenue.

The wide, muddy thoroughfare was packed with
traffic: carriages, wagons, horsemen riding through the November
drizzle, their faces like wads of dough beneath the flaring lamps.
The Justice Department building was at the corner of Tenth Street,
his own office on the first floor. It was a big, square room with
high ceilings and French windows which opened on to an imitation
balcony, unmistakably a man’s room and a working room. The
bookshelves were crammed with books, some lying flat, others face
forward, jumbled every which way but tidy. There were law books and
books on criminology, natural history, sociology, criminal
jurisprudence, psychology and rehabilitation, none of them new, all
of them often used for what they were, containers of information
necessary to the work of the man whose office it was—the man who
had prosecuted the unfortunate Andrew Johnson and secured his
impeachment, and had become the chief legal adviser to the
President of the United States of America.

He turned as the door to the office was
opened, and his personal private secretary came in from the
ante-room.

She was a tall, lissom girl with wide blue
eyes and honey blonde hair tied back with a bright red ribbon. She
wore a white silk blouse and a long black skirt and she had a smile
like a desert sunrise. The attorney general, who was a most happily
married man, was nevertheless somewhat gratified to hear that in
the Justice building, Miss Rowe was sometimes referred to as ‘the
fair Miss Hard to Get.’

‘
Yes, Amabel?’ he said.

‘
Mr. Angel is here, sir,’ she told
him. ‘Shall I send him in?’

The attorney general nodded and she stood
back against the door as Frank Angel came in. He looked drawn and
the deep tan on his skin looked yellowish. There were dark circles
beneath his eyes, and his clothes seemed to be hanging loosely on
his tall frame.

‘
Frank,’ the attorney general said.
‘Good to see you up and about. How are you feeling?’

‘
Pretty lousy, sir,’ Angel
said.

‘
You look like it,’ his chief replied.
‘Chest healing?’

‘
Sir,’ Angel confirmed. He moved over
to the leather armchair opposite the attorney general’s desk, and
sat down in it, lowering himself down like an old man who has been
to the edge of the grave, peered in, and drawn back sharply—which,
in truth was what Frank Angel had done. It was only by the merest
chance that the army escort which had come to Cheyenne to take
George Willowfield off the train had brought an ambulance, the
still unlikelier chance that when they had rushed the severely
wounded Angel across country to Fort Laramie he had arrived there
in time to be treated by the surgeon general of the United States
army himself. He was on an inspection tour of the Department of the
Platte, Military Division of the Missouri, and he had his
beautifully cut uniform off and his instruments unpacked in ten
minutes flat. The operation to remove the bullet from Frank Angel’s
lung had been successful—a rarity in Army operations, most of which
were conducted with the most primitive instruments and usually in
the field—and he had been sent back east by train to convalesce. It
had been a slow process. The deadly little Derringer bullet had
bored through Angel’s chest, burned its way through his right lung,
glanced upward off a rib and fractured the scapula, lodging against
that blade of bone. The surgeon general cursed even harder than he
had done when he first saw Frank Angel’s chest and was informed
that the long, raw burn of puckered flesh on the unconscious man’s
back was an earlier wound and not the one he was supposed to
treat.