Hunt Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #5) (11 page)

When Sheridan came back to the jail,
Angel was sitting at the smaller desk with his six-gun disassembled
on the flat top in the front of him and his fingers smeared with
cleaning oil. He
’d taken another gun down
from the rack and put it in his holster. He didn’t plan to be the
first Department of Justice troubleshooter to go into the big black
book they kept at Headquarters with the epitaph ‘Died while
cleaning his gun.’

‘Where’s Howie?’ Angel
asked.

‘He’ll be right along,’ Sheridan
said. ‘He just had to take one sashay through town in his new
outfit.’ He shook his head. ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes,’ he
confessed. ‘He looked like the old Howie again.’

‘You give him his
guns?’

‘Yep,’ Sheridan nodded.

‘That was a nice thing you did,
Dan,’ Angel said. Sheridan had told him he had Howie’s guns. He’d
hocked them to Johnny Gardner for booze a long time back. Sheridan
had paid Howie’s tab and redeemed the guns. He’d showed them to
Angel: a
buscadero
belt with two fitted holsters, the fine soft leather cut,
tailored for one man and one man only. The twin, ivory handled
Peacemakers had consecutive serial numbers and showed all the signs
of good care and sensible use. There wasn’t as much as a tiny pit
on the metal, and the chambers had clicked softly and smoothly when
he rolled them on the palm of his hand with the hammer on the
second notch. Sheridan had taken them over to the Hardin House when
he went for his meal and handed them without comment to his deputy.
Howie had taken the belt and guns out of Sheridan’s hands with the
care a new mother accepts her baby from the doctor, the same light
of wonder shining in his eyes.

‘Hey,’ he had said, softly. ‘Hey,
Dan.’

Nobody looked at him while he
blinked and sniffed around, shuffling his feet, ducking his head,
getting hold of it all. Then he strapped the gunbelt on. He looked
like something now. He had on an old shirt of Hal Hardin’s faded
blue but still in good condition, dark trousers with a faint
pinstripe in them. Even the boots Sherry had found had turned out
to be a good fit. The only thing Howie was shy was a hat, and he’d
told Dan he was going to go across to Mahoney’s and get himself one
on the way back to the jailhouse.

Sheridan went on ahead down the
street, while Howie got himself just so in front of the long mirror
he’d used earlier. When he was all set, Sherry took his face in her
hands and planted a kiss on his surprised face. Howie managed to
fire off a four-alarm blush and stumbled out of the Hardin House
into the street, a grin plastered across his face about half as
wide as the Cimarron River. He still had it on when the three men
jumped him from the alley alongside the Oriental.

It was very smooth, very neat, very quick.

A man Howie had never seen before
stood in his path as he came off the sidewalk to cross the alley.
The man was tall, gangling. Howie noted the prominent Adam’s apple
and the scrawny throat like a turkey cock’s.

‘Howie,’ the man said. ‘You got a
minnit?’

Howie frowned momentarily, but he
was feeling too good with the world to react the way he should have
done. He stopped to talk to the man and as he did the rope that had
been covered with sand and dust and into whose loop he had stepped
was pulled and he went down into the dirt with a thud that jarred
the breath out of his body. Cursing, spluttering to get the dust
out of his mouth, Howie clawed for the guns at his side and as he
did the man on the horse kicked the animal into a jumping run. The
rope tightened with a twang and Howie’s body was whipped off the
ground and then hit it bounding jarring him almost unconscious,
rolling him in front of a doorway in which stood the shadowed form
of Danny Johnston. Johnston stepped out of concealment, his arm
rose and fell, and the drawn six-gun in his hand glinted in the
sunlight. The barrel slammed against the unprotected head of the
deputy, who had scrabbled to one knee, flattening him face down in
the dust. When Howie tried once more to get off the ground, Danny
Johnston’s arm rose and fell again. This time Howie went down and
stayed there, blood trickling quietly from the gash in his scalp
into the heedless ground.

They dragged the unconscious form
into a tumbledown wooden hut that stood to the rear of the Oriental
and somewhat to the north on open ground that stretched across to
the broken edges of the bluffs above Cat Creek. When they had him
out of sight they stripped him of his new clothes; Johnny Evans,
the rider who’d done the roping, was about Howie’s size, and he
pulled them on.

When he was ready, he slid Howie’s
guns out of their tooled leather holsters and checked them. Both
had five shells in the chambers, and Johnny Evans cocked one of
them and pointed it at Howie Cade’s unconscious head. Danny
Johnston stopped him with a cursed command.

Tut that away, you goddamned fool,’
he snapped. ‘You want to queer the whole deal?’

Johnny Evans nodded slowly, once,
twice, three times, drawing in his breath deeply. ‘Later,’ he
promised. ‘I owe him.’

‘All right, later,’ Johnston said,
his temper short. ‘Later.’

He checked the door: there wasn’t a
human being in sight. He could see Nate Ridlow’s wagons still
parked in their neat row in the corral behind Mahoney’s. A woman
was crossing the bridge on Texas with a shopping basket in her
hand. The sagebrush-speckled flat between where Johnston stood and
the creek was deserted.

‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘He trussed
good?’

‘Like a turkey,’ the third man,
the one with the Adam’s apple, told him.

‘Bueno,’
said Johnston.

They went out of there and down the
alley to the street. They crossed without haste and went into the
livery stable. Their horses were there. Nobody took any notice of
them. It was three o’clock.

‘
Where the
hell is he?’

Dan Sheridan’s voice wasn’t so much
worried as exasperated.

Angel got to his feet. He’d had time
to put the six-gun back together without hurrying, which meant
Howie had been at least ten, maybe even fifteen minutes. Not enough
to worry about. But enough. He looked at Sheridan, and Sheridan
held up a hand in the ‘halt’ sign,

‘I’ll take a look,’ he said. ‘You
just set and take it easy.’

Angel sat back against the edge of
the desk, while Sheridan took a hitch at his belt with his left
hand, picked up the Greener, and went out into the bright sunlight,
muttering something about popinjays. The marshal walked out to the
middle of the dusty street where Texas met Front and checked all
three directions. Up toward the livery stable, Howie Cade was
standing in front of two riders who were handing down their
gunbelts to him. Howie walked over and hitched them over the rail
outside the stable, then waved the riders on. Sheridan moved back
toward the jail, leaning against the hitch rail and was watching
the two men come toward him. They had the dust of long travel on
their clothes. Then he saw one of them was Danny Johnston, he
didn’t know the scrawny one with the bobbing Adam’s
apple.

‘Johnston,’ he said. ‘You back
again?’

‘Come to parley, Marshal,’
Johnston said.

‘Talk away,’ Sheridan said. He put
the Greener down, stock first on the ground with the barrel resting
against his leg, fishing in his pocket for a cigarette. When he
looked up Danny Johnston had a six-gun in his hand and so did his
companion. Both held them low, on the side of the high saddle
pommels. No one in the street would even see them. They looked like
two men passing the time of day with the marshal. Danny Johnston
smiled.

‘No Sheridan,’ he said. ‘Howie
didn’t turn his coat. That ain’t him.’

The man dressed in Howie Cade’s
clothes was coming down the street, walking easily and without
haste in the center of Front, hands never far from the matched
six-guns. Sheridan looked at him and then at Johnston. His good
left hand inched toward the barrels of the Greener, and Johnston
showed his teeth, ‘You’d never make it, Sheridan,’ he
said.

Sheridan’s eyes were bleak. But he
didn’t try for the shotgun.

Inside the jail, Angel moved idly
across to the window. He’d heard the voices outside. They were
ordinary, the sound of desultory conversation. He glanced out of
the window at the marshal, facing the two horsemen whose faces were
concealed from his line of sight by the
ramada
roof around the jail. But the
tableau was wrong, and the figure of Howie Cade walking down the
middle of the street was wrong. Sheridan was tensed, his left hand
stiff and close to the shotgun at his left side, his shoulder down
as though he had frozen in a movement. Then one of the horses
shifted slightly, rearranging its feet, and he caught the wink of
metal from one of the low-held six-guns.

‘Where’s Howie?’ he heard Sheridan
ask, and he could hear the control Sheridan was having to exercise
on his voice to keep the sheer anger out of it.

‘In a safe place,’ one of the
riders said.

‘What do you want?’ Sheridan
said.

‘You go lay that shotgun against
the wall, Daniel,’ the hidden rider said. ‘Nice and easy. Then step
out here into the street.’

Sheridan shrugged; there was nothing he could do but
obey.

‘Easy does it, Marshal,’ one of
the riders said. He backed his horse up slightly and Angel saw that
it was Danny Johnston. That was all he needed to know. He moved on
feet as silent as an Indian’s toward the door, and eeled into the
corridor. Burt Hugess watched him with wide eyes.

‘What the hell. . . ?’ he began,
but he was addressing the air. Angel was already out of the door
and on the dark-shadowed eastern side of the squat building. He
moved easily to the corner. He could hear Danny Johnston
speaking.

‘—
gets here, you and me will go
into the jail nice and quiet and let Burt out. You do that, and
maybe you’ll live through this. Try anything else, and you
won’t.
Sabe?’

Angel got down flat on the ground
and eased an eye around the corner of the building: a man who looks
around the edge of a building at his own height will attract the
attention of another by being caught in the other’s peripheral
vision. Nobody ever expects anyone to peek around corners at ground
level. He got their positions fixed in his mind. The man in Howie
Cade’s clothes was just coming past the Oriental, and Angel knew it
had to be now. His fingers fastened on the tattered horse blanket
he’d snatched up as he came out into the corral. He pulled in his
breath, long and deep, and then he stepped out into the open,
already moving fast, the blanket flapping as he whirled it around
his head and whooped like a drunken Arapaho.

His sudden appearance, the startling
sight of the flapping blanket, and the unearthly noise had a
predictable effect on the horses of the Flying H riders. Both of
them went up into the air stiff-legged, ready to take off at a full
gallop when they hit the ground. Neither Danny Johnston nor his
sidekick had a cat’s chance in hell of letting off a shot at Dan
Sheridan, which was exactly what Angel had gambled on. Their
instinctive reaction was to grab for the saddle horn and as they
did so, he swept his gun from the holster, going down on one knee
in a sweet, trained movement, clasping the wrist of his right hand
in his left and cocking the gun in the same moment that the barrel
lined up. His first shot blasted the skinny man sideways out of the
leather with the astonishment of the moment still on his face.
Johnston had perhaps a second longer to act and he did well enough,
whacking a shot at Sheridan which took a piece of wood, about six
inches long and two inches wide, out of one of the uprights of
the
ramada
roof
not more than a foot from Sheridan, who was already moving for the
Greener. Before Danny Johnston could cock the gun in his hand
again, Angel’s second bullet tore through the muscles of Johnston’s
upper left arm, smashed its way through the bones, and ranged at a
tangent upward through his body, exiting in a bloody spraying mist
just below his right ear. The Flying H man went off the horse as if
someone had roped him, while the panicked horses stampeded off away
toward the bridge over Cat Creek. Johnston humped up once in the
dirt of Texas Street and then subsided even as Angel cocked his
six-gun yet again. The man in Howie Cade’s clothes had watched this
awful scene in a frozen disbelief that melted suddenly as he
realized he was standing in the center of the plaza, and that Dan
Sheridan had the Greener in his hand and was turning. He
ran.

‘Stop!’ Sheridan yelled at the top
of his voice. Johnny Evans heard the shout, but its meaning did not
penetrate his panic-stricken mind for a long moment. Then as fast
as he had turned to run he turned again with both of Howie Cade’s
six-guns in his hands and an animal snarl on his face that was torn
away in a welter of mangled ribbons as Dan Sheridan laid the barrel
of the Greener across his right forearm and pulled both of its
triggers, almost blowing Johnny Evans into two separate pieces.
Johnny went down flat on his back like one of those little metal
figures in a fairground shooting booth; and then it was
over.

Sheridan stood there in the middle
of the street with the smoking shotgun laid across his forearm
trying to figure out how it had all happened. He tossed the gun
aside and started up the street and Angel watched him go. He saw
people coming out of the houses and the saloons. Sherry Hardin came
out onto the street and ran toward Sheridan. She told him
something, and he turned away, going up an alley between the saloon
and the next building. Sherry ran down toward Angel. In the
curiously detached aftermath of the sudden action, he could see her
face and body very clearly. She was a good runner, he noted. He
watched the sweet, soft movement of her breasts. She stopped beside
him.

‘Frank,’ she said. She wasn’t
hysterical, upset, frightened. Just glad to be with him. ‘I saw it.
Saw what happened.’ She looked down at the torn, bleeding bodies of
three men. ‘It was - so quick. They died so fast.’

He nodded. They always did, but there was no point in
saying that to her. It was when you saw what the guns could do that
you hated them. You hated the fact that you had to use them knowing
what they could do. But you knew you had to do it.

‘Where did Sheridan go?’ he
asked.

‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘He’s
safe. He went after Howie.’

‘Where is he?’

‘They dragged him up the alley, I
think. The Chinaman saw them. He came and told me. But it was too
late for me to tell you. It all happened so fast.’ She shuddered a
little, holding her own upper arms with her hands, arms folded
across her chest. There was no breeze and it was hot in the late
afternoon sun.,

‘You need a drink,’ he told
her.

‘Not as bad as Howie,’ she said,
and managed a smile.

‘You’re quite a girl, Sherry,’ he
said.

‘You’re quite a girl yourself,
Angel,’ she replied. This time the smile took, and it warmed her
eyes. ‘Maybe I’ll buy
you a
drink.’

‘Let’s see if Howie’s OK first,’
Angel said.

She unfolded her arms and put them akimbo on her
hips, pretending vexation.

‘Don’t you ever relax?’ she asked
him.

‘Work first,’ he said. ‘Fun
later.’

Up the street, Dan Sheridan was
bringing Howie Cade toward the jail. He looked used up, and there
was blood on his face and neck. But he was on his own two feet.
He’d be OK, Angel judged.

‘Well,’ Sherry Hardin said when
they came level. ‘You sure are hell on clothes, Howie
Cade.’

With three men dead in the street it
didn’t really seem appropriate to laugh. But the laughter bubbled
up in them: first Howie, weakly, and then Sheridan, Angel all of
them. They stood there in the street and slapped each other on the
back, laughing at Sherry Hardin’s mild little joke. Maybe it was
relief. Maybe it was the reaffirmation of just being alive to laugh
at all. Whatever it was, they laughed until tears ran down their
cheeks. Mrs. Mahoney said it was almost indecent; so it
was.