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

‘
Agreed?’

And Angel would duck his head, agreeing.

‘
Then don’t get
involved.’

He pulled his thoughts back to the here and now,
heard Sheridan saying that the only thing he could usefully do was
to sit tight and wait to see what Hugess planned.

‘
Wal,’ Ridlow said. ‘Damned if I’m
gonna sit around waitin’ on him. I’m gonna round up some able
bodies an—’

‘
Nathan!’ Sheridan said. His voice
was not loud but it stopped Ridlow’s chatter like a tap being
turned. ‘Just-plain-don’t. And that’s an order!’

Old Ridlow looked at the marshal, and then at Howie
Cade, and then back at the marshal.

‘
Aw,’ he said. ‘Hell, Dan’l, if
that’s the way you feel.’

‘
That’s the way I feel,’ Sheridan
said. ‘And don’t you forget it.’

‘
Shoot,’ Ridlow said. ‘Then that’s
the way she’ll be. How about one more afore I get on about my
business? Just a leetle one. Haw!’

Sheridan poured the beer into the
cups. He handled the job quite well, but it was plain to Angel that
the marshal wasn’t used to using his left hand and that he’d be
somewhere less than fast getting his gun into action if he had to.
As for using a rifle ... it was better not to think too much about
it. Don’t get involved, he told himself again. When they’d finished
the beer, he got up to leave with Ridlow, telling himself that what
he’d do was wait it out, see what happened. He could always pitch
in alongside Sheridan if they hit the jail. He decided to hold on
until nightfall before making a decision, but the way it turned out
he didn’t have to make any decision at all. It was made for him at
around seven-thirty that night when someone cut Nathan Ridlow down
from ambush in an alley halfway up Front Street.

Ridlow hadn’t even been wearing a
gun. He’d spent most of the late afternoon and early evening going
from store to saloon to restaurant to livery stable to saloon,
haranguing the citizens of Madison to support their marshal,
completely ignoring the warning that Sheridan had served on him.
He’d been vituperative, scalding, merciless, calling Madison’s men
folk spineless, spavined, swaybacked, and possessed of less guts
than a cooked rainbow trout, but all to no avail. When he had
suggested a frontal attack on the Flying H riders, he had been
gently reminded of the presence of such trigger-happy gunslingers
as Danny Johnston and Willie Johns. When he had put up the idea of
sending out riders in every direction under cover of darkness, it
had taken only moments for someone to remind him that even if they
escaped the town, the riders would still have to traverse Flying H
range throughout the night, a range patrolled by heavily armed
Hugess riders no doubt looking for just such riders, not to say
hoping to encounter them. When in disgust Nathan Ridlow finally
stamped out of the Oriental with the flat-stated intention of going
the hell on down to the railroad depot and send him off a telegraph
message to Fort Worth so at least his boss would know what the Sam
Hill was holding him up, the citizens of Madison who’d had to stand
still for his tongue-lashing watched him go with a mixture of shame
and relief.

Nathan Ridlow stamped down the
street toward the railroad depot, his temper not really gone at
all: he’d whipped himself up into a good anger to tongue-lash the
men in the bar, but in actual fact he wasn’t truly angry, hadn’t
really expected them to rally round Sheridan. After all, they were
shopkeepers, small businessmen, not gunslingers. The whole idea of
hiring Sheridan was so he could do their gunslinging for them. If
he got himself a tiger by the tail, it was his job to unhitch
himself with the least possible damage to (a) the town, (b) its
citizens, and (c) not necessarily in that order.

‘
Which same is some trick,’ he
told himself, as he stomped down the boarded sidewalk. ‘Haw!’ He
stopped as he stepped down from the boards onto the dusty ground
just before the point where the side path going up to the church
split off from the main street, and in doing so, threw the aim of
the ambushers. The lance of flame speared from the alley alongside
the livery stable, and Nathan Ridlow felt as if some huge,
invisible being had punched him heavily on the upper chest. He was
astonished to find himself face down in the dust of Front Street,
and he could hear the deep repeated
whang!
of a Winchester carbine. Out
of pure instinct he rolled over, dying for the shadow of the
boardwalk off which he had just stepped. Now the sharper bark of a
six-gun laid itself over the repeated roar of the carbine, and
bullets smacked gouts of dust into the old man’s eyes and face,
half-blinding him. Then the roar of the carbine turned into a
terrible clanging sound, as if someone had smote a huge anvil right
next to his head, very close. He could hear the metal vibrating,
and there was the taste of iron in his mouth. He cried out from the
shock of it, not knowing that his body had been slammed back
against the wall of the house behind him, not knowing yet that he
was gunshot and dying.

‘
Goddammit all to hellangone!’ he
shouted, and got up and ran.

He ran toward the church, grabbing at his belly
instinctively, knowing somehow that he was all shot to hell down
there, seeing the white frame building with its red-tiled roof
through a blur of misting crimson that floated up over his eyes as
if he was sinking in it. He went down on his knees, and he heard
someone shouting behind him.

‘
Kill the old fucker!’ the voice
yelled, and he knew who it was, and then something went off like a
firecracker in his head, and he thought, that’s all, I’ll never. .
. .

Dan Sheridan was already out in the street and
running toward the sound of the shots. People were poking their
heads out of windows, doorways, eyes seeking movement and the
source of the shooting. The twilight was coming up from the creek
bed like a thief, gradually stealing the nearest ground. The alleys
between the buildings were already in black shadow, and Sheridan
ran harder, suddenly aware of his own vulnerability, Cade back in
the jail and nobody to back him if the Flying H boys stepped out on
to the street and made him fight.

As he reached the path that led up the slight rise to
the church, he checked, eyes swinging left and right. Nothing. No
movement that he could see. A trap?

‘
Marshal!’ someone called. ‘Up
here!’

The voice came from up the bluff, toward the
church.

‘
Who is that?’ He cocked the gun
in his left hand.

‘
Phil Petrie, Marshal,’ the man
shouted. ‘It’s Nate. I think he’s dead.’

Sheridan ran up the slope toward
Petrie, who was kneeling over the body of Ridlow, which lay
aflounder on the hard-packed earth, the side of the old man’s head
was a mangled mess of broken bone and tissue.

‘
You see what happened?’ Sheridan
snapped. Petrie was one of Ridlow’s men. Petrie shook his head. ‘I
was coming up the street, heard the shootin’,’ he said. ‘I saw the
boss roll down, as if he was hit. Then he got up and run up the
hill. Someone shouted to get him and then he went down like a
log.’

‘
Where did the shooting come
from?’

‘
Over by the livery, ‘s far as I
could tell,’ Petrie said, jerking his head at the bulking loom of
the stable across the other side of Front Street.

Sheridan looked up quickly as he heard someone coming
up the pathway fast: he had the gun ready, still cocked. He let
down the hammer when he saw who it was.

‘
Is he dead?’ Angel
asked.

For answer, Sheridan scrapped a
match on his boot heel. By the flickering flame Angel could see the
black blood that stained the entire middle of the old man’s back
and the awful gaping mess that had been the side of his
head.

‘
In the back,’ Sheridan said,
straightening up. ‘But why?’

‘
He was shooting his mouth off in
the saloon, Marshal,’ Petrie said. ‘Tellin’ everyone what gutless
wonders they was. Said he aimed to get word to Fort Worth as to why
we was hung up here.’

‘
Ah,’ said Sheridan, as though
that explained it all.

He turned and looked down the slope
toward the livery stable. Dark and squat, it was silent, menacing.
He measured it all out with his eyes, the old man down there in the
street, the men at the side of the stable, the shots, the
staggering run toward the church. . . . Old Ridlow had been given
about as much chance as a steer in a slaughterhouse.

‘
Anybody come out of there,
Petrie?’ Sheridan said. Petrie looked up, startled by the wicked
rasp in Sheridan’s voice.

‘
Out the stable?’

‘
Out of the stable.’

‘
No, sir, nobody,’ Petrie
said.

‘
You think they might still be in
there?’ Angel asked.

Sheridan looked at him as though
Angel had just sprung from the ground, a touch of annoyance in his
eyes. He put the barrel of the six-gun against Angel’s upper arm
and then put pressure on it, moving Angel to one side as if he were
some weird new form of obstruction.

‘
I want to help,’ Angel said,
quietly.

‘
Sure,’ Sheridan replied. ‘Then
get your friend Ridlow out of here.’

‘
No,’ Angel said.

Sheridan looked at him again, differently this time.
His eyes were empty, and Angel knew how he felt: it was the look of
the man who knows he is going to get killed but can do no other
thing.

‘
You join in now, you can’t stop
there,’ Sheridan said. ‘They’ll mark you down.’

‘
I know that,’ Angel said. ‘That’s
why they killed the old man, wasn’t it?’

‘
Right,’ Sheridan said. ‘A
warning. In case anyone in town was thinking of helping
me.’

He looked down at the body of Nathan
Ridlow and then he started down the slope, not looking to see if
Angel was following. Sheridan had one six-gun in his hand and
another stuck in his waistband. He crossed the street in shadow and
eased along the side of a house next to the livery stable until the
stable was there in front of him, maybe fifteen feet away. There
was a window high on the alley side of the stable, no doors. They
were in front and back, the rear ones opening into a fenced corral
in which half a dozen horses stood.

‘
Front or back?’ Angel said.
Sheridan turned to look at him, not letting the surprise show too
much, but glad someone was with him.

‘
How do you feel?’

‘
They’re hoping you’ll do this,
you know,’ Angel said.

‘
I know.’

‘
Then take the front. Go in fast
and hit the floor as soon as you do. They may not be expecting
anyone to come in from the back.’

‘
All right,’ Sheridan said. ‘What
for a signal?’

Angel did an owl hoot. It was pretty good, and
Sheridan managed a tight smile.

‘
OK,’ he said, and went across the
open space to the wall of the stable fast and low. Nothing
happened. He eased around the front corner of the building, seeing
Angel move quartering toward the corral like a shadow, and the
thought crossed his mind that maybe Angel wasn’t just a passing
drifter, but then it was gone as he put all his thoughts aside and
emptied everything out of himself except the cold readiness to move
when he heard Angel’s signal.

Whoo-hoo.

Sheridan ran across the face of the
livery stable and out into Front Street, turning in a tight arc to
smash the full weight of his right shoulder and body against the
double doors, wincing as the impact jarred his broken hand, diving
flat on the pocked dusty floor of the stable, eyes wide to get the
darkness out of them, six-gun up and cocked in his left
hand.

Nothing.

He eased forward slightly, and as he did, a shot from
somewhere high up whanged out, smacking dust up into his face,
forcing him to roll fast to one side as a second, a third, a fourth
shot smashed downward, the slugs seeking his body as he banged
against one of the wooden stall partitions, bringing down a harness
with a jangling thud.

He was getting carefully to his feet
when Angel came in through the rear door, moving very fast and
already having set up his aim for the man up in the rafters of the
stable, using the flashes of the man’s gun to fix the spot. Angel
moved across the door aperture from left to right, his body going
backward onto his shoulders, the six-gun in his right hand spitting
fire as he fanned the hammer in a continuous roar, offering the man
above no target, no chance. The five slugs were fired in a tight
four-inch arc, and the man in the rafters went up like a diver on a
high board as the first caught him in the belly, the second just
above the breastbone, and the third underneath his jaw at the point
where it hinges, below the ear. He came down with a solid thud that
sent flickering specks of chaff spiraling in the still warm air,
but Frank Angel wasn’t even looking at the man. He knew he was
dead. He was jamming fresh shells into his six-gun and running
toward Sheridan. Sheridan paused, puzzled, then Angel shouted,
‘Behind you!’ and he whirled to see the dark running form going out
through the doorway, and without thinking, without aiming, Sheridan
let the hammer of the Colt go, and he saw the man flinch, knew he’d
hit him.