Warn Angel! (A Frank Angel Western--Book 9) (4 page)

At Frank Angel’s request, the Union Pacific
had ferried Pat O’Connor eastward to meet their train, and the
engineer, complaining every mile of the way at being taken away
from his responsibilities, answered their questions as the Special
bucketed down the line toward Cheyenne.

‘
Sure, it’d be hard to say how many
men he had,’ O’Connor said, replying to one of Bob Little’s
questions. ‘I never seen more than four or five. How many he had up
on the top of the Cut, I’d only be able to guess.’

‘
Did you hear any names used?’ Angel
asked him.

‘
Never a one,’ O’Connor said. ‘They
weren’t much on talking.’

He surveyed his inquisitors with wary
suspicion. He’d heard that the Justice Department was sending out
two of its men with the ransom for the Freedom Train—that much was
already common railroad gossip. If you wanted the truth of it, it
was also common railroad gossip that the Justice Department was off
its head: what was needed for those barefaced thieves in Sweetwater
Cut was a squadron of cavalry with a Gatling gun. Sending two men,
however capable-looking they might be, was another indication that
politicians back east had no real conception of conditions out
west, or just how tough a gang of cold-blooded killers like
Willowfield’s bunch could be.

This Angel, now, O’Connor thought. (Angel!
That was a name for a fighting man, b’God!) Tall, he was, with eyes
that would make a man think twice about making any jokes on the
subject of angels. Broad in the shoulders and narrow at the hip,
Angel had the contained, capable look of a trained athlete. He wore
a dark blue shirt, corduroy pants tucked into the tops of mule-ear
boots that, even if they were well kept, had seen better days. A
cord coat in the same brown as the pants, a snug-fitting holster
with a Frontier Colt. Face tanned, the cheekbones high enough to
give Angel’s face an angular look. Hair streaked, sun-bleached
blond, cut fashionably long but not ostentatiously long like the
self-styled frontiersmen O’Connor had seen strutting around the
squares of midwestern cities, the type who got all their
verisimilitude from dime novels. Angel looked like he might be some
sort of engineer, a man who worked outdoors but not with his hands.
The other one, Little, had the same kind of look. Except that where
Angel spoke with a soft, clear drawl, Little’s voice was slurred
with the treacly vowels of the South. O’Connor, prideful of his
ability to assess a man from his looks, tabbed Bob Little as one of
those men who do well in all sorts of sport, who make the school or
college athletic team, whose big, beefy handsomeness inspires
hero-worship in all the other kids, and long sighs among the young
ladies. The type was peculiarly American: they all had the same
regular white teeth, the same ready boyish smile, the same ambling
amiability. They usually ended up, O’Connor thought, with a small
man’s satisfaction, with the same hanging gut, the same
false-hearty slap-on-the-back lifestyle, and the same sweet, small
shrewish wife. Little didn’t look like he was that far down the
road yet, but he had all the outward appearances of the
all-American boy.

O’Connor was about as wrong as a man could
get.

Bob Little was, in fact, one of
the three special investigators working for the Justice Department
in whom the attorney general reposed complete trust. His amiable
exterior concealed reflexes like a cobra’s and he had a brilliant
mind. He spoke four languages, was a champion swimmer, and like
Frank Angel, he was used to being sent into trouble spots without
back-up and often without even a briefing, his instructions
brutally simple:
clean it up.

There was a famous story about the Justice
Department’s investigators (later appropriated by the Texas
Rangers) originating at a time when the attorney general had sent
one of his men down to Lincoln county in New Mexico, where all the
signs pointed to the outbreak of a civil war between the Anglos and
the Spanish-American population. Later to be known as the Harrell
War, it was, in 1873, just another of those headaches that
frequently landed on the big desk in the echoing old building on
Pennsylvania Avenue—the headquarters of the Department of Justice.
On the documentation had been the presidential squiggle which
meant: take care of this.

The attorney general had done what he always
did: sent one of his special investigators down to the New Mexico
Territory. He so reported to the president.

‘
What?’ Grant had exploded. ‘You did
what?’

The attorney general repeated his statement
that he’d sent one of his men down to look into the affair.

‘
You only sent one man?’ Grant asked,
aghast.

‘
Why, yes, sir,’ the attorney general
said, his eyebrows rising a centimeter higher. ‘They only have one
war, don’t they?’

Justice Department investigators were a
breed apart. Their existence was not advertised, nor did the
attorney general supply the General Services Administration with a
detailed breakdown in his departmental budget of what the expenses
listed as ‘Training of Special Staff’ actually covered. They were
picked men, trained to the peak of performance by a series of
courses designed to create what the attorney general had envisaged:
a thinking killing-machine.

No man who bore the title special
investigator was allowed out into the field until he passed the
battery of tests devised by the dour Armorer, himself one of the
finest shots in the United States, a man who had forgotten more
about weaponry than most others would ever learn. After him,
trainees were passed along to the little Korean, Kee Lai, who
taught unarmed combat and the martial arts of the Orient. He taught
them how to kill with the edge of the hand, the way to find and
paralyze the nervous centers of the human body, and how to survive
the unexpected assassin. After that there were long hours with the
man they called ‘the Indian,’ who was said to be good enough with a
knife to take on armed men and come through alive. He taught them
how to look after their weapons, how to heft them and throw them,
how to place them hard into the human body so that no bone would
deflect their thrust and they would kill the first time every
time.

There was other training, too. Survival
training, tracking, fieldwork. And more cerebral pursuits: a full
and thorough basic grounding in law, the taking and presentation of
testimony, the composition, duties and responsibilities of grand
juries, military courts-martial and much more. The attorney general
had wanted thinking killing-machines. When the training was
complete he had them.

Put a gun, a knife, a club in
the hands of one of these men and they could use them, better than
most. Given the additional quality of intelligence and training,
they also
knew a much more important thing: when not to. They were
taught one basic rule: survive.

Of course, there was no way that Pat
O’Connor could have known all this. To him, Frank Angel and Bob
Little were a couple of well-built civil servants and if he let his
impatience with these city boys show through once in awhile, it was
only understandable. He explained, all over again, how the train
had been held up. How Willowfield had sent him in to Cheyenne with
the letter to be handed to the U.S. marshal. And how he’d been told
to be sure and tell the marshal not to do anything hasty until the
letter had been transmitted east.

‘
This Willowfield,’ Little asked. ‘How
does he speak?’

‘
Jeez an’ I must have told that twenty
times already,’ O’Connor said. ‘Have you boys got any idea at all
how many times I’ve been asked all this?’

‘
Tell us anyway,’ Angel
said.

‘
Jehosophat!’ O’Connor said,
exasperation plain in his voice.

‘
Son of Asa,’ Little recited. ‘King of
Judah. Defeated by the Moabites, Ammonites, and Edomites about 900
B.C.’

Pat O’Connor looked at the big man as though
he had just turned into a giraffe. Little grinned.

‘
Sure, it’s a Bible scholar yez are,’
O’Connor said, his face setting. ‘Now that’ll go well on a job like
this.’

‘
Patrick,’ Angel said gently. ‘Your
prejudice is showing.’

‘
Aye, so it is,’ O’Connor said. ‘But
all the same … ’

‘
The way of his speaking,’ Little
reminded him.

‘
I know it, I know it,’ O’Connor
flared. ‘Sure an’ I’ll tell yez if ye’ll give me but a
moment.’

They gave him his moment and he used it to
pull out a blackened clay pipe from the pocket of his navy-blue
donkey jacket. ‘English, it was,’ he said, as he unrolled a yellow
oilskin tobacco pouch and stuffed dark, oily looking shag into the
bowl of the pipe.

‘
You mean British English, Pat?’ Angel
asked.

‘
Now, then,’ O’Connor said, puffing
furiously away at the pipe, which emitted great clouds of pungent
smoke. ‘Is there another kind?’

‘
An Englishman,’ Little said,
thoughtfully.

‘
Well, now and I never said that,’
O’Connor said. ‘I said the way of his speakin’ ’twas English. As if
he’d maybe come from there. But I’d not swear to even
that.’

‘
Maybe English-born,’ Angel said. ‘But
raised here.’

‘
Could be,’ Little said. He asked
O’Connor another question.

‘
Me tobacco?’ O’Connor said,
surprised. ‘Sure, I buy it in Kansas City. By the pound.
Why?’

‘
Oh, nothing,’ Little grinned. ‘We
just wondered if someone we know gets his cigars from the same
place.’

‘
Sure as hell smells like it,’ Angel
smiled back.

O’Connor stared at them, as if finally
convinced that they were quite mad. He had no way of appreciating
their private joke about the attorney general’s famous cigars, and
the Department story that he had them specially made from yak
droppings laced with skunk-juice.

They heard the steady thunder of the driving
wheels change rhythm slightly and the lurch as they went into a
long bend. There was a deep rolling continuous boom of sound from
beneath them. They looked at O’Connor.

‘
North Platte,’ he said. ‘We’re making
damned good time.’

The Justice Department men
didn’t need to comment. Both of them knew this part of the country
well, and knew, just as if they were looking at a map, that the UP
tracks
described a figure like an elongated S lying face down,
Omaha to Grand Island to North Platte, where the rails crossed the
wide northern fork of the Platte River—half a mile wide, and half
an inch deep, as the old wagon masters had used to say—over a long
wooden trestle bridge. They also knew that they were already a good
two-thirds of the way to their destination. Ahead lay Ogallala and
Julesburg, one or two tank towns: nothing much before
Cheyenne.

Pat O’Connor looked at the big railroad
watch he’d taken from his vest pocket and nodded, yawning
ostentatiously.

‘
What time is it?’ Angel asked
him.

‘
Five,’ O’Connor said, and then again
as if realizing what he had said and doubting his own good sense,
‘five a.m.’

‘
Might get a couple of hours
shut-eye,’ Angel said.

‘
Aye,’ O’Connor said. ‘We’ll be in
Cheyenne by ten. I think I’ll just get me head down
awhile.’

They were the last words he ever spoke. He
hunched himself down in the hard cot rigged along the wall of the
caboose, and he was still there, trying to snatch a half-sleep,
when Willowfield and his men blew the Special right off the tracks
about forty miles on the far side of Julesburg.

Willowfield’s plan had been simple.

He didn’t want the Freedom Train, nor
anything in it. What could a man do with such dross—worthless
souvenirs of a pointless history? No, the Freedom Train had served
its purpose, and once he had secured presidential agreement that
the ransom would be paid, he had abandoned it. He had recruited a
band of drifters, helter-skelter rogues who knew nothing of the
ransom or the other part of his plan. Once the hold-up had been
effected, he had paid them off and they had dispersed. Around him
Willowfield kept only the men he had picked as the core of his
operation, the ones he had gathered together after he had decided
to stop the Freedom Train.

They had left fires burning on the rim of
Sweetwater Cut, dummies propped up on sticks guarding the
beleaguered train. The boy-soldiers had been disarmed and suitably
impressed with the necessity of doing nothing which would provoke
the destruction of the Freedom Train. Then, laughing among
themselves, Willowfield and his men had sifted out, moving down the
long timbered slopes eastward toward Julesburg. It didn’t matter
anymore whether the soldiers discovered the ruse or not. There was
nowhere they could go, no action they could take that would
interfere with the completion of Willowfield’s plan, and he led his
men eastward without haste.

They were all good men, but not too good. He
had his own reasons for wanting them to be just good enough.
Willowfield was a fair judge of a man’s reactions to given stimuli,
and he’d picked them on that basis: his ‘lieutenant,’ Falco, Davy
Livermoor, Hank Kuden, Gil Curtis, and even Buddy McLennon. Buddy
was a rather more special choice, but the rule still applied:
Willowfield never let sentiment interfere with business.

Chris Falco, the first of his
recruits, he’d found guarding a tinhorn monte dealer in a Wichita
deadfall, a tall, good-looking man with wings of gray hair
alongside his head that made him look older, more distinguished
than a paid gun had any right to look. Davy Livermoor had come up
from Texas with a herd of longhorns which he’d sold to a buyer from
the East for a good price. He’d joined up with Willowfield rather
than go back and face the man whose herd it was and explain how
he’d spent the money on Kansas City whores, lavish hotel suites,
hand-cut suits, and hand-rolled cigars—a half year of riotous
living that was coming to its inglorious end when Willowfield ran
across him. Kuden, born Kudenheim in Stuttgart, Germany, was a
former mercenary who’d emigrated to America a jump and a half ahead
of the German police (who wanted to question him about a duel in
which the young son of a noble
Graf
had died). His cropped head and scarred cheeks
proclaimed his nationality, and six years in America had hardly
softened the edge of his accent. He was a ruthless and
unquestioning killer. Gil Curtis was one of Falco’s finds. Falco
had said Curtis was tops with explosives, and if Falco vouched for
Curtis then that was all right with Willowfield. After all, Falco
accepted his recommendations without question. Falco even tolerated
Buddy McLennon, whom Willowfield had introduced as his traveling
companion. Neither he nor any of the others talked with the boy,
who in turn kept apart from them. He was just there, like one of
the horses. As long as Willowfield paid the freight, they reckoned,
they could turn a blind eye to his private life.