Warn Angel! (A Frank Angel Western--Book 9) (5 page)

And Willowfield paid lavishly. He had
learned a long time ago that in life everything had to be paid for.
You paid in money, or blood, or sweat, or time; but you paid. The
easiest way was money. With money you could get anything you needed
out of life. When he needed information, he simply bought it. He
had never encountered a man who could not be bought, one way or
another. Some wanted dollars in their hands; others wanted what the
dollars would buy: baubles, or women, or property. The loot, which
he had salted away during his years of plundering during War, was
more than enough to finance and support his contention, and to pay
the small price needed to ensure the loyalty of such as Falco and
the rest. He needed little himself, and that little was also easily
bought.

A lifetime study of criminals had convinced
Willowfield that their most besetting fault was a lack of
imagination. They simply did not think big enough. You never made
any sort of a killing if you tried to pinch pennies on the setup.
But if you were prepared to think on a really grand scale, there
was no limit to what you could do. Thus it was that when he had
first heard of the plans for the Freedom Train—a small item in a
newspaper in San Francisco—he had realized, as if it had been
preordained, that here was his opportunity, here the means of
effecting, in one fell swoop, a coup that would provide him with
the kind of money that few people even so much as see during an
entire lifetime—enough money for the rest of his life. He went
about his planning with a diligence and zeal that would have
exhausted a man twenty years his junior. He plotted and planned,
bribed and bought, hired and stole when and as he needed. He
invested all of his time, all of his not-inconsiderable
intelligence, all of his abilities to learning everything there was
to about the Freedom Train: its routes, its history, its
composition, its personnel. Then he set about learning the various
ways in which, given the appropriate stimulus, the Union Pacific
Railroad could, and would, respond to an emergency of the kind he
had in mind.

Then, knowing what he knew, it became
child’s play to forecast with reasonable assurance the probable
arrival time of the special train which would be used to send the
ransom money to Cheyenne. It was easy to establish that the money
would be in the charge of two men from the Department of Justice,
that one of the engineers from the Freedom Train had been sped east
to join them and—no doubt—to brief them upon the robbery and its
perpetrators. All exactly as he had expected. Officialdom is by
definition stupid, slow moving, since its brain is a collective
one. One man alone, ready to make rapid decisions and to act upon
them immediately, must always be superior to officialdom, can
always outwit it—since he can move faster, think faster and best of
all, disappear faster. Even after he paid each of his men, he would
still have enough to provide him with a good life for the remainder
of his days. New Orleans, perhaps. Even Europe. He smiled his
wounded smile and gave the order to destroy the Special.

They could hear her a long time before she
came into sight, a long time before she ran up on to the embankment
where Gil Curtis had planted the dynamite. Then she came thundering
along the right of way, the bright glow from her smokestack
projecting an orange glow onto the lowering dawn clouds. The raised
embankment ran along the flank of a gully like a shelf, falling
away below the train in a precipitous slope that was scarred with
rockslides and shale. It ended, forty feet below, where the ground
swelled upwards again toward the hills on the far side of the creek
that sluiced down the valley. Curtis let the Special get all the
way onto the embankment, the caboose rocking as she whammed past
his marker. He slammed the plunger into the box. The flat smack of
the explosion hit their ears an instant after they saw the
brilliant blue-yellow light beneath the engine, and for a fraction
of a second, the watchers thought the attempt had failed. Then they
saw how the engine was leaning, nosing down, the front bogie
completely destroyed, the bright brass reflector lamp crashing,
smashing, digging, tearing into the ties with an enormous,
deafening roar. Huge chunks of rock and earth and shattered timber
flew high into the air over the shoulder of the thundering
locomotive and then the whole terrifying juggernaut of metal and
wood and flying rock erupted in an astonishing booming burst of
fire that lofted great steel plates from the ruptured boiler up
into the air like playing cards. The blast whirled across toward
the hidden men, making the horses curvet in panic. They felt the
long soft insistent pressure on their ears but they could not tear
their eyes away from the terrible sight of the train ripping off
the tracks and plunging down the side of the rocky gully. They
heard the huge noise of the disintegrating engine sounding like the
last quivering clangor of the great bell of Hades, the tender and
caboose rolling over and over, breaking up as they rolled, and then
the locomotive jumping up off the rocky slope and turning over, and
over, and then, in a final, searing, stunning explosion of boiling
flame, ending its life in the scoured, smoking pit it had dug for
itself at the bottom of the gully.

‘
Jesus,’ Falco said, into the
comparative silence. His voice stirred Willowfield from the
hypnotized reverie into which he had sunk. Then the fat man swung
up into the saddle. The horse braced itself as his weight settled
into the fork, and he pulled its head around to face
downhill.

‘
Will she blow again?’ he asked
Curtis.

‘
Naw,’ Curtis said, dancing triumph
over what he had just effected still lighting the darkness of his
eyes. ‘That war the boiler went, Cunnel. She’s done
fer.’

‘
Good,’ Willowfield said. ‘Let’s get
down there.’ He kicked the horse into a walk and led off across the
broken ground toward the wreck. The bright yellow glow of the
flames flickering over the hulk of the shattered engine reflected
on the receding clouds. Hesitantly, somewhere in the smoking
depths, a bird began to sing.

~*~

When Frank Angel opened his eyes he thought
he was in Hell. The red glare of the flames, the charred stink of
the burned ground, the crackling heat that brittled his skin all
struck his senses simultaneously, muddling his mind. Fire? He could
not remember anything. His mind was completely disoriented and his
memory drowned in dread. Instinct told him to move. He could feel
the scorch of fire, realized he was inside something that was
burning. A broken wooden crate, his blurring eyes reported, seeing
broken slatting, wood, twisted metal. He tried to move, and felt
something pinning down his legs. He rolled back, kicking away the
piece of timber that lay across them. As he did so, what was left
of Bob Little’s tattered body rolled away from him and slid down
the canted floor.

It all came back to him then and he lay on
the charring floor retching, oblivious. After a few minutes he was
able to sit up, and the adrenalin surged through his veins: he knew
he had to move. The train had been dynamited, and that meant
whoever had dynamited it would be coming to inspect the results. If
they found him alive they would kill him. He knew there was nothing
he could do for Little, or for anyone else who had been on the
train. The way the train had been destroyed was proof that the
wreckers neither wanted nor expected survivors. He found his eyes
were accustomed to the reddish glare, and looking around discovered
that he was in a space between the collapsed wall and the
upright-tilted floor of what had been the caboose. The wood was
starting to smolder, and he could feel the heat of the flames on
the other side of it. He went down on one knee, breathed deeply of
the cooler air near the ground, and wormed through the A-shaped
space. He came out into flickering red brightness, faced by the
monstrous twisted jumble of the wrecked ten-wheeler. It lay on its
back, one of the huge drive wheels still turning as it sought rest
through gravitational pull. The entire body was torn apart like the
throat of a lamb brought down by a pack of hunting wolves. Tongues
of flame licked across the spilled oil and on the wood that had
been trapped beneath the crushed tender. There was no sign of
either the engineer or the fireman, and Angel knew that their
chances of having survived both the explosion and the crash were
virtually nonexistent. And O’Connor? If the little Irishman had
come through the crash, he hoped O’Connor would have enough sense
to keep his head down. The sound of horses moving on the shaley
slope told him that any thought of going to look for the little man
was out of the question. Instead he moved on noiseless feet across
the bed of the gully, away from the smoking wreck of the train. He
splashed icy water on to his face, welcoming the sudden shock of
it, then moved silently up a shelving slope toward a stand of pine
thirty or forty feet away. The cool dampness of the ground was a
welcome relief to his fire-dried skin, and he stretched his hands
in the dew-damp grass. His shirt was full of small burned holes,
his pants torn and filthy. His coat, with his wallet and money in
it, had been hanging from a peg in the caboose, as had his gunbelt
and sixgun. He cursed his own helplessness and eased back into the
shadowed trees as he saw Willowfield lead his riders across the
little creek and up to where the ruined train had ended its
terrible downward plunge.

‘
Check around everywhere!’ he heard
one of the men shout. ‘Make sure nobody’s alive!’

‘
Find the safe first!’ someone else
shouted. Angel thought he detected the nasal twang of a British
accent in the shouted command. Willowfield, he wondered? He wormed
his way through the brambles and thicketed undergrowth until he
reached a flattened bluff from which he could see down into the
basin below without being seen.

The sun was coming up over the top of the
mountains to the west now, sending long fingers of light that
shafted through the trees like searchlights, paling the flickering
flames that still licked stubbornly at the blackened wreckage,
touching the wreathing smoke with pink fingers. Down below in the
gully, Angel could see the men moving about. One of them sat on a
horse: a gross, ugly man who waved his arms as he shouted commands
to the others. Angel caught the timbre of the voice with its nasal
twang, and knew that this must be Willowfield. Alongside the fat
man was a tow-haired youngster on a fine piebald mare. He wore a
pale blue shirt that shone in the sunlight, like silk. His
close-fitting fawn pants were tight-tailored at crotch and rump.
Angel noted the girlish shoulders, the androgynous hips and the
full, pouting mouth almost clinically before turning his attention
to a third man who was up on the sloping side of the gully shouting
something.

‘
One off them alife up here!’ he
shouted.

Cropped bullet head, Angel noted, and the
rigid upright stance of a soldier. He was standing over a hunched
figure that lay on the slope where a break in the grass cover
revealed the slate base beneath the thin mountain turf. As he
watched, Angel saw the boy sitting next to Willowfield lay a hand
on the fat man’s forearm and say something. There was a plea in the
way he looked at Willowfield, who nodded.

‘
Wait!’ Willowfield
shouted.

The man on the skyline nodded and shrugged,
watching dispassionately as the boy kneed the piebald into a trot
and headed across the foot of the gully until he was below where
the bullet-headed one was standing. Then the boy got off the horse
and went up the shale slide like a cat, eagerness in every line of
his body. As he came up to the crest he slid a thin-bladed knife
from a scabbard at his side, and Angel watched helplessly as the
boy used it on the defenseless O’Connor. The Irishman’s dying
scream bounced off the rock walls of the gully as Angel bit back
his own curse. The fat man had not moved; Angel thought he could
see a smile on Willowfield’s face as the boy ran down the slope and
vaulted into the handsomely tooled saddle. He brought the piebald
back alongside Willowfield and touched the fat man’s pudgy hand, as
if thanking him.

Willowfield nodded, a Roman emperor
indulging his favorite.

‘
Colonel!’

The shout came from high up and off to the
left of where the dead body of Pat O’Connor lay in the gullied
shale. Angel could see a tall, broad-shouldered man who wore his
holster low on the right and whose black hair was winged with gray
from ear to crown. The man waved an arm.

‘
Colonel, I found the
safe!’

‘
Get Gil over there, Chris!’
Willowfield shouted back. ‘Let him handle it!’

The man called Chris waved acknowledgment
and yelled something. Another man came scrambling up the side of
the gully, a canvas tote bag in his left hand.

Gil, Angel thought. He’d be the explosives
man, the one who’d blown up the train. Medium height, slim, long
black hair, and dark, deep-set eyes. The man wore greasy buckskin
pants and a leather jacket. Gun on the left. No knife visible, but
that didn’t mean anything. Angel watched Gil go over the crest and
out of sight with the one called Chris. As they did, two others
came into sight and moved down the hill to where Willowfield sat,
smiling slightly like some obscene Buddha, his horse shifting its
feet as if to redistribute his weight. One of the men was short and
thickset, running slightly toward overweight: thin black hair,
slicked back, and a flat crowned Stetson hanging down his back on a
leather loop around the neck. High heeled boots—a cattleman, Angel
thought—maybe a horsebreaker. The second man was the bullet-headed
one with the German accent. He watched the man swing aboard a big
bay tethered to a bush near where Willowfield sat. Scarred face, as
if the man had been involved in knife fights. An Army holster with
the top flap cut away, the Army model Colt held in with a looped
leather thong. No cartridges on the belt. A military man, Angel
thought: he’d have his cartridges in a pouch from years of habit.
The man’s boots shone from polishing, and his saddle was in good
shape, soaped and shined. Soldier, Angel dubbed him. He had given
them all working names, to remember them by. Willowfield, Chris,
the one with the gray hair. Gil the dynamiter. Texas, the one with
the high-heeled boots. And the kid. There was a name for him, too,
but Angel didn’t use it.