Frame Angel! (A Frank Angel Western) #7 Read Free

the attorney general was shocked to see contempt and
dislike written plainly in the younger man ’s face. ‘Let me ask you, as an old
friend, as a personal favor,’ Wells said, ‘to keep me on active
duty while I look into the New Mexico thing.’
    The attorney general smacked a
hand flat on the desk and got up from his chair, striding angrily
across to the windows overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue, glaring down
at the pedestrians and carriages without really seeing any of
them. ‘You
know I can’t, Angus,’ he said.
    ‘ And you
know I can’t, either, Charles,’ Wells replied softly, and for the
first time his voice was touched with regret.
    The attorney general nodded,
sucked in his breath, and let it out as a long sigh. ‘I suppose not,’ he
said. ‘I suppose not.’ He sat down, his shoulders slumping wearily.
Absently he reached for the cigar-box to his right, taking one of
the long black cigars and lighting it with a wooden match. His head
wreathed in smoke, eyes crinkled to avoid flinching, he leaned back
in the chair. ‘When will you go?’
    ‘ Statutory four weeks,’ Wells said. ‘I suppose.’
    ‘ You’ll
not help with this New Mexico thing?’
    ‘ If I
can,’ Wells answered. ‘But—’
    ‘ I know,
I know,’ the attorney general said, holding up a hand to forestall
being told yet again. He didn’t want to start thinking yet about
how he was going to replace Angus Well’s experience, wisdom,
knowledge, and plain guts. He didn’t want to start thinking,
either, about what was wrong with a set of rules that declared a
man a cripple and therefore unemployable in certain jobs when he
had been crippled carrying out those jobs. He didn’t want to give
too much thought to how deep Angus Well’s bitterness might go and
whether – damn all political life! – his going meant the loss of
another good friend.
    ‘ Could
we at least talk about it?’ he asked humbly.
    ‘ Sure,’
Wells said. He didn’t sound the least bit interested.

Chapter
Three
     
    Morty Leaven had been with the
Pinkerton Detective Agency for almost ten years, and he resented
having been taken like an amateur. His partner, Ned Ruzzin,
didn ’t feel
any differently, and being a more vindictive man than his partner,
was looking forward to laying hands on the cat who had laid the
six-gun barrel alongside his skull, which was still throbbing as if
someone were boiling water inside it.
    Ruzzin was a big man, a burly man, well over
six feet tall, with shoulders like oak beams and hands like hams.
Leaven was shorter, squatter, older, smarter. Together, they were a
pretty good team, highly thought of at the regional office in
Denver.
    After Moses Glorification
Washington and Pat Seele had revived them by bathing their heads
with tepid
water from the engine, the two men held a council of war, which the
engineer and his stoker had watched with wide eyes and puzzled
expressions. They could not understand why Leaven and his partner
clambered up on top of the caboose, looking from beneath
eye-shading hands at the empty vastness around them. Leaven and
Ruzzin didn’t explain at first, either. They made their decisions,
came to their conclusions, and discussed what they figured to do
about both before they so much as even looked at the engineer and
his helper.
    Morty Leaven looked out across
the lava beds with pursed lips, his eyes narrowed, thoughts busy.
He knew this wild land, knew the bleak San Andres Mountains – and what lay
beyond them.
    ‘ It
doesn’t figure,’ he said to Ruzzin. ‘Why would they head west?
There’s nothing out there for two hundred miles – and every mile of
it Chiricahua country.’
    Ruzzin nodded. Beyond the malpais, the lava beds, lay
the empty San Andres Mountains and beyond them, the Jornada del
Muerto, the wicked, bleached, lifeless area that the conquistadores
had called the Death March. Arid, supporting no life, providing no
water, containing no habitation, the Jornada was a place to be
avoided like