Frame Angel! (A Frank Angel Western) #7 (5 page)

‘
Which
do you think it is?’ Angel asked.

‘
Fireproof,’ Wells answered.

‘
There’s
something else, though,’ Angel put in thoughtfully. ‘Something we
could try.’

Wells leaned back in his chair, eyes
narrowing slightly. He took a deep breath as the attorney general
nodded for Angel to continue.

‘
Put me
in with Briggs. Let me see if I can win his confidence. Three days
at the most. If I do, I’ll pass a signal. Then you fix it, Angus –
fix it so we can escape, crash out.’

‘
Are you
out of your head?’ Wells said harshly. ‘You think the territorial
penitentiary will stand for having its reputation
ruined?’

Angel looked at the attorney
general,
who
was frowning.

‘
The
territorial penitentiary will do what it is damned well told to do,
Angus,’ the old man said, ‘if I’m the one that tells
it.’

‘
It’s
only a chance,’ Angel said, ‘but it might work.’

‘
You
might also get your throat cut,’ Wells pointed out. ‘This Briggs
might get on to you.’

‘
He
might,’ Angel admitted. ‘It’s worth trying, If we got together – as
sidekicks – he might lead me to the others. Or the money. Or
both.’

‘
I don’t
know,’ Wells said. ‘It’s a damned long shot, Frank.’

‘
Name
another we can try,’ Angel said flatly.

There was a silence. If Wells had any other
thoughts on the idea, he kept them to himself. The attorney general
fell silent, too, tapping his teeth with a pen.

‘
Yes,’
he said, finally, decisively. ‘I think we’ll try it.’

Angel didn
’t smile. He wasn’t being
rewarded. It was just a good idea. It might work, and it might not.
It depended on how good they could make the escape look and if he
could swing Briggs’ friendship. He said as much.

‘
Oh,’
Wells said softly. ‘I think we can make it look good, all right.
That is, if you can break Briggs.’

‘
There’ll be a way,’ Angel said. ‘There always
is.’

‘
All
right,’ the attorney general said. ‘That’s it. Angus, I leave the
details to you. Get on to it and make it look good. Frame Angel so
he only just avoids being hung!’

He smiled to take the sting out
of his words.
‘Good luck, boy,’ he said to Angel.

‘
Thanks,’ Angel said. He figured he was going to need
it.

There wasn
’t much you could say about the
cells in Folsom. There wasn’t a hell of a lot more you could say
about the whole damned place. It sat like some kind of monstrous
concrete fortress on a bluff just south of the Cimarron, where the
road from Raton to Clayton bisected the monotony of the
sage-stippled plain. The ground between the sloping walls and the
river was bare and featureless, with hardly enough cover to protect
the gophers from the wheeling hawks. To the south the Sierra Grande
rose eight and a half thousand feet in the sky, dominating the
mesas beneath it.

The prison itself was simple but
not makeshift. A ten-foot-high wire fence separated the prison from
a twenty-foot-wide no-man
’s-land, patrolled by armed guards. The outer
walls were octagonal, and on every angled corner there was a guard
post manned by two armed guards who had almost a 180-degree
coverage of both the ground outside their stations and the exercise
yards inside. The walls were made of huge square blocks of
limestone quarried down south near Carlsbad and freighted up to
this desolate corner of the territory by ox-teams. The prison
buildings were gray and featureless, the windows tiny and barred.
From the corners of the square central administration block, two
stories high, radiated the cell blocks, each of them exactly the
same except for an identifying letter: A, B, C or D. On each block
were eight cells on a central corridor patrolled regularly by armed
guards. In each cell were two prisoners.

Armed guards were stationed at
the perimeter fence, and they checked everything carefully before
opening the padlocked gate and letting the wagon through. The heavy
steel-studded, metal-plated gates grated and squalled as they swung
back, allowing the wagon carrying Angel, whose arms and legs were
chained together, onto the grounds. Again the business with the
documents. The closing gates, clanging behind with an awful
finality, cut off the sunlight, and Angel shivered in a shadowed
chill of the triangular, cobbled yard. He was helped out of the
wagon none too gently, and they marched him across to yet another
guarded gateway, the doors made of what looked like
steel-reinforced oak. After his papers were checked, they were
admitted into a concrete corridor; and escorted
– again by armed guards – to the
left. A right angle turn – Angel assumed from the light coming in
from windows high above his head that the corridor was on the
outside of the square administration building – and through another
door. Beyond it were stone stairs rising in a wide half-circle. A
corridor at the top, and then another solid oak door with metal
straps and bolts reinforcing it.

They registered him, measured
him, doused his hair with delousing powder, stripped him, and
examined him medically. They confiscated all his clothes and issued
him a shapeless tunic and pants of yellow and black hooped stripes,
a soft forage cap, and boots without laces. He began to understand
how prison depersonalizes men when they gave him a board with the
number 4855, told him to hold the board in front of his chest, and
the photographer took his picture, firing the flash powder with a
fizzing
whoomphf
that made the guards flinch.

Then he was hurriedly marched down the
stairs and through the sliding barred gates that led to Cell Block
A.

‘
Number
twelve for you, forty-eight-fifty-five!’ the guard
snapped.

‘
On yer
right, hup-hi, look alive now!’

Sliding clang of steel door moving aside.
Two cots. Stinking bucket in the corner. Formless shape on the
right-hand cot ignoring his arrival. Whitewashed limestone walls
dripping with condensation. A chilly dampness in the air.

And silence.

Tangible, a humming silence that told him he
had been watched, measured, weighed, assessed by every prisoner in
the block.

Heavy footsteps as the guards paced up and
down the corridor.

No way to measure time.

‘
What
you in for?’

Angel lay on his cot looking at
the ceiling. He had seen Briggs get up off his cot and sized the
man up without actually appearing to look at him. About five nine
or ten, he figured. Hundred and eighty pounds or so
– the build of a
wrestler, a professional brawler. Bullet head with cropped dark
blond hair, a flattened pug’s nose. Sloping, powerful shoulders
that even the shapeless convict’s suit couldn’t hide. Pale, almost
green eyes beneath protruding eyebrows that gave the man’s face a
foxy, cunning look. He ignored the question.

‘
I said,
what you in for?’

Angel sprang off the cot like a
tiger. His forearm came across Briggs
’s throat like a bar of steel, and he
smashed the man back against the seeping wall, causing Briggs’s
eyes to pop with fear that burned with surging anger. He could feel
Briggs’s mounting resistance; and with the knuckles of his right
hand, he delivered a short, hurting blow that hardly seemed to have
any power behind it. Briggs collapsed, his heart momentarily
stunned by the driving force of Angel’s hand, his mouth falling
open as he gasped for oxygen.

‘
Uccchhh,’ Briggs managed.

‘
Stay
the hell away from me, you punk!’ Angel rasped. He yanked Briggs
around and thrust him away from him. Briggs’s legs hit the edge of
his cot, and he collapsed on it. He held up his hands in surrender,
and Angel turned away. Then he stretched out on his cot and stared
at the ceiling again, listening to Briggs gradually bring his
breathing under control and fall silent. Neither man spoke again
all day.

Food was brought to them after what Angel
figured must have been five or six hours. Suppertime, he thought?
Six, seven?

He got up and tipped the food into the slop
bucket in the corner. Briggs watched him in astonishment, mouth
full of food falling open.

‘
Hey,’
he began, then shut his mouth quickly as Angel wheeled around
threateningly to face him.

End of day one.

Bells clanging, clanging,
clanging, woke Angel. He couldn
’t remember having fallen asleep. He was stiff and
cold and uncomfortable. Briggs was moving about the cell, a grubby
towel looped across his forearm, finally coming to a stop by the
cell door with a bright, expectant look. There was a lot of
movement in the corridor outside. Angel swung his feet down to the
floor as the cell door was slid back. A burly, red-faced guard came
in, swinging his billy.

‘
On your
feet, you!’ he snapped, flicking the club over. It rapped on the
side of Angel’s head, stunning him momentarily. He lurched to his
feet, hands reaching automatically for the man, who took a
skipping, trained step backward and hit him again with the club.
Angel went down on his knees, still reaching for the guard, who
blew his whistle. Briggs cowered in the corner of the cell by the
open doorway. Two more guards came running in and saw Angel on his
knees in the middle of the cell. They hauled him to his feet and
dragged him out into the corridor. All the other prisoners were
lined up there, and they watched impassively as Angel was dragged,
feet trailing, the length of the cell block. The two guards dumped
him into a stone trough of cold water at the end of the corridor,
and when he recoiled, spluttering, trying to climb out, they jeered
at him and pushed him in again with their feet. Drenched and
choking from the fetid water he had swallowed, Angel was yanked out
of the trough and dumped onto the floor. Before he could get up,
one of the guards sank a boot into his ribs. He felt a sharp, sweet
pain in his rib cage.

‘
Get
your ass off the floor, pig!’ shouted the burly guard who had first
come into the cell. ‘I’ll let you off light because you’re new
here! No breakfast for you – just forty times around the yard with
the log!’

There was a murmur from the watching
prisoners. Nothing more, just a sibilant murmur stilled instantly
by roared threats from the guards. They dragged Angel outside, one
of them holding each arm, hustling him quickly along. Lying on the
floor was a foot-thick log, perhaps three feet long, greasy with
dirt and mold.

‘
P
ick it up!’ the guard snapped. ‘On your shoulders! Smart
now! Hup-hi!’

Angel grabbed the two metal
cleats on the log and hoisted it onto his shoulders. They made him
run around the
exercise yard while the other prisoners watched. It wasn’t
more than fifty yards each time, but they made him carry the log
until his shoulders were totally numb, his legs like molten rubber,
and his back a solid mass of shooting pain so complete that he felt
as if he were on another plane of existence. The guards watched his
reeling figure from above as it staggered around the cobbled yard,
falling, cursing, weeping, getting up, and staggering on,
endlessly, endlessly, until finally they had had their sport with
him and he was dragged back into the cell and thrown on the
cot.

‘
Next
time, on your feet sharp and ready for ablutions!’ yelled the
red-faced guard. ‘Got me?’

Frank Angel tried to spit into the glaring
face, thrust within feet of his own, but his mouth was bone dry and
his lips bloody and cracked where he had bitten them. He tried to
straighten out his back on the cot. The pain made him cry out loud.
Eventually he lapsed into unconsciousness.

It was so black when he opened
his eyes that he thought for one terrible moment he had gone blind.
Then he realized that it was not the total, empty black of
sightlessness but the ordinary darkness of night. Something had
awakened him, and after a while he realized it was Briggs standing
above him with a wet rag in his hand. He had bathed
Angel
’s
parched mouth with it and was about to do so again when Angel moved
in the darkness. His hand grasped Briggs’s throat, forcing the man
backward. Briggs reacted quickly, and his strength was far greater
than Angel’s. He knocked Angel’s hand away and pinned him down on
the cot, breathing heavily. ‘For Christ’s sake, man, I’m tryin’ to
help you!’ he hissed.

‘
Fuck
you!’ Angel gritted, trying – not very hard – to push Briggs off
him. ‘I don’t want no help from you or nobody else!’

Briggs made an angry sound. With
the palm of his hand he slammed Angel back flat against the top of
the cot.
‘You’ll last about ten minutes in this place, you carry on
like that, friend!’ he hissed. ‘Keep your voice down or you’ll have
every guard in the damn place in here beatin’ on your thick
skull!’