Kill Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #6) (3 page)

A tall
girl with honey-colored hair walked
down the corridor of the huge building on Pennsylvania Avenue which
housed the Department of Justice. She was a pretty girl with a wide
mouth always ready to smile, and impish blue eyes that danced now
with awareness of the man who followed her. Annabel Rowe knew Frank
Angel was watching her walk, savoring it. And she was pleased in a
perverse sort of way. Her whole education and upbringing told her
that her thoughts were unladylike and if anything rather forward,
yet she found that somehow her hips, as though controlled by some
other force than her own brain, swung perhaps just that little bit
more than they really needed to do.

Frank Angel watched
the intricate
movement with appreciation. There was something beautiful about the
mechanism of the female pelvis and the Attorney-General’s private
personal secretary had a beautiful walk. He thought he would like
to walk in the mountains with her one day.

She stopped in the antechamber
outside the Attorney-General
’s office and looked at Angel over her shoulder.
He was a big man, rangy and wide shouldered. Miss Rowe was a great
one for noticing hands, and Frank Angel’s hands fascinated her.
They were long-fingered and tapered, the hands of a skilled
artisan, a musician. She repressed a delicious shudder at the
thought that they were also the hands of a killer, for she knew too
that Angel, as a Special Investigator for the Department, was a man
whose assignments for the Department sometimes — often — required
him to kill in its service.

‘
He’s
expecting you,’ she told Angel.

‘
Ma’am,’ Angel said. Damn him, she thought. Ma’am, indeed.
Anyone would think I was ninety. I’ll see you later,’ she said
conspiratorially, and then blushed at what she had said.

‘
Sure
would be nice,’ Angel told her.

One of the two armed Marines
guarding the doors to the Attorney-General
’s office opened it with stiff
military precision and Angel went in. The Attorney-General came
forward to meet him, a smile on his face. ‘Frank,’ he said warmly.
‘Come in, come in.’

Angel took his accustomed chair across the
desk from the Attorney-General, hastily shaking his head when the
Attorney-General lifted the lid of his cigar box and raised his
eyebrows.

‘
Don’t
know what you’re missing,’ the older man said, lighting one of the
evil black cigars with relish, puffing delightedly on it and
exhaling huge clouds of smoke towards the open windows.

‘
Now,’
the Attorney-General said. ‘You’ve read Colonel Kramer’s
report?’

Angel nodded.

‘
A
patrol from Fort Huachuca got to Stockwood on the second morning
after the raid,’ he said, quoting the report he had spent most of
the preceding night studying in his apartment. ‘They found all the
buildings destroyed, livestock stolen or driven off, and forty
seven dead among the ruins, eight of them women from the cribs.
Several of the women had been the victims of multiple rape. One man
had been subjected to torture: a branding iron, the report
suggested. From identification found on the body they surmised he
was Richard Gould, the town marshal. They couldn’t understand the
reason for the torture until one of the Apache scouts found tracks
going away from the town not made by the raiders. They sent out a
search party and found an old man named Thistle all but dead in a
runoff about five miles south of Stockwood. He had been shot four
times by the raiders, twice through the lung and once through the
lower stomach. The other bullet had shattered one of his knees. The
old man had strapped a board to his leg with his belt and crawled
nearly five miles across the desert, and he died the night after
they got him back to Fort Huachuca.’

‘
But
not before he had identified the raiders as the Blantine gang,’ the
Attorney-General said. ‘That scum!’

‘
Yes, I
read the transcript of what he said. That Colonel Kramer out at
Huachuca is a smart soldier. Having someone take a stenograph copy
of Thistle’s story has at least given us some motive for what the
Blantines did.’

‘
The
marshal killed one of the old man’s sons,’ the Attorney-General
said, ‘yes, I know, I read it too. But to put a town to the torch
and kill fifty people — what kind of barbarism is that?’

‘
Well,
sir, from what I’ve been able to get out of our files on the
Blantines, the old man has been a thorn in the side of both the
military and the civil authorities on the border for years. He’s a
law unto himself. He owns that country down there. Nobody can
cross
it
without his say-so. Nobody can get into it without he knows about
it. And United States law doesn’t reach across the Rio Grande. He’s
pretty much fireproof.’

‘
I hope
you don’t mean that literally, Frank,’ the Attorney-General said,
relighting his cigar which had gone out again. They always did,
Angel reflected. ‘Because I’ — puff— ‘want you’ — puff

• ‘
  to
  bring Yancey Blantine in’ — puff — for trial.’
  

‘
Oh, is
that all?’ Angel said.

‘
That’s
all,’ the Attorney-General said. ‘Any questions?’

‘
Well,
I could probably think of a couple of hundred off hand,’ Angel
said, a faint smile touching his lips. ‘But I get the feeling the
answer to every one of them would be the same.’

The Attorney-General smiled, nodding
beneficently like a Buddha. He said nothing.

‘
When
do you want me to start?’ Angel asked.

‘
Anything wrong with today?’

Angel hesitated for a moment.

‘
Well,
man?’

‘
I had
a sort of — engagement in mind tonight,’ Angel said.

‘
Break
it,’ was the decisive reply. ‘I want you on your way, and the
sooner the better. Frank, I want that old renegade and I want him
so badly I can almost taste it. I want him brought out of those
mountains and down to Tucson and then I am going to try him in full
view of the entire Territory of Arizona for what he did in
Stockwood. It will give me a very great personal satisfaction to
see that ... that animal tried and convicted and hanged, and I
don’t want to waste any time getting at it. So — ‘he stood up,
extended his hand. ‘Good luck, my boy.’

‘
Thank
you, sir,’ Angel said. ‘I may need it.’

‘
Very
likely,’ the Attorney-General said and if he was smiling, Angel
couldn’t see it.

Angel went first to Abilene.

It was quieter these days; the
booming cattle trade had used up all Abilene could offer and was
now having headier times down the line at Dodge. He got a room at
the Drover
’s
Cottage and when he had cleaned up and eaten walked along the
tracks until he came to an unassuming building with a wooden sign
outside that said, simply ‘Vaughan — Guns’. He pushed the door open
and went into the gloomy interior. It smelled of metal and oil and
he could hear someone hammering in a room at the back. He rapped on
the counter and a man came out. He was tall and slim and fair
haired, with pale blue eyes and a mischievous mouth. He looked at
his customer and his jaw dropped.

‘
Frank?’ he said. ‘Frank?’

‘
Hello,
Chris,’ Angel said. ‘How are you?’

Well, Hell
’s teeth, Frank,’ Chris said,
‘it’s damned good to see you! What are you doing in
Abilene?’

‘
Looking for you,’ Angel told him.

‘
Well,
Hell’s teeth,’ Chris said again. ‘Listen, let me get my coat. We
got to have a drink on this. We’ll go over to the Alamo. Wait, now,
wait a minute.’ He went into the back room and came out with his
jacket, struggling to get his arms in the sleeves.

They walked up the street to the big saloon
and went into the cool interior, ordering beer.

‘
How’ve
you been, anyway, you old pirate?’ Chris asked. ‘I haven’t seen you
since ... well, when was it anyway?’

‘
Seventy-two,’ Angel reminded him. ‘The Fall of
Seventy-Two.’

‘
That’s
right,’ Chris said. His face went sober. ‘How did that all work
out, Frank?’

‘
All
right,’ Angel said. There was a look on his face that made Chris
realize he would answer no more questions. He ordered another pair
of beers.

‘
So
you’ve come to Abilene looking for me,’ he said. ‘I’m honored, but
what do you want with a small town gunsmith?’

‘
Come
off that, Chris,’ Angel said. ‘You’re as much a gunsmith as I’m
Father Christmas.’

‘
No,’
Chris said doggedly, ‘I quit all that, Angel. I gave it up. No more
of that stuff. Gunsmithing, that’s my racket these
days.’

‘
Sure,’
Angel said.

‘
I got
a job, I got a house, I got a pretty little girl who brings me
buttermilk and honey,’ Chris said. ‘I gave all that up,
Frank.’

‘
I’m
going down into old Mexico, Chris,’ Angel said.

‘
Lovely,’ Chris said. ‘Have a nice time.’

‘
I work
for the Government now.’

‘
Doing
what?’

‘
This
and that,’ Angel said. ‘Whatever needs doing.’

‘
Ahuh,’
Chris said, nodding. ‘This and that.’

‘
I want
you to come down there with me.’

‘
My
holidays aren’t due,’ Chris said. ‘Until September.’

‘
I want
you to come down there with me.’

‘
I
can’t, Frank. I told you. I gave all that up. I never touch a gun
any more except to fix it if it’s broken.’

‘
Sure,’
Angel said. ‘You’re the fastest man with a gun I ever saw, Chris.
Don’t tell me that.’

‘
Second
fastest,’ Chris said. ‘And was, not am. I gave it up.’

‘
A gang
of renegades attacked a town called Stockwood, in Arizona,’ Angel
said. ‘They burned the place to the ground, killed nearly fifty
people. They tortured the town marshal and then killed him, too.
I’m going down there to bring their leader in. Name of
Blantine.’

‘
Blantine? Yancey Blantine?’

‘
You
heard of him?’

‘
Yes,
yes, I have. And Satan. And the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
You’re out of your tiny Chinese mind, Angel.’

‘
I’m
going.’

‘
Like I
said, have a nice time.’

‘
I want
you with me.’

‘
Fat
chance.’

‘
I’m
going to get Pearly as well.’

‘
In a
pig’s ass.’

‘
I mean
it, Chris.’

‘
I
believe you, Angel. You always were hammer headed. You’ll do it,
all right. But not with me along.’

‘
Have
another beer,’ Angel said. ‘And we’ll talk about it.’

‘
I’m
not going,’ Chris said. ‘What are you paying, by the
way?’

‘
Not a
lot,’ Angel said. ‘But let’s talk about that too.’

‘
No,’
Chris said. ‘I quit gunslinging. I got this girl ... ‘

‘
Buttermilk and honey, I know,’ Angel said. ‘Two beers,
bartender.’

‘
Which
part of Mexico?’ Chris said.

They found Gates in Daranga,
Colorado, and he was in bad trouble. The saloon sprawled across one
corner of the dusty square that all four of the
town
’s
streets joined, a hip roofed box with a false front that bore the
legend ‘The Lucky Lady’. Outside the brightly lit building two men
lounged by the door, smoking cigarettes as if they had nothing in
God’s green earth to do but that. They looked half
asleep.

Vaughan and Angel pushed into the crowded
saloon, feeling the tension in the place. Everyone in there was
watching the play at a card table in the centre of the room,
brightly lit by a hissing oil lamp that swung overhead, casting
heavy shadows on the faces of the four men playing poker.

One of them was dealing as Angel
and Vaughan ordered drinks. He was a
big man, with a three-day stubble of beard
blackening the lower half of his face. His huge paws made the
pasteboards look like postage stamps, and Angel calculated that he
would probably stand around six foot three and weigh the better
part of two hundred pounds. Every few minutes the man would look at
his cards and then look up at the other players, his eyes bright
with suspicion and greed. His craggy face was shiny with sweat and
he kept looking at the pile of money on the table. The two men
sitting on his right and left were dressed in ordinary business
clothes, and Angel tabbed them as local men caught up in a game
which had gotten out of hand, now staying with it because their
investment in the pot was such as to make them plunge deeper than
they would ever normally do. The fourth man was as big as the
first, but where the dealer carried beef this one carried muscle.
Black haired, pug-nosed and friendly-looking, his Stetson was
tipped back on his head and he looked very relaxed. His pile of
chips was very big, much bigger than anyone else’s.