Frame Angel! (A Frank Angel Western) #7 (17 page)

‘
What
now, Angel?’ he jeered. ‘The belt buckle?’

Then he reached up behind his
neck, and from a scabbard which hung on a loop around his throat,
he slid a knife, long and two-edged, its needle point a wicked
diamond glinting in the thin light of the switch box lamps. Wells
palmed the knife like an expert
– flat on his hand, the blade lying
between forefinger and thumb – lightly holding it like a sword.
Angel watched him weave and sway, his eyes always on the hand with
the knife in it, never leaving it, forcing himself to concentrate
on it.

Suddenly, Wells slashed at him,
the
knife
whipping audibly through the air, inches from Angel’s belly as he
sprang back. Again Wells slashed and then suddenly back again.
Angel felt the beaded sweat on his forehead cold in the night air
and knew he was afraid. If he tried to get the other knife from his
boot on the right, Wells would kill him while he was trying for it.
If he did not, Wells would kill him anyway.

There wasn
’t much of anything left. In a
few more moments Angel knew his eyesight would start to blur, and
he would see Wells move too late, and he would be dead on the dirty
sand.
If
you
are
pursued
your
pursuer expects one thing: that you will run.

He stopped and forced his
breathing inward, directing all of himself to this place, at this
moment, perhaps for this last time. In his mind
’s eye he saw the slanting eyes
of Kee Lai. He summoned that inner power the Korean had
called
ch’i
until he felt the strength come into him, flow through him,
warm his genitals.

‘
All
right,’ he said brokenly. ‘All right. Finish it.’

Wells’
head came up, and he peered at Angel.
Angel let his head hang, and he saw the flickering feint with the
knife, waiting, watching Wells from beneath his eyebrows. Another
flickering feint. This time the blade drew blood from his
unprotected arm. Wells giggled, sure now.

‘
Angel?’
he said.

Wells came closer to get a
better look, and Angel put all of himself into the terrible
movement of his foot. The kick came up off the ground with every
ounce of strength he had left in him and buried itself in
Wells’ groin with a
cracking thud. Wells screamed like a pig in a slaughterhouse, a
mangled, banshee shriek that bounced off the stone walls of the
railway cutting and echoed back as he went over on his face, his
hands buried in his mangled crotch, back arching against the agony
of what was broken inside him. Everything seemed to be moving in
slow motion now, and Angel watched Wells go down as if he was
underwater, legs flailing, mouth distended in one long continuous
scream that went on and on and on until Angel slid the second knife
out of his boot with blood-slippery fingers and stopped
it.

‘
I still
can’t believe it,’ the attorney general said.

‘
No,
sir,’ Frank Angel replied dutifully.

He was fit again now. Tomorrow
he would be going to the hospital to have the second lot of
stitches taken out of his side, which had healed well
– no damned thanks
to him, the surgeon had said, tutting and fussing over the ragged
wound.

‘
What
made him think he could get away with it?’ the man behind the desk
asked of nobody in particular. His voice was full of
grief.

‘
I asked
him that,’ Angel said. ‘He never did say.’

‘
But
why?’ the older man persisted. ‘Why, in God’s name,
why?’

‘
I think
I can answer that, sir,’ Angel said. ‘A man like Angus Wells, he’d
bitterly resent being put out to pasture. He knew he was as good a
man with one arm and one leg as most other men are with two. As I
damned well found out.’

‘
But the
medical report … ‘

‘
Medical
reports don’t stretch to cover a man’s pride,’ Angel said
quietly.

‘
It was
Wells’ pride that was hurt, and when he realized he had a way to
steal a quarter of a million dollars of the government’s money, it
must have seemed like a delightful irony. Irresistible. Especially
when he could cover himself so well. Who would suspect the Justice
Department’s chief investigator if he asked for details about the
shipment? Who would question his appearing anywhere, asking
whatever he wanted to know, doing whatever he wanted to
do?’

‘
Like
intercepting your telegraph messages, you mean?’

‘
For one
thing,’ Angel agreed. ‘By the way, I’ve attended to that clerk in
Las Vegas. He’ll have plenty of time to think over what he did
while he’s in prison.’

‘
As long
as we didn’t know where you were, then we wouldn’t try to contact
you.’

‘
And by
definition, I wouldn’t know that Wells was not in Washington. I
thought I saw him when we made the break out of the penitentiary,
but I wasn’t sure, even when I was nicked by a bullet. I’d asked
them to make it look good. I reckon Wells was trying to make it
look even better.’

‘
But it
was a clumsy job, Angel,’ the attorney general said. ‘Badly
planned, clumsily executed. He hadn’t a chance of getting away with
it from the moment you reached Santa Fe. Once we knew your
suspicions, it would only have been a matter of time before we took
him.’

‘
It was
always only a matter of time,’ Angel said. ‘It didn’t matter to
Wells if we knew – in fact, I think he almost wanted us to know –
as long as he got to Trinidad before me and picked up the suitcase.
He was very cool, you know. He anticipated everything I’d do right
up to the end. Knew I’d telegraph through and put a watch on the
suitcase: left it sitting there for two clear days until he thought
I was dead. If I had been dead, there wouldn’t have been a damned
thing they could have done to stop him picking it up. He’d have
shown them department identification and overruled any local law.
Picked up the money and run.’

‘
We
would still have caught him – eventually,’ the attorney general
maintained stoutly.

‘
I
wonder,’ Angel said. ‘I’m not so sure.’

‘
Well,’
the attorney general said, his voice tired. ‘I’ve got more work to
do. Reports to write. We don’t often have someone in this
department go bad.’

Angel said nothing. There
wasn
’t
anything to say. He knew the old man and Wells had been friends. He
had thought of Angus as a friend himself. He thought of that insane
fight in the shadowed railway cutting. Friend?

The attorney general pressed the bell on his
desk that summoned his personal private secretary, Amabel Rowe.
Angel got up from his chair, nodding hello. She smiled back, and he
thought he saw something secret behind the smile.

‘
Well,
off you go, my boy,’ the attorney general said. ‘When do they take
out the stitches?’

‘
Tomorrow, sir,’ Angel replied.

‘
Good.
You’ll be taking a short rest, a day or two, before you report
back?’

‘
If
that’s in order, sir.’

‘
Certainly, certainly. Got anything in mind?’

Frank Angel made absolutely
certain he couldn
’t see Amabel Rowe’s face, nor she his, as he
replied.

‘
Yes,
sir, I have. Aim to take a beautiful woman to dinner, buy her
champagne, take her for a carriage ride in the
moonlight.’

‘
Capital, capital,’ chortled the attorney general. ‘Enjoy
yourself, my boy. You’ve earned it.’

Amabel Rowe opened the door, and Frank Angel
went out into the anteroom.

‘
Real
champagne?’ she whispered.

‘
Is
there any other kind?’ he replied.

She closed the door, smiling.

Frederick
Nolan, a.k.a. 'Frederick H. Christian', was born in Liverpool,
England and was educated there and at Aberaeron in Wales. He
decided early in life to become a writer, but it was some thirty
years before he got around to achieving his ambition. His first
book was
The Life and Death of John Henry Tunstall,
and it
established him as an authority on the history of the American
frontier. Later he founded The English Westerners' Society. In
addition to the much-loved Angel westerns, Fred also wrote five
entries in the popular Sudden series.

Among his
numerous non-western novels is the best-selling
The Oshawa
Project
(published as
The Algonquin Project
in the US)
which was later filmed by MGM as
Brass Target
. A leading
authority on the outlaws and gunfighters of the Old West, Fred has
scripted and appeared in many television programs both in England
and in the United States, and authored numerous articles in
historical and other academic publications.

Visit the
author’s website at

http://piccadillypublishing.org/christian.html

The Angel
Series

FIND ANGEL

SEND ANGEL

TRAP ANGEL

HANG ANGEL

HUNT ANGEL

KILL ANGEL

^{The Sudden Series}

SUDDEN STRIKES BACK

SUDDEN AT BAY

SUDDEN - APACHE FIGHTER

SUDDEN – DEAD OR ALIVE

Piccadilly
Publishing is the brainchild of long time Western fans and Amazon
Kindle Number One bestselling Western writers Mike Stotter and
David Whitehead (a.k.a. Ben Bridges). The company intends to bring
back into 'e-print' some of the most popular and best-loved Western
and action-adventure series fiction of the last forty years.