Trap Angel (Frank Angel Western #3) (2 page)

‘Dammit, Angus, now don’t
you go getting sulky on me,’ the Attorney-General said angrily.
‘You got yourself shot to pieces down Lordsburg and I —
’

‘ —
just wondered if I
could cut the mustard,’ Wells said quietly. ‘Havin’ only one hand
and one good leg, like.’

‘You could send someone
else,’ the older man said. ‘That new youngster, what’s his name —
?’

‘Angel,’ Wells said. ‘He’s
not ready yet.’

‘One of the others, then,’
the Attorney-General said. ‘Maybe — ’

‘Sir.’

Wells’ voice was flat and
unemphatic. The man behind the desk stopped in mid-sentence and
frowned. But he listened.

‘Every doctor in the
District of Columbia has said I’m fit,’ Wells said. ‘I can ride as
well as I ever could. I’ve learned to use my left hand as well as I
ever used my right. They didn’t shoot me in the head. So what’s
your objection to my going?’

‘Ahhhh.’ The
Attorney-General waved his cigar. ‘I just thought…’

‘With respect, sir,’ Wells
went on relentlessly. ‘You know we’re short staffed. You know this
can’t wait. And you know I can handle it.’

‘All right, all right,’ came
the testy answer. ‘You’ve made your point. Go get your fool head
shot off again.’

Wells grinned, his face
becoming boyish. ‘Not hardly,’ he said.

‘Good. That’s all settled
then,’ said the Attorney-General. ‘Will you need any
help?’

‘If I do I’ll send for
it.’

‘Where will you
begin?’

‘Fort Stanton is the
nearest, I’ll start there. I can be in Trinidad by Friday, and out
at Stanton before the weekend’s over. I know some people out there.
From last time.’

‘That youngster Angel knows
that country, doesn’t he?’

Wells nodded.

‘Why don’t you take him
along, Angus?’

Wells didn’t let his grin
show this time. He knew what the Old Man was up to. But he also
knew that he himself needed to go this one alone, perhaps to prove
to himself that he was all the things he had just convinced his
chief that he was: fit, and capable, and able to carry on as before
in a very tough job, twisted leg and useless hand
notwithstanding.

‘He’s in training, and I
don’t want to interrupt that,’ was all he said.

‘Doing well?’

‘I think so,’ Wells replied,
knowing the Attorney-General got a daily report on Frank Angel’s
progress from his instructors at what the men who worked for the
Justice Department unsmilingly called ‘the College’.

‘Don’t go taking any fool
chance, Angus,’ the Attorney-General said, finally. ‘These men,
whoever they are, are up to something that makes killing a
sideline. Stealing guns from the Army is a hanging offence anywhere
in the United States and they know it. They aren’t going to let
themselves be taken easily.’

‘Show me anyone we’ve ever
taken who was,’ Wells reminded him.

‘Let me know how you get
on,’ the Attorney-General said gruffly. ‘And send Miss Rowe in here
on your way out.’

Wells got up. The
Attorney-General watched him without speaking as he put his weight
on the thick cane he always used and walked across to the door.
Wells made a very big thing out of not fumbling over the door
handles and the man behind him let a smile touch the austere
mouth.

They didn’t come any better
than his Chief Investigator but he’d be damned uphill and down dale
before he’d say it out loud.

In the antechamber outside
the big high-ceilinged office, Wells stopped at the desk of a tall
honey-haired girl with a stunning smile. Annabel Rowe was the
Attorney-General’s personal private secretary and there wasn’t a
healthy male in the big, echoing building on Pennsylvania Avenue
who had not at one time or another tried to invite her out for
dinner, or the theatre, a carriage ride or a picnic. So far, no one
had succeeded and there were those who referred to her as ‘the Fair
Miss Hard to Get’.

‘The Old Man wants to see
you,’ Wells told her.

‘Don’t you let him hear you
calling him that,’ she said. ‘Or he’ll have you back shuffling
papers in the basement.’

‘Not sure I wouldn’t prefer
it,’ Wells grinned. ‘Nice quiet life.’

Miss Rowe got up from behind
her desk and went towards the doors which led into the
Attorney-General’s office. She looked back as she went in. Wells
was hobbling down the corridor like a man in a hurry to get
somewhere. He didn’t look anything like a man who’d prefer to be
shuffling papers.

‘Again,’ said the
Armorer.

He placed the gun on the
concrete floor. It was one of the new Colt .45 Frontier models. He
pulled two cotton bales in front of it then paced out seven
steps.

‘Ready?’ he said.

Frank Angel
nodded.

The Armorer went to the bank
of levers at the side of the big counter which ran across the end
of the range in the basement of the Justice Department
building.

‘Go,’ he said
quietly.

Angel ran forward, diving
headfirst over the two cotton bales and landing on his right
shoulder, head tucked down as he rolled forward picking up the gun
in one smooth sweeping movement as he came up, and as he did the
Armorer jerked one of the levers. A target shaped like a crouched
man popped up in the lighted section at the end of the range about
thirty feet from Angel, who had come to rest kneeling with the
hammer of the gun eared back. He fired and then fired again,
rolling forward as he did to the bale of cotton placed about two
yards to the right of where the gun had been laid. Again the
Armorer jerked the lever and again the figure jerked upright. Angel
fired twice more. The sounds of the shots slammed against the
white-painted walls. He stood up, punching the used shells from the
chamber as the Armorer turned a wheel which brought the target
along sagging wire towards the counter. He lifted it from its metal
holders and looked at it with pursed lips.

‘Not bad,’ he said
grudgingly and handed it to Angel.

There were four holes in the
target. Two were placed high on the shoulder of the cutout figure,
while the other two had perforated it just above what would have
been the line of the belt the man might have been
wearing.

‘He could still be on his
feet,’ the Armorer remarked.

‘Maybe,’ Angel
grinned.

‘You wouldn’t want to find
out the hard way,’ the Armorer said without any humor in his voice
at all. ‘Let’s try it again.’

He reloaded the gun and they
started over.

Frank Angel stretched out on
the bed in his apartment on F Street. Every muscle in his body
throbbed from the constant physical action. He felt the tug of
fatigue from reflexes dulled by the unceasing demands upon them. He
had been working with the Armorer for four days now, yet still the
man professed himself dissatisfied, never once offered a word of
encouragement. If — as had once happened — Angel suggested that
shooting at a target under whatever difficulties the Armorer could
dream up, was hardly comparable to shooting at a man who could
shoot back and kill you, the only reaction he got was a
grunt.

And perhaps later some
fiendish little test: four different revolvers stripped down and
all the parts mixed up — ‘All right, Angel, put ’em together. You
got just ten minutes.’

The training program, as
Wells had warned him when they first came to Washington, was
rigorous and exhaustive and merely average performance was not
tolerated.

He went back over the last
few months, recalling his disappointment when they came out of
Union Station into the muddy thoroughfare of the capital city. The
place was a clamor of building, everything either half erected or
half torn down. The grandiose monument to Washington that had never
been completed sat like a broken factory chimney on the Mall, pigs
scavenging at its base. The President’s home, ‘the White House’,
still had no toilets, Angel learned. He guessed you could figure
out what L’Enfant had had in mind if you sat down and worked at it.
Nobody would ever make him understand why they had decided to build
the capital of the United States smack in the middle of a
swamp.

The Department had given him
little time for sightseeing.

Within two weeks, he was in
New York, warily watching the fringes of the underworld with
astonishment: Bowery boys and Dead Rabbits parading in their street
gang finery and ready to cut the throat of any man for the price of
a drink.

At City Hall they filled him
in on political fixing and corruption, on the ways and means of
Tammany, on the social and sexual forces brought to bear by
unscrupulous men on the make — all ‘good for the education’ they
told him, and a necessary addition to the massive readings of
Blackstone’s Commentaries, of Federal and Territorial laws,
military and civil laws, laws governing Indian administration and
land laws — Desert land and Homestead land and Indian land and
pre-empted land, land in the public domain and Spanish grant land,
water rights, rights of earlier occupation, criminal jurisprudence
and contract law — leaving him alone for hours and hours in lofty
echoing chambers lined with heavy leather bound books, reading
until his eyes went sandy and grainy and he could not remember
anything.

Then the practical work.
Basic survival. Tracking. How to stay alive in the desert, in the
mountains, stranded alone in any wilderness. Disguises: how to
alter the appearance by makeshift means, a smudge of boot blacking
beneath the eyes, adding a limp to one’s walk, the wearing of
eyeglasses, combing the hair differently, adopting a slight accent.
Navigation by the sun, by the stars. And weapons, always more and
more about weapons. Knives, guns, rifles, spears, bows, arrows,
swords, clubs, staves, hatchets, explosives — their values, their
uses, their limitations. Culminating in the tests: they took him on
a train and then on horseback somewhere hours away from the city
and turned him loose in a swampy wilderness without food, water or
weapons. They gave him a one-hour start and then sent three trained
men after him. He had to elude them and get back to a house in a
clearing somewhere in the swamp. It took him four days and he lost
eighteen pounds doing it, but he made it. En route he had learned
how to find water when none seemed to exist, how to trap small wild
things and subsist on their meager, strong tasting flesh. He had
learned how to conceal his lair like any hunted thing, how to
defend himself in any situation. How to stay alive.

He went across the room and
opened the window. The noise from the street drifted in.

Somewhere he could hear a
man selling newspapers and the smell of cooking food came to his
nostrils. He felt hungry. Maybe he would go out and get a
meal.

‘You’re stupid! ’ the
instructor at ‘the College’ had shouted.

‘Yes sir.’

‘Say it!’

‘I’m stupid,
sir.’

‘You’re an insolent fool,
Angel.’

‘That’s correct,
sir.’

‘You wouldn’t know how to
use that gun if your life depended on it.’

‘If you say so,
sir.’

‘Damn you, Angel, don’t
answer me back!’

The unexpected searing shock
of the slap across his face, and his own reflex action as the anger
bit into his mind. He had stood there with the six-gun in his hand
and the instructor had laughed.

‘Look at you,’ he had
jeered. ‘You going to shoot me, Angel?’

‘I see,’ Angel said softly
and slipped the gun back into its holster.

‘Good boy,’ the instructor
said as if he were a dog.

‘Suppose I’d pulled the
trigger,’ Angel said to him afterwards. The instructor had grinned
like a cat with a fat mouse.

‘You don’t think I’d give
you a loaded gun to play with, do you?’

Angel had grinned as well.
They were training him. Training him to kill if he had to, but not
because someone had jockeyed him into a spot where emotion dictated
the action and not reason. Let no man chose the killing ground,
they told him. You select it. You decide what to do. And you will
stay alive.

He remembered the short
squat man with the dark skin who had been waiting for him in the
gymnasium one day. He never learned the man’s name. They were alone
and the floor was covered with the mattresses as always. The man
held out a thick stick, about two feet long.

‘No guns today,’ he had
said. ‘This time it’s knives.’

‘Where’s mine?’ Angel
asked.

‘Here,’ said the man and
came at him with a wicked Bowie flat on his palm, hard and fast and
without any kind of warning, a slicing cut that could have
disemboweled a horse. Angel acted blindly, instinctively, smashing
down on the man’s wrist with the heavy stick. The man grinned and
fell back and Angel saw he had heavy leather bands strapped around
his wrists. Then he came back in again, shifting the knife very
fast to his left hand and lifting the blade towards Angel’s
ribcage. Angel moved fast on his feet and brought the stick around
and as he turned jerked backwards with it and the blunt end hit the
man with the knife beneath the breastbone, bringing breath
whooshing out of him with a great gust.