‘Damn your impudent soul, sir!’ he screamed, as his open hand slapped Angel off the chair and sent him sprawling on the floor. The door burst inwards and a guard stood behind Denniston, revolver cocked, eyes taking in the whole scene in one sweeping glance.
‘It’s all right,’ Denniston panted, drawing himself upright. The man gawped at him and Denniston’s voice went up a register. ‘Get out!’
‘Yessir,’ gasped the guard, retreating hastily and closing the door behind him. Angel got slowly to his feet, sitting on the bed and leaning against the wall. The room slowly stopped spinning around and he focused on his captor, realizing Denniston was talking again.
‘You will remember to whom you are speaking, Angel!’ Denniston said coldly, his iron self-control fully reasserted now. ‘I hold your life in this hand —’ he held a clenched fist forward — ‘and should I order it, you would die in the room right now. Hold on to your last few hours of life, and savor them. As I shall do.’
He turned and knocked on the door. The guard opened it and Denniston went out. As he did, he turned. There was an ironic smile on his face.
‘Reflect upon the word insane, Mister Angel,’ he said, flatly. ‘Am I insane who can and will do exactly as I said I will? Or are you and your puny civil service heroes insane to try and stop me?’ He looked at the guard, who grinned obligingly, and then the door slammed into place. Frank Angel sat on the cot in the stone prison room and stared at the wall. In two hours it would be sundown. On present indications he had almost twelve hours to live. Right now he was hardly strong enough to knock down a self-respecting pigeon.
He looked at his trembling hands and grimaced.
Twelve hours.
Chapter Twelve
At around four in the morning Angel made his move.
He had heard the preparations for departure outside, the tinny sound of the bugles blowing assembly and the men running to meet their horse-handlers, taking the reins and swinging into the saddles moving out in a solid phalanx with the Gatling gun swinging on its spindly-looking wheels behind the team pulling it. Nightfall had brought a deep silence to the compound, as if the very mountains around it were huddled closer to shield it from prying outsiders. Once in a while Angel heard the guard (guards?) outside his cell coughing, or humming a few bars of ‘Lorena’. Towards midnight he could hear someone snoring. He edged his chair towards the window and watched the darkness outside until his eyes could make out the thicker, blacker shapes of men moving in the compound. There were still guards on the gates and in the vedettes above. How many? Were there any patrols on the fence? If so, where? And again, how many? He smiled grimly in the blackness. He’d find out soon enough.
Now it was time. He sat down on the cot and prepared his weapons. Although Denniston’s men had taken his guns and searched him thoroughly, they had not discovered the things which were the result of the hours Angel had spent alone with the Armourer, discussing ways in which a man could carry undetected weapons and what those weapons might be. They should, preferably, be weapons which killed silently and efficiently. The man should also have weapons which might double as tools. The tools and weapons should be very light but enormously strong, and they should be capable of concealment in places which would not normally attract attention during a search. The Armourer in the justice Department building had grinned at Angel’s insistence.
‘You don’t want much, do you?’ he had said.
‘It’s my life,’ Angel had reminded him. ‘I want the best there is.’
‘See what we can to,’ the Armourer had promised. And a few days later, Angel had received a message telling him to go down to the echoing basement on the Tenth Street side of the building, and the Armourer had met him with a wide grin.
‘Think I’ve got what you want,’ he said, and held out a pair of ordinary riding boots and a wide belt with a heavy brass buckle. Angel looked at them and then at the Armourer.
‘They’re your size,’ the Armourer said. ‘Try them on.’
And then he had seen the weapons. Inside the belt lying neatly in a groove scoured into the rough leather, looped a thin wire at both of whose ends were two flat wooden pegs, perhaps two inches long.
‘Garrotte,’ the Armourer had nodded. ‘Now the buckle.’
The buckle was in two pieces which clipped together. When separated one of them became a razor-edged knife whose wicked edge was covered by the overlaying decorative buckle when placed back on the belt.
‘Pretty snaky,’ Angel said, grinning. ‘How about the boots?’
They were straightforward mule-ear boots with a stitched pattern that was in no way unconventional. The Armourer showed him where on the outside flap — the long strip used for pulling on the boots which gave them their name of ‘mule-ears’ — the outer leather and the softer inner were slightly separated. Inside each scabbard thus formed nestled two flat—bladed throwing knives, perfectly balanced, their blades widening into tulip-head shapes and then wicked points.
‘Solingen steel,’ the Armourer said. ‘From Germany. Best there is. Just like you asked for.’
He grinned mischievously and then spent another hour or so with Angel showing him the best way to use the knives, throwing over-handed or under, flicking them out from the boot and up, until he pronounced himself satisfied.
And these were the weapons with which Angel must now make his desperate bid for freedom.
The odds were enormous, he knew. But there was no alternative. Somehow word had to be passed through to the President. Whatever it was, whatever he was doing, it must be something that would bring him within marching distance of the mountain stronghold. Some canyon. But where, where?
Angel stood up and flexed his arms. His body still felt stiff and overused, but there was no time to think of that any more. He slid on his boots and kicked the door, hard, yelling wordlessly. And he went on kicking and yelling until he saw the judas window slide back but now he was on the floor at the foot of the door, still screaming mindlessly and banging on the door with his boots.
‘Shut up in there!’ yelled the man outside. ‘Shut up, damn you!’
Angel went on making as much noise as his throat and lungs could manufacture, hammering his heels against the door and ignoring the curses and commands of the man on the other side of it.
After a few minutes he heard the sound he had been hoping for, the man’s keys scrabbling in the lock of the door, and as the door pushed inwards, he rolled away from it and came up along its edge, hands looping the garrotte neatly over the thick throat of the advancing guard. It was a nasty way to kill a man but Angel closed his mind to that. He clamped the man’s flailing arms with his own elbows, twisting the wire tighter, tighter, tighter, choking with nausea as the dying man’s sphincter muscle relaxed and his body voided itself, pulling the man back now and down on to the dirty floor, all of this taking minutes, his body drenched in sweat, lymphets of fatigue dancing before his eyes.
‘Charlie?’ someone shouted. Then ‘Charlie?’
Angel tore the biting wire loose from the man’s throat and stepped over the body, his hand ready as the man shouted ‘Charlie, what the hell?’
The man was a big, chunky fellow who stepped into the corridor, his mouth full of apple, the fruit in his hand. His jaws fell open at the sight of Angel in the doorway and his brain flashed a command that the body never got a chance to obey. Angel threw the flat-bladed knife in his right hand, snapping the arm down on the last part of the throw to give the weapon that penetration it would otherwise not have. The knife winked once in the lamplighted corridor and buried itself to the hilt in the throat of the man with the apple. He gave a horrible choking cry and lurched back against the wall, bright red blood spurting from the wound in his neck and splashing the ground and the rough stones as the man fell silently, dead as he hit the floor.
Angel was beside him even as the man gave one long last sighing moan and slid all the way down to deep and ending death, sliding the knife out with a rough flick
of the wrist, wiping it callously on the dead man’s clothing. He was in the outer room of the ‘Punishment Block’ as he had heard them jokingly call it. There were guns and carbines in a cabinet behind the desk where the man with the apple had been sitting. Two cups of coffee steamed on the table. Angel gulped one of them, the hot liquid warming his chilled body. He opened the cupboard and took out a new-looking Peacemaker, its 7" barrel nearest to the kind of weight and balance he had gotten used to from using an old Army Colt. Stuffing his pockets with ammunition, he scanned the other weapons in the cabinet and finally took down a shotgun whose barrels had been sawn off. It was a ten-gauge, and he found ammunition in a box behind it. This wicked weapon gave him for the first time hope that he might just make it out of the compound. The sawn-off shotgun was a terrible weapon: eighteen 00 buckshot — blue whistlers, some called them — could literally cut a man in half at close range, and — Angel grinned wolfishly as he thought it — sure as hell didn’t do anything for the health of anyone within twenty or thirty yards of the barrel.
He broke the gun, loaded it, sliding the Peacemaker into his belt. He didn’t want to start shooting until he had to, and so he fashioned a loop for the shotgun out of a thin leather strap that belonged to the case of a pair of field glasses. With the shotgun now hanging from his left shoulder, Angel eased back the door of the Punishment Block and looked out on to the deserted parade ground. There were no lights in the barracks, but one or two burned in the big building where he had been exposed by the man who had killed Angus Wells. Angel’s mouth went grim and thin at the thought: he would have a reckoning with Mister Ed Reed in due course.
He eased silently across the front of the cell building and then down the side furthest from the gate, cutting in front of the tattered board cut-outs standing in front of the sandbags on the firing range. He froze as he heard a footfall crunch on loose stone somewhere near the perimeter fence. He had kept his eyes half closed until now to hasten night vision. Now he let them open wide and picked the man up quickly. He was standing in the open, idling, not hurrying to complete his circuit of the fence. Angel watched as the man scratched himself and yawned. Then the man hoisted his Springfield off the ground and with the weapon at trail walked dawdling towards the shadowed rear of the Punishment Block. As soon as he reached the darkness, Angel moved. It was literally only three yards from his hiding place to where the man was walking, and Angel covered them before the man had time to whirl around or cry out. The seeking knife held rigid in Angel’s left hand found the lower ribs and slid upwards, severing the aorta even as Angel’s right hand clamped on the man’s mouth and racked his head back, Angel’s knee ramming into the base of the man’s spine, smashing him back and down dead on the ground. It hardly made a sound. Now Angel picked up the Springfield, and with it at trail himself walked slowly along the perimeter fence, turning left a he reached the right angle on the north-east corner, coming up to the gates and beneath the vedette tower on the right hand side. There were two men guarding the gate. One of them looked up as Angel came nearer.
‘Hey, Tom,’ he said. Then, ‘Tom?’
That was all the warning Angel was going to get and he knew it, so when the man’s hand stabbed for the gun in its holster, he flicked the Peacemaker up and shot the man through the head. The shot baroomed like thunder in the darkness as the second guard got his gun into action, trying to hit the now-rolling form of Angel, who had thrown himself to the ground the moment after firing the shot which had killed the first. Dust spurted up, and Angel felt the bullets slam into the ground and he fired through the dusty darkness and saw the second guard go backwards, clutching his belly, down over the edge of the bridge across the ditch outside the gate. Now the two vedettes were at the parapets, searching the ground below as Angel scuttled to the dark shadows at the foot of the fence. He could hear men shouting at the far side of the parade ground, and the dogs in the compound were barking furiously at the noise.
‘Where the hell is he, Willie?’ one of the guards above shouted. Angel rolled over on his back, his arm across his face to conceal its paler shade, and saw the men hurrying down the ladders of the towers, two from the side nearest him, one from the other. With a savage grin he rolled forward and on to one knee. One of the men shouted ‘There he is!’ and then Angel cut loose with the shotgun. The man who had shouted was torn off his feet by the first barrel, the nine double—zeroes whacking him seven feet to one side, his body cut to bits by the whistling buckshot. Even as the tattered body was falling, Angel swung the gun around and blasted the second man down, blowing him against the wire fence so hard that the wire acted as a trampoline and hurled the man hard away and down on his face, limbs and trunk as limp as those of a rag doll. The third man, firing hastily and without aim as he ran, saw the other two suddenly smashed down and tried t turn and run but instead got tangled up in his own confusion and fell to the ground in front of Angel, about fifteen yards away. He tried to raise the gun and his expression when the hammer clicked on an empty chamber was totally comical.
‘Some days nothing goes right, does it?’ Angel grinned and laid the long barrel of the Peacemaker alongside the man’s head, just above the ear. The man went down into the dirt like a bundle of old clothes. Now there were men coming out of the buildings and running across the parade ground and Angel slid two more of the red buckshot cartridges into the breech of the shotgun, pulling both triggers almost casually, the buckshot screeching into the advancing cluster of men, who slewed aside in panic as they saw the flash and heard the dull boom of the gun. One man went over, his legs kicking high in agony, and another let loose a high thin piercing scream as one of the double-zeroes smashed into his elbow and mangled the joint into a jelly of bloody tissue and bone. Even as the men scattered, Angel was quartering across the open ground towards the stables, one or two of the scattered men behind him firing blindly into the darkness where he had been, shouting confused orders to each other which nobody obeyed.
Inside the dark stable, Angel grabbed the firing hastily and without aim as he ran, saw the other two suddenly smashed down and tried to turn and run but instead got tangled up in his own confusion and fell to the ground in front of Angel, about fifteen yards away. He tried to raise the gun and his expression when the hammer clicked on an empty chamber was totally comical.
‘Some days nothing goes right, does it?’ Angel grinned and laid the long barrel of the Peacemaker alongside the man’s head, just above the ear. The man went down into the dirt like a bundle of old clothes. Now there were men coming out of the buildings and running across the parade ground and Angel slid two more of the red buckshot cartridges into the breech of the shotgun, pulling both triggers almost casually, the buckshot screeching into the advancing cluster of men, who slewed aside in panic as they saw the flash and heard the dull boom of the gun. One man went over, his legs kicking high in agony, and another let loose a high thin piercing scream as one of the double—zeroes smashed into his elbow and mangled the joint into a jelly of bloody tissue and bone. Even as the men scattered, Angel was quartering across the open ground towards the stables, one or two of the scattered men behind him firing blindly into the darkness where he had been, shouting confused orders to each other which nobody obeyed.
Inside the dark stable, Angel grabbed the halter of a big lineback dun and led him outside into the open, the shotgun in his right hand again loaded. He felt rather than saw the man coming up on his right and heard the man shout ‘Get him, boys!’ and knew the man had turned one of the dogs loose — how many of them were there?’ — and then he heard the dark deep growl of the dog as it launched itself at him and in pure reflex pulled both triggers of the shotgun. The dog was torn to ribbons by the terrible force of the shot at such close quarters and fell in a quivering, smoking heap of bloody meat to one side of him. The man came rushing at Angel in the wake of the dog, and Angel let him come, one hand still holding the rope halter. The man raised his gun and fired but the hasty shot missed. Then Angel whirled in a t
ight half—circle and hit the man across the bridge of the nose with the shotgun.
The man fell to his knees mewling through the broken bones of his face and Angel hit him again, a savage felling blow with the heavy gun that flattened the man to the ground. Without waiting to see whether the man would move, Angel swung aboard the horse and kicked it into a gallop, pulling its head around towards the gate.
Someone shouted from the shelter of the alleys between the barracks and he emptied the Peacemaker in that direction, his shots driving the men there back to cover as he thundered across the wooden footbridge and down the trail, the sounds of shots falling behind him, the night enveloping him, the rustling wind cold on his face. There was still the outer fence, he told himself grimly. Still more guards. He eased the horse to a canter, gripping the rope halter between his teeth as he slid cartridges into the
Peacemaker and again loaded the shotgun.
About a mile below him he could see the dark outline of the Palo Blanco canyon. Faint pink streaks were leaving the blackness of the sky. It would soon be dawn. Now he saw the outer fence, remembering as he did the way Denniston had opened the gates while all the others had hung back.
He rode the horse up to the gate and hitched it to the wire fence ten feet away. On foot, he ran across to the centre of the gates where the flat metal lock held the two steel uprights close and tight. Without ado he thrust the barrels of his shotgun against the lock, turned his face and body half away and pulled the triggers. The shotgun boomed and was torn out of his hand by the close recoil, but the lock, mangled and broken, fell apart and the gates swung open. He ran back towards the horse as someone shouted down by the bridge across the Palo Blanco ‘Hey, you!’ the man shouted. He was running, porting a rifle, not sure what was happening until he saw Angel coming at him on horseback, and then he dropped quickly to one knee and took aim. He fired at the same instant as Angel, but he was shooting uphill and did not lead enough. His slug went whining off into infinity as the bullet from Angel’s Peacemaker slapped him aside, his tumbling body going off the side of the steep canyon wall and down into the boulder-strewn bottom. Angel kicked the horse into a gallop on to the bridge as the second guard came running forward, levelling a six-gun which he thumbed twice, his slugs whipping past Angel as Angel launched himself off the back of the horse, his whole body and the speed at which he had been coming making him a projectile that smashed the man to the ground, the six-gun flying from nerveless hands. The two men rolled over and over on the wooden boards, the guard desperately trying to get some kind of grip on the body of his assailant. Locked together, the two men rolled about, their legs seeking purchase on the rough boards. They struggled to their knees, the guard’s thumbs gouging towards Angel’s eyes in a desperate attempt to blind his opponent, grunting with the effort, his face contorted with rage and the lust to kill. Then Angel relaxed, let go, rolled over backwards, bringing the guard with him, his right knee lifting the man slightly as the momentum of the rolling fall brought the man above him. Then Angel snapped his leg straight and the man went over and up, as if his head were a pivot on which he was turning, and came down flat and tremendously hard on his back, his head to Angel’s head.
Trap Angel (Frank Angel Western #3) Page 8
