Now Doc was running flat-out for the store across the street, flinching as bullets zipped around him, dodging like a deer while Angel emptied his six-gun towards the hidden Fischer riders hunkered down behind a water trough in front of the house down the street from the smoldering, flickering ruins of the destroyed jail. Angel’s fire put them out of action long enough for Dick Webb to squirrel back for shelter around the side of the ruined, charred but still-solid wall of the old jail.
“For God’s sake!” he shouted as one of the townspeople ran past him to safety, “give me a gun! Somebody give me a gun !”
Even as he yelled the words, he saw Angel’s body flinch hard and to the right, his head jerking around fast as a bullet touched him, and then Doc Day cut loose from the porch of the saloon with a shotgun, the shotgun Billy Luskam had dropped when he ran out into the street and was killed. The huge bar oomph! dulled the shouts of running people and Webb saw one of the Fischer men leap upwards and out like some strange fish rising to bait, falling across the water trough and hanging there, body shattered, arms dangling. The remaining three men there laid a heavy fire across the street and Doc ducked back to the shelter, reloading.
Angel was down on one knee in the middle of the street now, supporting himself with one hand, pawing with the other at the blood which tickled down into his eyes from the ragged cut across his temple just below the hairline. His eyes were unfocused from the smashing impact of the near-miss.
“Somebody give me a gun!” Dick Webb yelled again, but there was no one even near him now, and the street was empty except for the macabre figure of the reeling Angel, trying to get to his feet.
“Get down, Frank!” Dick yelled at the top of his voice. “Down, down, down!” He gritted his teeth as he waited for the shot to come from behind the water trough, but there was silence and he could not understand why. Turning his head, he saw the reason.
Swaying there, his hand on the hitch rail, was the most awful sight Dick Webb had ever seen. Almost naked, his body so torn and bloody and broken that it did not seem possible he could even stand, a six-gun dangling from his nerveless, stripped fingers, stood Trev Rawley. “Agghhhh!” he shouted. His voice was like the last call for help at the end of the world, inhuman, eerie.
Frank Angel heard the sound, and seemed to know that it was his name that the sound was supposed to be. He turned towards the place it had come from, the empty six-gun still in his hand.
“Anngghhhh!” said the thing.
Angel stumbled towards the sound. He shook his head, trying to clear it of the red mist before his eyes, the awful resonant pounding roar in his brain. “Rawley ?” he said, his voice puzzled. “Rawley?”
The people bayed in safe places along the street watched in hushed awe. Dick Webb got slowly to his feet. His shoulder hurt like hell. It didn’t seem possible that Rawley could walk across to Frank Angel, but he was doing it, doing it when everything in nature screamed that it was not possible for anyone so badly hurt to even try.
A spastic, twitching, bloody wreck, he lurched forward, putting one foot in front of the other once, twice, then hesitantly again. Dead on his feet, he moved inexorably, relentlessly, raw nerve ends twitching visibly in the pulped face, mad empty eyes glaring with only one desire, the desire that kept him moving —to kill the man in front of him. Two steps more and then two more he made, and still no one moved.
Angel stood there waiting, his head canted to one side, trying to place exactly where the threat was coming from. He heard the sibilant hiss of the footfall in the soft dust. But where, where?”
“Yougghh,” Trev Rawley said, in that ghastly whisper. “Youggghh.”
It was as he spoke the second time that the bright red mist in front of Angel’s eyes cleared slightly and he saw clearly. Rawley—this awful thing was Trev Rawley!—was only three yards away, the six-gun still at his side, and everyone watching, transfixed by the spectacle they could see and yet still not believe.
“Youggghh. D . . . Zzassssth.” You did this, he was saying.
Angel shook his head, and the movement dizzied him. He went down on one knee, hearing a sharp intake of breath from the people watching nearby. Why were they standing watching? Why didn’t they help? Damn them all!
“Bggggg,” Rawley said. Beg.
He lifted the six-gun very slowly, lining the yawning barrel up not more than a foot from Angel’s head. The barrel wavered, trembled as the awful apparition in front of Angel used every atom of its will to do the bidding of the crazed mind. The skinless thumb curled over the spurred hammer, slowly forcing it back.
Angel’s hand moved.
Up and outward it moved, away from the side of his boot in an underhand throwing movement, releasing the flat bladed, razor-edged knife which Angel had slid from its hiding place. Long, long before this moment he had spent arguing hours with the armorer in the echoing basement of the Justice Building, figuring ways in which a man might carry, undetected, weapons which would not be discovered in the normal, cursory search. One of their ideas had been twin knives, of finest Solingen steel, each perfectly balanced for throwing. It was the right-hand one of these which Angel had plucked from its scabbard between the inner and outer lining of his boot. It sped like a streak of molten silver across the space between the two men and buried itself in Trev Rawley’s throat. The man spun around, eyes bulging as he tried to scream over the awful slicing rigidity inside him, the pistol dropping from his hand as his fingers plucked themselves to bloody ribbons on the wicked blade. He opened his mouth and a horrid gout of thick black blood burst from it, joining the pumping wetness beneath his chin.
His sightless eyes fixed themselves on some distant place and turned inwards upon themselves. Then he fell in a long straight line, going down like some lightning-shattered pine, flattening out and emptying curiously, like a slightly deflated balloon. Angel looked up, helpless now if Fischer’s men used their guns on him. But no shots came.
He thought he could see Doc Day over by the water-trough, his shotgun menacing the men behind it. He thought he could see townspeople running to help Dick Webb. He stood swaying for a moment as people ran to help him and he nodded, as if this confirmed something he had been thinking.
Then he slid softly sideways into the dust, face down in the blood of the last of Ed Fischer’s killers.
Chapter Thirteen
There is a place you go when you are very badly hurt, or very, very tired, everything gone past some indefinable point of no return. It is a strangely comforting place, not quite as far away from life as death itself, but well beyond the borders of mere unconsciousness. You float there, weightless, formless, moving with effortless ease across mighty boundaries of time. Sometimes the strong elasticity of life pulls you towards the shallows of this blackness, near enough to hear voices, sounds, movements around you. None of them means anything.
In the darkness where you are, all sorts of wondrous things are possible. Angel was there now, remembering things he did not even know he knew and would forget again, living a dozen lives in places which never existed. It was a slow-moving, mysterious place he explored, tempted always to go ever deeper into the blackest dark by siren calls which made no sound.
He stayed in this soft world, safe, warm, caressed sensuously by tangible dreams spoiled only when true memory spilled like water across the nerve-ends of his mind. Once he remembered fire. It was a bad memory and he recoiled from it, going back down to the warm softness in the dark below memory. Then another memory: a staring, awful face, skinless, its mad eyes staring into the windows of his mind. He felt pain for the first time, a dull, solid throbbing in the side of his head. He came back from where he had been and opened his eyes.
“He’s awake,” he heard someone say.
A face floated into his range of vision; a pretty girl he had never seen before, her eyes dark and concerned, her long black hair falling forward to brush his cheek as she bent over him. She looked familiar, as though he should know her.
�
��You’re pretty,” he told her.
He closed his eyes on the picture of her fixed in his mind, intending to take it back with him down into the warm darkness and center endless dreams around it, but the drumming in his head persisted, and now he could feel the surge of life inside himself and he could not go back anymore. Once you hear the sound of life, you can no longer find the frontiers of the other place.
He opened his eyes a moment later. It was almost a full twenty-four hours since the last time he had awakened. The girl was gone, but there was someone sitting by his bed. He turned his head and saw a face he recognized.
“Dick?” he said, “is that you?”
The boy nodded, and Angel frowned to see that he was crying. That seemed a strange thing to do, and he said so.
“Sure, Frank,” the boy said, smiling at last. “Sure, it’s plain dumb.”
He patted Angel on the forearm as the man in the bed closed his eyes smiling, just relaxing now, not even sleeping. Coming through. Dick Webb watched him. There was no way he could tell him yet that he had been on the edge of death for four days, Doc Day swearing over his lack of response, his own failure to do much more than stand by and hope that Nature would mend Angel’s concussed brain. No, he’d tell him all that later.
He’d tell him about Doc Day, and how the townspeople had finally rallied around him to frog march the remaining Fischer riders across the street to lock them into the dank confines of the cellar of the Silver King. He’d tell Angel how Doc had singlehandedly stopped the crowd from hanging the gibbering Regenvogel, whom they’d dragged from his house down the street, and how Susie and Deluvina had reached Fort Union. How they had found a young Lieutenant there named Evans who reacted to Angel’s name as if it had been that of General Phil Sheridan himself.
With an Army patrol Evans had ridden at forced-march speeds all the way up to the Crossing, but far too late to do much more than mop up and take the sullen remnants of Big Ed Fischer’s fighting men down to Fort Union for trial. Young Lieutenant Evans took charge of the town, declaring martial law, organizing burial parties, gangs of men to clear the wreckage of the old jail and start work upon another. By the time Angel regained consciousness, Fischer’s Crossing was back to some kind of normal life.
He’d tell him all that. He’d tell him too, at the right time, that the young Lieutenant wanted to see him, and that he had a message for him from Washington. But there was plenty of time for all that: it would keep until Angel was on his feet again.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
“Damned hungry,” Angel told him, smiling,
“We can soon fix that,” Dick Webb said.
And they damned soon did.
Chapter Fourteen
She was a tall young woman with honey-blonde hair usually tied back with a ribbon. Today it swung loose across her shoulders. Today was different. Today she had left home knowing that Frank Angel was back and that he would be in to report to the attorney general and although she was a little bit annoyed with herself for making this concession to her own femininity, this admission that she wanted Frank Angel to notice her, admire her, she wasn’t so annoyed that she didn’t enjoy knowing it had made him do just that, or enjoy knowing that Angel was watching her walk and admiring that too. So her eyes were impish, her chin lifted a fraction above normal, and if she swung her hips a fraction more than you might have expected the personal private secretary of the attorney general of the United States to do, well, Amabel Rowe wasn’t at all sure that being the attorney general’s secretary was necessarily the most interesting thing a woman might do with her life.
So she preceded Frank Angel down the corridor of the big old building on Pennsylvania Avenue which was the headquarters of the Department of Justice, towards the first floor office of the attorney general with its leather-studded doors flanked by two Marines.
Angel followed her with a slight smile on his lips. Amabel was a very beautiful girl, and he’d thought so for a long time. Which was why, not ten minutes earlier, he had asked her to have dinner with him that evening in a nice little restaurant he knew over in Georgetown. Amabel wasn’t the kind of woman to play coy. She’d said yes straight off, a little light of promise dancing in her eyes. A man couldn’t ask to see more than that in any woman’s eyes.
She stopped now in the antechamber outside the attorney general’s office. The two Marines stiffly at attention outside the leather-studded doors affected not to notice either of them. Angel could see their eyes move as Amabel crossed towards her desk. He pitied the two soldiers: the thought of having to stand mute and silent, no more noticeable than a candlestick, while someone like Amabel walked around in front of you all day was something he could not imagine doing. But then, he reflected, uniforms do something to some people: about what a prefrontal lobotomy does for others. He stood waiting while Amabel went into the attorney general’s office, heard the growl of The Man as she told him who was waiting. Then she came out of the doorway and beckoned him, and Angel went forward, passing her as she came out.
“Seven o’clock,” he whispered.
She said nothing, but a flush rose up from beneath the high neck of her dress, touching her cheeks with peach bloom pink, and she went across to her desk, struggling not to let the laughter escape her lips. Angel realized why: just behind the half-open door the attorney general was standing glowering at him. Had he heard ?
“Come in, come in,” he was told. He glanced back at the girl, who was busily writing something, her head down. She looked up as the attorney general started to close the door.
“Now, young man,” she heard her boss say in his best My-God-have-I-got-to-do-everything voice. “Just where the hell do you think you’ve been? And what’s all this about Fischer’s—?”
The rest was cut off by the closing of the door, but she could envisage the two of them quite clearly and what they would be saying to each other. The attorney general would be opening his humidor and lighting one of his awful cigars, sitting back in the big chair by the tall window, waiting for Angel’s report.
“Well, sir,” Angel would be saying, “it’s kind of a long story.”
“That’s all right,” the attorney general would reply. “Take as long as you like. Take all night if you need to.”
Amabel Rowe let the smile come into full blossom now.
He’d better not.
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FIND ANGEL!
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SUDDEN – APACHE FIGHTER
Hang Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #4) Page 11