Kill Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #6) Read online

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  The Department of Justice wanted Yancey Blantine badly! The killer and his renegade crew had wiped out a town and slaughtered everyone in it, before running for the shelter of Mexico. The Attorney-General gave the order to follow Blantine’s trail and bring him in alive. He knew one man who could do it — Frank Angel — but he also knew what trouble Angel would face. Meanwhile, through the wild and empty land, the Blantines put out the word ... kill Angel!

  KILL ANGEL!

  (ANGEL 6)

  First Published by Sphere Books in 1972

  Copyright © 1972, 2006 by Frederick Nolan

  Published by Piccadilly Publishing at Smashwords: May 2014

  and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader.

  Cover image © 2013 by Westworld Designs

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Series Editor: Ben Bridges

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with the Author.

  A Note to the Reader

  In Record Group 60 of the National Archives in Washington DC, there is abundant documentary evidence to the effect that for a number of years the Department of Justice employed a Special Investigator named Frank Angel, who was directly responsible to the Attorney-General of the United States. There is no record that any of the events in this book took place, or that Frank Angel took part in them. Equally, there is no record that he did not.

  Chapter One

  ‘No man takes my gun,’ hissed the man at the bar, sibilantly. Gould shook his head. No matter how many times you proved it, there was always another one who had to learn the hard way. He let the thought come and go without letting it arouse any emotion. This kind didn’t anger him anymore, or disgust him the way they once had. He was all over that now.

  ‘Reconsider it,’ was all he said. There was no threat in his voice, nothing. He made it sound like advice. If anything, he sounded tired, but there wasn’t a man in the saloon who misread his nonchalant stance. Many of them had seen Gould in action and knew exactly how deceiving it was. The city fathers of the border hell that was Stockwood had chosen well when they had picked Dick Gould for their town marshal.

  The man at the bar was a thin, stoop-shouldered man of about thirty. Above a receding stubbled jaw, a hooked and aquiline nose jutted over lips drawn tight in a grimace of anger and unholy anticipation. The eyes were deep-set and beady as the eyes of a rattler. It was a weak face, the face of a man who has never had to make many decisions for himself. But he had to make one now and those watching saw the touch of indecision alter the outline of his eyes.

  ‘You know who I am?’ the man at the bar said.

  ‘It don’t matter all that much,’ Gould said, laconically. Nobody moved. They had all stood frozen when the beady-eyed one had shot down an unarmed man who had jostled his elbow when he was drinking a schooner of beer. The killing had been shocking, brutally unexpected and the saloon had gone stone silent until Dick Gould came in through the batwings at a half run, to where the weak-faced one had been standing in a well-cleared space in the centre of the floor, a half circle of bystanders watching open-mouthed; wide-eyed, awaiting the denouement, hoping they were out of the line of possible fire. Like people at a circus, waiting for something to happen, waiting for the tightrope walker to fall. Gould could hear their thick breathing.

  ‘I’m Rufe Blantine,’ hissed the man facing Gould. ‘An’ I say again: no man takes my gun.’

  There was a total stillness in the place that could almost be felt. Not a man there had not heard of the Blantines. They were a cutthroat crew, every one of the brood spawned by the mad old man whose renegade gang bowed to no law save their own, and whose plundering raids from their mountain hideout south of the Rio Bravo had made them as feared as the warring Apaches. Even here in Stockwood, men would normally walk wide of the Blantines. But if Dick Gould allowed any man to flout the iron hold he had upon his town, he would be laughed out of it by every bum on the border. No exceptions, he had always said. Now he had to make it stick against one of the most feared names south of the San Agustin and Stockwood waited with bated breath to see if he could.

  ‘Last time, Blantine,’ Gould said, making his choice. ‘Shuck it or use it.’

  ‘Damn yore eyes!’ screeched Blantine.

  His hand flashed down to the butt of the eagle-bill Colt’s .38 in the fancy, tooled-leather holster. He was quite sure of himself and the gun was up and out before he realized that Gould had beaten him. He had just one tenth of a second to assimilate the fact that he was going to die before Gould’s bullet smashed into his body and he was dead even as his thin frame was hurled backwards against the bar and slid lifeless to the dirt-packed floor. A thick gobbet of blood bubbled out of his nostrils and mouth and the surprised fear faded as the snake’s eyes glazed.

  Gould stepped forward. The six-gun was cocked again and ready for trouble. The man was wound up tight like a coiled spring and no one spoke for fear of releasing the terrible killing willingness in him.

  ‘Anyone else?’ Gould rasped. There was emptiness in his eyes. ‘Anyone?’

  ‘Easy, now, Marshal,’ someone murmured. ‘He’s a goner, sure.’

  Gould stood poised for a moment longer, then blinked, the way a man will coming out of a darkened room into bright sunlight. He drew in a long breath and let it out, holstering the six-gun as he did so. He knelt beside the fallen man, checking for signs of life.

  ‘Damned fool,’ he muttered, rising. He looked around at the circle of faces craning to see everything. A murmur of conversation had started up. The muscles at the corners of Gould’s mouth flickered slightly. He brusquely detailed two of the onlookers to carry the dead man across the street to Doc Tannenbaum’s office, then shouldered roughly through the crowd, past the ones who wanted to touch him, to slap his back or shake his hand as if some special current would pass from him to them, as if he carried some talisman which would bring them good fortune. He had observed the phenomenon many times before but tonight for some reason it made him feel repelled. He needed air, and he got out of there as his deputy, Oscar Thistle, came on up the street, a shotgun ported ready in his stubby hands.

  ‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘It’s OK.’ Thistle looked disappointed.

  ‘Awwww,’ was all he said. He had seen the look in Gould’s eyes, and knew it for what it was. Oscar had been a lawman all his life.

  He followed Gould back along the street to their office and went into the building. He did not comment upon the way the marshal had walked blindly through the Saturday night crowd, unseeing, uncaring about the resentful looks he had gotten from those he jostled.

  ‘I need a drink,’ Oscar said loudly. Gould was sitting in his bentwood office chair, staring at nothing. The deputy made a lot of fuss about getting the tequila bottle and some glasses out of a cupboard and sloshed some of the fiery liquid into them. He was a short, thickset man of about fifty, dependable, a good backup man upon whom Gould could always rely and knew it. Oscar had bossed a few towns himself in his younger days, until someone had emptied a shotgun into his back one night as he was playing pool in the back room of a saloon in Fort Griffin. He had pulled through and he had gone after the men who had done it and killed them, but Oscar could never straddle a horse again, never run anywhere, and ex
perience very few days when he did not have any pain. He was getting bald now too and thicker around the middle, but he was still a good man with a gun and it was a long, long time since anyone had made a joke about his name.

  ‘Those goddamned gawkers,’ Gould said finally, acid etching his tone. He drank down the tequila in one gulp and pushed the glass forward for more. ‘They don’t care who the shit gets killed — as long as somebody does.’

  ‘Shore, son,’ Oscar said, mildly. ‘Human nature, ain’t it? Edge o’ the precipice an’ all that.’ He filled the glass and pushed it back.

  ‘You old bastard,’ Gould said. ‘You’re buttering me up.’

  ‘Who, me?’ Thistle managed to look astonished. ‘Why’d I want to do that?’

  ‘Damned if I know, old timer,’ Gould said, a rueful note in his voice. ‘I reckon I might just have pulled the plug out o’ the sky tonight.’

  Thistle looked up sharply. He had never heard anything remotely like apprehension in Dick Gould’s voice before. His eyes narrowed.

  ‘What the hell happened?’ he asked, tersely.

  ‘That man I killed. It was Rufe Blantine.’

  ‘Christ’a mercy!’ ejaculated Thistle involuntarily. Then, seeing the edginess come back into Gould’s eye he moderated his surprise and asked noncommittally, ‘He give you any alternative?’

  Gould shook his head. He looked at the tequila bottle for a moment and then, as if coming to a decision, poured himself another drink.

  ‘Rufe Blantine,’ he said. He raised the glass ironically.

  Oscar Thistle got a plug of tobacco out of his vest pocket and sliced off a chew. He let it get good and settled in his jaw before he spoke again. ‘Ain’t no way to make yourself popular,’ he eventually observed.

  Gould’s face split into a grin at his deputy’s colossal understatement. Then it sobered again. ‘I know, dammit,’ he said. ‘It was fair and square, Oscar. I gave him all the rope I could.’

  ‘Knowin’ you, I never thought nothin’ else, son,’ the old man replied. ‘But from what they tell about Yancey Blantine I doubt he’s goin’ to reckon that’s got much to do with anything.’ Gould nodded again. ‘You could ... drift, mebbe.’ Thistle said it very gently, and swiftly raised his hands palms outward as the younger man swung around, eyes blazing.

  ‘On’y a suggestion, boy,’ he went on. ‘Don’t take offence. It might be smart.’

  ‘Smart!’ spat Gould. ‘Smart!’

  ‘Yep. Not heroic, mebbe. But smart.’

  ‘Oscar, will you quit that!’ snapped Gould. ‘You know I’d never get a job anyplace if I ran out on this thing.’

  ‘Not as no town-tamer, sure,’ Thistle agreed. ‘So what? Ain’t sure I wouldn’t ruther be a live anonymous than a dead somebody even so.’

  ‘No,’ Gould said. ‘This is what I do.’ His jaw was set in a firm line and Thistle had seen that look before. He argued no more.

  ‘It’s what I do,’ Gould said again, as if confirming a thought in his own head. He got up and went to the door. Opening it, he looked out on to the busy street. On Saturday, Stockwood was always lively. They could hear some of the girls singing in the cribs down at the south end of the street. A cowboy went by, reeling in the saddle.

  ‘It’s my town,’ Gould said to no one in particular, then hitched his gun belt around his lean hips and went out into the boisterous street, heading for Doc Tannenbaum’s, a good man doing his job.

  Chapter Two

  Stockwood slept.

  It lay like a scattered set of child’s building blocks on the flat scrubland, south of Tucson, east of Nogales and no damned further from the border than it had to be. To the south the Huachuca Mountains reared eight thousand feet, sharp and ugly against the blazing white vault of the sky. East, west and north lay only the emptiness of the Apache desert.

  Stockwood was a kind of unofficial staging post, temporary accommodation for drifters and long riders with a wary eye over their shoulder for the kind of dust clouds a posse might make, tank town for Mexican bandits to buy ammunition and supplies, for rustlers to be separated from some of their plunder, for enlisted men from Fort Huachuca to get laid, for the miners of Santa Rosa to drink away their money. Stockwood was an unlovely huddle of shacks, dugouts, adobes, saloons and cribs good for nothing except what you could buy in it or sell in it. It had been a wide-open hell town until Al Davies, who ran the general store and had a sizeable sideline in stolen US Army guns and ammunition, and the owners of the two saloons, Pitt and Kingham, had put their heads together and employed a town tamer. They had told him straight: they wanted the town kept on the rails but not closed down. If Stockwood got religion then they were out of business, so it was all a matter of degree. They wanted just enough law to make it unnecessary for the Territorial Legislature to feel it incumbent upon themselves to send in a real lawman. Private law was best, Davies and his cronies felt. You could reason with private law.

  So Stockwood was kept in line: just. Dick Gould was a man who knew instinctively when a firm hand was needed. His reputation helped: there were plenty of men in this part of the world who had seen him or heard of his exploits in Hays and with Oscar Thistle backing him up trouble tended to fizzle out rather than blow up in Stockwood. For themselves, Gould and Thistle had a vaguely formulated notion that one of these days they were going to take all the pay they had saved in Stockwood and buy a spread somewhere up in the Jackson Hole country, where rivers ran all year round and a man could see about three hundred miles of green, green grass in every direction. It was something to hold on to when you had to step into the middle of a fracas that could erupt into the mindless smash of sudden death.

  Stockwood was no beauty spot. At dawn, no lights showed at the windows of any of the buildings along its one wide street. Only mangy cats prowled after packrats in the unlovely piles of refuse scattered haphazardly between the larger buildings. Slowly the rising sun touched the half-gray sky with pinkening fingers, and a blush of light touched the scarred faces of the Huachucas, turning the black shadows at their base to pools of deepest purple. The thin twitter of wakening birds began in the sage-stippled hills and somewhere a lark began its trilling ascent towards the morning. A big old jackrabbit hitch-kicked across the edge of the trail to the south of town as a band of men rode towards Stockwood. They rode on horses darker than the dawn, giant like in the changing light, silent in the hock deep dust. Eight of them, ten, a dozen, twenty, they sifted up the single street and took up positions clearly preplanned, on porches, behind walls, some even climbing in snakelike silence up on to the flat roofs of the buildings. The first probing rays of the strengthening sun touched metal, glinting on the barrels of carbines, etching highlights on bandoliers of ammunition. No word was spoken. The horses were led silently away from the street and all the men at their posts waited, heads up, as if for a signal.

  In the first full light of the morning sun, Yancey Blantine raised his arm and jerked it up and down, the old cavalry signal for ‘forward’. Pale in the sunlight, flame flared on torches made of dried reeds as the men along the street methodically and with expressionless faces set fire to the houses and the saloons and the stores and the cribs. They moved about their work in total silence, an eerie and uncanny grimness in their movements. The hesitant flames touched the tinder-dry wood and bit, then flickered as if with joy, biting deep and hungrily into the timbers, dancing and leaping joyfully, spreading like liquid fingers, smoke starting to coil upwards in the still morning air.

  Still the silent men went on, setting torches to other parts of already burning buildings, tossing the blazing brands upwards on to the roofs with smooth and deadly precision. Now as the flames really caught the men fell back away from the searing heat, grouping in the center of the street, others behind and around the sides of buildings, carbines ported, six-guns loosened in their holsters, squinting into the flames which now lanced dancing upwards ten, twenty feet high, hurtling a great black oily cloud of smoke into the uncaring vault of the
sky. It was very noisy now in the street. The flames roared as a bright morning breeze touched them, encouraged them to greater efforts; the sudden yells, the screams of alarm which came from inside the houses caused no reaction from the narrow-eyed men in the street except for one, one man alone on horseback whose stallion curveted anxiously in front of the flickering flames.

  ‘Fire!’

  The cry was heard, repeated, shouted, screamed, cursed. ‘Fire!’

  In the street the waiting men heard the shouts and the screams and the curses impassively. Men yelling in fear, bellowing in pain, screaming in panic, women whimpering in terror, and always, always, the dreaded word, the terrifying enemy ‘Fire!’

  People were boiling out of the burning buildings. The saloon was an inferno, flames leaping thirty feet high above its roof.

  The man on the black stallion drew his six-gun and cruelly yanked the head of his horse around. He thundered up the street at a flat gallop, his six-gun barking in staccato rhythm. A man standing in the street in his nightshirt watched the rider coming towards him in complete astonishment and the man on the black horse shot him down as if he was a target. A woman ran screaming into the street towards the fallen man and shouted something after the rider but he did not turn for now the men who had started the fires had levered the shells into their carbines and they were firing too, a steady and withering hail of lead that sliced into everything that moved, every man and woman who came out of any of the blazing buildings.

  Al Davies came out of the shack in which he slept down at the south end of town and ran up the street, seeing only the fire and hearing the shots. He was shortsighted and did not recognize the men in the street until he was very close to them and then he tried to turn and run but one of them shot him in the back. Davies was smashed flat on his face in the dust of the street and tried to crawl away but the same man carefully aimed his carbine again and this time his bullet blew the back of Davies’ head to bloody smithereens. Man after man after man ran into the scything, murderous rain of death in the street. There was nowhere to run. Not a building remained that was not afire, and so the men died helpless, puzzled, astonished, shocked, terrified, defenseless against the granite indifference of the killers in the streets of Stockwood. Dead and half dead littered the smoldering sidewalks and the killers stalked among them, killing anything, anyone who moved, merciless and inhuman, showing not the faintest sign of humanity, of pity or of sorrow.