Kill Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #6)

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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.

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.

‘
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 experience
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.’