Stop Angel! (A Frank Angel Western Book 8) Read Online Free PDF Page A

from
Cervantes.
    ‘ Well,
now,’ he said to himself. ‘There’s a remedy for everything except
death.’
    Then he got up and went to meet the
killers.

Chapter
Four
    One hundred days to the day of Jaime
Lorenz ’s
death in Nix’s valley—although there was no way he could have known
of the macabre anniversary—Frank Angel eased on foot through the
high peaks of the empty mountains east of the Valley of Death.
Autumn was already in the air, and there had been snow higher up,
but at this level it was as hot as the hinges of the gateway to
Hell. The sun beat down vertically on the faceless rocks of the
high sierra, piling heat into them which they bounced right back
into the face and body of the lone figure wending its way through
the broken pass. Sweating under the heavy backpack and the exertion
in this rarefied air, Angel moved doggedly on.
    He had been trying to find a way
through the mountains for four days now. There was always a way
through, but first you had to find it. Sometimes you could spend
more time backtracking out of blind canyons than you did moving
forward, but sooner or later, inevitably, a determined man could
and would find the defile that climbed up to the higher peaks and
then slid alongside them and down to the other side. Angel was
determined enough, and patient enough. Even though, in the thin
mountain air, it was hard work just breathing, he kept plodding on,
exploring, probing the mountain ’s defenses, retreating when his path was finally
barred, thinking it through and then trying another way. He was
going to find a way into the Valley of Death, because whatever it
contained had killed Jaime Lorenz, and Jaime Lorenz came from an
elite corps of very hard-to-kill men. Which also meant that
reconnaissance was necessary for survival as well as
reckoning.
    They knew Lorenz was dead after sixty
days.
    They didn ’t need any message, any
notification, nor was there any. Indeed, it was the very absence of
any word that confirmed the fact that Lorenz was dead. All of the
department’s investigators had two cutoffs, no more. No matter
where you were, whatever you were engaged upon, you reported in as
often as possible, but in none but the most extreme cases did you
let the period between contacts exceed forty days. In extreme
cases, you could extend it to sixty, but no longer. If you did not
make contact in sixty days it was presumed—usually correctly—that
you were dead. Whereupon appropriate steps would be taken in
Washington.
    The Attorney-General felt very
strongly about having any of his men killed. Very strongly indeed.
He took it as a personal affront to himself, as well as a slap in
the face for the government he served. In fact, it was said that he
felt so strongly about the killing of Lorenz that steam had been
observed coming out of his nostrils. It wasn ’t true—not quite—but it made the
point well. The Attorney-General made it plain that he wanted
whoever had killed Lorenz, and he wanted him so badly that he could
taste it in his whiskey. He had spent a very long time getting
Presidential approval for his special force of thinking
killing-machines, even longer finding the right men to train them.
He was proud of his investigators: they were a product of a
training course that weeded out any but the best, mentally and
physically. The men who became Special Investigators for the
Department of Justice were not only fully versed in the intricacies
of federal and territorial law, but highly skilled practitioners of
the martial arts. Physically tireless, matchless riders, superbly
trained in the uses of all weapons, they were damned hard men to
kill.
    Which meant that Jaime
Lorenz ’s
killers were not to be taken on lightly. But taken on they most
certainly were to be, and when the Attorney-General sent for Frank
Angel, their conversation was not far short of perfunctory. Angel
knew what the Old Man wanted, and the Attorney-General knew that
Angel would do it. Or die trying to. They