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

discussed what had to be
discussed, and Angel rose to leave.
    ‘ Don’t
take any chances, Frank,’ the Attorney-General had said as they
shook hands. They always shook hands. Neither knew why, but they
always did. Angel already had his grip outside the
Attorney-General’s office, a hack waiting at the door of the
building. He would take the train up to New York, and catch a
steamer from there to Galveston. As he told the Attorney-General,
he wanted to come up on Nix gradual-like. Which was when the older
man proffered his advice.
    ‘ You
know me,’ Angel grinned. ‘When did I ever take unnecessary
chances?’
    ‘ Get the
hell out of here,’ the Attorney-General grinned, ‘before I have
Amabel come in and make up a list!’
    Amabel Rowe was the
Attorney-General ’s personal private secretary, and if there had been any
message in her usually merry blue eyes as she told him goodbye,
Angel hadn’t been able to read it. He wondered what she was doing
right now, and then grinned at the thought that she was probably
sitting in her office, in Washington, wondering what he was doing.
He sent her a telepathic message across the miles between. What I’m
doing is sweating, he told her.
    Fall is a treacherous time in
the Sierras. The nights can freeze you, while during the day the
sun will fry off your skin. You have to wear clothes that will at
least keep you warm at night, yet not leech the moisture out of you
while you are on the move in daylight. Right now,
Angel ’s
woolen shirt and pants clung to him as if he had been hosed down,
and the chill of the cool breeze, when it came around the shoulder
of the mountain, was like a draft of clear cold water. He picked up
his pace, for that slight movement of air could only mean one
thing: he had found the way through the mountains. In a short
while, he found himself on a rocky ledge looking down into a long
valley already filling with the purple shadows of the afternoon. On
its far side, the Burro Mountains tumbled along the horizon from
the south on his left to the north on his right. Off on the edge of
the northern fall of the valley he could see a line of trees, dark
greens and browns contrasting with the dun flatness of the
scrubland below. Shading his eyes with his hands, he thought he
caught sight of a smoke smudge. He closed his eyes and opened them
again, and this time he realized that what he could see was
the hacienda that Davis had told him about. He could not make out any
detail at this distance, but he didn’t really need to. He knew the
layout of the house, and to a lesser extent the valley, as though
he had a map in front of him.
    He ’d found Davis in Galveston.
    Welsh Al Davis, one-timer master
builder, down and out and snoring like a pig in a Houston Street
fleabag, just where they ’d said he’d be. They’d also said that Al was a
hopeless drunk, as dependent on the bottle as a babe on its
mother’s milk. The story—which Angel pieced together from two dozen
men, a bit at a time—was that Welsh Al had gone down on the border
someplace, building a hacienda for some got-rocks rancher. He’d come back with
more money than Croesus, and with whatever he’d formerly been using
for a backbone quite obviously removed. Welsh Al had a good
reputation and a good business before he went down Mexico way, but
he came back like a jigsaw with some of the pieces missing. His
friends rallied around, tried to help out, but Al would have none
of it. In short order he drank his way through his share of the
business, his frame house on A Avenue in Galveston, his government
bonds, his savings, and finally his loving and much put-upon wife.
She ran off with a drummer when Al was so far over the hill that
nothing could help him. Whatever it was he was trying to drown,
folks said, there sure as hell didn’t seem to be enough whiskey in
Texas to do the job. Or maybe, as one wit drily remarked, the
damned ghost could swim.
    By the time Angel got to him,
Welsh Al was seeing