Trap Angel (Frank Angel Western #3) Read Free

together. You
got just ten minutes.’
    The training program, as
Wells had warned him when they first came to Washington, was
rigorous and exhaustive and merely average performance was not
tolerated.
    He went back over the last
few months, recalling his disappointment when they came out of
Union Station into the muddy thoroughfare of the capital city. The
place was a clamor of building, everything either half erected or
half torn down. The grandiose monument to Washington that had never
been completed sat like a broken factory chimney on the Mall, pigs
scavenging at its base. The President’s home, ‘the White House’,
still had no toilets, Angel learned. He guessed you could figure
out what L’Enfant had had in mind if you sat down and worked at it.
Nobody would ever make him understand why they had decided to build
the capital of the United States smack in the middle of a
swamp.
    The Department had given him
little time for sightseeing.
    Within two weeks, he was in
New York, warily watching the fringes of the underworld with
astonishment: Bowery boys and Dead Rabbits parading in their street
gang finery and ready to cut the throat of any man for the price of
a drink.
    At City Hall they filled him
in on political fixing and corruption, on the ways and means of
Tammany, on the social and sexual forces brought to bear by
unscrupulous men on the make — all ‘good for the education’ they
told him, and a necessary addition to the massive readings of
Blackstone’s Commentaries, of Federal and Territorial laws,
military and civil laws, laws governing Indian administration and
land laws — Desert land and Homestead land and Indian land and
pre-empted land, land in the public domain and Spanish grant land,
water rights, rights of earlier occupation, criminal jurisprudence
and contract law — leaving him alone for hours and hours in lofty
echoing chambers lined with heavy leather bound books, reading
until his eyes went sandy and grainy and he could not remember
anything.
    Then the practical work.
Basic survival. Tracking. How to stay alive in the desert, in the
mountains, stranded alone in any wilderness. Disguises: how to
alter the appearance by makeshift means, a smudge of boot blacking
beneath the eyes, adding a limp to one’s walk, the wearing of
eyeglasses, combing the hair differently, adopting a slight accent.
Navigation by the sun, by the stars. And weapons, always more and
more about weapons. Knives, guns, rifles, spears, bows, arrows,
swords, clubs, staves, hatchets, explosives — their values, their
uses, their limitations. Culminating in the tests: they took him on
a train and then on horseback somewhere hours away from the city
and turned him loose in a swampy wilderness without food, water or
weapons. They gave him a one-hour start and then sent three trained
men after him. He had to elude them and get back to a house in a
clearing somewhere in the swamp. It took him four days and he lost
eighteen pounds doing it, but he made it. En route he had learned
how to find water when none seemed to exist, how to trap small wild
things and subsist on their meager, strong tasting flesh. He had
learned how to conceal his lair like any hunted thing, how to
defend himself in any situation. How to stay alive.
    He went across the room and
opened the window. The noise from the street drifted in.
    Somewhere he could hear a
man selling newspapers and the smell of cooking food came to his
nostrils. He felt hungry. Maybe he would go out and get a
meal.
    ‘You’re stupid! ’ the
instructor at ‘the College’ had shouted.
    ‘Yes sir.’
    ‘Say it!’
    ‘I’m stupid,
sir.’
    ‘You’re an insolent fool,
Angel.’
    ‘That’s correct,
sir.’
    ‘You wouldn’t know how to
use that gun if your life depended on it.’
    ‘If you say so,
sir.’
    ‘Damn you, Angel, don’t
answer me back!’
    The unexpected searing shock
of the slap across his face, and his own reflex action as the anger
bit into his mind. He had stood