Trap Angel (Frank Angel Western #3) Read Free Page A

there with the six-gun in his hand
and the instructor had laughed.
    ‘Look at you,’ he had
jeered. ‘You going to shoot me, Angel?’
    ‘I see,’ Angel said softly
and slipped the gun back into its holster.
    ‘Good boy,’ the instructor
said as if he were a dog.
    ‘Suppose I’d pulled the
trigger,’ Angel said to him afterwards. The instructor had grinned
like a cat with a fat mouse.
    ‘You don’t think I’d give
you a loaded gun to play with, do you?’
    Angel had grinned as well.
They were training him. Training him to kill if he had to, but not
because someone had jockeyed him into a spot where emotion dictated
the action and not reason. Let no man chose the killing ground,
they told him. You select it. You decide what to do. And you will
stay alive.
    He remembered the short
squat man with the dark skin who had been waiting for him in the
gymnasium one day. He never learned the man’s name. They were alone
and the floor was covered with the mattresses as always. The man
held out a thick stick, about two feet long.
    ‘No guns today,’ he had
said. ‘This time it’s knives.’
    ‘Where’s mine?’ Angel
asked.
    ‘Here,’ said the man and
came at him with a wicked Bowie flat on his palm, hard and fast and
without any kind of warning, a slicing cut that could have
disemboweled a horse. Angel acted blindly, instinctively, smashing
down on the man’s wrist with the heavy stick. The man grinned and
fell back and Angel saw he had heavy leather bands strapped around
his wrists. Then he came back in again, shifting the knife very
fast to his left hand and lifting the blade towards Angel’s
ribcage. Angel moved fast on his feet and brought the stick around
and as he turned jerked backwards with it and the blunt end hit the
man with the knife beneath the breastbone, bringing breath
whooshing out of him with a great gust.
    He went down on one knee as
Angel whirled around with the stave cocked in both hands, but the
man rolled away before he could deliver a blow and came up smoothly
on his feet as if without effort, eyes hooded, circling, circling,
moving all the time.
    ‘Not bad,’ he said. There
was an ounce of respect in his voice but no more than
that.
    They kept at it for almost
twenty minutes. By the time they were finished both men were
drenched with sweat. Angel never managed to get the knife away from
his opponent, but neither did the man get another chance, at
Angel’s body with the knife. Finally the man called a halt. His
shoulders were heaving from the exertion.
    ‘What’s your name, kid?’ he
asked.
    ‘Angel,’ the young man
replied. ‘Frank Angel.’
    The man nodded. ‘You’ll do,’
he said, and pulling on a heavy woolen sweater went out of the
gymnasium. Angel never saw him again and when he asked Wells about
him, all Wells would say was that the man was known as ‘the Indian’
and was reputed to be the best knife fighter in the United
States.
    Angel thought about coffee.
He wondered whether Mrs. Rissick, his landlady, would make him some
and send it up. He could use a cup of coffee. Before he went to bed
he would have to bone up on Blackstone again. There was another
written examination tomorrow.
    Another day at the
gymnasium, the instructor had just patted him on the shoulder as he
went through the door and then stepped back. It was enough to make
Angel wary: by now he knew that the surprises were always sprung on
you without warning. He went into the room expecting anything and
was tense and ready, balanced on the balls of his feet. Then
someone took hold of him and threw him across the gymnasium. He hit
the mattresses with a thud that knocked him breathless and lay
there for a moment, cursing silently. They never told you what to
expect. They just tossed you in and left you to do whatever you
could. There were no rules. Only survival counted. He got to his
feet carefully, and saw the man coming at him. He just had time to
realize it was a Chinese or Japanese. The man made a