Frame Angel! (A Frank Angel Western) #7 by Frederick H. Christian Read Free Book Online Page B

nodded. The signal was a
simple one. Angel would ask to see the warden before the exercise
period. The request would be brought upstairs as a matter of
course. The warden would deny the request. But he would know that
Angel was ready, and Angel, when told the warden ’s decision, would know that the
warden was.
    So the request had been made and denied, and
the wheels were in motion.
    Angel hoped they were rolling
smoothly while he and his fellow convicts were double-timed out of
their cells and across to the dining hall, which with the kitchen
took up the entire ground floor of the administration block. After
breakfast the steel doors separating the four triangular yards were
opened so that the prisoners could trot around the entire perimeter
of the building – Warden Abrams’s one concession against security, born of
his feeling that prisoners should have, even in this most minimal
of ways, a change of scenery at least once a day. There was little
or no danger. On each of the sentinels in the eight corners of the
octagonal wall, two sentries watched the shuffling prisoners with
sharp eyes, ready for trouble, Winchester repeaters in their
cradled hands. The heavy doors were locked, barred, and guarded.
And all the way along the long crocodile of shuffling prisoners,
every five or six yards, a prison guard marched, baton swinging,
left hand on holstered pistol.
    ‘ Hup-hi,
hup-hi, hup-hi!’ the guards shouted their cadences, their breath a
steamy fog in the chilly morning air. ‘Hup-hi, hup-hi!’
    As they came out of the yard between blocks
A and D into the cobbled parade, which was dominated by big main
doors, Frank Angel seemed to stumble and fell to the floor. In a
moment, the big, red-faced guard from cell block A, whose name
Angel now knew to be Chris Shore, was beside him, yanking brutally
on his arm, the baton poised to strike.
    ‘ On yer
feet, ye stumblebum!’ Shore rasped.
    He wasn ’t ready for the way Angel moved,
wasn’t anything like fast enough to stop the prisoner from coming
up off the ground like a striking snake. His left hand moved from
his right shoulder in a slicing chop that stopped with a slapping
thud in the fold of flesh between Shore’s chin and Adam’s apple. A
full strength blow would have destroyed his larynx, and Shore would
have been dead in ten minutes. But Angel’s blow merely paralyzed
the guard’s breathing. Shore’s eyes bulged as his lungs tried
desperately to draw oxygen through his stunned windpipe, and the
baton clattered from a hand gone suddenly limp. Angel picked up the
heavy club on the first bounce and as a second guard came running,
threw it as if it were a balanced knife. The heavy, metal-covered
billy whickered through the air. and the running guard ducked,
flinching away. In a moment Angel was behind Shore, the knife in
his hand flickering as it caught the first fleeting rays of the sun
coming high enough to shine over the gray walls.
    A running guard skidded to a halt, hand
fumbling at the flap of his pistol holster.
    ‘ Touch
that gun and you’ll see his throat cut!’ Angel yelled. ‘Hear
me!’
    The guard looked about him
wildly as the prisoners scattered to the safety of the outer walls,
leaving the tableau posed in the center of the cobbled yard – Angel with his
arm around Shore’s neck, the fat man’s spine arched back; the guard
standing, hand poised over his holster, looking about him; the
other guards frozen, waiting a moment. Briggs was about four yards
to one side and edging forward. Angel wrestled Shore’s gun out of
its holster and tossed it to Briggs.
    ‘ Get
over here close!’ he shouted. ‘Bring that guard here!’
    Briggs gestured with the pistol,
moving fast to be close to Angel and Shore. The other guard
hesitated and Briggs fired the gun. The bullet smashed into the
cobbles at the guard ’s feet, and he jumped visibly as the slug ricocheted away
into infinity. Some of the prisoners near the wall ducked
instinctively. The guard came