Read Send Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #2) for Free Online Page B

his arms, he lay gasping on the ground as the sun
climbed up into the molten sky and seared his skin. Slowly he let
the signals come to his brain, noting them as dispassionately as a
surgeon.
    His right arm was numb, the
wrist a puffy, swollen mass of purple and black bruises. Flexing
his fingers carefully, he awaited the screeching pain of broken
bone. None came. He nodded. Good. The effort had exhausted him. He
lay down again. Time passed, time without meaning. He hitched his
body around until he lay half curled on the ground and could see
his own body. With the stronger fingers of his left hand he tore away the
blood-soaked shirt and forced himself to look at the wound in his
middle. He was afraid and he knew it. To be gunshot meant days of
blinding agony even if a man were near help. Out here ... he shut
his mind to that. It would have been easy then to lie back and let
the whole world slide away, let death rise in him like water at a
dam, slowly, lapping him in cold oblivion. All he had to do was let
go. Then the memory of the voice that he had heard come back to him
and he knew he remembered it. Johnny Boot! He thought carefully of
the man’s face, fixing it in his mind, sorting out the features the
way a drunken man will go through a bunch of keys. He saw Boot’s
face clearly; visualized him pulling the trigger, saying ‘Tough
bastard.’ Then he let the hatred seep slowly into him, growing,
tunneling along his veins, building to a force that made him move
deliberately for the first time. And then he knew that he wanted to
live. He would live to kill Boot He nodded idiotically as if
someone had spoken the words to him, and the feral smile of a wolf
touched his broken mouth. Yes, he told himself. He would live. Then
he started to work out what he had to do.
    He lay quietly for another five
or ten minutes, although he had no real conception of time. He
closed his eyes and ears to everything else. Then he sat up again,
moving very slowly and carefully, testing himself against the
pains, moving only against the ones he knew he could control. He
took a longer look at the wound in his middle, forcing himself to
accept whatever he found. The bullet wound was low on the right
side, just below the ribcage and about three inches in. It had torn
through his body. He reached behind himself with the good left
hand, fingers finding the mush of the ragged exit hole. He traced
its outlines; about the size of a spur rowel, slick with blood
but as far as he could tell not pumping blood steadily. A clean
wound. He was weak from loss of blood, but the bullet had gone
through him. He nodded, and looked around. Something moved in the
clumped ocotillo, and he went cold with fear. But then he saw the
grey black pelt and knew it was a coyote. The buzzards still
watched. He shook his head. ‘Not me, you don’t,’ the movement said.
His horse was gone. They had stripped him of his gunbelt and empty
gun, and taken his boots. They? Two of them ? What did he remember? Something.
There must have been two of them. And that meant Mill was the other one.
Boot and Mill. Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Blackstone had called
them. Yes.
    He swung his legs around and
nearly blacked out again from the surge of pain that racked his
frame. Ribs, he thought. He moved both shoulders up and down, very
easily. Nothing grated, although the pain was intense. Maybe
nothing ’s
busted. He sure as hell hoped not. The thought of a broken rib end
spearing into his lung . . . no, he would not think about that,
either. His glance moved all around him. They had left nothing. He
was barefoot, a long way from anywhere, weaponless, without water,
busted up. He had not drunk anything for almost two days. He knew
there was little hope of surviving another. Only his iron
constitution had brought him through as far as this. Then he
remembered where he was. The arroyo! He turned on his left side and
began to scoop at the sand with his good hand. The pain raced
through him like