Angry Angel

By Richard Quarry

In turn-of-the-century San Francisco real-life heroine Donaldina Cameron earned the name "the Chinatown Angel" for rescuing Chinese slave girls forced into prostitution. To the tongs and brothel owners, though, she was Fahn Quai — the White Devil, with a price on her head.

 Now as Donaldina journeys to Seattle's ill-famed Restricted District an unlikely romance blossoms between her and a hard-bitten IWW organizer as they team up to rescue another girl from a brothel guarded by the tongs, the police, and a kung-fu killer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Quarry
• Release date: Mar 13, 2025
• ISBN: 9798230677512

Book preview

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Angry Angel

Richard Quarry

Copyright © 2022 by Richard Quarry

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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Contents

Angry Angel

About the Author

What Rough Beast

Angry Angel

Floyd Alvin rode the plush all the way across Washington state.

Well more like underneath the plush, clinging to the brake rods below the passenger coach speeding from Spokane to Seattle. Generally Floyd preferred the comfort of a nice leisurely box car, some side-door Pullman where a fellow might even be lucky enough to gather together some not terribly filthy straw to make himself a bed.

But she’d said come quick. So quick he came, three hundred miles breathing cinder dust while the steel wheels squealed around a couple of feet from his head, kicking up pebbles that stung like deer flies. Fall asleep and lose your grip, and the crows would be feasting for a hundred yards along the track.

Did she say her name? Floyd had asked Pocaloo Red, who’d carried the message out to Spokane from the Industrial Workers of the World union hall in Seattle.

Hell no, Red replied, spooning another mouthful of mulligan from the condensed milk cans used as dinner plates in the hobo jungle. Sparks from campfires where men sang IWW favorites like The Rebel Girl and Keep on Tramping whirled up toward the thinning leaves overhead.

All she said was ‘tell the Commodore I want him, and I want him quick.’ Like Lady Astor should be honored to shine her shoes. But got up more like a sober-sides than a swell, you know? Damn, Bill, where’d you ever run across a squarejohn dame like that?

It’s Floyd these days, Red. Floyd Alvin. Not Bill Wallace, and certainly not Commodore anybody. I’ve started seeing paper with that ‘Commodore’ on it. ‘Wanted for questioning’ kind of paper.

Wasn’t like he needed to hear her name anyway. Not the way his insides had already started to crank around, cringing on one pass and panting like a dog on the next.

So who is she? Red asked. Some preacher lady on holiday?

Sewing teacher, Floyd replied. A sewing teacher on holiday.

The kind of holiday likely to get him killed.

Still, when Donaldina Cameron put the word out to come quick, Commodore Bill Wallace — or rather Floyd Alvin, he had to watch that himself — let out all the links.

He’d been policing the hobo jungles outside of Spokane for the Industrial Workers of the World. Wobblies from all over the country were gathering in preparation for what was shaping up to be the biggest, skull-crackingest, fill-the-jails Free Speech Fight ever.

Of course such gatherings also attracted jack–rollers, yeggs, and jungle buzzards. The IWW’s answer to such undesirables was Floyd Alvin.

So far there’d been no shooting. Not even all that much slugging, really. Not with this many worked-up Wobblies backing his play. So Floyd didn’t feel too bad telling James Rowan, the head rep for the coming struggle, to rustle up another hard boy. Jim took the news philosophically. Jesse Oldham and the Flying Squad were already on the way.

Floyd hiked out of the jungle a little after dark, making for where the last express coach out of Spokane slowed for a long uphill grade.

By the time he rolled into Seattle, around four in the morning, his whole body shook from the vibration of the brake rods. His aching hands would not unclench, and all he could hear was