The Striker by Clive Cussler (ebook reader web TXT) 📕

an enormous sprawl of track in every direction. It was securely fenced. Bell spotted a break in the palings down by the river twenty tracks away.

“Ready?”

“Ready.”

Bell jumped first and landed with a jolt that seared his ribs. He kept his feet and reached for Mary and caught her as she tripped.

“Let’s go. We’ll get out of here fast as we can.”

They almost made it. They had crossed twenty pairs of rails and were running the last few yards when from behind a derelict caboose pounced a club-wielding railroad dick in a wrinkled sack suit and a dented bowler hat.

“Stop right there, you two!”

“Give us a break,” said Bell. “We’re just leaving.”

“You’re leaving all right—straight to the jailhouse. So’s your floozy.”

The rail dick reached for Mary’s arm.

Bell stepped between them and, when the yard bull raised his club, hit him with a left-right combination similar to the one that floored Eustace McCoy in the mine. The bull went down, holding his jaw. But the attack had been seen. Three more railroad police come running, pawing blackjacks from their coats. If they got past him, Bell knew, Mary would be next. He knelt beside the man he had knocked down and muttered urgently.

Railroad police were at the bottom of the peace-officer heap, despised as dregs, a bare step above brutal criminals. Few would refuse a Van Dorn detective a favor, dreaming that it might one day be returned with an invitation to join the outfit.

“Van Dorn. Pittsburgh field office. Call ’em off before I hurt somebody.”

“Hell, mister. Why didn’t you say you was a Van Dorn!” the rail cop blurted. “Almost broke my jaw.”

“Keep it quiet!”

“Hold on, boys,” the rail dick shouted. “He’s O.K. He’s a Van Dorn private detective.”

Mary Higgins rounded on Bell. “What?”

Her eyes flashed. Her cheeks flushed scarlet.

“A Pinkerton!” she yelled, her voice not at all musical, and slapped Bell’s face so hard she knocked the tall detective sideways. “You’re a Pinkerton?”

His disguise in shreds, Isaac Bell tried to explain, “No, Mary, I’m not a Pinkerton. I’m a Van Dorn.”

“What in hell is the difference? You’re all the same strikebreakers to me!”

She slapped him again and stalked toward the hole in the fence.

“You want we should stop her?”

“There aren’t enough of you,” said Bell. “Let her go.”

•   •   •

“WHAT LINE ARE YOU IN, SON?”

“Insurance. Dagget, Staples & Hitchcock.”

Bell had cleaned up at his lodging house and run with his bags to the train station, which was under construction and surrounded by an obstacle course of cursing carriage drivers and maddened horses, and had bought an extra-fare ticket on the Pennsylvania Special just as the express train pulled in from Chicago. Now, as the special’s locomotive accelerated smoothly out of Pittsburgh, he was sipping an excellent cup of coffee in the dining car, sharing a table with three well-dressed commission salesmen, and wondering what Mary Higgins was finding for breakfast.

“Where you headed?”

“New York.”

Mr. Van Dorn was there, and Bell was determined to convince the Boss that the gunman he had glimpsed inflaming the lynch mob and then shooting off his hat and holing his coat proved that a provocateur was intent on starting a war in the coalfields. Somehow, he had to persuade Mr. Van Dorn to give him more time to pursue the case. More important, he knew he could not pursue it alone. He needed help, a lot of help. Somehow, he had to convince the Boss to assign to him, for the first time, his own squad of detectives.

9

WELCOME BACK, MR. CLAY.”

The provocateur who shot at Isaac Bell from the back of the lynch mob marched into his elegant Wall Street office, where he was received with great deference, and no little fear, as the proprietor and chief investigator of the exclusive Henry Clay Investigations Agency of New York City. Clay’s manager, and secretary, and researcher, and telegrapher all stood respectfully at their desks, while the thugs ready to do his strong-arm work lined up in the back hall. Clay was a cultured man—his clothing exquisite, his taste sublime. The famous author Henry James had been known to converse with him companionably, utterly unaware—deserted, curiously, by his customary sound judgment—that Clay was also as ferociously ambitious as a hungry anaconda.

He had been raised in bohemian poverty by his mother, a struggling portrait painter who had named him after the man she claimed was his father—the ruthless coal, steel, and railroad baron Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie’s man of all work.

Henry Clay was thirty-five. He was well educated thanks to his mother’s gentlemen friends and clients who had staked him to excellent boarding schools in his youth. But the stints at school were as brief as his mother’s friendships, and he remained always the outsider—the day student at Choate, Phillips Andover, Exeter, Deerfield Academy, and St. Paul’s—brushing shoulders, fleetingly, with heirs to the great American fortunes that he hungered to possess himself.

At fifteen, Clay ran away from home and became a Pinkerton spy in the labor unions. At eighteen, in Chicago, he lied about his Pinkerton service and hired on as the first employee of the great detective of the age, Joseph Van Dorn. Van Dorn had recognized Clay’s extraordinary natural aptitude—his striking wit, his astonishing physical strength—and had held high hopes that his first apprentice would help him build his detective agency.

Van Dorn, a child of the Irish revolutions, which he had turned his back on when he saw them descend into criminality, had personally honed the boxing skills Henry Clay learned in school and trained him to fight with guns and knives. And while making Clay deadly, Van Dorn had taught him the fine art of investigation.

Clay still mourned the day they parted company.

Van Dorn had refused to make him a partner on the grounds that Clay was more interested in currying favor with industrialists than imprisoning criminals. Van Dorn, as bitterly disappointed in his choice of protégé