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

“Wish, what do you mean what am I doing here? You saved my life.”

“Heck, you did the same for me in New Orleans.”

“I didn’t step in front of a knife.”

Wish shrugged, which made him wince. “You’re making a mountain out of a molehill.” Then he winked. “Fact is, I enjoy the occasional wound. Nobody complains when I take a little something for the pain.”

Bell passed him his flask.

“How bad am I?”

“Doc says a couple of weeks in bed ought to do you.”

“Sorry, Isaac. I’ll catch up as soon as I can. You going to Pittsburgh?”

“Just stopping at Union Station to see Mack and Wally and Archie on my way to New York.”

“Why New York?”

“Report to the Boss.”

“What happened to the telegraph?”

“I want to see his face when I tell him what I’m thinking.”

•   •   •

MARY HIGGINS felt like she was falling backwards in her nightmare.

But she knew for sure that she was not dreaming. And she certainly was not sleeping. She was too cold and wet to sleep. Besides, who could sleep standing up, much less slogging along a road that had turned to mud?

Suddenly, screams pierced the dark, worse than any nightmare.

“They’re coming!”

“They’re coming!”

A glaring white light almost as bright as a locomotive raced straight at them. Men and women scurried off the road, dragging their children into the ditches and shoving them through the hedges. Eight huge white firehorses galloped up the road towing a freight wagon on which the Coal and Iron Police mounted a gasoline dynamo and an electric searchlight. Its only purpose was to terrorize. The miners’ wives had named it the Cyclops.

Their march was twenty miles short of Pittsburgh, and they were pressing on through the night, hoping to reach a farm where philanthropists and progressive church people were erecting a tent city. In this place, they dreamed, they would find hot food and dry blankets.

When the Cyclops had gone and Mary was helping people to their feet, a deep despair descended upon her. The cause seemed hopeless. But worse than her fear that the march and the strikes would achieve nothing was the bleak realization there existed in the world a brand of human being that wanted to attack with something as diabolically cruel as the Cyclops. A tiny, tiny minority, her brother always said, but he was wrong. It had taken many to dream up such a monstrosity, many to build it, and many, many more to allow it.

“Cyclops!”

Again it roared, blazing through the night, and again they jumped. From the ditch, Mary Higgins caught a fleeting glimpse of the horses as they galloped ahead of the light, nostrils flaring, eyes bulging, heads thrashing against their harness, terrified by the whip, the dark, and the screaming.

It was still raining when the last of the marchers straggled into the tent city at dawn. Mary was last, carrying a child in one arm and propping up the mother, a woman with a racking cough. She was surprised when church ladies, who looked like they had never missed a meal or ironed their own linen, rushed to help. They took the child and the mother to a makeshift infirmary and directed Mary to a soup kitchen under a stretched tarpaulin. Hundreds of people had lined up to eat, and she had just found the tail end when John Claggart appeared out of nowhere and pressed into her cold hands a mug of hot coffee that smelled better than seemed possible.

Claggart had men with him. They were dressed like miners. But none, she noticed, looked like they worked with their hands, and she recognized the flash operators who hung around prize rings, pool halls, and racetracks. She saw in their eyes their contempt for the miners.

“Who are those men?” she asked.

“Not choirboys,” Claggart replied boldly. “But they’ll get the job done.”

The word accomplices wormed its way into her mind.

“Criminals?” she asked.

Claggart shrugged. “It’s not for me to judge. But I’ll bet that you and your brother know plenty of men who have been railroaded into prison for fighting the good fight.”

“Those I know,” she said, “don’t resemble criminals.”

Claggart said, “Give me a brave man, quick on his feet, and I don’t care what you call him as long as he knows that the bosses are the real bums. Now, listen carefully. I have more barges tied along the banks and more boats to move them into the channel.”

•   •   •

“MISSED YOUR SPITTOON. SORRY, CHIEF.”

Henry Clay recognized the brown trail of tobacco juice that soiled his pale blue Aubusson carpet for what it was, a challenge by a thug who had never lost a fight and was too stupid to imagine that he ever would. A dozen of them—all blood-oath members of the Hudson Dusters, a West Side New York docks gang—had crowded into his front office through the back hall. He would never permit these scum in his private rooms. Most didn’t know him from Adam. All they knew was their boss had ordered them to appear for a special job. But now, instead of quietly listening to Clay’s orders, they were snickering at the mess on his carpet.

The spitter’s second mistake was to underestimate a Wall Street swell just because he wore a splendid suit of clothes. Clay stood up. The Dusters’ boss and his enforcer exchanged expectant glances. Pain was about to be suffered.

“What’s your name?” Clay asked.

“What’s it to you?”

“Tell him your name,” said the boss, signaling Clay that he had no desire to get in the middle.

“Albert,” said the thug, watching with amusement as Clay walked closer.

“Not to worry about missing the spittoon, Albert. Just lick it up.”

“What?”

“Lick it up.”

“Go—”

Clay hit him high, low, and in between, then put him in a hammerlock, slammed him facedown on the floor, and jerked his pinioned arm higher and higher until the gangster screamed. Eventually, his screams turned to pleas. Clay jerked harder. Pleas dissolved into sobs.

Clay let go.

“Don’t bother licking it up, Albert. We know you would, and that’s all that matters.”

Eleven Hudson Dusters laughed.

“All right, boyos, you’re