The Race by Clive Cussler (best book reader txt) 📕

Frost had jammed it into the river mud when he picked it up, deliberately tamping it into the barrel so it would blow up in Bell’s hand. Characteristic Harry Frost. Like the bent horseshoes thrown through victims’ windows to terrorize them, the chief investigator’s maimed hand would warn every Van Dorn detective: Don’t mess with Harry Frost.

Bell dunked the gun in the water and slammed it back and forth, sluicing out the mud. With any luck, it would fire a shot or two. But when he looked for his target, Harry Frost had melted into the shadows. Bell called, “Frost!” All he heard in response was laughter echoing under a distant pier.

“WHERE IS JOSEPHINE?” Isaac Bell shouted into the stockyard office telephone.

“Are you O.K., Isaac?” asked Joseph Van Dorn.

“Where is Josephine?”

“Camped out on Bedloe’s Island, fixing her flying machine. Where are you?”

“Who’s watching her?”

“Six of my best detectives and twenty-seven newspaper reporters. Not to mention Mr. Preston Whiteway, circling on a steam yacht, beaming searchlights for your fiancée to shoot moving pictures by. Are you O.K.?”

“Tip-top, soon as I get a propeller, a new wing stay, and a Remington autoload.”

“I’ll send word to Marion you’re O.K. Where are you, Isaac?”

“Weehawken stockyards. Frost got away.”

“Seems to be making a habit of that,” the boss observed coolly. “Did you wing him at least?”

“I took off one of his ears.”

“That’s a start.”

“But it didn’t stop him.”

“Where’s he headed?”

“I don’t know,” Bell admitted. His head ached, and his jaw felt like he’d been chewing thornbushes.

“Do you think he’ll try again?”

“He assured me he will not stop trying until he kills her.”

“You spoke?” The tone of Van Dorn’s voice suggested that if Bell could somehow see through telephone wire, he would be facing sharply raised eyebrows.

“Briefly.”

“What’s his state of mind?”

Isaac Bell had thought of little else since he swam ashore.

“Harry Frost is not insane,” he said. “In fact, in a strange way he’s enjoying himself. As I warned Whiteway in San Francisco, Frost knows he’s been dealt his last hand. He’s not going to fold his cards until he sets the casino on fire.”

Joseph Van Dorn said, “Nonetheless, the lengths he’s going to to avenge his wife’s supposed seduction would fit most folks’ definition of insane.”

“Let me ask you something, Joe. Why do you suppose Frost didn’t kill Josephine when they were still together?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why did Frost shoot Marco instead?”

“Put an end to the affair, hoping she’d come back.”

“Yes. Except for one thing. Having killed Marco—assuming he is dead—”

“He is,” Van Dorn interrupted. “We’ve been down that road.”

“Having killed, or tried to kill, Marco,” Bell replied evenly, “why is Frost now trying to kill Josephine?”

“He either is insane or just plain old-fashioned crazed with jealousy. The man was known for his temper.”

“Why didn’t he kill Josephine first?”

“You’re asking me to explain the order of a madman’s killings?”

“Do you know what he said to me?”

“I wasn’t there when he escaped, Isaac,” Van Dorn said pointedly.

Isaac Bell was too involved in his line of inquiry to countenance Van Dorn’s jibe. “Harry Frost said to me, ‘You don’t know what they were up to.’”

“Up to? Marco and Josephine were running off together, that’s what they were up to—or so Frost suspected.”

“No. He didn’t sound like he meant only a love affair. He indicated they were scheming. It was as if he had discovered that they had perpetuated some sort of betrayal worse than seduction.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. But I’m beginning to suspect that we are fighting something more complicated than we took on.”

“We took on protecting Josephine from getting killed,” Van Dorn retorted firmly. “So far, that’s been complicated enough for two detective agencies. If what you’re suggesting now has any bottom to it, we should call in a third.”

“Send me that Remington autoload.”

VAN DORN DISPATCHED an apprentice across on the Weehawken Ferry with the rifle and dry clothes from Bell’s room at the Yale Club. Andy Moser arrived in one of the roadsters an hour later, with tools, stay wires, and a shiny new nine-foot propeller strapped to the fenders.

“Good thing you’re rich, Mr. Bell. This baby cost a hundred bucks.”

“Let’s get to work. I want this machine flying by dawn. I already removed this broken stay.”

Andy Moser whistled. “Wow! I’ve never seen Roebling wire snap.”

“It had help from Harry Frost.”

“It’s amazing the wing didn’t fall off.”

Bell said, “The machine is resilient. These other stays, here and here, took up the slack.”

“I always say, Mr. Di Vecchio built ’em to last.”

They replaced the propeller and the broken stay and patched the holes Frost had shot in the wing fabric. Then Bell sawed twelve inches off the wooden stock of the Remington autoloading rifle, and Andy jury-rigged a swivel mount, promising to construct a more permanent installation “with a stop so you don’t shoot your own propeller” when he got back to his shop in the hangar car. Next time Harry Frost fired at him he would discover that the Eagle had grown teeth.

21

FOUR MILES DOWNRIVER, at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, Josephine was trying to fix her flying machine. Blinded by the searchlights glaring from Preston Whiteway’s steam yacht, choking on its coal smoke, and harried by reporters shouting puddingheaded questions, she and her Van Dorn detective-mechanicians, who had finally come over on a boat, addressed the mangled wing. But the damage was beyond their skills and the few tools they had with them, and the young aviatrix had begun to lose hope when help suddenly appeared in the last person she would have expected.

Dmitri Platov hopped off a Harbor Patrol launch from Manhattan Island, shook hands with the policemen who had given him a ride, and saluted her with a jaunty wave of his slide rule. Everyone said that the handsome Russian was the best mechanician in the race, but he had never come near her machine or offered his services. She was pretty sure she knew why.

“What are