Clive Cussler - The Assassin

“Howdy, Isaac,” said Hatfield, shaking hands as casually as if they had last worked together yesterday instead of a year ago. “This here’s Mr. C. C. Gustafson.”

“Craig Gustafson,” said the publisher, thrusting out his good hand.

“Isaac Bell. Congratulations on being alive.”

C. C. Gustafson proved to be as philosophical on the subject of getting shot as any Bell had met. “My little newspaper is just a fly nipping at the hide of Standard Oil. Fact is, I’m flattered they bothered to swat me.”

Bell asked, “Do we have reason to believe that’s who shot you?”

“I don’t know for sure this is true, but I have a vague memory forming in my mind that I was told that a Standard Oil Refinery Police chief arrived on the train the day before. That would have been Tuesday. I got shot on Wednesday.”

“Can you recall any local enemies here in town you might have provoked?”

“I haven’t stolen any horses and I haven’t burned any churches, and I can also eliminate angry husbands, since I don’t run around on my wife.”

Isaac Bell glanced at the barbed-wire-lean, hawk-nosed Texas Walt for confirmation.

The normally laconic former Ranger surprised him by drawling the longest sentence Bell had ever heard him speak: “Ah had the pleasure of meeting Janet Sue — that is to say, Mrs. C. C. Gustafson — at the hospital, and Ah can report that there ain’t a man in Texas who would entertain notions of running around on such a lady.”

“I have irritated Standard Oil for years,” said Gustafson, “and currently can claim some part of the effort in the Texas State House to ban the monopolistic vultures from doing business in our state.”

Bell asked, “What do you remember of the shooting?”

“Not a heck of a lot, as I was just telling Walt. It’s coming back, but slow.”

“Mr. Gustafson only woke up yesterday morning,” Hatfield told Bell.

“I’m surprised they let you out of the hospital so soon.”

“My wife has a theory that hospitals kill people, being full of sick people with infections. She marched me home the second I could walk.”

Bell turned to Hatfield. “Who’s the dead suspect the sheriff cleared?”

“Found facedown on top of a Springfield ’03 with his neck busted.”

“As if he fell while running to escape?”

“Until friends remarked that he was near blind without his glasses, which had got busted that morning in a poker table dispute.”

“Did you manage a look at the rifle?”

Hatfield said, “The sheriff cooperated. The rifle smelled recently fired. Four rounds still in the magazine, which holds five.”

“Telescope?”

“Nope.”

“Maybe that’s why the assassin missed.” Bell turned back to the newspaper publisher.

“Can you tell me what you remember?”

“The window broke. I was setting type for my editorial by the light of the window. All at once, the glass shattered.”

“What happened next?”

“I’m afraid my answer is not going to help you, Detective Bell. What happened next was I woke up in a strange bed with my wife holding a cool cloth to my brow. Looked around. Walt was standing nearby with his hands on his guns as if to discourage additional potshots.”

Bell asked, “Would you feel up to visiting your newspaper?”

“I was heading there when Walt suggested we have a snort, and then you walked in.”

They walked the long way to the Humble Clarion , taking back streets and alleys to skirt the mob collected around the gusher. The riggers were struggling to cap the new well, while ditchdiggers excavated a catch basin to contain the oil that was raining down like a monsoon. The train had gone. Most of the men aboard it had stayed.

The Clarion occupied the first floor of a corner building. C. C. Gustafson led them into the composing room where he set type. “It was that window,” he said. “My wife replaced the glass, and finished setting the editorial for me. After picking up all the type that went flying.”

Bell looked for bullet holes in the walls. He remarked that the office had been freshly painted.

“Janet Sue cleaned up the mess soon as the sheriff was done looking things over.”

“Did Mrs. Gustafson happen to mention how many bullet holes she plastered before painting?”

“She told me three.”

Bell looked to Hatfield. “How many rounds had been fired from the Springfield the sheriff found?”

“One.”

Isaac Bell stood in the window. It fronted on the side street. Across the street was a frame building under construction. Carpenters building the platform were hammering floorboards onto ground-floor joists. The otherwise-open lot allowed a long view over low-lying neighbors to the tall false front that topped the two-story Toppling Derrick saloon on the far side of Main Street three blocks away.

Averell Comstock walked at a remarkably brisk pace for a man his age thanks, he was quick to boast, to a regimen he had started when he first came to New York twenty years ago. He walked every midmorning from the office at 26 Broadway to the East River, where he could order oysters shucked fresh off the boat. He ignored the ketchup and crackers, preferring the briny taste of the bivalves unadulterated, and leaving room for coffee and cake from a food stall on Fulton Street, where he had fallen half in love with a middle-aged widow who had a hard face softened by beautiful blue eyes.

She stirred in the sugar for him. Just this week she had begun to insist on refilling his cup at no charge, stirring in more sugar with a pretty smile. What would she think, Comstock wondered, if she learned that the old man in the ancient coat was ten thousand times richer than any customer she had ever served?

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

“A little under the weather.” For several days he had felt not quite himself.

“I thought you looked pale. I hope you’ve not been eating oysters. They say there’s typhoid fever.”

“I eat only those from Staten Island,” he said. “It’s the Jamaica Bay oysters that carry the typhoid.”

“Well, I hope you feel better.”

“Well enough to walk down here,” he said. “That’s all I ask.”

He drained the second cup and hurried off. “Back to the salt mines. See you tomorrow.”

Mrs. McCloud put another sugar bowl on the counter and hid the one from which she had sweetened the old man’s coffee.

“Make sure you wash the spoon.”

Mrs. McCloud looked up. The man in the old-fashioned frock coat and fancy trilby hat was back, furtive and cold-eyed as a steerer who sends clients to a shyster lawyer.

“What’s in it?” she asked.

“What do you care?”

She glanced up Fulton for another glimpse of the tall old man’s top hat bobbing slowly through the crowd that thronged the sidewalk. A street car blocked her view. “I couldn’t care less.”

Heading back to the office, Averell Comstock was surprised when he had to stop and rest halfway there, pale and trembling.

Isaac Bell and Texas Walt Hatfield looked for the assassin’s shooting hide on the roof behind the Toppling Derrick saloon’s false front. They agreed that the sight lines were there, an easy shot three hundred yards to the Clarion ’s side window. With the roar of drinkers below celebrating new riches, it was doubtful anyone in the saloon would hear a shot, much less do anything about it. No other building looked down on the roof, ensuring privacy and time to draw a bead and wait.

Bell walked the perimeter. The roof sloped slightly to allow rainwater to spill off into a gutter. He saw a golden glint in the gutter, knelt down, pulled from the grit and hardened sediment that lined the wooden trough an empty cartridge shell.