Clive Cussler - The Assassin

But the question remained why such a light weapon for a man as big as Straub?

“No telescope.”

“Holes tapped for mounting one?” asked Walt.

Bell inspected the top of the frame. “Mounting holes tapped… You should have seen his shot in Kansas. Archie saw it.”

“Better part of a half a mile,” said Archie.

Walt said, “Mr. Straub must have had hawk eyes.”

The Springfield ’03 that the sheriff had found under the dead man in a Humble alley was fed ammunition by a removable straight magazine. The Savage had a rotary magazine. The indicator on the side of the chamber read “4.” Bell extracted one of the rounds. Instead of factory-made round noses, the bottleneck cartridges had been specially loaded with pointed, aerodynamic “spitzer” bullets.

Something about the weapon felt wrong to Bell. He unscrewed the barrel again, rethreaded it in a second, slid the wooden fore end back in place, locking the entire assembly. Then he carried the gun outside. The sorrel had wandered close. He tied its reins to the veranda railing in case shots spooked the animal, took a bead on a fence post a quarter mile away, and fired until the magazine was empty.

He rode the horse to the target and rode back.

“Hit anything?” Walt asked.

“Dead center twice, grazed it twice. It’s a good gun… But it’s hard to believe it’s the gun that killed Spike Hopewell.”

“Unless,” Hatfield grinned, “Mr. Straub was a better shot.”

“Doubt it.”

Archie said, “But we found a custom-made Savage shell.”

Texas Walt said, “Listen close, Archie. Isaac did not say that Spike Hopewell wasn’t killed by a Savage 99. All he’s saying is he don’t reckon this particular Savage 99 did the deed.”

“Telegram, Mr. Bell.”

Bell tipped the boy two bits and read the urgent wire he had been hoping for. Joseph Van Dorn had outdone himself in his constant effort to minimize expenses by reducing his message to a single word:

NOW

Bell told Archie Abbott to follow him when he was done helping Hatfield and sprinted to the station. He barely made the Sunset Express to New Orleans, where he transferred to the New York Limited.

He settled into a writing desk in the club car and was composing a report from his notebook when women’s voices chorused like music in his ear: “Fancy meeting you here, Mr. Bell.”

Edna and Nellie Matters were headed to Washington, where Nellie was to address a suffragist delegation petitioning Congress. Her balloon was folded up in the express car. When the sisters said they were sleeping in upper and lower Pullman berths, Bell gave them his stateroom.

Edna protested. Nellie thanked him warmly. “How can we repay you?”

“Join me this evening in the dining car.”

At dinner, Nellie entertained him, and the surrounding tables, with tales of runaway balloons. Edna, who had clearly heard it all before, listened politely as Nellie rattled on. “Sideways, the wind blows you into trees and telegraph wires. Low on gas, you fall from the sky. Emergency! Quick! Emergency gas!—”

“Excuse me, young lady,” a clergyman interrupted from the table across the aisle. “I could not help but overhear. Where do you find emergency gas when you’re already flying in the air?”

“I have special steel containers installed in my basket,” Nellie answered. “Lots of balloons do. It’s very handy having extra hydrogen.”

“They must be heavy.”

“They beat falling,” she dismissed him and turned her green eyes back on Bell. “Where was I? Oh, yes. Too quick, too much emergency gas, you soar too high and suffocate. The air gets so thin, you run out of oxygen…”

Over the Neapolitan ice cream dessert, Bell echoed Archie’s earlier comment. “Strange how the three of us keep turning up together where crimes have occurred.”

Edna replied, “I’m beginning to suspect you, Mr. Bell.”

Nellie laughed. “I suspected him from the start.”

“May I ask you something?”

Nellie grinned at Edna. “Doesn’t he look suddenly serious?”

“Like a detective,” said Edna. “Go on, we shouldn’t be teasing you.”

“At least until he’s paid the dinner check,” said Nellie. “Actually, you really do look solemn. What is it?”

“Spike Hopewell told me that your brother ran off and you never heard from him. Is that true?”

Their mood changed in an instant. Nellie looked away. Edna nodded. “Yes. Actually, he was a Yale man, like you.”

“Really? What class?”

“You were probably several years ahead of him.”

“He didn’t go back after his freshman year,” said Nellie.

“Perhaps you knew him?” said Edna.

“I don’t recall anyone named Matters.”

“His name was Billy Hock.”

“Billy Hock?” Bell looked at her curiously.

“Yes,” said Edna. “He was my older brother.”

“And my older half brother,” said Nellie.

Isaac Bell said, “I never made the connection.”

“We did,” said Edna. “Or we wondered. Do you remember now?”

Bell nodded, recalling a slender, eager-to-please youngster, more a boy than a man. “Well, yes, I knew him, slightly…”

Billy Hock had big, bright gray-green eyes as bright as Edna’s and Nellie’s. “He enrolled as a freshman my senior year. He was very young, youngest of the boys entering.”

“Fifteen. He was small. Undersized.”

Nellie said, “He tried out for crew. He would have made a perfect coxswain, being so light. But he was terrified of water. He always had a phobia about it.”

“The crew rowers ragged him mercilessly,” said Edna.

Bell nodded.

“Until some upperclassman stepped in and put a stop to it.”

“Yes.”

“We wondered how.”

“He could not abide bullies,” said Bell.

“One boy against a team?” asked Nellie.

“He trained at boxing.”

Edna directed her level gaze into Bell’s eyes.

“When I watched you and Archie boxing those men, I suddenly wondered was it you who stood up for our brother. Wasn’t it?”

“I hadn’t realized the connection until this very moment. The different name. We didn’t discuss our families at college — unless our people were related — you must remember when you went off to college how we were all so glad to be away from home at that age.”

Both women nodded.

“So Billy Hock was the brother who ran away? Strange… I wondered at school how he would fare. When did he go?”

“That same summer, right after his freshman year,” said Edna.

“He was adventurous,” said Nellie. “Just like me — always running around and trying new things.”

“We never heard from him again,” said Edna.

Nellie said, “Sometimes I blame myself. I became a kind of model for him, even though I was younger. He saw me running around — one second I was entranced by balloons, then I was trying to be an actress, then I ran off to be an acrobat in the circus — remember, Edna?”

“I remember Father laughing when the ringmaster walked you home.”

“On a white horse! He said I was too young. I said, ‘O.K., take me home on a white horse!’… And he did… I gave Billy courage. I only hope it didn’t push him toward the Army.”

“No, it didn’t,” Edna said, laying a reassuring hand on her sister’s arm. “If anything, it gave him courage to go away to Yale. Father,” she explained, turning to Bell, “so wanted Billy to attend Yale because many ‘Oil Princes’ went to college there — Comstock’s son, Lapham’s son, Atkinson’s nephews.”

“Billy and I talked about joining the Army. The Spanish war was brewing — the papers were full of it — and boys were signing up.” Bell had tried, caught up in the excitement, but his father, a Civil War veteran, had intervened forcefully, arguing with unassailable logic that there were better causes to die for than “a war started by newspapers to sell newspapers.”