The Striker

Bell asked, “Have you noticed we have three fellows sticking close behind us?”

“If you’re referring to the short, fat, and tall gents in bowler hats, they latched onto us where we left the auto.”

“The short ugly one was hanging around Black’s.”

They started across the Harrison Street jackknife bridge. Wish pretended to admire the elaborate ironwork of the lift towers and glanced back. “The fat ugly one was stuffing his face at Little’s lunch.”

“Do you happen to have your coach gun in your bag?” Bell asked.

“Right on top.”

“How about you stop to tie your shoelace?”

Wish knelt and opened his carpetbag. “Move a hair behind me, Isaac. She spreads wide.”

“Cops,” said Bell.

Three in blue coats and tall helmets coming up behind the men following them. The tallest had a handlebar mustache.

Wish Clarke had worked Chicago long enough to ask, “Whose team?”

Bell said, “That’s Officer ‘Muldoon’ in the middle. Looks like they were freelancing earlier.”

“And finishing the job here.”

Wish counted heads. “Six of them, two of us. We have to pull off a couple of triple plays, Isaac. Or is that Harry O’Hagan I hear galloping to our rescue?”

The answer came in the thunder of iron-shod hooves, and it was not the first baseman but two gigantic horses dragging a paddy wagon around the corner on the far side of the bridge.

28

The men in bowlers followed Isaac Bell and Wish Clarke onto the bridge. Moving in unison like a drill team, they drew press-button knives and released the blades with a simultaneous click that the detectives heard twenty feet away.

The cops led by Muldoon stopped under the lift towers, blocking that side.

The paddy wagon driver wheeled his horses across Harrison Street, barricading the other side.

Wish left his coach gun in his bag.

“It appears that the forces of the law have come to watch a knife fight.”

“Neutral observers,” said Bell.

“Unless we introduce firearms.”

“In which case,” said Bell, “the cops will shoot us.”

“How you fixed for knives?”

“A little throwing steel in my boot.”

“I’d hold on to that as a last resort,” said Wish, rummaging in his bag. “Well, look here. Would you like a Bowie knife?” He pulled a twelve-inch blade sharpened on both sides from its fancy worked-leather sheath.

“How many do you have?”

“Just the one. Flip a coin?”

“Keep it,” said Isaac Bell. “I’ll borrow one of theirs.”

He went straight at them at full speed, eyes locked like binoculars on the tall man in the middle. Five feet away, Bell feinted a kick at the fat man on the right, launched off his left foot and pivoted a half circle away from him. His right boot grazed the nose of the man in the middle and smashed the face of the short man on the left, who dropped as if poleaxed.

Isaac Bell snatched his knife off the deck. “Thank you.”

Wish was beside him in a rush, Bowie knife slashing the air like a saber. “Run for it, boys, while you still have faces.”

Fat & Ugly lunged with startling speed and skill. His blade plunged into the space where Wish Clarke had been an instant earlier. The razor edge of the Bowie knife parted his coat sleeve and tore the flesh of his forearm from his elbow to his hand. He dropped his knife, screamed, clutched his arm, and ran.

That left the tall man in the middle. His eyes flicked from Bell’s slim blade to the blood dripping from Wish’s Bowie. He shoved his blade at Wish. Isaac Bell chopped down with all his strength. The knife he had taken pierced the attacker’s hand and stuck there as the man reeled away.

Wish Clarke gave a harsh laugh. “Now all we have is to reason with the police— Look out, Isaac!”

29

The blade came out of nowhere.

The first man down, the man on the left whom Isaac Bell had kicked unconscious, awakened in a flash and lurched to his feet, gripping the knife that had fallen beside him and driving it toward the young detective’s ribs.

Bell tried to twist aside, but the blade kept coming and there was nothing he could do to avoid it. Just as suddenly as it had blazed at him, it disappeared, blocked by Wish Clarke, who grunted and staggered back, clutching his side.

Isaac Bell slammed a fist that started at his knees up against the attacker’s jaw, tumbling him over the side of the bridge and into the river. He caught his friend as he fell. “Wish!”

“I’m O.K. I’m O.K.”

But he was not, Bell could feel his big body go slack.

He made sure no arteries were cut. Thank God, there was no blood pumping from the wounded side. Then he slung Wish over his shoulder, picked up his carpetbag, and stalked to the paddy wagon blocking the bridge.

The driver and the officer riding shotgun stared down at him.

Isaac Bell said, “Odds are, your precinct captain is an old pal of our boss, Joe Van Dorn. You sure as hell don’t want him to hear you’re freelancing tonight.”

The driver looked across the bridge. Muldoon and company were shuffling their feet but not coming to help. “You’re right about that.”

“Drive us direct to the hospital and we’ll be square.”

“Jake,” the driver told his shotgun, “hop down and make the gentlemen comfortable in back.”

Bell laid Wish on a long bench and knelt beside it to keep him from rolling off. The driver whipped up his team, and the paddy wagon lurched through the city.

“Stop trying to talk,” Bell told Wish.

Wish beckoned him closer.

“I said, that mustache is working like I said it would.”

Aloysius Clarke woke up at dawn and looked around the private room Isaac Bell had paid for. “What are you doing here?” he asked Bell.

“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.