The Assassin

They converged on the bunkhouse, a flimsy building with an oft-patched roof, a few small windows, and a narrow veranda. Archie forged ahead onto the veranda and reached for the door.

“Wait.”

Isaac Bell pointed at a clot of mud on the veranda steps and motioned Archie from the door. The redhead pressed his back to the wall and peered in the nearest window. “Man on the floor. Can’t quite see. He’s got a rifle beside him, but he’s not holding it . . . In fact, if he’s not dead, he sure isn’t moving.”

Archie reached again for the door.

“Don’t!” chorused Bell and Walt. Neither questioned Archie’s courage, but his judgment was not seasoned to their liking. He had come late to the detective line—personally recruited by Bell, on the first case that Mr. Van Dorn had allowed him to form his own squad. As Mr. Van Dorn put it more than once, “It’s a miracle how a Protestant New York blue blood can get his Irish up as fast as Archibald Angell Abbott IV.”

“It’s O.K.,” said Archie. “He’s alone and he’s dead.”

Walt Hatfield cocked both his pistols. “Archie, if you touch that doorknob, I’ll shoot you.”

“Shoot me?”

“To prevent you from killing yourself. Stand aside and let Isaac show you how we do it in Texas.”

Isaac Bell gestured Walt to take cover, bounded onto and across the veranda, shouldered Archie aside, jammed his spine to the wall, and rammed his rifle backward to smash the door open with the butt.

The blast it triggered shook the earth.

11

A swath of buckshot wide as two men screeched through the doorway and splintered both sides of the jamb. Isaac Bell hurled himself into the bunkhouse before the assassin could reload.

Cavernous ten-gauge shotgun barrels stared him rock steady in the face. He dived sideways, hit the floor with a crash, and rolled into a crouch before he realized that the shotgun was lashed tightly to a post.

Ears ringing, Bell lowered his Winchester and looked around.

A horseshoe dangled from a rafter. It was swinging on a string that looped over several nails and down to the shotgun’s triggers. Opening the door had bumped the horseshoe off a nail. Its weight had fetched up the slack in the string and jerked the triggers, firing both barrels simultaneously.

Big Pete Straub lay on his back on the bunkhouse floor. His right foot was bare. Flies were darting in and out of a ragged three-inch hole in the top of his head. With one shoe off and one shoe on, the refinery police chief had killed himself by putting his rifle barrel in his mouth and pushing the trigger with his toe.

“So much for your assistance pattern, Isaac,” said Hatfield. “The man went out alone with a bang.”

“Almost took us with him,” said Archie.

“About that ‘almost,’ Archie?” said Hatfield, cocking an eyebrow that demanded an answer.

“Thank you, Walt. Thank you, Isaac.”

“You can thank us by remembering that criminals do the damnedest things.”

Bell was already kneeling by Straub’s gun. “Savage 99.”

Hatfield snapped a spent shell off the floor. “Another wildcat.”

The sleek, hammerless Savage felt remarkably light in Bell’s hands. He noticed an extension on the fore end of the chamber, as if a quarter-inch piece of metal had been added to it. A metal slide under the wooden end released it, revealing the underside of the barrel. A square stud projected from it. The wood had a corresponding hole. Bell fitted the wood to the barrel, held the chamber in the other hand, and twisted firmly. The barrel, which he expected to be compression-screwed into the chamber, rotated an easy quarter turn and pulled loose. He was suddenly holding two separate parts, each barely twenty inches long, short enough to conceal in a satchel, a sample case, or an i

“Walt, did you ever see a breakdown Savage 99?”

“Ah don’t believe the company makes one.”

“Someone made this one with an interrupted screw.”

Bell put it back together by inserting the barrel into the chamber and turning a quarter turn. A metal slide underneath fit into a corresponding slot, locking the barrel in place. Thanks to the interrupted threads—an invention that had made possible the quick-sealing ca

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 gri

“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 di

“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?”