The Assassin

“She’s here,” said Isaac Bell. “This nails it.”

“With her sense of humor intact,” said Wally.

The duck was high up on the huge tank, near the top. This one was painted red and stuck to the metal wall with a magnet. Electrical wire attached to its rail bracket ran down the tank. Nellie had concealed the wire artfully by snugging it against the heavy copper cable that grounded the tank’s lightning rod.

“Can you disarm it without blowing us up?”

“I’ll answer that after I find what she hooked to the other end of this wire.”

The two detectives traced it down the side of the tank to its concrete footing. Wally said, “Nice job hiding the wire. Doubt our guys would have noticed if the duck weren’t bright red.”

“She’s showing off.”

The wire snaked halfway around the bottom of the tank, hugging its edges, and still paralleling the lightning rod ground wire until it veered across the oil-soaked ground and disappeared down a storm drain. Bell snapped his fingers. A husky Van Dorn Protective Services operative lumbered over with a toolbox.

“Lift the grate. Don’t disturb the wire.”

The P.S. man inserted a crowbar in a drain slot and pried the cast-iron grate out of its seat. It was very heavy. Bell gave him a hand tipping it out of the way while Wally held the wire.

Bell wrinkled his nose. “What’s that smell?” he asked.

“Oil fumes.” The blistering-hot weather caused oil, kerosene, and naphtha to vaporize. The air reeked of flammable gases.

“No, it’s worse.”

“You’re right. Like something’s rotting.”

Bell said, “I wonder how a hundred-pound woman picked up this grate. Wally, give that wire a tug.”

“I don’t know what it’s attached to yet.”

“I do. And it won’t explode.”

“Then you tug it.” He stepped away and made a show of covering his ears.

Bell hauled on the wire. It pulled easily from the storm drain. “There’s what stinks.”

The wire was wrapped around a raw chicken leg that was putrefying in the heat. Pi

“The lunatic is taunting you, Isaac.”

Bell looked up at the sky and pondered Wally’s remark. Dark, anvil-topped thunderheads were marching out of the west, as they had every afternoon of the heat wave. “Nellie is a lunatic,” he agreed, “but she is one smart lunatic. If she’s taunting me, she has a plan. I just don’t know what it is yet.” Eyes still on the sky, Bell recalled Edna asking what he meant by a “madman,” never realizing the assassin was a “madwoman.” His answer to her was his answer to Wally now.

“Unpredictable.”

How to catch her? Be unpredictable, too? But there was the rub. What did Nellie Matters expect?

—

The infernal heat was finally her friend.

Nellie Matters was stymied by the combined presence of the Van Dorns, the Standard Oil cops, and the city police. Isaac—of course he rallied them, who else?—had robbed her of the high ground, every tower, every cupola, every hilltop she could use for a shooting blind. Her first choice, the remote fire department watchtower on top of the highest hill on Constable Hook, had cops guarding the ladder. So much for climbing with a pretty smile and a bullet for the lone fireman on duty.

Her alternate choice, the widow’s walk on The Hook saloon, offered short-range shots at storage tanks above the city and the oil docks below. Close shots were doubly tempting with the heat cooking crazy, flight-bending thermals. But the widow’s walk would be suicide. With a score of cops and detectives congregating at the nearby refinery gates, she could not escape.

The heat was her friend. Hot weather caused oil to vaporize. It charged the air with volatile gases. So what if Isaac Bell had stolen her high ground? Nellie Matters would play fast and loose. Get ready for the unexpected, Isaac. A surprise is lurking under you. Flamboyant, theatrical, showy Nellie Matters will take the low ground.

The heat boiled thunderstorms. Thunderstorms hurled lightning.

Lightning ignited the volatile gases that collected in the tops of oil tanks. Every tank at Constable Hook bristled with lightning rods because Rockefeller’s ultramodern enterprise obeyed the laws of physics that stated that lightning blew unprotected oil tanks to Kingdom Come. Those who challenged the law were directed next door to Bayo

Nellie walked down wooden stairs deep into The Hook saloon’s cellar. The walls were rough-hewn stone. Round tree trunks formed the beams that had supported the upper floors for two hundred years. The original brick sewer, disused now except to carry rainwater from the building’s gutters, led under Constable Street into the storm drains that riddled the refinery hillside.

She was not prone to reflection, much less self-examination, but she knew that something different resided in her makeup that refused to be afraid. Which wasn’t to say there weren’t things she disliked, primary among them any threat of being restrained. To crawl into a three-foot-diameter drainpipe was to be restrained in the extreme. But she had no choice.

She climbed into it with her nickel-plated side-cutting pliers and the end of the cable she had had delivered on a spool. It unrolled freely as she dragged it through the sewer. She knew she was inside the refinery fence when the brick-walled sewer co

Dull light poured down from a drain. She had to pass another. The third was her goal, beside the twenty-thousand-gallon naphtha tank where she had left Isaac a target duck and a rotten chicken leg. The cable grew heavy as it got longer and dragged on the concrete. As she crawled under the second drain she heard thunder. There were two things she did not want to imagine: a sudden rainstorm that would drown her or a bolt of lightning striking the cable. She reminded herself that being electrocuted by lightning was much less likely than being drowned by rain because she had wisely waited to attach the cable to a lightning rod—four lightning rods, in fact—until the end was aimed at the tank and she was out of the drainpipe. The third grate appeared. Almost there. She heard another peal of thunder, closer this time. She crawled directly under the grate. Raindrops wet her face. She lifted the end of the cable to the grate and used the pliers to fasten it to the cast iron with a twist of wire.

Then she turned around in the cramped space and started crawling back to the saloon as fast as she could. The last thing she wanted was to be wiring the other end of the copper cable to The Hook saloon’s ground wire when a thunderbolt struck the harpoon lightning rods on the roof of the widow’s walk.

—

Isaac Bell was making the rounds of his men guarding the oil docks—the huge piers on the Kill Van Kull where the refinery was loading tank ships with kerosene, gasoline, and naphtha—when a puff of icy air a

Bell stepped forward, Forrer threw the line skillfully, and in a moment they were conversing in the partial shelter of a loading shed. “One of my boys was rereading the assassin reports,” Forrer bellowed over the wind, the falling rain, and the huffing of several steam engines. “He reminded me that we learned that Bill Matters was moving up the ladder when he was invited to join a Standard Oil Gang private venture.”

Thunder echoed down the tank-covered hills. A bolt of lightning lit the rooftops of the city. Another bolt blazed over the tanks above the city and landed harmlessly on a lightning rod.