The Bootlegger (Isaac Bell 7)

ISAAC BELL ran full tilt. The gangsters peeled away and scattered, running back toward their auto, watching Bell carefully and making room for him to run past them. The river was at slack tide, the serene surface disturbed by a single round dimple. Trucks had plunged into the water like an anvil and sank straight to the bottom.

Bell tore off his coat, kicked out of his boots, and dived after him.

Piercing the center of the dimple that marked O’Neal’s entry, he drove straight down, stroking and kicking and reaching into the dark. Descending fifteen or twenty feet, he hit bottom, felt mud, banged into something hard—the foot of a piling. He felt around frantically and something soft closed around his outstretched hand and held on tight.

Bell could hardly believe it. It was a near miracle. But in diving straight down, he landed on the bottom next to O’Neal, who was clinging to his hand with all his might. Bell planted his feet in the mud and kicked off to pull him to the surface.

Bell could not lift him.

He tugged harder on the man’s hand as if to shout Push off! Help me lift you! Where was his natural buoyancy? Even a man who couldn’t swim would float partway to the surface, but Bell could not budge him from the mud.

He was running out of air.

He pulled himself down by the gangster’s hand, braced again in the soft mud, and tried to push off. But again he could not lift the man. Now he was out of air. He could hear his heart pounding. There was a roaring in his head. He had no choice but to swim to the surface, fill his lungs, and dive down to help him again. O’Neal’s hand tightened around his with the superhuman strength of desperation.

Isaac Bell pried his fingers loose, one by one.

He heard a sudden hollow rush. Bubbles of air rubbed past his face. O’Neal was drowning. His grip slackened. Bell yanked free and kicked with his last strength toward the light overhead. He held his breath until he could wait no longer and when he opened his mouth and inhaled, he was amazed to discover he had made it to the air.

“Get a rope!” he yelled. “Ed get a rope!”

The resourceful Tobin was already sprinting back from the ferry landing. He threw a long rope. Bell filled his lungs and dragged it under. Unhindered by the slack water, he dived directly to the drowning gangster, looped the rope under his arms and tied it around his chest and shot to the surface.

“Pull!”

Twelve feet above him on the pier, Tobin had been joined by a couple of vagrants, who shouted for others to help, and they heaved on the rope like men who worked on boats and slowly lifted Trucks O’Neal out of the water. His head broke surface. He was, Bell feared, dead, but he shouted for them to hoist him up to the pier. They did, then dropped the rope for Bell. He climbed out and discovered that the gangsters who had thrown Trucks in the river had tied concrete cinder blocks to his ankles.

Ed was laboring over Trucks’s prone body, pressing on his back and raising his arms, attempting artificial respiration, expelling water and making his lungs draw fresh air. But it was hopeless. O’Neal was dead.

Cops arrived.

“Well, that’s a new one. Cement overshoes.”

“Who was he?”

“He was,” said Isaac Bell, “the Van Dorn Detective Agency’s best lead.”

• • •

“CAN I GET A GUN from the weapons’ vault, Mr. Forrer?”

“Apprentice Van Dorns don’t carry guns.”

“I learned how to shoot in the Coast Guard.”

“Nix. I am sending you to Newark to interview a jobber of farrier supplies. It is highly unlikely that a man who makes his living selling horse nails and anvils will engage you in a shoot-out.”

Somers looked so disappointed that Forrer elaborated.

“Mr. Van Dorn believes that a young man with a gun is less observant than he should be, imagining that he can shoot his way out of difficulty. But a young man dependent upon his wits to survive learns to be more observant . . . A necessary detective skill, wouldn’t you agree, young man?”

Somers took the train to Newark.

In the Ironbound District, near the f

reight station, he found the warehouse that belonged to the New Jersey horseshoe jobber that he and Mr. Forrer had settled on as the likely purveyor of the horseshoe Mr. Bell had retrieved on Wall Street.

The jobber told him that the rubber scrap stuck to the horseshoe could have been either a Revere Rubber Company Air Cushion Pad or a Dryden Hoof Pad.