The Bootlegger (Isaac Bell 7)
Page 116
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HE WIRED GRADY AGAIN.
HOW FAR FROM SHORE DID HENNESSY TUNNEL STOP?
Grady telephoned long-distance.
“Too complicated for the wire. I found handwritten engineers’ notes on the survey that suggest they stopped excavating just where the bank began to slope upward.”
Bell spread open his Detroit River chart. “There’s a deep channel down the middle, nearer to Fighting Island, and then a narrower one, the Wyandotte Channel, that hugs the Ecorse shore.”
“They must have dredged it deeper since the survey. There’s no channel mentioned.”
“It hugs the shore,” said Bell. “The dredge would have struck the crown of the tunnel probably, so just beyond the current Wyandotte Channel is where they must have stopped.”
He improvised calipers with two fingers and compared the distance to the chart’s scale.
Grady said, “The other reason I telephoned . . .”
“What?” Bell was distracted. It wasn’t so much the headache—they were tapering off, and the plague of double vision had pretty much ended. He was puzzling some way to drop his improvised depth charge exactly one hundred feet offshore. “What did you say, Grady?”
“The Research Department is assembling a complete Prohibition file—an up-to-date encyclopedia of bootleggers, gangsters, rumrunners, et cetera, with curriculum vitae, photographs, fingerprints.”
“Good job. That’ll show the Justice Department what we can do.”
“I thought I’d pop down to The Bahamas. Get the latest on the Nassau import-export racket. What do you think?”
“I think you’d get in Pauline’s way.”
“Oh, that’s right, she’s down there,” Grady said innocently. “Is she all right on her own?”
“Pauline is quite all right on her own . . . Actually, you raise a good point. She could use a trustworthy runner. Tell you what, send young Somers to Nassau. I’ll cable Pauline.”
APPRENTICE ASA SOMERS COMING YOUR WAY.
GO-GETTER SAVED JVD BACON.
Then Bell called for the Protective Services op, whom he had sent earlier to the library.
“Go buy a rope.”
“How long?”
“One hundred four feet.”
“One hundred four?”
“The four’s for a loop. Watch carefully how they measure.”
• • •
JACK PAYNE, a Van Dorn detective on loan from the Cleveland field office, had been a combat engineer in the trenches during the war. Working in an empty backwater slip Bell located near the Detroit Yacht Club, Payne rigged the dynamite with waterproof fuses and detonators and screwed twenty pounds of old horseshoes to each of the forty-pound cases so they would sink fast.
After dark, they tied the cases into one heavy packet perched on the stern of one of the Gar Wood speedboats.
“Just to review your scheme, Mr. Bell,” said Detective Payne, “keep in mind that that shock wave will go up as well as down. The moment you drop these crates, jam your throttles and get away from there as fast as you can.”
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