The Bootlegger (Isaac Bell 7)

> “Sometimes . . . Sometimes they’re real louses. Sometimes they’re the cat’s whiskers.”

“How do you tell them apart?”

Fern put down her drink and looked up at the sky. “You don’t. Until it’s too late.”

32

ISAAC BELL inhaled the intoxicating mix of fresh paint, clean oil, and gasoline of a just launched, brand-new express cruiser. New she was, and beautiful, a sleek, ghostly gray that seemed to hover more than float on Biscayne Bay. He nudged her throttles and she got lively. He engaged the mufflers and she was suddenly silent.

A fast Prohibition Bureau boat pulled alongside and signaled him to stop. Bell waved good-bye. He cut out the mufflers and hit the throttles and left the revenuers bouncing on his thunderous wake.

He tore around Biscayne Bay, twirling her spoked wheel to cut figure eights past the hydroplane landings, the towering McAllister Hotel, draped in striped awnings, the Boat Club, and the Biscayne Boulevard finger piers, where the fleets of lumber schooners that supplied the building boom were unloading cypress and yellow pine. In the middle of the bay, off the Miami River, floated the pylons that marked the Motor Boat Race Course. Isaac Bell set an unofficial record around the three-mile circuit at sixty miles an hour.

Lynch & Harding had done themselves proud. She handled like a dream.

He circled a long passenger freighter from Baltimore that was transferring people to a harbor launch. A flying boat approached from the east. Bell raced alongside it as it landed. Then he opened her up and headed for the ocean, tearing under the causeway that linked downtown Miami to Miami Beach and pointing her razor-sharp bow at Government Cut at the south end of the bay. He blasted through the shipping channel at top speed and roared down the Atlantic Coast.

In the ocean swells, she felt big and fast and sturdy. Beyond the settlements, along shores thick with jungle broken repeatedly by the raw scars of clearance and construction, a dark boat shot from a mangrove swamp and chased after him. Bell slowed down and let the boat pull alongside. Three men wearing revolvers on their hips looked him over. Any doubts they were hijackers vanished when they reached for their weapons.

Bell tugged a lever conveniently located in the cockpit. A hatch popped open on the foredeck, and a Lewis gun swiveled up within easy reach. The hijackers raced back to their swamp.

Bell turned around and sped back past Government Cut and along the white sand of Miami Beach. He cut figure eights for the swimmers. Then he thundered back into Biscayne Bay and, having drawn the attention of half of Florida to Marion, he raced back to the dock.

A crowd of boatmen, tourists, and hotel guests had gathered. Bell landed in an explosive flurry of reversed engines, propeller wash, and flaming straight pipes.

“Wonder what you all are going to use that boat for?” drawled an onlooker with a snicker that everyone knew meant rum.

Isaac Bell said, “I’m going to get rich winning boat races.”

“That’s a good story for the Dries.”

“Want to bet? I’m calling out candidates.”

“Heck, who’d race you? That’s more airplane than boat.”

Bell said, “I heard about a big black boat whose owner thinks he’s hotter than jazz. We’ll see if he’s got the nerve to put his money where his mouth is.”

“Where is he?”

“Lying low,” Bell grinned, “since he heard I’m here. Fact is, I’ll pay a thousand dollars to anybody who tells me where to find him.”

“A thousand dollars?”

“Call it a finder’s fee. Call it a reward. I intend to call him out.”

“Show us the money.”

Isaac Bell pulled a roll from the pocket of his white duck trousers and flashed a thousand-dollar bill, common currency among top-notch Florida bootleggers. “Tell your friends,” he said. “Share the wealth.”

He tipped his visored skipper’s cap to the ladies and sauntered up the boardwalk to make a public show of lunch on the veranda while the word got around about the thousand. Before he got ten feet, he was waylaid by a beautiful blonde who was wearing a big hat and dark glasses and a white linen sheath dress that the sea breeze shaped to her trim figure.

• • •

MARAT ZOLNER focused binoculars on the McAllister Hotel quay.

A long gray rum boat was tied alongside, sleek and muscular as a captured shark. Ten stories above Biscayne Bay, in a top-floor suite, he had watched her slice through Government Cut at sixty miles per hour, streak across the bay, and land just below. He had not been surprised to see Van Dorn Chief Investigator Isaac Bell vault out of her cockpit.

From razor bow to sturdy transom, the gray boat’s powerful lines were first cousin to Black Bird’s, realized by the same Lynch & Harding who had built his boat. And by now he knew that Isaac Bell was relentless.