The Gangster (Isaac Bell 9)

He reached the track embankment and climbed to the rails. From that slight elevation, he saw Branco had planned an emergency escape even faster than an auto or a train. The ice yacht Daphne waited at the riverbank. At the helm, the bulky figure of J. B. Culp urged him to run faster. Antonio Branco hurtled, slipping and sliding, down the final slope, with Isaac Bell drawing close.

The gangster fell, slid, rolled to his feet, and vaulted into the car beside Culp.

Culp flipped the mooring line he had looped around a bankside piling and sheeted in his sail. The tall triangle of canvas shivered. But Daphne did not move. Her iron runners had frozen to the ice.

Bell put on a burst of speed. He still had his gun in hand.

Culp scrambled out of the car and kicked the rudder and the right-hand runners, yelling frantically at Branco to free the runner on his side. Bell was less than fifty feet away when they broke loose.

“Push!” Bell heard Culp shout, and the two men shoved the ice yacht away from the bank. The wind stirred her masthead pennant. Her sail fluttered. One second, Branco and Culp were pushing the ice yacht; the next, they were running for their lives, trying to jump on before she sped away from them.

Bell was on the verge of trying to stop and plant his feet on the ice to take a desperate shot with the pistol before they got away. But as her sail grabbed the wind and she took off in earnest, he saw the mooring line dragging behind her. He ran harder and dived after it with his hand outstretched.

The end of the mooring line was jumping like a cobra. He caught it. A foot of rope burned through his hand before he could clamp around it. Then a gust slammed into the sail, and the rope nearly jerked his arm out of his shoulder, and, in the next instant, the big yacht was dragging him over the ice at thirty miles an hour. He flipped onto his back and stuffed his gun in his coat and then held on with both hands. He had hoped the extra weight would slow the yacht, but as long as the wind blew, she was simply too powerful. Now his only hope was to hang on for another quarter mile. The yacht was racing downriver. So long as Culp didn’t change course, it was dragging Bell toward his own ice yacht, which he had tied up near Cornwall Landing.

The mooring line was less than twenty feet long, and Bell heard Culp laugh. Branco was poised to cut the line. Culp stayed him with a gesture, pointed at a clump of ridged ice, and steered for it.

“Cheese grater coming up, Bell.”

Daphne’s runners rang on the ridges and an instant later Bell was dragged over the rough. He held tight as it banged his ribs and knees.

“Another?”

One more, thought Bell. He could see his boat now. Almost there, and Culp inadvertently steered closer, intent on aiming for an even higher ridge to shake him off when Daphne slammed over it. Bell let go, freely sliding, swinging his legs in front of him to take the impact with his boots, hit hard, sprang to his feet, and staggered to his boat.

“He’s coming after us,” said Branco.

“Let him.”

Culp slammed his yacht skillfully into a deliberate crash turn. It spun her a hundred eighty degrees and put them on a course up the river, with the west wind abeam, the lightning-quick Daphne’s best point of sail.

“What went wrong back there?”

“I don’t know,” said Branco.

“Is that all you have to say for yourself?”

Branco was eerily calm and entirely in possession of himself. “I’ve lost a battle, not a war.”

“What about me?”

“You’ve lost a dream, not your life.”

“They will come after me,” said Culp.

“Nothing can be pinned to you that would nail you.” Branco reached inside his coat, and a stiletto gleamed in his hand. “But if you are afraid and are thinking of selling me out to save yourself, then you will lose your life. Take the pistol out of your coat by the barrel and hand it to me, butt first.”

Culp was painfully aware that they were only two feet apart in the tiny cockpit and he had one hand encumbered by the tiller. At the speed they were moving, to release the tiller for even one second to try to block the stiletto could cause a catastrophic spinout. “If you kill me, who will outrun Bell?”

“That will be between Bell and me.” He gestured imperiously with the blade.

Culp said, “I’ll want it back if Bell gets closer. I’m sure I’m a better shot than you.”

“I’m sure you are. I never bother with a gun,” said Branco. “Give i

t to me!”

Culp saw no choice but to relent. Branco shoved it in his coat.