The Striker (Isaac Bell 6)

“What do you mean?”

“I cannot kill another human being, even the worst one in the world.” She lowered the gun. “I can’t do it.”

“I can,” he said, and slammed the statuette down and jumped back — just in case a twenty-foot separation was not enough — and watched from afar.

Steam roared. Hot, needle-sharp jets spewed down from the ceiling and up from the floor and enveloped Mary Higgins in a scalding white cloud. She screamed only once. Congdon was surprised. He had expected it to take longer with a strong young woman. But she had died in a flash. So much for pain, he thought. She had died in the space of a single breath. Probably never knew what hit her.

He edged back to his desk and lifted the lever gingerly. It was actually cool to the touch, so tightly focused were the jets. The steam stopped gushing. The windows were fogged, and he felt dampness on his cheeks and saw a layer of dew on his polished desk. But the cloud that had enveloped Mary and The Kiss had already dissipated. Congdon wished he had planned ahead. He usually did; he could usually imagine consequences. But he had not thought to keep a sheet nearby — something, anything, to throw over the corpse.

46

The White Lady careened through a sharp bend in the river at mile marker 25 and pounded toward Pittsburgh belching black columns from her chimneys and churning a white wake behind her.

“She smells the barn!” said the Ohio River pilot — one of two Isaac Bell had hired in Cincinnati — along with a chief engineer famously reckless in the pursuit of hotter steam.

“Faster,” said Bell, and the pilot rang the engine room.

Forced draft furnace fans roared. Jim Higgins’s miners shoveled on the coal. And the engineer played fast and loose with his boiler levels, tempting eternal oblivion by pumping water on red-hot plates to jump the pressure.

At mile marker 10, Bell saw the horizon grow dark with city smoke. Thunderheads loomed. Bolts of lightning pierced them. Rain sizzled down and flattened the seething currents of the river in flood.

Soon the hills of Pittsburgh hunched into the dismal sky. Tall buildings emerged from the smoke. The White Lady steamed out of the Ohio River and up the Monongahela, past the Point and under the bridges of the Golden Triangle. Fifty-five minutes after mile marker 10, by Isaac Bell’s watch, forty-four hours from Cincinnati, the immense steamboat backed her paddle blades.

Escape pipes blew off excess steam with a roar that drowned out the ringing of her bell, and she nosed to a landing at the foot of the Amalgamated coal miners’ tent city. Miners recruited as deckhands hoisted her boarding stage onto a temporary wharf that the strikers had improvised by raising one of the barges that the Defense Committee had sunk to fortify the point with a crenellated breakwater.

Coal miners, their wives and children, church ladies, reformers, and scribbling newspaper reporters stared. Isaac Bell stared back, as amazed. The last person he expected to walk up the stage lugging his long carpetbag was Aloysius Clarke, decked out in top hat and tails.

“Pretty steamboat, Isaac.”

“What are you doing out of the hospital?”

Wish dropped his bag with a clank and caught his breath. “Couldn’t miss the Duquesne Cotillion.”

“You came all the way to Pittsburgh for the ball?”

“Quite a shindig. Everybody who was anybody was there. I even met Colonel J. Philip Swigert of the Pennsylvania state militia. Talkative gent, particularly when he’s had a few.”

“Well done!” Bell reached to slap Wish on the shoulder in congratulations. Wish stayed him with a gesture. “Don’t tear the stitches.”

Bell pulled up short. “Are you O.K.?”

“Tip-top.”

“You don’t look tip-top— What did the colonel say?”

“You got here just in time,” Wish answered gravely. “State militia, and the Pinkertons, and the Coal and Iron Police, are marching aboard the Vulcan King this morning. They’ll head downstream lickety-split. Reckon to round the Homestead Works two or three hours from now, depending how fast they load up. Then their cannon’ll blast an opening in these barges, and their whole gang will storm ashore.”

Bell called down to the miners tending the White Lady’s furnaces. “Get her coaled up and the boys fed. We’re going back to work.”

The appearance of Captain Jennings, master of the exploded Camilla, was even more unexpected, and Isaac Bell thought for an instant he was seeing a ghost. But the old pilot was no ghost, only a grieving father. “We swapped boats that night. They murdered my boy.”

“I am so sorry, Captain.”

“I’ll run your boat. I know this stretch of the Mon better than your fellers from Cincinnati.”

“She’s a lot bigger than Camilla.”

Jennings started up the stairs to the wheelhouse. “Boats are the same. Rivers ain’t.”