The Titanic Secret (Isaac Bell 11)

“What other deal?” Bell growled.

“Seems there’s a thousand-pound bounty on your heads, payable by an old son of Scotland named Foster Gly. Benny!”

Devlin’s enforcer pulled a two-barreled derringer-style pistol from his jacket pocket and held it steady to Bell’s stomach. The gun was an antique, at least fifty years old, but it was no less deadly now than it had been in some riverboat gambler’s waistcoat or up his sleeve.

A flash of silver. A jet of red and a high-pitched shriek. The derringer, along with the hand holding it, hit the concrete floor with a meaty smack. The enforcer grabbed at the gushing stump with his left hand so that blood spurted through his fingers. Joshua Hayes Brewster stood on the bed of the Leyland truck and swung a follow-through with the flensing knife they’d kept since the escape from the docks. The blade struck the gunman in the chest and sank almost to the handle. His chuffing screams of pain ceased in a wet wheeze.

Bell recovered his wits and scooped up the fallen pistol by first shaking loose its grisly adjunct. The room had exploded in motion. Most of the mechanics and hangers-on scattered after witnessing the barbarity of Brewster’s assault. A couple of others, the largest of the men, were hired for their brawn, not their mechanical skills, and they came at the truck in an all-out attack. Bell cocked the pistol and let fly the ammo in one of the barrels. The weapon was woefully inaccurate, even for a marksman of Bell’s abilities, and the bullet grazed a thug’s shoulder so softly that he didn’t even flinch.

A blackjack appeared in his hand even as he swung a heavy fist at Bell. The lead-filled satchel missed Bell’s head by a hair’s breadth. Bell weaved out from under the guard and fired off a straight right to the man’s nose that left the man’s knees wobbling. From the truck’s bed, Warry O’Deming finished the job with a tire iron to the crown of the man’s scalp.

A mechanic with more bravery than sense threw a hammer at the little Irishman. It missed, and O’Deming leapt from the truck, screaming like a madman, the tire iron cocked and ready. The mechanic yelled and started running, with Warry gaining on him rapidly.

Joshua Brewster had squared off with another guard, brandishing the flensing knife like a scythe and keeping the man well back. A guard tried to take Bell from behind in a hold around the shoulders, as if this were going to be a wrestling match rather than a rumble. Bell rammed down on the man’s instep with his boot. And when the tension went out of the hold, he snapped the attacker’s head back and broke his nose. The man released Bell to stanch the flow of blood and Bell unceremoniously kicked him at the juncture of his legs. As he went to the ground, another kick, this one to the face, took the last of the fight out of the man.

In the opening seconds of the fight, George Devlin had rushed to his office and closed the door behind him. Bell saw him throw the lock and scramble for a telephone hanging on the wall opposite his desk. Devlin was calling in reinforcements in case the runner he’d sent earlier couldn’t find Gly’s agents. Bell raced across the garage for the glass-enclosed space. He torqued in midair so that he hit the mullioned panes with his back with his fingers laced behind his neck and his elbows clamped to his sides to protect them from the glass.

He burst through the glass in a cascade of tinkling shards, landed on his side atop the gangster’s desk, and rolled to his feet, his right hand now extended so the pistol was pressed between the stunned Englishman’s eyes.

Bell flicked his attention back to the garage floor. Brewster and O’Deming were in the thick of it and holding their own, but they were outnumbered three to one, and Bell knew Gly had people on the way. He needed more time, though.

“Drop the phone,” he ordered the English mobster. Devlin complied, and Bell motioned him back to the shattered window. “Tell your people to stand down.”

“You’re dead, Yank,” Devlin sneered. “Only you don’t know it yet.”

“Harder men than you have died with that threat on their lips,” Bell said, watching the brawl and the cowering mechanics, including one near the rear bumper of his Leyland truck. He watched a moment longer. It was done.

Bell returned his attention to the gangster, his eyes cold, and cocked the second of the derringer’s barrels. “Call them off now.”

Devlin nodded so much that the pouch of fat below his chin squished against his chest. The mobster’s bellow echoed from every corner of his garage. “Enough, lads. Let it be.”

The guy facing Brewster and his flensing knife seemed relieved by the truce, though the Coloradan looked ready to keep going. Warry O’Deming was bleeding from the arm, and his face was a mass of contusions, but at his feet was a bruiser twice his size who would need an eyepatch for the rest of his life.

Bell forced Devlin to step through the shattered glass wall and remained behind him with just enough separation that the hood wasn’t tempted to try to disarm him. “Joshua, Warry, help shift Vern over to the black truck that’s parked behind the bus. It’s our ride.”

Brewster saw the heavy-duty vehicle and understood Bell’s plan. “Clever man. Using a dump truck to haul rocks. No one’ll look at us twice.”

“Right.”

Once they helped Vern Hall shuffle over to their new truck and they had the engine cranked to life, Bell motioned with the pistol for a mechanic to open the main doors out to the street. Only when that was done did he begin backing up, never taking the handgun off George Devlin.

Like when facing down a dangerous animal, Bell

put as much distance as he could between himself and the gangster before turning on his heel and running for the dump truck. He jumped up into the cab and had the chain drive rattling before Devlin could shout for his man to close the doors again.

At that moment, another vehicle raced through the partially open doors, knocking the mechanic back against a bunch of barrels, upending one and sending its mixture of oil and gasoline sloshing across the floor. The newcomers had arrived in a four-seater Austin tourer with the top up. Through the big windscreen, Bell could see the front passenger was armed with a sawed-off shotgun. He was sure these were local thugs hired by George Devlin to help Gly secure the crates of ore.

He gunned the dump truck’s engine but left it in low gear so it had maximum torque when its front fender staved in the Austin’s grille and ripped the engine right from its mounts. The front passenger was jerked so hard by the impact that the gun went off in his hands. The inside of the windscreen went instantly red, sparing Bell from seeing what horror the blast had done to the driver’s head.

Bell kept the truck going until he’d rammed the Austin into a wall with enough force to collapse the frame and tear the fuel tank. Smoke belching from the engine compartment quickly turned into a whooshing conflagration that saw flames shooting to the iron rafters twenty feet overhead.

Jamming the truck into reverse gear, Bell backed away from the flaming wreckage only to realize with mounting apprehension that the car was tangled up on the truck’s bumper and wouldn’t release. He mashed down on the gas, backing blindly in the cluttered garage and then throwing the wheel hard over. The centrifugal force of the maneuver ripped the wrecked Austin free and it slid like a burning meteor across the floor and into a group of rolling toolboxes and barrels. The oil-soaked scraps of cotton ticking that filled one of the barrels went up in another gout of smoky flame, while one of the four-hundred-pound metal boxes fell over on the man hiding behind it, breaking both his shoulders.

Pandemonium erupted throughout the garage as the fires spread. The sludge that had dumped out when the Austin first arrived ignited and turned the building’s entrance into a sea of flame. Smoke condensed along the ceiling in ever-thickening clouds that were rapidly mushrooming down toward the floor.

Bell’s eyes streamed tears. They had to get out.

The main door was inaccessible behind a lake of fire, and the smaller one next to it, though large enough for the truck, was closed. It could be opened only by a person pulling on a chain that mechanically raised it along tracks that curved under the ceiling.