The Race by Clive Cussler (red white royal blue .txt) 📗

Harry Frost, a giant of a man with a heavy jaw and merciless eyes. He straddled a crate of Vulcan dynamite inside the morgue wagon. Two ex-prizefighters from his West Side gang crouched at his feet. They were watching the newspaper depot through peepholes drilled in the side, waiting for the owner to return from his supper.

“I chased him off. He came back.”

“Run him in that alley. I don’t want to see him again, except carried on a shutter.”

“He’s just a drunk, Mr. Frost.”

“Yeah? What if that newspaper dealer hired detectives to protect his depot?”

“Are you crazy? That’s no detective.”

Harry Frost’s fist shot fifteen inches with the concentrated power of a forge hammer. The man he hit fell over, clutching his side in pain and disbelief. One second he’d been crouched beside the boss, the next he was on the floor, trying to breathe as splintered bone pierced his lung. “You busted my ribs,” he gasped.

Frost’s face was red. His own breath raced with anger. “I am not crazy.”

“You don’t know your own strength, Mr. Frost,” protested the other boxer. “You could have killed him.”

“If I meant to kill him, I would have hit him harder. Get rid of that drunk!”

The boxer scrambled out of the back of the wagon, closed the door behind him, and shoved through the sleepy newsboys lined up to buy their papers.

“Hey, you!” he yelled after the drunk, who didn’t hear him but did him the favor of stepping into the alley under his own steam, saving him the trouble of dragging him, kicking and screaming. He plunged in after him, tugging a lead sap from his coat. It was a narrow alley, with blank walls on either side, barely wide enough for a wheelbarrow. The drunk was stumbling toward a doorway at the far end, lit by a hanging lantern.

“Hey, you!”

The drunk turned around. His golden hair shone in kerosene light. A tentative smile crossed his handsome face.

“Have we met, sir?” he asked, as if suddenly hopeful of arranging a loan.

“We’re gonna meet.”

The boxer swung his sap underhanded. It was a brutal weapon, a leather bag filled with buckshot. The buckshot made it pliable so that it would mold to its target, pulverize flesh and bone, and pound the young man’s fine, strong profile flat as beefsteak. To the boxer’s surprise, the drunk moved quickly. He stepped inside the arc of the sap and knocked the boxer off his feet with a right cross as expert as it was powerful.

The door sprang open.

“Nice going, kid.”

Two middle-aged Van Dorn private detectives—ice-eyed Mack Fulton and Walter Kisley in a checkerboard drummer’s suit—grabbed the fallen man’s arms and dragged him inside. “Is Harry Frost hiding in that morgue wagon?”

But the boxer could not answer.

“Down for the count,” said Fulton, slapping him hard and getting no response. “Young Isaac, you don’t know your own strength.”

“So much for our fledgling investigator’s first lesson in interrogating criminals,” said Kisley.

“And what is that first lesson?” Fulton echoed. They were nicknamed Weber and Fields at the Van Dorn Detective Agency, for the vaudeville comics.

“Permit your suspect to remain conscious,” answered Kisley.

“So,” they chorused, “he may answer your questions.”

Apprentice detective Isaac Bell hung his head.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Kisley. Mr. Fulton. I didn’t mean to hit him so hard.”

“Live and learn, kid. That’s why Mr. Van Dorn teamed a college man like you with such wise old ignoramuses as we.”

“By our grizzled example, the boss hopes, even a rich kid from the right side of the tracks might flourish into brilliant detectivehood.”

“Meantime, what do you say we go knock on that morgue wagon and see if Harry Frost is home?”

The partners drew heavy revolvers as they headed up the alley.

“Stay back, Isaac. You do not want to brace Harry Frost without a gun in your hand.”

“Which, being an apprentice, you are not allowed to carry.”

“I bought a derringer,” Bell said.

“Enterprising of you. Don’t let the boss get wind of it.”

“Stay back anyway, a derringer won’t stop Harry Frost.”

They rounded the corner into the street. A knife glittered in the lamplight, slicing through the reins that tied the morgue wagon’s horses, and a heavyset figure lashed their rumps with the driver’s whip. The animals bolted, stampeding past the wagons lined up at the depot. The newsboys scattered from flying hooves and spinning wheels. Just as the runaway reached the depot, it exploded with a thunderous roar and a brilliant flash. The shock wave slammed into the detectives and threw them through the swinging doors and front windows of the nearest saloon.

Isaac Bell picked himself up and stormed back into the street. Flames were leaping from the newspaper depot. The wagons had been tumbled on their sides, their horses staggering on shattered legs. The street was filled with broken glass and burning paper. Bell looked for the newsboys. Three were huddled in a doorway, their faces white with shock. Three more were sprawled lifeless on the sidewalk. The first he knelt by was Wally Laughlin.

COME, JOSEPHINE IN MY FLYING MACHINE.

BY ALFRED BRYAN & FRED FISCHER

Oh! Say! Let us fly, dear

Where, kid? To the sky, dear

Oh you flying machine

Jump in, Miss Josephine

Ship ahoy! Oh joy, what a feeling

Where, boy? In the ceiling

Ho, High, Hoopla we fly

To the sky so high

Come Josephine, in my flying machine,

Going up, she goes! up she goes!

Balance yourself like a bird on a beam

In the air she goes! There she goes!

Up, up, a little bit higher

Oh! My! The moon is on fire

Come, Josephine in my flying machine,

Going up, all on, Goodbye!

BOOK ONE

“come, josephine in my flying machine”

1

The Adirondack Mountains, Upper New York State

1909

MRS. JOSEPHINE JOSEPHS FROST—a petite, rosy-cheeked young woman with a tomboy’s pert manner, a farm girl’s strong hands, and lively hazel eyes—flew her Celere Twin Pusher biplane eight hundred feet above the dark forested hills of her husband’s Adirondack