The Bootlegger by Clive Cussler (novels in english TXT) 📗

road, turned sideways, raised pistols, and started firing back. A bullet shattered the windshield and knocked the driver’s hat sideways. Another broke a headlight.

“Get the big one!” shouted Tony. They shifted fire, and a lucky shot from the swaying auto knocked the bigger man off the road. The smaller, a skinny scarecrow, stepped into the lights, gun raised like a target shooter.

“Run him down!”

Flame lanced from his pistol. A left front tire blew, and the wheel jerked in the driver’s hands. The scarecrow fired again. The right front tire blew, and the heavy auto skidded and screeched on smoking rims straight at him.

•   •   •

JAMES DASHWOOD drifted aside like a matador. The Packard slid past. He fired a shot into each rear tire, and the car swerved into a tree with a loud bang. Three men were thrown to the pavement. The driver was impaled on the steering column. Van Dorns swarmed from the roadhouse and surrounded them. Dashwood ran to where Isaac Bell had fallen.

“Isaac!”

“I’m O.K.”

Dashwood mopped Bell’s brow with a handkerchief. “You don’t look O.K. You’re covered in blood.”

“Scalp, I think.”

“He’s fine,” said Walt Hatfield, who hurried up with a shotgun. “Just leaking a little.”

Hatfield handed Bell a bandanna. “You’re O.K., old son, aren’t you?”

The Texan’s anxious expression scared Dashwood more than the blood.

“Where are they?” asked Bell. His ears were ringing, his head spinning. He saw the wrecked Packard wrapped half around a tree. Bloodied gunmen sprawled beside it. “Anyone else hurt?”

“Folks on the porch are mostly shook-up.”

A siren howled in the distance.

Bell surged to his feet and stood, swaying. He gripped Dashwood’s skinny arm and pointed at the gunmen. “Give the cops all those louses except the boss. Bring him to the cellar. On the jump! They’ll be here any second.”

•   •   •

“ATTEMPTED MURDER,” said Isaac Bell. “Even in Detroit they’ll lock you up.”

“Not for long,” said the gangster manacled to a cellar post. He had a gash on his head that had splattered his clothes as bloodily as Bell’s. Bell hoped that the man had a headache worse than the one that was jackhammering his own skull. He had left the doctor Texas Walt called to stitch his scalp cooling his heels upstairs until he had wrung everything he could out of the gangster. The whisky he poured on it to stop the bleeding had hurt worse than the bullet that parted his hair, and he could not quite see straight. It took no acting talent to sound vengeful.

“Long,” he said. “Very long. I’ll hand you to the U.S. Marshal. He’ll get you on a federal offense.”

“This ain’t federal.”

“Ever heard of the Espionage Act? The Congress wrote it with your name on it. Radicals throw bombs. Aliens throw bombs. Communists. Bolsheviks. The United States Attorney will put you in the big house for life.”

“They can’t pin that on me.”

“Thirty witnesses saw your gang throw a grenade. Thirty witnesses saw you rake a crowd of people with rifle fire.”

“They don’t have the guts to testify. I’ll be out in a day.”

“I’ve got the guts to testify,” said Texas Walt.

“So do I,” said Ed Tobin.

“Me, too,” said Dashwood.

“Even I will muster the courage,” said Isaac Bell. “That’s four of us.”

“Mister,” said Texas Walt, leaning in to put his hawk face an inch from the gangster’s. “You’ve got one greasy foot in the federal penitentiary and another on thin ice. It is high time you start talking.”

The gangster pressed his free hand to his bloody head. “What do you want to know?”

Bell studied their prisoner carefully. The thug would expect Bell to ask who had ordered him to bomb the roadhouse. Fear and criminal pride would make him resist turning in someone he knew.

“Your name.”

“Tony.”

“Tony what?”

“Big Tony Sana.”

“Who gave you the grenade, Tony?”

“War surplus. They’re all over the place.”

“It was a German stick grenade. How did you happen to get your paws on a grenade from the Kaiser’s army?”

Bell reckoned that the Comintern was the likeliest source. Such a powerful grenade would also explain the phenomenal damage Bell had seen at the former Van Dorn offices. The Detroit mobs hadn’t yet figured that the Texas Walt roadhouse was a Van Dorn masquerade. But the Comintern might well have.

The gangster shrugged. “I don’t know. One of the guys got a box of ’em somewhere.”

Bell thought that Tony Sana looked genuinely puzzled that of all the questions the roadhouse torpedoes could ask, who cared where a hand grenade came from? Had Marat Zolner paid Tony’s gang to attack Texas Walt’s? Had he allied with them as he had with the Black Hand in New York? No. Tony was small-time. If anything, Zolner was playing Tony’s boys for suckers, as he had the Gophers.

“I want to know who gave you the grenade.”

“Maybe some doughboy brought souvenirs home from the war.”

“Which one of your guys did he give it to?”

“I think it was Little Angelo.”

“We’ll deal with Angelo later. Now, what’s this I heard about a hooch tunnel under the river?”

“I didn’t hear nothing about no tunnel.”

Bell said, “People tell me boats are old hat. And come winter, driving whisky sixes across the ice will be old hat, too.”

“Yeah, well, there oughta be plenty of business for everyone.”

“Who’s your boss?”

“I’m my boss.”

“What about the cable sub?”

Tony looked glad to discuss a topic outside his own business. “These dumb Polacks, they got a long rope and a crank. They sink the booze in the river in steel kegs. The rope drags it across the bottom.”

“From where?”

“Some island.”

“Where does it go?”

“Poletown.”

“Who runs it?”

“I told ya, Polacks from Poletown.”

“Poles from Poletown?”

“Yeah, except the Jaworski gang says it ain’t them. Lying bastards. They was speaking Polack.”

“Polish? Who was speaking Polish. The cable sub?”

“That’s what I heard.”

“Speaking Polish? Or Russian?”

“Same thing, ain’t it?”

Bell exchanged glances with Dashwood and Tobin. Suddenly, there were two Dashwoods and two Tobins. It took a moment to realize that the shot that had creased his skull was giving him double vision. He blinked. There were still two of each detective. He turned to two Tonys.

“Tony, you