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

Bell watched from the boat. A top-floor window was open, ten stories off the ground, seven above the balcony where the body first struck. No human being could have survived that fall.

“She came out backwards,” said a male voice from the water.

Bell looked down at a skiff with a big motor that had just tied up behind his transom. A middle-aged Floridian, browned and puckered by the powerful sun, was squinting up at him.

“You saw?”

“Yup. I just happened to be looking up at that moment and out she came. Backwards.”

“You should tell the police,” said Bell.

“Well, the police and I are not on speaking terms.”

“If you have evidence of foul play, you should report it.”

“There’s no law against falling backwards. Anyway, I don’t have time to talk to the cops. It’s you I come talking to.”

“About what?”

“My thousand dollars that I hear you’re paying to find that big black boat.”

34

THREE DAYS IN FLORIDA had convinced Isaac Bell that Miami was a boomtown of braggarts, boosters, and liars.

At least the fellow holding his hand up for the reward money was not among the majority of citizens who were new arrivals selling tales about imaginary pasts. His weathered face, canvas hat, ragged shirt, and his over-powered little skiff signified a lifelong fisherman and crabber who had a new career running Bimini whisky up the Florida rivers and bayous that he knew as well as the Darbees and Tobins knew New York Harbor.

“Did you see it?” asked Bell.

“Yup.”

“What does it look like?”

“It’s black.”

“What else?”

“It’s big.”

“So far, you haven’t said a thing I didn’t tell that crowd of folks on the dock.”

“It’s faster than greased lightning.”

“That’s a safe guess, since I told everyone I want to race it in this one.”

“It’s got a big old searchlight on front. Almost as big as yours.”

“Searchlights tend to go on this kind of boat. Does it have another one in back like mine?”

“Nope,” he said, and Bell got interested.

“What else?”

“Got a lot of motors.”

“How many?”

“Couldn’t quite tell. I knew it was three, but there could be another one. Like a spare, maybe. There’s something back there that could be a motor.”

“What’s your name?” asked Bell.

“Why you want to know?”

“I like to know the name of a fellow I hand a thousand dollars to. If it comes to that.”

“What’s my name?” He cast a wary eye at the hotel, where cops were shoving through the crowd around the fallen body. “You can call me Captain.”

“Tell me more, Captain.”

“At night, she shoots fire in the sky.”

“So does this one. Straight-piped Libertys. Where did you see it?”

“I answered a lot of questions, mister. But I don’t see no money.”

Bell leaned over the transom and stared him in the face. “You’ll see the money when I see the boat.”

Captain said, “He came by last night, and the night before that. You want to see him tonight?”

•   •   •

THREE NIGHTS, Black Bird had set out for Bimini to buy a load of rye; three nights, she had captured other rumrunners instead before she was halfway there. Tonight she wouldn’t even leave the bay. Tonight she was going to war.

With Zolner at her helm and her engines muffled, she backed out of her hiding place between two of the dozens of five-masted lumber schooners that thrust their bowsprits over Biscayne Boulevard. The Comintern had purchased the ships, which were identical to the dozens that moored there, to use as floating liquor warehouses.

Paralleling the beach along the boulevard, slicing a quiet two miles through the dark, Black Bird motored south. She passed the McAllister Hotel, marked by a lighted sign on its roof, and turned into the narrow mouth of the Miami River.

•   •   •

ISAAC BELL was thinking that “Captain” had sent him on a wild-goose chase.

He and Dashwood and Tobin had been waiting for hours in a hot, muggy, mosquito-infested freight-yard slip a quarter mile from the mouth of the river. Captain had led them here in his boat. After Bell had backed Marion into the slip, he had sent the rumrunner to the safety of the hotel dock—clutching a fifty-dollar down payment on his finder’s fee—in the likely event of gunplay.

There was occasional traffic on the river, even this late, an intermittent parade of fishing boats, small freighters, and cabin cruisers with singing drunks. Some of the freight boats were steamers, others were sailing schooners propelled in the narrow channel by auxiliary motors. The auxiliaries kept playing tricks on ears cocked for the muted rumble of Black Bird’s engines.

Then, all of a sudden, Bell heard her coming. No auxiliary motor could make such a noise. It was neither loud nor sharp but, like a threat of barely contained violence, the sound of suppressed strength that could be loosed any second.

“That’s her,” whispered Tobin. He was a few feet ahead of him on the foredeck, manning one of the Lewis guns. Dashwood was on the stern, fifty feet behind him, manning the other. Bell was in the cockpit, his boots resting lightly on the electric starters, one hand on the searchlight switches, the other on the horizontal bar that bridged all four throttles.

“Tell me when you see her,” Bell told Tobin, who had a better view down the river from his perch on the foredeck. Happily, the boat traffic had stopped for the moment.

She was moving very slowly.

Captain had claimed that he had seen her pass this slip. He had speculated she would hide in a boathouse on the new Seybold Canal, which served a development of homes where the owners moored steam yachts. He had not claimed to have seen her turn off the river into the canal, and, in fact, she could be heading for one of the factories or freight depots or warehouses that shared the banks of the little river with residences, hotels, boatyards, and houseboats.

Until Bell heard her muffled Libertys, he had not fully believed Captain for the simple reason that a river only four miles long that ended