A stockman came along, cracking a whip. “What is this?” Bell demanded.
“Old manhole cover.”
“I see that. What does it cover?”
“Old sewer, I guess. There’s a few of ’em around. They used to drain the manure . . . Say, what the heck moved it? Must weigh a ton.”
“A strong man,” Bell mused. He peered into the darkness under it. He could see a brick-lined shaft. “Does it drain to the river?”
“Used to. Probably stops under one of them piers now. You see where they filled in the water and built the pier?”
Bell ran in search of a flashlight and hurried back with one he bought from a railroad cop. He lowered himself into the shaft, hunched under the low brick ceiling, and started walking. The tunnel ran straight and sloped slightly. It smelled of cow dung and decades of damp. And as the stockman predicted, after nearly a quarter mile he found a timber bisecting it vertically. Judging by the broken-brick rubble scattered around it, Bell reckoned it was a piling unknowingly driven down through the long-forgotten disused sewer by the builders of the pier.
The tall detective squeezed around it and walked toward the sound of rushing water. Now he could smell the river. The brick grew slippery, and the flashlight revealed streaks of moss, as if the walls were wetted twice daily when the tide rose. He passed another vertical timber and came abruptly to the mouth of the sewer. This would have been the end, underwater at high tide, originally extending into the river forty years ago before landfill extended the shore.
At his feet, a torrent of ebbing saltwater tide and freshwater river current raced toward the sea. Overhead, he saw the shadows of a dense frame of piles and timbers—the underbelly of the pier. He stepped onto a final crumbling lip of brick and looked around.
“What took you so long?” said a voice.
Isaac Bell had a split second to train his light on a bearded face, slick with blood, before Harry Frost hurled a pile-driver punch.
20
WITH FOUR YEARS of college boxing and ten years as a Van Dorn agent, including an investigation in the Arizona Territory disguised as an itinerant prizefighter, and another as a lumberjack, Isaac Bell reacted by rolling with the punch.
Memory speeded up, as if whirled in a turbine. He recalled events too fast to register as they had occurred. In memory, he could see Frost’s fist swinging at him. He could see that he had been caught flat-footed. If he went down at Frost’s feet, he was a dead man. His only chance to live was to make absolutely sure that Frost couldn’t follow up with another blow.
Harry Frost had obliged Bell by knocking him backwards into the Hudson River.
The current was swift, tide and river speeding toward the sea.
Isaac Bell was barely conscious, with an aching jaw and a throbbing head.
He saw Frost scrambling along the narrow shelf of mud that the falling tide had exposed on the shore under the piers. Dodging the pilings that marched from the land into the river, Frost tried to keep up with the current. He scampered like a dog wanting to jump in the water after a ball but afraid of drowning.
The current slammed Bell against pilings in the water. Bell seized hold of one. Less than fifteen feet separated the detective and the murderer. “Frost,” he shouted, gripping the slimy wood, fighting the current. “Give it up!”
To Bell’s surprise, Harry Frost laughed.
Bell had expected howling curses. Instead, the murderer was laughing. Nor was it insane laughter. He sounded almost cheerful when he said, “Go to hell.”
“It’s over,” Bell shouted. “You can’t get away from us.”
Frost laughed again. “You won’t get me before I get Josephine.”
“Killing your poor wife won’t do you any good, Harry. Give it up.”
Frost stopped laughing. “Poor wife?” His bloodied face worked convulsively. “Poor wife?” He raised his voice in an angry cry: “You don’t know what they were up to!”
“Who? What do you mean?”
Frost stared at him across the rushing tide. “You don’t know nothing,” he said bitterly. He shrugged his massive shoulders. An odd smile flickered across his mouth before his expression hardened like a death mask. “Say, look it this.”
Harry Frost bent down and pawed in the mud. He straightened up, holding Bell’s Browning.
“You dropped this when you ran away by jumpin’ in the water. Here you go!” He flung the pistol in Bell’s face.
Bell caught it on the fly. He juggled the muddy grip into his palm and flicked off the safety. “Elevate! Hands up!”
Harry Frost turned his back on the detective, clinging to the piling in the water, and stalked upstream against the flow of the tide.
“Hands up!”
“I’m not afraid of you,” Frost called over his shoulder, taunting. “You are nothing. You couldn’t even take one punch. You ran away.”
“Stop right there.”
“If you didn’t have the belly to take another punch, you sure as hell don’t have the nerve to shoot me in the back.”
Bell aimed for Harry Frost’s legs, intending to slow the man, climb out of the water, and get him. But he was numb with cold. His head was reeling from the punch. It took an act of will to steady the barrel, another to force his finger to curl smoothly around the trigger so he wouldn’t miss.
The gun felt heavy.
“You don’t have the guts to pull the trigger,” Frost flung over his shoulder.
Strangely heavy. Was he losing consciousness? No. It was too heavy. Why did Frost throw it instead of simply shooting him? Why was he daring him to shoot? Bell let go the trigger, engaged the safety, turned the weapon around, and looked at
