The Bootlegger: An Isaac Bell Adventure - Softcover

Cussler, Clive; Scott, Justin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0425272818 ISBN 13: 9780425272817

Publisher: Berkley Books, 2015

Synopsis

Detective Isaac Bell is on the hunt for justice in this extraordinary adventure in the #1 New York Times bestselling series.

It is 1921, and Prohibition is in full swing—even as millions still imbibe and ruthless criminals get rich overnight by selling them booze. Cops, Feds, and Coast Guardsmen are all susceptible to bribery. But when Bell’s boss and lifelong friend Joseph Van Dorn is shot and near-fatally wounded while chasing bootleggers, he enters the fray.

Bell promises Van Dorn that he will try to save the detective agency from the corrupting effects of Prohibition. But when the first witness to Van Dorn’s shooting is executed in a ruthlessly efficient manner invented by the CHEKA, the Russian Communist secret police, Bell finds himself combating men far more deadly than ordinary criminals. And he’s about to fight a one-man war...

About this title

About the Author:

CLIVE CUSSLER is the author or coauthor of more than fifty previous books in five bestselling series, including Dirk Pitt®, NUMA® Files, Oregon® Files, Isaac Bell, and Fargo.His most recent New York Times bestselling novels are The Eye of Heaven, Mirage, and Ghost Ship. His nonfiction works include Built for Adventure: The Classic Automobiles of Clive Cussler and Dirk Pitt, plus The Sea Hunters, and The Sea Hunters II; the latter two describe the true adventures of the real NUMA®, which, led by Cussler, searches for lost ships of historic significance. With his crew of volunteers, Cussler has discovered more than sixty ships, including the long-lost Confederate submarine Hunley. He lives in Colorado.

JUSTIN SCOTT’s novels include The Shipkiller and Normandie Triangle; the Ben Abbott detective series; and five modern sea thrillers published under his pen name Paul Garrison. The coauthor with Clive Cussler of four previous Isaac Bell novels, he lives in Connecticut.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

1

Two men in expensive clothes, a bootlegger and his bodyguard, dangled a bellboy upside down from the Hotel Gotham’s parapet.

The bodyguard held him by his ankles, nineteen stories above 55th Street. It was night. No one saw, and the boy’s screams were drowned out by the Fifth Avenue buses, the El thundering up Sixth, and trolley bells clanging on Madison.

The bootlegger shouted down at him, “Every bellhop in the hotel sells my booze! Whatsamatter with you?”

Church spires and mansion turrets reached for him like teeth. “Last chance, sonny.”

A tall man in a summer suit glided silently across the roof. He drew a Browning automatic from his coat and a throwing knife from his boot. He mounted the parapet and pressed the pistol to the body- guard’s temple.

“Hold tight.”

The bodyguard froze. The bootlegger shrank from the blade pricking his throat.

“Who the—”

“Isaac Bell. Van Dorn Agency. Sling him in on the count of two.” “If you shoot, we drop him.”

“You’ll have holes in your heads before he passes the eighteenth floor . . . On my count: One! Pull him up. Two! Swing him over the edge . . . Lay him on the roof— Are you O.K., son?”

The bellboy had tears in his eyes. He nodded, head bobbing like a puppet.

“Go downstairs,” Isaac Bell told him, sliding his knife back in his boot and shifting the automatic to his left hand. “Tell your boss Chief Investigator Bell said to give you the week off and a fifty-dollar bonus for standing up to bootleggers.”

The bodyguard chose his moment well. When the tall detective reached down to help the boy stand, he swung a heavy, ring-studded fist. Skillfully thrown with the full power of a big man’s muscle behind it, it was blocked before it traveled four inches.

A bone-cracking counterpunch staggered him. His knees buckled and he collapsed on the tar. The bootlegger shot empty hands into the sky. “O.K., O.K.”

The van Dorn detective agency—an operation with field offices in every city in the country and many abroad—maintained warm relations with the police. But Isaac Bell spotted trouble when he walked into the 54th Street precinct house.

The desk sergeant couldn’t meet his eye.

Bell reached across the high desk to shake his hand anyway. This particular sergeant’s father, retired roundsman Paddy O’Riordan, augmented his pension as a part-time night watchman for Van Dorn Protective Services.

“How’s your dad?” Paddy was doing fine.

“Any chance of interviewing the bootlegger we caught at the

Gotham?”

“The big guy’s at the hospital getting his jaw wired.” “I want the little one, the boss.”

“Surety company paid his bond.”

Bell was incensed. “Bail? For attempted murder?”

“They expect the protection they pay for,” said Sergeant O’Riordan, poker-faced. “What I would do next time, Mr. Bell, instead of calling us, throw them in the river.”

Bell watched for the cop’s reaction when he replied, “I reckoned

Coasties would fish them out.”

O’Riordan agreed with a world-weary “Yeah,” confirming the rumors that even some officers of the United States Coast Guard—the arm of the Treasury Department charged with enforcing Prohibition at sea—were in the bootleggers’ pockets.

Starting this afternoon, thought Bell, the Van Dorns would put a stop to that.

One big hand firm on the throttle of his S-1 Flying Yacht, the other on the wheel, Isaac Bell began racing down the East River for take-off speed. He dodged a railcar float and steered into a rapidly narrowing slot between a tugboat pushing a fleet of coal barges and another towing a bright red barge of dynamite. Joseph Van Dorn, the burly, scarlet- whiskered founder of the detective agency, sat beside him in the open cockpit, lost in thought.

The Greenpoint ferry surged out of the 23rd Street Terminal straight in their path. The sight of the slab-sided vessel, suddenly enormous in their windshield, made Joseph Van Dorn sit up straight. A brave and cool-headed man, he asked, “Do we have time to stop?”

Bell shoved his throttle wide open.

The Liberty engine mounted behind them on the wing thundered. He hauled hard on the wheel.

The Loening S-1 held speed and altitude records but was notoriously slow to respond to the controls. Bell had replaced its stick and pedals with a combined steering and elevating Blériot wheel, in hopes of making it nimbler.

Passengers on the Greenpoint ferry backed from the rail. Bell gave the wheel one last firm tug.

The Flying Yacht lunged off the water and cleared the ferry with a foot to spare.

“There ought to be a law against f lying like you,” said Van Dorn. Bell flew under the Williamsburg Bridge and between the spotting masts of a battleship docked at the Navy Yard. “Sorry to distract you from your dire thoughts.”

“You’ll distract us both to kingdom come.”

Bell headed across leaf-green Brooklyn at one hundred t miles an hour.

Van Dorn resumed pondering how to deal with misfortune.

The World War had upended his agency. Some of his best detectives had been killed fighting in the trenches. Others died shockingly young in the influenza epidemic. A post- war recession in the business world was bankrupting clients. And only yesterday, Isaac Bell had discovered that bootleggers, who were getting rich quick off Prohibition by bribing cops and politicians, had corrupted two of his best house detectives at the Hotel Gotham.

Bell climbed to three thousand feet before they reached the Rock- aways. Where the white sand beach slid into the ocean like a f laying knife, he turned and headed east above the string of barrier islands that sheltered Long Island from the raw fury of the Atlantic. A booze smugglers’ paradise of hidden bays and marshes, inlets, creeks and canals stretched in the lee of those islands as far as he could see.

Thirty miles from New York, he banked the plane out over the steel-blue ocean and began to descend.

“Can I come in the launch, Chief ?”

Seaman Third Class Asa Somers, the youngest sailor on the Coast Guard cutter CG-9, was beside himself. He had finally made it to sea, patrolling the Fire Island coast for rumrunners on a ship with a cannon and machine guns. Now the fastest f lying boat in the world—a high-wing pusher monoplane—was looping down from the sky. And if the roar of its four-hundred-horsepower Liberty motor wasn’t thrilling enough, it was bringing a famous crime fighter he’d read about in Boys’ Life and the Police Gazette—Mr. Joseph Van Dorn, whose army of private detectives vowed: “We never give up! Never!”

“What’s got you all stirred up?” growled the white-haired chief petty officer.

“I want to meet Mr. Van Dorn when he lands.” “He ain’t gonna land.”

“Why not?”

“Open your eyes, boy. See that swell? Four-foot seas’ll kick that f lying-boat ass over teakettle.”

“Maybe he’ll give it a whirl,” Somers said, with little hope. Flight

Magazine praised the S-1’s speed at lot more than its handling.

“If he does,” said the chief, “you can come in the launch to pick up the bodies.”

Up on the f lying bridge, CG-9’s skipper expressed the same opinion.

“Stand by with grappling hooks.”

The f lying boat circled lower. When it whipped past, skimming wave tops, Somers recognized Van Dorn, who was seated beside the pilot in the glass-surrounded, open-roofed cockpit, by his red whiskers bristling in the slipstream.

The roar of the big twelve-cylinder engine faded to a whisper. “Lunatic,” growled the chief.

But young Somers watched the Air Yacht’s ailerons. The wing f laps fluttered up and down almost faster than the eye could see as the pilot fought to keep her on an even keel. Back in her tail unit, the horizontal stabilizer bit the air, and down she came, steady as a loco- motive on rails. Her long V-shaped hull touched the water, flaring a vapor-thin wake. Her wing floats skimmed the swell, and she settled lightly.

“Somers! Man the bow line.”

The boy leaped into the launch and they motored across the hundred yards that separated the cutter and the flying boat. The huge four-bladed propeller behind the wing stopped spinning, and the pilot, who had made an almost impossible landing look easy, climbed down from the cockpit onto the running board that extended around the front of the rocking hull. He was a tall, lean, fair-haired man with a no-nonsense expression on his handsome face. His golden hair and thick mustache were impeccably groomed. His tailored suit and the broad-brimmed hat pulled tight on his head were both white.

Somers dropped the bow line.

“What in blazes are you doing?” bellowed the chief. “I bet that’s Isaac Bell!”

“I don’t care if it’s Mary Pickford! Don’t foul that line!”

The boy re-coiled the line, his gaze locked on the pilot. It had to be him. Bell’s picture was never in a magazine. But reports on Van Dorn always mentioned his chief investigator’s white suit and it suddenly struck Somers that the camera-shy detective could go incognito in a f lash simply by changing his clothes.

“Heave a line, son!” he called. “Come on, you can do it—on the jump!”

Somers remembered to let the coil reel out of his palm as the chief had taught him. To his eternal gratitude the rope fell into Bell’s big hand.

“Good shot.” He pulled the plane and the boat together. Somers asked, “Are you Isaac Bell, sir?”

“I’m his butler. Mum’s the word—Bell is still passed out in a speakeasy. Now, let’s get Mr. Van Dorn into your boat without drop- ping him in the drink. Ready?”

Bell reached to help Van Dorn, a heavily built man in his fifties with a prominent roman nose and hooded eyes. Van Dorn ignored Bell’s hand. Bell seized his elbow and guided him toward Somers with a conspiratorial grin.

“Hang on tight, son, he’s not as spry as he looks.”

Behind his grin, Bell’s blue eyes were cool and alert. He watched carefully as the older man stepped between the bouncing craft, and he relaxed only after Somers had him safely aboard.

“What’s your name, sailor?” asked Van Dorn in a voice that had the faintest lilt of an Irish accent.

“Seaman Third Class Asa Somers, sir.”

“Lied about your age?”

“How did you know?” Somers whispered.

“I worked that dodge to join the Marines.” He shot a thumbs-up toward the stern. “All aboard, Chief. Back to the ship.”

“Aye, sir.”

The boat wheeled away from the seaplane.

Van Dorn called to Bell, “Watch yourself at the Gotham. Don’t forget, those shameless SOBs have fifty pounds on you.”

If a mountain lion could smile, thought Asa Somers, it would smile like Isaac Bell when he answered, “Forget? Never.”

Joseph van Dorn cast a skeptical eye on CG-9, a surplus submarine chaser the U.S. Navy had palmed off on the Coast Guard for Prohibition patrol. With a crow’s nest above a f lying bridge, six- cylinder gasoline engines driving triple screws, and a three-inch Poole gun mounted on the foredeck, she had been built to spot, chase, and sink slow-moving German U-boats—not fast rumrunners.

She’d been worked hard in the war and scantly maintained since. The drone of pumps told him that her wooden hull had worked open many a leak. Her motor valves were chattering, even at half speed. She would still pack a punch with the Poole gun and a brace of .30.06 Lewis machine guns on the bridge wings. But even if she somehow managed to get in range of a rumrunner, who was trained to fire them?

Her middle-aged skipper was pouch-eyed and red-nosed. Her aged chief petty officer looked like a Spanish-American War vet. And the crew—with the exception of young Somers, who had scrambled eagerly up the mast to the lookout perch in the crow’s nest as soon as they shipped the launch—were pretty much the quality Van Dorn expected of recruits paid twenty-one dollars a month.

The skipper greeted him warily.

Van Dorn disarmed him with the amiable smile that had sent many a criminal to the penitentiary wondering why he had allowed this jovial gent close enough to clamp a steely hand on the scruff of his neck. A twinkle in the eye and a warm chortle in the voice fostered the notion of an easygoing fellow.

“I suppose your commandant told you the Treasury Department hired my detective agency to recommend how better to combat the illegal liquor traffic. But I bet scuttlebutt says we’re investigating who’s in cahoots with the bootleggers—pocketing bribes to look the other way.”

“They don’t have to bribe us. They outrun us, and they outnumber us. Or someone—I’m not saying who ’cause I don’t know who—tips them where we’re patrolling. Or they radio false distress calls; we’re supposed to save lives, so we steam to the rescue, leaving our station wide open. If we happen to catch ’em, the courts turn ’em loose and they buy their speedboats back at government auction.”

Van Dorn took a fresh look at the skipper. Maybe his nose was red from a head cold. Drinking man or not, he sounded genuinely indignant and fed up. Who could blame him?

In the year since Prohibition—the banning of the sale of alcohol by the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution and the Volstead Act—it seemed half the country had agreed to break the law. Millions of people would pay handsomely for a drink. Short of striking oil or gold in your backyard, there was no way to get richer quicker than to sell hooch. All you needed was a boat you could run a few miles offshore to a rum fleet of foreign- registered freighters and schooners anchored beyond the law in international waters. The newspapers had made a hero of Bill McCoy, captain of a schooner registered in the British Bahama Islands. He had come up with the scheme for circumventing the law, which made enforcing Prohibition a mug’s game.

“Like the song says”—Van Dorn recited a lyric from Irving Berlin’s latest hit—”‘You cannot make your shimmy shake on tea.’ How fast are the taxis?”

While fisherman and yacht owners sailed out to the rum fleet to buy a few bottles, big business was conducted by “taxis” or “contact boats”—high-powered, shallow-draft vessels in which professional rumrunners smuggled hundreds of cases ashore to bootleggers who paid top dollar.

“They build ’em faster every day.”

Van Dorn shook his head, feigning dismay. Isaac Bell had already convinced him to recommend f lying-boat patrols, though God knows who would pay for them. Congress banned booze but failed to cough up money for enforcement.

“Taxi!”

All eyes shot to the crow’s nest.

Joseph van Dorn whipped a pair of binoculars from his voluminous overcoat and focused in the direction Asa Somers was pointing his telescope. Low in the water and painted as gray as the sea and the sky, the rum boat was barely visible at a thousand yards.

“Full speed!” ordered the skipper, and bounded up the ladder to

the f lying bridge atop the wheelhouse. Van Dorn climbed heavily after him.

The engines ground harder. Valves stormed louder. The subchaser dug her stern in and boiled a white wake. “Fifteen knots,” said the skipper.

Subchasers had been built to do eighteen, but the oily blue smoke spewing from her exhaust ports told Van Dorn her worn engines were pushing their lim...

About this edition

• Publisher: Berkley Books
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0425272818
• ISBN 13: 9780425272817
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 435