The Assassin, Page 2

  The two young women acted as one.

  Nellie threw her arms around him and planted a kiss on his cheek. Edna wrested the gun from his hands. He did not resist. He would die himself before he let harm come to either of them. Edna, his adopted stepdaughter, a cub reporter for the Oil City Derrick who had just graduated from Allegheny College, was the quiet one. The younger, outgoing Nellie usually did the talking. She did now, cloaking urgency with good-humored teasing.

  “Whom do you intend to shoot, Father?” she joshed in a strong voice. “Do burglars lurk?”

  “I came so close,” he muttered. “So close.”

  “You’ll do better next time.”

  Matters lifted his head from his hands and raised his gaze to the clear-eyed, slender young women. The half sisters looked nearly alike, having inherited their mother’s silky chestnut hair and strong, regular features, but there the similarity ended. One was an open book. One a vault of secrets.

  “Do you know what Rockefeller did?” he asked.

  “If he drowned in the river, they’d find his body upstream,” said Edna. “JDR is the master of the unexpected.”

  “I wish he would drown in the river,” said Nellie.

  “So do I,” said Matters. “More than ever.” He told them about Rockefeller’s invitation to join Standard Oil. “Head of the Pipe Line Committee, no less.”

  Nellie and Edna looked at the pistol that Edna was still holding, then locked eyes. They were terrified he would kill himself. But would giving up his lifelong fight for independence kill him, too? Only more slowly.

  “Maybe you should take it,” said Nellie.

  “Father is better than that,” said Edna.

  His glistening eyes flickered from their faces to the toy theaters and settled on the gun. Edna drew it closer to her body. A queer smile crossed Matters’ grim face. “Maybe I could be better than that.”

  “You are,” they chorused. “You are.”

  Their helpless expressions tore him to pieces. “Go,” he said. “Leave me. Keep the gun. Ease your silly minds.”

  “Are you sure you’ll be all right?”

  “Give me until morning to get used to getting beat.”

  He ushered them out and closed the door. Wild thoughts were racing through his mind. He could not sit still. Father is better than that?

  He prowled his office. Now and then he paused to peer into the toy theaters. Twice a year he would take the girls on the train to plays in New York. And after the Oil City skating rink was converted to an opera house, they attended every touring company that performed. Shakespeare was their favorite. Romeo loving Juliet. Hamlet promising his father’s ghost revenge. Richard III instructing his henchmen. Secret promises. Secret revenge. Secret plots.

  Could he bow his head and accept Rockefeller’s invitation to join the trust?

  Or could he pretend to bow his head?

  What do you say, Hamlet? Make up your mind. Do you want revenge? Or do you want more? A tenth of Standard Oil’s colossal profits would make him one of the richest men in America. So what? How many meals could a man eat? In how many beds could he sleep?

  A tenth of the Standard’s power would crown a king.

  What do you say, Richard? How many plots have you laid? What secret mischief?

  Even Richard was surprised how blind his enemies were.

  Matters calculated the odds by listing his enemy’s weaknesses.

  The all-powerful monopoly was like a crack team of strong horses. But seen through Bill Matters’ clear and bitter eye, those horses were blinkered, hobbled, and hunted: hobbled by fear of change; hunted by government prosecutors and Progressive reformers determined to break their monopoly; blinded by Standard Oil’s obsession with secrecy.

  Could they be done in like Romeo and Juliet by the confusion of secrets?

  The Standard’s systemized secrecy, the secret trusts and hidden subsidiaries that shielded the corporation from public scrutiny, bred intrigue. On the occasions he’d been summoned to the Standard’s offices, he had never been allowed to see another visitor. Who knew what private deals were struck in the next room?

  Richard was the man to beat the Standard, the plotter of “secret mischiefs.”

  But where were his henchmen? Who would help him? Who could he count on? Spike wouldn’t be worth a damn. His old partner was a two-fisted brawler, but no conspirator, and too sunny a soul to kill when killing entered the plot. He needed henchmen with hearts of ice.

  BOOK ONE

  BULLETS

  SIX YEARS LATER

  KANSAS

  1

  A tall man in a white suit, with a handsome head of golden hair, an abundant mustache, and fierce blue eyes, stepped off an extra-fare limited at Union Depot and hurried forward to collect his Locomobile from the express car. He traded jokes with the railroad freight handlers easing the big red auto down the ramp, lamented Kansas City’s loss of first baseman Grady to the St. Louis Cardinals, and tipped generously when the job was done.

  Could they recommend a fast route to Standard Oil’s Sugar Creek refinery?

  Following their directions, he drove out of the rundown, saloon-lined station district, when two wagons suddenly boxed him into a narrow street. The men who jumped off were dressed more like prizefighters than teamsters. A broad-shouldered giant swaggered up, and he recognized Big Pete Straub, whom he had seen board the train at St. Louis.

  Straub flashed a badge.

  “Standard Oil Refinery Police. You Isaac Bell?”

  Bell stood down from his auto. He was as tall as Straub, well over six feet, but lean as wire rope on a one-hundred-seventy-five-pound frame. A head held high and a self-contained gaze signified life at full tide.

  Straub guessed his age at around thirty. “Go back where you came from.”

  “Why?” Bell asked nonchalantly.

  “There’s nothing for you in Kansas. We’ll fire any man who talks to you, and they know it.”

  Bell said, “Move your wagon.”

  A haymaker punch flew at his face.

  He slipped it over his shoulder, stepped in to sink left and right fists deep, and stepped back as quickly. The company cop doubled over.

  “Get him!” Straub’s men charged.

  An automatic pistol with a cavernous muzzle filled Bell’s hand, sudden as a thunderbolt. “Move your wagon.”

  —

  They sold gasoline in the freight yards. A hardware store supplied spare tubes and tires, a towrope, cans for water, motor oil, and extra gasoline, a bedroll, and a lever-action Winchester repeating rifle in a scabbard, which Bell buckled to the empty seat beside him.

  He stopped at a butcher to buy a beefsteak to grill on an open fire when he camped for the night, and a slab of ham, coffee beans, and bread for breakfast in the morning. Downtown Kansas City was jammed with trolleys, wagons, and carriages and fleets of brand-new steam, electric, and gasoline autos. Finally clearing the traffic at the edge of the suburbs, he headed south and west, crossed the state line into Kansas, opened the Locomobile’s throttle and exhaust pipe cutouts, and thundered onto the prairie.

  2

  No caress was gentler, no kiss softer, than the assassin’s finger on the trigger.

  Machined by a master gunsmith to silken balance, the Savage 99 lever-action rifle would reward such a delicate union of flesh and steel with deadly precision. Pressure as light as a shallow breath would fire the custom-loaded, high-velocity smokeless powder round that waited in the chamber. The telescope sight was the finest Warner & Swasey instrument that money could buy. Spike Hopewell appeared near and large.

  Spike was pacing the cornice atop an eighty-foot oil derrick that stood on the edge of a crowd of a hundred rigs operated by independent wildcat drillers. They towered over the remnants of a small hamlet at a remote Kansas crossroads forty miles north of Indian Territory. Since he had struck oil, a horde of newcomers seeking their fortunes had renamed the place Hopewell Field.

  Houses, stables, pic
ket fences, and headstones in the churchyard were stained brown from spouters that had flung oil to the winds. Crude storage tanks, iron-sided, wood-topped affairs eighty feet wide and twenty high, were filled to the brim. Pipes linked the tanks to a modern refinery where two-hundred-barrel stills sat on brick furnaces in thickets of condensing pipe. Their chimneys lofted columns of smoke into the sky.

  A boomtown of shacks and shanties had sprung up next door to feed and entertain the oil workers, who nicknamed it Hope-Hell. They slept in a “rag town” of tents. Saloons defied the Kansas prohibition laws just as in Wichita and Kansas City. Housed in old boxcars, they were not as likely to be attacked by Carrie Nation swinging her hatchet. Behind the saloons, red brakeman’s lanterns advertised brothels.

  Railroad tracks skirted the bustling complex. But the nearest town with a passenger station was ten miles away. Investors were selling stock to build an electric trolley.

  The refinery reeked of gasoline.

  The assassin could smell it seven hundred yards away.

  —

  A red Locomobile blazed across the Kansas plain, bright as fire and pluming dust.

  Spike Hopewell saw it coming and broke into a broad smile despite his troubles. The auto and the speed fiend driving like a whirlwind were vivid proof that gasoline—once a notorious refining impurity that exploded kerosene lamps in people’s faces—was the fuel of the future.

  His brand-new refinery was making oceans of the stuff, boiling sixteen gallons of gasoline off every barrel of Kansas crude. Fifty thousand gallons and just getting started. If only he could ship it to market.

  —

  The assassin waited for a breath of wind to clear the smoke.

  You could not ignore wind at long range. You had to calculate exactly how much it would deflect a bullet and you had to refine your calculations as impetus slowed and gravity took its toll. But you couldn’t shoot what you couldn’t see. The old oil man was a murky presence in the telescope sight, obscured by the smoke that rose thick and black from a hundred engine boilers and refinery furnaces.

  Hopewell stopped pacing, planted his hands on the railing, and stared intently.

  A breeze stirred. The smoke thinned.

  His head crystallized in the powerful glass.

  Schooled in anatomy, the assassin pictured bone and connecting fibers of tendon and muscle and nerve under his target’s skin. The brain stem was an inch wide. To sever it was to drop a man instantly.

  Spike Hopewell moved abruptly. He turned toward the ladder that rose from the derrick floor. The assassin switched to binoculars to inspect the intruder in their wider field of vision.

  A man in a white suit cleared the top rung and bounded onto the cornice. The assassin recognized the lithe, supple-yet-contained fluid grace that could only belong to another predator—a deadly peer—and every nerve jumped to high alert.

  Instinct, logic, and horse sense were in perfect agreement. Shoot the threat first.

  Reckless pride revolted. No one—no one!—interferes with my kill. I shoot who I want, when I want.

  —

  Isaac Bell vaulted from the ladder, landed lightly on the derrick cornice, and introduced himself to Spike Hopewell with an engaging smile and a powerful hand.

  “Bell. Van Dorn Detective Agency.”

  Spike grinned. “Detecting incognito in a red Locomobile? Thought you were the fire department.”

  Isaac Bell took an instant liking to the vigorous independent, by all reports a man as openhearted as he was combative. With a knowing glance at the source of Spike’s troubles—a mammoth gasoline storage tank on the far side of the refinery, eighty feet wide and twenty high—Bell answered with a straight face.

  “Having ‘detected’ that you’re awash in gasoline, I traded my horse for an auto.”

  Hopewell laughed. “You got me there. Biggest glut since the auto was invented . . . Whatcha doing here, son? What do you want?”

  Bell said, “The government’s Corporations Commission is investigating Standard Oil for violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.”

  “Do tell,” said Hopewell, his manner cooling.

  “The commission hired the Van Dorn Agency to gather evidence of the Standard busting up rivals’ businesses.”

  “What’s that got to do with me?”

  “Fifty thousand gallons of gasoline you can’t ship to market is the sort of evidence I’m looking for.”

  “It’s sitting there in that tank. Look all you want.”

  “Can you tell me how your glut filled it?”

  “Nope. And I won’t testify either.”

  Isaac Bell had expected resistance. Hopewell had a reputation for being tough as a gamecock and scrappy as a one-eyed tom. But the success of the Van Dorn investigation hinged on persuading the independent to talk, both in confidence and in public testimony. Few oil men alive had more experience fighting the monopoly.

  Age hadn’t slowed him a bit. Instead of cashing in and retiring when he struck enormous oil finds in Kansas, Spike Hopewell had built a modern refinery next to the fields to process crude oil for his fellow independent drillers. Now he was in the fight of his life, laying a tidewater pipe line to ship their gasoline and kerosene to tank steamers at Port Arthur, Texas.

  Standard Oil was fighting just as hard to stop him.

  “Won’t testify? The Standard flooded the courts with lawyers to block your line to the Gulf of Mexico.”

  Spike was no slouch in the influence department. “I’m fighting ’em in the State House. The lawmakers in Topeka know darned well that Kansas producers and Kansas refineries are dead unless I can ship their product to European markets that Standard Oil don’t control.”

  “Is that why the railroad untied your siding?”

  There were no tank cars on the refinery siding. A forlorn-looking 0-6-0 switch engine had steam up, but it had nowhere to go and nothing to do except shuttle material around the refinery. A quarter mile of grass and sagebrush separated Hopewell’s tracks from the main line to Kansas City. The roadbed was graded, and gravel ballast laid, and telegraph wire strung. But the connecting spur for the carloads of material to build the refinery had been uprooted. Switches, rails, and crossties were scattered on the ground as if angry giants had kicked it to pieces.

  Hopewell said, “My lawyers just got an injunction ordering the railroad to hook me up again.”

  “You won a hollow victory. Standard Oil tied up every railroad tank car in the region. The commission wants to know how.”

  “Tell ’em to take it up with the railroad.”

  A wintery light grayed the detective’s eyes. His smile grew cool. Pussyfooting was getting him nowhere. “Other Van Dorn operatives are working on the railroad. My particular interest is how the Standard is blocking your tidewater pipe line.”

  “I told you, son, I ain’t testifying.”

  “With no pipe line,” Bell shot back, “and no railroad to transport your products to market, your wells and refinery are worthless. Everything you built here will be forced to the wall.”

  “I’ve been bankrupt before—before you were born, sonny—but this time, I just might have another trick up my sleeve.”

  “If you’re afraid,” Bell said, “the Van Dorn Agency will protect you.”

  Spike’s manner softened slightly. “I appreciate that, Mr. Bell. And I don’t doubt you can give an account of yourself.” He nodded down at the Locomobile eighty feet below. “That you think to pack a towrope to cross open country tells me you’re a capable hand.”

  “And enough extra parts to build a new one to pull the old one out of a ditch,” Bell smiled back, thinking they were getting somewhere at last.

  “But you underestimate Standard Oil. They don’t murder the competition.”

  “You underestimate the danger.”

  “They don’t have to kill us. You yourself just said it. They’ve got lobbyists to trip us up in the legislature and lawyers to crush us in court.”

  “Do you k
now Big Pete Straub?” Bell asked, watching for Hopewell’s reaction.

  “Pete Straub is employed by Standard Oil’s industrial service firm. That’s their fancy name for refinery cops, strikebreakers, and labor spies. He smashed my pipe line back in Pennsylvania.”

  “I bumped into Straub only yesterday in Kansas City.”

  The older man shrugged, as if monumentally unconcerned. “Standard Oil has no monopoly on private cops and strikebreakers. You’ll find Big Pete’s bulldozing union labor in coal mines, railroads, and steel mills. For all you know, he’s on his way to Colorado to bust up the miners union. Heck, Rockefeller owns half the mines out there.”

  “He’s not in Colorado. He’s in Kansas. Last time Straub visited Kansas, independent refiners bucking the Standard turned up dead in Fort Scott and Coffeyville.”

  “Accidents,” Spike Hopewell scoffed. “Reed Riggs fell under a locomotive—drunk, if he held to pattern—and poor Albert Hill was repairing an agitator when he tumbled into a tank.” Hopewell shot Bell a challenging look. “You know what an agitator is, Mr. Detective?”

  “The agitator treats crude gasoline distillate with sulfuric acid, washes away the acid with water, neutralizes it with caustic soda, and separates the water.”

  Hopewell nodded. “You’ve done your homework. In that case, you know that the fumes’ll make you light-headed if you’re not careful. Albert tended not to be.”

  “I’m not one hundred percent sure both were accidents.”

  “I’m sure,” Hopewell fired back.

  Bell turned on him suddenly. “If you’re not afraid, why won’t you testify?”

  Hopewell folded his ample arms across his chest. “Tattling goes against my grain.”

  “Tattling? Come on, Spike, we’re not schoolboys. Your work’s at grave risk, everything you built, and maybe even your life.”