“With her sense of humor intact,” said Wally.
The duck was high up on the huge tank, near the top. This one was painted red and stuck to the metal wall with a magnet. Electrical wire attached to its rail bracket ran down the tank. Nellie had concealed the wire artfully by snugging it against the heavy copper cable that grounded the tank’s lightning rod.
“Can you disarm it without blowing us up?”
“I’ll answer that after I find what she hooked to the other end of this wire.”
The two detectives traced it down the side of the tank to its concrete footing. Wally said, “Nice job hiding the wire. Doubt our guys would have noticed if the duck weren’t bright red.”
“She’s showing off.”
The wire snaked halfway around the bottom of the tank, hugging its edges, and still paralleling the lightning rod ground wire until it veered across the oil-soaked ground and disappeared down a storm drain. Bell snapped his fingers. A husky Van Dorn Protective Services operative lumbered over with a toolbox.
“Lift the grate. Don’t disturb the wire.”
The P.S. man inserted a crowbar in a drain slot and pried the cast-iron grate out of its seat. It was very heavy. Bell gave him a hand tipping it out of the way while Wally held the wire.
Bell wrinkled his nose. “What’s that smell?” he asked.
“Oil fumes.” The blistering-hot weather caused oil, kerosene, and naphtha to vaporize. The air reeked of flammable gases.
“No, it’s worse.”
“You’re right. Like something’s rotting.”
Bell said, “I wonder how a hundred-pound woman picked up this grate. Wally, give that wire a tug.”
“I don’t know what it’s attached to yet.”
“I do. And it won’t explode.”
“Then you tug it.” He stepped away and made a show of covering his ears.
Bell hauled on the wire. It pulled easily from the storm drain. “There’s what stinks.”
The wire was wrapped around a raw chicken leg that was putrefying in the heat. Pinned to the meat was a sheet of paper. Nellie had written, “Hello, Wally. Give my regards to Isaac.”
“The lunatic is taunting you, Isaac.”
Bell looked up at the sky and pondered Wally’s remark. Dark, anvil-topped thunderheads were marching out of the west, as they had every afternoon of the heat wave. “Nellie is a lunatic,” he agreed, “but she is one smart lunatic. If she’s taunting me, she has a plan. I just don’t know what it is yet.” Eyes still on the sky, Bell recalled Edna asking what he meant by a “madman,” never realizing the assassin was a “madwoman.” His answer to her was his answer to Wally now.
“Unpredictable.”
How to catch her? Be unpredictable, too? But there was the rub. What did Nellie Matters expect?
—
The infernal heat was finally her friend.
Nellie Matters was stymied by the combined presence of the Van Dorns, the Standard Oil cops, and the city police. Isaac—of course he rallied them, who else?—had robbed her of the high ground, every tower, every cupola, every hilltop she could use for a shooting blind. Her first choice, the remote fire department watchtower on top of the highest hill on Constable Hook, had cops guarding the ladder. So much for climbing with a pretty smile and a bullet for the lone fireman on duty.
Her alternate choice, the widow’s walk on The Hook saloon, offered short-range shots at storage tanks above the city and the oil docks below. Close shots were doubly tempting with the heat cooking crazy, flight-bending thermals. But the widow’s walk would be suicide. With a score of cops and detectives congregating at the nearby refinery gates, she could not escape.
The heat was her friend. Hot weather caused oil to vaporize. It charged the air with volatile gases. So what if Isaac Bell had stolen her high ground? Nellie Matters would play fast and loose. Get ready for the unexpected, Isaac. A surprise is lurking under you. Flamboyant, theatrical, showy Nellie Matters will take the low ground.
The heat boiled thunderstorms. Thunderstorms hurled lightning.
Lightning ignited the volatile gases that collected in the tops of oil tanks. Every tank at Constable Hook bristled with lightning rods because Rockefeller’s ultramodern enterprise obeyed the laws of physics that stated that lightning blew unprotected oil tanks to Kingdom Come. Those who challenged the law were directed next door to Bayonne, where lightning strikes a few years back had ignited fires that burned for three days and left the operation a shadow of its former self.
Nellie walked down wooden stairs deep into The Hook saloon’s cellar. The walls were rough-hewn stone. Round tree trunks formed the beams that had supported the upper floors for two hundred years. The original brick sewer, disused now except to carry rainwater from the building’s gutters, led under Constable Street into the storm drains that riddled the refinery hillside.
She was not prone to reflection, much less self-examination, but she knew that something different resided in her makeup that refused to be afraid. Which wasn’t to say there weren’t things she disliked, primary among them any threat of being restrained. To crawl into a three-foot-diameter drainpipe was to be restrained in the extreme. But she had no choice.
She climbed into it with her nickel-plated side-cutting pliers and the end of the cable she had had delivered on a spool. It unrolled freely as she dragged it through the sewer. She knew she was inside the refinery fence when the brick-walled sewer connected with the modern concrete drainpipe.
Dull light poured down from a drain. She had to pass another. The third was her goal, beside the twenty-thousand-gallon naphtha tank where she had left Isaac a target duck and a rotten chicken leg. The cable grew heavy as it got longer and dragged on the concrete. As she crawled under the second drain she heard thunder. There were two things she did not want to imagine: a sudden rainstorm that would drown her or a bolt of lightning striking the cable. She reminded herself that being electrocuted by lightning was much less likely than being drowned by rain because she had wisely waited to attach the cable to a lightning rod—four lightning rods, in fact—until the end was aimed at the tank and she was out of the drainpipe. The third grate appeared. Almost there. She heard another peal of thunder, closer this time. She crawled directly under the grate. Raindrops wet her face. She lifted the end of the cable to the grate and used the pliers to fasten it to the cast iron with a twist of wire.
Then she turned around in the cramped space and started crawling back to the saloon as fast as she could. The last thing she wanted was to be wiring the other end of the copper cable to The Hook saloon’s ground wire when a thunderbolt struck the harpoon lightning rods on the roof of the widow’s walk.
—
Isaac Bell was making the rounds of his men guarding the oil docks—the huge piers on the Kill Van Kull where the refinery was loading tank ships with kerosene, gasoline, and naphtha—when a puff of icy air announced another squall sizzling in from the Upper Bay. In the middle of the tight little storm he saw one of his chartered steam launches heading for the dock. Its bow was weighted down by Grady Forrer, who stood gripping a coiled line and ignoring the rain.
Bell stepped forward, Forrer threw the line skillfully, and in a moment they were conversing in the partial shelter of a loading shed. “One of my boys was rereading the assassin reports,” Forrer bellowed over the wind, the falling rain, and the huffing of several steam engines. “He reminded me that we learned that Bill Matters was moving up the ladder when he was invited to join a Standard Oil Gang private venture.”
Thunder echoed down the tank-covered hills. A bolt of lightning lit the rooftops of the city. Another bolt blazed over the tanks above the city and landed harmlessly on a lightning rod.
“It made him one of the boys to partner up with Averell Comstock and Clyde Lapham, even though it was a sort of joke subsidiary.”
“What kind of j
oke?”
“Shares in a Constable Hook saloon.”
“Here?”
“Across from the front gate. They named it The Hook.”
Bell bolted into the storm.
Forrer raced alongside him, slipping and sliding on the oily path. “Comstock and Lapham are dead. Matters is in jail.”
“Leaving Nellie to ‘inherit.’”
—
Nellie Matters was finishing connecting the copper cable she had strung from the naphtha tank to the heavy wire that grounded the saloon’s lightning rod. The thunderstorm raging outside was the biggest in days. The sooner she could let go of the highly conductive cable, the better.
“Hey, what are you doing?”
One of the bartenders had come down the stairs they’d been specifically ordered not to.
“What does it look like I’m doing?”
“What are you, an electrician?”
Her bag was open. The Savage and its telescope were in the bottom, still wrapped in their horse blanket. But tools were out. She said, “You’re not supposed to be down here.”
He finally recognized her as “Eddie,” the nephew of the new owner.
“Sorry, Eddie. Where’s your uncle? Haven’t seen him around.”
“Went to Atlantic City to get away from this heat.”
“What are you doing?”
“My uncle wants this wired here.”
“What for?”
“Why don’t you ask him when he gets back?”
“Something fishy’s going on.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I had a job as an electrician’s helper. That’s a ground wire you’re messing with.”
He grabbed her arm. “Man, you’re skinny.”
—
Isaac Bell left Grady Forrer far behind as he ran full tilt up the refinery hill, through the front gates, and across Constable Street. He had noticed The Hook saloon. It looked like an old sea captain’s house with a widow’s walk on the roof. He shoved through the swinging doors.
The barroom was empty except for a floor manager, who shouted from behind the bar, “We’re closed!”
“Where are the cops watching the widow’s walk?”
“Home,” said the floor manager. “We don’t pay off cops to hang around— Hey, where you going?”
Bell paused at the foot of the stairs only long enough to turn the full force of his eyes on the man. “Stay there, you won’t get hurt.”
He bounded up three full stories, then into a sweltering attic, and up steep stairs onto the widow’s walk fully expecting to find the assassin aiming her rifle. But the room was empty. Nellie was not in it. Thunder pealed. He stalked to the windows and glared out at the refinery. He knew with every fiber in his being that he was close. But she was not here.
—
A derringer slug in the shoulder had knocked the fight and the curiosity out of the nosy bartender. Nellie pointed the gun in his face, fished steel handcuffs from the bottom of her tool bag, and tossed them to him. “Put one on your wrist.”
Stunned and disbelieving, he did as he was told.
“The other on the cable. Above, there, where it’s nailed to the wall.”
“Hey, wait. It’s lightning outside! It’ll electrocute me.”
“Better odds than this bullet,” she said. “Who knows if lightning will strike?”
“It hit yesterday. Twice last week.”
Nellie laughed. “Didn’t anybody ever tell you? Lightning can’t strike twice.”
“It’s the highest building on the street, higher than the tanks. It gets hit all the time. Why do you think they have four separate rods?”
“Bullet?”
He gave a terrified groan and clicked the manacle around the cable.
—
Isaac Bell racked his brain, trying to figure out what Nellie was up to now. Having the house right next to the refinery was a powerful opportunity. How would she use it if not to shoot from this brilliantly situated observatory?
Leaning a hand on the window frame as he gazed upon the storm, he felt a thick, rounded ridge on the sash. It looked and felt like it had been painted over and over for decades. But it was not made of wood like the rest of the room. Rope? No, cable. Metal cable. Still trying to winkle out Nellie’s deranged thoughts, he picked at it idly with his boot knife and saw a gleam of brass or copper. He traced it up to the ceiling, out the wall, under the gutter, and onto the roof. He flung open the window, thrust head and torso into the rain, and swung gracefully onto the sill. There he stood to his full height with his back to the four-story drop and traced the cable onto the flat roof, where it split into four separate strands. The strands went to the four corners. On each corner was a full-size bronze replica of a whaler’s harpoon.
“Nellie,” he whispered, “I underestimated you.”
Thunder pealed. Bell looked down and, as if he had conjured her with his voice, saw a slight figure hurry across Constable Street. It was her, carrying a tool bag long enough for her gun. Lightning flashed. Nellie stopped and looked up at the widow’s walk. Their eyes met.
Bell shouted with all the power in his lungs to the Van Dorns at the gate, “Get her!” A thunderclap drowned out his voice. Nellie blew him a kiss, and a bolt of lightning wider than a man plunged from the heart of the sky.
43
Ten million volts of electricity stormed down the ground wire, electrocuted the bartender manacled to it, and raged out the sewer and under Constable Street. Fumes from spilled oil were trapped in the refinery storm drains. These the lightning ignited. Fireballs shot from the drain grates. At the far end of the cable Nellie Matters had strung, the electricity jumped through the air and drilled a hole in the steel wall of a naphtha tank.
—
Isaac Bell heard the Standard Oil fire whistles chorus ghostly screams.
He staggered to his feet, vaguely aware that a thunderbolt had slammed him back through the windows. He had landed on the widow’s walk floor. He knew he hadn’t taken a direct hit; neither his skin nor his clothing was burned. But his heart was pounding, as if the immense surge of electricity passing so near had almost stopped it. His lungs felt half-paralyzed, hardly able to pump air, until he collected his spirit and demanded they get back on the job.
His vision cleared. He saw columns of flame fringed with black smoke.
In the refinery yard, fireballs danced jigs among the tanks.
Bell scanned the chaos below for signs of Nellie and quickly realized that what looked like chaos was orderly chaos. Thanks to the Van Dorn advance warning, the men running up and down Constable Street and dashing in and out of the refinery gates were moving with purpose. The company’s firemen hurried through the yards, ringing bells and dragging hose. Blazing oil overflowed from a burning tank. Workmen moved swiftly to pump oil from tanks near the fire to distant empty tanks and into barges on the waterfront. Others dug trenches to divert burning oil from vulnerable tanks.
Nellie was gone. But Bell was convinced that she would not run from the fires she had set. She would stay and finish what she had started. She would not find it easy. Prepared for the battle, the Constable Hook refinery she was trying to destroy was the best defended in the world. It was fighting for its life but not yet desperate.
If Bell knew Nellie, that would not discourage her. The question was how would one woman alone continue to attack? He stayed on his widow’s walk vantage point to find the answer.
A tank roof blew. Thick crude oil bubbled out. The side walls collapsed and a river of crude rushed down the hill. The black torrent split where the slope flattened. Some of it collected, forming a half-acre black lake. Shimmering in the heat, it roared spontaneously into flames. Globs of flaming tar flew in the air and landed on tank roofs. Firemen climbed the tanks with shovels and hoses. They ex
tinguished the fires on all but one. It ignited with a roar and gushed smoke that the flames sucked in and flung at the sky.
The crude that continued to rush down the hill was flowing toward the waterfront. The river split again suddenly and the main branch rampaged onto the docks, caught fire, and ignited stacks of case oil. Mooring lines and tug hawsers were set alight, and as the flames consumed them, they parted, sending ships and workboats adrift on a tide of burning oil. The ships caught fire and burned swiftly. Flames leaped up rigging faster than sailors could climb. Tugboats raced to the rescue and batted flames down with torrents from their fire nozzles.
The second stream of oil veered below the docks and splashed against a three-story hotel and restaurant on a pier in the Kill with a roof board that read:
GOOD NEWS CAFÉ
ROW, FISH, EAT DINNER, AND DRINK A SOCIAL GLASS
The oil ignited. Flame flashed up the restaurant’s wooden walls. A man and woman in cook whites ran out lugging a cash register and a glass case of cigars. The burning oil encircled the building and closed in on the couple from both sides. They ran toward the water on a path swiftly narrowing. The fire chased them onto the dock to the water’s edge, where they teetered, clutching their rescued treasures.
If I hadn’t missed my shot at Nellie Matters, Bell thought, these people would be safe.
A B&O railroad tugboat swooped against the dock. Deckhands pulled them aboard. But the burning oil chasing them splashed off the dock onto the water. Floating, still burning, it surrounded the tugboat with a ring of fire. Six tugs steamed to its aid, fire nozzles pumping water to confine the burning oil while their stricken sister steamed away and wetting down one another’s wheelhouses to cool paint bubbling in the heat. The tugs formed a cordon, spraying to prevent the fire from spreading on the water to nearby ships and piers.
After Isaac Bell saw the burning oil encircle the restaurant, and then the couple, and then the tug, he suddenly realized how Nellie Matters would attack next. He turned around and looked up the hill. The slope was a shallow incline and The Hook saloon was tall. He climbed out the window again and onto the roof of the widow’s walk. From that vantage he could see over the city’s tenement roofs. The swiftly expanding oil refinery had continued building higher up the hill. Tank yards and kerosene and gasoline stills were everywhere, below, around, and up behind the city.