A steer jumped over the back of another and landed on the fence, knocking over a section. As fencing fell, animals crowded through the opening, leveling another section and then another, streaming in every direction, into the rail yard, onto a road to Weehawken, and toward the piers behind Bell. In seconds, hundreds of beef cattle were milling between him and Frost. Frost shoved through them, shouting and firing a gun he had pulled from his coat.
Bell was surrounded by horn-clashing, galloping animals. He attempted to clear a space by firing in the air. But for every fear-maddened creature that shied from the gunfire, another charged straight at him. He slipped on the dung-slicked cobblestones. A heel went out from under him, and he almost lost his footing. If he went down, he would be trampled to a pulp. An enormous whiteface steer came at him – a Texas Longhorn – Hereford crossbreed he knew well from his years in the West. Ordinarily more docile than they looked, this one was knocking smaller cows out of its way like bowling pins.
Bell holstered his pistol to free his hands. Seeing nothing to lose and his life to gain if he could only get out of the herd, he jumped with lightning speed, grabbing the whiteface’s horns with both hands and twisting himself over its head and onto its back. He clamped his knees with all his strength, grabbed the shaggy tuft between its horns with a steel fist, whipped off his flying helmet, and waved it like a bronco rider’s.
The frightened bucking steer kicked its legs into a frantic gallop, shoved through the writhing mob, leaped a tumbled length of fence, and thundered back into the now empty stockyard. Bell tumbled off and staggered to his feet. Harry Frost was nowhere to be seen.
He scoured the acres of cobblestoned corrals for Frost’s trampled body, peered into sheds and under the elevated office. He had no illusions about his own escape: he had been extremely lucky, and it was highly unlikely that Frost had been as fortunate. But he found no body, or even a dropped weapon or a torn coat or a mangled hat. It was as if the murderer had taken wing.
He kept hunting, as the stockmen began returning from the piers, the rail yards, and the city of Weehawken, driving captured steers that shambled into the yards too exhausted to pose any threat. Evening shadows cast by the stone cliffs of the Palisades were growing long when the Van Dorn detective stumbled upon a curved brick structure a few inches below the cobblestones. It was a circle of brick and mortar a full six feet in diameter, partly covered by a thick cast-iron disk. He knelt to inspect the disk. It had a date in raised numbers: 1877.
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.”