Текст книги "The Wrecker"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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Текущая страница: 23 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

“They won’t go easy on you.”

“They’ll have to catch me first,” said Dow. He offered his hand.

The Wrecker took it gravely, imparting a sense of ceremony. He was not one bit emotionally moved but he was relieved. Whatever strange codes the assassin lived by, Dow would detonate the explosives if it took the last breath in his body.

“I’ll cover you,” he told Dow. “Give me your rifle. I’ll hold them off as long as I’ve got ammunition.”

He would make his final escape when the flood swept the Cascade Canyon Bridge into the gorge. If his luck held, he would be the last man across it.

55

ABBOTT SCRAMBLED ALONGSIDE BELL WHEN THE WRECKER’S gang stopped shooting.

“Isaac, he’s got a huge lake up there impounded behind a dam. I’m thinking if he were to blow it, he’d flood the bridge.”

Bell sent four detectives to track the fleeing gunmen through the woods. He settled three wounded men as best he could beside the road and made sure that at least one could defend them in case the attackers came back. There were two dead horses in the road. The rest had bolted. Bell started running up the rutted track, with Abbott and Dashwood hot on his heels.

“That’s the camp ahead,” called Abbott.

Just as the road opened up at the lumber camp, withering rifle fire sent them diving behind trees.

“It’s a diversion,” said Bell. “So he can blow the dam.”

They emptied their Winchesters in the direction of the attack. The shooting stopped, and they pressed on, drawing their sidearms.

CROUCHED AT THE BASE of the log dam, soaked by the spray of the water tumbling fifty feet to the river beside him, Philip Dow knew his life was over when the Winchesters stopped booming. Kincaid had held off the detectives as long as he could.

The killer had no regrets.

He’d stayed loyal to his principles. And he’d relieved the world of a fair number of plutocrats, aristocrats, and other rats. But he knew when it was time to call it quits. All he had to do to end with honor was to finish this one last job. Blow the dam before the Van Dorns killed him. Or caught him alive, which would be worse than dying. Except first, before he lit the fuse and took the Big Jump, he wanted to send a few more rats ahead of him.

Three of them charged out of the woods, pistols in hand. They would mob him the instant he attacked. This was a bomb job, and, fortunately, he had ample bomb makings already laid in the dam. He pulled a bundle of six sticks of gelignite from its nest between two logs. Then he snipped off a short length from the fuse and carefully removed one of detonators.

The detectives spotted him. He heard their shouts faintly over the roar of the water. They came running, slipping and sliding on the wet logs of the skid. He had only seconds. With fingers as steady as sculpted stone, he attached the short fuse to the detonator and jammed the detonator inside the gelignite bundle. He blocked the spray with his body, took a dry match and striker from their corked bottle, and touched the flame to the fuse. Then he held the six sticks behind his back and walked rapidly toward the detectives.

“Drop your gun!” they shouted.

Dow raised his empty hand to the sky.

“Show your hand!”

They drew beads on him. He kept walking. The range was still long for pistols.

Isaac Bell fired his Browning and hit Dow in the shoulder.

So concentrated was Dow’s mind on getting close to the detectives, he barely felt the light-caliber, underpowered slug. He did not stop, but turned that shoulder toward them and swung the explosives behind him, straightening his arm to catapult the bomb high and far. One of the detectives sprinted ahead of the others, raising a large, shiny revolver. It was big enough to stop him. If a running man could possibly hit a target at that distance.

“Get back, Dash!” Bell shouted. “He’s got something.”

Dow wound up to hurl the gelignite. The man Bell called Dash stopped dead and thrust his gun forward. He took deliberate aim. Then he made a fist with his empty hand and crossed his chest, which shielded his heart and lungs and steadied his weapon. Dow braced for the bullet. Dash was a man who knew how to shoot.

The heavy slug hit Dow squarely, staggering him before he could hurl the bomb. Everything within Dow’s range of vision stood still. The only sound was the roar of the water cascading over the dam. He remembered that he hadn’t yet lit the fuse to the charge that would blow the dam. The only fuse he’d lit was the one burning toward the gelignite in his hand. How could he call it quits if he didn’t finish the job?

His legs and arms felt like wood. But he summoned all his strength to turn his back to the guns and shamble toward the dam.

“Dash! Get out of the way!”

They saw immediately what Dow was doing. All three opened fire. He took a slug in his shoulder and another in his back. One in the back of his leg, and he started to go down. But those that hit him propelled him forward. He fell against the dam. He was hunched over the gelignite, pressing it with his chest to the wet logs, when he saw the flame jump from the fuse to the detonator. With a microsecond left to live, he knew he had finished the job and taken a squad of Van Dorn rats with him.

56

ISAAC BELL SEIZED JAMES DASHWOOD BY THE SCRUFF OF HIS neck and threw him to Archie Abbott, who caught him on the run and whirled him farther up the riverbank like a lateral pass. He was reaching for Bell’s hand when the bomb exploded. Twenty paces, less than a hundred feet, separated them from the blast. The shock wave crossed that distance in an instant, and the two friends saw a kaleidoscope of spinning trees as it slammed them off their feet and threw them after Dashwood. Ears ringing, they scrambled higher up the slope in an attempt as desperate as it was hopeless to escape the wall of water that they knew would burst through the exploded dam.

WHEN THE WRECKER HEARD the explosion, he knew that something had gone wrong. It was not loud enough. Not all the gelignite had detonated. He paused in his flight at a spot in the road where he could see the river down below in the canyon and watched anxiously for the moving wall of water the fallen dam would release. The river was rising, the water was definitely higher, but it was not what he expected, and he feared the worst. The partial explosion had only damaged the dam, not destroyed it.

Hoping it had at least killed many detectives, he started back down the road, confident that eventually the dam would collapse and send a flood smashing into the bridge, whether it took minutes or hours. Suddenly, he heard the sound of a motorcar-his Thomas Flyer-coming up the road.

His face lit darkly with a pleased smile. The Van Dorns must have repaired the flat tire. Kind of them. Pistol in one hand, knife in the other, he quickly chose a spot where particularly deep ruts would force the car to slow.

“IT’S A MIRACLE,” said Abbott.

“A brief miracle,” Bell answered.

A torrent of water as big around as an ox was blasting through the hole the assassin’s bomb had blown in the log-and-boulder dam. But the bomb Philip Dow had tried to kill them with hadn’t detonated the rest of the charge, and the dam had held. At least for the moment.

Bell surveyed the damage, trying to calculate how long the dam would last. A cataract was pouring over the top, and jets of water were blasting like fire hoses through cracks in the face.

Abbott said, “Dash, how’d you learn to shoot like that?”

“My mother wouldn’t let me join the Van Dorns until she taught me.”

“Your mother-”

“She rode with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show when she was young.”

Bell said, “You can tell your mother you saved our bacon. And maybe the bridge. Hopefully, that coal train will hold it … What’s the matter, Archie?”

Abbott looked suddenly alarmed. “But that was Kincaid’s idea.”

“What idea?”

“To stabilize the bridge with down pressure. Kincaid said they did it once in Turkey. Seemed to work.”

“Kincaid has never done a thing in his life without purpose,” said Bell.

“But Mowery and the other engineers wouldn’t have allowed it if the weight of the train wouldn’t help. I’d guess he knew the jig was up when he saw me ride up here. So he acted helpful to throw off suspicion.”

“I’ve got to get down there right now.”

“The horses scattered,” said Abbott. “But there are mules in the stables.”

Bell looked around for a better way. Mules trained to pull lumber carts would never ride them to the bridge in time to undo whatever the Wrecker had set in motion with the coal train.

His eye fell on a dugout canoe on the riverbank. The water had already risen to it and was tugging at the front end. “We’ll take the Hell’s Bottom Flyer!”

“What?”

“The dugout canoe. We’ll ride it to the bridge.”

They manhandled the heavy, hollowed-out log on its side to spill out the rainwater.

“On the jump! Grab those paddles!”

They pushed the canoe into the river and held it alongside the bank. Bell climbed in front, ahead of the crosspiece the lumberjacks had stiffened it with, and readied his paddle. “Get in!”

“Hold your horses, Isaac,” Abbott cautioned. “This is insane. We’ll drown.”

“Amorous lumberjacks have survived the run for years. Get in.”

“When that dam lets loose, it’ll sweep a tidal wave down the river that will wash over this canoe like a matchstick.”

Bell looked back at the dam. The torrent that gushed from the hole that Dow had blown in the bottom was tearing at the edges.

“That hole’s getting larger,” said Abbott. “See the logs above it sagging?”

“He’s right,” said Dash. “It could collapse any minute.”

“You’re both right,” Bell said. “I can’t risk your lives. Catch up when you can.”

“Isaac!”

Bell shoved off from the bank. Abbott lunged to grab the back of the canoe. The current jerked it into the middle of the narrow torrent.

“I’ll meet you down there!” Bell called, paddling furiously to keep the current from smashing him into a rock. “Enjoy the mules.”

The speed took him by surprise. The raging current drove the canoe faster than any horse and most automobiles. Hurtling along at this rate, he would be under the Cascade Canyon Bridge in twenty minutes.

If he didn’t drown.

The banks were steep, the river narrow and studded with boulders. Fallen trees jutted into it. He overtook whole cut trunks floating along almost entirely submerged. The little canoe rode up on one of them, and he started to overturn in a flash. He threw his weight the other way to right it. Then a tree that had been ripped from the bank by the flood rolled ponderously beside him, splaying the air with giant roots that reached for the canoe like tentacles. He fended them off with the paddle, then dug deep in the water, trying to outrun the flailing monster. A root whipped him in the face and nearly threw him out of the canoe.

Paddling for his life, he pulled ahead of the rolling tree, dodged another boulder, slid between two more, and banged over a flat rock hidden under the surface. Then the canyon walls closed in, and deep water tore between them in a long, relatively straight run of several miles. This was better, and Bell began to think he might make it to the bridge intact.

He looked back repeatedly. No sign that the dam had burst.

The straight run ended in a series of sharp bends. The bends caused whirlpools that spun the canoe in circles that one man, in the front of the canoe, could not control. Bell concentrated instead on keeping the canoe upright and fending off rocks that were suddenly jumping out of nowhere. Floating out of the third bend backward, he looked over his shoulder to see where he was going. The canyon walls had spread wider apart, and the water had climbed onto a shallow bank that produced rock-strewn rapids. The current thrust him at the rapids. He paddled with all his strength to straighten out the canoe and head toward the deeper water of the original bed.

But as soon as he had righted himself, he heard an ominous mutter that grew swiftly to a loud rumble. It sounded like a wall of water was rampaging after him. He looked behind him, expecting the worst. But the river was no wilder than before, which was wild enough. The dam, miles behind, was apparently still holding. But the rumble grew louder. Suddenly, Bell realized that the sound echoing off the steep canyon walls came from around the bend aheadof him.

The current sluiced him through the bend in the river.

He caught a glimpse of ropes tied to the trees on the bank. Then his eyes were riveted on what appeared to be a line across the river. But it was not a line. It was the clear break in the water where the river disappeared over a waterfall.

The lumberjacks must have tied the ropes to hold when they climbed out of their canoes to carry them around the falls. Portage was not an option for Isaac Bell. The current had already accelerated and was throwing his canoe at the falls at thirty miles per hour.

The rains saved him. At low water, he would be dead, smashed to splinters on the rocks. The high water shortened the fall and cushioned his landing.

He was still afloat, still flying along high and dry, when suddenly he was bearing down on an island-sized boulder that split the river in half. He dug in his paddle to steer around it. The stream rejoined on the other side of the boulder in a violent leap of spray and foam that battered the canoe on both sides.

Then, against the darkening sky, he saw the airy arch and crisp straight line of the Cascade Canyon Bridge joining the two sides of the gorge. It was strange that the clearest description of its simple beauty was from the Wrecker himself: it soared. It was hard to believe that any structure so large could look so light or span such a long distance. The coal train parked in the middle of it was fifty cars long and yet there were empty stretches of track in front and in back of it.

But the Wrecker who so artfully described the Cascade Canyon Bridge was the man who would destroy it. Surely the Wrecker knew a secret about the coal train that would gain him control of every major railroad in the country. Every act that Bell had seen him commit, every crime the Wrecker had perpetrated, every innocent he had killed, told him that Charles Kincaid had tricked the Southern Pacific Company into parking that coal train on the bridge for a reason that would serve his monstrous ambition and vicious dreams.

Moments later, Isaac Bell saw the lights of the town clustered along the bank under the bridge. He tried to paddle to shore, but it proved futile. The heavy canoe was firmly in the grip of the river. He raced by the outskirts of the town, and as the river narrowed and accelerated he saw electric lights blazing on the piers and on the coffer dams and caissons built around them. A thousand men and a hundred machines were teamed to shore up the flow deflectors with tons of rock and raise the sides of the coffer dams with massive timbers to keep above the rising water.

The river was sweeping Bell’s canoe between the piers. No one noticed him coming, for the canoe looked little different than the many dark logs racing low in the water. Just as he thought he would be swept under the bridge and into the night, the canyon walls narrowed the river. Currents leaped crazily.

The canoe was hurled sideways toward the pier farthest from town. It jumped over a tongue of stone jetty, spun wildly, and crashed against the wooden coffer dam. Fifty exhausted carpenters spiking planks to the timber frame looked up blearily as Bell stepped briskly from the canoe and marched across the gangplank that connected the coffer dam to the stone pier it surrounded.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” Bell said, not pausing to answer cries of “Who?” and “Where?”

He spied a steel ladder affixed to the stone and started up it rapidly, calling an urgent warning down to the men below. “There’s a flood crest coming down the river any minute. Build higher, and be ready to run for it.”

Sixty feet above the water, the stone stopped and the steel began. The pillar consisted of a square framework bolstered with triangles of girders, and it too had ladders. For painting, he presumed. From where he was standing on the top stones, the pillar looked to be as tall as the Singer Building he had seen in New York City, which Abbott once had boasted was six hundred feet tall. Hoping that this was a case of a confusing perspective, Bell reached for the bottom rung.

He felt the bridge trembling the instant he touched the ladder. It seemed to be shaking harder than when he’d run across it hours earlier. But not much harder. Was the coal train having the promised effect? Was it stabilizing the bridge? Baffled by the Wrecker’s intentions, Bell climbed faster.

His wounded forearm where Dow had shot him was beginning to throb. He was less concerned by the pain, which was growing sharper, than by what it meant. He had a long way to go to the top of the bridge and needed all four limbs in working order. The higher he climbed, the shakier the bridge felt.

How much worse would it shake without the added weight?

He smelled smoke as he neared the top, which seemed odd since there were no trains running on the bridge. At last, the ladder topped out on a catwalk that traversed the steel arch and led to a shorter ladder to the deck. He hauled himself up the last few rungs and swung his legs onto the deck, where he found himself in the narrow space between the coal train and the open edge. His head was reeling with the effort, and he leaned over to rest, bracing himself with his hand on the gondola.

He jerked his hand back with a startled shout of pain.

The steel side of the gondola was hot-so hot it burned his skin.

Bell ran to the next gondola and touched it tentatively. It was hot, too. And now he smelled the smoke again, and he realized in a flash the diabolic trick the Wrecker had pulled. So-called down pressure was stabilizing the bridge as he had promised. But the vibrations from the water pounding the weakened piers were shaking the bridge. In turn, the bridge was shaking the train, which was shaking the coal. Deep inside fifty coal cars, thousands of pieces of coal were rubbing against each other and creating friction. Friction made heat, like a frontiersman rubbing two sticks to start a fire.

Even as Bell realized the perverted genius of Kincaid’s scheme, the coal ignited. A dozen small sparks became a hundred flames. Soon, a thousand fires would mushroom through the coal. The entire train was smouldering on the middle of the bridge. Any second, the wooden crossties under the train would catch fire.

He had to move the train off the bridge.

The staging yard was jammed with stranded trains and locomotives. But with no work to do, none of the engines had steam up. Bell spotted the big black Baldwin attached to Hennessy’s special. It always had steam up, to heat and light the Pullmans and the private cars and to be ready to move at the railroad president’s whim.

Bell ran to it. Every brakeman and yardman he saw he ordered to throw switches to direct the Old Man’s locomotive to the bridge. Hennessy himself, looking frail in shirtsleeves, was standing next to the Baldwin. He was breathing hard and leaning on a fireman’s scoop.

“Where’s your train crew?” Bell asked.

“I was keeping up steam before they were born. Sent every hand below to work on the coffer dams. Just had to catch my breath. Something’s wrong. What do I smell? Is that fire on the bridge?”

“The coal has ignited. Uncouple your engine. I’ll pull the train off.”

With Hennessy directing brake– and yardmen, who ran around throwing switches, Bell drove the Baldwin off the special, ran it forward, then backed it onto the bridge. Partway across, he coupled onto the lead coal gondola, while every man still in the yard worked to switch a path of rails to an isolated siding where the burning train could be safely moved.

Bell shoved the Johnson bar forward and notched the throttle ahead, feeding steam to the pistons. This was the hard part. He had spent enough time in the cab to know how to drive locomotives, but driving and pulling fifty heavy gondolas were two different propositions. The wheels spun, the train did not move. He remembered the sand valve, which spread sand under the wheels to improve adhesion, and found its lever. Smoke was billowing from the gondolas now, and he saw flames start to shoot up. He reached for the throttle to try again.

Suddenly, the Wrecker spoke through the side window.

“With what will you replace the weight?” he asked mockingly. “More coal?”

57

“BALLAST WOULD HOLD THE BRIDGE, BUT SOMEHOW SIGNALS GOT crossed. Hennessy ordered track ballast. He kept getting coal. I wonder how that happened.”

The Wrecker swung into the cab through the open back and whipped a knife from his boot.

Suspecting a backup weapon identical to the sword he had ruined, Bell swiftly drew his Browning and pulled the trigger. But the automatic had suffered one too many douses of mud and water. It jammed. He heard the Wrecker’s knife click. The telescoping blade flew out and struck him before he could move in the confined space.

It was no flesh wound, but a terrible thrust below Bell’s shoulder. Stunned, wondering if the sword had punctured his lung, Bell reached under his jacket. He felt warm blood on his hand. He couldn’t focus his eyes. The Wrecker was standing over him, and Bell was surprised to discover that he had collapsed to the footplate.

58

CHARLES KINCAID DREW HIS SWORD BACK TO RUN ISAAC BELL through his heart.

“I was not unaware of my weapon’s weakness,” he said. “It wasn’t made to stand up to a beat. So I always carry an extra.”

“So do I,” said Bell. He tugged from an inside pocket Kincaid’s own derringer, which he had picked up from the tracks earlier. It was slippery with his blood, sliding in his hand. The shock of the wound was making him see double, fading in and out of awareness. He gathered his spirit, focused like a headlight on Kincaid’s broad chest, and fired.

Kincaid stepped back with a look of disbelief. He dropped his sword. Rage twisted his handsome features as he fell backward off the locomotive to the tracks.

Bell tried to stand. He was having difficulty getting his legs under him. From far below, beneath the bridge, he heard cries of alarm. A steam whistle on a barge crane set up a desperate scream. He dragged himself to the back of the cab. From there, he saw what was terrifying the men working on the piers. Upstream, the Wrecker’s dam had broken at last. The flood crest was on the march.

An angry white wave, tall as a house and studded with cut logs and whole trees, filled the river from shore to shore. Shouting men struggled to move the electric dynamos above the flood. A barge overturned. The work lights went dark.

Bell grabbed onto the Johnson bar and fought to regain his feet. The bridge was shaking the locomotive. Flames were shooting skyward from the coal cars. If he moved the burning train, he would save the bridge from the fire. But even dead on the tracks, the Wrecker would have his way. If Bell moved the train, he would remove the stabilizing weight, and the bridge would collapse from the scouring floodwater. If he didn’t move the train, the bridge would burn. Already he smelled burning creosote as the crossties under the train began to smoulder.

The only solution was a compromise.

Bell reversed the Johnson bar, notched open the throttle, and backed the train to the edge of the bridge. Holding tight to handrails, he climbed down painfully. A yard foreman came running, casting fear-filled eyes on the burning train. “We’re opening switches, mister, so you can move her onto a siding out of the way.”

“No, I need tools. Get me a crowbar and a spike puller.”

“We gotta shunt her aside before she sets off the whole yard.”

“Leave the train right here,” Bell ordered calmly. “I will need it in a moment. Now, please get me those tools.”

The foreman ran off and returned in a moment. Bell took the spike puller and the heavy crowbar and shambled across the bridge as fast as the hole in his chest would let him. On the way, he passed the Wrecker’s still form huddled between the rails. The train had passed clean over him but not mauled his body. Bell kept going almost to the far side. There he crouched down and began prying spikes out of the fishplates that held the rails on the upstream side of the bridge.

He could feel the bridge shaking violently now that the train was off it. A glance below showed the Cascade Canyon River raging like an ocean in a hurricane. Mind reeling from a lack of oxygen and lost blood, he felt himself getting giddy as he desperately pried up spike after spike.

Who’s the Wrecker now? he thought. The tables were turned. Isaac Bell, chief investigator for the Van Dorn Detective Agency, was battling with every ounce of his failing strength to derail a train.

It was getting harder to breathe, and he could see a bubble of blood rising and falling from the wound in his chest. If Kincaid’s sword had punctured his chest cavity and he didn’t get help soon, air would fill it and collapse his lung. But he had to free an entire length of rail first.

THE WRECKER WAS NOT as grievously wounded as Bell, but he was equally determined. He had regained consciousness as Bell shambled past with a spike puller. Now, ignoring a bullet lodged between two ribs, he was running, doubled over, as fast as he could toward the coal train. The detective’s spike puller told him all he had to know. Bell meant to derail the burning train into the river to divert floodwater from the weakened piers.

He reached the locomotive, dragged himself up to the cab, and shoveled several scoops of coal into the firebox.

“Hey, what are you doing?” shouted a trainman, climbing the ladder to the cab. “Mr. Bell said to leave the train here.”

Kincaid drew the long-barreled revolver he had taken from his Thomas Flyer and shot the man. Then he set the locomotive steaming ahead with a sure hand on the throttle and sand valve. The drive wheels bit smoothly, the couplers unslacked, and the locomotive drew the coal cars onto the bridge. The Wrecker saw the probing white beam of the headlight fall on Isaac Bell, who was struggling to loosen the rail.

THE HEAVY COAL TRAIN dampened the vibrations shaking the bridge. Feeling the difference, Bell looked up into the blinding beam of a locomotive headlamp and knew instantly that his derringer shot had not killed Charles Kincaid.

The locomotive was bearing down on him. He felt its wheels grinding the rails. Now he saw Kincaid thrust his head from the cab window, his face a mask of hatred. His mouth spread in a ghastly grin of triumph, and Bell heard the steam huff harder as the Wrecker opened the throttle.

Bell ripped the final spike out of its crosstie. Then he hurled his weight against the crowbar, battling with fading strength to shift the loosened rail before Kincaid ran him over.

Bell felt the front truck wheels roll onto his rail. The weight of the engine was holding it down. Summoning his last strength, he moved it the vital “one inch between here and eternity.”

The locomotive slipped off the rails and slammed onto the ties. Bell saw the Wrecker with his hand on the throttle, saw his triumph turn to despair as he realized that he was about to drag the burning train off the bridge and down to the river.

As Bell turned and ran, the V-shaped engine pilot on the front of the locomotive struck him. Like a fly swatted by a giant, he tumbled ahead of the locomotive and over the edge of the deck before catching himself on a girder. Wedged in the steelwork, Isaac Bell watched the locomotive crash over the side. It was a long, long way down, and for a moment the entire train seemed suspended in the air.

The locomotive and the string of cars thundered into the river with a splash that deluged the banks. Stream and smoke billowed. Even submerged, the fire continued to glow cherry red in the gondolas. But the cars were heaped in a tight string across the riverbed like the closely bunched islands of a barrier beach that protected the mainland from the power of the ocean. Floodwater tumbled over and around them, its force dissipated, its impact diminished.

The Cascade Canyon Bridge stopped shaking. The fallen train had diverted the flood. And as Isaac Bell passed in and out of consciousness, he saw the electric work lights blaze to life again as bargeloads of railroad men swarmed back into the caissons to buttress the piers.

59

BRAVING A BLIZZARD, CROWDS GATHERED BEFORE A GRAYSTONE mansion at Thirty-seventh Street and Park Avenue to watch the guests arrive at thewedding of 1908’s winter season: the union of a son of Old New York and the daughter of a shirtsleeve railroad titan. Those observing a handsome couple crossing the snowy sidewalk to mount the steps of the mansion assumed that the tall, impeccably dressed gentleman with the golden mustache was gripping the arm of the beautiful woman at his side so she would not slip on the ice. The opposite was true, but no one heard Isaac Bell say to Marion Morgan, “Who needs a walking stick when he has a strong woman to lean on?”

“A detective recovering from a punctured lung …”

“Only slightly. Never would have made it, otherwise.”

“… nearly bleeding to death, infection, and pneumonia, is who.”

“If that cameraman takes my picture, I’ll shoot him.”

“Don’t worry. I told him that Picture Worldwould fire him and throw his family in the street if he points it anywhere near you. Do you have the ring?”

“In my vest pocket.”

“Hold tight, darling, here come the steps.”

They made it, Bell pale with effort. Butlers and footmen ushered them inside. Marion gasped at the flowers arrayed through the foyer and up the grand staircase. “Sweet peas, roses, and cherry blossoms! Where did they get them?”

“Anywhere it’s spring beside the father of the bride’s railroad tracks.”

The father of the bride hurried up to greet them. Osgood Hennessy was dressed in a pearl-gray morning coat with a rose boutonniere. Bell thought he looked a little lost without Mrs. Comden at his side and grateful for a friendly face. “Marion, I’m so glad you came all the way from San Francisco. And you, Isaac, up already and full of go.”