He noticed that their eyes kept shifting toward a tall redheaded man standing nearby in a sack suit and bowler. A suspect? Did they think that Harry Frost had dyed his hair red, lost seventy pounds, and gained two inches? The fellow looked like a Fifth Avenue swell. But he had thin white lines of a boxer’s scarring on his brow. And his eyes were busy, looking everywhere even as he pretended not to.

Not a suspect, Frost surmised. Another goddamned Van Dorn—the chief of their squad, from the way the others were looking to him. Suddenly Frost realized who the swell was—Archibald Angel Abbott IV. No wonder they hadn’t bothered disguising him as a mechanician.

Archibald Angel Abbott IV was too well known to work covertly. He had always been a big deal in the blue-blooded society set—New York’s most eligible bachelor. Then the newspapers had made him famous when he married the daughter of the railroad tycoon Osgood Hennessy. She stood to inherit it all. Frost wondered why the hell Abbott hadn’t traded his guns in for golf clubs.

That question pierced Harry Frost’s seething skull like a lightning bolt.

Archibald Abbott had the right idea, continuing to work for the Van Dorn Detective Agency for a measly few bucks after he married rich. Retiring was a mug’s game. Harry Frost had learned that too late. He had lost his edge. From the time he was eight years old, Harry Frost had dreamed of not having to work to survive. He had achieved his dream. And what did it get him? Being made a monkey of. That was how he had been taken by Josephine and Marco—bunco artists he would have smoked in a flash in the old days.

Frost fingered his weapons. Josephine still had her head in the motor. He could seize her by the throat, let her see that it was him, then cut her heart out. But the awful truth was that he could not get near her. There were too many Van Dorns masquerading as mechanicians. He couldn’t kill them all. They would gun him down first. He was not afraid to die. But he was damned if he would die in vain.

He needed help.

He hurried back to the train terminal and boarded an electric to Flatbush, where he entered a Brooklyn savings bank. Fleeing poverty, riding the rails as a child, begging for pennies for food, he had vowed never to be caught short anywhere ever again. As he flourished—as he plowed the profits of the distribution empire into stocks that returned fortunes—he had banked money in states across the continent.

He withdrew three thousand dollars from an account that held twenty. The bank manager counted it out personally in his private office. After Frost picked it up, the banker casually laid on his desk a wanted poster similar to those Frost had seen at the racetrack.