O’Shay leaned over him. Paddy the Rat saw a glint of steel. A needle burst of pain exploded in his right eye. He knew instantly what O’Shay had done to him and he cried out in despair.

“Open your hand!” said O’Shay.

When he did not, the steel pricked his remaining eye. “You’ll lose this one, too, if you don’t open your hand.”

Paddy the Rat opened his hand. He quivered as he felt O’Shay press something round and terrible into his palm and close his fingers around it almost gently. “Give this to Tommy.”

O’SHAY LEFT THE BOY whimpering in the alley and retraced his steps to 39th Street. He stood in the shadows, still as a statue, until he was sure the little weasel didn’t have a partner watching. Then he continued east under the Sixth Avenue El, checked his back, walked to Fifth Avenue, and turned downtown, still studying reflections in windows.

A mustachioed Irish cop directing traffic shouted at a freight wagon to stop so the well-dressed gentleman could cross 34th Street. Doormen—whose blue-and-gold uniforms would have done an all-big-gun dreadnought’s captain proud—scrambled when they saw him coming.

O’Shay returned their crisp salutes and marched into the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

10

ISAAC BELL SPOTTED JOHN SCULLY’S RED HANDKERCHIEF tied to a hedge. He swung the Locomobile into the narrow road it marked, eased up on the accelerator pedal for the first time since he left Weehawken, and closed the cutout, which quieted the thunderous exhaust to a hollow mutter.

He steered up a steep hill and drove a mile through fallow farm fields that awaited spring planting. The resourceful Scully had procured a milk-can collection truck somewhere, exactly the sort of vehicle that would not look out of place on New Jersey’s farm roads. Bell eased quietly alongside it so the Locomobile could not be seen from the road. Then he heaved his golf bag off the passenger seat and carried it to the hillcrest where the Van Dorn detective lay flat on brown grass.

The laconic loner was a short, round man with a moon face who could pass for a trusted colleague of preachers, shopkeepers, safe-crackers, or murderers. Thirty pounds of fat disguised slabs of rock-hard muscle, and his diffident smile concealed a mind quicker than a bear trap. He was training field glasses on a house down the hill. Smoke rose from the kitchen chimney. A big Marmon touring car was parked outside, a powerful machine covered in mud and dust.

“What’s in the bag?” Scully greeted Bell.

“Couple of five irons,” Bell grinned, removing a pair of humpback twelve-gauge Browning Auto-5 shotguns. “How many in the house?”

“All three.”

“Anyone living there?”

“No smoke before they drove up.”

Bell nodded, satisfied that no innocents would be caught in a cross fire. Scully passed him the field glasses. He studied the house and the automobile. “Is that the Marmon they stole in Ohio?”

“Could be another. They’re partial to Marmons.”