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Railroad tracks skirted the bustling complex. But the nearest town with a passenger station was ten miles away. Investors were selling stock to build an electric trolley.
The refinery reeked of gasoline.
The assassin could smell it seven hundred yards away.
—
A red Locomobile blazed across the Kansas plain, bright as fire and pluming dust.
Spike Hopewell saw it coming and broke into a broad smile despite his troubles. The auto and the speed fiend driving like a whirlwind were vivid proof that gasoline—once a notorious refining impurity that exploded kerosene lamps in people’s faces—was the fuel of the future.
His brand-new refinery was making oceans of the stuff, boiling sixteen gallons of gasoline off every barrel of Kansas crude. Fifty thousand gallons and just getting started. If only he could ship it to market.
—
The assassin waited for a breath of wind to clear the smoke.
You could not ignore wind at long range. You had to calculate exactly how much it would deflect a bullet and you had to refine your calculations as impetus slowed and gravity took its toll. But you couldn’t shoot what you couldn’t see. The old oil man was a murky presence in the telescope sight, obscured by the smoke that rose thick and black from a hundred engine boilers and refinery furnaces.
Hopewell stopped pacing, planted his hands on the railing, and stared intently.
A breeze stirred. The smoke thinned.
His head crystallized in the powerful glass.
Schooled in anatomy, the assassin pictured bone and connecting fibers of tendon and muscle and nerve under his target’s skin. The brain stem was an inch wide. To sever it was to drop a man instantly.
Spike Hopewell moved abruptly. He turned toward the ladder that rose from the derrick floor. The assassin switched to binoculars to inspect the intruder in their wider field of vision.
A man in a white suit cleared the top rung and bounded onto the cornice. The assassin recognized the lithe, supple-yet-contained fluid grace that could only belong to another predator—a deadly peer—and every nerve jumped to high alert.
Instinct, logic, and horse sense were in perfect agreement. Shoot the threat first.
Reckless pride revolted. No one—no one!—interferes with my kill. I shoot who I want, when I want.
—
Isaac Bell vaulted from the ladder, landed lightly on the derrick cornice, and introduced himself to Spike Hopewell with an engaging smile and a powerful hand.
“Bell. Van Dorn Detective Agency.”
Spike grinned. “Detecting incognito in a red Locomobile? Thought you were the fire department.”
Isaac Bell took an instant liking to the vigorous independent, by all reports a man as openhearted as he was combative. With a knowing glance at the source of Spike’s troubles—a mammoth gasoline storage tank on the far side of the refinery, eighty feet wide and twenty high—Bell answered with a straight face.
“Having ‘detected’ that you’re awash in gasoline, I traded my horse for an auto.”
Hopewell laughed. “You got me there. Biggest glut since the auto was invented . . . Whatcha doing here, son? What do you want?”
Bell said, “The government’s Corporations Commission is investigating Standard Oil for violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.”
“Do tell,” said Hopewell, his manner cooling.
“The commission hired the Van Dorn Agency to gather evidence of the Standard busting up rivals’ businesses.”
“What’s that got to do with me?”
“Fifty thousand gallons of gasoline you can’t ship to market is the sort of evidence I’m looking for.”
