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Bell saw a thin, dark man edge from the building like a rabbit sniffing the wind.
“I’ll take him. You boys hang back.”
Bell turned away and watched the man’s reflection in a window. Leone hesitated. He looked on the verge of running back into the building. He jerked a watch from his pocket, stared at the time, pocketed the watch, looked around again. Shoulders hunched, he set off briskly toward the river.
The sidewalks were crowded with longshoremen and sailors and streetwalkers. Bell had little trouble staying out of sight as he shadowed him. He followed Leone across 40th Street to where it ended at a basin just above the 37th Street Pennsylvania Railroad Freight Station. The counterfeiter worked his way down the bulkheaded shore back up to 39th Street and suddenly darted to the water’s edge.
Bell saw a boat turn into the slip between the finger piers and arrow toward him. It was a fast steam lighter of the type that delivered provisions to the ships. From the freight pier, two men raced after Leone, their dark features at odds with the neighborhood of fair hair and blue eyes. Leone climbed awkwardly onto the timber apron at the water’s edge. The two men followed him and helped him down to the lighter.
Wally Kisley and Mack Fulton caught up with Bell.
“Those are Charlie Salata gorillas.
”
Salata’s gangsters jumped aboard with Leone. The lighter backed into the slip, turned around, and disappeared onto the smoky river.
“Now where’s he going?” said Kisley.
Fulton said, “Out of here before the Irish mob ’em, if they’ve got any sense.”
Bell pointed at the railroad pier. “Go get the dispatcher to telephone the Harbor Squad. Roundsman O’Riordan ought to be at Pier A. Then call the office. Tell ’em to run down Eddie Edwards; he’s working with the New York Central. And warn Harry Warren to watch the Salata hangouts in case they’re headed to Elizabeth Street.”
A livestock boat with tall, slatted sides nosed out of the coal smoke that shrouded the Hudson River. Tugboats shoved it into a Pennsylvania Railroad freight slip. Beef cattle lowed anxiously as deckhands moored it to the pier.
Ed Hunt and Tommy McBean, cousins who ruled the West Side Wallopers, a waterfront gang that preyed on merchant ships and railroad cars, waited inside a delivery wagon for the cows to unload. Hunt and McBean were taking a shot at big-time drug smuggling. A gang brother who had fled the cops and surfaced in Texas had a scheme to smuggle Mexican heroin in hollowed cow horns. The cousins had fronted the dough. Now all they had to do was wait ’til the cows were under cover to take their horns.
They passed the time writing a Black Hand letter to an Italian shopkeeper who could afford to fork over a thousand bucks if sufficiently frightened. They were New York Irish through and through, but you didn’t have to be Italian to send a Black Hand letter. Spreading paper on a barrelhead, they labored by the light of the van’s roof hatch. McBean illustrated it with skulls, knives, guns, and a black hand. Hunt scrawled the threats. They bantered in vaudevillian Italian accents.
“You pay-a de mon-ee?”
“How mooch-a?”
Isaac Bell flashed his Van Dorn badge and slapped five dollars into the hand of a Pennsylvania Railroad detective who tried to stop him. He ran to the end of the railcar float pier that thrust hundreds of feet into the river and climbed the gantry that raised and lowered the dock to align the rails with the barges. Twenty feet up in the air, he scanned the smoky river for the steam lighter that Leone and the Salata gorillas had boarded. It was gone, lost in the heavy traffic of tugs and barges, steamers and sailing ships.
He started to climb back down when he suddenly realized he was looking in the wrong direction. The lighter was nearby, almost at his feet, tied to a cattle boat that was moored alongside the railroad pier. Apparently, it had steamed out of the slip, turned around in the river, and steamed back into the next. Just as he spotted it, a dozen men with bulging sacks slung over their shoulders squeezed through the slats of the cattle boat and jumped onto the lighter. Ernesto Leone was the last aboard. The lighter cast off and steamed into the river, leaving Bell in the same position he had been moments ago, stuck on the gantry while the counterfeiter escaped.
Not quite, he thought to himself. He could see in the distance a New York Police Harbor Squad launch churning up the river at twelve knots. Roundsman O’Riordan, full speed ahead! The Italians spotted the water cops. They turned the lighter on a nickel and raced back into the slip. By the time the Harbor Squad churned into the mouth of the slip, the last of the gangsters were stumbling ashore.
Hunt and McBean’s van driver rapped on the roof with the butt of his carter’s whip.
McBean put down the Black Hand letter and peered through a spy hole. “Here come the cows.”
Hunt watched from an adjacent spy hole. Their laughter died.
“Where’s their horns?” asked McBean.
Of the beef cattle shambling down the gangway to the livestock pens, many had no horns. Some had only one.
“Somebody stole our horns.”
The Irishmen jumped out of the van, faces reddening, fists clenched, and ran to the pens. Hunt vaulted the fence and threw a headlock on the nearest one-horned steer. It tried to buck him off. McBean piled on, too. He couldn’t believe his eyes. Where its horn should have stuck out of its head was a neatly sawn base with a threaded hole in the middle.
“Sons of bitches unscrewed them.”
Their wagon driver ran up.
“Guy says a bunch of Italians just jumped off a lighter.”
