Читать книгу Death's Mistress - Arthur Leo Zagat - Страница 3

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OFFICER JOHN HAYDEN shrugged big shoulders as if the stiff cloth of his tunic bothered him, but his uneasiness had nothing to do with the fit of his uniform. Something in the wee-hour stillness of Exterior Street was getting him, something ominous in the black loom of the freighters squeezed between pier sides, in the continual lap-lap of greasy water against their hulls, distinct in the silence. The bay seemed to have a million tongues tonight, and each one whispered a warning.

A warning of what? Hayden's narrowed eyes slid along the deserted expanse of cobbles he patrolled. Illuminated patches hugged the wide-spaced street lamps closely. Between them shadows lay heavily...

The officer's unquiet glance roved to the right, skimmed blank facades of dingy warehouses, paused hesitantly at the black maw of an alley. He knew he ought to take a look in Acre, yet a curious reluctance restrained him. Anything, almost anything might be hidden in that tar-barrel murk!

Hayden shrugged again. "Hell of a cop I am," he muttered half-aloud. "Ye'd think I was a rookie doin' his first twelve-to-eight tour." He swerved toward the alley mouth, digging into a pocket for his flashlight; but his other hand took a tighter grip on his nightstick... There was a prickle of cold across the back of his neck as he sensed, rather than saw, a flicker of movement within the alley toward which he slowly thudded.

His torch-beam shot out. Crazily-leaning wooden walls leapt into being. The light-disk danced along scummed flag-stones, broken and up-ended, probed a pile of heaped refuse, moved further back—and was suddenly notched by a heavy-soled shoe, the blue hem of a trouser-leg. It stopped, quivered a bit, moved again, held in the center of its luminance a prostrate, oddly twisted form in a police uniform! The body lay face down in the alley filth; one arm was flung over the sprawled figure's head, and at its end a revolver barrel snouted.

Hayden's jaw hardened. His stick beat a rapid tattoo on the sidewalk, then he was plunging forward, cat-footed, toward the thing in there while his flash-beam stabbed into emptiness beyond.

The cop reached the unmoving form of his comrade, stood half-crouched above it. His eyes followed the lance of his light. Neither sight nor sound betrayed any living presence in the alley, but through the multifarious salty odors of the sea-breeze a faintly acrid tang stung his nostrils, a pungency that was somehow alien, exotic. It pulled his gaze down again to the body at his feet, and something he had been unable to see from the alley mouth struck the blood from his lips.

The fallen cop's hand, the fingers that gripped the butt of his useless gun, were brown, shriveled—had the texture and sheen of old parchment! The nails were blackened, curled oddly outward.

"God!" Hayden groaned, and dropped to his knees in the slime. He touched the strangely discolored hand with a tentative thumb, snatched it away as a crackle like that of dried tissue paper came startlingly loud in the silence. But the sere feel of withered skin clung to his fingertips, and the hardness of bone beneath. "God," the cop said again, in a hushed, shocked voice.

A hot spot of wrath burned in Hayden's skull at the same time that his skin crawled with unacknowledged fear. There was no whisper of sound in the alley as he pulled air into tightened lungs; but he felt eyes upon him—hot, inimical eyes. His light toured the narrow passage; slid along blank, windowless walls; skimmed mildewed, debris-strewn paving. There was nothing there, nothing!

"Good Lord," he grunted. "Why in hell don't Fred come? He oughta heard my raps and snapped into it pronto." Officer Fred Kane's beat ended only half a block from here and the two always timed themselves to relieve the tedium of the dawn patrol with mumbling talk. Hayden fumbled for his whistle; his dropping glance went almost furtively to the body's shriveled hand. And he gasped!

A tiny movement, when he had touched it perhaps, had pulled back the sleeve, revealing flat silver links of a wrist-watch band and the watch itself. Hayden stared pop-eyed at the odd, octagonal timepiece and his mouth worked. He knew that watch, had compared it numberless times with his own. It belonged to Fred Kane, to his buddy, his side-partner through half a decade of sidewalk pounding! But only an hour ago he had been chatting with Fred...

The policeman forced his arm to move, his hand to touch the flattened shoulder of the corpse, pressing it so that the head rolled limply and he could see its face. Its face! Good God! That which stared sightlessly at him was the face of no human thing!

The skin, brown and shriveled like that of a long-dried apple, had fallen into cheek-hollows, as if there were no flesh beneath. Blackened lips were retracted from stained teeth. The nose-tip was gone, the nostrils had vanished and their cartilage had shrunk tightly closed. Lid-less eyes were glazed white marbles in deep black pits. This was the face of a mummy, long dead, of a cadaver exhumed from an age-eroded tomb! Horror rocked the stalwart policeman back on his heels. He whimpered in his throat, fought nausea.

At that moment voices sounded behind him. He exploded to his feet, whirling as his free hand plunged to the holster for his gun! From the darkness of the alley, came the gruff rumble of a man's voice, the shrillness of a woman's.

The woman's: "No! No! Not again! Don't make me..."

Hayden's flash-beam searched for the voices, lashed into a billow of blackness, a swirling cloud of black vapor rolling toward him. Tendrils reached out for him, coiling ebony tendrils, monstrously alive! The cop's scalp tightened, the cold breath of fear beat on him, and the woman screamed "Help!" Screamed shrilly, agonizingly from beyond the cloud!

Hayden swayed a lightning instant, terror of the black mystery clamping his limbs. Then, snarling, white-faced, he plunged into the impenetrable mist.

He plunged, and his skin was suddenly a living flame that seared. Black fire scorched his face. A lightless blaze charred his eyes, nostrils, mouth! He drew flame into bursting lungs, his trigger-finger jerked spasmodically. Shot-Shot-crash pounded within the lethal cloud. And the flare of his gun was drowned in black vapor that swirled, thinned, and was gone.

Somewhere a woman laughed stridently, hysterically. Laughed till the sound of her mad cachinnation was drowned in the roar of a motor leaping away from the dark alley where two mummies lay—two horror-faced mummies in the blue uniform of the Granport police force.

Grim-visaged young Dan Lorraine, captain of the freighter Lomand, twisted with a weather-reddened hand the doorknob of Praying Joe's, hottest spot on Granport's waterfront. Erstwhile hot-spot, that is—for the usual tumult was silent behind the portal he was opening and the flaring neon sign above him lit with its red glare a deserted, eerily hushed street. Dan's yellow eyebrows knitted in puzzlement.

The door came open on a cavernous, dim-lit, low-ceilinged hall. The sailor's footfall thudded loudly, echoing, and a white-aproned bartender pounded across the floor toward him, a bulldog automatic jumping from a hip pocket. The man's face was a hard mask, but his little eyes glittered oddly, and his ordinarily florid features were filmed with a sickly green cast. Were it not for the thick-necked, jutting-jawed bull's head topping gorilla-like shoulders, Dan would have thought that fear lurked in Praying Joe's tiny orbs. Then recognition dawned on the dive-owner's face.

"Hell!" Joe grunted. "Dan Lorraine. Didn't know you was in."

The ship-captain watched Joe slide his gat back to its covert. "Yes," he growled. "I'm in, and I'm going out again on the dawn tide." He rolled past the saloon-man to the bar, got a foot up on the brass rail. "Whisky sour, Joe, and be damn quick about it."

In seconds the concoction slid across the mahogany, and Dan had gulped it down with a shudder. "Lousy as ever," he grunted. He let his eyes wander through the big cafe and came back to Praying Joe. "What," he said heavily, "is the matter with you and this whole rotten town?"

Joe swiped a foul-smelling rag across the wood-top, leaving a greasy film of dampness. His heavy face glowered. "What's eatin' yuh, pal?" he said at last. "What makes yuh think anything's wrong wid Granport?"

"Think!" the seaman exclaimed. "I damn well know it." He threw a big-thewed arm out in a sweeping gesture, indicating the dim-lit, nearly empty room, the few furtively whispering, tight-mouthed men who were its only other occupants, the vacant stage beyond the long bar. "Nice, lively spot this after ten months slogging the waves with the everlasting stink of Patagonian hides in your nose. Praying Joe's, the rip-roaringest dive on the waterfront, gloomy as a funeral parlor—and the rest of the port just like this. Nobody on the streets except the cops, and they going around in pairs with their hands on their gun butts, eyeing a fellow like he was a public enemy number one. Half the theaters closed, the rest empty. Hell—when I came in you went green-gilled and grabbed out your gun as if you thought I was Stan Kanio himself prowling for a stick-up."

The aproned one's eyes jerked to the tables and back. "Stan Kanio's not stickin' this joint up, nor any other. He's six foot under."

Lorraine straightened, interest momentarily brightening his broad-planed, wind-wrinkled features. "Oh, yes? Your dumb police force got him finally, did they?"

The bartender spat into the sawdust on the floor. "Not so dumb, Dan, not so dumb. They blasted him at the docks, caught him flat-footed wid a bag in each hand."

"Uh-huh." Lorraine's mouth twisted wryly. "Never gave him a chance, I suppose. Shot him like a dog when he couldn't pull his gat."

"Well," Joe shrugged, "they wasn't takin' no chances." He seemed relieved at the turn of the conversation. "His moll got away, somehow, in the rumpus. She—"

"So it isn't Kanio that's scared Granport gutless," Dan interrupted. He pushed thick fingers through his shock of yellow, rumpled hair. "What is it then? What are you afraid of, you and the rest of the burg?" His fingers were magically around the saloon-man's wrist, jamming him up against the counter. "Spit it out or, by God, I'll break your arm." The captain's narrowed eyes burned with a cold blue flame as they probed the other's tiny orbs.

Joe gulped and licked white lips. "Gripes," he whined. "No call for yuh gettin' tough. I thought yuh knew. Dere ain't nuttin' else in de papers but de mummy death."

"The what?" Dan leaned forward, his eyes glowing. "I've just landed, haven't seen a paper. What's that you said?"

"De mummy death. Two weeks it's been gain' on now, cops bein' found all over town all dried up like dem mummies in de museum. Dey ain't got no noses, deir ears is all dried up, deir faces—cripes—I seen one an' I ain't slep' fer t'ree nights with it lookin' at me in de dark." The saloon-man spilled whisky into a glass and threw the fiery liquid down his throat.

"You saw one. How—?"

"Yeah! I seen one an' I wish I hadn't. Tim Rollins it wuz, he wuz at me side door slucin' his t'roat wid a schooner o' lager when a dame steps up ter him. 'Officer,' she sez t'rough her veil. 'Officer, dere's a man in de hallway o' Number Twenty-six. I t'ink he's dead.' Her voice wuz soft an' she talked like a toff.

" 'Dead drunk, more likely," Tim sez an' he finishes his drink before goin' over. I watched him go up the stoop, an' inside de hall. Sudden-like I hears a yowl like nuttin' human. I wuz too damn scared ter do anythin' fer a minute, den I grabs me gat an' beats it over. Dere he wuz—Oh Gawd—don't ast me ter tell yuh what he looked like!..."

"And the woman?"

"She wuzn't anywhere aroun'. I didn't see her go, an' nobody else did." The narrator's voice was a husky whisper now, a whisper in which ancestral terror quivered. "An' I didn't see her come neither, dough I wuz standin' right next to Tim, lookin' out. She wuz dere one minute, nowheres de next." His next words were barely audible. "If yuh wuz ter ast me, I t'ink she wuzn't no woman at all."

"A man? But you said—"

"Nor no man, neither." Save for its network of wormlike red capillaries, Joe's face had gone fish-belly gray and his eyes were livid. He looked past Dan, seeing things that were not of the real world. "Nor no man," he repeated solemnly.

The sailor was all alive now, his big frame athrill with a tremor of excitement. His grip on the other man's wrist relaxed. "Wait," he said. "Wait. You said this mummy death takes only cops. What's everybody else scared about then?"

"Gees, guy, don't yuh get it? Here's a harness-bull paradin' his beat. Dere's a holler fer help somewheres, er someone comes runnin' up tellin' him about a prowler climbin' a fire-escape. Eight chances outen ten it's straight enough, but de udder two chances is dat it's de mummy death baitin' him. W'addya t'ink de cop's gonna do?"

"He's not going to be in any too great hurry to go looking for trouble," Lorraine answered, musingly. "He'll stop to think it over, to question his informant."

"Uh-huh. An' in de meantime de prowler gets away, or de stick-up's finished. Dat's what's happenin' in Granport de last two weeks, an' dere's plenty takin' advantage o' de set-up. Dey've even cleaned two banks, wid de squad-cars showin' up a half hour late."

"So that's it," Dan said softly. "So that's the layout. The police force paralyzed by fear, and the crooks running wild."