Читать книгу The Fear Merchants - Brant House - Страница 3

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HIGH UP, on the fourteenth floor of the big warehouse that faced the river, four men stole forward with the swift, silent steps of stalking ghouls. A wide corridor stretched before them, murky with night shadows, dank with the dampness of neglect. The certainty of their movements as they passed along it was grim proof that what they did had been carefully rehearsed.

At the corridor's farther end a high window rose. The leader of the quartet stopped abruptly when he came to this. He was a big man, ruggedly built, with features that suggested cubist art. His head was almost square. His mouth was a straight line across a square-cut jaw. His eyebrows formed a higher line set at right angles to the jutting down—sweep of his nose.

The others saw his profile outlined dimly against the faint glow that crept up from the street factory building that lay dark and still below. They watched as he softly raised the sash. They saw him poke his head cautiously into the chill night air, face stonily intent. For seconds he peered at this, eyes squinted up. Then he pulled himself in and stared down three stories to the roof of the tunnel. There was a faint click as his electric flash went on. Holding the light cupped deftly in the palm of his big hand, he let its beam fall on the features of his companions, studying each as he had studied the roof below.

Two were young, hard-bitten like himself; men with the steely eyes and the grim mouths of fighters; men picked for physical courage and mental poise—operatives of the Bates Detective Agency, one of the most efficient private crime-fighting organizations in the city.

The third man looked strange by contrast. Trampish, elderly, unkempt, his gray hair wisped down over a seamed old face. Rumpled and faded clothing hung on a body that seemed to have lost the limberness of youth. He stood with drooping shoulders, staring listlessly at the floor.

The holder of the flashlight scowled. "You'd better wait here, Peaselee."

The shabby man shook his head, "No, Mr. Bates, I will make it. Mr. Martin asked me to help. You lead the way."

The square-faced leader, Harvey Bates, looked doubtful. He nodded, said a gruff, "okay," then spoke suddenly to his own operatives, addressing them in clipped sentences, his voice harsh as the rasp of steel on ice. "Street's full of cops. Tough going if they catch us—hell to explain. They'll shoot. We can't shoot back. But we've got to do the job right!"

He handed his flash to one of his men, took a bundle from beneath his arm, unwrapped it. It was a long section of rope ladder tightly coiled. There were strong metal fasteners spliced to the ends. He looped these over the steam pipe, snapped them shut. He let the end of the rope ladder out the window, paying it carefully down along the building's face. There were no other windows on this side. The warehouse wall was a sheer unbroken drop of sixty feet, steep and dangerous as a cliff.

THE ROPE ladder finally lay swaying in the darkness like a giant snake. Bates nodded grimly, swung a leg over the window sill and groped for the first rung with his foot. "When I get down I'll jerk," he snapped. "Scallot, you come next."

In a moment he was gone, descending into the darkness, till he stood on the tarred surface of the factory roof.

The others followed. Peaselee came last of all. Yet, in spite of his awkward, trampish and feeble look, he didn't falter. Bates eyed him a moment, angular jaw thrust out. Then he gave final instructions to his men.

"You men know what's up. We're here to search every foot of this building and see if those firebugs who're holding up the insurance companies have been at work. It's a sure tip that the place will go up in smoke before midnight. The Great Eastern people wouldn't come across. And this dump's on the spot. The cops have searched already. Maybe we'll have better luck."

Bates angled his big body to the roof edge and peered down into the street. On both corners of the block alert figures were visible. Others prowled in the shadows across the way. There was a police cordon around the factory tonight. The way down the warehouse wall was the only means of entrance. This the police had overlooked.

Bates crossed silently to a skylight in the center of the roof. It was hooked on the inside where iron stairs led up, but the agency detective took a small jimmy from his coat and prepared to force the fastenings.

He had no more than thrust the jimmy's head under the crack of the skylight cover when the stranger, Peaselee, spoke quietly. "I know a better way."

Bates straightened, scowling, a sharp reply on his square-cut lips. Before he could utter it, Peaselee set to work. He produced a rubber suction thimble from somewhere in his coat, pressed this to the glass. In his right hand was a small glass cutter, hardly larger than a match. He drew this deftly around the edge of a skylight pane. He grasped the suction thimble, pulled. There was a single, barely audible snap. The pane came loose. Peaselee laid it carefully down, reached through the opening, and unsnapped the skylight hooks. In a moment the cover was lifted and the men were ready to descend.

Bates was scowling, keenly eyeing Peaselee. Then he clipped: "We'll go straight down. Begin at bottom, work up. Easy with those lights."

His operatives nodded. They'd been provided with electric flashes no bigger round than pencils. These threw a straight beam, converging in a disc of light the size of a ten-cent piece.

They passed quietly down through the floors of the empty factory, rubber-soled feet soundless on the steel-shod stairs. Not till they'd reached the engine-room below street level did Bates pause.

"No mistakes," he warned. "We're dealing with rats. Killers. We don't know how they get their fires going. Tonight we'll find out. Get busy." He gestured with his light for the men to spread and begin their search.

PEASELEE moved away from the others toward a cluttered corner of the room. His stabbing, tiny beam systematically covered every foot of wall space, every brace and pipe. His strange, dark eyes followed the shifting ray with the questing eagerness of a hawk. Minutes passed. Suddenly he tensed and knelt.

A test outlet of the factory's sprinkler system led down close to the floor. There were indications on the brass nozzle that it had been recently turned. But this wasn't what held the gray-haired man. It was the faint sheen of a greasy substance on the metal, oil, perhaps, to make the nozzle screw thread limber.

He stooped and sniffed, and the muscles along his back seemed to bulk larger like the rising hackles of a dog. A faint, disturbing odor reached his nostrils. Calcium carbide, it seemed to be—the gray stuff that gives the white-hot heat to burning acetylene vapor.

Peaselee stared at the nozzle a moment, then jerked to his feet. His light arced upward. His quick eye followed the sprinkler pipe to the automatic vent above. There were dozens of those vents in every room of the building. If some substance containing calcium carbide had been put into the sprinkler system itself, if this were ignited, what would be the result?

As though in answer, there was a sudden sound somewhere in the building. The faint, insect buzz of a tiny metal ratchet quivered in the air. Peaselee heard Bates give a snort, heard one of the detectives whisper hoarsely: "What's that?"

Another vibration sounded, like a katydid giving voice in a night-darkened forest. A chorus of buzzings came from several parts of the factory at once. A watchman, prowling on the floor above, cried out. Then louder, closer than any yet, a ghostly, metallic buzzing began in the very room they were in. It was over near the wall, hidden it seemed behind the plaster, close to the spot where Peaselee had sniffed at the sprinkler nozzle.

He started toward it, suddenly stepped back. For a tongue of flame had spurted against the pipe.

It came from the wall, lancing outward through a break that had opened. Hot and straight as a torch, it played against the pipe.

There was a sizzling sound, a boiling. The pipe appeared to swell before their eyes. A crack opened in it, greasy liquid gushed out. In an instant it glowed with lambent life, became a luminous, snakelike mass of writhing flame. The heat mounted, increasing internal pressure in the pipe. A melting, devouring fury of flame shot like a swift sword across the room. It struck the side of a great boiler, bit with the force of a gnawing canker into the steel.

The light of its seething, hissing sparks showed up the white faces of Harvey Bates and his men. The whole room was bathed in shimmering, ghostly light. The place had become a chamber of horror and swift destruction.

The detectives made a dash toward the stairs. They mounted the steel steps in sudden panic, climbed while the jet of torchlight flame snarled below them.

But the room above was hardly better. Pipes in all parts of the building were bursting, hissing. Gouts of flame shot across space in a roaring inferno. Steel walls buckled and melted. Plaster crumbled into a red-hot dust.

The watchman they had heard came running to them, sweat streaming from his face. His eyes were bulging, fists clenched. A column of flame like a malicious living thing caught his body close to the middle. It seemed for a moment to wrap writhing arms around him. A piercing, frenzied scream came from his throat. The sound echoed through the high vaults of the factory above the fire's roar. The man lurched and staggered, then collapsed, literally cut in two by the crucible heat. He lay, a horrible blackened thing that had once been a man.

Bates' square-cut face was bathed in sweat. Cords in his bull neck stood out. He made a dash for the steel stairs down which they had come from the floor above. But Peaselee saw him and followed, clutching his arm before the detective had taken a half dozen steps. He had noticed what Bates in his hurry had overlooked. Molten metal in lava-like streams was already trickling down the treads. The stairs were melting high above. They were no longer safe. All of them were trapped in a seething inferno of flame.