Читать книгу The Yellow Cloud: A Doc Savage Adventure - Evelyn Coulson - Страница 7

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The girl held the gun in both hands quite steadily. She had come into the airport waiting room with the weapon concealed in her flying helmet, which she was carrying in her hands, and now she had the gun pointed at Monk and Ham.

Monk and Ham stared at her in gap-mouthed astonishment.

Out on the tarmac somewhere a transport plane was rumbling its big motor, and in a hangar mechanics were banging hammers against machinery. The airport was far enough outside Philadelphia so that there was no rumble of the city.

Monk started to put his hands up.

“Keep them down,” the girl ordered grimly.

She was a small girl, somewhat a spriggins of a girl. From the quick way she moved, she seemed about fifteen years old; but she was a little older than that—twentyish, maybe.

The sky winds had browned her. Nature had put red in her lips and mahogany-colored fire in her eyes. She was pretty. Striking enough that Monk, who was a connoisseur of feminine pulchritude, would have opened his mouth and batted both his small eyes—even if she had not been letting him look into the muzzle of a gun.

“Listen,” Monk said. “We only want to see a party named Brick Palmer.”

“Yes,” Ham said. “We came—”

“Shut up!” the girl advised.

She stood small and tense. She had dropped her flying helmet—it was of the same brown leather as her zippered jacket.

“Walk out of that side door,” she ordered. “Act natural.”

They stepped out of the side door upon the gravel of the airport parking lot. It was almost dark, and the big beacon had been turned on and was swinging at monotonous intervals. Colored border lights made a far-flung path.

“Get in your ambulance,” the girl said.

Ham stared at her. “Ambulance?”

“We came in a plane,” Monk explained.

The girl did not believe that. She had picked up her helmet and covered her gun again. She lifted the helmet slightly, showed the weapon muzzle.

“I don’t fool people!” she said grimly.

“Do you tell people who you are?” Ham asked.

“You know that. You asked for me.”

“You’re not Brick Palmer!” Ham exploded.

“Abricketta Palmer. Yes.”

Ham said, “Oh!” and looked at Monk, who said, “Blazes!” They were astonished and puzzled.

“Go get in your ambulance,” the girl said. “You’re taking me away from here—but not the way you hoped.”

“We haven’t got any ambulance, I tell you,” Monk said.

The girl looked at them tensely, wondering what to do.

“We’ll walk then,” she said. “Get going.”

They walked down the main road and turned into a side lane at the girl’s command. They passed a house, and a dog came out of the yard and followed them, barking violently, but went back. It was not very dark. There was much traffic on the road they had left, but none on this lane.

They came to a spot which was lonesome.

“I better search you here,” the girl said.

She went through their pockets while they held their arms high. She made a little mound of their belongings on the road, then struck a match for a light. She examined the cards, looked at the names on envelopes. She straightened, looking foolish.

“I made a mistake,” she said.

The girl did not point her gun at them any longer. She rolled it in her helmet, uncomfortably.

She explained, “When I told my story back at the airport, they thought I was crazy. I heard them say something about sending for somebody to take me to a psychopathic ward for a medical examination. A psychopathic ward is an insane asylum, isn’t it?”

“Something like that,” Monk said.

“I thought you were two attendants who had come to get me,” the girl added. “I was determined not to go. When you came, they just said there were two men to see me and shoved me in that room, so I—well—”

Monk and Ham stood and squinted in the growing darkness, neither knowing what to say.

“We thought you were a man,” Monk muttered finally.

The girl picked up the things she had taken from their pockets and began handing them back.

“You are associated with Doc Savage?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“I have heard of him,” she said. “Quite famous, isn’t he?”

Monk asked, “What about the yellow cloud?”

The girl shuddered. “We were flying at about ten thousand feet. Chester’s plane was about a mile ahead of mine—”

“Who’s Chester?” Ham asked.

“Chester Palmer, my brother,” the girl explained. “He was about a mile ahead. We were flying over a cloud ceiling. This cloud just seemed to jump up, yellow and grim, from the ordinary clouds below and envelop my brother’s plane. It was like—hard to describe—as if a puff of yellow smoke had been blown up.”

Ham asked, “Did this happen in the daytime?”

“Yes.”

“Then what occurred?”

The girl stuffed her flying helmet in one pocket of her laced whipcord breeches and shoved the gun into another pocket. She took out a handkerchief and began to choke it.

“I got close to the yellow thing—cloud—” she explained. “It jumped at me. That is, one whole section of the cloud just kind of spurted at me. I banked plane, barely got away. It chased me for at least fifteen miles and almost overtook me. I never saw my brother or his plane again.”

“How fast did you fly,” Ham asked, “when it was chasing you?”

“About two hundred and fifty miles an hour.”

“And this yellow cloud kept up with you?”

“Yes.”

“What was it?” Monk asked.

The girl took a long time to get an answer. “I don’t know,” she said.

The night had been still, but now several small frogs—or they might have been crickets—set up an orchestration in the ditch water along the edge of the lane. The dog that had pursued them came snuffling down the road, barked three times, then turned and ran back again.

“Now you know,” the girl said, “why I thought you were two men who had come to take me to an insane asylum.”

“Was this an army plane your brother was flying?” Monk asked suddenly.

“Oh, no. Just an ordinary three-place, open-cockpit commercial job.”

Monk said, “Come over here, Ham.”

The two men moved down the lane a short distance and the girl remained behind until she was out of earshot.

“It’s so utterly screwy,” Monk muttered.

“You’re telling me!” Ham said. “But what do we do?”

Monk had something on his mind—he was thinking back. During the last two or three adventures in which Doc Savage had been involved, Monk and Ham had been unfortunate. They had fallen for feminine wiles. Three times in a row, a pretty girl associated with the enemy had made fools out of them. Doc Savage had not said much about it, but they suspected he had thought a great deal.

“You thinking about what I am?” Monk asked.

“I am thinking,” Ham said, “that we had better look into this girl’s story.”

“That’s the idea,” Monk agreed. “This time, we don’t fall for the first pretty face that comes along.”

“You think she might be trying to pull a phony on us?”

“I don’t know. Nothing about this thing so far is even believable, much less making sense.”

They went back to the girl.

“I hope,” Monk told her, “that you don’t mind being investigated.”

Monk and Ham never did quite figure out how that next thing managed to happen to them so unexpectedly. They were taken by complete surprise. Maybe it was because the girl was so pretty that they couldn’t keep their minds on anything else.

They were walking into the airport waiting room, and the girl was saying, “I hope that Doc Savage will interest himself in finding out what happened to my brother.”

“You want Doc Savage to try to find your brother?” Monk asked.

“Oh, I do, I do!”

“I think Doc will help,” Ham said.

“Oh, wonderful!” Brick Palmer exclaimed.

Her throat seemed full of relief.

“You see,” Ham said, “a man named Renny was the first—”

He never did finish.

The previous Fourth of July, Monk had lighted a nickel firecracker and threw it, and the cracker hit a tree limb and bounced back and hit Monk on top of the head, exploding just as it struck. Ham had thought it very unpleasant.

Monk’s head, now, felt the way it had when the firecracker exploded. He fell to the floor.

Part of the airport waiting room floor, Monk noticed for the first time, had been freshly painted deep-red. It had been blocked off by stretching a twine string to which was clipped pieces of newspaper. Monk had broken the string when he fell, and it and the newspaper fragments had fallen in the fresh, deep-red paint, also.

Vaguely, he became aware of yelling.

“Help me, stupid!” Ham was howling.

Monk got his thinking reconnected. He’d been banged on the head. By a man—a very long and active man who had skin that was the color of a good English boot.

There were three other men, all active, but not the same color. They were lighter, one having a reddish face. They were closing in on Ham.

Ham had unsheathed his sword cane, danced into a corner. He stood poised in the fencing stance they had taught him at Harvard. He liked to perform with that sword cane, did Ham. He lunged, sent out the blade. A man yelped, dodged back. The man’s elbow began leaking red.

“Only nicked me!” the man snarled triumphantly.

“You think!” Ham gritted.

The tip of the sword cane was coated with a sticky chemical, and even a scratch from it would soon render a victim unconscious.

Monk got up and roared. He always roared when he fought. His ordinary voice was a childlike squeak, but his fighting voice was something that might have come out of the big horn on the front of the Queen Mary’s forward funnel.

“Hell—gun ’em!” yelled the boot-colored man.

They must have been keeping their guns out of action because of the noise. But with Monk roaring, there could hardly be more noise.

The boot-colored man drew a thin-nosed pistol. He aimed at Ham. He shot Ham three times in the stomach. Ham sat down backward.

Monk hit the boot-colored man. Monk brought his fist from far back, and the man sailed across and thumped the wall, bounced like a rubber ball and fell.

The other men swung around with their guns.

Monk hated to mix any caution at all with his fights. But he could, when he had to. He took a precaution now.

Out of one pocket Monk snatched an egg-sized blob of metal. He pressed a lever on the thing. It popped, and spouted black smoke. The smoke spread, and almost instantaneously, the room was full of drawing-ink black.

Guns were crashing. But Monk was moving, and the bullets missed him.

“Get up an’ fight, Ham!” he howled.

Monk went silent, came up on tiptoes, and made for the spot where he had last seen the girl. Abricketta Palmer wasn’t there.

The boot-colored man began yelling.

“Get the girl and beat it!” he shouted, and added some profanity.

He sounded as if he had had enough fight.

Men began getting out of the airport waiting room. Monk felt around, slugged someone, and nearly got shot in the head. He became cautious, worked to the door and crept outside.

There was smoke outside now. There was yelling and confusion around the airport.

Monk crept out of the smoke, but dived back in again when the men began shooting at him. All four of the raiders were outdoors. They had the girl. Monk got back in the airport waiting room and listened to lead make holes in the walls. The waiting room was made of tiling, plastered, and the bullets breaking through sounded as if they were smashing pottery.

After a while, the shooting stopped, and an automobile left at high speed.

Monk dashed outdoors.

“Call the State troopers!” he yelled. “Have ’em get that car!”

Later the night breeze blew the bomb smoke out of the waiting room. Monk walked in. His shoe soles made stick-stick sounds in the tacky paint.

Ham sat on the floor. He was taking off his clothes.

“Why didn’t you get up and fight?” Monk asked.

Ham said thickly, “You were doing all right, weren’t you?”

“They got away.”

“Personally,” Ham said, “I was glad to see them go.”

Monk walked around and around Ham, examining him. He made tongue-clucking sympathy sounds.

“Hurt?” he asked.

“Listen,” Ham snarled, “were you ever shot three times in the stomach?”

“You had on your bulletproof undershirt, didn’t you?”

Ham scowled and yelled, “Bulletproof undershirt, or no shirt—were you ever shot three times in the stomach?”

Monk asked, “What are you undressing for?”

“The zipper of the infernal bulletproof shirt,” Ham explained, “is stuck.”

Ham eventually got out of the undershirt, and seemed hard to convince that there were no holes in his stomach. The undershirt—it had been devised by Doc Savage, and all of the bronze man’s group wore them habitually—was of very light, special alloy chain-mesh fabrication, effective against anything less than a military rifle slug.

Monk said, “They tried to kill us.”

“Did they?” Ham asked sarcastically.

Monk walked around the waiting room, examining the footprints in the fresh paint with considerable interest.

Ham asked, “What became of the one I nicked with my sword cane?”

“He ran off with the others.”

Ham picked up his cane and examined the tip disgustedly.

“I’ll have to mix a stronger batch of dope for the point of this thing,” he muttered.

Monk ambled out to their plane. None of the Doc Savage crew traveled without carrying some of the equipment which they used in their strange profession. Monk came back from the plane carrying a police type of camera. He began photographing the footprints.

He selected a footprint, got down on his knees beside it, and carefully placed a ruler so that it would show, in the picture, the exact length and width of the print.

“That’s your own footprint, you hairy gossoon,” Ham said.

Monk’s neck got red.

“All right, all right,” he grumbled. “I’m still dizzy. One of them guys hit me over the head with a gun.”

“Why?” Ham asked.

“He was trying to knock me senseless.”

“I mean,” Ham said, “what was the whole idea?”

“They couldn’t have been after the girl, could they?”

Ham jerked up straight. “They didn’t—”

“They took,” Monk explained, “the girl.”