Читать книгу The Freckled Shark: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 5
ОглавлениеTHE WAMPUS-CAT
By the barest margin, the story—picture included—caught the final edition of the morning newspaper, the one that the newsboys sold on the streets around eight o’clock, to people who were going to work.
However, one newspaper was purchased by a man who did not happen to be going to work. He had been up all night raising hell, as a matter of fact, and was going out to a drugstore—before he went to bed—to buy a box of aspirin, experience having taught him how his head might feel when he awakened.
He looked at the Jep Dee story and forgot all about aspirin.
“Damn!” he croaked.
He put his head back and ran like a pickaninny who had been walking through a lonesome graveyard at dark midnight when he heard a deep groan. He got out in the street and ran, because people were in his way on the sidewalk. He bounded aboard a ritzy, streamlined cabin cruiser moored to one of the yacht docks.
He fell down a companionway into the cruiser cabin in his haste.
Half a dozen men were in the cruiser cabin. They began laughing.
“Horst is seeing things!” one man chuckled.
“After the way he drank last night, I don’t wonder,” said another.
The man who had been in the market for aspirin—Horst—lay on the cabin floor and panted and glared.
Horst had the look of being twin to the devil. Twin to the pictures that depict the devil, at least. Horst was a little heavier than the devil, thicker through the neck, possibly not so tall, and did not have quite the same pointed dog ears with which artists equip their devil pictures. He was a rather brown devil.
“Stop that laughing!” Horst snarled.
The mirth died. Suddenly. As if ice water had been dumped on the chucklers.
Horst got up and took a gun out of his clothing, a large gun that was as black as the murder-mood in Horst’s eyes.
“Who thinks this is funny?” he asked gutturally.
No one said anything. For a minute, terror walked around and around on feather-light feet.
At last a man took hold of his courage and said, “We came to Key West to throw a party and celebrate the last of Jep Dee. Nobody meant anything when they laughed, Horst.”
The men had been a little drunk. They were shivering sober now.
Horst said, “Listen to me.”
He didn’t need to tell them to do that.
“Jep Dee is alive,” Horst said.
Ten minutes later, the occupants of the cabin cruiser had scattered to check on the newspaper story. None of them had slept, for they had caroused the previous night through, but now there were no thoughts about sleep. Some went to the post office where they stood around looking innocent and asking casual questions.
Horst and another man went to the hospital, where Horst told a glib story about a pal of his who resembled the published picture of Jep Dee, a ruse that got him a close look at the blind castaway whom the college boy had found on a desert island.
Horst stood looking down at Jep Dee, and he put a hand in his pocket, resting it on the black gun. But there were too many doctors around. Not to mention two policemen who stood out in the hall. The cops were asking a doctor when Jep Dee would be able to answer questions. It seemed that Jep Dee had fainted and not yet revived.
Horst went back to the big, sleek, fast cabin cruiser.
His men joined him.
“It’s Jep Dee, all right,” Horst snarled. He looked more devillike than ever. “The sharks didn’t get him. He must have made it by swimming.”
One of the men who had gone to the post office reported, “I talked to the guy who led Jep Dee to the post office. Jep Dee mailed something in an envelope.”
“Mailed what?”
“It looked,” the man said, “like a piece of freckled shark skin.”
“Like what?”
“A chunk of hide off a freckled shark. That’s the best description I could get, and this guy who led Jep Dee to the post office had a good memory.”
“Oh, damn!”
Horst made unpleasant faces while he thought.
“You say the guy that led Jep Dee had a good memory,” he continued. “Good enough to remember the address on the envelope? Or did he see it?”
“He saw the address.”
Horst scowled. “Well?”
“The piece of freckled shark skin,” the man explained, “went to Miss Rhoda Haven, Tower Apartments, New York City.”
Horst acted as if he had taken a hard hammer blow between the eyes. His mouth fell open slackly, his arms dropped, and he sank on a transom seat.
Small waves hit the boat hull and made the sounds of a kid with an all-day sucker, sea gulls circled around outside and gave their rather hideous I-feel-like-I’m-going-to-die squawks, and inside the cabin the boat clock clicked steadily.
“Damn, this is bad!” Horst croaked.
Suddenly he bounded to his feet.
“Call the airport,” he yelled. “Reserve places for all of us on the first plane to New York.”
“But what about Jep Dee?”
Horst said, “He’s helpless. He won’t be leaving the hospital. We’ll leave a man to watch him. Hutch, you do that.”
“Any preference about how I watch Jep Dee while you’re gone?” Hutch asked.
“Use your judgment,” Horst snapped. “Call the airport, somebody.”
“You have to go to Miami,” a man reminded him, “to catch the regular air line.”
“Then charter a fast private plane!” Horst yelled.
While one of his men was finding a plane and chartering the craft, Horst paid a visit to the cable office. He spent some time composing a cablegram, which he dispatched.
The cable was in code, and there was almost two pages of it.
The plane they rented was fast, so they ate dinner that evening in the restaurant at the airport where they landed on the outskirts of New York City. The dinner was grim. All of them were worried, Horst most of all.
They were dressed in dark, discreet business suits, the coats of which were cut full under the armpits so as not to reveal the firearms that rested in shoulder holsters. They spoke little.
Two of them, who had a distinct accent that marked them as South Americans, spoke not at all when there was any stranger near enough to overhear. Horst and the other two spoke excellent English, so much so that it was difficult, even after a conversation with them, to say whether they were native Americans.
There was an air of viciousness about almost everything they did. They did not have to act vicious. They were vicious.
From the airport, Horst went to the main New York cable office. He asked for a message for Jerry Shinn, stated convincingly that this was his name.
There was a cablegram, and it was in code; had been sent from the South American republic of Blanca Grande, was in answer to the message Horst had sent from Key West.
Riding uptown in a taxicab, Horst translated the cablegram. It said:
GET THAT FRECKLED SHARK SKIN, THEN WIPE OUT THE HAVENS AND EVERYONE CONNECTED WITH THEM
STEEL
The men gazed at the message dubiously.
“Get the shark skin, eh?”
“And wipe out the Havens.”
“That last order,” Horst said grimly, “may be easier to give than to carry out.” He leaned back and thought in silence for a few moments, and what he was thinking about must have been unpleasant, because he shivered.
“That Tex Haven,” he said, “is an old wampus-cat.”
