Читать книгу The Freckled Shark: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 7

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The “wampus-cat” being an imaginary creature, its exact measurements and specifications and qualities are necessarily indefinite. It may be long or short, high or low; and it may bark or mew or squall, as the circumstances require. But generally the qualifications state that it is an eat-’em-up kind of an animal.

But it was hard to look at Tex Haven and imagine a wampus-cat of any kind.

The man looked mild. He had a long face that was as benign as the countenance of a village parson. He had a long body that looked as if it had been constructed to fit inside a judge’s robes. His teeth showed a lot, his brownish hair was always tangled, the light of sunny Ireland was always in his blue eyes; and one looked at him and naturally expected him to laugh and chuckle more than he was silent. In truth, he rarely spoke a word; and when he did, it was a low-voiced one.

Tex Haven spoke gently to men, spoke loudly and pleasantly to babies, and hardly ever spoke to women. He kept away from high windows, looked four or five times each way before he crossed a street. He never drank. He swore terribly. He smoked a corncob pipe.

He did not get a letter during the time—six weeks—he had lived at the Tower Apartments, until the missive came from Jep Dee. Tex Haven got it out of the mail box.

“Rhoda!” he called gently.

His daughter came.

She was a tall girl, as long and gentle-looking as her father; but whereas old Tex Haven’s construction ran a bit too much to bones, the daughter was streamlined. Her hair was deep and coppery and always perfectly waved, her eyes were gentle, her mouth sweet and kind. There was a Madonnalike gentleness about her face. She dressed well, but with almost nunlike severity. She never drank. She swore only when it was necessary. She did not smoke, and whenever she got hold of one of old Tex Haven’s corncob pipes, she invariably took a hammer to it—then threw away the pieces.

“Jep Dee,” Tex Haven said, and extended the letter.

Rhoda Haven read Jep Dee’s letter.

Rhoda Haven had degrees from four of the world’s greatest universities. She had explored the Inca country of South America, and written a book which was used as a text by archæologists. She had nearly lost her life in experiments with a terrible tropic fever, and had come out with a cure for the fever, something that had previously baffled scientists. She had written a treatise on governmental administrative science that would probably win a Nobel prize.

A great sculptor had said that her head was the perfect type of patrician beauty.

The president-dictator of the South American republic of Blanca Grande had offered one hundred thousand dollars to anyone who would bring him Rhoda Haven’s head—without body attached.

“From Key West,” Rhoda Haven said of the letter, “with no name signed.”

Tex Haven sucked thoughtfully on his corncob pipe.

“Be from Jep Dee, figures like,” he said.

“I think so, too.”

They examined the shark skin. It was thin, so it must be the skin off a very young shark. It was also stiff, and had a tendency to curl. The freckle spots were not regular, but scattered; some of them were rather large and others were small. All freckles were shades of deep-brown or black.

Tex Haven said, “Mean anythin’ special to you?”

“Not a thing.”

“Here, neither.”

“But the note,” Rhoda Haven pointed out, “says that the shark skin explains everything.”

Tex Haven took his corncob pipe out of his teeth and gave it a look of mild reproach.

“Kinda looks like there might be a headache comin’ up,” he said.

The telephone began to ring. It rang steadily. Tex Haven went over to it, an ambling, peaceful-looking tower of a man, picked up the instrument, said, “Hello, hello?” several times, then stood holding the instrument and looking mild and patient.

“Tarnatin’ thing just goes on ringin’,” he said.

The telephone rang and rang. About five minutes later, knuckles tapped the door politely.

“Yes,” Rhoda Haven said.

A voice outside the door said, “Telephone man. There’s something wrong with your phone that makes it ring steadily. May we come in and fix it?”

Gentle-looking old Tex Haven started to open the door.

His daughter grabbed his arm, breathed, “No!”

To the man on the other side of the door, the girl said, “Just a minute, until I get into a robe. I’m taking a bath.”

Tex Haven knocked the fire out of his corncob, poured the smoldering tobacco into a tray, put the pipe in his pocket.

“ ’Twould have fooled me,” he said in a voice so low that it was hardly audible.

Rhoda Haven said, “I may be wrong. But I think trouble of this kind only originates in the mechanical ringer at the switchboard. I doubt if it would be our instrument.”

Each day since coming to the Tower Apartments, one of their first morning acts had been to carefully pack all their belongings in two handbags.

Tex and Rhoda Haven moved swiftly, got the two bags, whipped to a window and went down a fire escape. From the bottom of the fire escape, they dropped into a garden where the shrubbery was thick and where pigeons fluttered and cooed.

Three men stood up in the bushes. They held guns.

One gun-holder said, “We figured the phone gag might not work, in which case you’d maybe be going this way.”

Tex Haven eyed them mildly.

“You-uns downright serious about this?” he asked.

“What do you think?” one said. “Horst sent us. We want that piece of shark skin.”

Tex Haven said, “Waal, in such case—”

Quite a number of people had seen old Tex Haven go into a gun fight at one time or another, and not many of them had ever been able to explain where he got his guns. There was apparently some kind of magic about it. One minute the mild-looking old codger’s hands would be empty—next they were full of spouting iron.

Tex Haven fired once with his right hand and once with his left. One man barked and turned around from the force of a bullet in his shoulder. A second man stood for a moment very stiff and dead, hit between the eyes, before he fell.

Rhoda Haven doubled down, scooped a handful of soft dirt, sent it toward the face of the third man. He snarled, tried to turn his head from the flying dirt and shoot the girl at the same time. His shot echoes gobbled into the echoes of Tex Haven’s shots. The bullet missed the girl.

Tex Haven flicked his guns at the man.

A fourth man came into the garden fifty yards away. It was Horst. He lifted a long-barreled revolver deliberately.

Tex Haven saw Horst aiming and suddenly flattened. The man Haven had been about to shoot ran away. Tex Haven let him go; Haven seemed to have more respect for Horst’s marksmanship than desire for the life of the running man.

More men came into the garden. The place began to convulse with ripping shot crashes.

Tex and Rhoda Haven crawled slowly and carefully. Old Tex kept his gun ready. Neither seemed particularly excited, and each dragged one of the suitcases. They got behind a fountain which was spouting three streams of water into a concrete bowl that overflowed into a fake brook, that trickled across the garden and eventually vanished into a sewer through a grille. Tex and Rhoda Haven got into the brook, were very wet by the time they reached the grille.

Horst and his men had lost track of them. When the Havens came up, they had the advantage of surprise. Horst had climbed on a garden bench, was staring. He had nerve, at least. But he flung himself off the bench when old Tex Haven leaped up and fired.

Shot sound again slammed through the garden. Bullets knocked red dust off bricks, broke two windows, frightened the pigeons anew.

Tex and Rhoda Haven dived into a narrow passage that led to the back street. They ran down the street.

Inside the apartment house, residents were very quiet, although occasionally one stole a furtive look from a window. A woman had been screaming, but had stopped. The snarling sirens of police cars were already approaching.

The Havens got into a subway and took a southbound train.

There was no trace of excitement in the manner of Tex Haven or his daughter. Sitting beside her suitcase, the girl idly contemplated the allurements of a tooth paste as set forth by a car poster, and old Tex Haven even purchased a tabloid newspaper from a newsboy who was working the subway train, and calmly scanned it.

Once Tex Haven said in a low voice, “Nobody ’cept Jep Dee knowed we was livin’ at them Tower Apartments.”

“Jep never told Horst,” Rhoda Haven said quickly.

“Betcher life he didn’t. Horst likely learned from that letter. He ’peared to know a piece of shark skin was in it.”

They changed subway trains three times, shifted to taxicabs and used four different cabs.

The hotel to which they went eventually was small and respectable, had a proprietor notable for the size of his stomach and the proportions of his black mustache, who nearly fell over when he saw his guests, then exploded a delighted, “Tex Haven, you old bobcat in a rabbit skin!”

“Professor Smith and daughter be the names,” Tex Haven said mildly.

“Oh, ho! So you’re charming snakes again?”

“Bein’ charmed, more like.”

The Havens were shown to a suite of two small rooms, which were on the upper floor so the windows could not be shot into conveniently, and which had a handy fire escape.

Tex Haven called his daughter’s attention to an item in the tabloid newspaper which he had bought in the subway.

“Be a mite clearer, you read this,” he said.

Date-lined Key West, Florida, the newspaper item told of the mysterious man named Jep Dee, who had been found, a torture victim, on an uninhabited coral island.

“Poor Jep,” Rhoda Haven said in a low voice.

“Looks as if,” Tex Haven said, “they ketched Jep Dee.”

He got out his corncob pipe and filled it with fragments of poisonous-looking black Scotch tobacco which he tore, with difficulty, from a plug that was about the shape of a fountain pen, and fully as black and hard. Then he leaned back in a chair and let out clouds of smoke that smelled as if it came from a fumigator’s smudge pot. Later, he cleaned and reloaded his guns carefully. There were five of the guns, of assorted sizes, and carried in different places about his long person.

By that time he appeared to have finished his thinking.

“Jep Dee found what him an’ us are after, figures as if,” he said.

“Yes,” said Rhoda Haven.

“They ketched Jep, an’ treated him sort of poorly. We don’t know why they treated him that way, but we might smack a guess.”

“They were trying to make Jep tell them where they could find us,” the girl said.

“I’d smack the same guess,” old Tex Haven stated mildly.

Tex dragged several seething, acid-tinted puffs of smoke from his pipe, then took the corncob out of his teeth and contemplated it lovingly.

“Such industry needs reward, strikes me,” he said.

His daughter eyed him sharply. “What do you mean?”

“Ever hear of Doc Savage?”

“Doc Savage?”

“Yep.”

Rhoda Haven took hold of her lower lip with neat white teeth. She got up, went to the window, passed a hand over her forehead, then came back. Her mouth was grim.

“Look,” she said, “when you defied the Japanese army and they chased us all over Manchuria, I didn’t object.”

“Come to think of it,” old Tex Haven admitted mildly, “you didn’t.”

“And when you dared the German and Italian navy and landed a shipload of guns in Spain, I still didn’t object.”

“There for a while, I was kinda wishin’ you had.”

“The point,” the girl said, “is that you could arrange for us to stage a single-handed duel with the U. S. marines and I would string along with you.”

“You’re tryin’ to say—”

“Haven’t you ever heard about this Doc Savage?”

“In certain circles,” Tex Haven said dryly, “more people’ve heard of Doc Savage than know about Mussolini and Hitler.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“Strikes me,” Tex Haven said, “that in two hundred years from now, there’ll be more in the school books about Doc Savage than there’ll be about Mussolini and Hitler.”

“Maybe.”

“Will, if civilization advances any. Times I doubt if it’s gonna.”

Rhoda Haven stamped a foot.

“Quit beating around the bush,” she snapped, “and tell me what you’ve got up your sleeve.”

“We’re going,” Tex Haven said, “to do Horst and Señor Steel a dirty trick.”

“Dirty trick?”

“We’re going to sick Doc Savage onto ’em. Give ’em somethin’ to do besides devil us.” Old Tex Haven looked at his daughter and assumed the expression of a gaunt tomcat surrounded by canary feathers. “Right pert idea, don’t you think?”

“Which one of us is going to sick Doc Savage onto Horst and Señor Steel?” Rhoda Haven demanded.

“You, I reckon. Deceivin’ a man is a woman’s work.”

Rhoda Haven frowned. “If I tell Doc Savage the truth, he will be likely to cut loose on us, instead of Horst and Steel.”

Old Tex Haven grinned.

“There won’t,” he said, “be a splinter of truth in anything you tell Doc Savage.”