Читать книгу The Annihilist: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 3

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John Henry Cowlton was the first pop-eyed dead one. Cowlton was a young man who had inherited money, and the newspaper reporters, writing his obituary the next morning, called him a Park Avenue playboy. Cowlton was found in his penthouse gymnasium, and because the gym windows were open and it had been a cold night, his body was frozen only slightly less hard than a rock. There was no mark on John Henry Cowlton’s athletic body. But there was a very peculiar thing wrong with his eyes.

John Henry Cowlton’s eyes were protruding completely from their sockets, and for no good reason that the coroner could find. They were quite horrible, those eyes.

Everett Buckett was the second pop-eyed dead one. They found him in his limousine, which he drove himself. Buckett was a Wall Street operator whose machinations had sometimes moved others to call him “Old Bucket of Blood.” He was worth upward of forty millions of dollars.

There was no mark on his body, but every one who saw his corpse noted the way the eyes stuck out. Not only was this horrible to look at, but it gave the undertaker considerable trouble.

Of course Everett Buckett’s death was connected with that of John Henry Cowlton, on account of the eyes. But the catch was that there was no other connection between the two men, as far as any one knew. They had not even been acquaintances.

And certainly no one could connect “Nutty” Olsen with Everett Buckett, Wall Street wolf, and John Henry Cowlton, Park Avenue socialite.

Nutty Olsen was the next victim, and they found him in his cheap, filthy room with his eyes all a-pop. Nutty had been in numerous jails and he had a long police record; he was known as an utterly bad character. It was even suspected that he had murdered his mother because the old lady had once turned him over to the police. This had never been proved.

All of these deaths were in Manhattan.

The next one was in the Bronx. By this time, newspapers had started putting the pop-eyed deaths on the front page, and people who had nothing else to do were wondering if some new and mysterious disease might not have sprung up.

The Bronx victim was a lawyer, noted as a very honest man. He had a large family. They heard him screaming in his room. When they reached him, he was spread out on the floor with his eyes sticking out.

The tabloid newspapers began to turn handsprings. They ran big headlines; and the more timid citizens of New York began to look into mirrors frequently to see if anything was wrong with their eyes.

The thing was not a joke. A fifth and sixth man were found dead—one a comfortably fixed insurance man, the other a down-and-out hanger-on in a pool hall—and their eyes were not pleasant things to look at. The seventh was a professor in the city’s largest university.

There was no conceivable connection between any of these men. But they all died with their eyes sticking out.

The police department, urged by the mayor, sent to Chicago for a specialist in strange diseases, for none of the victims showed the slightest mark on their bodies. The conservative New York papers became as wild as the tabloids. They did their best to worry every one.

Certain unnaturally timid persons began to go south to Florida earlier than they had intended. Others went to Europe. Those who had country homes paid them a visit. So far, it was only the timid who were worried. But before long, every one was to feel the terror of it.

They thought it was some new disease. They were wrong. Just how hideously wrong, no one had yet realized. The secret of the whole thing started coming out after what happened at the Association of Physical Health.

In the Association of Physical Health, there was a frosted glass inner-office door which bore the legend:

Dr. J. Sultman, President

Behind the door, a man yelled hoarsely, “I won’t do it! No!”

There were scuffling sounds and a thump as if a chair had been upset. Rattling of the doorknob indicated some one was trying to get out.

In the big outer office, stenographers stopped typing. The flashy blonde on the phone switchboard ceased chewing gum and opened her lips.

The small man sitting in one of the leather chairs reserved for customers lowered his newspaper against his chest and looked over it, then shifted the paper so that his hands were concealed between it and his chest. The small man had long, oily hair and bleak blue eyes. His clothing was extremely conservative.

“Let me out of here, you damned fiend!” roared the voice back of the door.

Then the frosted glass panel broke with a jangling explosion. The man on the other side was beating it out with his fists, and when he had a large opening, he threw a light-brown topcoat over the jagged edges and vaulted through. He did not bother to recover his coat, but plunged toward the elevators, breathing heavily, horror on his face.

The man did not look like one accustomed to violent physical action. He was portly, with ruddy cheeks, and his head was almost bald. He had long-fingered, capable hands, which were also unusually smooth-skinned.

The small man with the newspaper stood erect hastily, let the paper fall, and showed an automatic pistol which it had hidden.

“Wait, brother!” he said.

The portly man looked at the gun, veered sharply to the left and slammed himself down in the shelter of a long leather divan.

“Help!” he roared at the top of his voice. “Police! Help!”

The small man’s mouth twisted, giving his face a cast of extreme evil. He aimed at the divan and began shooting, the gun convulsing and jumping with each ear-shattering report.

Stenographers screamed; nurses began running; and the blonde telephone girl swallowed her gum and tried to crawl under her switchboard.

When the small man’s automatic was empty, he snapped a fresh cartridge clip into the magazine with the skill of an expert gunman. Then he ran around behind the divan.

The portly man was a limp heap, leaking crimson in several places, for the bullets had driven through the leather and upholstery of the divan.

The small man shot once more, deliberately, and his victim’s head jarred as a small blue hole appeared a little above the eyes. Then the killer ran for the stairway beside the elevators.

He reached the first stair landing. There he stopped, began to writhe about and shriek.

Between yells, the killer gnashed his own lips so that scarlet ran down over his chin and stained his necktie and shirt front. He doubled over as best he could, stamping his feet, slowly, then threw back his head.

When his head was back, the strange thing happening to his eyes first became apparent. It looked as if something behind the orbs was slowly forcing them out of their sockets.

The small man fell down on the landing and his gargling noises weakened until, before many seconds had passed, he was silent. He ceased to breathe, but his body still retained its grotesquely stiff posture.

His eyes were all but hanging out of their sockets.

There was only one flight of stairs to the street, and heavy feet pounded these, mounting. Two policemen appeared, hands on hip holsters, and saw the body of the man on the landing.

“I’ll be damned!” gasped one officer, impressed by the dead man’s popping eyes. “Whatcha know about that? The eighth one!”

They went on up the stairs and entered the big reception room of the Association of Physical Health. There was much excitement, one of the stenographers having fainted.

The two policemen shouted down every one, gave orders that nobody was to leave, and one took up a position at the elevators after ascertaining there was no back door. The other cop made a brief inspection of the portly man who had been shot to death behind the divan.

One of the dead man’s arms was outflung, and the wrist was encircled by a shiny metal band which the policeman at first mistook for a wrist watch, only to learn, on closer inspection, that it held in place a round metal disk which bore an inscription that read:

Should anything happen to this man, notify Doc Savage.

“Hell’s bells!” gulped the officer, and ran for a telephone.

The blonde operator was too nervous to put up a connection, so the policeman did it himself, fumbling clumsily with the board.

“Doc Savage speaking,” came over the wire.

The voice which had answered was one so unusual that the officer was startled into momentary silence. There was a remarkable depth and power to the voice, a quality of capability which even the shortcomings of telephonic reproduction did not mask.

“There’s a man dead here,” said the policeman. “On his wrist is an identification tag asking that you be called if anything should happen to him.”

“What is the number on the back of the tag?” Doc Savage asked.

The officer went over and examined the tag, finding a number he had overlooked the first time. Then he came back.

“Twenty-three,” he said.

The policeman waited for some comment—then a bewildered expression overspread his flushed features. He absently put a finger up and rubbed an ear, as if that organ were playing him tricks.

He was hearing one of the strangest sounds ever to come to his attention. It was a weird trilling, this note, having a fantastic rising and falling cadence, yet adhering to no definite tune. It might have been the product of a faint wind through the cold spiles of an ice field, or it might have been the sound of an exotic tropical bird. The note ebbed away as mysteriously as it had arisen.

“I shall be there shortly,” Doc Savage said, and there was no trace of emotion in his unusual voice.

The policeman hung up and breathed, “Whew! Something about that guy gets you, even over the telephone!”

The other cop, who had come over and heard the last of the conversation, demanded, “Who is this guy Doc Savage?”

The first officer looked dumfounded. “You ain’t kiddin’ me?”

“Oh, I’ve heard gossip about him,” said the other. “But nothing first hand. What’s the dope on him?”

“He’s probably the most unusual bird alive,” said the first officer. “He’s the biggest and strongest man you ever saw. And he’s a whiz! He can do anything. Electricity, chemistry, engineering, he knows all about ’em all.”

“What’s his business?” demanded the other.

The first policeman shrugged. “High adventure, I guess. He likes excitement. And he goes around getting people out of trouble. But what I mean, he tackles things on a big scale. He saves thrones for kings and stops wars. That’s his calibre.”

The cop who was asking questions said, “He has five birds who help him, hasn’t he?”

“Yeah. Scientists, electricians and so on. Each one of the five is a topnotch specialist in some line.”

The other policeman nodded at the body, then at the telephone. “How come you called him?”

“That identification disk——”

“I know. But that’s business for Inspector Hardboiled Humbolt. He won’t like it, your calling this Doc Savage.”

“I don’t give a damn,” said the other officer. “This Doc Savage has done more good for the world than any other ten living men you can name. Yeah—any fifty you can name.”

“Hardboiled Humbolt is gonna lay an egg because you called Savage,” grunted the first cop. “You could call the president and the governor and the marines, and Hardboiled would still kick. He likes to run things.”

“Let him lay the egg,” snorted the other policeman.

They went out to stand guard. Down in the street, the caterwauling of a police siren was becoming louder.

The roadster had a long wheelbase, but it was not flashy and there was nothing particularly outstanding about its appearance. Only close inspection would have shown that the body was moulded of armor plate and the tires were filled with sponge rubber which would not be affected greatly by bullets. The glasswork was also of bulletproof construction, and the machine was fitted with apparatus for laying either smoke or gas screens.

Under the hood, a siren whined softly.

It was hard to say whether it was the whining of the siren or the appearance of the remarkable bronze man at the wheel which caused traffic to be parted with alacrity. The siren was the type reserved for police squad cars. Furthermore, the license plate consisted simply of three letters and a number—DOC 1.

More than a few persons on the streets recognized the bronze man. His picture was often in the newspapers; his name was mentioned even more frequently in the prints.

“Doc Savage,” some one said, and there was a small stampede for the curb to get a glimpse of the bronze man.

The roadster was a large one, a car in which an ordinary large man would have seemed small. But the bronze man had the build of a giant, even in the open machine. Tremendous muscular strength was apparent in his cabled hands and in the vertical muscles in his neck, which were like hawsers coated with a veneer of bronze.

This bronze hue was the giant’s motif throughout, his unusually fine-textured skin having a metallic hue imparted by long exposure to intense sunlight; his hair, straight and fitting like a metal skullcap, was of a bronze only slightly darker; the quiet brown of his business suit added to the symphony in metal.

Perhaps the eyes of the bronze man were the most impressive thing about him. They were weird, almost fantastic eyes, like nothing so much as pools of fine golden flakes continuously stirred by tiny winds. In them was a hypnotic, compelling quality.

The bronze man wore no head covering, and his eyes roved ceaselessly, seeming never to devote attention to the driving but rather to the streets through which the roadster passed. In spite of the seeming inattention, there was an expert ease about the way he drove.

He reached the building which housed the Association of Physical Health, drew to the curb and switched off the engine. Little more than the sudden death of the ammeter needle indicated the motor had stopped, so silently had it operated.

The bronze man drifted a metallic, muscle-cabled hand under the dash and touched a switch. Soft static crackle began coming from a radio loud-speaker. He brought a hand microphone to view.

“Monk—Ham,” he said into the mike.

A voice that might have belonged to a small child came from the radio speaker.

“We’re only a few blocks away, Doc,” said this small tone.

“Ham with you?” Doc questioned.

“The shyster? Sure. He’s along.”

“Watch the outside of the building.” Doc Savage directed quietly.

“Sure,” said the child-voiced “Monk.” “What do you know about this Association of Physical Health?”

“It is a concern which makes a business of giving physical examinations,” the bronze man replied. “A physician named Janko Sultman is the president and principal owner.”

Monk asked, “Any idea what this means, Doc?”

“None whatever,” said the bronze giant, and switched off the radio transmitter-receiver equipment.

He could hear the murmur of puzzled voices as soon as he entered the building. A police medical examiner was inspecting the body of the man who had died, pop-eyed, on the stair landing. He bowed with marked deference when he saw Doc Savage.

“What killed him?” Doc Savage queried.

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” the medical examiner said promptly. “It has me stumped. But he’s like the other seven.”

The bronze man said nothing, but knelt beside the dead man, his intention obviously being to make an examination.

There was a pounding of feet on the stairs, coming down from the second floor above. Doc Savage did not look around.

The newcomer was a burly man almost as large as Doc Savage. He had very large feet which were encased in canvas sneakers, and he walked as if his feet hurt him. His face gave the impression of being composed mostly of jaw.

He slammed a hand down on Doc Savage’s shoulder. The hand was red and bony with a skin that looked as tough as rhinoceros hide.

“What the hell you doing?” he growled. “Get away from that body!”

The beefy man kept his hand on Doc Savage’s shoulder as the bronze man stood erect. Then he shifted his grip to Doc Savage’s arm. A slightly blank look overspread his bulldog face as he felt the hardness of the arm beneath. The next instant blankness became amazement as the bronze man plucked the hand off his arm, accomplishing the feat with apparent ease.

The burly man peered foolishly at his wrist, which bore pale grooves where the bronze man’s fingers had reposed momentarily. He wriggled the fingers and seemed surprised that they functioned. Then he rumbled angrily, shook his arm up and down, and a shot-filled leather blackjack dropped into his hand. Evidently it had hung on a hook or rested in a shallow pocket in his sleeve.

“Tough guy, huh?” he growled.

“Don’t be a fool, Hardboiled!” the medical examiner gulped. “This is Doc Savage.”

“I know who he is,” “Hardboiled” rumbled. “He’s the guy who goes around mixing in other people’s business, and guys who try to buck him have a funny way of disappearin’.”

The medical examiner said, “Doc Savage has an honorary commission as inspector on the police——”

“Yeah, I know,” Hardboiled growled. Then he leaned forward and tapped Doc’s chest lightly with the end of his blackjack.

“Listen,” he said. “I been intending to get around to you, only I’ve been too busy. I’ve heard a lot about you, and we know each other by sight. You may know I’m a tough cop. That’s what the papers call me, damn ’em! I know you’re the Man of Mystery, and I know people try to kill you and you do things to ’em and the law never hears about it. I don’t like it. From now on, when anybody takes a shot at you, you call a cop and he’ll handle it. Do it like anybody else does.”

“In other words, have the police fight my battles?” Doc asked.

“Call it what you want,” Hardboiled scowled. “There’s laws to take care of crooks. And another thing: behave yourself and you won’t have any battles to fight.”

Doc asked dryly, “You have a faint suspicion I am a crook? Is that it?”

Hardboiled glared. “When I have suspicions, they’re not faint!” he yelled. “I come out with ’em.”

Doc said, “Suppose you come out with them now.”

The beefy inspector’s leather sap swung for emphasis.

“I think you do things outside the law!” Hardboiled roared. “That makes you subject to arrest. There are laws to punish criminals. And don’t feed me that hokum about them not being punished in this day, because they are. Let the law take its course.”

Doc said, “No one is disputing that.”

Hardboiled put out his jaw. “I’ve heard that you set yourself up as judge, jury and penitentiary, all in one,” he rapped. “Now that stuff don’t go. You make one slip, and I’ll clap your pants in the holdover so quick your head’ll swim! If there’s any one needs arresting in this town, that’s my job. I do it. And I don’t stand for anybody meddling with my job.”

Doc murmured without expression, “Very clear.”

Hardboiled got his jaw out farther. “Now I want civil answers to plain questions out of you. There has been two murders here, one of them the eighth in a damned mysterious chain of deaths that’s beginning to get everybody all bothered.”

“I see,” Doc said.

“Go upstairs and take a look at that other body,” Hardboiled directed. “Maybe you can identify it.”

The medical examiner managed to work close to Doc Savage’s side as the bronze man mounted the stairs.

“This Hardboiled is a character,” he said. “He would insult the president. He’s a leather-skinned cop of the old school, and he’s been doing wonders at cleaning up Manhattan since they put him in charge. He’s got a phobia for sticking to the letter of the law where police duties are concerned.”

“I have been following Hardboiled’s record,” Doc Savage said quietly. “The man is just what Manhattan needed.”

The examiner chuckled. “Hardboiled was canned by a previous administration for knocking the mayor down when they got in a quarrel over one of the mayor’s friends breaking the speed limit. He’s some character. His feet always hurt him. Maybe that’s what makes him so grouchy.”

Hardboiled Humbolt strode over to the body of the portly, bald man who had been shot to death and demanded of Doc Savage, “Who is he?”

“His name,” the bronze man said, “was Leander Court.”

“What was his business?” Hardboiled asked.

“He was a scientist and surgeon.”

“How’d he hook up with you?”

The bronze man’s flake-gold eyes seemed to acquire strange lights. “What do you mean?”

“How come he was wearing an identification tag asking that you be called if anything happened to him?” boomed Hardboiled.

“That, I shall not answer,” Doc Savage said.

Hardboiled glared. “Say, didn’t that lecture I just gave you take effect? You coöperate with me, or else you get in some trouble!”

He shook his sap down out of his sleeve.

The medical examiner yelled, “You’re making an unmitigated fool out of yourself, Hardboiled!”

Hardboiled scowled and growled, “I don’t like the methods of Doc Savage and I don’t give a damn who knows it, and he’s gonna answer my questions. There’s some motive behind this killing, and I want to know what it is. I want to know why the other seven were killed.”

“I can assure you,” Doc Savage told him, “that I have not the slightest idea why Leander Court was killed, or the other seven, either.”

“All right,” snapped Hardboiled. “Now, why was he wearing that identification disk?”

Doc Savage ignored the question. “Just exactly what happened here?”

The medical examiner, who was embarrassed by the attitude which Hardboiled Humbolt had taken, said, “The dead man, Leander Court, arrived about an hour ago, according to the reception girl. He said he had an appointment with Janko Sultman, the president of the Association of Physical Health, and she directed him to Sultman’s office.

“He was in there some time. Then he began yelling stuff about not doing something, and demanding to be let out. He broke the glass out of the door and climbed through. Then the man dead on the staircase downstairs shot him.”

“When did the man downstairs appear?” Doc Savage interjected.

“Shortly after Leander Court arrived,” said the examiner. “It looks as if the man followed Court here.”

The bronze man nodded. “Then what?”

“After he shot Court, the man fled,” explained the examiner. “He ran down the stairs, got to the first landing and had some kind of a fit, and died. That’s as near as we can reconstruct it.”

Doc Savage waved at the office. “Who was Leander Court yelling at before he broke out of the office?”

“That,” said the medical examiner, “is a mystery.”

“What do you mean?”

“There was nobody in the office.”

Doc Savage swung over to the door and glanced through the jagged aperture where the frosted glass panel had been broken out. The office beyond was plainly furnished, the opposite wall being perforated with one window, and there was certainly no one inside. He tried the door. It resisted his efforts.

“The lock is peculiar,” said the examiner. “It is a spring affair that has to be unlocked from either side with a key.”

Doc Savage questioned, “You are sure no one left the office during the excitement?”

“They would have had to climb out,” said the examiner. “Some one would certainly have noticed.”

The bronze man glanced through the door again. The window was fitted with a substantial lock, and this was fastened. No one could have left by that route.

“Very mysterious,” Doc Savage said.

“Not any more mysterious than your not wantin’ to tell us why Leander Court wore that identification tag,” Hardboiled Humbolt interjected sourly.

“Vot t’ings is happen here?” a strange voice demanded loudly.