Читать книгу Mad Mesa: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 4

Table of Contents

The black-gloved man was in a car, and the machine apparently had been cruising around and around the park in search of Tom Idle. The car was a touring model, the top down. The black-gloved man drove, and he was craning his neck as though hunting someone. Apparently, it was Tom Idle he sought, because he sent the car to Idle’s side.

“Hondo!” he yelled. “Get in!”

Tom Idle did not like the looks of the man. Probably he would never have gotten in the car, except for the fact that Skookum appeared in the distance, fired a shotgun blast, and two or three shots stung Tom Idle’s skin. He decided to get in the car after all. The stranger at least looked friendly.

The moment Tom Idle landed in the car, the vehicle leaped into motion. Within two minutes, it was breaking the speed limit; and in five minutes, it was going faster than Tom Idle had ever before ridden in a car.

“What in the hell happened?” asked the black-gloved man.

“I don’t know,” Tom Idle said truthfully.

“You went in the park with that bottle of stuff,” the stranger snapped. “That was over two hours ago. You told me to cruise around and be ready to pick you up. While I’m doing that, I see Seedy Smith come tearing out of the park as if a devil were after him.”

Tom Idle stared blankly. Here was another man who thought he was someone else.

“Who—who is Seedy Smith?” he asked uncertainly.

“Why, Seedy used to belong to your gang, Hondo. Don’t you remember? He double-crossed you, and you’ve been promising to croak him when you saw him.”

Tom Idle swallowed.

“Croak him? You mean kill him?”

“Sure,” said the black-gloved man calmly.

“Am I—am I the kind of a man who would kill Seedy Smith?” Tom Idle asked, feeling strange.

The black-gloved man laughed harshly.

“You’re Hondo Weatherbee,” he said. “You’d do anything!”

Tom Idle looked at the speedometer, and got such a shock that he decided not to do it again. The needle was kicking close to a hundred. The car felt as if it were a skyrocket, running on the earth only part of the time. They had left the city behind and were now climbing mountains, traversing the first of what promised to be a series of dizzy curves from which sheer precipices fell hundreds, in some places thousands, of feet.

“Not so fast!” Tom Idle said hoarsely.

The black-gloved man stared at him in surprise.

“What the hell, Hondo? It ain’t like you to be made jittery by a little speed.”

Tom Idle didn’t think it safe to startle the man by saying he was not Hondo Weatherbee. Not at the speed they were traveling, and on a road like this.

Clutching the door of the speeding car, Tom Idle examined his companion. The fellow had a long, well-stuffed body that was remindful of a number of large sausages. His face was distinctly uninviting. It was evil. The mouth was vicious, the nose thin, the ears pointed, the eyes small and discolored, like bird eggs that hadn’t hatched. He wore his black gloves, on both hands.

This unsavory personage was in turn eying Tom Idle at such times as he was not busy wheeling the thunderbolt of a car around awful mountain curves.

“There’s something strange about you, Hondo,” he said.

Tom Idle thought of a way in which he might perhaps get a clue to what had happened to him without startling this stranger.

“I must have got a bump on the head,” Tom Idle said, untruthfully.

“So that was it!”

Deciding the man seemed satisfied with the explanation, Tom Idle ventured, “You say I went into that park two hours ago with a bottle?”

“Sure,” the black-gloved man said. “Don’t you remember that.”

“I don’t recall it. What was in the bottle?”

“The stuff you got from a nut chemist.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“You didn’t tell me, Hondo.”

“Who was the chemist I got the bottle from?”

“Well—hell, you never told me that, neither. It was a big secret.”

Tom Idle felt defeated and desperate. More and more he was being gripped by the feeling that something frightful, and something he couldn’t possibly prevent, was happening to him.

“Didn’t I tell you anything at all?” he asked wildly.

The black-gloved man grimaced in a puzzled way. “You talked like you were drunk.”

“What did I say?”

“Something about if you could only find a bum asleep in the park, your troubles would be over.” The man gave Tom Idle a blank look and added, “Damn it, Hondo, I’ll never forget your exact words, just before you walked into that park with the bottle.”

Tom Idle shuddered. “What were they?”

“‘If I can find a bum asleep in the park, the cops will never get their hands on the brain of Hondo Weatherbee!’ That’s exactly what you said, Hondo.”

The touring car continued its headlong speed. The engine must have special power, because the steep grades did not seem to bother it. They had climbed so high now that the air was already much cooler, and the clouds, the great clouds that seemed like white rabbits, were close overhead.

Tom Idle sat so tensely that every muscle in his body seemed to ache. He was trying to make his mind grasp the situation. It was his mind. But his body—and his clothing—were the property of an outlaw named Hondo Weatherbee. His black-gloved companion apparently belonged to a bandit gang ruled by Hondo Weatherbee. And the bum, Seedy Smith, had been a man whom Hondo Weatherbee had promised to kill. And Skookum, the lunchroom man, and Officer Sam Stevens, had both known Hondo Weatherbee by sight, and had tried to capture him. Tom Idle took his head in his hands. It was too impossible to believe!

A violent start by his companion aroused him. Tom Idle realized the car had slowed, and that they were traversing a series of terrible curves.

The black-gloved man wiped his forehead.

“That one was close!” he croaked.

“What’s wrong?” Tom Idle gasped.

“Cops!”

“Huh?”

“They’re after us. Whatcha think we been drivin’ like a bat for? They’ve got high-powered rifles. They’re shooting at us.”

“Police shooting at us?”

“Look back, if you don’t believe me!”

Tom Idle was turning to look back when the inside of his head seemed to explode in a flood of blackness—and the blackness, spreading, washed completely through his body until all of him, mind and flesh alike, was composed of nothing but darkness, empty and still.