Читать книгу Red Snow: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 5

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The dead man was tall—they removed him from the trunk to examine, that they might be sure he was dead—and he wore clothes which were wrinkled, yet tailored of expensive cloth and not badly worn. He had a bald spot on the top of his head, back of where the bullet had entered; there was a typical Florida tan on his face, the tan of a native, and over the bridge of his nose was a pale strip, while other pale streaks ran directly back from the corners of his eyes to his ears.

“Wore shell-rimmed glasses,” Monk said slowly. “Wonder where they are.”

The glasses, it developed, were inside the man’s coat. In one of his pockets was a small flashlight: in the other pocket was a flat bottle and an object wrapped in wax paper.

Doc Savage uncorked the bottle, tested it with his nostrils, and said, “Water.” He unwrapped the wax paper and found a peanut-butter sandwich. When they looked in the trunk under the body, they found other wax papers which had been around sandwiches.

“The fellow has been in the trunk some time,” Doc decided quietly. “He entered prepared for a considerable stay.”

The apish Monk scratched his bullet of a head. “But how did he get in there? The lock was not broken.”

“Almost anyone can pick a trunk lock such as this,” Doc reminded.

“But he was locked in,” Monk pointed out.

“Which means some one helped him,” Doc agreed.

They rolled the dead man over in order to get to his hip pockets, and as they did so, there was a clatter and an object rolled across the floor. Monk reached down to pick it up, then jerked his hand back hastily.

“His false teeth,” he muttered.

The dead man had worn a complete set of upper molars. Doc Savage dropped a handkerchief over them, lifted them, then indicated with a finger.

The portion of the plate fitting against the gums was covered with what looked like a layer of red wax. This did not cover the whole formation of the false teeth, and looked as if it had been molded in place with a finger.

“Guess they didn’t fit him and he built them with sealing wax,” Monk decided aloud.

Doc Savage tucked the false teeth in the upper outside pocket of the dead man’s coat, the pocket commonly reserved for ornamental handkerchiefs.

“Was he killed recently?” Ham asked.

“Within the last half hour,” Doc replied. “That means while the raid was in progress on the truck, he was shot.”

They continued examination of the dead man’s pockets, and came finally to the left hip pocket. It held a billfold, and this, opened, yielded one of the identification forms which are usually found in new billfolds. It had been filled out:

Prof. Casson Adams,

7242 Floral Cliff,

Miami, Florida.

Monk squinted small eyes at Doc Savage. “I’m going to ask a silly question. Do we look into this, or do we?”

“We do,” Doc told him.

Monk sighed, as if a great load had tumbled off his shoulders.

“I was afraid this Florida trip would really turn out with us spending all of our time trying to give mosquitoes the influenza or something,” he said. “Now it looks interesting!”

Ham scowled at him and snapped, “I wonder where this Floral Cliff is?”

“A city real-estate map should show us,” Doc said. “We will rent a car.”

“I guess I’ll leave the hog here to convalesce,” Monk decided.

Half an hour later, Monk was looking at Floral Cliff and relieving himself of a loud snort.

“Floral Cliff!” he grimaced. “They should call the place Aroma Flats.”

He pinched his flattened, much-broken nose between a furry thumb and forefinger.

There was odor in the air. It was a very distinctive scent. It was remindful of a bonfire fed with old overshoes, rags, and now and then a fistful of sulphur. An added touch was a tang similar to cooking cabbage.

Sand was all about them, here and there looking as if it had been played on by a preposterously huge child with a shovel, for there were deep grooves, as well as mounds which bore no similarity in formation.

Almost the only vegetation growing on the dunes was palmetto, and this, in spots, was too thick to permit convenient passage. But more often, the sand was bare.

The fantastic and unpleasant odor, while it was not strong, seemed to have permeated everything in the vicinity.

The car which Doc Savage had rented, a small touring, attacked the sand which the wind had heaped across the beach trail. The exhaust alternately pounded and sagged as if engaged in a terrific struggle, then, with a few violent jerks, the machine came to a stop half across a sand drift.

Monk got out and looked under the car and saw radius rods and front axle buried in coral particles.

“Looks like we ride shank’s mare from here,” he grunted.

They got out and went on. There was a sharp wind off the sea; they could hear the noise of waves breaking and it was like a great mouse playing in a box of loosely wadded paper. The wind buffeted their ankles and occasionally their hands and faces, with sand particles; it pushed the weird odor into their nostrils, making the aroma seem doubly oppressive.

“Two bits says we’re on the wrong road,” Monk complained.

“Look!” Ham pointed.

Barren as was the waste of sand, rather ancient-looking signs, nailed to stakes, were sticking up at intervals. These bore the names of streets, streets which had existed only on the maps of imaginative real-estate dealers. The legend on one said:

7100 Block,

Floral Cliff.

“The number we’re hunting is 7242 Floral Cliff,” Ham added. “It is probably over that next dune.”

Monk looked at the next dune, which was thick with palmetto, and snorted, “A swell place for a house with a number!”

They continued advancing and Doc Savage, not speaking, however, pointed out the fact that the barren road had been used recently, for there were footprints in the sand. Most of them were obliterated by wind driftage, although here and there they stood out plainly. At points, there was evidence that wheeled conveyances used the trail, although infrequently.

The men topped the dune and stopped.

“What did I tell you?” Ham asked.

They had come to a wall. Once it had been an impressive, carefully constructed thing of stucco, but the stucco had fallen away and the bricks beneath had cracked their mortar and in places had fallen to the sand. The barrier had a height of eight or nine feet.

Standing atop the dune, they could see a thicket of scrawny palms inside the wall, and beyond that, what seemed to be a once prepossessing house which was now in a state of almost fantastic disrepair. Gaping holes, where the tiles of the roof had fallen in, were visible, and stucco had scabbed off such of the walls as they could see.

“Spooky-looking joint,” Monk muttered. “Built during the boom, then left to go to seed.”

The trail through the dunes angled around and led them to a gate. This was an affair of rusted iron bars which formed an ornamental grille that was not unimpressive, but boards had been nailed on the inside.

Monk tried to find a crack in the planking. He looked surprised.

“What d’you know!” he breathed.

Ham scowled at him. “What is it, you missing link?”

“Canvas nailed on the inside,” Monk muttered. “Looks as if we were not supposed to see in.”

There was a bell cord hanging beside the gate, an iron handle secured to its end, and Doc pulled this. The cord broke and the handle came away in his fingers; there was no sound but the rotten chug of the cord breaking.

Monk took another look through the gate and added, “The canvas is not new. Looks as if it had been there a few weeks, anyway.”

Doc Savage called sharply, in a voice that carried far: “Hello inside!”

The silence which answered might have been that of death.

Doc Savage moved to the right, sank a little and leaped upward, catching the crest of the wall. Bricks loosened in rotten mortar, gave way, and let him back to the sand. He tried again, and this time got on top of the wall.

He surveyed the interior for a moment, then helped Monk and Ham to clamber upon the wall. They all looked over the interior.

Palm trees and semitropical bushes had once been planted with some adherence to a landscaping plan, but had grown untended, interlacing into a miserly jungle which straggled like a green festering around the decrepit mansion, forming a setting which made the house somehow like an animal, once healthy, but which had strangled in the surrounding canker. They began lowering themselves inside.

There came a clatter from their left, near the foot of the wall. It was a tiny sound.

“Hey!” Monk grunted. “What was that?”

Doc Savage shifted to the left, strange flake-gold eyes downcast, searching. He came to a small depression in the soft sand. He hesitated. Then he dipped bronze fingers into the sand and sifted, exploring.

The object which he brought out gave off brilliant reflections in the Florida sunlight.

Monk peered closely, then let a long breath of surprise make a hissing through his teeth.

“Boy, oh boy!” he gasped. “Did somebody throw that at us?”

Doc Savage rolled the thing he had picked up in the cup of one bronze palm. It was a ring, delicately feminine. The band was of white gold, the portion around the setting of platinum, and the stone itself was a blue-white diamond something near the size of a pencil eraser.

“Where’d it come from?” Monk’s eyes started to range the decrepit mansion—then, as Doc Savage made a slight gesture, he fell to eying the diamond ring again.

Doc had turned the ring over so that the inner band, the portion under the setting, was visible.

The space between the gem and inner surface had been stuffed with a substance which resembled red sealing wax more than it resembled any other common substance. A bit of tissue paper immediately under the diamond kept the red material from showing through the facets of the stone.

“Hey!” Monk exploded. “That red stuff—remember the false teeth of the man who was killed in the trunk?”

“There was some of this red material sticking to the inside of the teeth!” Ham breathed.

“It looked like the same thing,” Monk amended.

Doc Savage made no comment. The bronze man’s weird flake-gold eyes were ranging over the pocked, shabby walls of the strange abandoned mansion in the sand dunes.

So unexpectedly that it was startling, Doc’s fantastic trilling came into being. It had a hastened, imperative quality, and might have been the product of the wind which was sucking at the sand under their feet. After an excited moment, the sound was gone.

“Get out of here!” Doc said grimly. “Do it as quickly as possible!”

Monk and Ham rolled their eyes to see what Doc had sighted. They discerned nothing.

“Run!” Doc said, and the word was an imperative command.

Monk and Ham both received an impatient shove. They began to run, not knowing why, but sure Doc had heard or seen something. They prepared to scramble wildly over the wall.

Then they stopped suddenly.

A man had appeared on the wall. He had come up from the other side, silently, with an almost uncanny ease and lack of noise. He was not especially tall, and he was lean-bodied, with thin arms and legs. His thinness was not that of emaciation, but rather that of a cat made lean by much hunting. He wore golf knickers which were very large and ballooned out above his knees, making him look somewhat ridiculous.

His striking characteristic, however, was his head. It was a head large beyond normal proportions, with no vestige of hair upon it—no mustache, eyebrows or lashes, the top entirely shiny and bald.

The eyes were bulging under their lids, somehow like halves of ripe blue plums stuck upon the face with a narrow knife slit in each so that the purplish meat of the fruit showed through beneath. The mouth was unnaturally small, its slit seeming scarcely larger than one of the eyes, and looking, too, a little like them.

His skin was jet, amazingly black, except for the back of one thin hand, where the black had been rubbed away, showing that it was grease paint covering skin of a definitely yellowish hue.

In both hands, the newcomer held large electric light globes. These were more than two-thirds full of a liquid which had the color and consistency of coffee. Over the bottoms of the bulbs where the glass point projected—they were of an old-fashioned type—adhesive tape had been plastered.

“You will each lie down on your backs,” he said quietly.

Monk dropped words from a corner of his oversize mouth. “Doc, this bird wasn’t with the gang who made the trunk raid, was he?”

“No,” Doc Savage said.

The weird-looking man on the wall held out his two light globes.

“Two of you understand something of chemistry,” he murmured. “Look at these closely.”

He spoke fluidly enough, but his voice was shrill, almost a flute piping.

Doc and his two companions eyed the liquid in the light bulbs. They said nothing.

“The bulbs are filled with chlorine,” offered the man on the wall. “Of course, you can see that it does not have the true greenish-yellow color of chlorine, but that is because certain other chemicals have been added to make it more effective.”

Ham breathed, “Will chlorine hurt a man?”

Monk said, “For a little while. Then you croak. Remember, they used it in the War.”

The man on the wall lifted his strange weapons. His weird, flute voice was grim.

“I trust you do not think I am being dramatic,” he piped. “I can hit you with these bulbs, and you will die. Or you can lie down on your backs.”

Monk began, “I can get to my machine pistol——”

“No,” Doc told him. “Do as this fellow says. He’s not bluffing.”

They lowered themselves to the sand, then lay down on their backs.

“Now,” piped the man on the wall, “you will each scoop up handfuls of sand and pour it over your eyes. You can shut your eyes first, of course. I merely do not wish you to see what I am doing.”

Reluctantly, Doc and his men scooped up sand.

Dame Fortune is a vagrant, unreliable hussy, and Doc Savage had long ago ceased to rely upon her entirely. But occasionally the wench did make an offering which was not to be spurned. She made one now. As Doc dug down for sand, his finger tips encountered half a brick which had evidently toppled from the wall months ago.

He dug up the brick, threw it. If he stopped to think, it was for no appreciable interval.

The black-faced man on the wall was on his guard, but it did him little good. The brick hit him in the face. In throwing, Doc had sacrificed force for accuracy, so the brick did not kill the man. It did bowl him off the wall, however.

The fellow showed a remarkable presence of mind and threw both his light bulbs inside the fence. Then he fell in the other direction.

The bulbs landed not more than a dozen feet from Doc and his two men. They burst with squishy noises. Greenish-yellow vapor spread, swirled in the wind, came toward Doc.

Ham had bounded up from the sand. Monk followed him. But Monk was howling angrily. He had piled sand on his eyes before Doc threw the brick fragment, and some of the particles had gotten under the lids.

Doc seized his two aides and rushed them away from the spreading chlorine. There was only one way for them to go—toward the house.

Ham started to bear toward the south end, the most convenient corner.

“The other one!” Doc rapped. “There is a man with a gun at one of the windows on that side. Saw him just before the other fellow appeared on top of the fence. That is why I was in such a hurry to get out of here.”

They sloped around the house corner—and were instantly the center of a swirl of striking, swearing men.

The attackers—they all had black grease paint on their faces—were coming out of a side door. Nearly half a dozen were at hand, and the door was spitting more of them. They seemed confident of their numbers, for they piled upon Doc and his men, bare-handed.

Nor was their confidence too greatly misplaced. Doc Savage went down; even his tremendous strength was not proof against four pairs of arms leeching to his ankles. He began to club with his fists. Men moaned, screamed, fell away.

The wind was carrying the cloud of chlorine toward them.

Beyond the chlorine menace, the man with the big black head climbed shakily back atop the wall. The half brick had started his face leaking red strings down over his shirt and golf trousers.

He screamed something. It was in a foreign language—the same tongue spoken by the two fruit peddlers who had led the raid upon the truck bearing Doc Savage’s baggage. Then the man changed to English.

“Get the thing they picked up from the sand inside the wall!” he fluted.

His words seemed to redouble the violence of the fight as the wearers of the black grease paint sought to overcome Doc Savage, Monk and Ham. Seven of them had set upon Doc now and, clawing and striking, sought to hold him, only to succumb, in rapid succession, to blows which they hardly saw at all, so swift was the delivery. In no case did the bronze giant hit a man twice. He picked his spots, and each terrific fist impact felled an assailant.

“Use knives!” shrieked the man on the wall. He was pawing scarlet off his hideous, hairless countenance. “Shoot them!”

One tried to take the leader’s advice, and with a thin splinter of steel in his fist, lunged in upon Doc Savage. The bronze man did not shift position, except to throw out an arm with a speed which made it appear to vanish in mid-air so that the hand, when it reappeared, was fixed upon the knife wielder’s wrist.

The bronze man moved casually and the knife wielder shrieked as if he were dying, instead of having his arm merely disjointed.

Ham still retained his sword cane, and was using it as briskly as close quarters permitted. He made no attempt to run his foes through, or induce fatal wounds by slashing and cutting. Instead, he merely pricked with the tip of the blade, which was coated with a sticky compound for the first six inches of its length. And after a few seconds, the men who had been pricked began to weave on their feet.

“The blade is poisoned!” a man screamed.

“Get the thing which they picked up inside the wall!” shrilled the bald black man who had been hit with the brick.

Three grease-painted fellows hit Doc simultaneously. The sand gave poor footing. He was upset. They clawed at him. One, purely by accident, tore open one of Doc’s coat pockets, and it chanced that into this same pocket he had dropped the ring. The ring fell out. A black-faced man seized it.

“It’s the Space girl’s diamond ring!” he yelled.

“Run!” piped the man on the fence. “The chlorine!”

The hideous chlorine was almost upon the men as they began to run. They left Doc Savage and his two aides, and seemed not to care what happened to their own fellows who had been overcome in the fight.

Monk, still quite blind from the sand in his eyes, had been lunging about, striking at random, and now he accidentally hit Ham, knocking the sword-cane-carrying lawyer sprawling.

“That was no accident!” Ham shrieked unreasonably.

Doc shoved Monk, getting him in motion, and Monk struggled and tried to strike back until it dawned on him that he was being manhandled by Doc. Ham also reared up on his feet.

They headed to the left, toward the wall. There was no shooting. For the moment, action had suspended while every one escaped the chlorine.

As it developed, the recess was hardly necessary, for an air current caught the chlorine as it piled along the side of the house, and the stuff backed up, was swept toward the roof and away, dissipating itself in the brilliant sunlight.

The man with the big, hairless head had vanished from the wall during the excitement. The others had doubled back and entered the house.

Doc Savage reached the wall, gave his two aides a hand over, then crossed over it himself.

“The man with the big head dropped outside the wall,” Ham rapped. “Let’s get him!”

But Doc Savage was already whipping along the wall toward the spot where the fellow in golf knickers must be lurking. Ham followed. Monk, eyes as yet not functioning properly, stumbled along clumsily. Ham came back, grabbed Monk by the short hair on top of his head and guided him roughly.

“Ouch!” Monk groaned.

“You will slough me by accident, will you!” Ham hissed.

Ahead, Doc had reached the corner. He thrust his head around, ready to draw back instantly; but the bald quarry was not in sight. Footprints in the sand showed where the fellow had run, in the opposite direction, along the wall.

Doc followed them. Ham came in his wake, still leading Monk urgently by the hair.

They stopped when they heard a voice. It was the flutelike tone of the bald man, calling to those inside the wall.

“Are you sure you got whatever it was they picked up?” he piped.

“Sure!” some one bawled. “The ring——”

“I do not think it was the ring,” called the shrill voice. “The ring has no importance——”

“There’s some stuff that looks like red wax under the diamond!” the man, inside yelled back.

The chief piped shrill curses in his foreign tongue.

“So that was it!” he trebled. “They have the secret and are trying to pass it on to this Doc Savage!”

“It must have been the girl!” yelled the man inside.

“Of course!” piped the other. “Go quickly and make sure she has not freed herself.”

Ham came up alongside Doc Savage where the bronze man crouched beside the wall.

“This is getting involved,” he breathed. “That red stuff seems to be the key to some mystery. And they’re holding a woman prisoner.”

Doc nodded slowly. “She must have seen us come over the wall and threw the ring at us to get it in our hands.”

Monk, making horrible grimaces, dug the last of the sand out of his eyes.

“Just what in blazes do you reckon we’re gettin’ into?” he asked mildly. Then he shot a startled look at Doc. “Say, that guy they killed in the trunk was——”

“Was evidently trying to get to us secretly,” Doc said, finishing Monk’s thought.

“But how’d he know about the baggage at the depot?” Monk pondered. “How’d he know about us at the hotel? And why didn’t he come himself, instead of hiding in a trunk so he would be carried there?”

“It looks as if some one has been keeping very close tab on our movements,” Doc said.

They were creeping forward now, seeking their hairless quarry.

Monk muttered, “Say, you remember that red stuff sticking to the false teeth of the guy in the trunk? It looked like the same material that was in the ring. Now, I wonder——”

Whatever Monk wondered, it never became clear. They heard a clatter, a scratching, and knew the man with the monstrous head had vaulted over the wall into the compound.