Читать книгу The Other World: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 6
ОглавлениеTHE DESPERATE MAN
Chris Columbus rolled over and managed to sit up, after which he made a throat-clearing noise that had nothing of pleasantness in it.
“Feeling better?” the taxi driver asked.
Chris tried three times before he could say a coherent, “No,” after which he lay down on the floor again to be punished by sickness. The illness itself wouldn’t have been so bad, if it wasn’t for the frantic condition of his mind. It was, really, a battle between the two, his body wanting to lie there and sleep for a long time, his mind a raging tiger of anxiety.
Finally he rolled over and tried to get up again, and this time he made it, although after he was on his feet he had to walk sidewise for a short distance to keep from falling again.
“Whew!” he said.
The taxi driver said, “You remember me now? I’m the guy who hauled you around in a hack. The guy you gave five dollars to come here after half an hour and get you away from an intoxicated friend.”
Chris Columbus peered at him blearily and muttered, “Yes, I know. Thank God for you!”
“What happened to you?”
“I had a fainting spell,” Chris explained, “and it must have embarrassed my friend greatly, because when I faint, I thresh around violently and utter embarrassing cries. I presume that is why my friend tied me and gagged me. I presume also that my friend has merely dashed out for a doctor, which leads me to suggest that we depart rapidly, a doctor under the circumstances being inclined to commit me to the goon house, which I would dislike.”
The taxi driver grinned and said, “You may not be the best liar, but you’re a long-winded one.”
“You doubt me?”
“Now and before. I had strong doubts when you first began telling me about the friend, and it didn’t sound right, either, when you told me to say a policeman was waiting downstairs. It looked as if you wanted to give somebody a cop scare.”
“Did you wait a half hour before coming?”
“Not quite.”
“Probably a good thing.” Chris massaged his head briskly, hoping to get some of the fog out of it. “Or maybe I would have survived. He had used that chloroform on a dog, then let the bottle stand with a rag cork for a long time. The stuff must have evaporated and gotten weak.”
The taxi driver walked over and picked up the telephone.
Chris said, “What are you going to do?”
“Call the law.”
Chris felt of his hip pocket and discovered he had not been robbed. There were four ten-dollar banknotes in his billfold. He presented the taxi driver with three of them.
“Suppose you have a lapse of memory,” he suggested.
The hackman hesitated, grinned, said, “Sold—one lapse of memory,” and took the three tens.
The fur market opened at nine o’clock the following morning, with Chris Columbus the first man inside. He knew a number of fur men in the place, having bought skins in St. Louis on a number of occasions in the past, and being employed by one of the most reputable quality houses in the business. Chris became a fountain of questions.
“Sure,” he was told. “There was a guy walked in here yesterday with a pack of furs of the kind you describe.”
“Where are the furs?”
“Locked in the vaults, I suppose. He rented a vault, I heard.”
“What’d he look like?”
They described Decimo Tercio, dwelling in particular upon the peculiarity of his garb of buckskin trousers and coat, and his one-piece metal shoes.
At this Chris Columbus practically jumped up and down in his excitement.
“This is marvelous!” he exploded. “The man obviously came straight from—uh—that is, I’ve got to find him. Where is he?”
Tercio had made it generally known that he was going to the Black Fox Hotel, desiring that prospective buyers of his unusual furs call him there.
“He seemed mighty anxious to sell those skins,” a fur man explained, “even if he did persist in holding out for the ungodly price of five thousand dollars apiece.”
Chris broke speed records to the Black Fox Hotel.
“Mr. Tercio has not appeared this morning,” he was told.
Chris found the hotel manager and said, “I want a look at Tercio’s room, and it’s important enough to me that I’m going to be blunt about it. Either you go up there now with a master key and unlock the room and let me look it over, or I’m going to call the police and tell them Tercio has disappeared, which will get in the newspapers and do your hotel no good.”
The manager was sensible, finally grumbled, “Well, if Tercio comes in while we’re there, I’ll tell him you are an interior decorator and we’re looking over the room.” They went up.
Decimo Tercio’s original clothing, the garments made from the material similar to buckskin, and his all-metal shoes, lay on the floor.
On a table were gun catalogues from the leading St. Louis sporting goods houses.
There was nothing else.
“They got him,” Chris croaked.
He stumbled out of the hotel. He stood on the street, mentally tearing his hair, peering about in a distraught fashion. Finally he walked back into the hotel and seated himself in the writing room, where he picked up pen and paper—
Later, when Chris Columbus again appeared on the street, he was carrying an envelope and licking an airmail stamp which he applied to the envelope. Then he dropped the letter in a mailbox on the corner.
Chris walked on, moving like a man with a purpose until he reached a cab, which he entered, and the cab vanished in traffic.
Shortly after this, Fancife came out of a drugstore from which he had been watching the hotel. He scowled at the mailbox for a time, then went back into the drugstore and telephoned Two Wink Danton.
When Two Wink arrived, half an hour later, Fancife met him eagerly, demanded, “Did you stop and get a maul?”
Two Wink unwrapped the bundle which he was carrying, and disclosed a sixteen-pound sledge hammer.
“This one heavy enough?” he asked.
“It ought to do the job,” Fancife said.
They used the sledge to smash open the mailbox. Being made of cast iron, the box split from the first terrific blow. Four letters, the entire contents, fell out. The two men snatched up these and fled, getting away safely.
Two Wink was as worried about the mailbox robbery as he had been the night before over the supposed murder of Chris Columbus.
“That is a Federal offense,” he groaned. “Now they’ll put the postal inspectors and maybe the Feds after us, and those are no babies to fool with.”
Fancife had been looking over the letters, finding the one which Chris Columbus had written, and opening the missive. He read, and began wearing the expression of a man who was drinking vinegar.
“Choosing between the two,” he said, “I’ll take the postal inspectors and the Feds.”
There was strangeness in his voice that made Two Wink glance at him sharply, demand, “What do you mean?”
Fancife shook the letter. “This was a letter asking help.”
“Help? Who from?”
Fancife said, “Have you ever heard of a man named Doc Savage?”
Two Wink Danton was smoking a cigar; he gave the weed a slow bite and his face assumed an expression not on the cheerful side.
“See you’ve heard of him,” Fancife said.
Two Wink grabbed the letter, stared at it, and was somewhat disappointed as he read. The missive was addressed simply to Doc Savage, New York City—not that Two Wink entertained any doubts about it failing to reach its destination because of insufficient address, had they failed to apprehend it.
What disgusted Two Wink was the fact that the letter gave no information which he did not already have. The communication stated the ostensible facts—that a mysterious fellow named Decimo Tercio had brought unusual pelts to St. Louis and offered them for sale at five thousand apiece, and that Two Wink Danton and Wilmer Fancife had made away with Tercio; also that the sender of the letter, Arnold Columbus by name—called Chris for short—wanted to locate Tercio, it being more important than anything else in the world that he do so.
The letter added that the writer, Columbus, had abruptly recollected that he had heard Doc Savage was a man who made a business of righting wrongs and punishing evildoers who happened to be outside the law. Here, Columbus wrote, was a great wrong to be righted—and “a mystery so fantastic you would not believe it if I put it on paper” to be solved. Further explanations would be forthcoming upon Doc Savage’s appearance at the Ritz Hotel in St. Louis, where Columbus was staying.
“That’s bad,” Two Wink said thoughtfully.
“I call it good,” Fancife retorted. “Suppose we hadn’t laid hands on this damned letter? Suppose it had gotten to this Doc Savage?”
“How bad would that have been? I’ve only heard rumors about an adventurer, or soldier of fortune or something of the sort, named Doc Savage.”
Fancife frowned at his associate. “You don’t travel much, do you? Never go out in the field—Alaska and Siberia and Ecuador and places like that—buying furs?”
“No.”
“Well, you hear about Doc Savage in those places. The man must have been everywhere, and wherever he’s been, they don’t seem to forget him. He’s not an adventurer or soldier of fortune, like you said. He’s—well, a damn fool, it seems. He chases crooks—for the fun of it.”
“No profit in that.”
“I’m not explaining the man—I’m telling you what I’ve heard. You can’t hire him, and if a thing doesn’t appeal to him, he won’t touch it. I don’t know where he gets his dough, and neither does anybody else. He always has plenty.”
Two Wink frowned at his partner in crime, finally said, “I take it you don’t want any part of Savage?”
“That’s right.”
“In which case we’d better put the bingo on Chris Columbus. If we don’t, he’ll send this Savage another message.”
Fancife nodded, asked grimly: “Can you get hold of a good rifle with a silencer?”
Two Wink, confronted by the approach of a second murder attempt, turned the approximate color of a peeled potato.
“I can try,” he gulped finally.
