Читать книгу The Spook Legion: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 7
ОглавлениеNO CHANCES
The dapper Ham seemed to be a little faster on his feet, although the apish Monk moved with fantastic speed for one of such grotesque physique. Ham reached their car first, whipped open the door and dived for the wheel.
Out of the car came a loud, displeased squeal. There was a flurry of movement. A pig which had been in the front seat shot over onto the rear cushions. The pig had enormous ears, and as he jumped, the ears had the appearance of wings. The shote was long-legged, lean-bodied, incredibly ugly.
Monk, rumbling angrily, sent out one huge hand and closed it about the dapper Ham’s throat.
“You kicked Habeas Corpus!” he gritted. “I gotta notion to see how easy your head comes off!”
Ham made croakings past the fingers constricting his throat. He tried to slug the apish Monk in the pit of the stomach, and the sound was much as if his knuckles had rapped a hard wall. He grimaced in agony, and fumbled at his black cane. The cane came apart near the handle, revealing the fact that it housed a sword with a long, razor-sharp blade. This blade was tipped for three or four inches with a sticky-looking substance.
Monk released his throat grip before the menace of the sword cane tip and dodged back. His movements were so fast that they barely could be followed with the eye.
Ham swallowed twice, then snarled, “I didn’t kick that hog, but sometime I’m gonna bob his tail off right next to his ears!”
The two looked at each other with what seemed genuine, utter hate.
From down the road, the sound of more shots drifted.
“Step on it, you overdressed shyster,” Monk growled.
Ham put the car in motion. His driving was expert. They were far down the road before the last of the gravel which their wheels kicked up had fallen back to the airport parking lot.
This was the same road which passed the airport, and from the city out to the airport it was wide and well paved, but here, beyond the flying field, it was narrow, rutted, flanked by high weeds and small trees. Side roads, barely more than trails, branched off at infrequent intervals toward scrawny shacks almost lost from sight in the shrubbery.
The car rocketed around a curve. Ahead, another car was cocked over into the ditch. It was the machine driven by the pilot and his assistant. Three tires were flat.
Both fliers stood alongside the machine, arms held up rigidly.
Clustered about the car were the half dozen nice-looking men who had raided the hangar. All were armed. With them was the fat man whom the two fliers had been taking to a police station.
There was no sign of the roadster bearing the individual who resembled a prizefighter.
Ham, bent over the wheel, clipped, “What’ll we do?”
“Barge right in!” Monk grunted.
Ham put more weight on the accelerator. Monk grabbed door handles and cranked. It became apparent that the unusual car was fitted with two sets of glass. The second had concealed panels, which now came into view, were thicker and equipped with thin loophole slits reënforced with steel bullet deflectors.
When he had raised all of the shields, Monk dug a peculiar weapon from an armpit holster. This gun resembled an oversize automatic with a drum magazine. Its mechanism looked intricate.
Ham trod the brakes, jockeyed the wheel. Tires shrieked on the roadway, the car rocked, and finally came to a stop not many yards from the ditched touring car.
Two of the nice-looking men broke for the brush alongside the road.
“Hold it!” Monk commanded, his small voice suddenly a great howl. “Get your hands up!”
One of the men whipped up a revolver and blasted a bullet at the homely Monk.
The slug hit the thick bulletproof glass shield with a noisy clank and left a spider web of fine cracks. A flattened blob, the lead fell back to the road.
The pilot leaped at the gunman, swung a fist from near his heels and knocked the man flat on his back.
“Get down!” Monk roared at him. “We can handle this!”
Monk then shifted the muzzle of his unusual gun toward the fleeing pair. The weapon emitted an ear-splitting roar, a sound not unlike the note of a gigantic bullfiddle. Beside the running pair, weeds and small shrubs upset as if cut off by an invisible scythe.
Both fugitives stopped, stunned. They had not been touched by the storm of bullets, but they were scared, knowing the weapon was a machine pistol of a type they had never before encountered.
“Get ’em up, get ’em up!” Monk squawled. “All I gotta do is make one pass and you guys are named mud!”
It was not a situation which afforded opportunity for much debate. Guns were dropped. An automatic exploded from the shock of striking the road, but its wild bullet hit no one. Hands went up.
Monk and Ham both heaved out of the car. Monk’s pet pig, Habeas Corpus, followed them.
The two airmen looked somewhat dazed.
“What in the devil is this all about?” the assistant pilot demanded.
Monk menaced carelessly the nice-looking men with his machine pistol.
“Maybe they didn’t like the way you were treating their friend,” he said.
“They were taking him from us,” said the associate flier. “They shot our tires to pieces, then jumped out in the road when we stopped. We didn’t have a chance!”
“Where were you taking the fat guy?” Monk demanded.
“To a police station up this road,” the other replied. “He’s nuts!”
“Nuts—hell!” the other aviator interjected. “I don’t think he’s any more nuts than I am.”
Monk grunted, “Just what’s behind this?”
“Search me!” The pilot waved his arms angrily. “This fat guy ups in our plane and shoots off a gun three times into an empty seat. Then he talked like he was bats, and knew Shakespeare. He even claimed he was Shakespeare!”
“What about the excitement in that hangar back at the airport?” Ham put in.
The pilot gestured at the nice-looking men. “These guys raided the hangar to look into our plane. They were hunting for something that they didn’t find.”
“This fat man ordered them to search the plane, I think,” Ham said.
“Huh?” The pilot blinked.
Ham explained: “The fat man made some kind of sign talk through the back window of the operations office. He probably told them to rescue him, too.”
The fat man, unnoticed, had sidled to one of his men and was surreptitiously dropping a hand into the fellow’s pocket. He brought out a nickeled revolver.
He did not use it. Instead, he yelled out in surprised pain and the gun left his fingers. The weapon remained suspended a few inches from his hand. He grabbed at it. The gun, with absolutely nothing visible sustaining it, evaded his clutch.
Monk gaped.
“For the love of mud!” he gulped. “Spooks!”
So astounded was the homely fellow that the gang got their chance. They moved swiftly.
Monk started to swing his machine pistol around, but was tardy, and was knocked down. A lusty kick sent the superfirer into the ditch.
Ham was also disarmed and, with the fliers, forced to put up his hands.
The pig, Habeas Corpus, retreated hastily to the nearest brush clump.
“We’d better blow!” said the plump man.
There was a noise in the brush beside the road, and a huge figure appeared. It was the individual who looked like a prizefighter. He held a shiny revolver in one scarred lump of a fist.
“I was just ready to help you birds,” he said. “But I don’t guess you need me. Say, what happened to that gun?”
Instinctively, all eyes sought the gun which had behaved so mysteriously. It now lay in the ditch beside the road. No one had observed just how it got there.
“Never mind the gun!” rapped the fat man. “We’re leaving here!”
“We might as well ride,” said the prizefighter individual.
He ran to the car in which Monk, Ham and the pig had arrived. This was obviously the only machine available for an escape, since the tires of the aviators’ touring were flat. The man dived behind the wheel and reached for the key.
The fat man and the others were running toward the car, but were not yet close enough to see the pugilist as he grasped the key, and, instead of turning it, pulled it out and palmed it. Then he got out.
“Blast them birds!” he growled.
“What’s wrong?” demanded the fat man.
“They took the key!” The fellow shrugged his huge shoulders. “We’ll have to leg it away from here.”
“Then what are we waiting on?” the fat man snapped.
They all ran into the brush beside the road.
They covered a hundred yards and got themselves organized so that they traveled in a string, one behind the other, taking turns at leading the procession and opening a way through the thick tangle. The plump leader dropped back beside the prizefighter.
“I never saw you before,” he said. “We ought to know each other.”
“It might help,” agreed the pugilist.
“What’s your name?”
“Bull Retz, right now,” said the scarred man. “Did you go to the fights in the Boston Arena last night?”
“I rarely go to fights,” said the plump man.
“Then you didn’t see me,” the pugilist muttered. “It’s just as well. Boy, did I get bopped around!”
“You lost, eh?”
“And how!” The man blew on a scarred fist. “There was a young punk, and could he sling his dukes! Say, that guy got red pepper on his gloves somehow and after he started my eyes smarting, he hit me with everything but the water bucket! If I ever meet that punk——”
“Let it ride.” The fat man adjusted his black hat. “Like I said, I never saw you before. Why’d you help us?”
“I was coming down the road,” said the other. “It looked like you guys were behind the eight ball.”
The eyes under the black hat brim were very curious. “And why did you help us?”
The man who said he was “Bull” Retz seemed to consider deeply.
“You looked like right guys,” he said.
“Meaning what?”
The huge shoulders shrugged. “The manager and training expenses ate up the loser’s share of last night’s purse. I’m flat. I mooched that plane ticket off a newspaper lug who got it for nothing. So I saw you guys, and you looked like a right crowd who would return a favor.”
“I see.” The plump man adjusted his hat again. “You thought we would return a favor.”
“Why not?” The other squinted suddenly. “Or maybe I was mistaken?”
“You don’t need to beat around the bush with me,” the portly man said dryly.
“O. K.” The scarred face warped into a grin. “I’m flat, like I said. I thought maybe you could throw something my way.”
“What are you good at?”
The scarred grin widened. “Strong-arm stuff. And I ain’t too particular.”
“I see,” said the fat man.
They went on, and the individual who looked like a prizefighter began to register doubt and uneasiness; finally, he turned and confronted the fat man.
“Say,” he whined, “I ain’t askin’ much. I done you guys a turn, see? Don’t I get something out of it? I don’t mean that you have to pay off. Just put me next to something. You know, something where a guy can make a buck. How about it?”
“Of course,” said the fat man, “we’ll put you next to something.”
“Something good?”
“Very good!”
They went on, and the fat man dropped back a pace, absently sinking his hands into his pockets. He brought one hand out slyly a moment later. It held a shot-filled leather blackjack which he must have secured earlier from one of the other men. He swung the blackjack suddenly, terrifically.
It seemed that the pugilist sensed the blow coming for he sank a little, taking the swing across the top of his head. But there was a loud thud as the sap landed, and the scarred man sagged forward on his face, quivered a little, then became limp, unmoving.
One of the nice-looking men eyed their fat chief.
“The guy might have meant all right, Telegraph,” he said.
The fat “Telegraph” nodded peacefully and returned the sap to his pocket.
“We are not in a position to take chances with gentlemen whom we do not know,” he murmured.
