Читать книгу Bandits of the Cylinder - Raymond King Cummings - Страница 4

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Dirk and I both saw the flash—the small blue beam of a ray-gun on a shadowed rise of ground ahead and to the left of us. I shoved on the brakes and slowed down.

“A shot, chief!”

“Yes. Looked like it.”

Then we saw three more. They seemed coming from the doorway of a small house set in a grove of trees a few hundred feet back from the traffic viaduct. Some one was standing up there firing into the night.

Dirk leaned over and shouted: “Unfold the wing! We’d better hop up there and find out what’s going on.”

We were rolling along the viaduct at twenty or thirty miles an hour. It was about 3 a.m., and there chanced to be no cars passing in this segment at the moment. I turned a switch. The wing came out over us, but still I held us to the road.

There were shouts coming from the little hill now—an uproar there.

“Jac, look! Somebody making off!” We saw the blob of a figure running down the hill away from the house. “Lift us!” Dirk added. “Land in there—see what the devil it’s all about.”

The house was a trifle ahead of us and to the left. I put on the power and raised us off the road. We skimmed over the viaduct parapet and missed the first of the tall elm trees by inches. There was no moon this night. The house on the brow of the hill showed vaguely in the starlight. The shouts up there had suddenly stopped. But we could see the escaping figure slanting down the other side of the hill.

“Land us!” Dirk repeated. “There’s an open space—over by that path! Drop us down!”

We seemed to fallen into some sort of a crime. Franklin Dirk, my chief, was at this time consulting criminologist in government service. We were returning this night in 1981 to our office in Great-New York from a week’s vacation in Canada. Under Dirk’s vehemence I brought our Bat down with a bump into the soft ground of what seemed to be a flower bed.

The wheels mired in and the up-tilting stern tumbled us out; but we had done that so many times before that we landed safely like cats on out feet.

Dirk had his gun in hand. “There he goes, Jac! Under that line of trees!” Dirk was off on a run. He flung back at me: “Don’t shoot him—can’t tell what the devil this is. Head him off—over there to the left by the wall.”

There was no danger of my shooting any one. My gun was locked up in the car; it would have taken me ten minutes to unpack it.

“Watch yourself,” Dirk shouted. “Keep back—go down by the end of the wall!”

I ran that way. The figure had momentarily disappeared. Dirk slipped into a heavy clump of shrubbery. I lost sight of him; then I saw him drawn up cautiously behind the trunk of a tree. The stone and concrete wall was a barrier before me. It was twelve or fifteen feet high—too smooth and too high to mount. Our quarry undoubtedly had not climbed over it.

I dropped flat into a little hollow and lay listening. The fugitive had to be near by, for we had seen him come down this slope. Our abrupt arrival had sent him plunging off toward the wall, and when he found he couldn’t climb it there was no time to get back past us.

From two hundred feet to the side of me suddenly came Dirk’s voice.

“Hi, there! Stop, or I’ll flash you! Stop, I say!”

A man’s figure came lunging from a thicket almost directly at me. He had seen Dirk, but not me. Dirk’s blue beam flashed into the trees over our heads with its simultaneous little thunderclap. I rose up as the fellow passed and caught his legs. He came down with a bump; the gun in his hand was knocked away from him.

We rolled in the hollow. I am a pretty solid six-footer; this antagonist felt considerably smaller. He threshed and banged at my face with his fists, but I had him pinned in a moment and was sitting on his chest when Dirk dashed up.

“Good enough, Jac! Lift him up. Watch out for his weapons.”

I climbed off him and yanked him to his feet.

“Put your hands out,” I told him.

“Search him, Jac,” said Dirk.

“I got no weapons,” the fellow panted.

“He had a gun, chief. It’s on the ground over there.”

Dirk picked up the gun. I snapped the steel over our captive’s wrists.

“You got no right doin’ that,” he protested.

“Haven’t we?” said Dirk. “That can come later. What were you doing up at that house?”

He was a slim, pale-faced fellow in his early twenties. He stared at his feet sullenly while Dirk searched him. He had no additional weapons. Nothing on him at all that seemed criminal.

From up at the house a man was calling down to us. “You down there—what are you doing?”

“We’ll go up,” said Dirk. “Come on you. What’s your name?”

But our prisoner only stared at us dumbly. We pushed him between us up the slope of the hill toward the house.

“Don’t want to talk, eh?” said Dirk.

I laughed. “He’s been nipped before, chief. He’s busy thinking.”

“I wasn’t at the house,” the fellow said abruptly.

“No?” I retorted. “Where were you running from, and why?”

“I was crossin’ the hill. I seen shootin’ an’ it scared me so I ran.”

“That all?” Dirk demanded.

“Yes, that’s all. You let me go. I done nothin’ you can nip me for.”

“We’ll see what they say at the house,” said Dirk.

It seemed a more or less routine burglary. The house was occupied by a bachelor, one Robert Rance. He was a government employee in the Postal Service—a traffic director of the vacuum tube cylinders in the Yonkers Division. He lived here alone with one manservant named Jelks. The servant had been awake, had heard a noise downstairs. He came softly down just in time to see a man’s figure getting out through a broken window oval.

“Was it this fellow?” Dirk demanded.

Jelks could not say. He had rushed to the window, shouting and firing his flash-gun. He had thought he saw two figures, running in different directions down the hill.

“Well,” said Dirk, “maybe this is one and the other got away.”

“I never was in here,” said our prisoner. “I know nothin’ about it.”

The uproar had awakened Rance. He had rushed down to find that the little strong-box in his lower corridor had been broken into.

We looked the box over now. It seemed quite a small affair. The lock mechanism was melted away by a hydrogen heat-torch.

“Nothing stolen,” said Rance. He smiled lugubriously. “Nothing except my last pay—ten pounds of gold leaf. Everything else seems intact. I seldom keep valuables in here anyway. The bank is the best place for them—serves me correctly for keeping that gold leaf here overnight.”

Rance was a tall, wiry man of forty-odd, or perhaps older, with black hair gone prematurely gray. He stood before us in dressing gown and slippers.

“Nothing else stolen—Jelks evidently frightened them off.” He eyed our prisoner, who stood sullenly staring at the floor. “Who was with you? What is your name, young man? Why break my strong-box? Did you think I had treasure in it? How did you know that gold leaf was here? And what did you do with it?”

“I didn’t break it, I tell you. I got no torch—nothin’ like that. I wasn’t even in here. You can’t nip me for crossin’ your hill outside.”

The interior of the strong-box was littered with Rance’s personal papers strewn around it. Old Jelks was on his knees restoring them to order.

“What are you going to do with this fellow?” Rance asked us. “Do you have to hold him?”

“We’ll see what Tarrytown says,” Dirk decided. “It’s their affair, not mine.”

I used Rance’s audiphone for connection with the local Tarrytown police commander. We shoved our prisoner before the mirror-grid and turned a light on him; but the Tarrytown chief had never seen him before.

“I’ll fly a man right over for him,” he told us.

“Will you prosecute him?” I asked Rance, as I disconnected.

The postal official shrugged. “What for? A bundle of gold leaf, which has vanished? Ruining my strong-box, if you can prove that he did it?”

Dirk and I left as soon as the local policeman arrived. The prisoner had all the marks of a professional criminal, but his identity was certainly a secret, for that night at least. The tattooed writing of his signature on his forearm said “John Allen,” but under the microscope we could see at once that it was a forgery. And his fingertip traceries were all artificially distorted.

“That got done when I was ten years old,” the fellow volunteered. “I was workin’ in a laundry an’ burned them fingers.”

“Well,” said Dirk, “it’s none of our affair, Jac. Come on.”

Rance thanked us for what we had done; the local policeman took John Allen away to hold him on general principles and for investigation of suspected submerged identification.

The dawn was at hand when I lifted the Bat out of Rance’s flower-bed and fluttered us back to the viaduct. In fifteen minutes we were lolling into the main north entrance of Great-New York.

“Wonder who that fellow was,” I said out of a silence.

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” yawned Dirk. “So far as you and I are concerned, that’s the end of it.”

But it wasn’t. It was only the beginning.