RGL e-Book Cover©
RGL e-Book Cover©
The Spider, June 1939, with "Doc Turner and the Winged Terror"
Out of the darkness a winged slayer had swooped down upon Doc Turner's impoverished neighbors. In this atmosphere of terror, only Doc had the courage to challenge the strangest crime set-up that had ever enslaved human beings!
BRONTO WSLAW died in full view of a hundred men and women, but no one knew how he died. Morris Street had been turbulent with its usual early evening crowds; shawled housewives chaffering with unshaven, sweating pushcart hucksters, children screaming at their games of gag and "one old cat," swarthy, labor-grimed men wearily plodding homeward from backbreaking toil.
It was just before the supper hour, but night had already gathered between the drab, bleak facades of the tenements. At the level of the shifting throngs, brilliant lights brought out the vivid colors of the peddlers' wares, but fifteen feet above the cracked sidewalks the "El" structure brooded, a black roof to the slum thoroughfare.
Burly, bull-necked in his earth-encrusted overalls, palpably weary yet straight-backed with pride in an honest day's labor honestly performed, Bronto Wslaw reached the corner of Morris Street and Hogbund Lane, paused to let a huge van pass—then suddenly vented a high, wild scream that knifed the raucous clamor of the market thoroughfare, sliced it short to a stunned, appalling silence.
Wslaw thudded down, lay crumpled on the corner manhole cover of a sewer. Blood spurted from his gashed throat, made a scarlet glistening pool about his pallid head.
Andrew Turner was the first to reach him, the frail old druggist, quicker by seconds in his reactions than the nightmare-paralyzed pedestrians, was across the sidewalk from the door of his pharmacy and kneeling beside the man who had screamed before those much nearer Wslaw quite realized what had happened. But Doc, too, was rigid at once, staring at the laborer's thick throat—at the scarlet flesh that had been jaggedly torn across three times, windpipe and sinews and arteries shredded three times as if by a three-pronged fork.
Bronto Wslaw was beyond Doc's aid, was beyond the aid of anyone human.
When the police came, questioning, some who had been nearest Wslaw when he screamed and thudded down told an incredible story. They said that a shadow had swooped down out of the overhead shadow of the "El," the instant before he screamed, that it had enveloped his head and had leaped back into the "El's" shadow as he fell—that its pounce and vanishing had been accompanied by the sound of wings. The police laughed at this wild tale. Whoever had heard of a bird ripping a man's throat as Wslaw's was ripped? Whoever had heard of a bird as large as a twenty-pound turkey flying free in the heart of the city?
No, the police decided, since no one had been seen to do this to the man, he must have done it himself. His weapon—whatever it was—must have dropped down the sewer outlet just above which his limp hand rested, hanging over the curb. They said he had gone mad—but not suddenly, for on the sidewalk beside him they found a blood-stained sheet of coarse grayish paper such as is sold to children, a writing pad for four cents, and on the paper, crudely printed in scarlet crayon, these mad words:
ONE FOR THE BLACK EAGLE
A reporter who, having nothing better to do, had come along
from the precinct for the ride, scented a curious folktale in
this set-up. He began asking questions. The Italians sent him to
the Irish, the Irish to the Jews, the Jews to the Armenians, the
Armenians to the Letts. The Letts acknowledged that Wslaw had
been one of them, though not that he had been their leader. When
the reporter asked them the meaning of the "Black Eagle," they
stared at him with blank brown eyes, shrugged stalwart shoulders,
and turned away. The cops could have told him that he would get
no information. They knew that these aliens kept their folklore
and their troubles to themselves—that even if this were
murder they would have stared blankly, shrugged uncomprehending
shoulders, and turned away.
The cops were grateful that it was not murder. They were very glad that it was suicide—and the suicide of a bohunk at that—so that all they had to do, as soon as the medical examiner's cursory inspection was finished, was to put what was left of Bronto Wslaw into the morgue wagon and phone for a Sanitation hose wagon to wash down the gutter and sidewalk.
The turbulence of a Morris Street evening closed in around the incident like the waves of the sea might close around the place where a ship had gone down. The shawled women resumed their chaffering, the peddlers their raucous crying of bargains. But the Lettish laborers stumbled homeward with a dark brooding of fear in their meek brown eyes, an ashen pallor of dread graying the swartness of their skins.
JACK RANSOM lumbered into Turner's drugstore, squat and
barrel-bodied, a streak of grease across his freckled young face,
his carrot-hued thatch of hair rumpled. As he thumped between the
dingy showcases that once were painted white, Turner himself came
through the curtained doorway in the partition at the rear of the
store.
"Hey, Doc!" Jack called. "I just towed a customer's car from way hell and gone out in the sticks, and they tell me at the garage you wanted to see me. Sorry I'm so late. Is it about what happened to Bronto?"
"Yes, Jack. It's about Bronto." The grimy light tangled in the silken whiteness of Andrew Turner's hair as he reached the sales counter that paralleled the partition, stopped there. "I gather you've heard about him." Turner's bushy mustache was as white as his hair, he was frail-bodied and stooped a little with age, but his eyes, a faded blue, were somehow still keen and alive beneath the shaggy eaves of their brows.
"Yeah," Ransom grunted. "I heard, but I don't get it. It's the first time I ever knew one of those bohunks to kill himself."
Doc's fingers, fleshless and acid-stained, drummed on the counter. "Wslaw didn't kill himself, Jack," he said slowly. "It was murder."
"You seem damned sure of that, Doc," Jack said soberly. "You've got a reason for being so sure?"
"Yes, son," the aged pharmacist sighed. "Yes. I've a reason."
"And you wouldn't have sent for me if you didn't mean to do something about it."
This was no guess on Ransom's part. Doc Turner was more than druggist to the poverty-stricken aliens of Morris Street. He was their counselor, friend to those who otherwise were lonely and friendless in a strange land whose bewildering ways they struggled hard to learn. Many times, in the long years he had served them, had he left this moldering pharmacy of his to fight for them against those meanest and most dangerous of criminals—the wolves who prey on the helpless poor, and in these forays Jack Ransom had been his companion, his good right fist.
"Come on, spill it."
"All right, Jack," Doc said. "Listen. When I came to open the store, early this morning, Wslaw was waiting for me. He handed me a paper...."
DOC TURNER had been sorely puzzled that morning, by the
grayish-white sheet Bronto Wslaw had handed him—the paper
that had on it, crudely printed in scarlet crayon, words whose
meaning was all too plain, but whose signature was a black
drawing that seemed to have no meaning at all.
"What's it about?" Wslaw had asked, his round head set solidly atop the short, thick column of his collarless neck, his frame burly and brutally powerful in its work clothes. "What shall I do about it all, Doc?"
Doc's fingers drummed on the edge of the showcase beside which they stood. "I don't like it. I don't like it at all." He read the message again, frowning thoughtfully:
BOHUNKS
QUIT TAKING OUR JOBS OR ELSE
"This drawing at the bottom looks like it was meant for an eagle," Turner muttered, more to himself than to the other. "A black eagle, pouncing, its claws outstretched to rend its prey. This is evidently a warning, Bronto, to you and your people, to give up your jobs."
"Give up our jobs?" A muscle twitched in Wslaw's swart cheek. "We just got them from the union, on the new bridge. They are hard jobs, digging dirt, pushing wheelbarrows, carrying big stones, but we are glad to get them instead of being on relief. A long time ago our bosses said, 'Bronto! Tell your people to take less than union pay, and we'll give them all the jobs right away.' But I told my people to wait, and not to take jobs less than union pay—it's not the American way."
"I don't know," Doc interrupted. "Wouldn't it have been the American way to take work for whatever you could get, instead of living on the taxpayer's money?"
Wslaw shook his head. "It makes no difference to the taxpayer, Doc. Bosses can't get men cheap, and just as many get off relief. But when bosses hire from the union, they must take who the union says, and we Letts are bottom on the list—so we got to wait our turn. Now our turn comes, and we get our jobs, but somebody says, 'Quit!' Why must we quit when the union says our turn has come—?"
"Hold it, Bronto," Turner dammed the flood of words. "That's all beside the point. How did you get this thing? In the mail?"
"No. It was pushed under my flat door in the night. My wife found it in the morning. All the Lettish fellers who work on the bridge found the same thing."
"All of them, eh!" Doc's brow furrowed. "How many are there on the union lists after your bunch?"
"Nobody. We're last on the list."
"Hm. Look, Bronto—are the others scared? Do they want to quit?"
"My people aren't scared easy. But I'm their—how you say, their leader? I got to think what is the best thing for them, tell them. What do you think I should tell them?"
"Tell them to hold on to their jobs, to fight for them if they have to," Doc said. "That's the American way, Bronto. But I don't think you'll have to fight. I think this is just a bluff."
"I WAS wrong," Doc Turner finished, his face bleak and expressionless. "And because I was wrong, Bronto Wslaw was murdered. That warning was no bluff."
"I get it," Ransom said through tight lips. "Wslaw was killed to scare the rest of the Letts off the bridge job, and if they don't scare, there's going to be more killings."
"Exactly. Unless we stop them."
"Well," Jack grinned, humorlessly. "What are we going to do about it?"
"The first question is what are they going to do about it?" Doc asked. "They're meeting in Jan Hrcla's grocery store, down on Hogbund Lane right now, and Jan has asked me to come there and advise them. Would you like to come along?"
"Damn tooting I would! What are we waiting for?"
THE odor in the little grocery was of cheeses, strangely
flavored sausages, foods exotic to Doc and Jack but nostalgic to
the heavy-bodied, round-headed Latvians who clustered together,
as is the habit of each of the various races that people this
slum, in two or three tenements on Hogbund Lane. Something of the
Mongoloid there was in them, Andrew Turner thought as he looked
about the dim-lit, crowded confines of the shop, but more of the
Nordic.
He occupied the only chair in the place, and Jack leaned against a high pile of boxes behind him. The Letts themselves, shabbily dressed but clean-scrubbed save for the earth so deeply engrained in their work-calloused hands that it could not be scrubbed out, sat on counters and barrels; or stood in a close ring, silently listening to the gray-haired, high-cheek-boned Hrcla who was addressing them in labored English for the benefit of the visitors.
"I keep store here," he was saying, "not work on bridge. But everybody knows if you men don't work you have no money to buy things from me, and I starve too. So I got a right to tell what I think. Yes?"
"Go ahead, Jan," someone told him. "You got a right."
"Here's what I think. You like to work, take care of your families, but if you get killed who takes care of them, anyhow? I say don't take a chance and get killed like our friend Bronto Wslaw. Give up your jobs. Maybe other jobs will come along. Maybe you can go back on relief. What's the difference so long you stay alive?"
Grunts ran around the circle. A burly, black-haired individual shoved out into the cleared central space, stood on spread, pillar-like legs, growling. The mutter of talk ceased.
"Everybody knows me too," the man began. "Everybody knows me, Carlo Wslaw. Everybody knew Bronto Wslaw my brother."
"Sure," Hrcla said. "Sure we do."
"But I am not talking as the brother of a murdered man now," Carlo went on. "I'm not talking even as a Lettish man. I talk as an American, with first papers, who next year will be a citizen. I say, I don't want to be on relief. I want to work for my family, my country. I say that the only one who's got the right to say if I work or not is a union of fellers who do the same kind of work I do. I tell you, everybody, if the union says this is my job, I'm gonna keep it."
"I say Hrcla is wrong and you're right," Konrad Psitto yelled. "I say we should tell this Black Eagle to go to hell!"
The little store rocked with the hoarse voices that acclaimed Carlo Wslaw's stand. The pendant electric bulb that gave the only light pendulumed to that chorus of voices—went out!
Darkness smashed into the grocery! The voices cut off.... Somewhere in the darkness there was a flutter of wings. Blacker in the dark, something—a flying fear—was alive in the darkness, swooping. Doc heard Jack's sudden yell, heard a high, shrill scream, felt a rush of terror-sweated, heavy bodies crush against him, topple his chair. A heavy-soled shoe crashed against his forehead, crashed him down to oblivion....
PAIN swelled in Doc Turner's head, and consciousness came back
to him. He opened his eyes to yellow light again, shoved himself
up from the floor where he lay. He could not have been out long,
because the Letts were still there, shoved back against the
counters, the walls, of the store, a greenish pallor under the
swartness of their skin, their brown eyes staring.
They were staring at the thing that lay on the floor, at the still body of Konrad Psitto lying as Bronto Wslaw's had lain, not many hours before, a pool of blood spreading about the gore-masked head, the throat shredded as if by three prongs of a fork.
On the bare, rutted floor beside Doc lay a grayish-white paper, scarlet lettering on it, and a crude black drawing of a pouncing bird. He twitched this into his hand, pulled himself up by the chair from which he had toppled.
"You see?" Jan Hrcla's voice, thinned by terror, came to his ears. "You see what happened to somebody who told the Black Eagle to go to hell? What do you say now, Carlo Wslaw?"
Wslaw's thick, colorless lips moved, but no sound came from them. Doc was looking at the paper. The scarlet letters said:
TWO FOR THE BLACK EAGLE!
QUIT, BOHUNKS, BEFORE YOU ALL GO THE SAME WAY.
"What do you say," Hrcla demanded again, "you Latvians? You want to keep on fighting the Black Eagle, or are you ready to take my good advice now and quit?"
"I say fight." Hoarse, almost unrecognizable, there was still something indomitable in Wslaw's tones. Something that brought growls of agreement from his fellows, despite their fear and their horror.
"How can you fight something you can't see, that you can't lock out? You are a fool, Carlo Wslaw. I'm old enough to be your father and I say you are a fool. You think this over while I telephone the police."
"Jack!" Doc exclaimed. "Come here. Look at this. Jack!"
He looked up. Hrcla was yammering something into the telephone, but Doc didn't hear it. He was looking for Jack, and Jack wasn't there. He was nowhere in the store.
He hadn't gone out of it, either. The door had been bolted when the last of the Letts came in, and Turner could see from where he stood that the bolts were still shot from the inside. He must be somewhere in the store.
But he wasn't... When the police came they searched every inch of the place, and there was no sign of Jack Ransom. No sign, either, of how he could possibly have gotten out. The store's back door had long ago been boarded up and the old druggist himself tested each board to find it firmly nailed, the nails rusted home. The one window, in the rear wall, was too small for any grown man to squeeze through.
Jack Ransom had vanished into the thin air out of which the Black Eagle had seemed to come....
THE Letts were too preoccupied with their own troubles to
realize this, and Doc said nothing about it to the cops. To have
done so would have resulted only in throwing suspicion on the
carrot-headed youth, suspicion of murder, for even the police
were convinced that this killing was murder. The old
druggist himself was too well and favorably known to them for
them to detain him after he had volunteered his view of what had
occurred—which gave them no more information than they were
obtaining from the others.
He left Hrcla's store and hurried toward Morris Street along the dark, silent early morning reaches of Hogbund Lane, hurried to his ancient pharmacy and fumbled his key into its door, as if to begin his long day at three a.m.
But he locked the door again, when he had entered, and turned on no light till he was in the privacy of his prescription department, behind the partition that closed off the drugstore at the rear.
Not bothering to remove hat or coat, Doc took a huge glass beaker from the shelf over the sink, a glass rod from a drawer in the long, white-scrubbed prescription counter. He sprinkled some iodine crystals in the bottom of the beaker, laid the rod across its top. Fumbling from his pocket the paper he had picked up from beside Psitto's body, he folded it in half, writing uppermost, hung it over the glass rod by the fold, so that it was inside the glass.
Now he struck a match, lit a small alcohol lamp, passed the beaker-bottom back and forth through the hottest part of the hot, blue flame. Abruptly the reddish-black spicules in the glass were subliming—not melting but passing at once from the solid to the gaseous state.
The purple fumes eddied, coated with a mirror-like sheen the cooler sides of the beaker, bathed the paper that hung within it. Doc sighed, set the beaker down, lifted the now hot paper from the glass rod, dropped it on the counter to fold open.
On what had been its blank back, there now were reddish-black marks, where the iodine had collected in minute depressions of the paper whose presence Doc had been led to suspect by certain whitish streaks in the crayoned drawing of an eagle. The marks formed letters, and though the letters were backward, and from left to right, the old druggist needed no mirror to help him read them.
They were large, scrawled in an unformed, almost illiterate hand. There was a name, MISTER CORBIN, and an address, 4th fl., 1024 PLESENT AV.
THERE was yet no graying of dawn in the black sky when a bent,
shabby figure stood on the curb, gazing with narrowed eyes at
1024 Pleasant Avenue. It was a ramshackle, dilapidated brick
building—an undertaker in the street floor store, wide
windows above lettered with peeling gilt to indicate offices.
The post of the narrow door that gave entrance to those offices was hung with shabby wooden signs. "Randolph Macin," Doc read. "Lawyer and Notary Public." Below that, "Graeco-Turk Travel Agency—Money Sent Home," and under that a board whose lettering was too weathered to be read at all.
The lowest sign said:
CORBIN DETECTIVE PATROL
"WE WATCH WHILE YOU SLEEP"
FOURTH FLOOR
A glimmer of satisfaction showed in Doc's eyes. He looked up
and down the long street, saw no one, flitted across the sidewalk
and into the lobby of 1024. A scarred, almost paintless door
resisted his effort to open it, but one of the keys on the old
pharmacist's well-equipped ring soon remedied that.
Within there was gloom, and the stench of moldering wood, of rotting plaster. The walls were almost too close for two men to stand side by side, and directly ahead a staircase filled the space between them, rising to obscurity.
The ground-glass paneled door on the fourth floor landing was no less amenable to Doc's keys than the one below had been. He closed it soundlessly behind, looked about him.
To his left was the wide window he'd seen from below. Dirt-crusted as it was, enough of the city's sky-glow seeped through to make visible the big room, a huge desk parallel to the window, a set of filing cabinets against the wall next to it.
The rest of the room was filled with long wooden benches, as though this were the waiting-room of some railroad station of a hundred years ago.
Turner got noiselessly to the files. A pencil-thin flashlight beam blossomed in his hand, flitted over the labeled pulls of the drawers, stopped at the one marked, R-S. The drawer grated out, papers rustled under exploring fingers.
Ra-Re-Ro.—Ah! Rosner Contracting! Doc slipped the folder out, laid it on top of the others, opened it. His tiny flash beam traveled along typewritten lines—
"Find what you want?" a voice asked pleasantly. "Or do you need help?"
Doc spun. A square-built man stood spraddle-legged just within a door he had not noticed—in the wall beyond the benches. A black revolver snouted out of the man's fist, and it was aimed straight for the druggist's midriff. The man was fully dressed, except that he lacked coat or collar, but his hair was rumpled and his eyes drowsy, as though he had been asleep.
"I found enough," Doc said, calmly, "to tell me I'd like to look at some more of this correspondence. But I imagine you might have some objections."
"You imagine right." The man with the gun smiled. "And also I object to the way you hold your hands. If you put them on top of your hat, this gun would be lots less likely to go off. Do you mind?"
"I don't mind at all," Turner complied. "If it makes you any happier."
"I'd be lots happier if you hadn't waked me up," the man said. "You see, I sleep inside here, in case any of my patrolmen happen to need help during the night."
"Or in case they foozle a job of murder?"
The grin disappeared from the man's face. He prowled nearer, slit-eyed, thick nostrils flaring. "What do you mean?" he growled.
"I mean that the game's up, Mr. Black Eagle," Doc said. "Your killers slipped, over in Hogbund Lane, and we've got them where they're going to start talking pretty soon. The best thing for you to do is come across, claim that they exceeded your instructions. Help us to fry them and you'll get off with a twenty-year sentence, and that's a better bargain than you're entitled to."
"A smartie, huh! Only trouble, guy, with your muscling in like that is that John Corbin knows you ain't no dick. I know everyone on the city force like I know my own brother—"
"Who said I was on the city force?" Doc asked. "Ever hear of the F.B.I.? The Federal Bureau of Investigation?"
"Huh?" The man gaped.
"Exactly," Doc said. "That Cross-bay Bridge is a Federal job and if you start to monkey with it, you start to monkey with the Old Man with the Whiskers. All right, Corbin, come on—drop that gun."
"Wait a minute. Not so fast. How do I know you're a G-man?"
"I've got my badge in my coat pocket. Want to have a look at it?" Doc started to let down his left hand.
"Get that back where it belongs!" Corbin snapped, his gun jabbing. "I'll do all the taking of things out of your pockets that's done around here."
"Suit yourself."
Corbin prowled nearer, shoved his gat up against Turner's belly, reached, with his free hand, into the left side pocket of the old man's topcoat. Doc lurched sidewise, in that instant—and there was a peculiar, crunching sound, a pungent odor. "Hey!" Corbin exclaimed. "I cut my fingers!"
"You've got to keep me alive now," Doc snapped, "to save yourself from dying. That's an ampoule of deadly poison you just broke and it's in your blood already. If I don't give you the antidote, you'll be dead in an hour."
"Gawd," Corbin's hand jerked out of the pocket. It was scratched, wet with the pungent fluid, tiny bits of glass adhered to it. He stared at it as if it had been cut off at the wrist. "Poison," dropped from his suddenly white, twitching lips.
"Exactly," Turner's eyes blazed. "You were right. I'm no G-man. I'm not even a cop. I'm just a druggist, but I'm the only one who can save you. No doctor in this city can find out what that poison is unless I tell them, and if they found out, it wouldn't do you any good, because the only supply of the antidote nearer than Chicago is in this other pocket of mine. Look." Ignoring the gun that still snouted at him, he dropped his hands, pulled a hypodermic syringe out of his right-hand coat pocket.
"What are you waiting for?" the terrified man squealed. "Why don't you inject it?"
"And have you shoot me for my pains?" Doc smiled grimly. "I guess not."
"Hell!" The black revolver thudded on the floor, spun across it to the entrance door. "There you are! Now give me the stuff."
"Not so fast, Mister Corbin. First you're going to tell me what happened to my friend, the red-headed chap who was in Hrcla's store. Where is he? Come on!"
CORBIN stared at him, pupils dilated with the terror in them.
"Red-headed—I don't know what you were talking about. I
wasn't there. I was waiting for their call—" he jerked a
hand toward the phone on the desk—"when I heard you....
God's sake, man. I feel that stuff working in me already. Give me
that—"
Doc dodged away from the clutch of the big hands. "Not till I know where Jack is—not till I know he's safe." He was backing between the benches. "Look. I told you you've got an hour. We'll wait for that call. When it comes, you'll tell them to let Jack go, and when he phones here that he's free and safe, I'll give you the injection that will save you." He reached the door, bent and picked up Corbin's gun.
"Suppose—suppose they don't call?"
Doc laughed, humorlessly. "That will be your hard luck." He came forward again. "Meantime, don't try to get near me, or I'll use this gun on you like I would on a snake. Sit down. If you keep moving around you'll make your blood move faster, and the poison might reach your heart before that call comes. When it does, you'll go—poof—like that!"
"Oh, Gawd." Corbin sank into the seat, a jelly-like mass, his face pasty with the fear that was in him. Doc sat down too, in the second bench, glad of a chance to rest.
"You're a fine detective," he laughed. "Strike-breaker is what you are. And a supplier of non-union labor at non-union rates. The Rosner firm has used your cheap, imported labor a lot, but they wrote you they couldn't use them on the Cross-bay Bridge because their contract specified that they must employ union labor as long as any was available. There would be plenty of profit in that job for you, so you decided to scare off the union men, beginning with the Letts. And you didn't stop at murder to do it. I...." He checked. Sounds were coming through the door, muffled sounds of heavy feet climbing stairs, distant as yet.... "They were to telephone you, eh?" he snapped. "For that you die." His gun lifted.
"I didn't know!" Corbin yowled, coming up out of his seat. "I swear I didn't expect them. Look. You hide there, under that bench and I'll talk to them, get what you want out of them, and get rid of them. All right?"
"All right," Doc agreed. It was the best bargain he could make, if he was to save Jack. He went down under the bench, crouched there.
The footsteps became louder, were at the door. Someone rapped on the door, in a way that formed a signal. Corbin moved to it, moved out of Turner's sight. Doc heard the door open, heard feet trample in, and the door close again.
"Geez, boss," he heard someone exclaim. "What's that smell of amyl nitrate in here?"
"Amyl nit—" Corbin exclaimed "You're nuts, Gerson. There's no smell in here."
"Don't kid me. I use it plenty for hay-fever."
"For hay—!" Before Doc could move—before he could get out from under the bench—the roaring, maddened Corbin had kicked the bench away, had kicked the gun out of his hand. Rough fingers grabbed his collar, hauled him to his feet. "Poison," Corbin bellowed. "Poison, you said!" A fist crashed against the side of Doc's face, crashed him down to his knees, dizzy, blinded.
"Give me that eagle," Doc heard Corbin grunt, and then he heard a flutter of wings, saw the shadow of monstrous wings flit across the floor—He exploded to his feet in a terror- inspired leap, leaped again on the seat of a bench, from that to the next, stumbled and fell, managed to pull the bench over on top of him just as something thudded into the wood, splintered it.
"Wait," someone grunted. "You can't do that to him here." There was the sound of a scuffle, a bellowed, "Let go!" from Corbin, and then, "All right, Gerson. I guess you're right. He can't get away, and we don't want this place all smeared up." The sound of panting next.
"That's the ticket, boss," Gerson said. "We'll take care of the guy, but not here. Listen." The voice dropped to a whisper.
DOC found that he could peep through the crack in the bench
that had saved him from the claws of the black eagle. He saw
Corbin, still empurpled by rage, whispering with the two other
men who'd come in, thin men and evil-eyed, but what made him gasp
was the thing one of them held.
It was a long pole and on top of the pole was fastened a bundle of black feathers that glimpsed hurriedly and in the dark would look like outspread wings. Within the spread of those wings, still bloody, was—just such a three-pronged, sharp-pointed fork as would shred flesh and sinews and arteries of a throat the way the throats of Wslaw and Psitto had been shredded!
Turner recalled the van that had passed in front of Bronto Wslaw just before he died. If that thing had lashed down from the roof of the van, been instantly withdrawn, no one would have seen anything but the pounce of the black feathers. Certainly no one would have thought to look up to the van roof for the man who'd manipulated it. But how, in Hrcla's store—?
The bench heaved off from atop him.
The old druggist struggled painfully to his feet. "Nevertheless, Corbin," he grinned. "I gave you a bad quarter-hour."
"You've got a worse one coming to you," the other gritted. "And you won't be telling anyone about it. What I want to know now is how you came to tumble."
Doc shook his head. "No one squealed. It just happened that one of your recruiting agents had written this address on the same pad that you later used to draw your messages on. His pencil grooved the address into the cheap paper, and I read it. Simple, wasn't it?"
"Simple as hell," Corbin growled. "But what's going to happen to you is simpler." Doc felt his arms grabbed from behind, felt cord lashing his elbows together. "You're going downstairs with the boys, and you're going to get into their van and—and sometime tomorrow you'll be found floating in the River with the mark of the Black Eagle on you."
A gun prodded Doc in the back. "Get going." He stumbled to the door, stumbled downstairs. This was the end for him, he knew, and it didn't much matter, but he was worrying about Jack. These killers hadn't seen him, or they would have said something to their leader, but that only made the mystery of the youth's disappearance all the blacker. He'd dropped into the unknown, and there was no explanation of where he'd gone.
They were at the bottom of the stairs, were out in the chill air, and Pleasant Avenue was graying, deserted except for the huge moving van that stood at the curb. The three went across the sidewalk, veered to the back of the truck.
"Open the doors, Mort," Gerson directed. "And we'll stow our baby inside, with you to keep him happy." The other man came around in front of Doc, reached up to the latch of the van doors. The great leaves swung open.
Then a foot crashed against Mort's jaw, and he went down, and a half-glimpsed form leaped over Doc's head. A shot—red-hot iron seared the old man's side—and he whirled in time to see Gerson crumpling under the carrot-headed youth who had leaped on his shoulders. He saw Jack Ransom's fist pound down, once and again, and the thug stiffened.
"Doc!" Jack cried. "Did he get you, Doc? Are you all right?"
"All right, Jack." Turner kept his wounded side away from Ransom. "But there's another upstairs, the leader. Grab that gun and we'll go get him." Doc bent to get Mort's gun, lifted, saw Corbin in the doorway of 1024—saw Jack straightening up into the line of the black revolver's fire, instantly flung himself at the youth, was jolted by the bullet that would have taken Jack in the head, hit the sidewalk....
CORBIN crumpled as Ransom's snap shot from the concrete took
him in the stomach, and he slid down, down into oblivion.
DULL pain throbbed in Andrew Turner's side—dull pain lay
across his scalp where Corbin's bullet had creased him, but the
hospital bed was soft and cool and it was good to rest for a
week.
"Maybe you'll stop kidding me now about the way I stick all kinds of things in my coat pockets and forget them," he smiled at Jack Ransom, who sat beside the bed. "If I hadn't happened to drop those amyl nitrate pearls in one pocket when Doctor Bayne met me on the way to the store and returned them—and the hypodermic in the other when some salesman insisted on giving it to me as a sample—I wouldn't have been able to stall Corbin the way I did. But what on earth happened to you?"
Jack smiled. "Do you remember the way I was leaning against that pile of boxes at the back of Hrcla's store when the lights went out? Well, I just happened to be looking up at that moment. I saw the end of the stick, with the feathers tied to it, appear from over the pile in the split-second before it got dark. I went up and over the pile of boxes, and got a glimpse of a square of light in the floor behind, and something dropping down into it—and then that went dark."
"A trapdoor," Doc nodded. "I thought there must be something like that. But it must have been cleverly hidden."
"So cleverly that it wasn't till the light came on again that I found how to open it, and then only because I knew exactly where it was," Jack said. "I got it open, dropped down into a sort of basement, and it automatically closed above me. There was no one in the cellar by the time I did that, but there was only one way out and I got out just in time to see the van starting to move away.
"I leaped for its end, found the back doors unlatched, squirmed in, figuring on finding out where the killers were going and getting help when they got there. But when the truck stopped, I discovered that when I'd pulled the door tight getting in they had locked the thing from outside.
"Luckily there was a big enough crack in the side for me to look out of. I was watching through this for a cop to come along. Then I saw you come out."
"A trapdoor in Hrcla's store," Doc mused. "Hrcla must have been mixed up in the thing then."
"Sure he was. The cops got Gerson and Mort to talk, and they told them all about it. Hrcla had sold out his people. And listen, Doc. This is rich. Hrcla is the longest in this country of all those Letts, and he's the only one that isn't either a citizen, or at least has first papers."
"Yes," Doc nodded. "I might have expected as much. He had never learned the American way."