Robert Wallace - The Dancing Doll Murders

Bowers’s men, anticipating his next move, began firing fiercely through the blackness toward the stairway head. They laid a barrage of bullets that would keep Van from attempting escape that way. But he couldn’t turn, couldn’t pause now. He dropped flat, snaked forward over the cold cement floor, and saw the flashlight go on again.

He whirled, ripped a bullet from his.38 straight at it, and heard a man cry out. He pivoted to the right as the flashlight clattered, and while Bowers’s gunmen tried to rake him with lead. But the shots went high. The Phantom reached the stairway and plunged down.

At the foot of them there was revealing light again. The big assembly room with the cars in it seemed empty. But, as Van moved across it toward the head of the second stairway, two running men appeared. They were dressed in greasy overalls. Both carried sawed-off automatic rifles.

They saw him at the same instant he saw them. His hastily flung shot sent them dodging back into the black mouth of the stairway. But now that means of escape was cut off.

Van’s eyes roved the room desperately. The windows, he saw, had heavy steel mesh across them. If he ducked in among the cars he would only be prolonging his murder. The men above, already at the top of the stairway, would hunt him down and slaughter him.

Then he saw the open door of the big elevator and made a quick decision. It still stood at the fourth-floor landing with the sedan that had brought Van and the others from the river in front of it. It was slow, ponderous, but it offered momentary refuge.

VAN leaped in, jerked the inside handle that snapped the two sliding doors shut. Bullets smashed against them even as they came together. Van’s fingers touched the elevator control, and the big cage began to move slowly down.

He didn’t stop it till it reached street level. But the instant he opened the sliding doors a couple of inches he realized again that he was trapped. The dial on the outside revealed to Bowers’s men below that the cage had descended. They were watching and knew that the fugitive had arrived. Bowers’s telephoned warning had made them alert.

A stream of slugs smashed into the doors as Van partly opened them. He closed them again with a quick jab of the handle; and lead continued to come through the door panels till Van, to save himself from quick annihilation, had to touch the control lever again and start the car up. As he paused at the second floor the hopelessness of his situation was borne home to him even more keenly. Once more that dial outside betrayed him. There were men watching there, too, eager to put him on the spot. He was like an animal being hunted, cornered, with no way for escape. He could run the cage up and down; but, at whatever floor he stopped the killers would know it. He would be met by a hail of lead if he tried to step out, and if he stayed in the cage they would get him sooner or later.

Already he heard men hammering on the fourth-floor door in the big shaft high above him. Once they got that open they could fire down through the open top of the cage.

There was no panic in Van’s mind as he considered his peril. He clearly saw that force was futile now, that his only possible hope of saving himself lay in somehow outwitting his would-be slayers. But how? What possible trick could he use to divert the killers’ attention long enough to give him a chance to escape?

The sides of the big cage were open except for a sheet-iron safety wall about five feet high. It was the regular type of car elevator Van had seen in many garages. He might be able to leave it, climb up or down the shaft on the steel cables, but if he did so what would it avail?

It was then that the Phantom devised a subtle play. Those dials outside, telling the killers just what floor he was on had been his chief undoing. Except for them he might have escaped by taking the watching guards by surprise. Why not turn those betraying dials into an asset?

Van’s eyes were bright with excitement as he let the big elevator move up. The men above, hammering at the sliding doors to burst them in, would watch his progress on the dial, and think that in his panic he had utterly lost his head. Those on the first, second, and third floors, would follow the upward progress of the cage also.

And Van made his big play now, his carefully thought-out chess move on a board of life and death. He was staring aloft, watching the big counterweights in their grooved track at the side of the shaft come down. They would pass between the elevator cage and the wall, huge bars of tongued pig-iron which partially balanced the weight of the cage and took some of the load off the hoisting cables operated by electrically driven gears above. There was room between the elevator and the shaft wall for a man’s body to slip through.

Van left the control lever on; crossed the floor of the cage swiftly; and, grasping the overhead steel braces, drew himself up to the top of the five-foot safety wall. Here he waited till the car had passed the second floor and the big counterweights had come parallel with it. They went down as the cage went up. Van knew that the principle of all elevators was the same.

It was dangerous business dropping down off the narrow cage rim to the greasy top of the descending counterweights. Though the cage’s speed seemed slow, the combined upward and downward speed as it and the counterweights passed was perilously rapid!

Van swung his body over, clutched the counterweight cable, and slid down it to the top of the pig-iron bars between the wall and the elevator cage. The cage continued up as Van went down.

And now the clever strategy of his move was apparent. For the killers on the various floors were watching the dials. There was a burst of firing high on the fourth floor as the emergency control switch stopped the elevator when it reached its point of maximum upward movement. Bowers’s men thought their quarry had returned in his panic. They thought they had him this time.

And those watching on the floors below and seeing that the hand on the dial pointed to 4relaxed their watchfulness. The kill would be made, they thought, where the chase had first started. But Dick Van Loan was clinging to the counterweight now at street level.

He climbed off silently, crossed the elevator pit, and approached the inside handle of the door again. He opened it cautiously, inch by inch, but now there was no burst of firing.

The gunmen below had moved away from the elevator exit. One was standing with his back turned, looking up the side stairway. Another had gone to the street door in front. The rest were not in sight.

Van pressed down on the handle, drew the doors wide, and stepped out. The sound of them made the nearest killer whirl. Van’s bullet caught him in the shoulder and spun him around.

The man in front cried out, tried to get his gun into action. Van’s savagely slammed shots unnerved him, made him fumble and lose his aim. Van was upon him in almost an instant, and the man was staggering back.

Van’s gun streaked flame again, flinging hot lead against the hands that held the machine-gun. The man dropped his weapon with a shrill scream of terror and dangled bloody wrists. Van was by him and out the street door in a second, leaving the bedlam of the garage behind.

UNDER its grotesque disguise of Dopey, the Phantom’s face was hawklike. His eyes were snapping. He had escaped, but he must not lose the trail of the killers. He sensed what their next move would be. Having failed to get their victim, knowing that their hideout had been discovered they would leave the garage as rats leave a sinking ship.

And Van was right. He had no more than reached the corner of the dark block when, looking behind him, he saw the big outside door of the garage slide back. A moment later a car came out, filled with men.