Кеннет Робсон - Death in Silver

The fire escape was ancient and groaned and shed rust under the bronze man's weight. But it furnished him the means of reaching the roof. Crouched on the roof edge in the fog, he could hear the caterwaul of police sirens headed for the spot.

As Doc had expected, there was another fire escape at the rear. He ran down that lightly and stood in an alley that was black, filthy. When he was very near the rear door, he could hear voices.

The silver men were grouped just inside, arguing.

"We gotta clear out of here!" one was insisting. "Listen to the bull wagons howl. The place'll be runnin' over with Law in a minute!"

"Quiet!" commanded Ull's voice. "Savage may hear us."

At that instant, the grenade which Doc had left behind exploded deep inside the building.

"He's still blastin' around in there," a man said, voicing what Doc had hoped they would think.

Another growled, "Wonder if he's wise that the 2 women ain't here?"

The police sirens were getting very close.

"We shall have to leave!" Ull snapped.

The rear door opened.

- — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Being heavy, the door opened but slowly. Ull's words had given Doc an instant of warning, too, and he was already in motion.

40 feet away up the alley stood an ash can. Doc was behind it before Ull and his silver men stepped out into the alley.

The silver hoods were more bulky, due no doubt to gas masks which Ull and his fellows had donned. The group ran in the direction of the near-by river. After one searching glance around, they did not look back but gave all attention to getting away before the police arrived.

When they were out of the alley, Doc followed them. He kept under cover using his greatest skill, for he wanted to follow these silver men to the spot where Pat and Lorna Zane were being held. The quarry made noise in their haste, and that simplified Doc's trailing them.

Warehouses shoved out of the fog and became dank, towering piles. There was the odor of polluted bay water, the sound of waves, and the noise of a disconsolate gull.

Doc quickened his pace. He caught sight of the silver men, still in their weird disguises. They rounded a warehouse and ran out on a wharf where they were lost to view behind a tool house.

On the pier lay old machinery, piling, timbers. Doc worked through this on hands&knees most of the time. A dozen feet from the tool house, he lay still and listened.

There was no sound.

The bronze man leaped up and lunged for the tool structure — a smoke bomb in one hand and a grenade in the other.

As soon as he was around the structure, all of his grim haste left him and his great muscles uncoiled from their tenseness so that he seemed suddenly slack and weary. His motions as he pocketed the grenades were slow.

The gull that had been making the noise spun low overhead, then zoomed away, frightened by a fantastic note — an eerie , indefinable sound that might have been a spawn of the fog. The sound was trilling , melodious, yet devoid of tune — an eerie cadence which lasted only a moment then came to an end as fantastic as its beginning.

Doc's lips did not move as he made the sound, such a quality of ventriloquism did it possess that a close bystander could not have told from whence it came without previous knowledge.

The tool house was an open shed. There was no one in it, no one on the wharf, nor on the water which lunged — greasy and menacing — at the bronze man's feet.

Doc looked under the wharf. The silver men were not there. He listened for a long time. No boat could have taken them away in the fog so silently that he could not have heard their departure.

The silver men had vanished in a fashion as strange as their costumes!

- — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

There was a crowd of police about the ramshackle, grimy — and now half-destroyed — building where the trap had been set for Doc. They asked questions of the giant bronze man who wore the grotesque, padded garb of a deformed beggar.

"A trap," Doc said simply and got the hand-organ which he had carried when playing the part of the mendicant.

Carefully concealed in its innards, the hand-organ the ultraviolet lantern. The big colored glasses that Doc had worn while playing beggar had been the spectacles which helped in detecting — by daylight — the fluorescing of the black light. Thus he had traced the vague smears of vaseline to the building.

Doc started for his truck, but deviated to join a crowd at a nearby corner. There, police were keeping the crowd back from a body sprawled on the sidewalk.

An officer was removing an all-enveloping silver garment from it. The dead man was burly, evil of face, and his body had not spilled much scarlet because he had been shot perfectly between the eyes. There was a gun near the corpse.

"I came around a corner, bumped into him, and he ups-and-ats me with his iron," explained one of the cops. "But he was a little slow."

Doc said nothing and did not change expression, although the death of the burly man closed a source of possible information for the fellow was the one who had come out and kicked Doc when he was doing his beggar act.

"I will take the silver suit," Doc said.

The police passed it over without objection. They knew this bronze man — with his scientific skill, his daring which sometimes seemed madness — could probably accomplish more against the menace of the Silver Death's-Heads than the entire metropolitan police.

There was an expensive wristwatch on the dead man. Doc glanced at it, then at his own wristwatch. The other was exactly 2 minutes and 15 seconds fast.

Doc Savage started away … only to pause and do what for him was a rare thing. He reconsidered. Then he came back and took the expensive wristwatch from the arm of the dead man.

He donned the watch and wore it in place of his own.

Doc Savage had exchanged his armored delivery truck for a dark, somber sedan which — in its way — was as impregnable as the truck and as deceptive. The change had been made at the skyscraper Headquarters .

Ham and Rapid Pace occupied the commodious front seat with Doc. Monk and Hugh McCoy were wedged in the back with a large number of metal equipment cases. There had been no time out for explanations.

"Come on," Doc had directed, then rattled out a string of numbers. The numbers corresponded with the numerals inscribed on the equipment boxes which Doc kept ready packed in the skyscraper aerie.

But now the bronze man was finishing a brief synopsis of what had happened at the end of the vaseline trail.

"It was, of course, a trap," he said. "Now Ham, what did you learn about Bedford Burgess Gardner? Or did you have time to learn anything?"

Ham rolled his sword cane between manicured fingers. He had changed his clothing and looked dapper, neat. Not at all as if he had been in a mad whirl of death, destruction, and mystery throughout the night.

"I learned enough," he said, and grimness crackled in his orator's voice.

"What do you mean by that?"

"One year ago, Bedford Burgess Gardner beaded a second-rate shipping company," Ham stated. "Exactly 1 year ago, negotiations were under way, discussing the merger of Gardner's hack concern with a larger, sounder company. One man opposed the union — the president of the board of the other company. That night, the president was killed by a burglar whom he caught ransacking his house. The merger went through."