Doc Savage: The Secret of Satan's Spine (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage Book 15) (7 page)

One man snatched the supermachine pistol out of Monk’s hand.

Here, the hairy chemist was taken completely by surprise. Normally, he would have whirled and brought the heads of the two men together, but he recognized the familiar prod of hard steel against his back, having had the drop gotten on him many times in the past.

“What’s doin’?” growled Monk.

“You tell us, brother.”

“I’m just payin’ a call on Raymond Lee. Know him?”

“No,” said one.

“Who is he?” chimed in the other.

“Maybe I got the wrong address,” Monk said hopefully.

“Maybe we should ask Diamond about that,” said the man who did not know who Raymond Lee was.

A key was produced, the door unlocked, and Monk was herded inside. The two hard gun barrels never left his shoulder blades, and the hairy chemist knew that if either or both discharged, his shoulder blades would crack like china plates.

“It worked!” said one.

“Yeah,” added the other, “he fell for our phony fracas like a ton of bricks—the dumb ape.”

“Watch who you’re callin’ a dumb ape,” yelled Monk. “I got feelings.”

“You feel the gun muzzles at your back, don’t you? Those are the only feelings you need to bother about right now.”

The smoky-haired gentleman who had called himself Raymond Lee came bounding down the stairs from above, took one look at Monk and groaned, “This is a hell of a note.” His Southern accent seemed to have escaped him.

“Who is he?” demanded one ambusher.

“Who is he!” echoed Raymond Lee. “Who do you think he is? This is the character we’ve been trying to get out of the way.”

Monk looked baffled. “Who? Me?”

Raymond Lee charged up to Monk and looked down at him like he had found a cockroach in his kitchen.

“This is Mayfair?” asked another gunman.

“It is.”

“I thought you gave him a bone to gnaw on.”

Raymond Lee growled, “He must be one of those guys who wolfs down his food and comes around looking for more.”

A gun barrel pushed in hard. “Is that right, Mayfair? Do you gobble your grub?”

The polish that Raymond Lee—if that was indeed his name—had displayed earlier in the morning had now been rubbed off. He looked to be a rough sort, and he talked as tough as a dock walloper. He no longer wore his Southern gentleman’s whites.

“We sail in a few hours,” he bit out. “We need to get him out of the way.”

As if he had not heard that, Monk asked, “I gather you’re not really Davey’s father after all.”

“Gather what you want, squat and stupid,” returned the smoky-haired man. “It won’t matter to you anymore. Nothing will.”

“Is that the way of it?” returned Monk.

“That’s how she lies,” said the man, sounding like a seaman of some sort.

“What do we do with him, Diamond?” asked one of the gunmen.

“March this lump of hair down to the basement, and empty your guns into him, Weedy.”

Monk said abruptly, “Let’s not be hasty.”

Diamond returned in a brutal voice, “We should have done it this way in the first place!”

Behind him, two voices said out of joint, “March!”

Gun muzzles urged the hairy chemist in the direction of a door that evidently led into the basement.

Monk immediately became stubborn. “I ain’t goin’ down there. And you can’t make me.”

Raymond Lee, who was evidently going by the name of Diamond, laid cold amber eyes upon Monk Mayfair and remarked, “It’s not a big bother to shoot you on the spot and carry your corpse down.”

Whereupon the man who had lifted Monk Mayfair’s supermachine pistol, offered, “I took this off him. It’s supposed to fire trick bullets. I read that in a fancy magazine.”

Diamond grabbed the pistol, examined it with curiosity, and said, “Now that you mention it, Weedy, I read the same thing in the tabloids.”

Lifting the pistol, he trained the muzzle on Monk’s chest, and pulled the trigger.

A great many strange things began happening all at once, altering the picture as definitely as if an earthquake, a hurricane and a stray tornado had decided to converge upon one spot.

Chapter VI

FLOP

SOMETHING CYCLONIC EMERGED from the basement, slamming through the door with the juggernaut force of a Sherman tank.

The thing that made such an unexpected appearance moved so rapidly that it could not be clearly tracked with the eyes, especially after it began flinging gunmen around as if they were department store mannequins.

As one of the gunmen later expressed it, “It was all metal and wide as a truck.”

This was an exaggeration, of course. But such was the impact of the hurricane force that stormed the men in the room that they could be forgiven for thinking a squad of commandos had burst out of the basement.

In actual fact, it was only one man.

But that man was Doc Savage. This explained much.

The bronze giant had charged up and out of the basement, seized the man named Diamond, and flung him away, simultaneously harvesting the supermachine pistol that he had been fiddling with, and tossing it in Monk’s direction.

The pistol was designed to defeat use by anyone not familiar with its intricate series of safety catches. It was unlikely the man would have gotten the weapon to discharge. The violence was purely Doc Savage’s doing, hence its hurricane qualities.

Doc Savage next seized Monk by the shoulders, spun him off in the direction of Diamond, doing this so rapidly that the two gunmen who had impaled Monk’s shoulder blades with their pistol muzzles did not understand what happened until a colossus of bronze was suddenly towering over them, moving like a ricocheting thunderbolt.

The gunmen reacted instinctively. They squeezed their triggers, and a pair of .38-caliber slugs struck the bronze man in the chest, driving him backward.

Meanwhile, Monk Mayfair had the supermachine pistol firmly in hand and was scrambling to his feet. He tried to lay his gunsight on one gunman, but Doc Savage’s backpedaling form blocked his view.

From somewhere above came excited shouts, and other men suddenly put in an appearance, charging down the stairs from above.

This reserve crew brandished revolvers and automatics, and started looking for people to perforate.

One shot Doc Savage in the back, but his weapon was of insufficient caliber and velocity to do much more than arrest the bronze man’s active progress.

Seeing this, Monk opened up with his supermachine pistol, and aligned the stitching tracers to cross the man’s chest on a diagonal, causing the fellow’s loud tie to flip up. The man fell backward, stumbled, and then began rolling down the stairs, completely helpless.

The amazing weapon was charged with “mercy” bullets, which were hollow shells of soft lead filled with a chemical anesthetic which acted instantly, once the mushrooming rounds broke skin.

After shrugging off a small-caliber bullet in the back, Doc Savage was suddenly moving on the gunmen again, and these two worthies fired anew.

Doc’s bulletproof chainmesh undervest absorbed the dual impact. The bronze giant was staggered slightly, and threw himself off to one side, lest one of the gunmen strike his unprotected head or hands.

The smoky-haired individual who had called himself Raymond Lee and was now going by the name of Diamond took immediate charge.

First, he drew a blackjack, a nasty-looking leathery pouch of a thing, and bopped Monk Mayfair across the top of his bristle-furred skull.

Then, turning to the men charging down the steps, he roared, “Finish them off! Then let’s clear out of here!”

Guns commenced barking like angry dogs, and Doc Savage ducked around the corner into a side room, simultaneously fishing into his pockets and extracting a number of objects that resembled glass marbles.

The bronze man had every intention of hurling these into the hallway, where they would shatter and release a volatile chemical mixture that would produce virtually instantaneous unconsciousness.

Before he could do so, there was a new arrival.

The front door flew open, and there stood Ham Brooks, supermachine pistol in one hand, a fresh sword cane in the other, looking ready for battle.

“What’s going on here?” he demanded.

The dapper attorney was promptly shot, one bullet striking him in the belly, the other knocking his cane out of his hand, with the result that both man and cane went flying backward, tumbling down the short flight of porch steps.

“Scuttle him, too!” roared Diamond.

Doc pegged his tiny grenades at that point, and they landed out in the hallway, coming to rest on the thick carpet.

Unfortunately, the deep nap prevented them from breaking, and nothing useful happened whatsoever.

Doc Savage plunged out of the side room at that point, but was driven backward by a hail of punishing lead that chewed and chipped at the framing of the door.

More bullets punched through the plaster walls, one shattering a light fixture, the other breaking a window, causing glass to crash and jangle.

Someone brought up a shotgun, set the muzzle against the hallway wall, and blew a large hole in the plaster.

This was done at about shoulder height, which gave the determined gunmen a fresh loophole through which to insert their gun muzzles and take turns blasting away half blindly.

Exhibiting an understandable concern, Doc Savage managed to evade the first burst of bullets, and threw himself out one intact window, taking the glass and the window sash with him. He had first doffed his coat, clutching it before him to protect against glass shards so sharp they could sever an artery.

Reaching grassy ground, the bronze man rolled in tight against the granite foundation of the old dwelling for protection.

Considerable yelling came from within the house, and orders were chopped out, “Fan out! Hunt him down! Shoot him into splinters.”

The desperate voice belonged to the man who went by the names of Diamond and Raymond Lee, true name unknown.

Hearing that, Doc Savage came to his feet, charged around the back of the dwelling, found the hatch that opened into the basement, flung it up. Diving in, he landed on a set of cobwebbed timber steps, and pulled the hatch shut behind him.

This was done with such speed and stealth that no one witnessed it, nor could anyone have imagined it could be accomplished so quickly.

Moving through the gloomy basement, Doc Savage went directly to the stairs that he previously mounted in order to surprise Diamond and his gang, having earlier secreted himself in the dank basement.

The bronze giant took the unpainted steps with great caution, in case anyone was stationed at the head of the staircase.

He drew from his clothing a slim black tube, which he extended telescope fashion, then manipulated in another way, fashioning a periscope of sorts.

Reaching the top of the stairs, Doc hung back, and extended the tubular periscope, peering outward to ascertain the lay of the land. The first thing he saw was Monk Mayfair lying sprawled on the floor. A reddish patch at the back of his head looked nasty.

Men were charging about, and guns were going off. The sound was of a general bedlam.

No one seemed to be concerned with Monk, so Doc took a chance, flashed out, grabbed the hairy chemist by the shoulders and pulled him down onto the basement steps.

That accomplished, Doc surreptitiously closed the door at the top, and drifted back to the basement hatch, moving quietly but with grim efficiency.

The bronze man’s intention was to rescue Ham Brooks next, but the minute his head poked out of the hatchway door, lead started snapping at him, and he was forced to withdraw.

The caterwauling of a police siren could be heard, something that might have been predicted given the general conditions of combat. Quite a commotion had been produced.

This caused Diamond to execute a change in plans.

“Pile into the cars!” he ordered. “Get the hell out of here. Rendezvous at the second departure area.”

There was a concerted slamming of feet down rattling porch steps, through hedges and onto the heat-cracked pavement.

Various vehicles had been parked on either side of the residential street, and evidently they all belonged to Diamond and his gang.

Listening, Doc heard a flurry of slamming car doors, and the grinding and choking of automobile engines.

Quite a number of cars roared off as the sirens grew near. Doc reemerged, swept around to the front of the Old Sailors Home, and mounted the porch steps, discovering Ham Brooks, who was not very much worse for wear.

In the mad stampede to escape, men had trampled him rather roughly, his immaculate clothing thus picked up a number of dusty footprints, but Ham was otherwise unharmed.

As Doc Savage lifted Ham into a seated position, the elegant attorney began coughing, then complaining, for his sword cane lay in pieces, the elegant wood barrel broken, but the blade largely intact.

Ham snapped open his hands, and shook off the splintery remnants of the barrel, then climbed to his feet unsteadily.

Examining the state of his attire, he discovered a parade of footprints upon the fine fabric of his coat and trousers. His chiseled profile collapsed in horror.

“This is the worst day of my life!” he moaned.

SEEING that Ham was otherwise sound, Doc ducked into the house, opened the door leading down to the basement and pulled Monk Mayfair into the carpeted hallway, then knelt to examine his head injuries.The homely chemist had been blessed by nature with a hard skull. Possibly a sledgehammer might have dented it, but the blackjack had done nothing more than scrape off a patch of skin and smack him senseless. Doc realized with relief that he would be coming around shortly.

Doc walked out to the porch in time for two green police patrol cars with bone-white roofs to show up, sirens keening.

“Monk will be fine,” he told Ham. Then he went to greet the officers.

The bronze man was known to the police, having an honorary commission and a great deal of influence with City Hall.

He gave a rapid recitation of the events that resulted in the partial demolition of the Old Sailors Home. Then, to the amazement of the officers, he gave them complete descriptions of the makes, models, and license tag numbers of the cars that had just quit the neighborhood.