Doc Savage: Glare of the Gorgon (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage Book 19) (14 page)

JANET FALCON LIT OUT OF TOWN. GOT A LINE ON HER. TAKING MIDNIGHT TRAIN TO KANSAS CITY.

It was signed, “THOMAS.”

“Long Tom didn’t write this!” exploded Monk. “It’s more than ten words. That runt is too cheap to pay the extra word charges.”

“Although I detest crediting this brainless baboon,” chimed in Ham, “he is correct. Also, Long Tom would never sign a telegram with his formal name.”

Doc nodded. “Nor are any of our usual code words employed to verify that this message is genuine. Someone has waylaid Long Tom, not suspecting that such a ruse would never get by.”

Monk asked, “So what do we do? We ain’t gotta clue where that runt went off to.”

Doc said, “Long Tom was to visit Janet Falcon. We will start there.”

After securing lodgings, Doc and his aides returned to their rental sedan, and drove through early morning traffic to the apartment of Janet Falcon.

They made good time, inasmuch as it was too early for most commuters to be on the road. South of the Loop, rising out of Lake Michigan, reared a fantastic sight—a cluster of futuristic buildings, most of them windowless.

This was the waterfront site of Chicago’s late world’s fair, the Century of Progress. It had recently closed. Now its impressive layout, built around a pair of artificial lagoons, awaited demolition.

Ham remarked, “I wonder if cities will really look like that in coming years?”

Monk grunted, “Don’t act so impressed. Those overgrown shacks are built out of plywood and gypsum. They’re mainly for show.”

Ham added, “I read that the fair’s success led to the establishment of the scientific exposition Long Tom is attending. It is intended to be an annual affair.”

“It is a direct continuation of the fair’s Hall of Science exhibit,” inserted Doc. “By all reports, it is off to a promising start.”

Pulling up before the modest yellow brick structure, they alighted. Doc Savage strode into the vestibule, and depressed the push-button next to the name of
J. Falcon
. He did this several times.

“Kinda funny not to be up and about,” muttered Monk suspiciously.

Doc reminded, “Remember that her employer is now deceased. She is likely out of work.”

Doc Savage wore a bulletproof vest of many pockets. From an inner pocket of his carry-all garment, the bronze man produced an unusual key of his own devising. He carried several of these. The exact properties were not known to his aides, but the ingenious mechanical gadget possessed the ability to adapt itself to certain kinds of locks.

Doc inserted the device, manipulated it in a way that neither Monk nor Ham could clearly discern, and the door immediately fell open.

They mounted the stairs, found Janet Falcon’s door, and noticed that the hallway carpet runner was somewhat askew.

Drops of blood had spattered here and there.

Doc Savage looked at those drops, and to Monk and Ham’s profound astonishment, announced, “That is Long Tom’s blood.”

“Jove!” exploded Ham.

Monk’s jaw sagged alarmingly. “Blazes! How can you tell, Doc?”

It was such an uncanny deduction that Monk and Ham were momentarily flummoxed.

“If you were to kneel down,” informed Doc, “you would see blond hairs mixed in with the fluid. They are the exact color of Long Tom’s hair. This leads to the inescapable conclusion that Long Tom was struck upon the head on this very spot.”

Monk and Ham looked a little sick.

They considered how to enter the apartment after first knocking and receiving no response.

Doc began to go through his miracle keys, but Monk proved to be impatient.

Stepping back, the gorilla-like chemist threw his burly form against the door. The panel was solid. But its hinges were not. The door went flying inward, its lock smashed out of the jamb.

Monk puffed out his barrel chest, boasting, “Renny could hardly have done as nifty a job of door wreckin’.”

Renny was Colonel John Renwick, esteemed civil engineer and one of the absent members of Doc Savage’s band of trouble-busters. Renny was possessed of a pair of horny-knuckled hands the size of the wooden mallets employed by circus roustabouts for the purpose of driving the pegs with which to stake down bigtop tents. When balled into fists, they became intimidating monsters. For some reason known only to the big engineer, Renny liked to haul off and smash down inoffensive doors with one devastating punch.

They entered the room, snapped on the light.

The living room disclosed at first appeared ordinary, its furnishings categorizable as shabby-genteel. Dominant was a horsehair armchair covered in faded yellow damask. The high back and seat cushion were freckled with tiny, uniform holes, no bigger than the lead shaft of a mechanical pencil.

Doc Savage’s keen gaze absorbed these details, then came to rest on something even more unusual.

On the floor of the parlor lay a pile of what appeared to be construction debris. This consisted of chunks of irregularly-shaped stone or concrete. Much of it had been thoroughly pulverized, as if persons unknown had taken sledgehammers to the pile of rock.

In fact, impressions found on the rug were greatly suggestive that exactly this had happened.

“Whoever took hammers to this rock pile, wanted to make sure it was unrecognizable,” Monk decided.

Flake-gold eyes active, Doc Savage moved around the rock pile, staring at it intently.

That was when he noticed spots of crimson on the divan. They were still somewhat moist, and sticky. A bronze finger touched one spot, lifted it to his sensitive nostrils.

The bronze man sniffed the sticky stuff carefully. Then he said something that stunned his aides.

“Someone in this room had been shot with a mercy bullet.”

Ham stared. “How the deuce can you tell?”

“Mixed in with the vital fluid are faint traces of the chemical contained in our mercy bullets.”

The fact that Doc’s olfactory senses could detect the potion was not as remarkable as it might seem. As a part of a routine of daily exercises followed since childhood, he subjected his five senses to a regimen of tests. These included smelling the contents of an ever-changing variety of vials while blindfolded, and correctly identifying the odors bottled therein.

Other apparatus tested the upper limits of the bronze man’s vision, hearing, touch—even his taste buds were challenged, for sometimes it was necessary to identify substances by application of his sensitive tongue when no other means was available.

“Any idea whose blood it is?” asked Ham, half hopeful of a positive reply.

“None,” said Doc, his active eyes going to the pile of grit spread over the carpet.

It had been virtually demolished, but something stuck out of the gritty pile.

Employing the toe of one shoe, Doc nudged it, bringing a pale object to light.

The others gathered around.

Kneeling, Doc Savage reached in and extracted the thing.

It proved to be a human hand, but apparently composed of stone. Despite possessing a somewhat swollen thumb, the hand looked vaguely familiar to them.

Ham blanched. He struggled to form words, but his tongue failed him.

So Monk did it for him. “That kinda looks like Long Tom’s hand. I recognize a scar on the back.”

Doc Savage said nothing, but from a pocket he withdrew a small magnifying glass. The bronze man began studying the tips of the stone hand’s digits, and now he put them under the glass one by one.

As he examined each pad, his trilling seeped out, eerie and ethereal.

“What is it, Doc?” bleated Ham.

“This stone hand exhibits seemingly lifelike fingerprints. The thumbprint is the only one that is clear, but unquestionably it matches Long Tom’s print.”

Monk and Ham took turns going pale. The hairy chemist pointed at the debris pile, and his eyes were sick.

“Is that—” Monk said thickly.

Doc Savage stood up, holding the hand. His next words made them all feel ill at ease.

“If this hand in fact belongs to Long Tom Roberts, it follows that this pile of pulverized rock comprises his mortal remains.”

No one spoke after that. The ticking of a wall clock was the only sound heard.

Then Ham noticed something odd. It was an unusual gun, being larger than a common pistol and possessing a long, distorted barrel and no sign of its operating mechanism. He picked it up.

“What is this?”

Doc Savage took it, and said, “This is a new gun Long Tom has been working on. He was planning to display it at the scientific exposition. He would never have left it behind.”

Ham groaned. “That’s further proof that Long Tom is no longer with us.”

Doc Savage said nothing. The monotonous ticking of the wall clock was the only noise audible in the apartment.

The place was as quiet in a macabre way as a funeral parlor.

Chapter XIII

THE GRAY GHOUL

DURING THE DRIVE back to the hotel, the mood was pensive.

Doc Savage drove. Monk Mayfair sat in the passenger seat beside him. In the rear, Ham Brooks was examining the strange pistol found at Janet Falcon’s apartment.

“This looks bally familiar,” he said somberly.

“It’s a magnetic gun,” offered Monk. “You remember that time we tangled with that Arab, Mohallet. He had a bigger version of that contraption. It fired bullets that were so quiet, you could hardly hear them whistle past your ears.”

A light of understanding flared up in the dapper lawyer’s intelligent eyes.

“I remember now! We almost fell into a trap in which one of these infernal devices figured.”

“Yeah,” said Monk. “After we captured it, Long Tom put it in that private museum of his. He got to tinkerin’ with it, and started believin’ that he could miniaturize it. Mebbe make one small enough it could be toted around in a holster.”

“So this is what he produced,” marveled Ham.

Doc Savage inserted, “It was Long Tom’s belief that magnetic guns such as those could be developed to a degree of proficiency that they might one day replace our superfirers.”

Monk snorted derisively. “I got wind of that. It gave me a better idea. Not a new gun. Different bullets for our regular supermachine pistols.”

Ham had been examining the magnetic pistol and saw that the barrel consisted of a shielded coil, and reasoned that sending power into the coil was the means by which bullets could be emitted at high speed in utter silence, the gun mechanism having no moving parts beyond its trigger and ammunition feed.

The dapper lawyer looked up and remarked, “So that is why you developed that Charlie horse bullet.”

“And others besides,” said Monk proudly. “Long Tom and I were kinda havin’ a contest to see who could do a better job of improvin’ the weapons we chose.”

“And now Long Tom is no longer with us,” said Ham sadly. His eyes went to the woman’s hatbox on the seat beside him. Doc had appropriated this from Janet Falcon’s apartment, and into this receptacle he had poured several handfuls of the powdery rock, as well as the petrified hand which bore the electrical wizard’s unique thumbprint.

“Could that really be Long Tom’s remains?”

Doc Savage said, “Whatever turned the brain of Ned Gamble to stone—or a substance the consistency of stone—could conceivably do the same to human flesh and blood and bone.”

Neither Monk nor Ham responded to this assertion. They lapsed into an uncomfortable silence.

Doc Savage added, “Only a rigorous scientific analysis of the material will tell us for certain.”

They said no more about it after that.

The morning was getting along, and the rental machine was wending its way toward the famed Loop in the heart of downtown Chicago. A cold wind blew off Lake Michigan, biting in the extreme, and the skies looked vaguely threatening.

Snow on the ground was several days old and, while a good deal of it had been plowed and picked up, much of the soiled stuff remained.

Doc Savage drove expertly, managing to avoid the worst streets as if he could see around corners. It was nothing of the sort, of course. Doc knew Chicago well. He had visited the Windy City many times, in different seasons, and had retained virtually all memory of his previous experiences.

The bronze man recalled from past experience which streets were favored during inclement weather and which thoroughfares the city was less diligent about plowing. He merely followed his mental map as he drove along.

Abruptly, he pulled over into a side street in the Jeweler’s Row District.

Braking, Doc lifted his golden eyes to the rear-vision mirror and waited.

Monk and Ham looked about them, faces baffled, thinking they had arrived at some undisclosed destination.

But Doc Savage made no immediate move to quit the vehicle.

They saw that the bronze man was studying the view out the back window through the rear-vision mirror. They swiveled their heads about to look.

Traffic swept by, moving at an energetic pace.

Then one machine—a purple convertible phaeton—slithered forward, slowed, seemed about to take the turn, then hesitated.

Doc Savage got out, went to the trunk and opened it. He began removing chains from the trunk, as well as a jack and tire iron.

Monk clambered out, and watched with a curious light in his gristle-pit eyes.

“Are we plannin’ to drive out into the country? We don’t need chains for the streets. They’re pretty well plowed.”

In Mayan, a tongue understood by few outside of a tiny enclave in Central America, Doc said, “Observe the phaeton behind me.”

Monk was canny about it. He did not react suddenly. Standing close to Doc, he squinted one eye, and seemed to be observing the bronze man, but in actuality was sizing up the phaeton.

“Blazes!” he breathed. “Glim that driver.”

By that time, Ham Brooks had joined them. He had caught the exchange, understood it perfectly. All three men spoke the ancient Mayan language as a result of experiences encountered during their first great adventure together.

Ham caught a glimpse of the driver through the windscreen, as he dawdled at the corner.