Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 087 - The Boss of Terror

VIP免费
2024-12-19 0 0 389.47KB 75 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
THE BOSS OF TERROR
A Doc Savage Adventure By Kenneth Robeson
This page copyright © 2002 Blackmask Online.
http://www.blackmask.com
? Chapter I. THE LOONS
? Chapter II. THE HOUSE OF WORRIED FOLK
? Chapter III. THE QUEER DEATH
? Chapter IV. THE FURNITURE POLISHER
? Chapter V. OXALATE SMITH AND THE FOOTPAD
? Chapter VI. THE TRAILING OF ANNIE SPAIN
? Chapter VII. ANOTHER SMITH DEAD
? Chapter VIII. THE SERUM TRICK
? Chapter IX. LONG TOM AND TROUBLE
? Chapter X. DEATH FOR SMITHS
? Chapter XI. THE HEIR
? Chapter XII. THE LIFE PRESERVER
? Chapter XIII. TRAIL TO MAINE
? Chapter XIV. THE CLIFF
? Chapter XV. MYSTERY BELOW
? Chapter XVI. GIRL TREACHEROUS
? Chapter XVII. THE CHANGE OF MIND
? Chapter XVIII. THE BAD BREAK
? Chapter XIX. THE STOMACH TROUBLE
Scanned and Proofed
by Tom Stephens
Chapter I. THE LOONS
THE ambulance was traveling about fifty when it took a corner and missed a lamp-post scarcely more
than a quarter of an inch.
The passenger spoke to the driver.
"The stork that brought you," he said, "should have been arrested for smuggling dope."
The driver grinned. He looked startlingly like an ape when he grinned—and before he grinned, for that
matter.
The ambulance lined out on a straight stretch through the park and the speedometer climbed up to
seventy. The siren made a lot of cat-on-the-fence noise.
The passenger—he rode in the front seat with the driver—was wasp-waisted and wide-shouldered, with
an orator’s mouth. He wore striped afternoon trousers, a cut-away coat, a pearl-colored vest. In other
words, he was dressed fit to kill. He balanced a neat black cane on his knees.
The driver yanked the wheel. The ambulance took a corner on two wheels, tires howling in complaint.
"From the way you drive this ambulance," the passenger said, "one would think you owned it."
The driver snorted. "Well," he said, "nobody knows we stole it—yet."
Nothing more was said for some time. The ambulance dived out of Central Park, which occupies the
middle part of New York City like a great lung, and veered sharply north on the street that runs along the
west side of the park, Central Park West.
The driver came near being as wide as he was tall. Standing on his feet, he could scratch his knees with
his fingers without bending over. There was a good deal of reddish hair, of the nature of rusty shingle
nails, on all exposed parts of his person. His face was something to frighten babies with; yet babies
usually weren’t frightened by him. There was something pleasantly fascinating about his homeliness.
The driver pointed with one hand. "Isn’t that it?" he asked.
He was indicating a limousine—a long black limousine that looked like at least seven thousand dollars
recently invested. It was empty, except for the chauffeur.
"That’s it," the dapper man admitted.
"Sure it’s it," said the driver. "I told you we could head it off by cutting through the park."
"The way you’ve been driving," complained the other, "you could have headed off Eddie Rickenbacker in
an airplane."
This seemed to enrage the ambulance driver. He gave the wheel a jerk. The ambulance crashed into the
limousine. There was a great deal of noise.
THERE was more noise than damage, really, although there was some shock, too—enough to pile
ambulance driver and passenger against the windshield, and enough to knock the uniform cap off the
limousine driver.
The driver got out of the limousine obviously with just one intention, which was to fight. He looked as if
he could give an account of himself, being practically seven feet tall and built along the symmetrical
proportions of a circus acrobat. It was a case of no particular part of him being big—he was all big. He
jerked open the ambulance door.
"Come out of there, you mutts!" he ordered angrily.
The ambulance driver and his dapper companion sat perfectly still, glancing at each other out of the
corners of their eyes, but not saying anything.
"Come out!" The giant limousine driver grabbed the ambulance door and shook it—shook the whole
ambulance. "Come out, you skulls!" he bellowed. "I’m gonna ruin you both!"
From the corner of his mouth, the dapper man whispered, "Gosh, he’s big, isn’t he?"
Also from the side of his mouth, the ambulance driver agreed, "He wants to play rough, too."
"So you won’t come out, eh?" roared the limousine pilot. "O. K. I’ll take you out."
He reached in and got the dapper passenger by one leg. The well-dressed man yelled, "Wait, you fool! I
wasn’t driving this thing!" This remonstration did no good; he was dragged out anyway. "Run into me, will
you!" said the giant. He knocked the dapper man flat on his back in the street. He said, "That’ll teach
you." He reached in and grabbed the apish man by the leg.
"Now wait a minute," said the apish man hastily. "Let’s talk this thing over."
"Talk, hell! You ran into me. What’s there to talk about?"
"People run into other people every day. What’s there to argue—"
"They don’t run into them on purpose. Not into me, anyway."
The limousine chauffeur then hit the ambulance driver with his fist. The ambulance driver staggered, but
not as much as might have been expected. He emitted a howl, the noise being somewhat like the sound
made by a bull when one of his horns is being sawed off by a cowboy.
A fight ensued. If the street had not been paved with asphalt, the brawl would doubtless have raised quite
a cloud of dust. Soon the big limousine chauffeur hit the pavement alongside the dapper ambulance
passenger, and sat there, his breath temporarily knocked out.
"Hit him, Ham!" puffed the apish ambulance driver.
"Nothing doing," said the dapper man. "He might hit back."
"Fine help you are!" said the apish man. He took in a deep breath, then rushed his dazed opponent. He
received a left hook between the eyes that made him stagger back. He rushed again. This time, he
clipped the big limousine chauffeur on the jaw, dazing him and knocking him down.
"Nice going, Monk," said the dapper Ham. "Too bad you didn’t have a sledge hammer."
The apish Monk puffed for breath and surveyed the size of his momentarily stupefied opponent.
"I know what elephant hunters feel like now," he remarked.
The dapper man nodded.
"You’ll know what a hamburger feels like—if he gets up once more," he said. "I don’t believe you can
knock him down again."
"Help me throw him in the back of the ambulance," Monk ordered.
"Not me. He’s your bird."
"Give me a hand, or I’ll ram that cane down your throat."
The apish man and the dapper man laid hold of the arms of the limousine driver. The latter was still
dazed, but he could get words out, after a fashion.
"What’re you gonna do?" he gasped, trying to struggle.
"Why, we’re going to give you a loving kiss," Monk said.
They heaved the big limousine chauffeur into the back of the ambulance and locked the doors.
A POLICEMAN arrived.
The cop had seen the whole thing, but it happened that he, as an individual, did not hold any excessive
love for either ambulance drivers or the pilots of extremely swanky and shiny limousines, so he had
remained in the background. He thought the thing was rather evenly matched. He liked a good fight. But
now he thought he’d better stop it.
"Hey, you!" he barked. "What’s going on here?"
Monk and Ham glanced at each other. The glances were not happy.
"There was an accident," Monk said.
"Yes," Ham added. "And we came to get the injured man. We just put him in the ambulance."
"You’re not kidding me," the officer said. "I saw the whole thing."
He was a large, square officer, general color reddish. He looked as if he might have been partially
constructed of the roots of oak trees. He was twirling a club almost as long as his arm. There was a
noticeable bulge under one of his coat tails that was probably a revolver.
"It was this way, officer," said Monk, moved by inspiration. "The poor fellow is demented. His mind has
been affected. Probably it is the heat—"
"It’s been cold for a week," the officer said.
"The heat of nervous strain," said Monk, "caused by driving in this New York traffic. At any rate, his
mind isn’t right. We were going to take him to the hospital for observation."
Ham nodded emphatically. "Yes, that’s it. We think he should be observed."
"He’s worth observing," the cop said. "Particularly, the way he swings a right hook."
"His mind—"
"There’s nothing wrong with his mind," the policeman growled. "Anybody would get mad the way you
two fellows ran into his car. Probably his boss will give him hell."
Monk and Ham looked hurt.
"Officer, I’m afraid you don’t believe us," Ham muttered.
At this point, there was a violent beating on the rear doors of the ambulance.
"Let me out of here!" a voice squalled.
The cop twirled his club ominously and scowled at Monk and Ham.
"Turn him loose," he ordered.
"But—"
"Turn him loose!" The policeman fished out a pair of handcuffs. "The Clancys don’t tell you twice. Either
you turn him loose, or—" He twirled the bracelets suggestively.
"I’ll let him out," Monk said with haste.
"And I’ll get ready to run," Ham said uneasily.
Monk unlocked the rear doors. The limousine chauffeur stumbled out onto the pavement. One of his eyes
had turned black—it was remarkably black, considering the short time that had elapsed—and there was
some damp red fluid on his fists, as if he had skinned them. He appeared mad enough to give off sparks.
"You want to prefer charges against these two?" the policeman asked him hopefully.
"I’ll get ‘em!" the driver growled ominously.
"You can have them arrested," the cop explained.
"Yes, and we can have him arrested, too," Ham said. "It’s a horse of one color and a donkey of the
same."
The officer scowled at Ham. "How come you know so much?"
"I’m a law—" Ham swallowed. "I studied law one time."
The limousine chauffeur blocked out his fists and glowered at Monk and Ham.
"I’ll get you guys!" he said. "You just wait!"
Having rid himself of that threat, he stamped over and climbed into his machine.
"Hey!" called the cop. "Don’t you want to prefer charges?"
"Go jump in the lake!" the chauffeur said.
The limousine had not been greatly damaged by the collision—there was a somewhat crumpled fender,
but the wheels and the chassis were intact.
The chauffeur drove off in the limousine.
The cop stalked around to the back and looked into the ambulance, and started when he discovered a
figure lying on a stretcher inside, swathed in white sheets.
"You got a patient in this thing!" he barked in astonishment.
"Oh, him," Monk said. "He’s just an emergency case we was rushing to the hospital."
"Emergency case!" The cop looked blank. Then he gave Monk a poke with his billy club. "You idiot! Get
in that thing and get going. The poor feller might have died while this tomfoolery was going on."
Monk and Ham climbed in the ambulance and disappeared up the street.
The cop stared after them. The cop was well satisfied with himself.
Of course, the officer was not aware that the present driver of the limousine was not the same chauffeur
who had sat behind the wheel before the accident. There had been a change in limousine drivers.
Chapter II. THE HOUSE OF WORRIED FOLK
THE limousine was composed about fifty percent of hood, the power plant being a sixteen-cylinder
motor that was constructed with the care of a fine watch, or so the manufacturer claimed. It ran very
quietly.
The chauffeur took the first opportunity to turn into a side street. He stopped. Producing a handkerchief
and a small mirror, he repaired his appearance.
He wiped off the black eye. It was a smudge of dark grease paint.
He mopped up the red stains on his fists. These were a crimson-dyed syrup which did not leave
permanent discoloration.
The next stop was at a place which made a specialty of quick body repairs.
"Had a little accident," the chauffeur explained. "Can you fix it up?"
He stood around while they put a thick coat of grease on the bent fender to keep the paint from cracking,
then went to work with a small straightening machine and returned the fender to an appearance very
close to its former one.
"Thanks," said the driver. "What do I owe you?"
"A dollar eighty— Say, you’re sure a big guy, ain’t you?"
"Yes." The driver paid up and drove the limousine to the home of John R. Smith, which was where it
belonged. It was John R. Smith’s limousine.
Out-of-town visitors to New York frequently walked along upper Fifth Avenue and mistook the John R.
Smith home for a museum, a bank, or even a modernistic church. Native New Yorkers often made the
same error. It was a white marble edifice—"edifice" was the word—on the more swanky section of the
Avenue.
The chauffeur drove into the garage. He inspected himself in the small mirror before he left the machine.
The glass showed him a dark-skinned face, furry dark eyebrows, crow-black hair, and a scar—it was a
long, thick scar that arched down from the corner of his left eye almost to the edge of his nose—which
was his most distinguishing feature.
He made sure that the collodian compound out of which he had manufactured the scar was sticking
tightly to his skin. Satisfied it was, he entered the house.
The interior of the house was a miniature of Grand Central Station—not so miniature, at that. It was a
long way between pieces of furniture, and the furniture was huge.
It was a house full of strange-acting people. The chauffeur became aware of that by degrees, his first
encounter being with the young woman who was walking backward.
The young woman came down a hallway. She was on her tiptoes; also she was moving backward. Her
behavior seemed strange, almost eerie, for a moment; then the chauffeur realized she was retreating from
someone and did not wish to be seen or heard.
The chauffeur reached out rather brazenly and took her arm. The young woman—it would have been
natural for her to emit a frightened yelp, but she didn’t—turned her head and looked at him coldly. She
also moved one hand close to the large handbag she was carrying.
"What do you want?" she asked.
"I was afraid you might stumble," the chauffeur said mildly.
"Get out of this part of the house!" the young woman said. "You’re a servant. You don’t belong here."
She was a slender young woman with dark hair, charcoal-black eyes and a remarkably fine-textured skin
of olive tint. It was almost as if her skin was made of silk. Her clothing—neat blue-serge street suit,
high-heeled black Oxfords and a tricky little black hat—was obviously expensive. She was a completely
smart person, and very much an eyeful.
"Do you belong here?" the chauffeur asked.
"What?"
"Do you belong here?"
"You insulting dog!" said the young woman. "I’ll find John R. Smith and have you discharged."
The chauffeur grinned.
"I’ll find John R. Smith and save you the trouble," he said. "I don’t believe you belong in this house at all."
He walked away from the young woman with an air of determination. But he did not go far. He stopped
around the nearest corner, and looked back cautiously.
The well-dressed young woman was in flight. She literally ran out through the front door and fled down
the street.
THE chauffeur accosted the butler, asking, "You let that girl in?"
"Why, yes."
"What name did she give?"
"Annie Spain, I believe. Yes—Annie Spain."
"Ever see her before?"
"No," said the butler, "I haven’t."
"Then how come she got in?"
"The master," replied the butler stiffly, "seemed to be expecting her. He told me to show her in, which I
did." The butler lost his formal manner, and inquired, "What the hell business is it of yours? You don’t
belong in this part of the house. Go back to the garage."
The chauffeur said, "Keep your shirt on," and walked away from the butler. But he did not return to the
garage. Instead, he sauntered through the house. He carried his uniform cap in his hand, and seemed
greatly interested in everything.
Finally he found the electrician.
The electrician was a rather scrawny-looking fellow who had a complexion that would have blended well
with unbaked dough. He was standing on a chair in the west-wing library, tinkering with the mounted
moose head that was over the fireplace—that is, he was doing this up until he heard the chauffeur
coming. Then he gave a great jump and reached one of the air conditioning controls, with which he began
to fumble.
The big chauffeur walked up and stood beside him.
"Is the moose head air-conditioned, too?" he asked.
"I was just looking at it," the electrician said. "Big one, ain’t it? Good job of mounting, too."
Nothing was said for several moments, during which interval there was an air of stiffness in the room.
"Don’t you recognize me, Long Tom?" the chauffeur asked suddenly.
The electrician gave a start, then stared unbelievingly.
"Good grief—no!" he exploded. "Say, that disguise is all right."
"It fooled the butler, so it seems that it might get by."
"I didn’t know you."
The chauffeur pointed at the moose head. "What were you doing over there?"
"Rigging a microphone in the ear of the moose," Long Tom explained. "Makes a first-class spot for it.
The ear of this moose was acoustically designed by nature for the purpose of picking up sound. With that
microphone deep in the ear, and the wires run under the moose hair and through a hole in the
wall—there’s a closet nobody uses in the back, and I’m taking the lead-out through that—I should be
able to make a phonograph recording of everything that anybody says in this room."
"Nobody suspects you?"
"Why should they? I’m supposed to be checking over the air-conditioning installation."
"How many rooms have you wired for eavesdropping?"
"About half of them. The ones they use the most. This is the last one I intend to wire."
The chauffeur was silent a moment. He might have been thinking.
"Do you know Annie Spain?" he asked abruptly.
"Who’s she?" Long Tom shook his head. "No, I don’t know anybody by that name."
"A very pretty dark-haired, dark-eyed girl who wears a blue tailored suit so plain that it must have cost
two hundred dollars."
"I still don’t know her."
"I see. Have you seen John R. Smith yet?"
"From a distance only."
"How is he?"
"Scared green," said Long Tom.
"Annie Spain is apparently well acquainted with John R. Smith," the chauffeur said thoughtfully.
The two men parted.
JOHN R. SMITH was one of the industrial powers of the United States—more properly, of the North
and South Americas—and therefore frequently in trade magazines and confidential reports emanating
from the New York and Buenos Aires stock exchanges, although on the other hand neither his pictures
nor news about his personal doings were often seen in the daily newspapers, this last being true not so
much because he was a modest man, but rather for the reason that too much newspaper publicity does
very little for exceptionally rich men other than set them up as a target for moochers and skin-game
artists. John R. Smith was certainly not modest. No man could be as rich as he had become and be truly
modest. To get as much money as John R. Smith had, you needed to be convinced in your heart that you
were a greater organizer than Napoleon and gifted with unparalleled courage.
John R. Smith was more often called Radiator Smith. Almost no one, except the people who worked for
him, called him anything else. Persons in his employ were afraid to call him Radiator Smith.
But Radiator Smith he was. He was Radiator Smith in the John Smith Club to which he belonged. The
John Smith Club had as members only men whose names were John Smith, and the John Smiths were
designated with nicknames according to their professions—there was Insurance Smith, Bank Teller
Smith, Broker Smith, Sailboat Smith, and a lot of other Smiths in the John Smith Club. John R. Smith
was Radiator Smith because manufacturing radiators happened to be his principal business.
Radiators made in Radiator Smith’s plant were used the world over in automobiles, airplanes,
air-conditioning, and in whatever fashion radiators are employed.
Like many rich men, Radiator Smith had a no-good son. The son was named Maurice, and he and his
father were the sole occupants—if one didn’t count thirty-seven servants—of the huge mansion on upper
Fifth Avenue. The other Smiths of the Radiator Smith clan had all passed on to the other world.
Radiator Smith liked to sit in royal privacy in the south-wing library—this library was larger than either
the west-wing or the north-wing library, and more impressive—during his leisure at home. He made sure
that he had one hour of leisure each day. He took it as he took his exercise, without fail.
Radiator Smith was sitting in the south-wing library with a cigar when the big chauffeur walked into his
presence.
Radiator Smith jumped nervously. "What do you want?" he demanded.
"I just wanted to let you know we are on the job," the chauffeur said.
"Job?" Radiator Smith stared. "What job?"
"The one you called us in on."
"What?"
"You telephoned this morning. Surely you have not forgotten that soon."
"Say!" Radiator Smith sprang to his feet. "Who the devil are you?"
"Doc Savage," the chauffeur said.
Radiator Smith peered at the chauffeur. He rubbed his jaw, then scratched his head, giving an excellent
picture of a man completely baffled.
"I never heard of you," he said. "Doc Savage—no, never heard of you."
A trace of a peculiar expression came over Doc Savage’s features. "That’s queer," he said.
In the house—not in this library, nor anywhere near it, but still somewhere in the house—there was a
loud rap of a noise. Sharp. Somewhat like the sound of a shot, but not quite that either, because it was a
longer noise. It did not have enough volume to excite either of the two men in the library, or distract their
attention from each other.
The moneybags suddenly became irritated. He yelled, "What kind of a trick is this?"
"Don’t start shouting," Doc Savage said quietly.
"Shout? I’ll shout if I want to. Help! Police!" He ran for the door. "You’re an intruder! I’m going to have
you arrested!"
Just as Radiator Smith reached the library door, the door opened and the butler appeared. Radiator
Smith collared the butler.
"Jonas!" he shouted. "Get the police!" He waved a hand over his shoulder at Doc Savage, explained,
"We’ve got some kind of a crook here."
The butler, Jonas, made no move. He opened and shut his mouth, trying to speak. He was as pale as a
regulation ghost is supposed to be, and had been that way when he opened the library door.
"Master Maurice," the butler finally managed to gasp. "Your son, sir."
"What about Maurice?"
"He just died, sir. Under—er—most peculiar circumstances."
Chapter III. THE QUEER DEATH
RADIATOR SMITH had had a long career as a money chaser during which he had ruined quite a
number of men financially—those in close association with the radiator magnate had been known to
whisper that at least four suicides marked the wake of Radiator Smith’s activities in garnering one of the
world’s great fortunes—so the master of wealth should have been inured to shocks. But he didn’t act like
it now.
All of the muscles in his body seemed to jerk rigid and he made a coughing sound. He became pale
slowly, then the paleness turned to a blue-green kind of hue. His breathing resolved into an unpleasant
rattling noise, and he upset; he would have struck the floor quite heavily had Doc Savage not caught him.
Doc put the man in the handiest chair, began loosening his clothing at the tighter points.
"Get the medicine kit," Doc ordered.
"I’ll call a doctor," the butler gasped.
"Get the medicine kit!" Doc said. "I’m a doctor."
The rattled butler yelled again, "I’ll call a doctor!" and dashed out of the room.
The electrician—the man named Long Tom—dashed into the library, demanding, "Hey, what’s going on?
What ailed that butler?"
"He was going after a doctor," Doc explained.
"Doctor?" Long Tom stared. "Why, the damned fool! Don’t he know that you’re one of the world’s
摘要：

THEBOSSOFTERRORADocSavageAdventureByKennethRobesonThispagecopyright©2002BlackmaskOnline.http://www.blackmask.com?ChapterI.THELOONS?ChapterII.THEHOUSEOFWORRIEDFOLK?ChapterIII.THEQUEERDEATH?ChapterIV.THEFURNITUREPOLISHER?ChapterV.OXALATESMITHANDTHEFOOTPAD?ChapterVI.THETRAILINGOFANNIESPAIN?ChapterVII.A...

展开>> 收起<<
Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 087 - The Boss of Terror.pdf

共75页,预览15页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：75 页 大小：389.47KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-19

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 配电装置 动力学连接体 力的合成 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 75
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注