Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 118, No. 2, March 19, 1938
- Автор: Clark Dale, 12627 Convict
- Год: 1938
- Язык: английский
- Год: The Red Star News Company
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 118, No. 2, March 19, 1938». Краткое содержание книги:
Now, why should anyone hijack stuff like this? The oral vaccine was ideal for flood conditions — you didn’t need complicated equipment, your patients didn’t suffer the severe reactions. But still, it could be used only by a physician. No doctor or hospital would buy anything like that except through legitimate supply channels. What in the devil could the hijackers do with it? What was the purpose.
However, that problem wasn’t for Danny’s aching head to solve. Let the cops figure out the whys and wherefores.
He wriggled feet first out of the boxcar. The handcar was less than a hundred yards away. It slowed to a stop. The crew of one got off, stared at Dann Lane, walked slowly toward him.
Danny recognized the Special’s brakeman. A strapping big fellow, he carried a handful of metal seals and pasteboard cards. The recognition was one-sided, at first. Nothing in Danny’s overalled appearance suggested the neat interne of the preceding night.
“Hey, you!” the brakie said belligerently. “Can’t you damned hoboes stay out of — great guns!” He dropped the seals, came closer, stared. “Say! Ain’t you the guy they drowned last night?”
Danny Lane grinned feebly. “I’m the guy they almost drowned, but never mind about me. How fast could you get a message to Dr. Randall in Riverside?”
The brakeman’s broad face remained a map of astonishment. “Well, I’ll be a so-and-some-more!” he ejaculated, ignoring the interne’s question. “Is the other feller alive, too?”
“What other feller?”
“That foreign one,” the brakie said. “Torres. They don’t know if he was killed like you — like you’re supposed to be — or if he run off with the robbers. It was an inside job. The train stopped because somebody pulled the emergency cord, see? Huh. Where’d you get them overalls?”
“Farmhouse,” Danny replied laconically. “How about getting a message into the city?”
The man considered. “First I got to seal these cars and tag ’em. There’s a switch engine coming up from Merionville to clear this siding for the milk trains to come in.” He kept staring at the overalls. “What farmhouse, doc?”
“The closest one.”
The brakie said, “Oh. You mean Joe Barker’s place?” His tone held a nagging curiosity. It occurred to Danny Lane that the man might be suspicious of his sudden reappearance — especially if the robbery had been an inside job. It seemed so, for the brakeman continued warily: “Barker couldn’t help you any — getting your message into town?”
Danny spoke earnestly. “Listen. Barker’s dead — murdered, I think. Anyway there’s a dead man in the house up there.” He went on, put that part of the story in as few words as he could. “The hijackers killed him, I suppose. They used his horses and baling outfit. The stuff’s hidden inside the bales in this boxcar here. That’s the message we’ve got to get to Randall.”
He said this excitedly and the brakeman got excited, too. He exclaimed, “Sure! They musta figured nobody’d look inside them bales. This here hay was supposed to be loaded before the stickup—” He broke off, then: “You bet, doc. You leave it to me. I know this country here, see? Why, I helped shunt these empties onto the siding. That’s why they put me on the Special — on account of knowing the quarry spur and her switches. I’ll get that message through. The quickest way is for me to go down the spur. There’s a phone at the crossroads store, two miles down. You stay here and watch, huh?”
Danny nodded. “And... there’s a personal message. Tell Randall to let Miss Orr know I’m all right.”
“Miss Orr, huh? What address?”
“She’s one of the nurses. Randall will know.”
“Maybe you better write the name out, doc.” The brakie fumbled in his pocket, found a stub of indelible pencil. Danny picked up the pasteboard cards the man had dropped in his excitement at seeing a supposed dead man come to life, and wrote the name. He handed the card over.
“Okay, doc. I got it.”
The brakeman jumped aboard the handcar and started down the track.
“Hey!” Danny called. “You forgot—” But the man did not hear.
Danny bent over to pick up the rest of the seals and cards and stuff them into his pocket when a word caught his eye. A very familiar word to Danny Lane.
He grunted, stared hard at the card for this hay was consigned to the “Randall Farms” — the farm where Dr. Randall quartered his racing horses.
Danny Lane gasped, “Holy—” and sat down on a rock. His mind was more of a confused jumble than it had been a moment before but one aspect of the puzzle leaped startlingly clear. If it had not been for his almost miraculous discovery, this boxcar’s contraband cargo would have wound up in Dr. Randall’s stock barns. How did this tie up with Torres’ disappearance?
Danny shook his head slowly. Probit was all coincidence — just as much a matter of accident as the fact that he, Randall’s interne, had gotten off the train last night.
He stood up, thrust the cards into his overall pocket, turned to look after the handcar. It had already vanished around a curve below the bridge.
He leaned against the boxcar, stared thoughtfully up the barren track toward Riverside. Gradually his stare narrowed. There was something wrong about this scene. Only the rails, the weeds growing up to the trackside, and the gray waste of water beyond. But there was something wrong! Something missing!
Yet for the life of him, Danny couldn’t think what. Whatever it was, eluded his pain-numbed wits. He struggled to remember — and failed. Like having a name almost at the tip of your tongue, but only almost. Perhaps if he didn’t think about it for a moment, the correct answer would come—
Danny jerked around, warned too late by the sound of a footstep. The rising sun silhouetted a head and shoulders leaning around the end of the boxcar, cast a reddish glimmer along the rifle barrel aimed at the interne’s chest.
“Come along quiet,” the silhouette said. “We got you covered from both ways.”
True enough, they had both ends of the siding covered. Another man came up behind Danny, snouted a gun against his back, and said: “Walk a rail, kid. We ain’t leaving any footprints, see?”
They all walked the rails, Danny ahead of the others. Sometimes, his head swimming dizzily, the interne would stumble and be rewarded with a curse.
They headed him away from the quarry, down the track and across the cattleguard at the road, until they came to a cindered footpath leading back under the bridge.
“Down here, kid.”
The bridge stood on tall, creosote-treated timbers. Flood water had backed in, was within eight feet of the sleepers overhead. One of the men went ahead of Danny, up to the wall of planks at the lower end of the bridge. It was a retaining wall, built to keep the roadbed from landsliding into the creek bottom there. The man lifted two of the planks aside, said: “You crawl in.”
The two planks had concealed a length of concrete ditch tile. The tile was barely large enough for a man to crawl through. Danny could see a glow of white light at the other end.
The man with the rifle prodded Danny. “Now crawl!”
The interne crept into the tile.
He emerged into a cave hollowed under the railroad. It was shored up with boards, lighted by an electric lantern hung on a twisted copper tube. The tube was part of an old still. Clearly, the cave had been a bootlegger hideout during Prohibition.
There were already two men in the dugout. One of these was a pug-nosed fellow, slouch-hatted, with an air of authority about him. Much of the authority derived from the revolver in his fist.
Danny blinked. He’d never seen a gun like it before. An H&R .38, with three inches of knife steel protruding from the barrel end — an ugly little bayonet.