Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 28, No. 3, November 12, 1927
- Автор: Alexander R. W., Ames John
- Год: 1927
- Язык: английский
- Год: The Red Star News Company
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 28, No. 3, November 12, 1927». Краткое содержание книги:
He counted in his soft voice — “One — two — three!”
At the last word, I bolted — not into the side door, but for the alley to the right.
A bullet, fired from an automatic with a perfect silencer, hit the cement just ahead of me, pinged off and crashed through a window somewhere. I abandoned all hope of the alley and swerved into the side door of Luigi’s and there Hilliard was waiting for me.
Without a word, almost without looking at me, and indicating his next move only by closing an iron hand on one of my wrists, he led me swiftly up a flight of stairs, where Cottrell, as silent as Hilliard, and as prompt, took me up another flight, Hilliard going swiftly down the stairs up which we had come.
It was Branley who met me at the top of the second flight of those ill-kept and forbidding stairs, and he dragged me up still another flight and plunged me into that small, breathless, lightless back room from which, only three months before, Ruggles and I had carried the senseless body of Pendler, the drug-vendor.
What their intention was in bringing me here, only they knew — it had all been worked out by Mueller, undoubtedly, and I realized the futility of my trying to plumb the dark depths of Mueller’s mind.
Back in the comfortable little apartment which had come to mean so much to me, I had heard Mueller assure Markley that when they had brought me to this tomblike room at Luigi’s, I could safely and surely be counted on to do a certain thing — a thing, moreover, absolutely essential to the success of their plot to bring about the death, to-night, of Stannistreet.
There was something bewildering in realizing that, without my being told or in any way consulting me, these men confidently looked to me to perform, on scheduled time and with complete obedience to them, an act by which they, my enemies, would profit.
I tried to imagine what this anticipated act of mine was to be; in their plans for me and for themselves, it unquestionably played a vital part, but the more I groped for it, the less able I was to settle on anything which, in my mind, could be the thing they had planned for me to do.
But, though I could not fathom their plans for me, I knew that they had overplayed their hands: I did indeed know this old rookery — I knew it far better than they thought I did.
It was not for nothing that Ruggles and I had hunted Pendler and others as bad and even worse through this ancient ruin of a building.
Markley and Mueller would be waiting in the taxi across the street, and Cottrell, Hilliard, and Branley unquestionably were stationed at the front and the two side doors; but there was still another exit and I needed no flash light to find it for me.
All in a flash, I had remembered this. Ruggles himself had showed it to me. Instantly, I abandoned all effort at imagining what my recent captors had planned for me to do.
Standing motionless by the wall against which Branley had thrust me, I closed my eyes and visualized the approach to the tunnel by which I knew I should presently escape.
I had ascended three flights of stairs, the first under the espionage of Hilliard, the second with Cottrell, and the third with Branley; I was now on the fourth floor. To reach the exit I had so luckily remembered, I had, I knew, to descend to the street floor; but I would reach it by the back stairs and not by those up which I had come.
It was a matter of only an instant for me to feel in my back hip pocket for my small automatic; there is was, and my fingers told me that it was loaded and ready if I needed it.
Slipping the gun into my right side coat pocket, then taking off my shoes and tying the laces together, I fastened my belt over the connecting strings and thus made the shoes fast at the same time having both my hands free.
There was no light in this room I knew; and it was as dark as if its four walls, floor, and ceiling had been sheathed with tar paper. I felt along until I touched the door, then stood motionless again.
The moment of danger would come when I opened that door and stepped into the hall which, I remembered, was lighted none too well for general purposes and yet much too well for mine, by low-turned and weakly flickering gas jets.
I felt reasonably sure that Markley and his gang would be waiting outside; but they might have stationed some one outside my door, for all that.
Whatever the risk was, however, ft had to be taken, and I took it quickly in a series of bounds which almost instantly carried me past the head of the stairs and into the almost pitch-black corridor in the first angle of which I crouched, panting but overcome with relief.
Chapter VI
Number One-Forty-Four
In my first dash through the doorway of the room I had just left, it had seemed to me that I saw a huge, black shape glide into a room a little way down the hall; but there had been no effort at pursuit, and after a moment I could persuade myself that it had been my imagination only and not an actual witness of my swift escape.
Old though the house was, and neglected though it had been for who knew how many years, the floor was solid still and no board creaked under my feet as I hurried along, found myself almost immediately at the head of the back stairs, and began instantly their descent.
Their first turn brought me close to a window; a close, sultry air flowed heavily in on a sullen, heavy bellow of thunder; at the same time, something made me turn swiftly and look up the stairs I had just darted down. What I had expected to see, I could not have told; but, stare as I could, I could see nothing. Then, just as I was turning, grateful for having caught no pursuer in the act of following me the whole world seemed to turn a sickly, livid gray and simultaneously to reel under a volcanic vibration of thunder. In an atom of time, that dazing flash of lightning had passed, but I knew I had seen, leaning over the stair’s rail above me, a huge, hairy face, not speaking, not moving — but seeing me, I could not deny now, and seeming to know where I was going, even to what my desperate errand was.
I had used caution in descending the stairs until now; but now I threw caution to the winds — speed was my only hope and I knew it — escape, before this watcher could warn Markley and his gang where I was.
The burly giant who had peered down at me could not overtake me; my danger was that he might dart to one of the front windows and hail Markley and Mueller from there; if he did, they would have only to rush to the exit for which I was making at the back, and I should be trapped like a fly in a bottle.
My only hope was to reach that exit and get out before they could reach it.
Then I became aware of a new danger: instead of warning Markley and Mueller at the front, my pursuer was descending the stairs after me.
This I knew from the heavy steps whose sound, between the recurrent crashes of thunder, he now made no attempt to hide. On down he came, two steps, three at a time, the banister creaking and seeming about to give way under his heavy hand as he hung to it while sluing round its successive turns.
With my thoughts concentrated on the danger drawing every moment nearer behind me, I had forgotten the dangers lurking before my face: I reached the cellar door only to find standing before it a braced, apelike figure of a man who warned me back with a leveled gun.
If I had wanted to stop, I could not have done it — the door was exactly at the stair’s foot and before the man could pull the trigger of his gun or spring aside I was on top of him, by the sheer momentum of my rush hurling him on his back and knocking him unconscious.
In an instant I had the cellar door open, had sprung through the doorway, closed and bolted it behind me, then was down the brilliantly lighted stairs into the cellar, across it, and had dived like a frog into the tunnel-like exit.
There was wet earth under my stockinged feet now, and in the silence I heard the crash of the cellar door as my gigantic pursuer broke it in; then I was out in an open court, was across this and out between two tenements and on the sidewalk.