Doc Savage - The Pink Lady Part 11

That much happened, and the smoke enveloped them. A gun began banging. It was a submachine gun, judging from the noise it made, but it was latched in single-fire position so that the ammo drum would not be exhausted too quickly.

Doc dragged Ham to him, said, "Get behind my car-behind the engine."

They did that.

"I've got some tear gas," Ham said.

"Turn it loose on them."

Ham did that. Because of the smoke from the grenades, they could get only a vague idea of what was going on. There was plenty of movement, though. And noise. The gun was banging with clockwork regularity.

Then a truck motor roared, and then another. Two trucks. They left rapidly."They got away!" Ham yelled. "All of them! They took two trucks-and Monk."

The dapper lawyer dashed to the two smaller trucks which the raiders had left behind. They were empty.

Tracing the machines might prove something-probably only that they were stolen.

Doc said, "Come on!" The bronze man was in the pa.s.senger car. It began moving as Ham reached it; he hung on with one arm, got the door open and inside. "Better get in the back and lie down," Doc advised.

"Try to get in the center, so that the motor will stop any rifle bullets."

An instant later, there was a loud report, then another. Tires going out. The car rocked, and Doc fought the wheel. Once the machine was completely broadside in the road, and Ham's hair stood up. Finally it stopped.

Two of the tires were out. There was only one spare.

Behind them, another car began to careen madly on the pavement, and finally stopped.

Doc said, "They scooped big flat-headed building tacks out on the pavement behind them."

It was a simple trick, not new. But it had effectively shut off pursuit.

Without a word, the bronze man began to run, leaving the road and heading across a field. There was a house over there, a telephone line leading to it. He outdistanced Ham easily, although the dapper lawyer was putting out his best efforts, and when the bronze man entered the farmhouse, Ham was far behind.

Later, Doc finished giving an alarm to the State police. He turned from the telephone.

Ham said, "Everybody thought you were dead."

"They threw grenades into the river after I went in," Doc admitted. "The concussions were bad, but I was not close to the spot. I had thrust that periscope of mine into the bottom and let the end protrude above the surface to mislead them. And I still had the 'lung' diving device I had used in the river. With that, I was able to go a long way under water before coming to sh.o.r.e."

The bronze man's usually expressionless features showed irritation.

"They had left the old s.h.i.+pyard before I could get back there," he said.

"Why do you suppose they didn't wait until they got to the stop light to hold up the truck?"

"Some detail might have gone wrong-I do not think it is as easy to get a New Jersey State policeman's uniform as they antic.i.p.ated it was going to be." The bronze man's flake-gold eyes stirred uneasily. "Or they might have become suspicious."

Ham squirmed. "You don't think they could have found out who Long Tom is?"

"Long Tom is a good actor," Doc Savage commented, which was all he had to say on the point.

They walked back toward the highway. A radio patrol car of the State police had arrived. At least twenty cars were disabled with flat tires. One was in the ditch. The police were flagging down others.

Doc asked, "Where are Renny, Johnny and Chet Farmer?"

Ham told him. And before Ham finished, he realized Doc Savage was concerned."What's wrong?" Ham demanded.

Doc said, "I should have told Renny and Johnny that Chet Farmer was a crook."

"Crook?" Ham was dumbfounded.

"My guess," Doc Savage said, "is that he joined up with us merely to make use of what we learned."

Ham strained his hands through his hair. "I should have guessed something like that when you were so careful to keep Farmer from finding out that we were planting Long Tom with the gang as a pink man."

Ham broke into a run toward the cars. "We've got to, warn Renny and Johnny-if it's not too late!" he gasped.

Reaching the embroilment on the road, he found his pet chimp, Chemistry, on top of one of the trucks making noises at the crowd. Of Monk's pig, Habeas, there was no trace.

A State policeman approached Doc Savage. "We've checked on the freight that was in that truck," he said. "And we don't exactly understand why it was stolen."

"What was the truck's load?" Doc asked.

"Material for making machine tools," the officer replied.

The policeman went away.

Ham said, "That doesn't make sense."

"On the contrary," Doc Savage said dryly, "it makes a great deal of sense."

Chapter X. THE BROTHER.

NOTHING had made sense to Monk Mayfair for a long time, but finally some semblance of reality began returning to him, and with it a revival of sensitivity, particularly his sense of taste, for everything in his mouth was deep-brown with the added quality of apparently having been lately vacated by a cat, and not a very sanitary cat at that.

"Oooooo!" he said. "Pooey!"

He opened his eyes and they hurt, hurt terribly, and still hurt after he closed them. He got hold of his wits and carefully a.s.sembled them. Let's see. They had some stuff on a handkerchief. He'd had to breathe that. And it had been like getting hit a slow blow with a hammer.

Suddenly alarm seized him, for he had realized what the anaesthetic had been. It was a chemical that not only was potent, but dangerous. Still, getting scared now did no good. He was alive.

"Just barely alive," he amended.

And in very solid surroundings, wherever he was. His hands were lying by his side, and his fingers, when he closed them, touched concrete floor, fingernails gritting unpleasantly on the stuff.

A voice, not a pleasant one, said loudly, "Hey, guys, the beauty is wakin' up!"

Monk's eyes flew very wide, but he still saw nothing. His hands came up, felt and gave him the information that a blindfold banded his face. An object, a foot he decided, kicked at his exploring hands.Although he did not feel in the least like a fight, Monk grabbed the foot with both hands and adopted alligator tactics-alligators that seize their prey and whirl over and over-tried to twist the leg off its owner.

No great success attended the effort. More men were around him than he had supposed. One of them gave him an awful kick where it hurt the most, and another got a knee on the back of his neck. They held him.

"What do you want done with him, Cy?" a voice asked.

Cy said, "Tie him to a chair. No! h.e.l.l, he'd tear a chair to pieces. Use that narrow table over there."

After they had spread-eagled Monk on the hard wooden table top and bound him there with a quant.i.ty of rope, they wrenched the blindfold off his eyes. The wrenching was not done gently; some skin went with it.

It was a cellar. The bas.e.m.e.nt of a wooden house. Monk glanced about, noting various things-shelving that sagged under mason fruit jars of fruit and vegetables, a pork barrel with salt-incrusted rim, a cider press, kraut board-and decided that it was a farmhouse bas.e.m.e.nt.

Some of the men gathered about him had taken part in the raid on his river shack. Others he had never seen before.

The man called Cy had put on overalls, scuffed work shoes, faded blue s.h.i.+rt and straw hat. He could have been chewing on a straw, too, and he still would have looked phony, Monk decided. But there was nothing false about Cy's grim purpose.

Cy said, "You're a tough boy, handsome, but it won't get you any marbles in this game. Why don't you get smart?"

"Smart how?"

"Like a little bird, tra-la."

"Nuts," Monk said.

"You can sing out answers to some questions," Cy told him. "That's what I mean."

Monk snorted. "Sing out the questions."

In a conversational tone, Cy explained, "Here is the situation. A guy calling himself Chet Farmer-the police know other names for him-is going around trying to whack himself a piece of our cake. We don't like that. If we could get hold of him, we believe we could convince him he don't want no cake."

Monk said, "That will be all right with me. He is no great friend of mine."

"Where is he?"

"I don't know."

"We hate to disbelieve you," Cy said, "but it happens the guy we mean has been palling around with you."

"Don't blame me for that," Monk said. "And I don't know where he is."Cy was looking more unpleasant. "Another thing-this trouble Doc Savage has been giving us. It don't make us happy."

"It generally doesn't," Monk agreed.

"Where can we find Savage? You know what I mean-find him where we can persuade him to lay off."

Monk said nothing. But his lips moved slightly, insultingly.

Cy sighed. "You're a tough guy and we could whittle the arms and legs off you without you talking. But we got a plan."

Monk did not answer.

Cy kicked him. "We got a plan. You hear?"

Monk sighed.

"Bring on your dog, friend," he said, "and quit talking about it."

They gave him the anaesthetic again. He fought them, fought them furiously with a mad kind of frenzy born of fear of death, because he knew that in unskilled hands an anaesthetic such as they were using could easily kill. But he could not help himself, and he became lost in blackness.

As he pa.s.sed out, Cy was staring at him and saying, "We want Chet Farmer, and we want Doc Savage, and this is the way to get them."

The blackness crawled through Monk's mind softly with tremulous terror retreating before it, like a black ferret going into a hole after a rabbit. Eventually all was black.

There was, just once, a touch of something else. It was a jarring interruption, and to Monk's stupefied mind it was like an electric shock-it began slowly, like one of the penny shocking machines where you put in your coin and turn a handle-and climbed in force that lasted for two or three minutes.

AT last somebody was laughing. The mirth at first was only sound, and unrelated sound at that, a kind of silly cacophony. But it got real. It was a man laughing.

"Watch his face when he sees," the man paused to say.

Then he went on gobbling out mirth.

Monk sat up and moved, and there was a biting at his wrists that was steel. Handcuffs. His wrists were fastened together behind his back.

He had some difficulty with his eyes. The room seemed filled with a rose-colored light. Curious, he stared at the light bulbs and decided they were, for some reason or other, rose-colored.

They were around him, Cy and the others. The same gang who had made him unconscious. They were grinning at him, all looking pleased about something. Their behavior puzzled Monk-until he saw a man look slyly to the left, and followed the fellow's glance.

"What the-" Monk roared.His gorge rose. He heaved up, strained at the handcuff links until they gnashed together like angry teeth.

"Who done that!" Monk bellowed.

He meant his hog. Habeas Corpus was a pink hog. A blatant, garish pink that had no parallel for coloring that Monk had ever seen. The pig moved around, peered at Monk, and seemed distressed.

Cy snickered his mirth.

Monk said, "I'll kill you!" and the way he said it wiped the mirth off Cy's lean fish lips, chilled the cackling of his snicker in his throat.

Cy came over and punched Monk in the chest. "You better worry about yourself," he said.

Monk scowled. "What do you mean?"

Cy said, "Bring a mirror."