by Jerry eBooks
Those icy snowflakes again on the back of his neck. A man was erect in the seat beside the wheel. He was sitting motionless. Sudden figured he was too close to draw back now. One hand whipped his police gun from inside his coat and he pointed it at the same instant he yanked the door open.
It was only a slight jar, but the man in the seat had toppled forward, his head banging the instrument board. Then he rolled sideways and slid out head first at Sudden’s feet as the reporter sprang back.
Sudden’s breath caught and choked him. Every inch of his flesh quivered. Never before had the unexpected, even the horrible, gripped him as this did.
For the body at his feet was that of District Attorney Yarrow, with the single gold tooth gleaming.
What should he do? Hell, but this would be one proper mess to square with the police. Stealing a story was one thing, but apparent abduction of a murdered man was considerably farther than even Sudden had ever gone.
He started to walk around the car. A foul, sweating hand went over his mouth. It was almost as if the dead man had come to life behind him. He tried to squirm loose, but the hand tightened inexorably. A sinuous arm was wound around his throat. All at once there was a sweetish smell and then there was nothing at all.
YARROW’S shrunken, ghastly face leered through Sudden’s bad dream. It was there as he awoke and when he was awake it still leered at him with that dead, gold-toothed mouth.
For a few seconds he imagined he must still be beside his car. But sunlight slanted through a high narrow window, making a pattern on the floor that showed the panes were barred. He was in an empty room, except for odds and ends of old furniture. Yarrow’s body was in the corner he was facing. He shuddered and turned his head.
Sudden’s head ached and he was nauseated, but he got shakily to his feet. His police automatic was gone. So were notes and some letters from his pockets. He tried to keep his eyes from turning toward Yarrow’s corpse.
He tried the one door, knowing it would be useless. But as if his movement had been a signal, he heard shuffling steps outside. He drew back quickly, his impulse to poise at one side and hurl himself upon any person who might enter.
Something pricked his leg. Then his brain clicked. He was here because he had in some manner interfered with the plotter of death who had got Yarrow and now was seeking to extort a million from Marsden. Or he must have something the killers wanted.
That was it. That silver syringe under his hose supporter. They had overlooked it when he had been knocked out. He believed, from Ralston’s analysis, the syringe contained the antidote for which Marsden was to be forced to pay.
The steps paused before the door. Sudden bent swiftly, took the syringe from its hiding place and slipped it into a crack between the loose boards of the attic wall. He rolled to the floor and was stretched out when the door opened. He kept his eyes closed for an instant.
Bodies reeking with sweaty odor were close when hands pulled him up. He opened his eyes slowly, as if still dazed, and he was looking into the deeply meditative eyes of Dr. Von Kruppen.
“I might have known it would be you,” said Dr. Von Kruppen. “You’re a very smart young man indeed. I could see that at Marsden’s. Very smart. You didn’t betray what you knew to the police, and at that time I didn’t know that my boys were following you.”
Sudden twisted his arms, but black hands were stiff as manacles on his wrists. Dr. Von Kruppen?
“So it’s you,” he said. “And I was going to look you up to give you a chance at the—”
He bit his tongue sharply. The doctor’s deep eyes sparkled and he smiled evilly through his blond beard.
“Yes, a chance at—well, go on.”
The big Negroes holding him stood still as statues. The doctor rasped out a command in a guttural, native language.
Sudden was twisted to the floor. Piece by piece his clothing was stripped from him. He was left in his underwear and socks. The doctor went through his shoes. When he cast them aside he glared at Sudden.
“Smarter than I thought,” he said. “Now, you have proved you are bright. Where’s that syringe you took from the dead man?”
Sudden saw the idea.
“Oh, that? Why, a chemist friend of mine has the syringe. He dumped it for analysis. He’s going to let me know about it tomorrow.”
“You told him where you got it?” said Dr. Von Kruppen quickly.
“No, but he’s read the Star-News by this time and he knows.”
Dr. Von Kruppen laughed harshly, with a sinister, metallic note.
“It doesn’t matter, not to you. We’ll find out about that, but you won’t care much. They tell me you’re a great reporter. So, I’m giving you the greatest story you ever had, only you won’t ever see it printed.
“If my boys hadn’t been smart, too, five years of hard work would have gone for nothing. By this time you’ve guessed plenty, so I’ll give you the rest of it.
“Yes, I gave Yarrow that pleasant, little prescription. Some idea, using him for a horrible example to Marsden and a couple of others that were on the list. Besides, Yarrow had been too damned inquisitive. He had been digging up some stuff and I had to have it. He had found out that I came over to the States from London after my last trip through Africa and something had made him suspicious.
“Two birds with one stone, getting him. Then, just when he seemed all ready to pass out, the boys get careless and he walks out on us. He already had that card in his pocket, because we expected he was about ready to be packed out. Somehow he got into the laboratory and found that syringe and the serum, but he was too late.
“But he was tough, I tell you. He got all the way to his own place, but he couldn’t quite make it, and he didn’t have strength enough to use the antidote after he got it. My boys were trailing him, and they tell me they saw two men find him at different times. We intended to have his body found, but not with the antidote in his hand.
“They got the other man, but he didn’t have that syringe, so they went after you. They were waiting for instructions when you went back from Marsden’s. Well, they got their orders and here you are.”
SUDDEN’S mouth was so dry his tongue stuck, but he said, “You can’t get away with it. You must be mad. They’ll nail you on this Marsden thing before you get started. The police are smarter than you think.”
“Yes? You think so? I have been Marsden’s personal physician for nearly three years. I have a consultation this afternoon with three eminent gentlemen who will help me decide what strange illness has attacked him. We will reach no conclusion. Not yet.
“A great story, young man. One for a great reporter, but it will take a greater reporter than you to write it, as you will see.”
Again the doctor spoke a guttural command. Sudden was helpless. He set his teeth as the needle bit into his arm. He was firmly clamped by the Negroes. Dr. Von Kruppen even sponged the spot scrupulously with an antiseptic wad of cotton before he thrust the deadly instrument into the blood vein.
“God!” whispered Sudden. “You can’t do that!”
The doctor did not reply. He stepped back, smiling crookedly. Sudden would have hurled himself upon him, but he was still held powerless. Dr. Von Kruppen put away the death syringe carefully. He was a brighteyed madman now, who wanted to talk, to boast.
“It will creep over you quickly,” he said. “You’ll feel no pain. You will be sick, but that will pass. If you haven’t guessed, it’s the sleeping sickness of Africa, the Nagana, they call it. My boys come from there. They’re good boys. They owe me their lives, for I saved them with the animal serum I discovered.
“In a few minutes now you will feel it, because there are millions of the germs in that shot. Soon you will be unable to help yourself. You will live for hours, perhaps days, but you will be as dead all the time.
“In the meantime, my smart young man, we shall put Yarrow’s body where the police will find it. We’ll call that a tribute to a good reporter who beat the town with his story. But
you won’t be reading about it. I gave five years of careful building up for that million I’m going to have. At the proper time, with the aid of some of my worthy colleagues, I shall be forced to advise Marsden that his only hope is to pay for that antidote.
“And then, there’ll be a little joker. What he’ll get won’t be worth any more than so many drops of water. Can this physician help it if he was done to death by this strange disease?”
The doctor laughed mirthlessly. Sudden tried to conquer an overpowering nausea. His body went limp and a strange numbness started creeping along his arms, over his shoulders, along the cords of his neck to his brain.
The doctor seemed magnified, yet fading away, a laughing, blond monster.
SUDDEN was alone in the room. He turned his head with an effort. A sickening lassitude gripped his muscles. When he tried to arise, his arms and legs had no sense of direction. A dull pain throbbed across his forehead. It hurt more intensely when he tried to remember what it was he must do.
The syringe. Over there in the cracks of the boards. It must be night now, for a small light bulb burned at the end of the room. The body of Yarrow had been removed. They had left Sudden his wrist-watch and it had stopped.
God! How many hours had he waited, slept? Or had it been days? Yarrow had rallied at the last, and Von Kruppen had said he couldn’t use the antidote when he had got it. Time ceased. Only his will to move kept him awake, moving inch by inch toward that wall crack.
The board was loose. His fumbling, nerveless hand pulled it away. More hours across his brain as he hunted, and despaired and hunted again.
The touch of the silver tube was a final spur to ebbing will power. He half rolled, driving the needle deep in his leg. He made the weight of his knee shove the plunger home. He sank back and he knew the needle had snapped off in his flesh, but that didn’t matter.
Whether he slept again, he could not tell, but when he opened his eyes, his head was clearer. Fearfully he experimented and his right hand obeyed his will. Strength was flowing through his veins.
When he had dozed and aroused himself again, steps were sounding outside the door. Sudden came to his feet quickly. Soreness ran along every quivering muscle, but he was no longer bound by lethargy.
The door opened and a tall Negro stepped inside. He came in with the careless assurance of one who knows there is nothing to fear. Sudden’s right toe flicked out and caught the black above the ankle.
The Negro grunted and half somersaulted backward. Sudden was on him, a thumb under his armpit, fingers exploring for that nerve end in the Negro’s neck. It found it and the big body quivered and stiffened. It was Sudden’s own pistol his other hand encountered, stuck native fashion into the Negro’s belt. He had no compunction as he brought the butt crashing down on the Negro’s skull.
He was out through the door. Dr. Von Kruppen’s smooth head and his blond beard poked up over the level of the floor as he came up the stairs. Sudden flung himself forward and he was close when he fired twice. The blond beard and the bald skull vanished and there was a thumping on the stairs.
Three Negroes were starting up. One had a knife and he threw it Sudden felt the blade slice his arm as he dodged. The Negroes were close together. Sudden dropped to the top step, aimed carefully and the automatic jerked in his hand until the magazine was empty.
He picked up the fallen knife and went down. At the end of a long hall he found a locked door. In the kitchen he dug up a heavy iron and he smashed through a panel.
On the long table were many bottles, but on a small shelf at the side were two glass jars. The labels were in German but Sudden remembered enough to piece out part of the meaning. Enough. One was the antidote serum.
His knees threatened to collapse as he went into the hallway and found the telephone. But he propped himself against the wall and called the Star-News. Finally he got Morrison.
“Give me—rewrite—quick—he said, surprised at the way his words halted. “The story’s cleaned up. We’ll save Marsden.”
Morrison started burning the wire.
“Rewrite first—” Sudden said slowly. “It’s a whale of a yarn—an’ it’s all sewed up—an’ when you’re on the street, you’d better call the police an’—say—you put my byline on it—y’hear!”
THE KILLER TYPE
William Decatur
He was the kind of man who killed women. But somewhere there’s always another man who can catch killers, no matter how clever
THE woman sat, fiddling and fidgeting with her fingernails, in a nervous pretence of polishing them. A fear that she could not analyze, but which every atom of her feminine instinct assured her was well based and sinister, increased as she looked at the second hand of the electric clock on the mantel, skidding round and round the dial, swift and inexorable as grains of sand falling through the hourglass of Life; marking the moments she had left to live.
It was late, but she did not dare to go to bed, although she had a new lock on the outer door of the apartment-flat; the whole second floor of a house on the west side of Central Park. The neighborhood was not aristocratic but it was respectable, although, such is the layer-cake character of Manhattan, it was close to localities that were shady.
The apartment was furnished with taste, well-kept. There was a faint odor of oil-of-cedar that proclaimed housewifery. The woman was a demiblonde, under thirty, with a definite allure in face and figure. She was dressed in lounging pajamas beneath a negligee.
An hour ago there had been a soft footfall outside, the grate of a key that would no longer fit the lock.
The bonds between her and the man she loved; or had thought she loved; were broken; not yet entirely severed; but she meant them to be.
She was independent of him, and it seemed to her strange that the quality of his devotion had subtly changed from the moment that she had told him of her small fortune. His ardor had seemed extravagant, his phrases stilted; there had been times when she even thought him a trifle mad.
IT WAS a relief when the telephone rang, though the shrill sound of the bell made her leap in her chair, her heart beating wildly as she picked up the instrument.
“Lucille, it’s Mort. Sure, Listen, honey, you didn’t have to change your lock. It made me feel terrible to think you’d shut me out that way. I got your letter. You’re all wrong. It’s you who’ve changed; but if that’s the way you really feel about it, I wouldn’t try to hold you. Only just to say good-by. Not in writing, not after all we’ve been to each other . . .”
She felt herself slipping, and called herself a fool, as she listened to the hypnosis of his voice.
“. . . I promise you, Lucille, after tonight, you’ll never see me again. I swear it.”
She hung up, sat down, weak. Woman-like, she went into her bedroom and made herself look her best, for the man she no longer loved—or did she? She turned on the radio.
She set back the catch on her lock. He must have been close by, for he came swiftly; knocking, then entering.
The house was only three floors high—with the janitor living in the basement. Lucille barely knew the others who lived there, would not have recognized them on the street, nor they her. Such is New York.
He came in, immaculate, light-coated and mufflered for the early spring night, drawing off his gloves. She would not let him take her in his arms and he sat in his familiar lounging chair, with a shrug of his shoulders.
“Have it your own way, Lucille. What’s wrong with you?”
“It’s you, Mort. I’m afraid of you, lately.”
“Afraid of me?” He laughed, as if the idea furnished him with enjoyment. “Afraid?”
She nodded. The look came into his eyes that made her wonder if he was entirely sane. Terror gripped her. Blue eyes that now glowed like the flame of burning alcohol. They were fixed on her, they held her gaze.
“You mean you’re tired of me,” he said. “All right.” He looked at her from the low chair until she could see the whites of his eyes clear benea
th the upturned orbs.
She watched him, fascinated as a rabbit before a snake, while he reached for his gloves, from the side table; putting them on, as he always did; first the fingers, then the thumb, tucked in. He gripped the wooden arms of the chair and seemed to haul himself out of it. He was strong, terribly strong. He had often made her feel his muscles, hard as rubber cored with steel.
“Then it’s good-by. I see you mean it. Somebody else?”
“No.”
He laughed again. “I didn’t really think that. There never will be anybody else, Lucille?”
She shook her head, not meaning anything, only waiting to see him go.
Praying to see him go. The sense of danger, of horrible danger, gave her a slight vertigo. She fought off the fainting spell.
“It’s all over,” he said. “All over. You don’t mind helping me on with my coat, for the last time, Lucille?” Some inner voice whispered “no.” But she could not refuse. She took the coat by its shoulders, held it for him. He stood facing her, looking at her with a smile that froze her.
The smile of a madman—a fiend! Those flaming eyes . . .!
Strength went out of her arms. They dropped, still gripping the garment—and his hands clamped about her slender throat.
“Mort! . . . Mort! . . .” she gurgled.
Her eyes protruded, staring, losing luster. Her tongue swelled from between her scarlet lips and even, pearly teeth. Her face turned bluish, the rouge upon it a horrible travesty.
When he was quite sure she was gone, he let her down to the rug she had crumpled in her tap-dance of death.
He looked at the wall safe he had insisted she should install. He had suggested the combination, set it for her. Her money was there, in cash, with some jewelry. She had been waiting for him to tell her how to invest it in the jittery market.
For a moment, his face lost its satisfied expression as he wondered if she had banked it. It cleared again as he spun the disc about the dial. The cash was there. He did not touch the trinkets. He had bought two or three of them, bait for a killing.
