“I’m not going to stay here and burn to death!” cried a reporter, bolting for the door.
“Wait a minute!” yelled McCord.
But with wild shouts of terror, the whole group was stampeding for the door. They charged past McCord before he could prevent them, and rushed outside in mad haste to escape the blazing inferno which the hangar was rapidly becoming.
Blair James had stopped to clutch McCord’s arm. He yelled over the soft roar of the flames.
“You’ll have to get out of here too, McCord! Nothing can save the hangar now!”
“We’ve got to get the bodies of Lucky and Stangland out!” McCord told him.
He reached down for the still form of Stangland, while Blair James seized the body of his cousin.
As they dragged the two bodies toward the door, the fires were roaring terrifyingly, all along one side of the hangar, enveloping the airplanes there in sheets of bursting flame.
They got outside with the bodies. The floodlights on the roof had gone out, and the darkness was relieved only by the flickering glow from within the burning hangar.
Davidson ran up to McCord. He said: “I was getting a flashlight from the car when I saw the fire. Where’s the group you were holding inside?”
“They stampeded out and now they’ve all escaped,” McCord told him. “You and Blair get the officers together and try to round them up. Find McLiney and Jandron!”
Davidson nodded in understanding and raced along the side of the burning hangars, shouting for the policemen who had been posted around it.
Automatic alarm bells were now ringing wildly inside the squat, great building, and the roaring flames seemed spreading swiftly to that side of the building, that held the administrative offices and machine shops.
Blair James remained behind Davidson a moment to cry a question to the detective-captain, who had whipped a handkerchief from his pocket and was rapidly tying it around his mouth and nose.
“McCord, what are you going to do?”
“I’m going back into that building, to Stangland’s office,” McCord told him.
“Stangland said that a letter Lucky wrote him gave a direct clue to the killer. That letter must be in his office file. The killer fired the hangar to destroy that letter, and I’m going to get it before—”
Blair held him back.
“McCord, for God’s sake don’t try it! That building is a death trap now!”
“You go and help Davidson find McLiney and Jandron,” McCord told him, pushing him after the police lieutenant. “I’ll find that letter and be out in a couple of minutes.”
With the words, McCord ran along the front of the burning hangar and around the corner to a side of the building not yet burning so fiercely.
He tore open a door and plunged into a dark hall, from whose ceiling smoke was curling ominously. He ran down it, bumping around a turn and into another corridor at whose end bursting flames were rapidly advancing with a steady, crackling roar.
McCord looked tensely ahead. There were a few doors down at the burning end of the hallway and he darted toward them. The heat of the flames just ahead scorched his hands and masked face, and the heavy smoke made him cough and choke.
Through tear-dimmed eyes he saw that one of the doors had on its glass panel the legend:
AIRPORT SUPERINTENDENT
He darted into a little office whose one wall was burning, filling the room with quivering light. The shifting glow showed beside a desk a letter file of green steel. McCord tore open the file, rapidly rummaged the mass of papers in its drawers, examining them with smarting, blinking eyes by the light of the flames.
His desperate search failed to discover the letter he sought. Heedless of the creeping fires, he continued to ransack the contents of the file. Choking from the stifling smoke, he suddenly uttered a hoarse, exultant exclamation as he found a carelessly scrawled letter with the signature, “Lucky,” and a date of a few weeks back.
A swift glance through it told McCord that it was the letter he sought.
Stuffing the letter into his pocket, he darted through the now burning door frame and raced down the corridor away from the advancing fires.
McCord rounded the turn in the hall and was running down the dark section of the corridors when out of the blackness at the side of the hall a foot suddenly projected to trip him.
McCord sprawled headlong, and pinwheels of light spun in his brain as he struck the floor. Out of the darkness leaped the shadowy form of a man who hammered McCord with swift, deadly blows as he sought to rise.
McCord, already half-dazed by his fall, felt his attacker’s savage blows swiftly beating him into unconsciousness.
His numbed brain apprehended what had happened. The murderer of Lucky James and Stangland, seeing the detective-captain enter the burning building in search of the damning letter, had also entered the flaming hangar to see that McCord and the letter both perished in the flames.
McCord made a supreme effort of will and body to save himself from the horrible fate that awaited him if he allowed himself to be beaten into unconsciousness. He reached out desperately, plucked at his attacker’s ankles, jerked them hard. The assailant fell to the floor.
In the moment of respite this allowed him, McCord dug frantically in his pockets for his gun. He got it out, thrust it forward and squeezed the trigger.
The gun only clicked. Too late McCord remembered that he had fired all its shots in his effort to save Bushell from the mob.
He dropped it, clawed in another pocket for the stubby, cloth-wrapped automatic with which Lucky James had been shot, and which the detective-captain had been carrying ever since.
He got it out, but before he could use it, the killer had grasped his wrist and was trying to wrench the gun out of his hand. They struggled there in the dark corridor, the noises of their combat drowned by the roar of flames now advancing around the turn of the hall.
McCord swung his left fist hard. He felt a crunching shock as it struck the other’s face. The man uttered a cry of pain, recoiling a little, and McCord seized the opportunity to wrench his gun-hand free.
He fired instantly, the crimson streak of the shot blazing across the corridor, but the murderer had thrown himself aside, and now his feet were pounding down the corridor as he ran down it toward the outside.
McCord, still on his knees, fired down the hall again as he heard the outside door slam. Then he was on his feet, plunging down the corridor after the fleeing criminal.
But before he had made two strides, there was a cracking crash ahead and a mass of burning wood broke down through the corridor ceiling ahead of him, blocking his way with a barrier of flame!
McCord spun around. The way behind him, too, was still blocked by the fires that were swiftly creeping around the corner of the hall toward him.
He was caught in a horrible trap whose jaws of flame were rapidly closing upon him. He glanced swiftly about, his craggy face and cool eyes showing no sign of fear, but tensely weighing every possible chance of escape.
CHAPTER IV
Struggle in the Sky
A quivering glow of the advancing fires, now illuminating the corridor brightly, showed McCord a door a few feet from him. He ran to it and ripped it open.
A mass of flames filled the office or room inside, almost as terrifying as the fires at the ends of the hall.
But McCord’s smoke-dimmed eyes glimpsed a window on the other side of the flame-filled room.
McCord knew that to dash across that burning room was to take tremendous risks. Yet to stay in the corridor meant meeting a horrible death without even an attempt at escape.
Rapidly he stripped off his coat and wound it around his head and face. With one swift glance he gauged accurately the position of the window, then pulled the coat across his eyes and threw himself blindly like a human projectile across the flaming room.
He felt tongues of fire scorch his arms and legs, and then with an impact and crash of shattering glass he burst t
hrough the window and fell to the ground outside.
McCord unwrapped the coat and got to his feet, heedless of his singed limbs and the slight lacerations which the glass had inflicted on his body. He ran around the corner of the flaming hangar.
In front of the burning structure, fire trucks were dashing up with bells clanging, and a crowd of firemen and policemen were already toiling frantically to connect hoses with fire mains.
Davidson ran out of the group toward the scorched, disheveled detective-captain.
He cried, “McCord, what in God’s name happened to you in there?”
McCord, disregarding the other’s excited question, asked swiftly, “Did you see anyone else come out of the building?”
The police lieutenant shook his head.
“I just got back here from rounding up your group of suspects. We found the reporters at the nearest telephones, but haven’t found McLiney and Jandron yet.”
“McLiney and Jandron still at large?”
Then McCord suddenly cried, “By heaven, I know where the killer has made for, now that he knows I have the letter. Lucky James’ plane!”
Before the astounded Davidson could comprehend him, McCord had turned and was racing down the runway into the darkness, away from the flaming hangar.
From the dark ahead there came to McCord’s ears the sudden clatter of an airplane motor starting.
He sprinted forward frantically, Davidson and others coming yelling after him a few hundred feet behind.
Now the detective-captain descried in the dark ahead of him the big silver shape of Lucky James’ great monoplane being taxied around to point down the runway. The silver ship started to roll forward, its motor roaring. McCord was abreast of it and dove for its side.
He got the handle of the cockpit door in his grasp and clung to it, trying desperately to open the door as he was dragged along with quickly increasing speed.
The door suddenly opened under McCord’s frantic efforts. He reached in and got a hold inside, and with a convulsive effort drew his body partly in through the little door.
His legs still hung out of the door, and cinders flying up from the runway stung them. Then the cinders ceased to sting, and McCord knew that the roaring monoplane was rising into the air.
The wind tore viciously at the detective-captain’s legs as he sought to climb completely inside the cockpit. Then, with a surge of desperate strength, McCord pulled himself up into the cramped little space.
A black figure, sitting at the controls in the front of the dark, crowded little cockpit, whirled in his seat. McCord jammed his pistol into the other’s back and yelled over the roar of the motor:
“Take this plane back down and land or I’ll kill you right here!”
The man, his face invisible in the dark, laughed wildly.
“You don’t dare kill me, because if you do the plane will crash and you’ll die, too!” he cried.
“Don’t fool yourself!” snarled McCord. “I worked with the police plane division two years and I’ve done a little flying. If you don’t turn—”
Before he could finish the sentence the man, whose hands had been busy a moment swiftly adjusting something at the controls, turned and struck suddenly at McCord with a gleaming tool.
McCord was knocked back against one of the big tanks at the rear of the little cockpit, and the shock sent his gun flying from his hand. The killer scrambled over his seat to strike at him again.
The monoplane was roaring along at an unvarying altitude on a straight course. McCord, squirming desperately to avoid those deadly blows, knew that the killer had made use of the automatic pilot device which Lucky James had had installed for his lengthy flight.
He knew, too, that the murderer meant to knock him out and then heave his body out of the open cockpit door.
McCord grasped the other’s hand and they squirmed and struggled, on top of the parachute pack and thermos bottles and other objects on the cockpit floor. The killer fought to use his gleaming weapon.
Suddenly the roar of the thundering motor faltered. Almost instantly it faltered again, then abruptly died.
The monoplane’s interior was filled with the screaming of the wind outside, shrill and keen. The cockpit in which the two men struggled tilted crazily this way and that.
McCord knew instantly what had happened. The gasoline in Lucky James’ ship had been almost completely exhausted by his long flight, and now had given out altogether. The ship was drifting downward with its motor dead!
The murderer abruptly tore loose from McCord and clawed beneath him for the parachute pack, trying to struggle hastily into the harness.
He scrambled with it toward the open door of the cockpit. But McCord had scooped up the metal tool the other had dropped, and struck quickly with it.
The thunk of the blow on the killer’s head was followed by his limp collapse on the cockpit floor.
McCord scrambled into the seat to the controls of the ship. He tore off the automatic pilot device and got the monoplane under control, then banked around in the darkness.
Down there below in the dark, some distance away, the big hangar of Gotham Airport was like a vast, red torch, flaming high.
He headed the monoplane straight down toward the field in front of the burning building.
A few minutes later the silver ship swooped silently down and made a ragged and bumpy deadstick landing near the flaming hangar.
When it rolled to a stop, McCord salvaged his stubby pistol and then was climbing out of the cockpit when, from the burning hanger, a group of shouting men ran toward him.
Davidson was the first to reach him, with Bushell and McLiney and the others behind him.
“McCord, you’re all right?” cried the lieutenant.
McCord nodded. “I’m okay, and so is the murderer, though he’s not conscious right now.”
“You got him, then?” cried Davidson.
For answer McCord reached into the cockpit and pulled out the unconscious form of the murderer.
Lying there in the red glow of the burning hangar, sprawled half out of the little cockpit door just as his first victim had sprawled a few hours before, lay—
“Blair James!” yelled Davidson in utter amazement.
They stared unbelievingly.
“But it can’t be that Blair killed Lucky James, his own cousin!” cried the police lieutenant.
“He did, though,” said McCord somberly, “and he did it for the same reason that many a closer relative has been killed: for money. Lucky James, by completing his flight from Cairo to New York, automatically became worth fifty thousand dollars as soon us his plane landed tonight. Blair, as he told us, was Lucky’s only near relative. As such, he was Lucky’s heir, and would inherit the fifty thousand.” McCord took from his pocket a scorched and crumpled letter. He looked up from it a moment.
“You’ll remember that Blair himself told us Lucky had lectured him about his gambling and spendthrift ways? Well, this letter which Lucky wrote to Stangland from Cairo explains why Blair needed money so badly and was willing to kill his cousin for it.”
McCord read:
Stangland, I wish you’d keep an eye on Blair until I get back. I had quite a quarrel with him before I left. It seems he’s lost several thousand dollars in I.O.U.s gambling and is being pressed hard for payment. You know he’ll lose his job as pilot if the company officials find out about it.
He wanted me to give him part of the money the company advanced to back my flight, and when I told him I’d never give him another cent to pay gambling debts, he became very resentful and bitter. Try to keep him from doing anything rash, for he seemed in a desperate mood. Lucky.
“That explains it,” McCord said. “Blair, bitter at Lucky and desperate for money, decided to kill his cousin when he landed and thus inherit that fifty thousand. He killed Stangland when he guessed that Lucky had written Stangland about his gambling debts and the quarrel, and he fired the hangars to destroy the letter. When I went in after i
t, he went in after me.”
“And because McLiney and Jandron were still at large, I was sure one of them was the killer!” Davidson exclaimed. “But we found it was they who went to turn in the alarm that brought the firemen here.”
McCord nodded toward the unconscious man. “We’d better take him and lock him up—we had a hard enough time getting him.”
“We will,” Davidson said, “and then you’re going to come with me and have a drink. You look as though you need one.”
McCord, his craggy face relaxing into tired lines for the first time that night, nodded assent.
“We’ll all have one,” he said, “and make it in honor of a kid who must still be flying, somewhere. We’ll drink to Lucky James.”
THE SCALPEL OF DOOM, by Ray Cummings
Lots of things, particularly unpleasant ones, can get crowded into an hour. I’ve had it happen to me often, but never quite like that hour which began at about midnight, one evening last summer. And I never thought I’d have occasion to kill a man. Every doctor worries that sometime he might make a little mistake, or even just an error of judgment; his patient would die—and the doctor would forever after blame himself. But this wasn’t anything like that. I wanted to kill this fellow, and I did. I can’t say I’m exactly sorry, but it gives you a queer feeling just the same.
I was alone in my office, that summer night. I live in a little stucco house near the edge of Pleasant Grove Village, with my office and reception room occupying about half its lower floor. My wife and young daughter were away for a week at the beach. I was alone on the premises, that night at midnight. I’d had quite a tough day at the hospital—two operations, one of which had turned out to be more serious than I had anticipated, and a long steady grind of routine calls that had kept me going until about eleven-thirty. I had just decided to go to bed when a car stopped outside. Hurried footsteps came up the walk; my night bell rang.
It was a slim, dark-haired young girl. She wore a black, somewhat shabby raincoat and hood. Which struck me as odd, because it was a hot summer night, with a full moon in a cloudless sky. “You Dr. Bates?”
The Pulp Fiction Megapack Page 28
