by Lester Dent
Leaning over Nace, Zeke gritted, “I’m gonna put this thing in the suit with you! That’s what I done with the girl’s nosey brother, when he caught me lookin’ at my swag. Then I’m gonna close your suit up tight and reverse the air pumps. They’ll suck all the air from your suit. Your eyes and tongue will stick out. You’ll look like hell when they find you! Like Jud Ogel looked!”
“I figured that’s the way you did it!” Nace told him hatefully.
“How come you figured that out?”
“That purple beak of yours showed you were a diver. Most old-time divers have schnozzles like that. It’s the pressure that does things to the fine blood vessels under the skin. You being a diver, it was natural you’d think of a stunt like this taking pressure out of a diving suit to do your murdering.”
Zeke shoved the moccasin’s head close to the helmet opening. It was so near that Nace shrank back to avoid its darting tongue.
“You ain’t gonna do much more fine deductin’!” Zeke grated.
Red-headed Julia Nace came racing out of the warehouse. She held a revolver—one of Sergeant Gooch’s police specials. She ran in a semicircle.
While Zeke still gawked at her, the revolver cracked flame.
Before Nace’s face, the head of the moccasin disappeared as if by magic. The bullet had shattered it.
Zeke straightened, yelling. He flung the only weapon at hand—the snake. It gyrated, contorting in the air, toward the girl. She ducked from the hideous thing in spite of herself.
Zeke rushed her. She shot at him. Missed! She fired again, and the bullet tore flesh from his shoulder. Then his fist caught her on the jaw and she dropped as if poled. She hit the wharf hard and did not move a muscle.
Whirling, Zeke ran back. Halfway to Nace, an idea seemed to hit him. He sprang upon Jeck, gibbering, striking with his fists.
Jeck went down, knocked unconscious. Zeke rolled Jeck on his face. Then he backed away, took a running jump and came down with both feet in the middle of Jeck’s back. There was a sickening pop as Jeck’s spine broke. He must have died instantly.
Zeke screamed madly, “By hell, there ain’t nobody gonna get a split of that swag! I bombed the salvage boat so I’d be the one to get it in the first place! I’ve had to kill men since to keep it! I’ll kill a few more! That woman, too!”
He leaned down, grasped the window of Nace’s suit, preparing to close it. He could not resist one last boast.
“I’ll reverse the pump and it’ll suck the air out of your suit! That’ll fix you! I altered that pump especially for these sucking jobs!”
Then he jumped, howled, and clapped both hands to his eyes. He weaved back wildly, pawing at his face. He came blindly to the edge of the wharf and plunged over.
There was a loud splash. A silence! Then more splashes. Zeke began screaming. His voice was horrible.
“I can’t swim! Help! I can’t—”
An ominous guggle-guggle-guggle ended that. There was no more noise. Zeke had drowned.
Nace lay in silent agony. He opened a tear gas bomb that he had the foresight to carry inside the diving suit.
THIRTY minutes later, he was rubbing his eyes and confronting the red-headed girl and Sergeant Gooch. The red-head had regained consciousness, unhurt except for an aching jaw.
They had found Sergeant Gooch bound securely in the house.
Gooch was growling, “Them two came to an understanding, then they grabbed me—”
“They wouldn’t have come to an understanding if you hadn’t left them alone while you tried to third degree me!” the red-head snapped.
Gooch flushed under his blue beard stubble. “I thought—”
“I doubt it!” said the girl. “I haven’t seen you show any signs of being able to think!”
Nace eyed her steadily. “Say, are you going ahead with this salvage business that your father ran?”
She hesitated. “No. Why?”
Nace grinned widely. “For years, I’ve been looking for a woman assistant. You’ve got everything it takes. How’d you like the job?”
“I think I’d go for that in a big way!” she said promptly.
“Fine! We’ll show these New York cops some things!”
Sergeant Gooch emitted a forlorn groan.
The Tank of Terror
Grim and horrible were those warnings of the Big Boss. They were found in automobiles, office buildings and in homes. They were the mutilated corpses of men boiled in oil. And they told the Oklahoma police not to be too inquisitive. Into this hotbed of horror came Lee Nace to buck a triple-decked deal of the Big Boss—a reward-hungry newspaperman—and the two-gun Robin Hood of the oil company.
Chapter I
Hot Oil
SHE was tall, blond, streamlined. The roadster was long, cream-colored, and also streamlined.
She was making motions at powdering her nose, using a pancake compact with a mirror fully four inches across. She held it braced against the steering wheel.
Utter concentration rode her long, beautiful face. The big, flat powder puff dabbed the compact with strangely erratic frequency. It slapped only the mirror—never the powder cake.
Oklahoma sunlight, white and hot, sprayed blond and roadster. To the right, it cooked evergreen stucco buildings of the Tulsa Municipal Airport. To the left, it toasted flat classroom and barrack structures of a school of aeronautics.
In spasms, the sun leaped from the blond’s compact mirror. Her powder puff, whipping systematically, was dividing the beam into dots and dashes.
On hands and knees beside the airport waiting room, Lee Nace crawled. He was very long, bony, blue-eyed. He was gathering together the wind-scattered sheets of a letter.
Standing and staring at Nace were six or seven people who had been his fellow passengers on the recently arrived New York plane.
They were fascinated by the scar on Nace’s forehead. It was a perfect likeness of a small coiled snake—an adder. A Chinaman had once hit Nace in the forehead with a knife hilt which bore a serpent carving, and he was destined to forever carry the scar.
Ordinarily the scar was unnoticeable. But it flushed out redly when he was angry or worried. He was worried now.
Inside the ornate, modernistic waiting room, a male voice was shouting: “Telegram! Wire for Private Detective Lee Nace! Telegram!”
Nace continued picking up the sheets of his letter. He pretended to read each. When he had spilled the sheets, he had taken pains to make it seem an accident.
Slyly, over the paper, he read the heliograph message being flashed by the blond’s compact mirror.
“A reception committee!” she sun-flashed. “Three of them, man with the telegram is one. The other two are wearing coveralls—to hide bullet-proof vests.”
Nace captured two more sheets of his letter, pretended to read, but kept his eyes on the mirror.
“The one with the telegram is ‘Robin Hood’ Lloyd,” the girl continued. “He’s Oklahoma’s bad boy.”
She ended her transmission.
Nace arose and barged in under a striped canopy which could be telescoped out to meet arriving planes. He entered the flashy waiting room.
“TELEGRAM for Lee Nace!” droned Robin Hood Lloyd.
The Robin Hood was a lean, young-old wolf. His chin bore scars, irregular, wavy lines—marks of an ancient beating with knucks.
The men sat side by side on a modernistic divan. They were chunky. Their faces might have been meaty blocks covered with a good grade of brown saddle leather.
Both wore khaki overalls. Both had newspapers spread open in their laps.
Headlines on the papers read:
OIL SCANDAL GROWING!
There was a picture of a man with a flowing white beard. He looked like Santa Claus. Under that was another black-faced type line.
EDITOR APP LEADS STOLEN OIL INVESTIGATION
Nace sidled, long-legged, for the seated pair. These men did not know him, or they would not be using the telegram ruse to spot him.
He was still moving when his long arms shot out. His hands, long-fingered, bony, swung hard against the right ear of one man and the left ear of the other. Their heads, driven together, made a hollow bonk!
Each man gave one convulsive quiver as he became unconscious. Then they lay back on the modernistic divan, mouths agape, eyes pinched. The newspapers slid off their laps, revealing frontier six-shooters.
ROBIN Hood Lloyd stood and stared, a yellow telegram envelope dangling from his right hand. Suddenly he dropped the envelope and began to shake his right hand madly.
A small revolver, dislodged from an armpit, dropped out of the sleeve and hung swinging on a string.
Before Robin Hood could seize his hideout weapon, Nace’s fist lashed. It hit the handiest spot—the undershot jaw which gave the Robin Hood his wolf look.
Oklahoma’s bad boy flippered his hands convulsively. He was not entirely knocked out, and feeling himself going down, wheeled in an effort to land on all fours. He failed and hit the floor all spread out.
The sound as he came down was a metallic clank, as of a pile of scrap iron on the tile floor, rather than a man.
Nace had read about this Oklahoma cut-up in the New York papers. The fellow went around armored like a knight of old—not only with a bullet-proof vest, but with steel leg and arm shields.
The Robin Hood rolled on his back, made a tent over his face with his hands, and moaned loudly.
“The wild and wooly west!” Nace said through his teeth. “I’ll show you how we handle ’em back where the lights shine bright!”
He rushed—bent low, long arms hanging down.
He never did know exactly what happened next. One of the men on the modernistic divan unlimbered with a gun. Or maybe it was both of them. A bullet slammed against Nace’s right side. It spun him just enough so that the second slug got him in the stomach. The Robin Hood managed to draw back both feet and kick him in the head.
Nace’s eyes became two gory bonfires of pain. His insides felt as if they were torn out. He started to cave.
It soaked through his dazed brain that he would die if he did. He hauled up, swayed around, and ran blindly for the white blur he knew was the sunlit door.
When he got outside, he knew it only because he seemed to be in a white-hot snow storm. He pawed his kicked face, beat his body where the bullets had hit.
He wore a bulletproof jacket which had saved his life, but the slugs had mauled him horribly.
Flaying his tortured brain, he managed to remember where they had stacked the baggage from the plane. He veered for the luggage heap. His canvas zipper bag was there. He wanted it. It was his war sack, his bag of tricks, his life preserver. He was too drunk with pain to realize he could not get to the bag before the trio in the waiting room could come after him.
Nace never carried a gun. He subscribed to a theory that toting a firearm tended to make a man helpless, if ever he was caught without it.
FINALLY he snapped out of the daze. He swiveled around drunkenly on a heel.
His hand, clawing inside his coat, fished out a little metal tear-gas firing cylinder. He exploded it in the waiting room door.
On the opposite side of the building, the roadster engine was moaning anxiously. The blond waited, tense at the wheel.
The Robin Hood and his two followers floundered out into the sunlight. Blinded by the tear gas, they were holding hands to keep track of each other. They acted like three small boys trying not to get lost.
“Come on, guys!” rapped the blond. “Blow!”
The blinded Robin Hood tried to climb into the roadster hood, under the impression that he was getting in the back seat. He hauled out a single-action gun, jabbed it above his head and fanned out its five slugs. Then he found the car door and piled in. “O.K. That’ll hold ’em! Blow!”
The roadster seemed to snug its oilpan belly to the ground, then jump. Scooting away, it left a rain of gravel.
“Did you get the dirty so-and-so?” the blond demanded.
“Hell, no!” The Robin Hood held his jaw with a clench so tight that tendons on his hands whitened like chalk rods. “Damn! Did he land one on my kisser!”
“My heroes!” The girl’s voice was dry. But her eyes were brightly glad.
As if it were clawing cats, the wind tore her blond hair about. It was so very blond, that hair, that it was plainly dyed.
Nace staggered around the airport waiting-room, covering as much ground to right and left as he did ahead.
The field operation office was in the same building with the waiting room, but there were doors, probably closed, through which the tear gas had not penetrated.
Like a dude out of a bandbox, a man popped out from an office window. He wore striped trousers and a gray lap-over tea vest. The pearl grip of a derringer protruded, charm-like, from his watch pocket. He pulled his tiny gun, leveled it. The thing made a sound like a giant firecracker and kicked his fist back in his face.
He looked foolish when the slug dug a geyser of dirt not a hundred feet from where he stood.
Nace leaned, white-faced, against a wall, said, “Better get a bow and arrow!”
The dapper man looked around and grinned. “When I do hit ’em, though, I make a big hole! Say, Skipper, you look like hell!”
The pain had faded the adder scar off Nace’s forehead. It was coming back slowly.
“And I was the cookie who was gonna show how it’s done in the east!” he said dryly. “I done swell! Yes, I did!”
The nattily dressed man reloaded his derringer with a cartridge as thick as his little finger. “Y’know who that was?”
“Mr. Lloyd, I believe.”
“You said it, Skipper! Oklahoma’s contribution to the wild and woolly west—the Robin Hood himself. The lad who can walk down Main Street in Tulsa, from the Louvre to Brown-Dunkin’s, and not a cop can see him—because they’re afraid to. ‘Officers again escape Robin Hood,’ is the streamer an Oklahoma City rag runs every time he has a gun fight with the law.”
Nace grimaced. “You talk like a newspaper man! What sheet?”
The dressy man skidded the derringer back into his watch pocket. “The Telegram! Halt Jaxon’s the name. Oil editor!”
“Know Ebenezer App?”
“I ought to! He pays me!”
“Let’s go hunt him up!” Nace suggested.
Dapper Halt Jaxon made a whistling mouth. “You must be Lee Nace, the private shamus the governor hired to come from New York to come here and work with the boss!”
“The same!”
Nace walked behind the waiting room and came back with his canvas zipper bag. “Do we go?”
“We do!”
Jaxon led the way to a roadster. It was a speedster, low and yellow, remindful of an overgrown canary.
Chapter II
The Hot-Oil Ring
THE canary car tweeted a horn when it pulled out of the airport parking. It tweeted a different one wen it turned into Sheridan Drive, heading toward town. Not once during the trip in did it sound the same horn twice.
“I was sent out here to meet you!” Halt Jaxon offered a cork-tipped fag from a silver case.
“I need something stronger!” Nace produced a stubby pipe and a silk pouch. “Whew-w-w! What a reception! Is that the usual thing out here?”
“If you’re going up against the Robin Hood, it is! I guess you’re out here on this hot-oil trouble.”
“What hot-oil trouble?”
“For cryin’ out load! Don’t you read the newspapers?”
“Where’d you get the idea your troubles mean anything to Broadway rags?”
“Oh! So it’s like that! Well, for the last year or so, most of the Oklahoma oil fields have been shut down. They passed laws—”
“Proration!”
“Go to the head of the class! The governor had to stick the militia in some fields to close ’em. They’re just discovering that, while the fields were shut down, somebody stole a lot of oil!”
�
��What do you call a lot?”
“We ain’t pikers! Thirty or forty millions!”
“Barrels?”
“Dollars!”
Nace felt tenderly of his shoe-bruised face. “You wouldn’t kid me?”
“I might, but I ain’t. I tell you, they’re just getting into the damn mess! The governor has investigators all over the state. Wherever they dig, they turn up a dead cat.
“Down at Bowlegs, they found a farm of 55,000-barrel crude tanks plumb empty. In the Oklahoma City field, a lot of leases are running salt water where they should be making oil. The oil has been pulled out by mysterious persons unknown—lifted, heisted, stolen!”
“Can’t they put a finger on anybody?”
“Sure—small fry! But some great big bright brain is behind the whole thing! They can’t learn who! I’m telling you, Skipper, it’s the most colossal robbery in history.”
Nace wiped crimson off his fingers. “What’m I supposed to do? Make news for App’s paper?”
“App owns a lot of production up in the Osage which ain’t in production any more. He’d like to know who pinched the oil! And any news fit to print, we print.”
The canary car swung past MacIntyre airport. Off to the left, derricks in the Oil Exposition grounds stuck up, a horny, cactus-like cluster.
“THE hell of it is the way they get drowned in hot oil!” Halt Jaxon said.
Nace stuffed his pipe, then looked at the stem. It was cracked. He took a small metal case from his zipper bag, extracted a fresh stem from the assortment it held. He chewed an average of a stem a day out of the pipe. The total often reached three or four when the going got tough.
“What’s this—drowned in oil?”
“Several state investigators have been found that way. Also oil men and roustabouts. They’re simply drowned—and pretty badly scalded.”
The tower of the Exchange National swelled up ahead. Immaculate Jaxon tooled his canary roadster toward it, trying out different horns on the traffic.
“They all got too close to the master mind!” Nace mixed his question with a mouthful of smoke. “That it?”
