Doc Savage: Glare of the Gorgon (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage Book 19) (21 page)

The clerk continued, “The next thing I knew, they were trying to bundle the woman into a touring car. That’s when the two men came bounding out of the elevator, waving strange-looking pistols. They gave chase.”

“Then what happened?” Doc asked him.

“There was a lot of shooting, and I ducked,” admitted the clerk.

“In other words, you didn’t see anything further?”

“No, but I heard plenty. Bullets zinged everywhere. Sounded like a hand grenade went off, too. It reminded me of the bad old days just a few years ago. I thought those times were done with.”

One cop rocked back on his heels and remarked, “So did we, brother, so did we.”

Doc Savage made his presence known. “The two men were my assistants, Monk Mayfair and Ham Brooks. Somehow they have been abducted, along with a woman whose name is Janet Falcon. She is a private secretary of the late Myer Sim.”

“What is this all about, Mr. Savage?” asked one officer.

“That is entirely unclear. But it all seems to have started with Sim’s death.”

The police officers look nonplussed. Here was the famous Doc Savage, renowned as a scientist, medical genius, and investigator of unparalleled skill, confessing that he had not a clue.

“Well,” concluded one cop, “I guess we’ll have to get the stiff to the morgue, and try to sort things out.”

They got to work on that. At one point, an officer suddenly thought of a question. He turned to voice it, blinked at the spot where Doc Savage had been standing a moment before. The space was now empty.

“Well, where did he go?”

There was a general search for Doc Savage, beginning with the bank of elevators. None of the operators had taken the bronze man upstairs, so it was clear that he had quitted the hotel. To where, was a complete mystery.

Doc Savage went out, and began to study the slushy sleet, which was firm enough to hold the imprints of the tire tracks of the two touring cars. The bronze man committed these to memory. Then he reclaimed the rental sedan he had been previously using, and sent it out into the street. The police officer whose motorcycle he had commandeered had seen to it that the machine was returned to the hotel.

Doc was able to follow the tire tracks of the two touring cars for quite a distance—almost three quarters of a mile—when the last traces of the machines became lost in the general confusion of crosstown traffic.

Changing course, Doc Savage next drove out to the municipal airport, parked the sedan, and entered the operations building, where he requested permission to take off without delay. This was summarily granted.

That matter settled, Doc went to the aircraft hangar where the great bronze speed plane stood waiting, its three propellers gleaming.

Climbing aboard, Doc saw that it had been refueled as instructed, and gunned the engines.

The hangar door was already up, so Doc ran his speed plane out onto the tarmac, warmed up the engines, then released the brake.

The bronze ship scooted down the runway, vaulted into the air, and began climbing for altitude. Presently, Doc leveled off at only five hundred feet. Then the bronze man sent the speed plane out over Lake Michigan’s watery expanse.

From the air, he spotted the beach in front of the Drake Hotel where the weird submersible automobile had plunged into the water.

It stood to reason that a rubber-tired vehicle rolling along the lake bed would stir up mud. It had. A spreading trail of discoloration led deep into Lake Michigan. Doc followed it from the air for approximately three quarters of a mile.

The muddy tail seemed to cease, ending in a diffused patch of brownish water.

Abruptly, the bronze man dropped the plane, and began skimming the wavelets that wrinkled the lake surface. The afternoon sun was high in the air, and the lake sparkled with myriad solar jewels.

Again and again, Doc hiked the speed plane about, peering down as if to penetrate to the lake bottom. But the lake was not clear enough to permit such viewing.

Finally, Doc turned the plane toward the spot where the spreading fan of mud petered out. Aiming for that point, he brought the amphibian plane down, dropping onto its pontoons. He chopped power. The whirling props went still, freezing in place.

Doc was an expert pilot and what he next accomplished showed that clearly. The aircraft struck the water, bumped along, then wallowed. Doc steered the pontoon’s water rudders and jockeyed the plane toward the spot he desired to reach.

The speed plane coasted to a stop at almost that precise point.

Stripping to his black silk undershorts, the bronze man donned a diving lung of his own invention, which consisted of a canister which strapped to his chest, and an air hose leading to a rubber contrivance that covered his mouth and nose. Opening the hatch, he dropped down.

The lake water was just as frigid as he recalled; fortunately it was not freezing.

Doc commenced swimming downward, using kicking motions of his feet and great sweeping motions of his mighty bronze arms.

In a surprisingly short time, he discovered the aluminum automobile resting on the lake floor.

Sweeping in, Doc saw that the retractable snorkel was entirely submerged. He went for the angle near the top, took hold of it, and began examining the contrivance.

The projection was as he judged it earlier. A combination periscope and snorkel. Two channels were built into the steel pipe, one for air, the other for viewing. Under pressure of pursuit, the driver had misjudged the depth of the lake, and apparently driven it beyond the point at which the retractable snorkel could be extended.

Using his hands, Doc worked down the snorkel barrel until he was kneeling on the roof. Ducking his head, he peered through the windshield.

There was a single seat, a steering wheel, various levers not found on an ordinary automobile. But no sign of the operator.

The interior, however, was filled with muddy water which was slowly settling.

Stepping off the roof, the bronze man alighted on his feet and discovered that the driver-side door was not latched. The gray-faced man who had driven the submersible car out into the lake had clearly quitted his outlandish vehicle when the driver’s compartment began to flood.

He must have possessed a ration of nerve, for he had retained the presence of mind to close the door after him, even if he did not finish sealing it.

No trace of disappointment showed in Doc Savage’s flake-gold eyes as he left the strange machine empty-handed. It would not be possible to take fingerprints off the vehicle, since it was completely immersed.

Pushing upward, Doc swam back to his waiting plane, climbed aboard one pontoon, got inside, and toweled himself off. His hair had dried by itself, a peculiar property it possessed.

The cabin was electrically warmed, so Doc did not bother dressing again as he ran the aircraft along the tops of the choppy waves. Soon the tri-motor was back in the air and Doc pointed the howling snout upward, seeking altitude.

Again, he leveled off at about one thousand feet. Flying past the municipal airport, Doc aimed for the city. The purpose in this endeavor was difficult to discern. The big bronze man began flying meticulous circles, no doubt seeking the whereabouts of his missing men, Monk Mayfair and Ham Brooks—not to mention the abducted woman, Janet Falcon.

Chapter XX

JOE SHINE

HAD HE BEEN born in Naples, Italy, Giuseppe Athalentia Shinola would probably not have made much of a mark on the world. But his Neapolitan parents had immigrated to America before he was born. When he came squawling into the world, Giuseppe Athalentia Shinola had done so in the city of Chicago. That, conceivably, had made all the difference.

His childhood was not remarkable. He had got into no more trouble than any other shaver his age. Growing up near the stockyards, young Giuseppe had naturally been drawn to the sprawling slaughterhouses when it came time to make his first living.

A beef killer is a man with a peculiar occupation. The beef killer stands at a chute in the stockyards and sticks a thing like an icepick into the base of the beef’s brain. Most beef killers use a hammer, though.

Giuseppe Athalentia Shinola—he was going by the name of “Joe” by that time—became a beef killer. He had a knack for it. He hadn’t minded all the blood. In truth, he rather enjoyed it. He customarily wore a heavy smock and wading boots to protect his street clothes and shoes from the constant splashing of bovine blood.

For how long Joe Shinola would have stood the strenuous work of being a lowly beef killer is difficult to guess. Not long, certainly. For in those days Chicago was changing. Prohibition became the law, and where there is law, there inevitably follows lawlessness.

By the time Joe Shinola had grown weary of the stockyards, he was mentally prepared to participate in the brawling boom town that the Windy City was fast becoming. He was physically prepared as well. The stockyards had seen to that, too.

When young Joe Shinola, dressed in his best Sunday suit of clothes and highly polished shoes, had presented himself to Angelo Moroni, who in that day had controlled the South Side of Chicago and all its rackets, he wasn’t laughed at, exactly.

“What do you got to offer me, kid?” Moroni had demanded.

Joe Shinola had had trouble being heard over the raucous noise of the speakeasy that day a decade ago.

“I know how to kill,” he insisted.

“Is that right? How many men have you killed, punk?”

“None so far. But I’ve slaughtered hundreds of heifers.”

Angelo Moroni did not laugh. But he did smile. Craftily.

“Killing a man is not like killing an animal. Come back when you’ve got some real blood on your shoes. Now beat it.”

Joe Shinola beat it. He did not go far. He ran over to the North Side and found Red Gains. Red Gains was having his hair cut in a barber shop.

The bootlegger listened to Joe Shinola patiently. At the end of the spiel, he did not look up from the newspaper he was reading. Nor did he address the eager young man with the shiny black shoes directly.

Instead, he remarked casually, “That Angelo Moroni is gettin’ too big for his britches. Somebody oughta run that grifter out of town. I’d do it myself, but the coppers might take offense.”

An avid light came into Joe Shinola’s shoe-button eyes.

“Well,” mused Red as he turned to the sports page, “maybe some day I’ll get around to that chiseler.”

When the silent barber expertly whipped the sheet off Red Gains’ lank form, the young beef killer was no longer standing there.

They found Angelo Moroni sitting in the Gem Theater the next day. The Gem Theater had been showing another cowboy picture. “Wyoming Guns,” the picture was called.

A sail needle had been used on the victim. It would be some time before they found the needle there.

The police had been rightfully baffled. The press had had the proverbial field day. Accusatory fingers were pointed all over the Chicago underworld. But the murder was never solved, nor was the slayer ever named.

Only two individuals suspected the truth. One was Red Gains and the other the ill-fortuned barber who had been privy to the first meeting of the crime boss and his new assassin.

Later, the barber was found in his barber chair, sitting glassy-eyed in death. The only reason the medical examiner discovered the sail needle buried at the base of the man’s brain was that recent experience had told him where to look. For there had been no blood in evidence.

That killing was never solved, either.

The years had passed by swiftly. During that interval, Joe Shine—as he now styled himself—rose to prominence in the Red Gains outfit, becoming a lieutenant in the North Side branch of the Chicago underworld, which by then had grown fat from the profits made from distilling illicit liquor.

Came Repeal, and all that changed. The brutal gang wars had weeded out the weak. Angelo Moroni was long gone. The Savoli mob were likewise no more.

Red Gains was a philosophical gangster. He looked at the sorry state of affairs and called a meeting of his lieutenants, among them Joe Shine.

“Boys, this racket is cooked,” he announced through heavy cigar smoke. “We’ve skimmed the cream. I got mine. I’m cashin’ out. My advice is that you all do the same. Find yourselves respectable wives, and start families. It’s all over. This Prohibition cow has been milked dry.”

There was the expected grumbling, but it was soon drowned by newly-legal whiskey. The party lasted long into the night, breaking up before dawn.

None of the participants remembered much the next day when the maid found Red Gains lying asprawl his magnificent bed, dead to the world.

It was two days before the police were called. The M.E. by this time was a new man. He had not been around during the bad old days of the gang wars.

Consequently, he never found the sail needle that had been driven by a small hammer into the base of Red Gains’ skull.

No one questioned Joe Shine when he announced to a convocation of the North Siders that he was the new head of the rackets. Without a shot being fired, the former Giuseppe Athalentia Shinola became the latest crime czar of Chicago.

That was not very long ago.

JOE SHINE was having his shoes buffed when his afternoon was interrupted. Most men have their shoes shined once a week, if that. But Joe Shine was different. He had his own personal bootblack.

The rackets king of the North Side was seated at his private table at the Neapolitan Restaurant, which he owned. It was his headquarters, as well as a front for his illegal activities.

The bootblack was liberally applying shoe polish to Joe Shine’s expensive brogans. This was the third time today that the shoeshine boy was performing this task. If needed, he shined these same shoes four or five times a day. It was a ritual with them. Nothing quite explained this ritual, but a psychologist might have harkened back to Joe’s days in the Chicago stockyards, when his work boots were literally splashed with bovine fluids on a daily basis.

It was as if Joe’s shoes could never be polished enough for him.

Into the restaurant came charging one of Joe Shine’s lieutenants.