Day of Doom: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & The Griffin, Volume 2 (23 page)

The plane came hurtling down in an abrupt dive, twisting, as if it were going into a tailspin. It looked as if the pilot had suddenly lost control, but the moment and place of his disability was too pat to be coincidental.

The flier was skillful. Manning saw his helmeted head peering and wished he had a rifle. His inner voice told him to shoot this man, to kill to prevent murder. His pistol was useless at that range. His voice could not carry above the roar of the plane, which barely straightened out before it lunged into the water, sending up spray, lurching with a seeming clumsiness that Manning believed an excellently timed and deliberate movement.

It sideswiped the police boat to port with its starboard, metal pontoon and capsized it, left it sinking, while its crew struggled in the water.

With prop revving furiously, the amphibian appeared to blunder between Curran’s tender and the police launch directly ahead. It screened the latter from view. Those on it could not see what might be happening to Big Joe’s craft. They were anxious to help their comrades, thinking the amphibian’s acts accidental. A crash had seemed inevitable, and fatal. Water is as hard to smash on as land, scarcely more elastic.

Manning had reflexly drawn his gun.

He saw the mahogany-hulled launch suddenly abandon all signs of trouble. It came tearing up astern at tremendous speed. It was making sixty, seventy, miles an hour. Its bow lifted to the pace and showed its racing “step” as it caught up with the police boat as if the latter were a scow.

Manning saw several men swarming in its cockpit.

It was abeam of the police launch for only a second or so, but it left it a sinking shambles. Manning saw pale flame vomit from the cockpit. Shrapnel, sprayed by trained gunners, perfectly calculating speed and range, belched from a quick-firer. It spattered the cabin glass and shattered the upper-works of the official craft. The trajectory shifted and tore through the hull at waterline. The police who had swarmed out of their hiding place were mowed down, and the murder-boat rushed on.

The police boat to starboard started to swerve in to the rescue. A lame leveret might as well have tried to outrun a whippet. The swift cruiser let out another link of speed and seemed to leap clear of the water like a thrasher whale. Its quickfirer was now silent.

Manning watched it come as a man in a kayak might watch a charging narwhal. This attack was not the affair of some lone, insignificant crank. Its conception came from a subtle brain; one backed by resources.

He had no time to follow up that thought. He poised his gun and fired—once—as the cruiser surged alongside, and was gone.

He saw one man fall back. He dimly glimpsed another hurl two objects, as a pitcher with perfect control might pitch two balls in swift succession.

They crashed aboard the tender. There was a tremendous, deafening explosion that sent Manning staggering from its impact, his arm across his face. The launch seemed to fairly split apart and dissolve into flying fragments in a cloud of black, suffocating vapor that came from the second bomb.

Manning was flung to the disintegrating floor of the cockpit and, without trying to stand, he shuffled through into the cabin which was filled with ignited gas and rushing flame. He dimly saw the huddled figure of Curran by the broken engine and clutched for him, his own flesh seared, his hair and clothes singed. He held his breath against the fiery blast that would annihilate his existence if it reached his lungs and dragged Curran outside, if the wrecked hull could be said to have exterior or interior left. Half blind, Manning managed to topple overboard with the man he had tried to save.

He slumped into the water, near the stern, striking out, grasping the stilled propeller, supporting the helpless body of Big Joe.

The police boats would come to the rescue. Manning’s blurred gaze, looking upwards, saw a second plane coming from the land, saw the amphibian in flight, its decoy trick of being damaged successfully played.

The mahogany-hulled cruiser was coming back again, literally running rings about the police craft. The mahogany hull was veneered steel, so were the tan sides of the cabin. The glass was bulletproof. It swept once more close to the remnants of the launch, now burning like a pitchpine torch. From it leaned the bearded man.

He had taken off his glasses. His eyes gleamed above his prow-like nose. They seemed to radiate a devilish satisfaction. He poised an automatic as his boat passed the stern where Manning clung with his limp burden.

Deliberately he fired two shots. His eyes centered with deadly aim. The first sent a slug fairly between the brows of Big Joe Curran, already almost drowned, if not burned, to death.

The second shot flung its missile as Manning sank under water, still holding the propeller—still clinging to the body of Big Joe. If the bearded man had fired at him first he would have been killed instantly. As it was, the bullet struck the water at an acute angle and ricocheted harmlessly as the cruiser rushed on, thinking its mission complete.

A police boat came up. Manning and the dead man were hauled aboard. Far north, twin specks in the sky, soared the planes. East, throwing spray, javelining for the open sea, where it might turn north or south and dodge into a thousand hiding places, rushed the cruiser with the mahogany hull.

Manning’s face was set and grim as they landed him on the private wharf that had belonged to Big Joe Curran who now lay shrouded under a spare sail from the boathouse. One more “imperial Caesar turned to clay.”

Manning looked like a scarecrow, with the clothes half burned off him, his face and hands blistered or raw, eyebrows, eyelashes and hair singed. He paid no attention to his hurts. They could wait.

He cursed eloquently in Malay as he saw the police plane following the amphibian, once more acting as decoy. The mahogany-hulled cruiser was speeding like a ball-carrier in a broken field. Even if any other boats, now heading for the scene, tried to intercept her, she could dodge them or riddle them. The men aboard would stop at nothing.

Who were they?

Like lightning on a dark night there flashed a solution into Manning’s brain.

The Griffin might be in this! He was a prisoner, barely out of hospital, reported broken in mind and body, not liable to live long. The last word from a visiting committee, including prominent alienists and psychiatrists, was that his fits of depressive dementia were becoming chronic, his cerebral cortices breaking down. They thought there was an abscess in his brilliant, but always abnormal, brain and a lesion might occur at any moment. He showed no interest in anything and was a victim of profound melancholia.

But—there might have been a final flash that linked up his once superb, though warped, mentality. And he might well have had a grudge against Big Joe Curran. It was quite conceivable that he might have made a plea, through his attorneys, for re-examination, hoping that if he could be proven sane, the law would find that his madness at the time he committed his hideous crimes palliated them, and would set him free.

That was a fallacy, of course. His attorneys would know that the Griffin would never be turned loose again. The whole press of the nation would denounce such a move. He was a monster.

But, in his increasing madness, he might have held that insane idea. His reaction to failure would be revenge. Even if he was a life captive his cunning might have devised some means of discovering, of making a leak, even through the stern rule of Dannemora. His aerie had been destroyed with his organization, but he might still have resources hidden away.

The idea hammered on Manning’s brain like a striker on a gong. His hunch held that hammer. It was not to be overlooked. Clews to the crime just accomplished might be unearthed at the penitentiary.

He climbed into his car and raced to the nearest village. He got through long-distance to the commissioner and told him what had happened; breaking through the Commissioner’s shocked comment.

“I’m meeting you at Dannemora,” he said. “Phone the warden!”

He added his hunch, his supreme belief, that the Griffin, for all his weakness, had contrived outside communication with agents who were still faithful to him—faithful, at least, to the Griffin’s hidden gold.

“I’ll take a plane,” said the commissioner. “How will you get there? Shall I pick you up?”

“I’m driving,” said Manning. “I’ll be halfway there by the time you step into your plane.”

Manning’s commissions given him by the New York Police Department and the governor were still in effect. He was one of a very chosen few given the privilege of a police siren, a special license plate and permit.

He changed plates, switched from his usual Klaxon horn and went screaming along the highways—from Long Island to the mainland of New York State, speeding north to Dannemora.

The commissioner, barely ahead of him, was waiting, with the warden, both their faces grave. The commissioner had been warned, he had taken what he deemed adequate precautions, and still the death of the most prominent man in the State, so far as politics and police were concerned, would be laid at his door. He had lost two members of his force, killed outright. Five more were desperately wounded. For once he trusted that Manning’s hunch was not entirely true.

The warden held the same desire, though he was confident the Griffin could not have contrived to escape. He was almost moribund; he had been well guarded.

“I suppose you want to see him,” said the commissioner. “I did, just now. I think you’re wrong, Manning. He couldn’t have managed this.”

Manning was inclined to agree with him when he looked through the grating of the door of the Griffin’s cell. He saw a huddled figure that looked like a bundle of rags, inert. But he knew that supreme madman. He had seen a shark’s heart beat twelve hours after it had been taken from its body and laid on a ship’s rail. There might have been a flash of satanic intelligence, now vanished, that had devised this supreme and final crime, even though there was no longer cerebration to realize he had triumphed once again.

“I’ll go in,” said Manning. “Alone.”

The warden demurred.

“He might be dangerous,” he said. “He attacked the last man who talked with him. An alienist from Vienna. The Griffin resented his examination—scratched him up before the guard overpowered him.”

“I handled the Griffin once,” said Manning. “Unlock the door. I’m armed, if it’s necessary.”

It did not seem so. The huddled figure did not move. It hunkered in a corner of the cell, arms limp, head on its knees. The once burning eyes looked like grapes from which the bloom is rubbed. The ravages of physical illness, added to the disease rampant in the brain, showed the effects of his downfall and incarceration.

He looked without recognition at the man who had run him down, defeated him. The flaming spirit had dissolved. Only once, as Manning ordered him to stand up, he seemed to snarl, as a stricken tiger might, showing tusks that could no longer rend. He got slowly to his feet and stood in the corner.

His shoulders were bowed, his mouth sagged. These were the features of the Griffin, the monster who had boastingly destroyed almost a dozen prominent and outstandingly useful citizens out of a mad wantonness that seemed bred of the very heat of hell. It seemed to Manning as if that face, proud as Lucifer’s was now like a mask of wax that was in dissolution, blurred, hardly animate.

Surely this derelict could not have….

A terrible thought smote him as he gazed. Smote like the chiming of a brazen gong.

He gripped the Griffin by his shoulders. The other struggled with unexpected strength and Manning shifted his hold. He surged forward, pinning his man in the angle of the cell’s steel walls, his forearm across the captive’s throat, compressing his windpipe. He called to the others to come in; a summons not needed.

Manning lifted the prisoner’s long hair as the guard and the warden pinioned him.

“This is not the Griffin!” cried Manning. “Look at his ears! I have seen the Griffin’s ears when we fought together. Pointed, feral, like a satyr’s ears. Tufted with hair. This man is an impostor, a substitute. The Griffin has escaped!”

They stood as if stunned. Only Manning ruled.

“You. Who are you?” he challenged.

The pseudo Griffin was suddenly docile. Intelligence came into his eyes. They showed cunning.

“Okay,” he said. “You win. You’re Manning, I suppose? I figured this might happen, but I took the chance of being discovered.”

“For money?”

“Sure. For
big
money. I needed it. For my wife and kids. I was broke. It looked like a dive out of a top floor for me. The Griffin said he’d see I got out, same way he did. With money. Now I’ll take the rap, but my folks are fixed, anyway.”

“What’s your name?” demanded the warden. The man jeered.

“Wouldn’t you like to know, so you could hound down my family, take away the jack that I’ve earned. Try and find out, if you can. I’ll stand the gaff.”

“He’s an actor, of course,” said Manning as he and the Commissioner sat with the warden in the latter’s private quarters. “Selected because he looked like the Griffin. Some character actor out of work. Plenty of them released these days by the stage and the film companies. Now, let’s find out how he got in—and the Griffin got out.”

The warden looked uncomfortable, but he was resigned. This man Gordon Manning was a genius.

“It’s beyond me,” he feebly parried. “Go ahead.”

“Did the Griffin have any visitors, aside from the regulation visit of the Penology Board?” asked Manning. “How about that alienist he attacked? The doctor from Vienna?”

“He was the only one,” answered the warden. “We do not even allow the Griffin yard exercise, though he asked for it. He seemed in pretty bad shape, although he may have faked it. But we took no chances. He claimed that the shock of his arrest, in which he suffered great physical injury, caused by you, Mr. Manning, I believe, had cleared his brain. He demanded a re-examination.”

“For the first time?” asked Manning.

“So far as I know.”

Manning said nothing. He knew that the Griffin must have smuggled out a letter to Curran. When that failed he evolved another scheme that included revenge on Curran. They could dig that up. Right now he was interested in the alienist from Vienna.