Doc Savage: The Secret of Satan's Spine (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage Book 15) (8 page)

The police rushed to their vehicles to call descriptions in to headquarters, then they tore off in opposite directions, seeking the fleeing machines.

Ham wandered up and asked, “Are we not going to join the chase?”

Doc Savage shook his head silently. “There may be no need. I have a good idea where those men decamped to.”

Ham stared wordlessly. Despite long years of association, the bronze man’s uncanny ability to deduce facts that seemed to have no antecedents baffled him.

Doc entered the dwelling, picked up the two hundred and sixty pound Monk Mayfair as if he weighed two hundred pounds less than his grown weight, and carried him down the street and around the corner to the bronze man’s own waiting machine.

Ham followed with alacrity, a dozen questions on the tip of his tongue.

Doc Savage deposited Monk in the back seat where he could sleep off the lingering effects of the blackjack, then claimed the wheel while Ham inserted himself in the passenger seat.

The car—it was a nondescript black sedan—hummed into traffic. Doc Savage headed south.

Ham began asking questions, “What on earth happened here?”

Doc Savage declared, “I have been tailing a number of the individuals involved since yesterday.”

“So you agreed with my suspicions?”

Doc nodded. “Certain details did not add up.”

“What did you discover?”

“To begin with, the girl who called herself Davey Lee is not who she said she was.”

“Then who was she?”

“That I have yet to determine,” said Doc, piloting the sedan through traffic. “But after she was abducted from Pennsylvania Station, she was taken to a certain house in a secluded neighborhood.”

“How did you know that?”

“Because I witnessed the kidnapping, and followed the taxicab that spirited her away.”

“Strange. I was there as well, and I did not notice you. Nor did Monk, apparently.”

Doc Savage said nothing to that. Despite his great size, he was highly skilled in the art of disguise, as well as possessing the ability to lurk about unnoticed, even by those as sharp-eyed as the alert barrister.

“The girl was being held under guard, but appeared to be safe. I followed one of the captors to this Old Sailors Home which, by the way, is a fake. There is no Old Sailors Home registered in Brooklyn. Evidently, the man calling himself Diamond and his gang set it up to discourage neighborhood curiosity during their occupation.”

“Peculiar thing to do,” mused Ham.

“Think of it as a kind of camouflage,” stated Doc. “How did you come to be here, Ham?”

“A taxi driver called headquarters, demanding to know if I was good for Monk’s fare. When he told me the address, I came straight away.”

“We did not acquit ourselves in our usual efficient manner,” remarked Doc.

Ham said in a determined voice, “No doubt we will make up for it when we rescue the girl.”

THE RESCUING of Davey Lee—or whatever her real name happened to be—did not exactly go according to plan.

Doc Savage cruised by the address, which was a modest, two-story cream clapboard home, with the traditional white picket fence. There was nothing unusual about it. Doc circled the block, driving past it twice, looking for signs of activity.

The cars which had fled the vicinity of the Old Sailors Home were not in evidence.

Doc said, “The one calling himself Diamond instructed his men to meet at a second location. It stands to reason that this would be it.”

Ham wondered, “Perhaps they have not yet arrived?”

“It is possible the police ran them down, although that was not my expectation,” allowed Doc.

“Why did you sic the police on them if you wanted to track the gang down yourself?”

Doc explained, “Time appeared to be of the essence, from what I have learned, and sending the police off on a wild chase was preferable to standing around answering their questions.”

“I see,” mused Ham, who did not exactly see at all. His high brow furrowed. Examining the remnants of his sword cane, he seemed disgusted with the trend of events thus far.

Parking around the corner from the cream-colored clapboard home, they hunkered down in their seats and Doc Savage once again brought out his handy pocket periscope and surveyed the dwelling after transforming it into a slim telescope.

Minutes passed, and the traffic moving along the street did not stop or even pause near the house under their surveillance.

“Why did you not rescue the girl if you knew she was here?” asked Ham at one point in the stakeout.

“Her role in this affair is unclear. And since the gang seems to be hiding in two separate dwellings, I thought it prudent to collect as much data as possible before making a move.”

“Something big is up?”

Doc nodded. “If not big, exceedingly mysterious. I have been eavesdropping on both portions of the gang while secreting myself in their respective basements. The fragmentary talk I overheard tonight leads me to believe that they are prepared to sail on an ocean vessel in just a few hours.”

“For what purpose?” asked Ham.

“The only thing I overheard was a cryptic phrase.”

“Yes?”

“They were talking about something they called ‘Satan’s Spine.’ ”

“Sounds devilish,” remarked Ham.

Doc Savage declined to reply to that. He continued to scrutinize the cream house. In the back seat, Monk Mayfair began snoring like a water buffalo. Ham Brooks took a silk handkerchief out of his breast pocket, and used it to squeeze Monk’s nose shut, closing off the awful snoring cacophony.

“He is going to have quite the headache when he awakens,” commented Ham.

After another twenty minutes dragged on by, Doc Savage opened his car door, and cautiously approached the house. Ham followed along, searching the immediate environment for any sign of lurking gunmen.

They were not challenged in any way, nor were they sniped at from the windows.

Then Doc Savage walked up to the front door, took a slim steel probe out of his vest pocket and, by jiggering it in the lock, defeated the mechanism.

The name on the mailbox was Kilroy. It meant nothing to either of them.

They entered cautiously, Ham Brooks jutting his machine pistol forward, Doc Savage ready for anything, but showing no weapon. He did not believe in them.

They made an efficient sweep of the house, but discovered no evidence.

“Dratted dead end,” fumed Ham.

Doc told him, “It is not beyond the realm of possibility that Diamond and his gang might yet show up. While we are waiting, a search of the place for clues is in order.”

Separating, they got to work on that.

The place had a bare minimum of furnishing, and not much in the way of personal items. They did find a bedroom that had a feminine touch to it, and Ham realized that this was where Davey Lee must have been kept in confinement.

Stripping the bed, Doc Savage discovered under the pillow a woman’s purse. The material was alligator skin, and when he opened the purse, Doc found that it was virtually empty except for a piece of paper crumpled up and stuffed into a side pocket.

“Women do not normally leave their purses behind,” observed Ham.

Removing the wad of paper, the bronze man unfolded it and saw that there was writing inscribed in pencil.

The note said:

I am being taken back to Louisiana by these horrid men. I pray that you find this note, and come to rescue me, for I fear for my life. Go to the northern part of Louisiana and look for the Sugar Hill Plantation, east of Shreveport. Start now. Or all may be lost.

“Jove!” exploded Ham. “That girl is in danger. We must start out for Shreveport at once!”

“The mysterious blonde is undoubtedly in danger,” returned Doc Savage, “but she has not been taken to Louisiana.”

“But the note says—”

“No time to explain,” rapped Doc Savage. “Even less time to waste. Come on.”

Chapter VII

THE NORTHERN STAR

WHEN MONK MAYFAIR awoke, he did not at first feel the pain at the back of his thick skull. His small eyes snapped open, looking momentarily unfocused. Blinking, he found himself staring at an unfamiliar ceiling. He sat up, looked around.

Only then did he become aware of a throbbing at both temples. Grabbing his blunt skull, he let out a low, anguished growl like a bulldog suffering from a hangover.

In this way, Monk discovered that he had a pounding headache.

The headache was of secondary importance, however, because the homely chemist immediately recognized his surroundings as the stateroom cabin of a ship of some sort.

Rolling off his bunk, Monk found his feet, but his wobbly knees knocked together alarmingly, and he immediately sat back down.

Monk grabbed his head again and gave out another groan, and the sound would have done credit to a disturbed bull.

“Where the heck am I?” he muttered to himself.

The homely chemist tried to remember the last thing that happened to him. His thoughts went to his shoulder blades, which still ached somewhat from being prodded by cold steel gun muzzles. Monk recalled being at the mercy of the man who called himself Raymond Lee, and that he had been on the point of being taken into the basement of a phony Old Sailors Home to be executed.

The basement door had exploded outward. After that, it was as if a cyclone had entered the house….

A vivid impression of fast-moving thunderbolt resembling Doc Savage charging about the house leaped into his mind. That was about all he could remember of the wild series of events that followed.

Monk, of course, knew nothing about having been blackjacked, except his searching fingers located a moist, sticky patch at the back of his head, where his rusty hair was short and bristly, and soon discovered what appeared to be some type of bandage.

The hairy chemist added two and two and decided, “Either Doc rescued me, or them guys changed their minds and hauled me off to this place, whatever it is.”

That Monk was on a ship seemed evident. Wrongdoers he had gone up against before sometimes executed wildly imaginative schemes. Just because he woke up in what appeared to be a stateroom did not make it so. For all Monk knew, this was the basement of that very same house, tricked out to look like a ship’s cabin for some peculiar reason.

Finding his feet again, Monk stumbled bowlegged to the door, which proved to be locked, as well as blocked by a dark curtain. There was a porthole beside it, but the thick glass was painted over, a wartime precaution Monk knew was calculated to reduce the number of visible lights on vessels operating in war zones—which constituted the entirety of the Atlantic Ocean these days. Digging into his pocket, he produced a key ring and employed the brassy teeth of one to scrape out a peephole. Peering out, the hairy chemist saw daylight and a forest of masts and cranes that made him think he was not in any basement, but tied up at a dock somewhere.

Monk tried the door, but it refused to open.

“Locked from the outside, dang it,” he mumbled to himself. “That’s gotta mean I’m somebody’s prisoner.”

Monk began wondering what happened to Doc Savage, his erstwhile rescuer. He tried pounding on the door, just to see what would happen.

Not long after, someone unlatched it. Much to the hairy chemist’s slack-jawed astonishment, Doc Savage and Ham Brooks entered.

“Doc!”

“LOWER your voice, Monk,” admonished the bronze man.

Ham slipped in, carefully shut the door, as Doc Savage asked, “How is your head feeling?”

“Like a shell burst in slow-motion,” complained Monk.

“You were bludgeoned,” Doc informed him.

“I figured as much,” said Monk. “Where the heck are we?”

“Investigating a vessel about to sail.” Doc Savage produced the note that had been written by the missing Davey Lee. “The men you discovered were holding Miss Lee at another location. We went there, but they had decamped. I found this message, apparently from Miss Lee.”

Monk read the message eagerly, and said, “We gotta head out to Shreveport!”

“Hold your horses,” said Doc. “That note is not what it seems to be.”

Monk frowned. “It reads plain as day. The girl’s father said she grabbed Davey and put her on a train.”

“I strongly doubt Miss Lee is on any train,” said Doc. “Read the letter again, and pay particular attention to the underlined words.”

Dropping his gaze, Monk read again, moving his lips, and muttered, “ ‘Northern’ and ‘start’ are underlined.”

“Actually,” corrected Doc, “only the first four letters of the word ‘start’ are underlined. The stressed words actually read
Northern Star
.”

“I don’t get it,” admitted Monk.

“Try harder,” suggested Ham.

Doc Savage said calmly, “Monk, did you not think it peculiar that a young woman waylaid you with the promise of a Louisiana vacation a day before you were to ship out to England to do important war work?”

“Well, I kinda figgered it was a coincidence,” said Monk, scratching his head.

“Convenient coincidence,” sniffed Ham.

Doc Savage continued, “What was the name of the ship on which you planned to take passage?”

Monk’s head was pounding, and he didn’t feel at all well. So he had to think about that a moment.

“
Northern
Star!
” he burst out. “Blazes! She’s sayin’ something about the
Northern
Star
.”

Doc Savage nodded, “That is the name of the vessel we are presently investigating.”

Ham Brooks took the note, read it with avid eyes, and his high forehead puckered.

“I am not so certain about this,” he mused. “Those are perfectly normal words to have underlined under the circumstances.”

Ham’s inveterate habit of disagreeing with the hairy chemist may have had more than a little to do with his sudden change of heart.

“A plant,” asserted Doc. “This note is a ruse to lure us to Shreveport—all of us. The initial plan was to get Monk to forego taking his sea voyage. But now that we are all involved, this Diamond fellow is attempting to shanghai us to Louisiana. But Miss Lee, having been forced to pen the decoy letter, wrote it in such a way that by underlining two words she was pointing us in the correct direction.”