"028 (B088) - The Roar Devil (1935-06) - Lester Dent" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

Doc Savage made no move to pass through the door. He stood well within the reception room, and his flaked-gold eyes roved. Most of their attention centered on the red pool on the floor. When he spoke, it was with a voice of quiet, controlled power, and his tone showed no emotion whatever. He might have been commenting on the ordinary weather.
"Red ink does not make an altogether convincing substitute for blood," he said.
The effect of that statement on the man on the corridor floor was instant and violent. He jerked back on his haunches. His hand, which had been near his coat, dived under that garment and came out with a blue revolver.
The fellow had skill with guns. His weapon lipped flame and powder noise when hardly clear of his coat. He came erect shooting with quick precision. His gun was a type which held five cartridges. He fired four of them. Then he stopped. His eyes seemed about to pop out of his head.
Doc Savage had not moved, nor showed any such surprise as might have been expected. Nor had he been harmed.
The bullets had stopped in mid-air in front of him. Three had flattened and bounced to the corridor floor. The fourth hung suspended, and from it radiated a spider web design which showed what had happened. There was a barrier of thick bulletproof plate glass inside the door.
"Hell!" gritted the gunman, and lunged forward as if to find a way around the protective plate.
Comparative gloom of the reception room made the glass wall almost indistinguishable, but the gun wielder found it with his hands, then lunged upward, hoping to find a space at the top. There was none. He kicked the glass and cursed.
Doc Savage advanced.
The gunman, frightened now, swore, whirled and ran down the corridor.
DOC did not pursue him immediately, but spun back to the large table which stood before the window. The inlaid top of this appeared innocent, but the mosaic pieces were cunning push buttons. He thumbed one of these.
When he whipped back into the corridor - circling the protective barrier of glass in the proper direction - the gunman was not in sight. He had not gone down the stairway, for that was blocked by a metal gate which was kept locked. He must have taken an elevator.
Doc Savage listened. Usually, sighing noises made by the swift-moving cables came from the elevator shafts. But now there was silence.
The bronze man ran down the stairway, let himself through the gate and continued his descent. On each floor, he examined the elevator doors and listened.
Four stories down, he heard a banging from one of the shafts. Some one in a cage was beating at the metal panels of the sliding doors. Even as the bronze man watched, the metal sheet bent, tore loose.
A fist of unbelievable hugeness delivered the panel a few more blows, then grasped the metal and tore it aside. A man crawled out of the elevator cage, which had stopped below center, so that the safety trip prevented the doors being opened.
The man would have weighed in excess of two hundred and fifty pounds, and yet somehow managed to seem gaunt. He had a long face which bore an expression of puritanical gloom. He looked at Doc Savage and seemed sad to the point of tears.
"What's going on?" he demanded in a voice something akin to the rumble of a disturbed bear in his den.
"Gentleman tried to shoot me, Renny," Doc Savage told him quietly. "He fled in an elevator. I pressed the button which cuts the current off all the elevator cages, stopping them, and now I am hunting the car which has the gunman in it."
"Holy cowl" Renny boomed gloomily.
"Renny" was Colonel John Renwick, world-famous engineer, one of Doc Savage's five assistants.
Renny's expression, as he followed Doc Savage down the stairway, was that of a man going to the funeral of his best friend. But it was a peculiar characteristic of Renny's that, the more gloomy he looked, the more pleased he was with events.
Nine floors down, Doc stopped.
"Listen!" he said.
Muffled profanity was coming out of an elevator shaft. It was the voice of the gun wielder.
"FORTUNATELY, the current went off when his cage was between floors," Doc Savage said. "He was trapped."
The sliding doors into the elevator shafts could be opened by a metal hook of a device, one of which was kept in a niche on each floor. Doc Savage got the doors apart. They could look down upon the grating which formed a part of the cage roof.
"Anaesthetic gas," Renny rumbled, and produced from an underarm holster a weapon which resembled an overgrown automatic pistol, fitted with a drum magazine. It was really a machine pistol capable of a tremendous rate of fire, a product of Doc Savage's inventive skill.
The pistol was carried under Renny's left arm, and under the right was a padded case which held extra ammunition drums, painted in various colors. Renny selected one marked with green paint.
"This one has slugs charged with a gas that'll make him unconscious for about half an hour," he boomed grimly.
He aimed at the grilled cage top. The machine pistol made a sound like a gigantic bullfiddle.
Twenty minutes later, they had the stocky would-be killer in the eighty-sixth floor study, and were watching him give signs of returning consciousness.
"Not a thing in his pockets," Renny rumbled. "You say you never saw the guy before, Doc? I know blamed well I never saw him. Why should he try to kill you?"
"That," Doc Savage replied, "is what we will try to find out."
The bronze man had brought from the laboratory an apparatus similar in appearance to those employed in hospitals for the administration of anaesthetics. Now, before the gunman entirely regained consciousness, he fitted the face piece upon the fellow's features and tuned various valves on the supply tanks.
Renny had seen the procedure before, and knew what it meant.
"Truth serum," he said.
"Administered in vaporized form," Doc Savage agreed. "The stuff seems to be more dependable, if used in that manner."
The stocky man did not regain consciousness, in the true sense of the word. He merely passed from the influence of the anaesthetic and came under the spell of the serum.
Doc Savage began to put questions. Some of the replies were coherent; others not entirely clear.
"Why did you try to kill me?" Doc demanded.
"Ten grand," the man mumbled. "Half of it in advance."
"Hired," Renny boomed. "And he got a good price, too. Only he didn't get away with it."
"Who hired you?" Doc asked.
"Telephone," the man droned, his true consciousness unaware of what he was doing. "Money - letter - my mail box."
"Who hired you?" Doc persisted.
"Roar Devil, they call him," said the prisoner.
Renny scratched his head with an enormous finger. "This sounds scatterbrained to me."
"Who hired you?" Doc repeated for the third time.
The man mumbled something they could not understand, but finished, "Roar Devil. Nobody knows more about the chief than that."