"058 (B055) - The Golden Peril (1937-12) - Harold Davis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

Doc picked himself up and looked at his aids. They were bruised a bit, but otherwise unhurt.
"The real police will now be here shortly. Stay here and explain to them," Doc instructed Long Tom. "Monk and Ham will come with me."
With swift strides, the bronze man led the way to his private, high-speed elevator.
THE HOTEL ROYALE, where Baron Vardon was stopping, was one of the more pretentious of Manhattan's hostelries. It ran more to the ornate than suited the average visitor, but it was always filled.
Monk and Ham automatically dropped back a few paces and separated as they strode through the lobby. That was a matter of habit, a practiced system. If trouble occurred, they were less vulnerable, more ready for effective action than if they were packed together.
Monk and Ham scrutinized faces closely, mentally catalogued types, ran experienced eyes up and down figures for suspicious bulges in their clothing.
Two men stood together at one side, hands thrust into their pockets. One spoke out of a corner of his mouth to the other. Both looked hard at Doc and his aids.
At the desk, a seedy, long-haired man argued violently with the hotel clerk. His shiny frock coat was green with age. Under an arm, he held a battered violin case. In a foreign accent that somehow sounded counterfeit, he loudly insisted that there must be some mail for him.
It seemed to Ham that the two shifty-eyed men in the corner glanced at him and at the violin case. But Ham couldn't be sure. It might be his imagination.
Doc had the baron's suite number. He didn't bother with the clerk, but went straight to the elevator.
"Twelve," he clipped. The lift rose.
Baron Vardon's suite was 1208. Doc Savage knocked softly on the door. There was no reply. He knocked again. The door yielded under the slight vibration.
Monk's bulgy muscles swelled under his coat. Ham swung his sword cane swiftly. Doc opened the door wide.
A dim table-lamp gave the only light. Curtains in the room had been drawn. But that table-lamp was sufficient.
Directly before them, on the floor, were a pair of expensively shod feet. Above the feet came well-creased trousers and a dinner jacket, then the face of Baron Vardon.
The diplomat was twisted in an unnatural position on his back. His lips were contorted into a grimace of horror.
But it was the neck that held the attention of the three who had walked into the room.
Upon that neck was the red outline of a hand. It seemed to be growing brighter every instant.
"The hand of death!" Ham gasped. "It has struck again!"
Chapter IV. INTO A TRAP
DOC stepped quickly past the body on the floor, leaped to a door at one side of the room. He flung it open and found only an empty bathroom. He looked at the room's one large window, pulled back the shades.
Outside was a narrow airshaft court, scarcely twenty feet square. Another door gave onto the bedroom of the suite. Apparently no one was there.
Monk waddled about the room like some huge anthropoid, sniffing on a trail. The hairy man's eyes lighted on a great wardrobe trunk in one corner of the room. It was a bigger trunk than he had ever seen before. He moved toward it.
And the trunk erupted!
From a horizontal slit near the top of the trunk, a long, thin muzzle was jabbed. It swept the entire room.
Br-r-r-r-r-r-r!
The machine gun roared in a staccato crescendo of death; .45 caliber slugs sliced through the room like a solid metal knife, just above waist height.
That terrific blast should have killed everyone in the room. It didn't. The killer within the trunk thought at first he was dreaming. That dream slowly turned into an awful nightmare.
Growling, long arms outstretched, Monk walked straight into the hail of lead like an avenging Juggernaut. Fingers that could bend a silver dollar double gripped the edges of the trunk. The muzzle of the gun swung squarely toward his stomach.
With a bellow of rage, Monk tore the top of the trunk open. A mean, ratty face was there. But there was a horror and disbelief on it, now. The killer forgot all about his Tommy gun. Here was a man who absorbed Tommy slugs as casually as he would take a shower!
The killer screamed, leaped from his little fortress. Red eyes darted back and forth. Doc and Ham were between him and the door. Monk took one step forward, a look on his face that would have made a tiger shrink.
The thug's voice ended in a gurgle. He ran blindly, crashed into a window. The sill struck him just above the knees. Before he could stop he had soared on out into space. A cry that was scarcely human came from his lips. That cry ended abruptly as he hit the bottom of the airshaft, twelve stories below.
There was a moment of silence. Then a low, grating voice broke in.
"I will shoot for the head, my friends," it said. "I know you wear union suits of chain metal that will defy machine-gun slugs. But the bones in your head are not that strong."
The three men whirled. There in the doorway crouched the musical-appearing fellow who had been shouting for his mail in the lobby downstairs.
There was no artistic expression on his face now. The wig of long hair was pushed askew on his forehead. A mirthless grin was on his face. A businesslike machine gun had emerged from the violin case.
That gun swung up, head high; a grimy finger tightened on the trigger.
And then Doc Savage moved. He moved like chain lightning. Like a bronze flash he dived across the room. His arms swept out.
The bronze man had been too far away to try and nail the gunner. He didn't try. His arms scooped up Ham and Monk, lifted each as if they were little children. In the same fraction of an instant he swung, head low, head away from the killer.
Br-r-r-r-r-r-r!
Slugs bounced off Doc's back as he covered the length of the room in two quick leaps. Crouched, holding his aids so their heads were out of the direct line of fire, he was safe for the moment from the deadly bullets.
But the room was small. It was an easy matter for the killer to maneuver into a better firing position.
And he did. But it didn't do him any good.
Without slackening his stride, his two aids held firmly, Doc Savage leaped through the window. On the concrete, far below them, lay the crushed body of the first killer.
THE homely face of Monk wore an expression of blissful unconcern as he felt himself catapulted into the airshaft. Ham, likewise looked as if he were thinking about some abstruse point of law that he might argue before the Supreme Court. Both of Doc's hands were occupied holding Monk and Ham. He doubled up like a contortionist in the air. His teeth closed on a tiny button on his vest. Then his head snapped erect. There was a swish, a sudden tugging, and their plunging drop was checked to a gentle fall.
Monk looked up above them critically. It was the first time he had seen this experiment. He had often thought of the possibilities of a special parachute built for an airshaft. There was no reason, he had figured, why one of the proper size and shape couldn't be just as effective in a short drop as the plunger in a pump. There was little space for the fugitive air to escape.
But Monk had only thought about such a parachute. It had remained for Doc Savage to construct one.
They drifted gently to the bottom. The gangster up above could have shot them during the last few seconds of the fall. But when he first looked out the window, he was too amazed to move. By the time he poked his gun over the sill, there was nothing but an expanse of silk for a target.
Doc and his aids on arriving at the bottom dived through a doorway into the cellar of the hotel.
"That parachute was good, but I don't think you gave it a real test, Doc," Monk argued as they reached the street.