"071 (B066) - Mad Mesa (1939-01) - Lester Dent" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

"Why, Seedy used to belong to your gang, Hondo. Don't you remember? He double-crossed you, and you've been promising to croak him when you saw him."
Tom Idle swallowed.
"Croak him? You mean kill him?"
"Sure," said the black-gloved man calmly.
"Am IЧam I the kind of a man who would kill Seedy Smith?" Tom Idle asked, feeling strange.
The black-gloved man laughed harshly.
"You're Hondo Weatherbee," he said. "You'd do anything!"
TOM IDLE looked at the speedometer, and got such a shock that he decided not to do it again. The needle was kicking close to a hundred. The car felt as if it were a skyrocket, running on the earth only part of the time. They had left the city behind and were now climbing mountains, traversing the first of what promised to be a series of dizzy curves from which sheer precipices fell hundreds, in some places thousands, of feet.
"Not so fast!" Tom Idle said hoarsely.
The black-gloved man stared at him in surprise.
"What the hell, Hondo? It ain't like you to be made jittery by a little speed."
Tom Idle didn't think it safe to startle the man by saying he was not Hondo Weatherbee. Not at the speed they were traveling, and on a road like this.
Clutching the door of the speeding car, Tom Idle examined his companion. The fellow had a long, well-stuffed body that was remindful of a number of large sausages. His face was distinctly uninviting. It was evil. The mouth was vicious, the nose thin, the ears pointed, the eyes small and discolored, like bird eggs that hadn't hatched. He wore his black gloves, on both hands.
This unsavory personage was in turn eying Tom Idle at such times as he was not busy wheeling the thunderbolt of a car around awful mountain curves.
"There's something strange about you, Hondo," he said.
Tom Idle thought of a way in which he might perhaps get a clue to what had happened to him without startling this stranger.
"I must have got a bump on the head," Tom Idle said, untruthfully.
"So that was it!"
Deciding the man seemed satisfied with the explanation, Tom Idle ventured, "You say I went into that park two hours ago with a bottle?"
"Sure," the black-gloved man said. "Don't you remember that."
"I don't recall it. What was in the bottle?"
"The stuff you got from a nut chemist."
"What kind of stuff?"
"You didn't tell me, Hondo."
"Who was the chemist I got the bottle from?"
"WellЧhell, you never told me that, neither. It was a big secret."
Tom Idle felt defeated and desperate. More and more he was being gripped by the feeling that something frightful, and something he couldn't possibly prevent, was happening to him.
"Didn't I tell you anything at all?" he asked wildly.
The black-gloved man grimaced in a puzzled way. "You talked like you were drunk."
"What did I say?"
"Something about if you could only find a bum asleep in the park, your troubles would be over." The man gave Tom Idle a blank look and added, "Damn it, Hondo, I'll never forget your exact words, just before you walked into that park with the bottle."
Tom Idle shuddered. "What were they?"
"'If I can find a bum asleep in the park, the cops will never get their hands on the brain of Hondo Weatherbee!' That's exactly what you said, Hondo."
THE touring car continued its headlong speed. The engine must have special power, because the steep grades did not seem to bother it. They had climbed so high now that the air was already much cooler, and the clouds, the great clouds that seemed like white rabbits, were close overhead.
Tom Idle sat so tensely that every muscle in his body seemed to ache. He was trying to make his mind grasp the situation. It was his mind. But his bodyЧand his clothingЧwere the property of an outlaw named Hondo Weatherbee. His black-gloved companion apparently belonged to a bandit gang ruled by Hondo Weatherbee. And the bum, Seedy Smith, had been a man whom Hondo Weatherbee had promised to kill. And Skookum, the lunchroom man, and Officer Sam Stevens, had both known Hondo Weatherbee by sight, and had tried to capture him. Tom Idle took his head in his hands. It was too impossible to believe!
A violent start by his companion aroused him. Tom Idle realized the car had slowed, and that they were traversing a series of terrible curves.
The black-gloved man wiped his forehead.
"That one was close!" he croaked.
"What's wrong?" Tom Idle gasped.
"Cops!"
"Huh?"
"They're after us. Whatcha think we been drivin' like a bat for? They've got high-powered rifles. They're shooting at us."
"Police shooting at us?"
"Look back, if you don't believe me!"
Tom Idle was turning to look back when the inside of his head seemed to explode in a flood of blacknessЧand the blackness, spreading, washed completely through his body until all of him, mind and flesh alike, was composed of nothing but darkness, empty and still.
Chapter III. THE FINGERPRINTS
THE penitentiary had high stone walls, and they were gray. The summer sun beat down on the place; hot desert winds blew across it and heated the interior like a furnace. In the winter, the same winds were as cold as solid ice, and refrigerated the place thoroughly. The penitentiary had a reputation as being a place of which to steer clearЧthe kind of a reputation a penitentiary should haveЧin spite of the fact that it was modern, and had a warden who was perfectly fair to every inmate.
There was a cell block to itself where the desperate criminals were confined. This was isolated. The cells were bare. No luxuries were allowed. There were no windows, but plenty of light came through the cell doors. There were great frosted windows across the corridor, and light from these fell through the cell doors and cast bar-checked shadows across the cell floors.
It was the shadows of these steel bars which Tom Idle saw when he regained consciousness.
He had the sensation of something being wrong about the way he regained consciousness. Back in Missouri, he had once fallen out of a tree while trying to twist an opossum out of a hole with a forked stick, and it had knocked him senseless. He recalled how he had felt when he regained consciousness. This awakening was different. He felt as though he had been ill for a long time. But then, everything that had happened had been different.