"078 (B078) - The Crimson Serpent (1939-08) - Harold Davis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

They both leaped for the girl at the same time. Monk was a trifle closer. Ham moved slightly faster. Consequently Ham smashed into Monk. They both went down.
Consuelo Manresa leaped back, her large, dark eyes flashing.
"Peegs!" she shrilled. "Madmen!"
A small gun came to one of her exquisitely manicured hands. She backed swiftly toward the door behind her.
Monk and Ham tried to get up.
Pf-f-f-t.
The small gun made a hissing sound and lead whistled over their heads. They remained still.
"I will not deal with a man gorilla and a gigolo who both are mad!" the girl cried. She slammed the door behind her.
It was only seconds before Monk and Ham got that door open again. The girl had vanished. That wasn't so hard to explain. There was a stairway nearby. Once there, she could go either up or down, could find a hiding place in a score of places.
Evidently, she did. She couldn't be found.
"She was right when she called you a gorilla!" Ham raged futilely. "If you hadn't got in my way, I would have had her."
Monk had regained some of his customary good humor. Seeing Ham so upset was partly responsible for that. It wasn't often the dapper lawyer got that way.
"Yeah, but I notice she was lookin' at you, not me, when she yelled 'peeg,'" Monk grunted.
THE bickering continued for some time. Neither Monk nor Ham would have admitted it, but it helped keep them from thinking of big Renny. They didn't like to show emotion.
They didn't mention the girl again either. That one small, dark-tressed Spanish girl could escape from the view of them so easily was not a memory they could view with much pride. They had a secret suspicion she was laughing at both of them.
But she wasn't laughing. She made her way from the office building fast enough, went to a large hotel. There she put in a long-distance call. A thin furrow creased her high forehead at the message she received.
Then she packed. Pretty girls usually carry a large assortment of clothes with them. This one, quite evidently, was different. She packed all her belongings into one small bag. After that she checked out of the hotel and got into a taxicab.
She was still in the cab when she saw Monk and Ham get out in front of a dilapidated building on the water front. The sign on the warehouse read "Hidalgo Trading Co.," but it really belonged to Doc Savage; in fact, it housed his planes, dirigible, yacht and even a submarine.
It was still dark and the girl's cab was parked some distance from the front of the building. Monk and Ham failed to notice it at all.
Not long afterward, a silver shape rose slowly over the Hudson and pointed its nose west.
The girl nodded with satisfaction and spoke to her driver. She held a large bill in her hand.
The driver made a record trip to the Newark airport. The girl produced more large bills. When a private plane took off a few minutes later, she was aboard. The plane took out after the dirigible.
An alert newspaperman, with an eye for beauty, tried to learn who the girl was, and why she had hired a private plane. All he could find out was her name. He was to recall that name later, but at the time the world at large had not yet heard of the horror that had gripped the Arkansas swampland.
Chapter V. AN UNEXPECTED DISCOVERY
MONK and Ham loafed along in the dirigible on their way to Chicago. They wanted Doc to get a little sleep before they started on the next lap of their trip.
Doc wasn't asleep. The bronze man had been busy constantly after receiving the message from his aides. He made many long-distance calls. Little information resulted.
Stories of engineers on the flood project merely confirmed what Monk and Ham had been told. Something mysterious and deadly was loose in the swamp. Renny had been killed; another engineer, Bill Craig, had disappeared, probably, one excited witness declared, carried away by the strange thing that made the sound of clanking metal.
Doc asked that as little publicity as possible be given the occurrence. Then he himself called a newspaper office. He didn't, however, talk about what had happened. His conversation was on an entirely different topic.
It was about this time that the ring he wore began to act peculiarly.
The ring itself was uncommon. It appeared of some rare blue stone. Occasionally it seemed to show a thread of dancing light. Right now that light was more than a thread, it seemed to be a whirling disk beneath the blue.
Doc lifted the telephone receiver, and placed another call. Then he set the receiver silently on the table and went to the door. A moment later he drifted shadowlike down the hallway.
At an adjoining doorway he stopped and listened. No sound came from within.
A small piece of metal came to the bronze man's hand. He picked the lock on the door silently. Then he leaped inside, flashed on the lights.
The room was empty.
Doc whirled, reached down to the floor. His fingers caught a tiny, almost invisible wire. The wire led out the door, on down the hall. It did not lead far. It had been broken, evidently by a sharp jerk. The other end had vanished.
The bronze man showed no emotion. There was a complicated listening device in the room adjoining his. It was of the type which permitted a listener to pick up telephone conversations even without direct contact with the telephone wires.
The blue ring on Doc's finger had shown that such a device was in use. The ring, extremely sensitive to electrical circuits when boosted by coils, had flashed the warning the bronze man had seen.
But whoever had been seeking to listen in on Doc also had been shrewd. The thin wire leading from the room could have led almost any place. With a pair of headphones at the other end, a spy could eavesdrop in comparative safety.
Doc's rush to the other room evidently had been seen. The wire had been broken at once, destroying any link to the spy.
The bronze man got the listening device and returned to his own suite. He did not appear perturbed. There were several fingerprints on the case that contained the listening device. Doc brushed powder over them, inspected them through a glass.
He did not need a check to identify those prints. He knew them as well as he knew his own.
THERE was no light in the hotel room directly across the street from Doc's suite. But two men were there. One had been peering through the window, using a pair of high-powered binoculars.
"He spotted it," he said. There was relief in his voice.
"I told yuh that guy was smart," said his companion.
The man with the binoculars placed them on a table, then drew down the blinds and turned on the lights. He was a small man, nattily dressed. He had thin features, and the hat he wore had a small feather in its band.
"Just so he ain't too smart!" he said.
The other grinned. He was bigger, and looked more like a night-club bouncer, with cauliflowered ears and a battered nose.
"No guy would be smart enough to figger this one out." he chuckled.
Noise came faintly from an adjoining bedroom. A gun leaped to the hand of the thin-faced man. His companion's big shoulders hunched.
Both spun, approached the door cautiously. The big man took a key from his pocket, unlocked the door, then jumped back. Then the thin-faced man laughed.