Doc Savage - Terror and the Lonely Widow Part 1

Terror And The Lonely Widow.

A Doc Savage Adventure.

by Kenneth Robeson.

Chapter I.

THE man stumbled backward wildly, upsetting two chairs and a water carafe, colliding with a waiter, sending the waiter staggering, and ending up against the brick wall of the Park-Ritz. He hit the wall quite hard. He pressed against the wall tightly, as if trying to distribute himself into the joints between the bricks. His hands came up, instinctively, to his face, and remained clamped there. The color of his face changed progressively from sunburned toast-brown to hazel to fawn to buff to straw-yellow. The straw-yellow was about as near corpse-gray as his very tanned skin could turn.

Still holding his hands on his face, he looked upward. His eyes searched the tall front facade of the hotel ... Presently he began brushing his face and the front of his suit with both hands, brushing off the earth that had been in the flower box. A bit of the earth had lodged in the corner of his mouth and it dissolved and made a small taste of mud.

After the flower-box fell, for a few jolted seconds, the crowded sidewalk cafe was unbelievably silent.

The waiter caught himself and froze, eyes fixed on the table.

The flower box, before it had split on impact, had been about four feet long, eighteen inches wide and twelve inches deep. Filled with earth and plants petunias, wandering-jew it had weighed about three hundred pounds. Enough to cave a skull. It had come down without the slightest warning. It had split, and in turn split the table. It had scattered earth, silverware, dish fragments, scrambled eggs, coffee indiscriminately. It had missed the man by about three feet, in fact, crashing into the table and into the breakfast he was eating.

The man he was still brushing earth off himself was about five feet ten, angular, hard-boiled. Aroundforty. There was a full ridged muscularity around his mouth which had the effect from a distance of giving him very thick lips, although actually his lips were as thin as a dog's lips. There was the same muscularity around the eyes, and the eyes were very pale blue, just enough blue in them to show coloring. His blue pin-stripe suit was new and expensive, and he wore it with the air of one to whom such splendor was unaccustomed.

The waiter unhooked himself from his shocked fright. He asked, "Are you hurt, sir?"

The man did not answer. He looked up at the hotel front again. Without speaking, without troubling to pick up his hat, which still stood on the chair beside the shattered table where he had placed it before three hundred pounds of flower-box fell, the man walked away. He left the hat there, some loose dirt sprinkled on brim and crown.

He crossed the street, turned and stood looking for some time at the hotel front.

"d.a.m.n them!" he said bitterly.

He went at once to his hotel, where he packed a blond leather suitcase, also new, with the sort of belongings that men buy when they visit the city after a long absence. A new very expensive electric razor, for example. The sort an out-of-the-way place wouldn't t be likely to stock. He wore a grim expression throughout his packing.

He didn't check out after all. He scowled at the telephone, and went over and scowled out of the window, and turned his displeasure again on the telephone. But he did not check out.

He seemed to have decided that the flower- box might, after all, have been an accident.

He went out to get a second breakfast. He hadn't had a chance to eat the first one.

He turned south on Seventh Avenue and walked about sixty yards and a taxicab turned in from the street, hurdled the curbing and missed-by about a foot- plastering him against the wall of a building. The cab hit quite hard, but in a calculated sort of way hard enough to have killed him (squashing him from the waist down) but not hard enough to injure the driver so that he could not run. In fact, the driver was instantly out of the cab and running. The driver's collar was turned up, his hat was low, and apparently he had smeared grease or burned cork on his face to soil it and was holding something about the size of small potatoes in his cheeks to distort his features into unrecognizability. The driver popped around the corner.

Now there was no doubt about it.

The man didn't bother about his breakfast after all. He went back to the hotel. He got on the telephone.

"This is Mr. Worrik, in Room 1204," he explained. "I'm checking out. Will you send the porter?"

He didn't really need the porter, but he knew it was customary to have one when you checked out-the hotel, he suspected, liked to make sure you weren't packing the thing off with you. Moreover he wanted the porter to bear witness that he had taken a cab to Grand Central.

To make sure of the porter as a witness, he said, "Will you get me a taxi to Grand Central Station?"

He did not leave any more of a trail than that. He was sure it wasn't necessary. Whoever was shadowing him was doing it adeptly-he had not, at any time, seen anyone suspicious. Except, of course, the running cab driver.He let the taxi roll several blocks south and east, then paid the driver suddenly, alighted and doubled into a subway. He rode, successively, that subway, another one uptown, a street-car, a cab, another subway, a bus. His last subway trip took him uptown to the section of middle-cla.s.s hotels west of Central Park.

He registered in one of these.

He wanted to use the telephone. He debated using it for some time. Finally, he didn't. Too risky. He didn't think anyone could possibly have traced him during the last hour, but he didn't dare take the chance. He began sweating it out.

THE room was not very neat. Outwardly the hotel had a certain crispness, and certainly it did not look shabby, but the rooms were not well-kept. The best explanation was that the management didn't know the war was over. They were trying to cash in, get by on the skimpy service of wartime. The man sat on the bed for a while and contemplated the threadbare carpet. He realized he was perspiring. He washed his hands and face in the bathroom.

"Cut it out, stop being nervous," he said to himself. "n.o.body could have followed you here."

The argument did not have much effect. He tried a drink, with no better results. Not too stiff a drink, because he was afraid of impairing his wits, every bit of which he might need.

He remembered, with horror, that he had forgotten to register under an a.s.sumed name. He had signed, Farrar Worrik. Without thinking. Not once, after taking all those elaborate precautions, had it entered his head to use a phony name. He shivered violently. The oversight frightened him.

He did not, he realized, even have the initials FW on his bag or on anything else. The error, the more he thought of it, became the source of considerable horror. He wondered how many Worriks there were in New York City, and got out the telephone directory-his room only had the Manhattan volume and the red book-to see. The Worriks were few enough to worry him...Suddenly he tried to figure out why the scant number of Worriks in the phone directory should worry him, and couldn't see any good reason.

The jitters.

"Boy, I've got them," he grumbled.

He stood up and went to the window to stare out sourly.

The bullet came in a moment later. It hit a trifle a foot, perhaps over his head and a bit to the right. It made a considerable racket. A small teaspoonful of gla.s.s sprayed out and two tiny cuts appeared magically on his face, and two large healthy red drops of blood, like fine rubies, gathered quickly. Across the room, a little plaster trickled down the wall from the spot where the bullet had hit. A moment later, the bullet itself fell to the floor, went thud-thud-thud lightly across the carpet. It had hardly penetrated the plaster, which was remarkable.

The man had never been shot at before.

But he knew what to do. Drop.

THE rifle was a calibre .220 Swift, bolt action, with a side-mounted scope. Doc Savage kept it cradled to his cheek for some moments after he had fired, not because he expected to shoot again, but because the telescopic sight gave him a better view of the hotel room window. It was about a block distant.

Presently Monk Mayfair said, "He dropped awful quick.""He took his time," Ham Brooks said. It was Ham's policy to disagree with almost anything Monk said and condemn almost anything Monk did.

Doc Savage made no comment. But he did take his eye away from the scope and lower the rifle. He moved a little back into the room, confident that this would make him unnoticeable to the man in the distant hotel room.

"Doc," Monk said.

"Yes?"

"You think he'll make a break right away?"

"There's a chance he might, although he has been rather methodical in his other actions. Seems to take time to think out each move. However, he might make a fast break this time. You and Ham had better get on the job."

"You think he's ripe to pick?"

"I don't know. We'll have to take him now, though. If we try to keep this up, we re sure to lose him."

"Grab him, then?"

"Yes."

Monk said to Ham Brooks, "Come on, you well-dressed shyster," and went out. Ham followed him.

Doc Savage continued to watch the distant window, but cased the rifle while he was doing this. He was a very large man, but not in an obese sense; there was a fluid tenseness about his movements that fitted a much smaller man, or a quick animal. He was a remarkably impressive figure, handsome without prettiness, darkly bronzed skin, and eyes that were like pools of flake gold always stirred by tiny winds.

The rifle case was black leather, plush-lined, and had compartments for scope, cleaning tools, cartridges.

He placed the rifle in the case with care. It was his favorite rifle.

He placed the case at his feet, glanced at the telephone, returned his gaze to the distant window. He had seen nothing. No movement.

His manner was sober, intent, serious. This wasn't just his manner of the moment. It was his habitual tone.

Something of a sobersides.

But the power-vitality, force, a hypnotic personal magnetism-of the man was an over-whelming thing to strangers. And not only strangers; his aides, the men who had worked closely with him for some years, like Monk Mayfair and Ham Brooks, had never outgrown the same feeling of omnipotence which the big bronze man gave them. There was nothing phony about this hypnotic effect he produced. It was quite a real effect, and did not advertise anything he could not deliver. There was very little of the average about his appearance. There was very little that was average, Monk and Ham would have readily testified, about the man.

Monk and Ham considered Doc Savage a freak. It was entirely unnatural for one man to be such a combination of mental genius, physical might and scientific wizard. It was quite unreasonable. They accepted it, though, and understood it, because they knew his background, knew about the completely abnormal, but scientific, training he had undergone from the cradle to early manhood. They even suspected that Doc's father-his mother had died very early must have had a screw-loose to conceiveand execute such an up bringing. As a whole, in the opinion of his aides, the bronze man had survived his upbringing fairly well. That is, he was a human as they could reasonably expect. He was a little too moral for their comfort sometimes. He did not go in very heavily for humor, but he tolerated it. He was, they suspected, scared of women. They knew he was utterly convinced that he couldn't tell with the slightest shade of accuracy what a female mind was thinking, or what it would do next.

His aides were probably the best advertis.e.m.e.nt of his amazing ability to grip people and hold them to him. The aides, five of them, were a collection of genius themselves. They were also, to various shades, screwb.a.l.l.s. Genius is supposed to be eccentric, and they were that. They would have driven an average intelligence mad, but no average intelligence could have held them together in the sort of a.s.sociation they had-devoted to the Galahadian theme of righting wrongs and punishing evildoers in the far corners of the earth. This was, really, their profession. Their other professions-lawyer, chemist, archaeologist, engineer, electrical researchist-had become sidelines long ago. This was all unorthodox, unusual. But it had a simple explanation.

Adventure.

They liked excitement. Excitement was the thread, together with Doc Savage's amazing qualities, which had tied them together in a unit which didn't always function in expected ways, but functioned well.

Doc Savage, still watching the window, was worried. There was a chance his bullet had actually hit the man. He had seen the hole in the window, exactly where he aimed to frighten the man. But there was the chance that some freak accident could have occurred. He shivered. The consequences of such an accident-the death of the man-would be blood-curdling. The least consequence of all would be the death of the man itself.

He wrenched upright when the telephone rang.

It was Monk.

"We got him," Monk said.

"Where?"

"On the fire escape. You know them fire hoses they have rolled up in boxes in hotel hallways? He had one of the hoses and was trying to la.s.so a chimney on the next building so he could get away across the rooftops. He might have made it, too."

"How scared is he?"

"I'd call his condition satisfactory."

"Does he suspect we dropped the flowerbox?"

"He ain't said so."

"Is Ham there?"

"Yeah."

"With him?"

"Uh-huh."

"Better have Ham get out of sight. He may recognize Ham as the fellow who was driving the taxi whichhe thinks-we hope-almost got him."

"Okay."

"You think the fellow is scared?"

"If he isn't," Monk said, "I'll never see a better imitation."

"What floor are you on?"

"Seventh."

"I'll be over."

Chapter II.

THE hotel hall carpet was thin and the color of a mouse and the flooring felt hard under it. Doc Savage reached it in an elevator that whimpered like a puppy, and walked toward the silhouettes of two men, Monk and the other man, who were cut cleanly against the window at the end of the hall.

Monk grinned amiably and said, "I had him roll up the fire hose and put it back. Might hurt the hotel people's feelings if he left their hose scattered over the floor."

The other man shuddered violently, as if the remark had terrified him. Which it probably had. Monk Mayfair was a short, wide man whose arms were somewhat longer than his legs, whose looks were baby-frightening, who was covered with reddish bristling hair, and who would not have to be encountered in a very dark spot to be mistaken for a dwarf edition of King Kong. Monk normally looked quite pleasant. But when he wished, he could put on an expression that would crack rocks.

Doc Savage addressed the prisoner. "You are Worrik?"

The man hesitated, thought it over, decided not to answer.

"Do you know who we are?" Doc asked.

No answer.

Monk said, "I don't think he knows us."

"No, probably not," Doc agreed. "There is no reason why he should, not having seen us before, and having had no idea, quite possibly, that we were involved in the matter."

The man was watching Doc. The lumpy muscularity around the man's mouth had the effect of enabling him to look about twice as frightened, or twice as angry, or about twice any other emotion, as he was.

He licked his lips with a quick, terrified whip of his tongue.