Doors of the Night Part 10

"I was only waiting for your friends to go, Bundy," she said coolly.

The revolver sagged a little in Billy Kane's hand. He could not see her face very well, the single incandescent dangling from the ceiling was miserably inadequate, but dark eyes flashed at him out of an oval face, and the chin thrown up gave a glimpse of the contour of a full throat, ivory white-and all this was merged in the background of a slender figure clothed and cloaked in some dark material, unrelieved by a single vistage of color.

She spoke again.

"I don't think you are quite as badly hurt as you pretend, Bundy," she said, with a sort of icy composure. "You were out last night when I came here, and if you could prowl around the streets, I think perhaps you could manage now to get from the bed over to the door there and back again without doing yourself any serious injury. The door has been unlocked since Red Vallon went out, and it might be safer-locked."

Billy Kane did not answer her. He got up, crossed to the door, locked it, and, returning, sat down on the edge of the bed. She had not moved from her position near the far end of the room. He became conscious that he was still holding his revolver in his hand, and he thrust the weapon quietly now into his pocket. A grim smile came and hovered on his lips.

This complication, another of the ramifications of his stolen ident.i.ty, he did not understand at all-except that it promised him no good. She was the author of last night's note-she had just said as much-and the wording of that note was not rea.s.suring as to her att.i.tude toward him, nor was the mockery in her laugh, nor was the self-contained, almost contemptuous note of command with which she had just spoken. Who was she? What was she to the Rat, that she knew the secret of that underground tunnel, and the secret of that door?

He jerked his hand toward the chair Red Vallon had vacated.

"Sit down, won't you?" There was a tingle of irony in his voice. His invitation was at least safe ground.

She came forward toward the table, a subtle, supple grace in her movements. Subconsciously he noted that she made no sound as she crossed the room. She was like a cat-but a very beautiful cat. He could see her face better now. The eyes were hard and unfriendly, but they were great, brown, steady eyes of unfathomable depths.

She leaned against the table.

"I prefer to stand." There was a challenge in her tones. "What I have to say will not take long."

Billy Kane waited. The initiative was with her. He meant it to remain so. Her small white hand, ungloved, clenched suddenly at her side until its knuckles stood out like little chalky k.n.o.bs.

"You look sleeker about the face, clearer about the eyes-you beast!"

There was a studied deliberation in her voice that gave the words the sting of a curling whip lash. "Perhaps you've been--"

"You were listening there at the door?" suggested Billy Kane imperturbably, as he reached into his pocket for a cigarette.

There was a mocking little lift to her shoulders.

"Of course! That is what I came for. I followed Red Vallon here. I supposed that you would meet at the old place, now that you are back; but since you are an invalid--" Again the shoulders lifted.

"I am afraid it hardly paid you for the trouble-to listen," Billy Kane murmured caustically. "I'm sorry! I rather fancied I saw the door move, and you see, my illness has affected my voice, and at times I can scarcely speak above a whisper, otherwise you might have overheard--"

"I overheard enough!" She took a sudden step toward him. Her eyes were flashing now; there was a flush, angry red, mounting from the white throat, suffusing her cheeks. She raised her clenched hands. "You will die with insolence and bravado on your lips, I believe!" she cried out pa.s.sionately. "How I _hate_ you! But I've got you-like _that_"-she flung out an arm toward him, and the small clenched hand opened and then closed again, slowly, as though in its grip it were remorselessly crushing and exterminating some abhorrent thing. And then her hand was raised again, and was brushed across her eyes, and a little quiver ran through her form, and she spoke more calmly. "I overheard enough. I thought this Merxler affair would be worked to-night, and I came to tell you that you are to stop it. I came to tell you to-_remember_! I promise, before G.o.d, that if there is murder done to-night you will be in the hands of the police within an hour. And it's not very far from the Tombs to the death chair in Sing Sing-Bundy Morgan."

Billy Kane's eyes were hidden by drooped lids. His eyes were studying with curious abstraction the pattern of the faded, greasy, threadbare strip of carpet on the floor beside the bed. Murder! The word had come with a shock that for a moment unnerved him. He had not a.s.sociated anything that Red Vallon or Karlin had said with murder. They had spoken so lightly, referred to it in so humdrum a way. Murder! There was something ghastly in that lightness now. A tightness came to his lips, a horror was creeping into his soul. He was only on the verge of things, of hidden and abominable things, here in this shadow land, this night land of skulking shapes, this sordid realm of the underworld. He pulled himself together. He was the Rat-he had a part to play. He was conscious that those brown, fearless eyes were fixed on him contemptuously.

"What have I to do with it?" he muttered sullenly.

"Do with it! _You!_" Her voice rose, as though suddenly out of control.

"You dare ask that! You, with your devil's brains-you, who planned it all before you went away!"

The cigarette that he had lighted had gone out. He sucked at it, circling it around his lips. He was fencing now with unb.u.t.toned foils.

"Well, you've said it!" There was a snarl creeping into his voice. "I've been away. I don't know what they've done since I've been away."

"You know about the will, and the sealed envelope in Merxler's safe, and you know the combination to the safe," she said levelly. "And that's all you need to know to stop this from going any further."

He laughed out shortly.

"And suppose I don't know the combination! You don't think I can carry a thing like that in my head forever, do you?"

"No," she said. She smiled curiously, and one hand slipped into the bodice of her dress. "I don't think you ever did memorize that combination. But perhaps you will recognize it again-the original in your own handwriting." She held up a crumpled piece of paper before him, then tossed it on the table.

"Where did you get that?" he demanded roughly.

Her shoulders lifted mockingly again.

"There are other secrets in this room besides that door and the tunnel to the shed, aren't there-Bundy?"

He eyed her now for a long minute, biting openly at his lip, his face twisted in a well-simulated ugly scowl.

"So, I'm to queer this game, am I?" he snarled suddenly. "And if I'm caught-as a snitch-they'll tear me to pieces!"

She leaned a little forward from the table, a tense, lithe thing, and her voice came low with pa.s.sion:

"We're wasting time-and you've none to lose. We've gone over this ground before, haven't we? It's the one chance you have-to save yourself. Some day you won't be able to save yourself. Some day the reckoning will come; but you will always have the _hope_ that it won't, and that you will always succeed in staving it off each time as you have in the past.

But until that day does come the only chance you have for life is to pit your wits against the fiends like yourself that are around you. For what you have done there is no atonement-only punishment. I mean you to live in suspense, but even while that suspense lasts you will pull apart and unravel your devil's work as fast as you knit it together. You have a chance that way! When the end comes and they get you, you know how the underworld will pay-but there is the chance-that is what holds you-and with the alternative-the police-there is no chance."

She was breathing hard. She leaned back against the table, her hands gripped tightly at its edge.

For a moment there was silence in the room. Billy Kane's mind was groping blindly now, as in some utter darkness. In some way, for there was no question of the genuineness of her self-a.s.surance, her very presence here in seemingly placing herself in the Rat's power proved that she held the Rat, and the Rat's life and liberty in the hollow of her hand, at her beck and call. How? What was the secret of the power she possessed over him? He lighted a match nonchalantly, and, as he applied the flame to the half-burned cigarette he lifted his eyes to her through the blue haze of smoke that he blew negligently in her direction.

"Sometimes," he said in a low, menacing tone, "people, even women, who grow troublesome, have been known in this neighborhood-to disappear."

She laughed sharply.

"You have no time to waste in foolish words!" she warned him curtly.

"You know the consequences of my-disappearance. You are at liberty to take those consequences any time you choose. But you do not like them, do you-Bundy?" She moved suddenly across the room, back to the secret door through which she had entered. "I am going now," she said steadily.

"If there is murder to-night, or if any part of that plan goes through-_remember!_"

X-THE PIECES OF A PUZZLE

Billy Kane made no effort to stop her, as she closed the door silently behind her. She was gone. The minutes pa.s.sed, and he still sat there on the side of the bed, his eyes mechanically fixed on the spot, an innocent blank wall now, where she had disappeared. His face, hard and set at first, grew harder. What was he to do? There seemed to yawn before him, to have opened at his feet an abyss, bottomless, pitiless, and he tottered on the brink of it, and unseen hands reached up and s.n.a.t.c.hed at him to drag him from the narrow ledge that was all that was left to him of safety. What was he to do? To go on? Every hour that he clung to this role of the Rat held a surer promise, not only of desperate peril to himself, but a promise that he would find himself launched in a sea of crime, of shuddering things, of murder, of blood, of sordid viciousness, of hate. In G.o.d's name, who was this Rat, who in this hole here with its secret opening and its gnawed tunnel to the daylight made the pseudonym so apt!

He clenched his hands suddenly, and rising to his feet began to pace the room. He began to see now what, strangely enough, though it should have been plainly obvious all through that day, he had not seen until she, this unknown, mysterious woman, had, herself unconscious of it, made him see. Her power over the Rat to which he was subject in his a.s.sumed character, did not, in the final a.n.a.lysis, whatever the source of that power might be, materially affect the situation. It was not her threat that was the driving force that must actuate him. There was another and a far greater force which he could neither ignore nor escape. He saw that now. If the foreknowledge of proposed crime came to him, he was as guilty, if he stood idly by, as those who became the actual perpetrators of that crime. To-night, if there was to be murder done, and it was within his power to prevent that murder, or even if it were only within his power to attempt to prevent that murder-and he did nothing-he was a murderer himself. And so to-night he had no choice. He must act. It did not seem to him that there had been any question in his mind about this in a specific way at all from the moment she had spoken of murder. But afterwards-if he went on-the crimes that Red Vallon and Karlin and their confederates would plot, and that he would know of-what then?

He halted by the table, and laughed in a short, harsh way, and in the dark eyes there burned a sudden fire. Was there really any question about that, either? Had there ever been! He asked only one thing in life now, and to that everything else was subordinate-to feel his hands upon the throat of the man who had murdered David Ellsworth, and who had fastened that guilt upon him-Billy Kane-to wring from that man a confession that would clear his name. Nothing else mattered. He could run for it, discard this role of the Rat, and perhaps effect his escape, but he would thereby throw away almost every hope of bringing the guilty man to justice. The other way was to fight. Well, he would fight! It would be a good fight! And, as the Rat, he would not have to fight alone! If he accepted the chances as they stood, he must accept the risk involved in foiling the plots and crimes of those who thought him their confederate; but against this, the first step already inaugurated, he had the craft and cunning of the underworld at his back in the one purpose that meant anything to him now. It would be a good fight! If he failed, he might as well go out this way as any other-better this way, for then at least some of the projected deviltry would never know fruition. He drew in his breath sharply as in a sort of strange relief.

It was settled now, once for all! He would go on-as the Rat-to the end.

And to-night he would see this Merxler plot through to the end.

Billy Kane picked up the crumpled piece of paper she had dropped on the table, studied it for an instant, then placed it in his pocket. It contained the scrawled figures of a safe's combination, nothing more.

And now, glancing at his watch and finding that it was already a little after eight o'clock, Billy Kane worked quickly. The mask that had served him the night before was already in his pocket, as was his revolver. To these he added the electric flashlight that Whitie Jack had procured for him that morning, and, from where they dangled in the lock of the door, Whitie Jack's bunch of skeleton keys. He extinguished the light; then pa.s.sing out through the secret door, which he closed carefully behind him, he made his way quickly through the little underground pa.s.sage, gained the shed through the trap-door, emerged on the lane, and from there, cautiously, he reached the street.

He walked rapidly now, but keeping always in the shadows, shunning the direct rays of the street lamps. He cared nothing for the police; his danger did not lie in that direction. Seen anywhere in the city by either police or plain-clothes man he would be recognized, not as Billy Kane, but as the Rat-and the authorities, he was fairly well satisfied, had no particular or immediate interest in the Rat. His danger lay to-night in an unlucky recognition by some prowler of the underworld, the report of which might reach the ears of Red Vallon and his crowd.