The Metal Master: A Doc Savage Adventure Read online

  They pushed another rapid search of the premises, and after that, they were convinced Decitez’s four men were not there. They held a final consultation.

  “Where can we get hold of Tops’l Hertz?” the spokesman asked.

  Decitez countered, “What are you going to do to him?”

  “Proposition him,” said the other. “If he wants to join us, and take a share, it’ll be all hunky-dory. If he don’t, Tops’l will get his.”

  Decitez sighed deeply and tremulously. He was thinking of what Tops’l would do to him if he heard about this double-crossing. But there was only one thing Decitez could do, under the circumstances.

  “Tops’l is headed for Alligator Island,” said Decitez.

  Had a pistol gone off unexpectedly, it probably would have caused less surprise. The spokesman tried to gasp something and only made a stuttering noise.

  “What Alligator Island?” he finally barked.

  “The one off the Carolina coast,” Decitez explained.

  The other man swore hoarsely.

  “How did you lugs learn about that island?” he snarled.

  “Why,” said Decitez, “Tops’l has Louis Tester on his schooner. He made Tester talk, and Tester told about the island.”

  “We gotta beat Tops’l to Alligator Island!” yelled the other. “And we gotta get to the chief! This puts the chief in a tough spot!”

  “The chief is pretty smooth, if you ask me,” said one who had more faith.

  The doorbell rang.

  * * *

  The men all looked at each other. It was not exactly a propitious time to hear a doorbell ring. It clanged out again.

  “You go!” the spokesman rasped at Decitez. “Get rid of whoever it is. We’ll be right behind you, and our hands won’t be empty, either!”

  Decitez went to the door. It was all he could do to keep from staggering. He opened the door.

  “Cable for Mr. Napoleon Murphy Decitez,” said a clean-faced lad.

  Decitez was relieved enough to throw his hat into the air. He carried the missive back into the house. It was not really a cable, but a radiogram. He tore it open.

  “Who’s it from?” he was asked.

  “Tops’l Hertz,” Decitez admitted.

  “Read it.”

  It read:

  BEST RATING IN NORTHERN GENERAL MARKET AREA CUBA. HOPE INCREASE NOT EXTENDED IN NORTH. RETURN OVERLAND ON MARCH 7. HOLDOVER ORDERS TOTAL EXCELLENT. LEAVING BENTLY ON ORDERS NOW EXPECTED.

  The spokesman of the Metal Master’s men scratched his head.

  “Now what in the blazes does that mean?” he pondered aloud.

  “Code,” explained Decitez. “You take the first letter of each word.”

  They took the first letter of each word. They got:

  BRING MACHINE IN ROOM 7 HOTEL BOONE.

  “Hm-m-m,” murmured the Metal Master’s spokesman. “Not bad. And what is this machine?”

  “Search me,” said Decitez. “It must be something belonging to Louis Tester that Tops’l has learned about.”

  “Let’s look into it,” growled the other.

  Chapter XIII

  SLICK!

  The Hotel Boone did not make a great show. It rarely advertised. It was an economical, homey place where some guests maintained a room the year around, although they were out of town a great deal. This was because the monthly rates were very low indeed.

  “Who has Room 7?” asked Decitez.

  The desk clerk, with a friendly smile, said, “Louis Tester.”

  “We’ll go right up,” said Decitez. “He is expecting us.”

  “I did not know Mr. Tester was back in town,” murmured the clerk.

  “He just got in,” said Decitez, and they went up.

  Outside the door of Room 7, which was on the second floor, they came to a stop.

  “I’ve got a guy here who knows locks,” said the spokesman of the Metal Master’s men.

  The man came forward and demonstrated that he did know locks, getting the door open almost at once.

  The room had plain furniture, and there were some old suits hanging in the closet, rather good suits. Shirts and socks were in the dresser.

  Under the bed was a box. At first, they mistook it for a suitcase, because it had a carrying handle. But it was of some black insulating compound, sealed airtight. To the handle was attached a tag. It read:

  DO NOT OPEN

  (Opening Will Damage Contents)

  The Metal Master’s spokesman lifted the strange box.

  “Heavy,” he said. “Must be a machine of some kind.”

  “Going to open it?” asked Decitez.

  “No,” said the other, after some thought. “I probably wouldn’t know what it was, if it’s a contraption. We’ll take it along as it is.”

  “Take it along?” Decitez wet his lips. “Where’re we going?”

  “To Alligator Island,” growled the other. “With Doc Savage on the prowl, and our chief in a jam, things are too hot here.”

  “What kind of a jam is the chief in?” Decitez queried curiously.

  “Never mind,” grunted the other man.

  Merely out of curiosity, they made another search of the room. Because the room faced a court, it was rather gloomy, so they turned on the lights. There was a chandelier in the center of the room, and four lights in brackets on the walls. One of the wall brackets did not illuminate. But nobody gave that any attention.

  They found nothing more to interest them.

  “We might as well get along,” said Decitez.

  The spokesman of the Metal Master’s gang unexpectedly stepped forward. He swung his fist. It hit Decitez’s jaw. Decitez hit the floor as if he had been shot.

  “Don’t you say ‘we’ any more!” snarled the man who had struck the blow.

  Decitez gasped, gargled, and finally got words out.

  “But I’m one of your crowd now!” he whined.

  “In a gnat’s eye, you are!” sneered the other. “Don’t you know when you’re being strung along?”

  Decitez gasped, “But you said——”

  “We were just kidding you,” jeered the other. “We wanted to see how much we could get out of you.”

  An awful pallor overspread Decitez’s face. He began to tremble. All of his fat, rodentlike body shook.

  “You—you’re going to kill me?” he wailed.

  “I don’t know,” said the other. “We’ll have to see about that.”

  They went out, taking Decitez and the mysterious black box which was sealed, and which they had decided not to open.

  * * *

  For some moments after they left, the room was very quiet. The men had smoked in the room, and the odor of the smoke lingered, stale. A cigarette stub, cast carelessly on the floor, smoldered, and the room filled with the odor of scorched carpet. It went out after a time. Then the door opened.

  Doc Savage came in. Ham, the dapper lawyer, was with the bronze man.

  Doc Savage went straight to the light bulb which had not lighted. He unscrewed it carefully, and wrapped it in a piece of paper.

  “We do not want this to get broken,” he said. “It is the only one we have at present.”

  Ham smiled widely. Ham had a sharp, aesthetic face, but it became quite handsome when he smiled.

  “They are rather difficult to construct, eh?” he asked.

  “Somewhat,” Doc Savage admitted. “The wall of the bulb, which looks like frosted glass, is in reality a flexible material which serves as a diaphragm for the microphone which is concealed inside and connected to the terminals so that when the bulb is screwed into the socket, the microphone will be connected. It is rather difficult to construct the thing so that it will not distort the reception.”

  Ham asked, “Shall we reconnect the electric wires from that socket, which we disconnected and led into the other room to attach to the trick microphone?”

  “No time,” Doc Savage said.

  Ham chuckled softly. “I hope Monk ma
kes out all right.”

  “He should,” Doc Savage replied.

  “Monk is a great guy,” Ham murmured.

  Monk would have had a spasm, had he heard that praise from Ham.

  Doc Savage and Ham went downstairs. Doc Savage spoke to the pleasant-faced desk clerk.

  “Thank you for telling those fellows the room was registered in the name of Louis Tester,” he said.

  “It was no lie,” grinned the clerk.

  Doc Savage placed a twenty-dollar bill on the desk.

  “For you,” he said. “The gentlemen were completely deceived. They never got an inkling that the room had been taken in the name of Louis Tester less than ten minutes earlier, and that it was myself who rented it.”

  The clerk held the twenty out in front of him and blew a kiss at it.

  “The first time I ever really believed there was easy money in this old world!” he chuckled.

  Doc Savage and Ham went out, got in a taxi, and the bronze man directed the driver toward the skyscraper which housed his headquarters.

  Ham wondered aloud, “How soon should we hear from Monk?”

  “Hard to say,” Doc replied.

  * * *

  The taxi traveled swiftly. The driver evidently knew the identity of his famous passenger, and was exuberant, trying to show off. He ran through a red light, and a traffic cop started over, but turned back when he got a look into the cab.

  Ham had been thinking over the episodes of the last hour. He broke out in a hearty chuckle.

  “We got a break when we went to Decitez’s house, and that gang turned up,” he said.

  “It stood to reason that Decitez would go there to see what had happened to the four men he left guarding me,” Doc Savage pointed out.

  “That microphone that looks like a light bulb sure did its stuff there,” Ham smiled. “We got just about all they said.”

  “Let us hope so,” the bronze man said noncommittally.

  Ham eyed Doc Savage. Admiration was in his gaze.

  “Your stunt of getting a messenger boy to deliver that fake radiogram was a slick one,” he said. “It sure tricked that gang into going to the hotel, getting that box, and taking it with them.”

  Doc Savage did not comment.

  “I’d like to know one thing,” Ham continued.

  Doc said nothing.

  “What was in the box?” Ham asked. “You made a flying trip to the laboratory to get it and take it to the hotel. But what was in it?”

  For a long moment, Doc Savage did not speak.

  “The thing may not do its work, when the time comes,” he said dryly. “So if you do not know what it is, you will not depend on it in a pinch. Depending on things is very bad, especially when they do not work.”

  They went up on their private elevator to the eighty-sixth floor of the skyscraper. Doc Savage did not enter his office immediately. Instead, he looked at a famous picture of a Madonna in a plain frame. It was the only bit of art in the plainly modernistic corridor.

  The Madonna’s eyes were dark. Had they been bright—made so by a tiny light bulb connected to Doc’s complicated burglar alarm system—the bronze man would have used a great deal of caution about entering the place; if he entered at all, he probably would have used one of the secret entrances, which would have given him a chance of surprising any skulker.

  “I wish Monk would report!” Ham grumbled uneasily, after they were inside the laboratory.

  Ham was frankly worried, although he knew perfectly well that the homely Monk was fairly capable of taking care of himself. Having nothing to take his mind off Monk’s possible mishap, he was uneasy. He remained uneasy for an hour.

  Then Monk put in his appearance. He just walked in.

  Ham did not look at Monk as if he were glad to see him. Instead, he glared. Then he got a glimpse of the object Monk was carrying under his arm. Ham jumped up and shook his fists.

  “You freak of nature!” he squawled. “Send you to do something, and you turn up with that Habeas Corpus!”

  * * *

  Monk stood in the doorway, grinned amiably at Doc Savage, then gazed at Ham as if the latter were a dead mouse which had been found in the cream jar.

  “Insectivorea!” he said, that evidently being a new word he had just thought up to express his personal opinions of Ham.

  Ham rarely got so mad that he sputtered. But he sputtered now. He was looking, not at Monk, but at the creature under Monk’s arm.

  It was a pig—a totally remarkable-looking pig, the equal of which probably did not occur in the porker strain once in an age. It had long flapping ears and legs like a dog.

  The pig was Habeas Corpus, Monk’s pet.

  Ham ceased sputtering and began to spit words.

  “You promised to keep that—that hog out of my sight!” he howled.

  “What did you learn, Monk?” Doc Savage asked, interrupting the beginnings of another argument between Ham and Monk.

  Monk spat in Ham’s direction, put Habeas Corpus down, and spread his hands in a gesture indicating partial defeat.

  “I trailed the crowd all right, after they left that hotel,” he said. “They went to a field on Long Island, where they had a plane. Not a regular flying field. A farmer’s field. They had the plane there, all gassed up. And they took off and left me there talking to myself.”

  “Who did they take along?” Doc Savage asked.

  “Decitez, Gettian and Nan Tester,” said Monk. “And there was quite a crowd of the Metal Master’s men. It was a big plane.”

  Doc queried, “Did you see anything of the black box which we tricked them into taking from the Hotel Boone?”

  “Yep,” said Monk. “They took the box along in the plane with them.”

  “They headed south?” Doc Savage surmised.

  “They sure did,” Monk agreed. “I guess they’re headed for that Alligator Island, wherever that is.”

  “The island is shown on the charts,” Doc Savage told him. “It will not be difficult to reach.”

  Monk grinned. “I take it we’re going there?”

  “Immediately,” Doc Savage admitted.

  A buzzer whined. It was one of the signals, operated by hidden contacts built into the floor, which indicated some one was in the corridor. Monk went to the door, opened it cautiously, and his jaw sagged.

  Pretty Nan Tester walked in.

  * * *

  “They turned me loose,” she said.

  Monk exploded. “But I saw them take you in the plane!”

  She blinked, plainly surprised.

  “You fellows really get around, don’t you?” she exclaimed. “They landed me a bit later, down in Jersey.”

  Monk gave her his most pleasant grin. Monk was particularly susceptible to young women, especially pretty ones. He liked to be around them. As a matter of fact, Monk, who had a chemical laboratory in his penthouse down in the Wall Street sector, employed a secretary whom he maintained was the prettiest secretary in the city. Those who saw her agreed with him.

  “I sure thought they would keep you a prisoner,” Monk said. “But I’m glad they didn’t.”

  “Why should they?” asked Nan Tester. “I have no idea of what this is all about, or at least they think I haven’t.”

  “Then you have learned something?” Doc Savage interposed.

  Nan Tester smiled at the bronze man. There was a small light in her eyes, and Monk, taking note, felt like groaning his loudest. He could recognize the signs. The pretty thing was getting a crush on Doc Savage, which meant Monk’s attentions would not receive much consideration. And it meant Doc would be in for an uncomfortable time. Doc never had anything to do with the fair sex. He was womanproof.

  Nan Tester said, “I overheard the name of the man who is the Metal Master.”

  “Who is it?” Monk howled.

  “A fellow called Punning Parker,” said Nan Tester.

  Chapter XIV

  THE PUNNING MAN

  Punning Parker, pint-siz
ed assemblage of skin and bones, was getting along very well aboard the good hellship Innocent. He had wormed himself completely into the confidence of Tops’l Hertz. Punning was an ideal follower. He did not talk back. He hatched good ideas, and when Tops’l Hertz purloined those ideas as his own, Punning did not say anything about it.

  “Figure as ’ow you an’ me is gonna make a likely pair of blokes,” Tops’l Hertz had said.

  “Sort of a pair of likely-hoodlums, eh?” Punning had chuckled.

  “Your other qualities are better’n your bloody puns,” snorted Tops’l.

  “Puns should be a pun-ishable offense,” Punning agreed.

  That had been some hours ago, and now Punning Parker was lounging on the forward deck, where the fisherman staysail cast a shade of sorts. Punning was not there entirely because of the shade. The spot was directly above the two tiny cubicles occupied by the two prisoners, Colonel John Renwick and Louis Tester.

  Punning Parker wore a sly expression. He was watching Tops’l Hertz, who was trying to sheet in the mainsail so it would pull just right. The sly look in Punning Parker’s eye indicated he did not have a great deal of respect for the intelligence of Tops’l. The look showed that Punning had decided Tops’l was not so hard to deceive.

  Punning Parker was interested in something else. This was a faint grinding noise which seemed to come from below him. This was audible at times above the noise the engines were making, which was considerable, for the engines were turning over at their best, driving the schooner at a speed that would have startled a sailor familiar with auxiliary type boats. At present, the schooner was using both sail and power.

  Arising suddenly, Punning Parker went below. He sought out the cubicle occupied by Renny, drew a gun, unlocked the door and went in. He played a flashlight on Renny.

  The big-fisted engineer was seated innocently against the far bulkhead. Both Renny and Tester had been released from their bonds.