by Jerry eBooks
But before he could squeeze the trigger, his engine cut out. Buzz had been so interested in following the other plane that he hadn’t noticed the period of rough running, and now it had quit cold. Buzz swore fluently and leveled off. He went to work in the cockpit, trying to get the engine turning over again.
He opened the cooling vents, turned his emergency fuel pump on, and jockeyed the throttle. He was gliding downwards, losing five hundred feet of his precious altitude every minute. He leaned to the side of the cockpit and picked out an empty field below for an emergency landing.
But he pulled his head back quickly. The spat-spat of fifty caliber machine gun bullets plunking into his plane came to his ears. Damn the bastard, Buzz thought. He must have stolen one of the gunnery planes, all loaded up for a gunnery practice hop. Buzz saw that the first burst had peppered his wing tip with neat round holes.
Buzz heard the second burst now, splattering against the armor plate in back of him. Buzz squirmed, knowing that a fifty caliber would puncture armor plate. The guy had the aim but he was firing at the extreme range. Otherwise Buzz would have been finished. But Buzz knew it wouldn’t be long before DeWitt closed that range. And then . . .
Buzz went after the cockpit controls with renewed interest. Now it was either get the engine started or get shot up. He checked the temperature gauge and found that the open cooling vents had brought it almost back to normal. Buzz was perspiring as he checked the switches.
Another burst from the plane behind him! This time the sliding hatch over Buzz’s head shattered. And then with a roar of power, Buzz’s engine cut back in again.
With a whoop of relief Buzz laid his Hellcat over in a vertical turn to the right. Then be snapped the stick back into his stomach, did a vertical reverse so that he came out in a tight turn to the left. The sudden maneuver caught DeWitt by surprise. He was still following Buzz’s first turn when Buzz brought his guns to bear.
He let go a heavy blast at close range, directly into the engine of the other Hellcat. It was a head-on shot and his slugs tore great holes in the banked cylinders. Black oil smoke poured from the gaping wounds. Buzz swerved from the staggering path of the crippled fighter to avoid a collision. Then he circled and watched.
Nothing happened at first. “Get out of that thing, you bastard,” Buzz screamed. “You’ve got to get out!”
Then he saw DeWitt slide the hatch back and go over the side. Within a few seconds the white parachute blossomed out. Buzz went down to a thousand feet and circled the figure dangling from the end of the shroud lines.
“I ought to chop you up with this prop for what you’ve done,” Buzz said, “but I need you too much.” Then he grinned as he thought of shroud lines. Yes, those silken cords by which DeWitt was hanging from his chute were shroud lines in more ways than one.
Buzz followed the gently oscillating parachute until it had settled in a clearing below him. He watched DeWitt struggle with the lines until he was cleared. Then he saw him start running across the field toward a patch of woods.
“No you don’t,” Buzz shouted. “You’re staying here until the marines come. You’ve gotten away often enough today.”
Measuring the fleeing pilot’s path, Buzz opened up with a burst of fifties right in front of him. DeWitt dived to the ground. Every time he moved Buzz let a burst dig up the earth near him. DeWitt cringed, staring up at the plane. He hugged the ground but made few attempts to break away.
Finally the jeep with the marines in it came into sight, bouncing down a little side road. Buzz grinned as he thought of the rugged ride they must have had to arrive as quickly as they had.
He flew lower and did a tight circle over the spot where DeWitt lay huddled. The advancing marines saw him and waved. The jeep turned off the road and headed out into the clearing. It stopped a hundred feet from DeWitt, and the four marines, with Thompson sub-machine guns, approached him. DeWitt, seeing that resistance in the face of so much fire power was useless, gave up without a struggle.
Even from the air, Buzz could see that DeWitt had been badly frightened by his chattering fifties.
When Buzz saw the marines leading their prisoner toward the jeep, he rocked his wings and turned the nose of his ship for home.
“See you later, DeWitt,” he shouted happily.
When Buzz walked into the Operations Office, Commander Cales, the Skipper, was sitting behind his desk waiting for him. Before Buzz could open his mouth, Cales lit in.
“Ford, this has gone far enough. First you are indirectly responsible for the deaths of three of our best instructors. And then you have the gall to fly one of our planes when you know that you’re grounded. I hope you’ve got a good explanation, because if you haven’t, you’re going to see the insides of hell before your time.”
Buzz started to explain, but the Skipper cut in again. “Say, what in hell happened to you? You look as though you tangled with a prop and came out on the short end.”
Buzz grinned sheepishly and looked down at himself. Blood from his shoulder wound had soaked through his coveralls. There was a lump on his jaw that was probably black and blue. And he knew that he must be pale from weakness and loss of blood.
“Well, sir, you see . . .”
Tommy Reynolds burst into the office. “It’s no soap, Buzz. I talked with that ensign and he doesn’t . . .” he stopped short. “Jeez, Buzz, what hit you?” He reached out and touched the spot of blood on Buzz’s coveralls. Buzz winced as a knife of pain slashed through him, and then folded like an accordion.
Tommy jumped and grabbed him as he fell. He stretched the prostrate form on the floor, and by the time that Buzz was lying flat the Skipper was back with a glass of water.
“Here,” Cales said, “make him drink some of this while I phone the dispensary for a doctor and an ambulance.”
Buzz regained consciousness before the ambulance arrived. As he opened his eyes he saw the Skipper and Tommy talking.
“Ford,” Commander Cales said, “Reynolds here has told me as much of your story as he knows. Suppose you finish it now.”
Buzz sat up to finish the glass of water and then began. He told the whole story. When he had finished, the Skipper just stared at him with big, dumbfounded eyes.
“Well I’m damned!” he snorted. “If that isn’t the damnedest! And right here on this . . . Ford, you said the marines are bringing this . . . this, murderer back with them?”
“Yes sir,” Buzz replied. “I saw them drive away from the clearing with DeWitt in the jeep.”
The Skipper went to the phone quickly. While he was giving orders to have DeWitt delivered to him, the doctor and two hospital corpsmen came in with a stretcher. They lifted Buzz gently and put him on it. The Skipper bent over Buzz before the medics carried him away.
“Ford, you’ve done a great job, and I owe you all kinds of apologies. The court martial business is off. But I’ll have to give you a few days restriction.”
Buzz was surprised. “Restriction? You mean I’m restricted to my room. What for, sir?”
“Well, you flew when you were grounded, and that’s a pretty serious offense.” Cales turned to the doctor, who had been examining Buzz’s wound. “Say doc, how long before this hot rock will be out of bed?”
“Oh three or four days. He’ll be all right. Nothing to worry about.”
“Well, then, Ford, you’re restricted to your quarters until you are allowed out of bed by the doctor.” There was a twinkle in Cales’ eyes as he said this. “And maybe we can get you ungrounded,” he added. “If you can fly well enough to do what you did this afternoon, I don’t see why you should sit around an office.”
Buzz felt himself fading again, so he just grinned and said to the two corpsmen who were carrying the stretcher, “Lead on MacDuffs, and don’t fire until you see the lace on their panties.” He passed out again, this time with a happy look on his face.
THE TRIANGULAR BLADE
Carter Sprague
Major Jimmy Grey, just out of the
army, is confronted with a puzzling mystery that defies solution when a lovely lady meets death in the luxurious home of an industrial tycoon!
CHAPTER I
SILVER KNIFE IN THE STARLIGHT
BOTH saw the single eye of the lighted cigarette staring at them as they stepped out onto the terrace. Despite the bright French windows in the big house at their backs, the cunning incidence of landscaped box cedar and the moonless autumn night caused it to glow at them with an orange, suspicious gaze. It lay twenty-five or thirty feet to their left, on the dining room portion of the elevation.
“You ought to police the place up,” said Jimmy Grey to the girl whose soft white arm was linked with his. “I can’t feel very secluded with that thing looking at us.”
“The Army must have given you a complex, darling,” Dawn Barton replied. “Somebody must have thrown it there and walked off.” She pulled him around to face her, slipped both arms under his, lifted a pair of softly inviting lips.
He kissed her—he had been waiting to kiss her for two long years, part of which had been spent with the occupation forces in Munich. But all the time he could feel that cigarette and perhaps its owner staring at them. The devil of a note, he thought. But after five years in a uniform he had just relinquished, he wanted privacy—privacy plus!
“Sorry, Dawn honey,” he said, unwrapping himself gently. “I’ll be right back.”
“You’ll have to hunt long and far for me,” said the girl.
But she waited none the less, looking fondly after his dim long-legged figure as he strode toward the offending butt. She wondered why she loved this hunk of man.
He was tall, yes, tall and thin. But his hair was neither dark nor curly to match her own ash-blond tresses. Instead it was a dirty brown and straight as a plumb-line. His face was craggily undistinguished save for a pair of level blue eyes. He had been doing well as a young Manhattan lawyer before enlisting, and had won a major’s rank in the Army. But successful men were not new in the life of Dawn Barton. Her uncle, Olin Wade, was the tycoon of Laketown, a man of national importance.
Outside of a quiet and at times upsetting sense of humor, there was nothing remarkable about Jimmy—except that he was Jimmy. She sighed. She was lost, had been lost ever since she had first met him, on leave from the Army, while in New York two years before on a shopping and theater spree.
SHE heard him utter something between a gasp and a grunt. He knelt quickly, after grinding out the cigarette that had offended his sense of privacy. Dimly she saw him peering around the corner of a shrub at the outer edge of the terrace. She began to walk toward him.
The sound of her footsteps broke through the web of his concentration. He lifted his head from the horror before him, saw her coming.
“Go inside, Dawn,” he told her, and even to his own ears his voice sounded abrupt and unnatural. In emergency the habit of command was still too strong to be broken. “Tell your uncle and Rick Carden to come here—and have them bring a flashlight.”
But she was already at his shoulder. He could feel without touching her the coldness that crept over her skin. For facedown on the terrace steps that led to the swimming pool beyond lay a body—a body clad in white satin with a low-cut back, a back from which the silver handle of a knife gleamed dully in the starlight.
“It’s Anne!” the girl said in a choked voice. “Oh, my heavens above, it’s Anne!”
She turned and fled abruptly, a little unsteadily, toward the French windows behind which the party was still in full swing. As he rose, dusting his knees automatically, he wished she hadn’t seen it. Inured as he was to executions and violent death, he wished he hadn’t seen it. Then, almost as an afterthought, he moved swiftly, stooped to pick up the remnants of the crushed cigarette.
He was holding the bits of paper and charred tobacco in his hand when the terrace lights went on abruptly and the French windows opened to release a babel of sound. Quickly he pulled the silver cigarette case from the pocket of his dinner jacket, opened it, and put the cigarette’s corpse at one end.
His arrival at Olin Wade’s sprawling graystone mansion a few hours earlier had been his introduction to Laketown. It had promised to be a festive one. To see well-fed, well-dressed, amiable people living so luxuriously had been an immense reassurance after a year spent in the hungry rubble of Central Europe. He himself was hungry, had been hungry for two years, to be again with Dawn.
His arrival had coincided with a party given by Mr. Wade to celebrate the engagement of Rick Carden, tall, spare, darkly handsome right bower at the Wade factory, to Anne Lewis, the charming, redheaded ingenue whose lifeless body now lay on the steps at his side. Had Jimmy and Dawn not wished to be alone rather than with the noisy crowd within the house, they would not have discovered it.
Jimmy wondered if he were fated to be pursued by violent death—there had been plenty of that abroad—and felt a brief qualm of nausea. Then he braced himself as people came hurrying toward him.
Olin Wade himself was in the lead—whether because of speed remarkable in so gross a body or because the others, from long habit, fell in behind him Jimmy could not tell.
An unusual man, thought Jimmy, who had seen many men in his thirty-three years. Perhaps unusual was too weak a word for Olin Wade. Bald, of barely average height and weighing at least an eighth of a ton, Jimmy’s first impression of his host had been of a man made up of wisdom, strength and charm, with charm the dominant factor.
Now, as Wade strode up to him, the erstwhile major was conscious chiefly of strength that amounted to power. The single pearl stud of his shirt front was gleaming opaquely against its starched white background, and his mouth was set in a single curveless line amid the flabbiness of his face.
“What is it, Jim?” he asked, and his voice was low, in full control of its owner. “Dawn was a trifle inco—”
He broke off as Jimmy stepped aside so that he could see the corpse, its identity unmistakable because of the red hair that gleamed a copper reply to the terrace lights. The line of his mouth thinned almost to invisibility. For a moment the tycoon of Laketown simply stared. When he did speak, it was in a strained, harsh tone.
“This is rotten!” he said, paused again.
Habit of command took hold then, and he swung on his heel to address the dozen or more guests clustered behind him a few feet away.
“Harry”—this to one of them—“phone Chief Potter. Then bring Rick Carden here and inform my wife that Miss Lewis has met with an accident. The rest of you wait inside. Stone will bring you whatever drinks you want.”
Jimmy, anxious to be with Dawn, took a step to follow them, but Olin Wade gripped his elbow with a pressure unexpected in a man whose fingers looked soft and flabby.
“Not you—Jim,” he said, briefly at a loss to remember his house guest’s name. “From what Dawn has told us, you’ve had some experience with this sort of thing.”
“Only in the Army,” said Jimmy. He wanted no part of this. “Since I’m so new to Laketown, I hardly feel—”
“That’s just my point,” said Wade. “The rest of us know Laketown too well. A guest in my house has been—been . . . The devil with soft soap! She’s been murdered. No one is going to get away with that. I need your help.”
IT WAS quick thinking, Jimmy thought, quick thinking under extreme pressure by a man used to and qualified for command. His respect for Olin Wade rose another notch.
“Very well, sir,” he said. “But I can’t promise to deliver anything.”
“Never mind your promises,” snapped Wade. “I want your help! And I’ve never been knighted, so don’t call me ‘sir’.”
“Okay then—Olin,” said Jimmy. He nodded toward the French windows, one of which had opened to allow a couple passage. “We have company.”
His host turned and glowered for a moment at the man and woman who walked toward them. The man was tall, and the sheen of his smoothly brushed black hair gleamed in the terrace lights. He wore beautifully tailored evening cl
othes, and an expression of concern was on his handsomely saturnine face. It was Rick Carden, the dead girl’s fiance.
The woman beside him, who came to his shoulder, was clad in green silk with cloth of silver belt and shoulder straps. She was red-headed, but not as the corpse was redheaded. Where Anne Lewis’ locks had shown fiery copper undertones, this woman’s were red and silver, a shade Jimmy had never seen on any but a few Englishwomen. Her perfect face beneath its pancake powder mask was without expression, her lavender eyes were in shadow. She was Olin Wade’s wife, Marian. Her accent, as she spoke, italicized the ex-major’s belief in her overseas origin.
“My dear Olin,” she said, “what is it? Rick and I were in the pantry seeing to the punch and heard a commotion.”
“You’d better not come closer, Marian,” said Olin Wade, his voice suddenly tender. “This concerns Rick rather than you.”
“But, Olin, you know my curiosity,” she protested.
“Yes, Olin, what gives?” This from Carden.
“Very well,” said Olin Wade. “Anne is dead. Someone stuck a knife in her back. She’s dead.”
“Oh, no!” cried Marian Wade. Her eyes went wide and she stepped back a pace. For a moment she looked unsteady on her high-heeled silver slippers. Then she rallied to protest as Jimmy stepped toward her, “I’m all right, really. It—it’s the shock. Poor Rick!”
Poor Rick looked as if he had been turned to stone. Then his face began to work. First it twitched slightly. He began to grimace more and more violently. Desperately his hands sought his pockets, emerged with a handkerchief barely in time. His sneezes shook the terrace.
“By Jove!” said Olin Wade, echoing Jimmy’s shocked surprise. As if aware of the younger man’s thoughts, the millionaire turned and explained, “Rick has hay fever like no one else this month—devil of a time for it too.”