by Lester Dent
The car angled off the road, ran a hundred feet up a lane and stopped. Beef said, “This is as good a place as any, Spence.”
Then Beef got out of the driving seat. Spencer also got out.
With a quick move, Spencer put his right-hand gun against Beef’s head and pulled the trigger.
Beef fell, his head horribly mutilated.
Sneering, Spencer wiped the grip of the gun with which he had killed Beef. Satisfied it was free of fingerprints, he threw it into the surrounding woods.
“The goop thought I’d split with ’im!” he growled, referring to Beef. “Maybe he knows better now.”
He scowled into the car at Nace. “What’s the matter with you, shamus?”
Nace was doubled over, wired hands hanging close to his feet. His face was strange.
“What you just done made me sick,” Nace said.
“You’ll feel worse before I’m done,” Spencer promised. He reached into the sedan front seat, brought out a tin box shaped like a tobacco tin, but somewhat larger.
He opened this. It apparently had a double wall. Pale grayish, steam-like vapor swirled out of the box mouth.
Spencer upended the box, shook it. A piece of dry-ice fell out. It was this which was making the vapor.
“My pocket refrigerator,” Spencer leered. “It keeps these babies cool!”
He shook from the box four metallic balls about the size of grapes.
NACE was still doubled over, wired arms hanging down. The fingers of one hand toyed absently with his right shoe. But his eyes were on the killer.
“So those are your bombs?” he grunted.
“There ain’t a more powerful explosive in the world,” Spencer declared with an insane pride. “I made Fatty Dell swallow two of ’em, an’ tied his mouth so he couldn’t get ’em up. I only had to use one each on Rubinov an’ Hasser, droppin’ ’em in their pockets. But I tossed three in the log house, close to Fred Franks’ feet. I wasn’t takin’ no chances on him.”
The girl gave no sign that she had heard.
“So they explode automatically after they’ve been exposed to normal temperatures a while,” Nace grunted.
“After about three minutes, shamus,” Spencer agreed. “Each one has a tiny detonator of two acids which explode when they get together. They’re held apart by a little wall of a gelatin solution. When it warms up, the gelatin turns to a liquid and lets the acids mix. Then—whango!”
Spencer put the metallic balls back in the can, replaced the dry ice, clamped the lid down and pocketed the container.
“I ain’t quite ready to use ’em. I’ll have to tie all of you more solid. Then I’ll drop a ball in each of your pockets, tie the pockets shut so you can’t shake ’em out, and go off and listen to the fireworks.”
He reached into the car to drag the prisoners out. The dome light, slanting downward on his face, made it a countenance of limitless evil.
He saw Nace was now fumbling with the heel of his shoe. He cursed sharply. “Hey, shamus, what—!”
A crack of a report answered him. The heel of Nace’s right shoe seemed to spit a two-inch tongue of flame.
Spencer jerked convulsively, reeled back out of the sedan. He turned around twice and fell heavily on his back. A sluggish fountain of crimson played on his chest, above the heart, subsided quickly and became a grisly trickle of crimson.
Nace patted the heel of his shoe as though it had done good work. These were the shoes he had donned at his hotel when the trouble first started.
“Short barrel holding a single .32 bullet built into the heel,” he told the open-mouthed hotel clerk. “Fired from a lever inside the shoe.”
They worked on the wires holding each other, and were no more than two minutes getting free.
Nace led the girl away, down the lane toward the road. She’d seen enough hell for one night. His arm was around her shoulders.
The hotel clerk remained behind a while. He took the tin box out of dead Spencer’s pocket, ran into the woods a couple of rods, pulled the lid off the box, and dropped it. Then he broke a dash record leaving the vicinity.
The explosion as the metal balls detonated exceeded for violence anything the clerk had ever heard.
To Nace’s sharp yell, he said he was all right. Then he hurried to overtake Nace and the girl.
“About that gun in your shoe heel,” he called. “How’s it rigged so it won’t go off when you ain’t expectin’ it?”
No answer.
A convenient lightning flash sprayed the scene with brilliance. The clerk saw Nace and the red-head. He had gone a dozen feet past them, and they were pretty well blended in each other’s arms.
The clerk could take a hint. He ambled on down the lane, an appraising eye cocked on the noisy heavens.
“Danged if I believe it’s gonna storm after all,” he grinned.
The Skeleton’s Clutch
Lee Nace had seen many men die, their going was a thing to chill the heart. But he had never seen a man dragged into the grave by a grisly, bony skeleton’s hand. And he had never felt the power of the Green Skull. But then Lee Nace had never met Baron von Auster before. The baron had many ghastly surprises up the sleeve of his natty jacket.
Chapter I
The Treacherous Baron
LEE NACE, a tall and big-boned man in a baseball uniform, leaned a hard shoulder against the partly opened bungalow door.
Nace’s bony jaw was out angrily; his cheeks were craggy with drawn muscle. His pale eyes threatened.
“A woman—a scared woman!” he said vehemently. “She buzzed me from a phone that traced to this address!”
The man inside the bungalow glowered and pushed harder against the door, trying to keep Nace out. The man was plump. His cheeks glowed pink, as if recently slapped. He looked very natty in summer evening dress, with a white monkey jacket.
In a vacant lot on the corner of the block, small boys were playing baseball—a batter had just popped their ball into a weed patch and they were all hunting it. Inside the bungalow, a radio droned big league scores for the day.
“Nein!” he gritted, lifting his voice over the radio. “Das ist unrecht!”
Lee Nace, gaunt and disheveled in the ball uniform, did not look like a scholar. Nevertheless, he could converse fluently in more languages than he could number on his combined fingers.
He had been advised in German, that he did not know what he was talking about.
Speaking German through his teeth, he said: “The woman no more than got hold of me before she started yelling! She was screeching like a calliope when somebody cut her off!”
The pinkish man blinked rapidly. His surprise showed he had used his mother tongue unwittingly in the excitement, and was a bit taken aback that Nace had understood it.
“I tell you there is no woman here!” he hissed in excellent English. He was forced to lift his voice over the rattle of baseball scores from the radio.
Nace was extremely tall, only a little under seven feet. His big-boned frame had a knobby, clumsy aspect. His long, solemn face was reddish with sunburn. His dark suit was dusty, wrinkled, and his white Panama possessed little shape.
On Nace’s forehead, anger was bringing out a strange, flushed design in scarlet—the mark of an old scar. More and more distinctly, the scar burned as he shoved at the door. It assumed a definite design—the likeness of a coiled serpent.
Nace had once been hit in the forehead with the hilt of a knife that bore a serpentine carving, and the design was destined to remain forever imprinted upon his head. It gave him a sinister look when he was enraged.
“I’m coming in there, brother!” he grated.
He put more weight upon the door. The Teutonic man’s black kummerbund burst with the effort of shoving from the other side, uncovering the stiff white front of his dress shirt.
“Gehen!” puffed the dark man. “Begone!”
Then a veiled, wily look entered his sea-blue eyes. He sprang suddenly backward, wrenching th
e door wide open.
Nace had been around enough not to be caught by that one. He did not fall headlong across the threshold. He did not cross the threshold at all. Instead, he leaped to one side.
Ten feet distant was a window. It gaped open, but was fitted with a screen. Nace shoved head and shoulders through the screen as if it had not been there.
In the middle of the room stood the dapper man who spoke Deutsche when excited. He had a shiny, small-calibre revolver trained on the open front door.
THE ripping as Nace tore through the screen brought the man half around. There was a rigidly set expression in his face—the grimace of a man who has steeled himself to shoot.
Immediately before the window stood a light table. It had two modernistic metal vases. Nace hit the table with both palms—hit it hard!
The table jumped end over end. The pinkish man, very agile, bounded to one side. But he had no time to shoot.
Nace, wriggling over the windowsill, grabbed one of the metal vases which had fallen to the floor. He threw it with a wrist-snap. It seemed to half-bury itself in the plump man’s middle. He dropped his gun; his eyes popped, and he folded in agony.
Lunging forward gauntly, Nace seized the revolver, unloaded it, then threw it through the hole in the screen. It sailed far away in the night.
Sitting on the squirming prisoner, Nace searched. He found a roll of bills containing more than two thousand dollars. There was nothing else, not even shells for the gun.
Nace flipped open the white monkey jacket. It was obviously quite new. He read the label.
THE PLAZA SHOPPE
The ruddy man still writhed from the pain in his middle. Nace tangled thick, bony fingers in the fellow’s luxuriant hair and lifted. The man forgot the ache in his ample middle for the new agony in his scalp. He came to his feet, spluttering.
“For laying hands on the Baron Marz von Auster, you shall—”
The serpentine scar on Nace’s forehead seemed to come and go with his pulse. He shook the man. “Is that what you call yourself?”
“I am the Baron Marz von Auster!” snarled the other. “The title of baron is genuine, I might add!”
“That’s two strikes on you—I don’t like titles!” Nace, flushed and hard looking, shook the man again. “Where’s the woman?”
The baron licked his lips. “You are wrong! There is no woman here!”
Still gripping a fistful of black hair, Nace straight-armed the baron out ahead of him.
“We’re going to look this dump over!” he advised.
The living room of the bungalow was paneled, and beamed in natural wood. The furniture was natural wood and red leather. The Aubusson underfoot looked expensive. A telephone stood to one side.
The radio droned away noisily beside the phone stand. It was a large set in a custom cabinet that matched the other furniture.
Nace glanced at the kilocycle number at which the dial was set.
“The Morning Tribune station,” he murmured, and listened to the Yankees-Red Sox score. The Yanks had won.
“Did you come in to get baseball scores?” snarled Baron Marz von Auster.
Nace kicked open the handiest door. It gave into a study. He glanced in, whistled shrilly.
Almost every piece of furniture in the study was torn to bits. Stuffing, springs, upholstery leather, strewed the floor. The search had even progressed to splitting the table legs.
Nace’s shaggy brows snuggled together. He asked:
“Is this your house, baron?”
“Yes!”
“You’re a liar! The phone book and the city directory both said a guy named Jimmy Offitt lived here!”
Baron von Auster knotted his fists so tightly his pursy arms trembled.
“I do not know who you are, or what brought you here!” he snarled. “But I do know this—you had better go! Go! Go—before something happens to you!”
“Don’t get sassy!” Nace nodded at the mutilated study. “Hunting something, eh?”
Baron von Auster answered with stiff silence.
“Hadn’t got this far with your search, eh?”
“I was not searching!” Baron von Auster clipped. “What happened here was my own affair! Now, if you do not leave at once, I am going to have you arrested. I am wealthy, and I will use my money to see that you rot before you get out of jail!”
“You talk as big as that robber of an umpire the cops rung into our ball game!” Nace jeered.
SNORTING cheerfully, Nace shoved his prisoner for another door. His cleated baseball shoes left big, unlovely scars on the varnished hall floor.
He found a bedroom. It was a wreck. The dressing table had been taken apart, paper scraped off the walls, the mattress ripped open. Nace tried a second bedroom, a kitchen, the bath, pantry. He looked in closets, cupboards, the refrigerator. He climbed into the attic and struck matches. He descended to the basement, peering into coal bins and the furnace.
He found no one. About half of the house had been torn up. They returned to the front room where the radio was mouthing ball scores.
There, Baron von Auster suddenly missed his two thousand dollar roll.
“Thief!” he wailed. “So that is it! You are one of the thieves who have torn my house up in this fashion! Not finding what you wanted, you came back to hunt!”
“To hunt for what?” Nace asked curiously. “What was I after?”
Baron von Auster swore, and spread his hands. “What do you thieves usually seek? Jewels—money—”
Nace scowled. His knobby face was red with fresh sunburn. And about his left eye, a bruise was growing. It had darkened perceptibly since he had entered the bungalow. Unmistakably, he had been in a fight before he arrived.
He grasped the baron’s hands and turned them palm-up. Under the fingernails was a gray deposit of plaster and colored bits of wallpaper.
“I suppose your manicurist put that there?” he questioned dryly. “Of course, you couldn’t have gotten it while pulling paper off the walls!”
Baron von Auster said a tight-lipped nothing.
Nace boxed the knuckles of a big fist and shook them under the pinkish man’s nose. The movement caused dust to puff from his grimy baseball shirt. His cleated shoes had been leaving dust prints on the Aubusson.
“I asked you a question!” he rumbled. “What was the object of this search? What’s going on here? Where’s that woman? And who was she?”
Baron von Auster sucked in his stomach, pulled in his chin, as if to get them both away from that big, hard fist.
“By what right do you demand to know?” he wailed.
Frowning, Nace seemed to consider. The radio muttered on. It was giving the scores of commercial and sand lot teams of the city.
“Listen!” Nace said, and pointed at the apparatus.
The voice from the loud-speaker was saying: “The real fireworks of today’s baseball came from a local diamond, where a game between the police nine and a team of private detectives ended in a free for all fight, with the score seven to nothing in the sixth inning.
“Lee Nace, probably the city’s most astute private detective, and certainly the most widely known, was pitching. According to reports, he beaned a sergeant of police. The latter swung on Nace, with the result that it took three riot squads of policemen to save their own team from the embattled private operatives.”
“HE forgot to say that bunch of cops rung a retired flatfoot in on us for an umpire!” Nace growled. Then, glowering at the baron, he indicated his own darkening left eye. “There’s where that bum of a sergeant sockoed me!”
The rosy man wet his lips three times in quick succession. He ran a hand slowly across his hair where Nace had pulled it.
“You—are—Nace?” he muttered, as if repeating some very bad news.
“In person—not a pinch hitter!” Nace told him with a sort of fierce levity. “The cops chased us out of that ball park—the tramps—and we couldn’t get our clothes out of the lockers. I went to my offic
e. When I came in the door, the phone was ringing.”
He shot his jaw forward belligerently. “It was that woman! She asked if I was Nace, speaking in a whisper. Behind her, I could hear a radio going. Then the woman began to yell. In a minute, she was cut off. But that radio—it was tuned to the Morning Tribune station. They were just starting the baseball scores. This set is tuned on that station!” He pointed at the radio.
Baron von Auster wet his lips several more times. He peered furtively at Nace, then away. He seemed fascinated by the weird serpentine scar on Nace’s forehead, the scar that had become so brilliant it was almost like a design done in red ink.
“I don’t know you!” he said thickly. “I do not know anything about what you have found here! Nein!”
Obviously, he was lying on both counts. He had heard of Nace. He couldn’t have helped it, if he had read the recent newspapers. Nace—dubbed the “Blond Adder” because of his light hair and the serpentine scar on his forehead—had just returned from England, where he had spent some months as technical consultant at Scotland Yard.
Nace made good newspaper copy. He was tough. His language was picturesque and forceful. His methods were spectacular. He knew that newspaper publicity boomed his business, so he went out of his way to accommodate the news hawks. Occasionally, he wrote magazine features.
Nace blew on a fist. “For a little, I’d tap you a few times to see what would shake loose!”
The prisoner squirmed uneasily. Then there came into his azure eyes a foxy look akin to that which had first appeared there when he had leaped back from the front door to draw his gun.
“I am tired of your insults!” he snarled. “We are going straight to the nearest police station! You shall regret your high-handed behavior!”
Nace laughed noisily, angrily. “Yeah?”
Baron von Auster put up his hands and seemed to be having trouble with his chest. He questioned hoarsely, “You won’t—go?”
“No!” Nace said cheerfully. “You won’t, either! You and I are going to hunt that woman!”
The baron had more difficulty with his chest. A minor convulsion seemed to double him over. He sought to straighten.