Doc Savage - The Freckled Shark Part 8

Monk turned around and glared.

"Stop talkin' that foreign language!" he shouted.

"That's English," Johnny explained with dignity. "Anyway, what are you so touchy about?"

"Ham." Monk took his bullet-shaped head in his hands. "For hours now, we haven't heard from Ham."

"Ham is all right."

"How do we know he's all right?" Monk groaned.

"Well, he is trailing the Horst gang. We figured one man could trail them with less chance of being noticed, and we matched for the job, and Ham won."

"I'm worried," Monk muttered.

His homely face was a battleground for various kinds of concern.

Johnny snorted. "Earlier in the day, I heard you promise to knock all of Ham's teeth out and use them for marbles. Now you're worried."

"Ham is the best friend I've got in the world," Monk said emphatically.

Johnny, having opened the newly arrived letter, emitted a startled grunt. He held the fragment of freckled shark skin up for inspection."An acromatical involucrum," he muttered.

"Eh?"

"A puzzling piece of hide," Johnny said, using small words.

Monk examined the shark skin. "What makes you think it's hide?"

"Ratiocination."

"Eh?"

"A little common sense."

"If you don't stop using them words on me when I'm worried, I'm going to make you into something longer and thinner than you are," Monk said disagreeably. "Probably I'll just strew you out."

The homely chemist picked up the sheet of paper which had accompanied the shark skin fragment in the letter. There were words on the paper, saying: THIS PIECE OF SHARK SKIN SEEMS TO BE THE KEY TO THE WHOLE MYSTERY, SEE IF YOU CAN SOLVE IT.

There was no signature on the note.

"Heck, you read this first, and that's how you knew it was a piece of hide," Monk complained. "What are these spots on it?"

"Look like freckles."

"There ain't no such thing as a freckled shark," Monk pointed out.

THE question of whether or not there was such a thing as a freckled shark had gotten to the stage of consulting the encyclopedia when a green light flashed.

"Probably Ham!" Monk exploded.

The green light was attached to a short-wave radio receiving set-hooked up through a sensitive relay which operated when a certain combination of clicking noises were received-and announced that they were being called by another radio. The green light served the same purpose as the bell on a telephone. To make it function, the operator of a sending set merely switched on his apparatus and, with his fingers close to the microphone, made the proper combination of snapping noises.

Monk reached the radio and cut in the loud-speaker.

Ham's voice said, " Boy, you better move fast! They're headed somewhere."

" Why didn't you tell us where you had been, you rattle-brained shyster!" Monk yelled indignantly.

" You oaf! Don't start yelling at me." Ham said over the radio. "I was busy trailing that Horst gang. They're out on Long Island."

" Where on Long Island?"

" The airport. The one that last transatlantic flier crashed on. Remember?"

" What are they doing?"

" Hear that plane motor warming up? They're getting in it."

" In ten minutes," Monk said, "we'll be out there." The congested city location of Doc Savage's skysc.r.a.per headquarters had its inconveniences. One drawback was the fact that traffic made it difficult to leave the city quickly in an emergency. However, Doc Savage had largely overcome that handicap by installing what Monk called the "flea run."

Monk and Johnny got into the bullet-shaped cartridge of the flea run. Monk had grabbed Habeas by one wing-sized ear, his habitual manner of carrying the pig. He also made a grab for Chemistry, the ape, but the latter dodged away distrustfully. At the last minute, Chemistry ran and jumped into the cartridge.

Monk jerked a lever. There was a sound as if an elephant had coughed through his trunk, and the cartridge gave a terrific jump. The bullet-shaped car, which was so small that even two of them crowded it, traveled through a metal tube at a speed of considerably over a hundred miles an hour, driven by pneumatic pressure. It swayed, shook, and the noise was deafening. When it stopped at the other end, the shock rendered the occupants breathless.

"That blasted thing," Monk complained, "is worse than a mole's nightmare!"

They were now in Doc Savage's water-front hangar-a huge, grimy brick building with a sign across the front that said "HIDALCO TRADING COMPANY"-where the bronze man kept his planes and such boats as he had occasion to use.

They took a plane that had practically no wings and twice the usual amount of motor.

The s.h.i.+p was a seaplane equipped with retractable landing gear for use on land. The wheels up, the craft lunged across the surface of the Hudson, and climbed like a big b.u.mblebee into the sky.

DOC SAVAGE and his a.s.sociates used a short-wave radio habitually. All their planes were equipped with transmitters and receivers. Monk switched on the one in the speed s.h.i.+p.

"We're on our way," Monk said.

Ham said, " I see that the sky looks kind of funny over in that direction."

" That," Monk said, "isn't a good gag."

The plane bored on up into the sky and dived into low-hanging clouds.

So fast was the s.h.i.+p that almost at once it was circling toward the airport, but at some distance.

Ham's voice came over the radio again.

"Something funny about this," he said.

Johnny said, "Hermeneuticalize."

Ham, who understood such words, knew that Johnny merely wanted an explanation.

"Horst's men," Ham said, " apparently followed somebody out here."

"Followed somebody?"

"Well, not exactly. What I mean is that they seem to have had somebody watching the airport, and they rushed out here when the fellow called them. They chartered a plane."

"Are they there now?" Monk asked.

"No. Horst and all his men left in the plane about three minutes ago."

Monk was flying the speed s.h.i.+p. He slanted it down, b.u.mped the wheels on the tarmac, and braked to a stop near the administration building, which was small.An old man in rags came out to meet them. The small old man had whiskers that looked like soiled angora goat wool, and spectacles that magnified his eyes into ostrich eggs. He looked as if his home were behind an ash can in some alley.

This was Ham in disguise.

Ham said, "I think I found out why Horst and his men rushed out here and took off in a plane."

"Why?" Monk demanded.

"Come over here and listen to a greaseball tell it."

The mechanic wore greasy overalls, had a distributor in one hand and an insulating screwdriver in the other. Apparently, he also had an observing nature; likewise an eye for profit, because it took two dollars to loosen his tongue.

He referred to Horst's men as "them last guys." "Them last guys," he said, "took off to follow another plane that left earlier. The other plane belonged to a long, drawly old guy, and he's been keeping it here some time. Sweet s.h.i.+p, too."

"Was there anybody with the long old guy?" Ham asked.

"Boy, there was a honey!"

He described the "honey," and it was obvious that she was Rhoda Haven. The mechanic also described a large young man with freckles, red hair, and an impulsive disposition.

"When I catch that last one, I'm gonna take a souvenir off him," Monk said. "One of his legs or something."

Ham snapped, "We're killing time. We had better follow them."

They ran back to their speed s.h.i.+p. It took the air.

"They went south," Ham stated.

It took them something like forty minutes to pick up a dot in the sky ahead. Ham used powerful binoculars, said, "That's the Horst plane."

Monk sent the speed s.h.i.+p into the clouds, and after that dropped down only occasionally to spot the craft ahead. It became dark soon and they could see the flying lights of the plane ahead, which simplified the trailing. They merely extinguished their own lights and flew a mile or so in the wake of the other plane.

HORST was flying a rented s.h.i.+p. He was handling the controls himself, and doing an experienced job. It was a cabin craft, and there were seven men with him. One of the seven came forward to the cabin pit.

"Be tough if anybody reports we're flying south," the man said. "We told the guy who we rented this crate from that we were mining engineers, and that we were going up to Canada."

"Who's going to report anything? Airplanes aren't news any more."

"Well, I just thought of it."Horst scowled. In the subdued light glow from the instrument panel, he looked like an intent satan. He gave the throttle an angry bat with his palm, but the thing was already wide open.

"d.a.m.n it!" he snarled. "We've got to overhaul old Tex Haven."

"Tex's s.h.i.+p is fast."

"Don't I know it!"

Horst looked so enraged that his followers saw the need of placating the chief with a little praise.

"You made a darn smart move, Horst," someone said, "in putting a man to watch old Tex Haven's plane.

The old h.e.l.l-raiser had given us the slip entirely. If you hadn't thought of watching the plane, we probably wouldn't have got on the trail."

Horst was susceptible to praise. He showed his teeth appreciatively. "You know what I think?"

"What?"

"The Havens are on their way to Key West to get hold of Jep Dee."

"Then the thing for us to do is get Jep Dee first."

Horst swore. He could swear more profusely in Spanish, so he used that language.

"Thing for us to do," he snarled, "is shoot old Tex Haven's plane out of the sky. Tell 'em to get the machine guns ready."

"You got any idea who the new guy is?"

"You mean that lug with the red hair and the freckles?"

"Yes."

"I got no idea who he is," Horst said grimly, "but he is no more bulletproof than the next man."

"It's risky to pull killings here in the States."

Horst said, "There's enough at stake that nothing is too risky."

The man went back in the cabin. The craft was not soundproofed, and was very noisy, and he had to bellow in each man's ear the order Horst had given.

Their machine guns, dismantled, were in large suitcases. They got these out, put them together. They were modern weapons, the size of the conventional submachine gun, but they fired a more high-powered bullet than the conventional sub gun of .45 caliber.