on its gunwale. It came within an ace of turning turtle. Water cascaded into both cockpits. Then it righted itself and was off on another angle, leaving the police boat astern. But a gun on the deck of the police cruiser began to chatter, lashing lead close as a signal to stop.
The man beside Dick Van Loan whirled, lifted the ugly snout of his tommy-gun, and held the trigger hard back. He hosed bullets at the dazzling eye of the searchlight. For a full minute the gun jerked and chattered while acrid fumes of cordite whirled around them. Then the gunman found his mark. The searchlight disappeared as abruptly as though a giant hand from the sky had snuffed it out.
The pilot began zigzagging, throwing his passengers from side to side so that they fell, cursing and clinging to each other. But he avoided the bullets that were probing through the darkness for their lives. The powerful motor amidships rose higher and higher until the boat seemed to hang taut and motionless on the highest crest of the waves. But Van could tell by the wind blast that it was streaking ahead. The shots behind grew even more random. They were leaving the police cruiser far astern.
The mad getaway continued. Dick Van Loan was a companion of killers leaving what they thought was a murder scene. He was in with murderers who backed up with knife and bullets the sinister threat of those mysterious dancing dolls.
Yet these men were only tools, he felt certain, instruments of a more cunning, ruthless will. He made, therefore, no attempt to stop them.
His cue was to go along with them, find out where they went, and who supplied the payoff.
The boat veered again. It headed in toward a dark section of the shore. The pilot slowed the engine, cut it down to a mere idling speed. The craft nosed in to a low sea wall, with a gloomy riverfront street beyond it. It bumped against rocks while Van and the others swarmed out.
Then the pilot reached back and dropped a match into a wad of oily waste in the boat’s cockpit. Rather than leave any clues for the police they were setting fire to a speedboat that must have cost several thousand dollars. Van realized that it was probably stolen property anyway. Fingerprints were what the killers feared.
They sprinted across the vacant lot to a big parked sedan. The top of the sea wall was showing red as the car sped away.
The pilot of the speedboat was now the driver, a squat, toadlike man with a thick-lipped mouth. The other two were obvious mobs’ men; flat-chested, hard-faced. A letdown had come after their fast action. They sat hunched beside the Phantom, their glassy eyes staring straight ahead.
The driver tooled the big car halfway across the city, up a cobblestoned avenue for nearly a mile, then into a block of grimy, red-brick buildings. He twisted the wheel deftly, stopped with his headlights close to a large metal door. He winked them on and off three times and the door slid up.
The car lurched into an old garage, crossed an oil-smeared floor, and entered a big elevator. The man who had let them in slammed shut the elevator door and they were lifted creakingly four stories above street level. Then the car rolled out into another cement-floored room.
Van’s quick eyes took in his surroundings. A half dozen automobiles in the higher-price brackets stood around the big room in various stages of disassembly. Most of them were almost new. But their motors were exposed.
Grinding machines, welding torches, and paint-spraying devices were close at hand. Undoubtedly this was a place where “hot” cars were repainted, reassembled, and their motor numbers changed. The business of car stealing had been put aside temporarily for the more sinister occupation of murder.
The men with Van left this chamber and climbed a flight of narrow steel stairs to a floor still higher. They passed through a workshop to a partitioned room in the building’s center a big windowless barn of an office. In this room were more than a dozen people.
VAN had never seen a more motley, evil-looking group. It was as though whoever was behind the dancing doll murders had deliberately got together the
There was one elderly man wearing glasses, whose face was mild and almost benign looking, except for the grey hair thinning in two peaks on either side of his high forehead like sprouting horns; and except for something furtive and crafty in his smile. He had seen better days obviously. Van wondered who he was and what he was doing here.
Another man, big, brutal-looking, with a black-browed face claimed his attention. This one seemed to be the boss. For the three with Dick Van Loan, headed straight for him.
One of them nodded.
“The job’s done, Bowers.”
Bowers grunted, his eyes expressionless as polished agates. He reached for a phone on his desk, and suddenly the Phantom’s gaze became alert behind negligently drooping lids. For the phone was a new one and the big man called Bowers was dialing. Van was close enough to see the numbers and letters. His machine-like brain registered each movement as the big man’s pudgy finger twirled the dial.
KLondike 5-9292!
There was a pause, then the big man said: “Lemme speak to Blackie.” Another pause, and Bowers continued:
“Blackie, the boys are back. Want to come over and talk to them about the job?”
Van’s pulses tingled. He caught the inflection in Bowers’s voice. The man was speaking to “Blackie” as one addresses a superior. He was turning in a report, awaiting orders. It might be that he was in direct contact with the brains of the murder ring. The man at the other end of the wire gave an answer that Van couldn’t hear. Bowers dropped the receiver in its cradle, lit a cigar, and leaned back in his office chair.
Van was still watching him. But an eerie sense of danger made him turn his head. He stared for a moment straight into the face of the elderly man whose high-peaked forehead made him look very much like a devil.
The man had risen abruptly, and now came toward Van with that furtive, cunning smile on his face. He stood in front of the Phantom, hands clasped behind him, teetering on his heels – and time seemed suddenly to hang suspended.
For there was an expression of interest, of deepening suspicion on the grey-haired man’s face.
He spoke in a husky, cultured voice.
“Dopey, you don’t look right! After that shot of morphine I gave you – there’s something funny!”
The big boss Bowers heard him, and swung around. “What’s that you say, Doc?”
The smile on the face of the other deepened, became almost angelic.
“Just a little professional observation, Bowers. I’m somewhat puzzled. I gave Dopey O’Banion here thirty grains of morphine to pep him up before he went with the others to do his job. And now look at his eyes. No sign of expansion in the pupils. Murder seems to counteract the effect of drugs in Dopey.”
Though his face betrayed no emotion, Richard Curtis Van Loan’s heart was hammering This smiling man in front of him whom they called “Doc” was bringing him close to the brink of destruction.
Then another voice that cut like a knife through the now quiet room brought him closer still. It was the voice of one of the hopheads who had come back with him from Channel Point.
The man’s lips were slack. He was staring not at Van’s face, but at his hands.
“Look!” he screamed suddenly. “That guy ain’t Dopey! He can’t be! Dopey’s got a sliced-off finger!”
There hadn’t been time for Dick Van Loan to make a close study of his subject. He had played his cards as they came to him – played them bravely, recklessly – and had lost.
For he read death on the faces of those around him. In his first close contact with the criminals the Phantom stood exposed!
CHAPTER VII
THE Phantom moved with desperate quickness. While those about him, stunned by surprise, were grasping the fact that he was an impostor, he grabbed a straight-backed chair and swung it savagely at the overhead light. His
