killer whirl. Van’s bullet caught him in the shoulder and spun him around.
The man in front cried out, tried to get his gun into action. Van’s savagely slammed shots unnerved him, made him fumble and lose his aim. Van was upon him in almost an instant, and the man was staggering back.
Van’s gun streaked flame again, flinging hot lead against the hands that held the machine-gun. The man dropped his weapon with a shrill scream of terror and dangled bloody wrists. Van was by him and out the street door in a second, leaving the bedlam of the garage behind.
UNDER its grotesque disguise of Dopey, the Phantom’s face was hawklike. His eyes were snapping. He had escaped, but he must not lose the trail of the killers. He sensed what their next move would be. Having failed to get their victim, knowing that their hideout had been discovered they would leave the garage as rats leave a sinking ship.
And Van was right. He had no more than reached the corner of the dark block when, looking behind him, he saw the big outside door of the garage slide back. A moment later a car came out, filled with men.
Van’s own car was miles away. No use to summon the police now. The murderers would be away before they got here. Van did the one thing he could – ran on till he saw a cruising nighthawk taxi. He leaped in, thrust a bill under the driver’s nose.
“Back,” he barked, “the way I came. There’s a car I want you to follow.”
They reached the street where the garage was located just as the last of three cars roared out. It turned away from the direction in which the taxi was headed. And, as they passed the garage, Van saw that these reckless desperate men had fired the place, just as they had the speedboat. A drum of white gas had been opened and a match applied. Flames were seething inside as the taxi whirled by.
There was only one car visible now, the last one in the rear. Its red tail-light was like some satanic thing beckoning them on. It fled through the almost deserted streets of the night-darkened city, for this was the hour just before dawn when even New York seems dead. The taximan was crouched over his wheel, knowing that something was up, bent on earning the money Van had given him.
He didn’t see, as Van did, the streaking black shape that came from a side street. Van drew in his breath, and the skin of his scalp felt suddenly tight. For a car without lights, one of those which had fled the garage, nosed out from a spot where it had been lurking.
Murderers’ strategy! Bowers had known that the man who had impersonated Dopey was some sort of detective. He had anticipated that when they left the garage they would be followed. And the first car out had been told to wait and cover the rear.
Van reached forward through the taxi’s partitioned window and twisted the wheel just in time. The driver hadn’t seen death coming, so intent was he on that bobbing light ahead. He cried out as Van’s muscular fingers wrenched the wheel from him.
The taxi swung in toward the curb, away from the hurtling black shape beside it. The blasting stream of machine-gun fire that was meant to rake it from front to rear missed its angle, and instead merely ripped the back tires to ribbons. This and the taximan’s hastily jammed brakes swung the cab squalling around.
The other car shot by. One bullet from the killers’ machine-gun caught the taximan in the side. He screamed with the sudden pain of it and fell forward across the wheel as the cab reared up on the sidewalk and turned over with a shattering crash.
CHAPTER VIII
HELL’S SWITCHBOARD
DICK VAN LOAN jerked at the handle of the door above him, pushed up quickly, and heaved himself out. He was bruised, shaken, but uninjured.
He looked around, then caught his breath in a whistling gasp and clawed wildly at the side of the driver’s seat. For the black murder car was backing up! He could hear the high-pitched scream of its gears, see its dark shadow racing at him. A machine-gun began to chatter again, spraying lead savagely, even as he got his hands on the wounded driver. The man was groaning, trembling with fear.
Van hoisted him bodily, and left the warm stickiness of blood on his hand. He knew that in a moment those killers ahead would return to finish the job. A bullet spattered against the cab as he got the taximan in his arms and raced with him across the sidewalk.
He clenched his teeth. There was an almost insane fury in the way that machine-gun hammered, waking a thousand spitting echoes along the dark street. Van had stirred up a hornets’ nest of murder. Bowers’s assassins had been instructed to get him, wipe out any possible chance of being identified or followed. The man who had disguised himself as Dopey O’Banion was marked for death.
BUT Van was thinking more of the wounded driver than of himself as he plunged through a wrought-iron areaway gate into a front court that was slightly lower than the level of the street. He had got the taximan into this scrape and must see him through it. He laid the wounded man prone on the flags of the court, told him to lie flat. Then he whipped out his.38, flung himself down also, and began firing at the approaching car.
There was a moment, a five-second period, when Death seemed to be debating whether or not to end the career of the Phantom. The killers’ bullets came close, whining and screaming through the areaway fence, glancing off the flags of the court, digging sinister pockmarks onto the building behind Van. A slug burned through his coat sleeve, searing the skin. Another slapped viciously across the heel of his left foot.
But his own aim was calm, deadly. Many times in his strange career the Phantom had been under fire. He wasn’t only a man brilliant in his deductive methods; he was a born fighter. The flash of cordite, the searing heat of bullets seemed to forge a razor edge of alertness to his nerves. The murder ring must not make an innocent victim of the taxi driver, and they must not kill the Phantom, with his work on this strange case barely begun.
One of his shots made spider-web cracks in the shatter-proof glass of the killers’ car. He swung his gun, flung bullets savagely toward the driver’s compartment The backing car swerved a little, as Van’s lead either struck or unnerved the driver.
The screaming volley from the machine-gun was deflected. A basement window in the house behind Van broke into shattering fragments. Then the black car slowed suddenly, stopped, reversed the direction of its movement, and roared away. Van had beaten off the murderous attack upon him.
His thoughts turned instantly to the wounded driver. Fear had made the man lie on the flags as still as death. Van pocketed his gun, whipped out a small flashlight. He was glad to see that the driver’s wound was in the right side, far over. He peeled the man’s coat and shirt back. A brief examination convinced him that the wound wasn’t fatal. It was a searing, painful furrow, with a possible fractured rib underneath.
Lights had sprung up in windows all along the street. Running feet sounded, and a policeman’s visored cap swung into view. Van waited quietly till the officer came up, gun in hand.
“Stand still there, you two!” the cop ordered. “What’s going on here?”
Van spoke softly. “The show’s over. It was an attempt at murder that fell through.”
“Yeah! Well keep your hands where I can see them. Come on out here, fella – make it snappy!”
The cop was eying Van’s ugly disguised face, the face of Dopey O’Banion, with deep suspicion. But Van’s hand flashed into his pocket in spite of the warning.
Then the patrolman stiffened. For in Van’s fingers as he stepped forward, gleamed under the rays of the distant street light, was the badge in the shape of a mask; the badge of platinum incrusted with small, brilliant diamonds.
The cop looked at it, gulped, glanced at Van’s face again. “I’ve heard of that shield!” he said huskily. “You must be – the Phantom!”
Van nodded. “Call an ambulance. Get this wounded man to the hospital.”
“There was shooting,” said the cop. “What was it? I gotta make my report.”
“Let that pass now. See to this wounded man. I’m going to leave him with you.”
The cop touched his cap, turned, and ran toward his corner call-box. Plainclothes detectives and bluecoats along the beat had been instructed to take orders from the Phantom. He had aided the department so many times in its fight for law and order that even men on the force who had never seen him had learned to respect him. Van bent over the wounded cabman.
