THE SPIDER-City of Doom (10 page)

Drunkenly, he reeled to his feet, found he was standing on the ceiling of the car. Groans and frightened whimperings filled the car with a fearful symphony of pain. Off in another car, a man was screaming, over and over a single shrill note. The scream weakened and faded. Wentworth peered behind him, saw Anse Collins crumpled against a partition with a thread of blood across his temple. Beside him, the conductor pushed groggily to his feet, teetered for a moment on hands and feet and then straightened, struggling for balance.

Wentworth picked his way through broken glass and tumbled luggage to Collins' side, went hurriedly about reviving him. Abruptly, Wentworth snapped to his feet. He heard a faint sound as if some one were pounding an incredibly noisy typewriter with vehement fingers. Through the intermittent chattering, a man shrieked. Collins came to with a jerk. "A machine gun," he gasped.

"A hold-up," Wentworth snapped. "And the Master is behind it!"

He scrambled out through a broken window and raced along the embankment, a gun in each hand. The smashed cars were spilled over jumbled rocks, a sprawling, disjointed snake. Moans and screams punctuated the mechanical cackle of the gun. A group of men, carrying striped mail sacks over their shoulders, went down over the rocks with mountain-goat leaps.

Wentworth's guns blazed once, but he knew he was out of range. He charged on. It was impossible to advance in a straight line. He had to spring to right and left where flat surfaces offered secure footing, and that fact undoubtedly saved the
Spider's
life. A machine gun stammered from close at hand and powdered granite sprang up in dust directly in Wentworth's path. Only the fact that he had sprung sideways to better footing saved him. He jumped once more, going down on his knees between two chunks of granite. Lead buzzed past within inches of his head. He heard the deep boom of Collins' forty-four, but couldn't see the Southerner.

Cautiously, Wentworth squirmed between rocks down toward the spot where the machine gunner had hidden. He was cursing with impatience, knowing that the robbers were escaping, that it would be certain death to take up the pursuit before this machine gunner was eliminated. His trousers had been torn by that quick leap between the rocks. His scraped knees left a bloody trail. Collins' gun boomed again, and Wentworth jerked quickly into sight. He caught a glint of metal in a clump of bushes at the base of the embankment and sped ten shots in a continuous roll of fire from both guns.

Twigs flew high and the dead branches quivered and shook, then began to thrash violently. A man's hand slid into sight along the ground, gloved fingers clawing at the frozen ground. The hand and arm stiffened, then relaxed.

"Good work," Collins called, twenty feet to his right. "Man, that was good!"

Wentworth peered about. The robbers had vanished and over beyond a narrow strip of woods, automobile engines raced and dwindled into the distance. Wentworth's lips closed thinly. The bandits had escaped, but at least he had stopped one. He rock-leaped down the heap, hauled the man out of the bushes. At least six of Wentworth's bullets had hit him. Three had smashed through the side of his head.

Collins, pulling up just behind Wentworth, stared down and repeated: "Man, that
was
good!"

Wentworth scowled thoughtfully at the dead machine gunner. He knew that face. He was "Trigger" Skinner of Mickey McSwag's mob. Even as the
Spider
had guessed, his wiping out of Devil Hackerson had not hampered the Master in the least. He had had no trouble in finding other men who were willing to do his murdering for him to gain the secret of the chemical that turned vault doors into cake sugar.

Shoes rasping on rocks pulled Wentworth around and he saw two men running toward him with revolvers glinting in their fists. They were red-faced men, glowering beneath the pulled-down brims of felts. They eyed Wentworth suspiciously until they spotted "Trigger" Skinner dead on the ground, then admiration replaced the glare. "What'd you get him with, his own machine gun?" one growled.

Wentworth smiled grimly. "Automatic pistols are pretty deadly weapons, too, when properly used," he said dryly. "Did they get away with anything?"

"Only ninety grand," snarled one of the men. "Not counting those the wreck killed, there's four dead men in the express car. We was riding passenger as an extra precaution or the typewriter would of caught us, too."

His remark confirmed Wentworth's surmise that the two were railroad detectives.

"Listen," he said. "I've got some damned important business to attend to in Middleton. Suppose it would be all right for me to shove along? It wouldn't make me sore if I didn't have to hang around to tell about this." A jerk of his head indicated the corpse of the gangster.

The detectives' eyes narrowed. They asked a few questions but in the end the men's hunger for praise won them over. They agreed to take credit for the kill. Wentworth pushed off up the rocky embankment toward where a relief train and autos had stopped, a half mile down the right of way. He and Collins could do no more good here.

Wentworth's face was white beneath the lean tan and his eyes smoldered as they surveyed the white-coated doctors climbing over the wreckage, the stretchers filing past toward the hospital car. Seven coaches were sprawled over the rocks, and the locomotive was a smashed wreck in the ravine. Two white splotches beside it, sheet-covered corpses, marked the resting place of the crew.

Wentworth's eyes rose to the glinting line of the steel rails, following it backward from the spot where the shattered engine lay. A few hundred feet back there was a break. His mouth lipless with compression, he walked rapidly to that spot and stared down at the crumbled wreckage of the rail. If there had been any doubt before that the Master was behind this carnage, a single glance at the track dissolved it. He stooped and picked up a segment of gray steel, struck it with another. There was no ring, only a sodden thud and fragments crumbled off and sifted gray powder on the ground.

THE STEEL fell from his hands and a low bitter oath rasped his throat. He had counted thirty stretchers passing and men still labored to extract the injured and dead from the debris of the train. Was there no end to the infamy of this killer? Either Wentworth had accidentally taken the train which they intended looting, or the Master had deliberately wrecked it to get him at a disadvantage and mow him down. It looked suspiciously like that machine gunner had been planted solely to dispose of him—as if those shots had been fired partly to lure him from the protection of steel cars if he had survived the crash.

The
Spider
had killed the killer, but loot and slaughter had added to the villain's toll. This time there seemed more reason behind the atrocity that had been committed, but still the purpose behind the wrecking of the skyscrapers did not appear. The answer might be found in Middleton. Wentworth and Collins completed their trip to the town in relief automobiles, repaired their clothing and went directly to the Collins apartment.

Collins stopped with an oath inside the door. The apartment was a wreck. Rugs had been stripped from the floor, pictures ripped from their moldings, overstuffed furniture cut to pieces. Drawers full of papers were tumbled upon the floor. Wentworth entered with a grimly satisfied smile. He made a telephone call, then from the wall above a closet door dug out a small camera and an electric fixture.

"Infra-red camera and light," he explained to Collins. "It could take a picture in darkness as well as light and the man it snapped would not be aware of the photograph. We'll have it developed."

Wentworth took the camera to a specialist shop and emerged to find extras being screamed in the streets. The headlines covered half the front page.

MUNICIPAL BUILDING CRASHES!
BANK LOOTED OF HALF MILLION!
GOVERNOR CALLS OUT TROOPS!

With hands as rigid as rock, and as cold, Wentworth gripped the paper to read the details. Truly, the Master had struck terribly in New York City. Apparently, he had only waited until Wentworth's back was turned to deal his most terrific blow. The death toll this time was only a thousand. The mockery of that qualifying word, "only," jeered at Wentworth like a grinning death's-head. But the casualties had been light as compared with the toll of the Sky and the Plymouth buildings.

The Municipal Building, which housed the business offices of the city, had collapsed at the rush luncheon hour when the street was thronged with persons. Luckily, it had caved in upon itself, rather than plunging full length into jammed Park Row. If that had happened, the death toll might well have been several times as great. There had been no high wind, but engineers figured the constant jarring of subways beneath the building had broken down the crystallized steel.

Wentworth's burning eyes skipped from that account to the looting of the bank. It had occurred even as their train had been pulling out of Pennsylvania station. Machine guns had swept the entrance and interior of the bank clean of human life and steel shields had furnished no protection. They had crumpled like glass beneath the pounding bullets. The vaults had been no stronger and within minutes of the attack, the gangsters had rushed out with a fortune, the biggest robbery of its kind in history. Police were quickly on the scene and had managed to kill four of the robbers, but the rest had escaped.

A smaller item was the $250,000 robbery of an armored truck. Only the fact that a similar method had been used in this holdup even won it space on the front page. A large sedan had rolled up beside the armored truck and opened fire with machine guns. Under the hammer of the lead, the sides of the truck had crumpled. The guards had been literally riddled with bullets and the blood-stained loot snatched away. It had all happened within a space of moments. Three pedestrians had been burned down with the machine guns while they stood paralyzed by surprise.

And now, martial law had been declared in New York City. Hereafter, bayonet-armed troops would patrol the street. A stringent curfew would be enforced, and no one could enter the financial district of the city where the banks were concentrated unless he had a special military permit. Wentworth saw the keen planning of Kirkpatrick behind these precautions, but he shook his head dubiously. Resources were being concentrated there under the supervision of the soldiers. Smaller banks, terrified by the ruthless efficiency of the attacks, were pouring their money into the strongly-protected centers. The insurance companies were responsible for that move, of course, insisting on these supposed safeguards under threat of vastly increased premiums. Couldn't the fools see that they were playing directly into the Master's hands?

Slowly, Wentworth folded the newspaper, looked up to find Collins white-faced and hot eyed. "I reckon Jim is better off dead," he said slowly. "If he knew that his invention was being used to kill people, he'd turn over in his grave."

With a wrench, Wentworth hurled the newspaper from him, stared about him at the throngs that were reading the extras. He saw men glance nervously over their shoulders at banks; he saw people move away from tall buildings with frightened strides. The panic was on. Until that monstrous Master was wiped out, men would walk in constant terror of their lives. Business was suffering already and once more the nation's faith in government and banks would reel. The industrial repercussions of this fright would send thunderous waves across the oceans and shake security there. A world that had buttressed its wealth behind steel—that protected its shores and borders with steel—would stare disintegration in the face.

"Listen," said Collins, "don't you reckon Alrecht might be behind this thing? You haven't even looked him up. I tell you, he and Bill Butterworth were the only folks that knew of Jim's invention."

Wentworth nodded shortly. "That's one of the reasons we came to Middleton today," he said. "You get to Butterworth and bring him down to our hotel room. I'll pay Mr. Alrecht a call. By that time, our infra-red film should be ready and we may know the answer to our problem."

Collins agreed, strode off with a long-legged determined pace, his face set and his heavy shoulders thrust forward. Wentworth watched him go with speculative eyes, then walked deliberately down Main Street toward the city's largest building, the First National Bank, in which Alrecht had law offices. As skyscrapers went, it wasn't very tall, but fourteen stories was an all-time high in Middleton. An elevator boy was arguing with the starter in the hall.

"I ain't hankering after being mashed in that cage," the boy said vehemently.

"This is the tallest building in Middleton, and if those fellows come here, this will be the first place they hit. They're already robbed a bank here, and . . ."

"You can leave if you want to," the starter told him shortly, "but there isn't any need coming back tomorrow or the next day and expecting to get your job back."

The operator jeered, jerked off the coat that was the entire uniform and flung it on a chair. "This building ain't going to be here tomorrow," he said and strode toward the basement lockers. The starter crossed to the cage with an apologetic glance at Wentworth. "The whole town's half-crazy, sir," he said. "I'll take you up."

Wentworth caught himself listening for sounds in the building as the elevator rose, listening for creaking groans that might herald its collapse, and he cursed himself silently. Hell, he was getting as bad as that elevator boy. But his thoughts brought home with a shock to him how fearfully the terror of the steel-eater was spreading. If the
Spider,
knowing more than anyone else about the gangsters—but he had to admit that his knowledge was terribly limited—could thus become nervous on merely entering a tall building, think of the effect of the spreading propaganda of fear upon the people as a whole!

Alrecht's outer office was well but not expensively furnished with brown leather chairs in a commodious waiting room. A girl clerk patted her metallic marcel as he told her that he was a police detective from New York City. She powdered her nose before she went into the inner office, but her calculating blue eyes were upon Wentworth again as she ushered him in. He walked with the slight swagger that unimportant men assume when, burdened with authority, they face a man who overawes them. He kept his hat on.