THE SPIDER-City of Doom (46 page)

"
Nita!
" Wentworth cried despairingly.

Nita struck at his face with clawed fingers. "You murderer," she cried. "Let me go! I saw you kill that man! You put—you put a spider on his forehead!"

At that instant, Wentworth heard hard, positive footsteps running toward them. Nita heard them, too.

"Help!" she cried. "Help, police! This man is a murderer!"

Shocked incredulity gripped Wentworth. This blow, coming after so much else, left him without coherent thought. He realized that the concussion of the blast had done something to Nita, but that was only a dimly conscious dictate of his mind. The rest of him was too stunned by this reaction actually to understand what possessed the woman he loved.

But he heard the voice behind him. A man's voice. It rasped, "Let go that woman, you fiend!"

Wentworth's head whipped about. A policeman had checked beneath a street light. He held a revolver lifted in his hand, was sighting along the barrel! With a desperate effort, Wentworth flung himself aside. Nita screamed again, and ran toward the policeman!

"Save me!" she cried. "Save me! He killed that man! He put a spider on his forehead!"

For a moment, Wentworth wavered. If only he could make Nita understand . . . . The policeman's gun came up again. His whistle was between his teeth and he made it shrill wildly in the night, even as he fired. Wentworth felt the wind of the bullet. Frantically, he flung himself toward the door of a house. It was locked. He flung his weight against it blindly, and the police gun crashed again.

The cop was yelling now. "The
Spider!
" he shouted. "The
Spider!
Surround that house. It's the
Spider!
He killed a guy and tried to kill this woman!"

Wentworth was sobbing drily. This was the maddest mockery of all. He crushed his body into a corner of the doorway and stilled the hammering wildness of his thoughts. He knew now what had happened to Nita. The shock had brought on a temporary amnesia, a forgetfulness of everything save the present. She had seen him kill. Naturally, she had been terrified. That was all. He told himself that, but the shock of Nita's horror at him, and of her flight, still was a pain that blocked rational thought.

He remembered then that he had guns in his armpit holsters. He yanked one out and drove two bullets through the lock of the door. It was high time for action. Other policemen were charging into the streets. A bullet whanged past him, flattened against the bricks. The glass of the door was suddenly shattered in a design of death. Splinters of glass cut his cheek as he hurled himself once more at the barrier. It yielded, and he catapulted into the dark hallway.

But the police were just behind him. Wentworth ran blindly. He caromed against the stairway, staggered against the opposite wall. His feet beat raggedly as he ran on, off balance. He leaped against another door, fell to the floor. Gun-flame brightened the hall fitfully behind him. The lead beat on metal ahead of him. A pan jangled to the floor and drummed as it spun on edge. Plaster dust roiled into the darkness. He felt it burn his throat as he raced on. Another door, locked. But the key was in it. Somehow he locked the door behind him and fled on.

It gained him a few seconds. He was in the open air again, running beneath a sky that was red with fire. A fence . . . his heavy body went over it, but he landed off balance, stumbled to his knees. He was up again, dodging, running. A dog began to bark savagely, snapping at his heels. He vaulted another fence and felt pain stab through his hand. A nail. He fell, and for a long moment he could not lift himself from the ground.

In staggering pain, he lumbered toward the rear of the house that must give on the next street. He reached up and struck with his gun at the glass of a window. It did not break. God, was he so weak? He struck again, and glass showered down into his face. Laboriously, he grasped the sill and muscled his weary body upward. Somehow, he was through the window, was stumbling through a room where every step brought him against a new piece of furniture. Upstairs, a woman was screaming.

Another door, and another . . . the blessed air of the street. He forced himself to check and lean against a wall. He was fleeing in blind panic—he, the
Spider!
He forced himself to stare about him, to seek his bearings. The police were at least two blocks behind him. He could hear their shouts. There was a sudden crash of gunfire as they raked a suspicious shadow somewhere.

There was an auto parked at the curb right in front of him.

Wentworth staggered toward it.

The door was locked. He put his shoulders into a heave on the doorhandle, and the lock snapped. He flung himself behind the wheel. His fingers were shaking as he reached to the leather girdle about his waist. There was a tool there . . . . He stabbed the lock-pick at the ignition switch, and missed.

He closed his eyes and forced himself to breathe slowly. He crushed his shaking hands together, held them firm with an effort. Slowly the madness went from his brain. When he reached for the lock again, he was stone cold inside. His eyes held their old keenness. The police were rounding the corner, a half block away, when he maneuvered the car into motion. Their bullets drummed against the metal back of the car. One punched through the window, and made its hole-centered star in the windshield. Then he whirled a corner and was leaving them behind.

Wentworth knew now where he was going. Regardless of danger to himself, he must get to Commissioner Kirkpatrick at once and tell him how terribly these killers were armed. The police must be organized on a new scale, equipped with new weapons. In God's name, what sort of organization was this that devastated a section of the city for the sake of a petty racket!

There was no way of guessing, but the threat they constituted needed no analysis. The people must be protected against any recurrence of such horror.

Wentworth eluded the police in a space of a half dozen blocks and headed straight for police headquarters. He remembered dimly that he had ordered his masked ally, Jackson, to speed there after giving his message to the police. Perhaps Jackson had managed to get through to Kirkpatrick. It was a thing that must be done . . . quickly.

Wentworth bore the accelerator to the
floor, wove through confused traffic as he raced for headquarters. A block away, he abandoned the car. The license number might have been spotted. The bullet scars were a betrayal in themselves. Wentworth raced on afoot. There was a dilapidated coupe parked before headquarters and as he saw it, he uttered a gasp of thankfulness. Jackson was here first, then. He had carried the message!

Wentworth darted toward the car and uncertainty shook him. The right front tire was flat. There were bullet-pocks on the armored sides, and the windshield had great frosted blotches where lead had hammered on its protective thickness. He swerved toward the coupe, whipped open the door.

On the cushion was a dark stain. Slowly, Wentworth touched the spot. It was still wet and his fingers . . . were red!

The sound of a man coming out of swing doors fast made Wentworth whip his head toward the entrance to police headquarters. A stiffly erect figure in a Chesterfield and derby was coming rapidly down the steps. He caught the set, saturnine profile of Commissioner Kirkpatrick and gladness thrust through him. He would be in time, then, with his message. He took a single stride forward . . . then checked.

That limousine sliding to the curb where Kirkpatrick had stopped was not the police commissioner's machine. It bore the license plates of the Mayor of New York!

Even before the car slid to a halt, the door batted open and the bounding, energetic figure of the mayor leaped out. His deep voice had a rasp.

"Kirkpatrick!" he snapped. "I'll expect your resignation by tomorrow morning. You're suspended as of this moment!"

Kirkpatrick stiffened under the shock of the words. His metallic, crisp voice was angry. "I'll discuss that with you later, Mr. Mayor," he said coldly. "Right now, there is an emergency which must be handled at once."

The Mayor caught Kirkpatrick's arm as he strode past. "Just a moment, Kirkpatrick," he said harshly. "I said you were suspended. I have already appointed your successor. Inspector Littlejohn will be acting commissioner."

Wentworth winced at the name. Littlejohn was a competent man, all right, but completely ruthless. His pursuit of the
Spider,
and his sure but proofless conviction that Wentworth and the
Spider
were one amounted almost to an obsession. With Littlejohn in control, there would be no co-operation between the police and Wentworth. His knowledge would never be used.

The Mayor was saying, "There is no time now to discuss the details. The charges will be preferred if you demand it. For the present, I'm busy!"

He whipped toward the car, and the dour-faced Littlejohn stepped down. Wentworth peered into the interior of the limousine. There was a large and bulging figure there he recognized. Daniel Flagg, boss of a political machine. But Wentworth's eyes lingered there only a moment. They centered on the woman who was alighting, her hand resting upon Littlejohn's.

It was Nita!

"Nita!" Kirkpatrick cried. "Confound it, Littlejohn, have you already started your persecution?"

But Nita was staring at Kirkpatrick in a dazed way. "Am I supposed to know you, too?" she asked emptily. "But I am not being persecuted. I saw a man commit a murder, and they tell me he is a notorious criminal called the
Spider.
I am going to try to identify him for the Mayor and Inspector Littlejohn."

She pressed her hands to her temples. "I have the queerest feeling. This is what they call amnesia, I suppose. I remember nothing except that I was walking along a street near a big fire and saw this man commit murder and put a red seal on his victim's forehead. He seemed to think I should know him, too. He called me by my first name . . . . He was horrible. There was blood on his hands . . . ."

Littlejohn took her arm and urged her toward the doors of headquarters. Quietly, Wentworth slipped into the wrecked coupe. There was a twisted smile on his lips. Nita, afflicted with amnesia, and prepared to identify him to a hostile police commissioner! Kirkpatrick out of power when the city needed his efficiency most! And a deadly group of butchers striking with the efficiency of a German Blitzkrieg!

Wentworth pressed his hands hard to his head. He would have to go into hiding, of course. But he would lose not one hour in striking against the criminals, against Big Gannuck and the rest of his army of destruction. But first, he would have to find them . . . .

Wentworth shook his head wearily. He had destroyed the only headquarters of which he, or those brave boys, knew. He—abruptly his eyes narrowed. He stooped and picked up from the floor of the coupe a short billy such as policeman carry. He turned it over slowly in his hands. There were stains on it. Wentworth's face grew stern and cold. This club had been used against Jackson. But it was not a police billy. It did not bear the tell-tale initials N.Y.P.D. which all police equipment carried.

Abruptly, Wentworth's head jerked up. His hands clenched on the stained billy, and from his unsmiling lips, there came a mocking sound that promised destruction to the criminals who had done these deeds of horror. Soft and mocking, flat and ominous, it sounded there in the darkness of the wrecked coupe . . . the laughter of the
Spider!

It was a long, lavishly furnished room.

The walls were covered to the ceiling with pale green leather and the ceiling itself was of tinted soundproofing blocks. Furniture consisted of a long table of gleaming mahogany and six chairs.

There was no chairman's seat at the head of the table. That space was blank. But, seeming balanced upright on that end of the table, there was a sheet of glass! It was translucent, blank and, for the moment, meaningless. It was not intended as a protection, for it was not thick enough to be bullet-proof. A panel in a corner opened soundlessly and a girl walked in. Her golden hair lay in metallic neatness down her nape. There was something of the Orient about the girl, though her features and coloring were pure Caucasian. Perhaps it was in the style of the high-necked gown of soft rose which she wore, perhaps in the utter submissiveness of her bearing. Her head was bowed. Her shoulders were . . . yielding. She moved up the length of the table until she stood beside the pane of glass. She touched it with her fingers, softly.

She went back to stand beside the door. She opened a panel in the leather covering of the wall and took out a folding chair. She sat on that chair, with her hands folded in her lap. Her eyes closed and her lips moved. She might have been praying . . . to a sheet of glass!

Long minutes dragged past and the girl did not stir. Presently, there was a faint, blurred drumming on the door. The girl rose to her feet and opened a peephole. Outside stood a man who was shrouded from crown to toe in an all-enveloping black robe. He was a large man and his movements were brusque. He lifted his left hand and dragged the hood back from his masked face so that his forehead showed.

Against the swarthy, lined brow, a symbol glowed bright crimson. It was the seal of the
Spider!

Without a word, the girl opened the door. The man recovered his forehead and slouched toward one of the chairs. He stared with slowly moving eyes about the room. When he saw the sheet of glass, he grunted skeptically. Then, he settled into his chair to wait. The girl composed herself upon her folding chair by the door.

In a space of minutes, the muffled drumming was repeated and once more she peered through the peephole, and a robed-and-hooded man outside bared his forehead, and a
Spider
seal, for her inspection. Four times more, she repeated the process, and four other men gave the required identification. The only deviation was when the broad, bony forehead of the sixth man showed not one, but
two Spider
seals!

The man growled an oath. "Open up, you empty-faced fool," the man snarled. "You know me well enough. It's just that I had another little run-in with that scum of hell, the
Spider!
"