Holocaust House, Norbert Davis [book series for 12 year olds txt] 📗

said desperately. “That damned scoundrel, Crowley. Tricked me. Hit me—hit me—chair.” He heaved himself up on his elbows, eyes glaring. “Doan! I’ll hold you responsible! Got away! Your fault!”

“They didn’t hit me with a chair,” Doan pointed out.

“You!” Brill gasped. “Leaving me with them. While you wander off… They’ll get away! They’ll get to the station! Jannen will help them! Flat-car there—go down the grade…”

“We’ll telephone ahead and stop them.”

Brill rolled his head back and forth helplessly. “No telephone. Tried it upstairs. Line cut. You’ve got to go after them! They’ve got only a few minutes start! You can catch them! That girl—she can’t go fast.”

Doan said: “You mean you want me to go out in that storm again?”

“Oh, damn you!” Brill swore. “Don’t you understand that my whole career is at stake? I hired your agency, and you failed me! I’ll have you black-listed. I’ll sue!”

“All right, all right,” Doan said. “I’ll go bring them back. Take another coat and give it to the girl you find down cellar.”

He went to the front door and opened it. The wind whooped in triumphantly, driving a fine mist of snow ahead of it.

“Light,” said Brill weakly. “They’ve got an electric lantern. You can see—”

Doan slammed the door shut. The wind came whipping down out of the black mouth of the ravine with a fierce howling intensity. Doan was struggling to get into his topcoat, and the wind billowed the coat out like a clumsy sail and blew Doan with it down the steps and across the black, rock-strewn ground.

He stumbled into a drift waist-deep before he caught himself. He stood still for a moment, one arm crooked up to shield his eyes from the cutting whip of the snow. The wind blasted at him, and then he caught the flicker of a light on the path that led up out of the flat.

Doan began to run. He was half-blinded with the snow, and the wind pulled and tugged at him, pushed him in staggering crazy spurts. He stumbled and half-fell, and then the gravel on the steep path grated under his shoes.

The light was high above him, much closer now, and as he watched, it flicked over the edge of the ravine and disappeared.

Doan fumbled under his coat and found the revolver. He went up the path at a lurching run. His breath burned icily in his throat. The air was thin and fine, with no weight to it, and his heart began to drum in a sickening cadence.

He was breathing in sobbing gasps when he hit the top of the ravine, sweat crawling in cold rivulets under his clothes. He paused there swaying, looking for the light, and found it off to his left.

He turned and plowed stubbornly in that direction, and there was no path here, nothing but thick drifts of snow piled against stunted brush that tore at his clothes with myriad clutching fingers.

The light tossed up high ahead of him, very close now, and showed stunted trees lined up in a ghostly gallery, leaning forward in the push of the wind as they watched.

Doan tripped over a snow-hidden log and went down flat on his face in powdery whiteness. He heaved himself stubbornly up on hands and knees, dabbed at his smeared face with his coatsleeve—and he stayed that way, half kneeling, rigid, staring into savagely cruel greenish yellow eyes on a level with his own and not a yard away.

“Hah!” Doan said, grunting with the exhalation of his breath.

The eyes came for him with the sudden slashing gleam of teeth under them. Doan poked the revolver straight out and fired, wondering as he pulled the trigger whether his fall had packed snow in the barrel and whether the gun would blow back at him.

The shot made a bright orange flare, and the eyes were gone. A heavy body kicked and squirmed in the snow. Doan struggled up to his feet, and another dark low form slipped sideways in the whirling darkness, circling him.

Doan leveled the revolver and fired instantly. A shrill ki-yi-ing yip echoed the smash of the shot, and the second dark form went tumbling over and over in the snow, contorting itself into desperate struggling knots.

The third one came in a black streak out of the darkness, up out of the snow in a long lunge, straight at Doan’s throat. He fired going over backward. The flat-nosed .38 hit the animal in the chest and turned it clear over in the air. It fell back rigid and still beside the first.

Doan struggled in the snow, heaving himself up, and then Jannen loomed above him, yelling something the wind garbled into an unintelligible, frenzied scream. He had an ax in his hand, and he swung it back up over his shoulder and down at Doan in a full sweep that made its head glitter in a bright, deadly line.

Doan whirled himself sideways, rolling.

“Jannen!” he yelled frantically. “Don’t! Don’t! I’ll shoot—”

The ax-head hissed past is ear, and Jannen caught it on the upswing and chopped back down again with it.

Doan couldn’t dodge this time. He didn’t try. He shot Jannen just above the grassy gleam of the buckle on the wide web belt around his coat.

Jannen made a queer, choked sound. The ax stopped in midair. Jannen took one step back and then another, trying to get the ax up over his shoulder again.

“Drop it,” said Doan.

The ax was going up inch by desperate inch. Jannen’s breath made a high whistling sound. He made a clumsy step forward.

“All right, baby,” said Doan.

He pulled the trigger of the revolver again. There was a dull, small click—nothing else. Before Doan even had time to grasp what that meant, Jannen reeled queerly sideways and went down full length on his face, as rigid as a log.

“Good God,” said Doan in a whisper.

He got up slowly. The thing had happened in split-seconds, and the echos of the gunfire were still rolling lustily ahead of the wind.

Doan stared at his gun. It was bright and deadly in his hand, with the snow moisture gleaming on its thick cylinder, and he remembered now that he hadn’t reloaded it. He had fired once at the metal case and once in the snow-shed. There had been four cartridges left in the gun. He had used them all. If he had missed just one of those four shots…

The wind whistled shrilly through bare branches, chuckling in its high, cruel glee.

Doan stumbled forward, leaned down over Jannen. The man was dead, and the snow already was laying a white cold blanket thinly across his distorted face.

Doan plowed back through the drifts and brush, found the hard surface of the path. He felt weak and numb with cold that was more than cold. His legs were stiff, unwieldy sticks under him as he went back down the steep path, across the flat toward the warmly welcoming glow of the windows that watched for him through the whirl of snow.

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CHAPTER X. TOO MANY GUNS

DOAN WENT BLUNDERING across the porch with his head down and ran into the front door. He found the knob, fumbled it with numb fingers, finally turned it. The wind swept the door out of his grasp, banged it back thunderously against the wall.

Doan stamped through into the soft luxurious warmth of the hall, fought the door shut again behind him. Sighing in relief, he wiped snow moisture off his face with the palm of his left hand.

“Drop your gun on the floor.”

Doan jerked to attention. Brill was standing in the doorway of the living room. He was wearing a blue dressing gown now over his pajamas. He lounged there, quite at ease, with the big .45 automatic bulking huge and black in his right hand.

“Drop your gun on the floor,” he repeated in the same confident, quiet voice.

He looked very theatrical, with the white blaze showing up in his smoothly brushed hair, with his eyes narrowed. He was smiling in a dramatically sinister way.

Doan loosened the stiff fingers of his right hand and the .38 thudded on the carpet.

“It wasn’t loaded anyway,” he observed.

“Come in here,” said Brill.

He backed out of the door, and Doan followed him into the living room. Someone had thrown kindling on the fire, and red flames crackled greedily in it.

“You know Miss Alden, I think,” Brill said.

She was sitting on the divan. She was wearing a man’s overcoat so big that it almost wrapped around her twice. She had brown hair cut in a long bob, mussed a little now, and the fire found warm glints in it. Her brown eyes were wide and scared, and her soft lower lip trembled. There was a smear of coal dust on the end of her short straight nose.

“Hello, again,” said Doan.

She didn’t answer, and Brill said:

“You’re becoming a nuisance, Doan. What happened to Jannen? I heard you shooting.”

“I was just target practicing,” Doan said, “but Jannen, that dope, stepped right in front of my gun just when I happened to be pulling the trigger. I expect he’s sort of dead.”

Kokomo came in from the kitchen. There was a lopsided swollen lump on one side of his jaw, and his eyes glittered malevolently at Doan.

“You tricky little devil! When I get my hands on you—”

“I can hardly wait,” Doan told him.

“Later, Kokomo,” Brill said. He was watching Doan with gravely speculative eyes. “I suppose you are beginning to understand this now, aren’t you?”

“Oh, sure,” said Doan. “I figured it out quite a while ago.”

“Did you, now?” said Brill sarcastically.

Doan nodded. “Yes. You were next in line for the management of Sheila Alden’s trust fund after this gent Dibben. You had all the time in the world to figure things out and get ready for this little play. You saw that an accident happened to Dibben at the right time. You knew Sheila Alden was coming up here—probably suggested the idea yourself—and you made all your arrangements beforehand.

“First you got Leila Adams, Sheila’s secretary, to throw in with you by promising to split part of what you got from Sheila with her. Then you got Kokomo to do the muscle-work, promising him a split too. When you were prowling around up here beforehand you found out that Jannen was a crackpot with a grudge against the Aldens.

“Now, there was an ideal fall-guy for you all ready-made. Anything that happened you could always blame on him. But Jannen talks too much, and this poor guy, Boley, the regular station master, got suspicious of what you were cooking up with him, and either you or Kokomo or Jannen—or all three of you—got Boley drunk and probably doped him and left him out in the storm to freeze.

“Leila Adams wasn’t going to impersonate Sheila Alden unless it was necessary on account of someone like me coming around. You definitely didn’t want anyone around—not with the real Sheila Alden locked in the cellar.

“And so—” Doan paused, ran a hand over his cheek.

“Jannen knew a lot about explosives, and so you got him to fix up that little cigar case present for me. You knew I was going to be on the job because the trust company hired the agency, and Toggery told you he was going to send me up. So you dressed up in a fancy costume and laid for me with your cigar case bomb.”

“How did you know I was the one who gave you that case?”

Doan grinned. “I couldn’t miss. You spent so much time trying to cover yourself up that you stuck out like a sore thumb. You wanted to be