Chapter 2

THIRTY-STORY DEATH

THE NEXT few seconds offered a study in abject helplessness and an exhibition of incalculable strength. The two seized men at first windmilled their arms, but the awful agony of the grip on their necks seemed to surge like deadening poison through their bodies, and they became limp.

Around Doc Savage’s metallic fingers, and between them, the flesh of his victims all but oozed, so terrific was the pressure. The faces of the pair turned purple, eyes ogled and tongue stuck out stiffly.

Doc arose, and the two were limp as rags hanging from his great hands. They quivered a little and that was all.

The bronze man released them, and although neither was fully unconscious, they were too weak to do more than make croaking noises.

A search of their clothing brought the light small sums of money and billfolds containing cards. Leaking’s full name seemed to be Manuel Caesar Dicer. Hallet carried a blue army automatic and Leaking the slightly smaller gun with which he had clubbed the cop in the taxicab.

The outer office was fitted with a leather divan. Doc popped the two captives down on this, bound their wrists and ankles securely with the same cord they had intended to use upon him, and fell to eying them steadily.

“I want to know what is behind this,” he said. “It is going to be very, very unfortunate unless you start talking.”

The captives glared, exchanged glances and said nothing. The globules of moisture on Leaking’s forehead fattened, broke from their moorings and chased each other downward, forming little rivulets.

“Talk up!” Doc said sharply.

The pair registered discomfort, but held silence. This was something of a feat in itself, for there was a fierceness in the giant bronze man’s weird flake-gold eyes.

Doc straightened suddenly, swung around the office once, then went into the inside room. This was fitted with desk, chairs, ice water stand, a large sheet metal clothes locker the color of grass, and shelves holding innumerable law books. Atop a fat legal volume on torts perched a telephone.

Scooping up the instrument, Doc unpronged the receiver and asked for a number. His voice was low, and traffic sounds from the street below the open window kept his words completely from the two in the other chamber.

“Monk?” Doc asked when he got an answer.

“Sure,” said a mouselike voice.

Doc Savage now spoke rapidly, but not in English. The tongue he used was not unmusical, composed of liquid gutturals and sharp clackings, but it was doubtful if more than half a dozen people in the so-called civilized

world would have understood it. Yet the language was the mother tongue of a race once among the most powerful and cultured — the ancient Mayans of Central America.

His conversation completed, Doc hung up and went back to the prisoners. They had been trying ineffectually to escape, but desisted when they saw him.

“I never saw either of you gentlemen before this afternoon,” he said in an ominously calm tone. “Yet you go to great trouble to seize me off the street.”

Birdlike Hallet trembled; Leaking perspired; and neither let a word escape.

“Why did you seize me?” Doc asked, his voice vibrating a grim power. “What (lid you intend to do with me?”

This time, Leaking spoke. “H-how did you get rid of the effects of that gas so quick?”

“The gas never had any effect on me in the first place,” Doc said.

“W-what?” Leaking stuttered.

“You underestimate the human powers of observation,” Doc assured him dryly. “When you dropped that trick purse, I saw you.”

“You picked it up, knowing it was a trick?”

“The picking was done most carefully, if you had noticed,” Doc told him. “There were two logical things to suspect — a poisoned needle and gas. To avoid a needle, I did not open the purse in the usual manner of a man who has found one. And to checkmate the gas, I merely held my breath until the breeze blew the vapor away.”

“But why?”

“Why pretend to be overcome? Merely to find out what your game was. And now, any more questions?”

Leaking only glared.

“Then perhaps you will relieve my curiosity,” Doc suggested. “Why did you seize me?”

Leaking blew sweat off his upper lip and said, “You go to hell I”

VIOLENT ACTION followed Leaking’s profane suggestion. Doc Savage lunged, closed metallic hands upon the fellow and lifted him.

Leaking grimaced in agony and opened his mouth wide to cry out. Doc corked a wadded handkerchief into the gaping maw, and Leaking could only squeal through his nose.

Next, Doc gagged plump Hal]et.

Leaking was carried helplessly through the door into the inner office. The door was slammed shut.

Hallet, the sparrowlike lawyer, sprawled helpless on the divan and ogled the closed door. He tried to move. His ropes were drawn excruciatingly tight, many of the strands almost buried in the fellow’s soft flesh, and the gag distended his mouth to its greatest capacity.

Suddenly his eyes flew wider and his jaw sagged in horror. Out of the inner office were coming awful thuds, smackings and grunts. It was as if a man were being horribly beaten.

“You won’t talk. eh?” Doc Savage’s grim, powerful voice came through the door.

The sound of more blows followed, together with buzzing sounds that might have been a gagged man crying out in terrible pain.

Hallet tried to scream, hut his own gag made his best effort a whining, and he desisted to lay panting through his nostrils, round face draining of color until it had a clay hue. He was the picture of a man scared out of his wits.

Certainly the sounds emanating from the adjacent office were such as to strike horror. Again and again Doc Savage’s unusual voice put questions, to which Leaking only whizzed or whined through his nostrils, or, the gag removed, cursed smashingly. The blow thuddings always resumed, more violent than before. And finally there came the climax.

“Well, if you won’t talk, out of the window you go!” Doc boomed.

The window rattled up.

Hallet’s face was white enough to he written upon with a pencil, for he was visualizing that twenty-story drop to the street, and the hard sidewalk below. Many times he had looked down and visualized what would be the lot of one who fell.

Hallet abruptly tried to scream through his gag. He had heard a scuffling sound, as of a living body pushed over the window sill. A gruesome cry, faintly receding, followed that.

The connecting door leaped open. Doc Savage came through, his weird eyes hot aureate pools, the tendons on his neck standing out like rifle barrels.

Hallet sought to scream again. He had never glimpsed anything which looked quite as terrible as did the bronze giant.

Doc swept Hallet up easily and carried him to the inner office. The window was open, and Doc shoved Hallet half outside.

“Look down!” he directed.

Hallet looked, and shook as if be had taken bold of a charged electric wire.

The crowd on the sidewalk below resembled flies around some dark speck of succulence, while other flies came scudding across the street or climbed out of cars which were stopping. A fly in blue ran for the spot, tweetling a police whistle.

Doc wrenched Hallet back. His great voice was a grim crashing.

“They’ll be up here to investigate in about two minutes,” he said. “You have that long to tell your story’.”

“I d-don’t know anything!” Hallet stuttered when his gag was out.

Doc picked him up helplessly and ran him toward the open window, and the man screeched out in chilling fright, confident the bony hand of death was cupped to receive him down there in the street.

“I’ll tell you everything!” he shrilled.

Doc calmly carried him back into the outer office and tossed him on the leather divan.

“Why did you and our — er — unlucky friend, Leaking, attempt to seize me?” the bronze man demanded.

Hallet wet his lips. “We were hired. We were to get ten thousand dollars for grabbing you and holding you where no one could find you for two weeks.”

“So some one wants me out of circulation for two weeks, eh?” Doc showed no great surprise at the news; indeed, now that Hallet was talking, the bronze features had settled into a metallic repose. “Who hired you?” he continued.

“I don’t know,” Hallet muttered.

Doc grasped the man, rumbling, “The window is still open!”

“Fountain of Youth, Inc., hired me!” Hallet shrieked fearfully.

“Who?”

“It was handled in a roundabout way,” Hallet mumbled rapidly. “I was approached over the telephone with this proposition to seize you and hold you. The party who called me said there was no need of us ever seeing each other, and it would be better, in fact, if we didn’t. The only name I got was Fountain of Youth, Inc.”

“Man or woman?”

Hallet squirmed. “I am not positive.”

“Don’t forget that window!” Doc said meaningly. “You should know whether you talked to a man or a woman over the telephone.”

“It was a shrill, unnatural voice,” Hallet gulped. “I couldn’t tell. Honestly, I couldn’t.”

“Why did this Fountain of Youth, Inc., want me held?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea. I asked that question, of course, but was told that there was no necessity for me knowing.”

Doc’s strange eyes dwelled upon the frightened lawyer for a moment. “Since you have no information of importance, I shall have to consign you to that window, it seems. Has Fountain of Youth, Inc., got an office?”

“Yes. It is Room 1402, the Queen Tower building.”

“What about a telephone?”

“Yes. It is in the Queen Tower office. I had it traced.”

“So you tried on your own hook to learn something of this mysterious Fountain of Youth, Inc.?”

Hallet had gotten some of his nerve back and was almost chirping, birdlike, when he spoke. “Do you blame me for trying to get a line on them?”

Doc did not answer, but considered. Although his features showed no expression, there was a certain finality about his manner which indicated that he was sure Hallet had no more information to reveal.

Doc swung into the next office. Hallet could see the bronze man through the open door. Doc went to the big grass-green clothes locker and opened it.

Sight of the object which rolled out caused Hallet to turn very’ purple in the face.

LEAKING HAD been in the locker, bound and gagged. He fell out when Doc pulled the door ajar, and his garments made moist squishings, so profusely had he perspired. Leaking was uninjured.

“I thought — I thought — ” The words choked Hallet up and he could not finish.

“The power of suggestion,” Doc assured him dryly. “A few noises, some words, and you got the idea he had gone out of the window.”

“But the body on the street — “

“Ever hear of my five assistants?” Doc asked.

“Y-yes,” Hallet mumbled. “But w-what — “

“One of them, Monk by name, played the part of the body in the street,” Doc explained shortly. “New Yorkers are curious souls, and they all ran to see what a man could be lying on the sidewalk for. That naturally made Monk’s trick very lifelike. You see, Monk was summoned by telephone.”

“Oh!” Hallet swallowed. “I remember I did think I heard you phoning.”

Leaking, when the gag was removed from his jaws, swore choice profanity in a low voice that dripped rage. When it was suggested that he tell what he knew, he only snarled.

Of a different caliber was this Leaking. A block of a jaw and ugly eyes showed determination, offering a hint that to get information from him would take application of a more moving third-degree method than had urged Hallet to talk.

“My assistant, Monk, who played the dead man in the street, will be up here shortly,” Doc stated. “With him will be another of my group of five aides, Ham. By the way, Ham is a lawyer of no little reputation and may want to take measures to have you, Hallet, barred from practice.”

Hallet scowled; Leaking went on profaning in a guttural, hoarse monotone.

The afternoon sun sloped through the both offices, throwing shadows into the fear lines on Hallet’s face, and glistening on the wetness that filmed Leaking’s features.

An elevator doer clanked in the corridor outside, then feet tramped the hallway. They approached the office door.

“That will be my two men,” Doc said. He walked over and yanked the door ajar.

A man came in, holding a revolver straight out in front of his chest.

“Ain’t I the lucky one, Savage!” he gritted. “Get them hands high!”