The man got the elevator door shut before Doc’s friends reached it. The cage sank swiftly.
But directly beside the lift the sneak had used, stood another car, open.
In the office, Oliver Wording Bittman searched about wildly, calling, "Where are the guns?" He was not going to barge into trouble unarmed, it seemed.
Renny, Long Tom, Johnny, and Monk dived into the open elevators. Monk stamped the button which started the doors sliding shut.
Quick-thinking, waspish Ham threw himself against the closing panels, halting them.
"Hold on a minute!" he clipped. "That man deliberately let himself be heard! And there is no attendant in this elevator!"
THE others stared at Ham, not comprehending what he was driving at.
"Scat!" rumbled Monk. "If you don’t wanta see action, get out of the way of somebody who does! You can stay and guard Bittman. He still ain’t got no gun."
"Shut up!" Ham rapped. "Come out of there! All of you!"
"But what — "
"Come out and I’ll show you what I suspect!"
The conversation had occurred rapidly. Renny, Monk, Long Tom, and Johnny erupted from the elevator door as tumultuously as they had entered.
Reaching into the cage gingerly, using his sword cane for a prod, Ham threw the lift control lever to the point marked, "Down."
Nothing happened.
Ham let the doors slide shut, closing the master circuit of the hoist machinery. Ordinarily, the cage would have departed with a gentle acceleration.
But this time it fell!
The dull report of a blast echoed from high overhead. An explosive had been placed in the lift mechanism!
"Aw — " Monk muttered. He was not affected as much by the narrow escape from death as by the thought he would have to thank his roasting mate, Ham, for saving his life.
Ham’s quick thinking had saved them from Kar’s death trap!
"We’ll use Doc’s scooter!" Renny barked.
They ran down the battery of elevators. The metal-paneled last door was shut. Apparently no cage stood there.
Renny’s monster hand found a secret button and pushed it. The doors cracked open. A waiting cage was revealed.
This was Doc Savage’s private lift, to be used in reaching the street in moments of emergency. Doc’s friends called it his "scooter." It operated at a far greater speed than any other cage in the huge skyscraper. It always waited here on the eighty-sixth floor for Doc’s use.
Oliver Wording Bittman now came dashing out of the office. He had apparently reconciled himself to going into action without a gun.
"Wait for me! I want in on this!" he called.
He sprang into the elevator with the others, Monk hit the control lever. The cage floor seemed to hop out from under their feet. So swift was the descent that the sensation of falling persisted for some seventy stories. And the stopping piled them down on all fours.
"Golly!" grinned Monk. "I always get a wallop out of ridin’ in this thing!"
They hurried out to the street.
"There he goes!" declared Long Tom.
Their skulking visitor stood beside the curb half a block distant. Parked at this point was a cream-colored taxi. The man drew a taxi driver’s uniform cap from the cab, donned it. Evidently this was his masquerade.
Suddenly he discovered Doc’s men.
He bounded into the cab. The machine jumped from the curb, turned in the street like a dog chasing its own tail, and hooted away.
Fortunately, Renny had his own car parked near. It was a tiny sedan, ill befitting Renny’s immense bulk. Into it, Doc’s men piled.
The chase was on!
FEW vehicles other than an occasional milk wagon moved on the streets. That was lucky. The headlong pace the pursuit set allowed for no niceties of traffic dodging.
Up Broadway they thundered, leaving a trail of bleating police whistles behind.
Renny’s peewee limousine proved a surprise. It ran like a racer. And Renny was something of a Barney Oldfield at the wheel. The fleeing cab was slowly, steadily overhauled.
Desperate, the machine dodged, doubled back. It only lost ground.
Finally, the taxi veered over to Riverside Drive, then off the Drive and down a rutty workroad — the same road followed by the gold truck Doc Savage had trailed.
Renny steered his machine in pursuit.
Behind them, a police squad car caterwauled along the Drive, but missed seeing them. It wandered off, wrapped in the bedlam of its own siren, vainly searching for the two automobiles which had used the early morning streets of New York for a race track.
The fleeing thug drove almost to the tumble-down pier where lay anchored the Jolly Roger. He hopped out, kept behind the taxi and scuttled for the pirate vessel.
A pistol flamed desperately from his hand as he caught sight of Renny’s little sedan bucking down the rutty road. The murk was thick, so he missed.
Renny instantly leveled one of the compact little machine guns Doc had devised.
"It would be better if we could question the fellow!" Ham suggested. "Maybe we can make him lead us to Kar!"
Realizing the truth of that, Renny withheld his fire. He braked to a stop. Monk all but tore a door off the tiny sedan in getting out. They pounded after the fleeing rat.
Hollow clatterings arose as the rat ran across the wharf timbers, then a rowdy thunder as Renny and the rest arrived. The would-be killer had no time to draw in the gangplank. Wildly, he sprang for the first shelter handy — the forward deck hatch. His body plummeted straight into the black hold interior.
The fellow made a bad landing. Monk nearly overhauled him there, his great, anthropoid hulk descending with a loud crash into the hold, and his hairy fingers trapping the quarry’s coat.
But the Kar rodent twisted and tore out of his coat. He fled sternward.
It was Renny who winged the man with a quick shot. The fellow plunged down, a leg shattered by the bullet.
In a moment, Doc’s five men and Oliver Wording Bittman had surrounded the captive. They prepared to ask questions.
Not even the first query was put, however.
Several flashlights suddenly popped blinding beams upon them. The glare came from the hatchway above, and from the door in an aft bulkhead. The ugly nozzles of machine guns appeared in the luminance.
Doc’s men stood helpless. They had pocketed their own compact and deadly weapons while they examined the prisoner.
"Let’m have it!" snarled a voice from the hatch rim.
Another rat suggested: "Maybe Kar will want — "
"Sure — he wants ‘em dead! We got the bronze guy! We’ll get these fellows and finish the job! Let’s have it!"
Oliver Wording Bittman gave a shrill cry and sprang to one side, seeking madly to evade the incandescent blaze of the flashlights held by Kar’s killers.
On the hatch rim, a machine gun in the hands of one of Kar’s men released an awful hail of bullets.
While Doc was seemingly in the grip of death due to Kar’s planning, Doc’s friends, too, had fallen in a trap of the evil Kar!
Chapter 13. HIDING PLACE!
DOC SAVAGE, as he braced himself on all fours with the terrific weight of the deadfall crushing down upon his back, knew the fate intended for him. He saw the slight steadying of the air gun which presages a trigger being pulled. He saw the finger of Kar’s hired killer snug to the trigger.
The many hundreds of pounds atop him prevented even his mighty bronze body from negotiating a leap. He could not possibly reach the air gun muzzle and knock it aside.
Nor did he attempt to!
Doc had another plan. Inside his buttoned coat, he wore a metal plate which covered most of his chest. It was no ordinary metal, that plate. It was composed of the same material as the capsule missiles which held the Smoke of Eternity.