For a time, the instrument mumbled nothing but routine business.
“All cars attention! A pickup order for Lee Nace, the private detective.” Nace smiled without alarm. But his face froze at the next words from the radio. “This man Nace is wanted by the New Jersey authorities on a murder charge. Witnesses saw him departing from a tourist camp where the bodies of two murdered men were found.”
The radio launched into more routine.
Nace took a side road to avoid the spot where the taxi and the murdered driver had been found. He pulled up at the edge of the airport tarmac.
“I want,” he told the field manager of one of the city’s largest aerial taxi services, “to hire a plane to take me to Lake City, Ohio.”
The manager grinned. “What is this, a gold rush?”
“Why?”
“You’re the third. About an hour ago, two other planes left for Lake City. They got off about fifteen minutes apart.”
Nace recited monotonously, “One carried a red-headed girl and a purple-beaked guy. A man dressed in black and a little, hawk-faced fellow hired the other ship. Which pair went up first?”
“The girl and the fellow with the sunrise face.”
“Give me the fastest ship you have!” Nace said grimly.
Chapter IV
Peril House
The afternoon was well along when Nace’s hired plane sloped down out of low-hanging cotton-tuft clouds and wheeled a slow circle over Lake City.
Between four and five thousand would catch the population of the place. A three-story structure was the tallest building in town. This was the schoolhouse. Some of the streets were unpaved. Plumes of dust trailed such vehicles as were using the near-by country roads.
The sun-irradiated blue smear of Lake Erie began at the edge of town and stretched away until it was lost in a gray haze. Near town were docks, moored launches and cruisers, and small boats drawn up on a pale beach.
Perhaps a mile down the shore, there was an empty dock, warehouses, and a great rambling old house situated on a vast but seedy-looking lawn.
Nace had been unable to secure a fast ship, and knew he had not passed the two taxi planes from New York. The ships were not to be seen. Nace hoped they had arrived, landed their passengers and departed. They could have beaten him here by a couple of hours.
His own ship let him out in the stubble of an oatfield. He had brought his zipper-fastened canvas bag. Carrying it, he hoofed into town.
He found a car with a taxi sign on the windshield. The driver told him Julia Nace’s place was about a mile away on the lakefront. It was, Nace discovered, the establishment with the empty wharf, warehouses and old rambling house.
The hackman also said three or four planes had circled the town within the last two hours. This was fair evidence that his quarry was ahead of him. He could not account for the fourth plane. It might have been a barnstormer.
He rode the taxi halfway out, dismissed the machine, and hoofed it the rest of the way. Nearing the place, he vaulted one of the fences that paralleled the road and eased through brush and small trees. He was taking no chances.
From a distance of a hundred yards, he surveyed the sprawling house. As he watched, a farmer in a wagon passed along the road. A small terrier trailed the wagon. The dog bounded across the rambling lawn to the front door of the ramshackle house.
The actions of the dog then became strange. It reared upon its rear legs, as if to look in the open door. Then the animal spun and fled at full speed, tail tucked under.
Nace let the wagon get out of sight. Then he sprinted for the door of the house
He did not know what he was expecting. Whatever it was, he was disappointed. When he veered inside, he saw only a composite of worn hall carpet, ancient stairs with a worn runner, and brightly figured wallpaper.
There was mail on the hall table — circulars from a marine engineering concern, a boat builder, a nursery, and a telephone bill. All were addressed to Miss Julia Nace.
Nace opened a door, found himself in an old Colonial living room. There was a picture of Nace’s grandfather, Silas Murray Nace, over the fireplace mantel. The venerable old gentleman was garbed in the uniform of a buck private of the Confederate army.
Grandfather Nace was tall, blond, angular of feature.
Nace cocked a critical eye at the picture, remarked, “The block the chip came off of.”
He did not waste more time admiring his ancestor. He began a search of the house. He found the kitchen well stocked with food. Adjacent, he found a windowless, rather large room that had evidently once been a pantry. But it now bore a bed, a dressing table, a hooked rug. Feminine garments were draped on hangers.
Two Winchester repeating rifles rested on nails driven into the walls. There was also a box of a rural telephone on the wall. Nace lifted the receiver and listened. A dead silence told of cut wires.
Stepping back, Nace absently tamped tobacco into his pipe.
He thought of the way the dog had acted. Opening his zipper bag, he got out a bullet-proof vest. Peeling coat and shirt, he put the protector on underneath.
The big pantry was a poor place for sleeping. There were no windows. But the door was strong. It struck Nace as a likely bower for someone in fear of attack.
Suddenly, in the direction of the front room, a woman began screaming. Her shrieks had the ripping quality of a soul torn out. They were full of rasp and choke, rather than being loud, and there were no words, but only the enstrangled cries.
Nace moved, but not toward the front room. Instead, he pitched through the kitchen door, banked right around the house, and stretched himself to reach the front door. Lifting on his toes, he floated to a comparatively silent stop in the doorway.
The red-head lay on the floor, well down the hall. Her long, finely moulded form was slightly atwist, with knees drawn up and both arms under her. Her head was canted on one side, so that her face was toward him.
Her eyes were open so widely that they seemed to protrude.
Nace ventured a doubtful step across the threshold.
Something seemed to squeal behind him. The squeal was so sharp, sudden, as to be something of a snapping report. It was a bullet, and it hit Nace in the back, directly over the heart.
He sprang convulsively upward and forward, came down with a noisy crash, and rolled completely over twice, bony limbs rattling on the floor.
Noise of the rifle shot swished across the clearing, hit the house, and an echo glanced back, a single crack like a stick breaking.
The red-headed girl got up from the floor, both her hands gripping a sawed-off shotgun on which she had been lying. She ran past Nace to the door. She stocked the shotgun to her shoulder and looked out.
The uncertain waving of the muzzle showed that she could see no target. A rifle bullet came through the door with a piping squeak. It hit the wall, scooped a fistful of plaster upon Nace’s prone form.
The girl backpedaled from the door. Nace got up, trying to reach his back with both hands. The bullet-proof vest had saved him, but the slug had carried an energy of many hundreds of foot pounds. He stumbled into the room that held the picture of Grandfather Nace, fell prone on the floor and lay there, writhing a little in agony.
The girl went to the window, picked the curtain back, and looked out. She stood there perhaps a minute, then turned. Her face was very white under her red hair.
“I can’t see a sign of him!” she said, hot excitement in her contralto voice.
Nace pulled up on hands and knees and went to the window. His back was a mass of dull pain. He watched the brush at the edge of the lawn for three or four minutes, but could discern no trace of the rifleman.