Murder on Wheels

CHAPTER I Death at Dawn

The girl shivered as she stepped out into the dawn. Dawn is a time for executions. But she didn’t think of that at the time. It was only later that she realized that it must have been this dread thought that had made her shiver.

At the moment all she had in mind was danger and the premonition of some fantastic thing about to happen; but death was not within her comprehension.

She had stepped from a train running up along the Michigan shore of Lake Michigan. The train puffed and started on north. She looked around.

The station was all hers; she had it to herself. Not that possession of the station meant much. It was a shack about as big as a boxcar with a small platform sagging between it and the single tracking. No soul was around, save herself.

She left the station and began walking up a road with bare sand dunes on either side. Wild desolation. It was like being alone in the Sahara, instead of in western Michigan. And it was almost as cold as it gets in the Sahara at dawn.

The dirty-gray light changed to pink as the sun began to rise. The pink helped the pink in the girl’s cheeks. It showed that she was a very beautiful girl, indeed — tall, dark-blonde, with deep-blue eyes and a figure to write home about. A very beautiful girl and a very scared girl — for some reason.

She was walking along a narrow dirt road. She was not familiar with the district. This was shown because she kept looking at a road map.

Pretty soon she came to a larger road, two lanes of concrete. The road was like that station had been — completely deserted. It was an old road, heaved at the joints with winter cold and moisture, and it looked practically abandoned. Indeed, the road map showed that it was. There was a big four-lane highway paralleling it, a mile to the east; so this one was probably used very little, now.

The girl figured she had gone far enough. There was a big tree, the only one for some distance around. She stopped beside it and leaned against the massive trunk. She might have been just leaning there to rest — or she might have been hiding from possible eyes. In any event, whether she thought of concealment or not, the tree trunk offered it to her.

She got out her pocketbook. On the side were the two metal letters: D. J. They stood for Doris Jackson. She had a small automatic in the bag, and she took this out and held it in the folds of her dress, in her right hand. It made her feel better.

Sound carried a long way in the still air. She heard a sound, now. It was a deep-throated rumble, far down the deserted road. The rumble was the low growl of an extra-heavy-duty truck motor. And in a moment she could see the truck, itself, with pink from the sun shining on its squat hood.

The truck was mammoth. Even a mile away, she could see that. Its purr of power lowered, and the truck stopped. It had swung a little sideways on the road just before it stopped, as if to block the highway from the south, where traffic was most apt to come.

The girl had slid around the tree when she saw the truck, so that she could not be seen by anyone in that direction. She stood there, the gun convulsively clenched in her hand.

From the back of the truck was slid a sort of runway that slanted down like the runways over which elephants come from circus cars. And like an elephant, a bulk lowered itself cautiously from the great body of the closed truck.

The bulk was that of an automobile — a car within a car. But it was an automobile such as is seldom seen on the public highways.

Then that car, brought here in such concealment in a closed van, began to do the most extraordinary things.

Such were the hummocks on the old road that it was unsafe to drive more than twenty-five miles an hour. But the car began coming toward the tree behind which the girl stood, at a pace far beyond that.

It must have been doing eighty when it passed her. The car seemed to take off and fly at each of the treacherous humps. It was knocked sometimes as high as six feet when it struck one. Impossible treatment for a car to take; but this thing took it.

It streaked out of sight beyond the girl. Then in a moment, it appeared as a fast-growing dot. It had been turned and was coming back at an even higher speed. Then she clapped her hand over her lips to hold back a scream.

One of the bumps had finally thrown even this car. Its superstreamlined body turned sideways in midair. It smashed on its side, rolled over and over and finally stopped right side up, again. It was still under heavy momentum; so it jumped the ditch and crashed into a telegraph pole.

The pole splintered up four feet, and then broke off like a matchstick. The girl peered fearfully at the now inert bulk of the car. Every one in it must be jelly—

A man stepped out, took a step or two as if dizzy, and shook his head. But he was certainly not jelly; he was shaken up but all right. His hat had been knocked off and his hair showed, dark-brown and rumpled.

Doris Jackson stared at the man’s hair with large disappointment in her blue eyes. She sighed, and turned to go. It was as if all she had come here for, in the pink dawn, was to learn the color of the man’s hair.

“Good morning.”

She jumped and stared to her right.

The tree was the only one for a long way around. But the dunes were everywhere, and behind these sand barricades, a person could hide very easily.

Doris didn’t know whether this man had lain hidden behind the dune to her right and watched her while she watched the weird automobile, or whether he had walked openly toward the tree and only this moment topped the dune and come into sight.

“Cole!” she said.

“In person,” said the man.

He was a young fellow, and rather striking-looking. In fact he was handsome, with straight brown hair, high off his forehead, and with the alert black eyes and a heavy jaw. He came slowly toward her, and even that slow pace showed beautiful coordination of muscle and great power.

Doris Jackson, however, didn’t look as if his handsomeness was a treat to her.

“What in the world are you doing here, Cole?” she gasped.

“What are you doing here?” he countered.

She bit her lips and did not answer.

“Don’t you know this place is dangerous, just now?” the man said, nodding down the road toward the car which was incredibly undamaged by the rough treatment it had just had.

“Is that why you’re here?” she demanded.

The man hesitated. His face gave away nothing. It was the face of a man with a razor-keen brain, but it gave away no thought.

“Why not?” he said. “Cole Wilson, friend of the family for most of his life, would want to protect Doris Jackson, wouldn’t he?”

“You weren’t on that train,” Doris jerked out. “So you couldn’t have followed me here. No one on earth knew I was coming; so you couldn’t have learned my plans and met me here. You must be at this place through coincidence. And coincidences are sometimes suspicious.”

“A suspicious nature usually defeats its own purpose,” said Cole Wilson. “I’d fight against being suspicious, if I were you.”

Doris looked as if about to make an angry reply; then she closed her lips firmly and turned. She went back toward the railroad station, across the dunes instead of down the road, because the great truck was still down that way. She didn’t want to be seen.

Behind her, Cole Wilson made no move to follow. He just stood there, face unreadable but keen, black eyes like polished jet, watching her slim, lovely form dwindle out of sight.

The deserted railroad station was in sight ahead of her when it happened.

Sound carries far over the dunes at dawn; and this sound carried to her ears from back there near the closed truck and Cole Wilson and the freak automobile. But she paid no attention to it. If there had been just one shot, she would have. But there were half a dozen shots, and they were so regularly spaced that she thought it was the truck backfiring and went right on.

It was not backfiring. It was deliberate, spaced firing from a .45 automatic! A man had slunk behind a dune till almost beside the streamlined, freak automobile and then had straightened up and poured lead into the driver.

The driver, just settling behind the wheel to go back to the truck, never had a chance and never made a sound. He slumped in the seat, executed at dawn as surely as though stood against a wall! The man with the gun hauled the body out, climbed behind the wheel, himself, and drove the car fast along the road to the north.

The big closed truck started. It raced with sudden frenzy after the stolen mystery machine but was losing two yards in every five, even when it got up to seventy miles an hour.

But all these things, the girl near the station did not know. Even if she had been aware of the tragedy, it would have been driven from her mind a moment later.

That was when the sedan slid to a stop beside her.

She heard the car only when it was within fifty yards of her because it was coming slowly with little motor noise, and a dirt road can mute tire sounds. She heard it and looked behind at a sedan with three men in it, two of whom held guns, and she started to run!

She raced off the road and to the east. So the car went off the road, too, plowing through sand in second gear, and it went after her like a hound after a fox. But the men did not fire.

Far up the track showed a plume of smoke. The next train due was coming down the shore to swing eventually into Gary and South Chicago. Her lips moved wildly, though no sound came out.

So near had safety been! If the sedan hadn’t showed till after she had gotten on the train—

She circled like a desperate rabbit, back toward the lake and the tracks. The car, fast even in sand but not so easily maneuvered, managed to get straightened out by a swearing driver and plunged in her tracks again.

She crossed the road and the train rails, toward a small culvert where a drainage ditch ran under the roadbed to the lake. She threw up both hands, screamed and leaped off the embankment toward the water.

Up the track, the approaching train slowed as the engineer saw some kind of trouble ahead. He also saw a sedan plunge toward the roadbed as if to climb onto bare rails just in time to be struck. But the driver of the car stopped with his nose almost on the track.

The three men leaped from the sedan and raced over the track just as the train hurtled at them with grinding brakes. They looked at the strip of beach and didn’t see the girl.

That was because the girl had crawled back under the track bed through the drainage culvert and now had the slowly rolling train between herself and the men. But they didn’t tumble to that for a minute. They waded into the water, guns glinting in the pink morning light, looking to see if she was swimming under water or something.

The engineer started up again at the sight of those guns. It looked like a potential holdup. The train began grinding south again, at a swifter and swifter pace. And then one of the three men saw the culvert.

They didn’t even swear, they were so mad. Nor did they hunt around any more. They got into the car, backed around, and began following that train.

They were right in their hunch. Doris Jackson was on it. She had jumped a car step like a lithe boy, as she emerged on the land side of the tracks. She went into a day coach, looking calm and fresh as if she had just stepped up here from a rear car. But she was inwardly shaking.

The sedan couldn’t follow the train very closely. The driver concentrated on being at each station when the train reached there, to see if the girl got off. And this was not enough. Because she didn’t get off at a station.

Outside Gary, there is a desolate marsh spot where the trains slow down for a long curve, and here Doris quitted the day coach. She lay in the long marsh grass for a time; then she went to the nearest highway and thumbed a ride east from a cheerful-looking elderly lady in a big car.

About midafternoon she took a cab from the outskirts of Detroit to a small hotel on Woodward Avenue. There, as soon as she got to her room, she put in a long-distance call to New York.

“Mr. Benson is not here, just now,” she heard a musical but somewhat mechanical voice say. “Do you wish to leave a message?”

The voice was mechanical because it came from a phonograph record that was geared to the telephone that had just rung. It was the voice of a girl named Nellie Gray, although Doris didn’t know that; nor, indeed, did she know Nellie.

All she knew, then, was extreme disappointment — and fear.

With despair in her heart, she had called Richard Henry Benson, known to the underworld as The Avenger. And he was not in his headquarters to answer. That was very bad for her.