The Dancing Doll Murders

CHAPTER VII

THE Phantom moved with desperate quickness. While those about him, stunned by surprise, were grasping the fact that he was an impostor, he grabbed a straight-backed chair and swung it savagely at the overhead light. His only possible hope of escape lay in darkness. He was no miracle worker. There were a dozen armed and merciless criminals facing him, ready to riddle him with screaming lead.

The chair struck the big bowl light, hurling slivers of glass halfway across the room. But even at that, one of Bowers’s gunmen triggered with the speed of a striking snake. A slug came fearfully close to Dick Van Loan’s neck. He flung himself sideward, taut with the knowledge that he had escaped death with nothing to spare. The whole place seemed to explode into shouting tumult.

No one else dared fire, but there was a concerted rush of plunging bodies toward the spot where Van had been. He streaked away. A man got in his path, and Van felled him with a lashing blow of his fist. That was one point in his favor. He could treat them all as enemies, while the darkness forced them to be cautious with each other.

A flashlight clicked on somewhere. Its beam moved frantically over the heads of the milling mob. Van clenched his teeth. He knew if that light touched him it would spell his doom. But he couldn’t risk firing, because the flash of his gun would draw a volley. He stooped low, raced along the left side of the office toward the workroom door.

He heard Bowers’s voice, calm amid all the hubbub, giving orders by phone to some of his men below. His words carried plainly to the ears of the Phantom.

“There’s a guy up here who looks like Dopey but isn’t. Cover the exits. Don’t let him get out. If you see him let him have it.”

Van’s heart went cold. He was four stories above the street, in unfamiliar surroundings, and by that quick order Bowers had trapped him. The Phantom could fight, but the chances of winning now were hopeless. He had planned to make a mad plunge down the building’s stairs ahead of the murder pack. But, no matter which way he went, there would be guns waiting.

He clutched the knob of the office door and turned it. There was a bulb burning in the workshop outside. He leaped through the doorway, silhouetted for a second, and in that second death came close again. Guns crashed in the darkness. Bullets followed him in a leaden hail. If he hadn’t whirled and run toward the side of the workshop parallel with the office partition he would have been riddled.

HE risked firing now. Not at the men behind, but at that bulb ahead. Its light would make him an easy target once the killers entered the workshop. His shot sped true. Glass shattered. The room went dark again. And Van had glimpsed the location of the stairway.

Bowers’s men, anticipating his next move, began firing fiercely through the blackness toward the stairway head. They laid a barrage of bullets that would keep Van from attempting escape that way. But he couldn’t turn, couldn’t pause now. He dropped flat, snaked forward over the cold cement floor, and saw the flashlight go on again.

He whirled, ripped a bullet from his.38 straight at it, and heard a man cry out. He pivoted to the right as the flashlight clattered, and while Bowers’s gunmen tried to rake him with lead. But the shots went high. The Phantom reached the stairway and plunged down.

At the foot of them there was revealing light again. The big assembly room with the cars in it seemed empty. But, as Van moved across it toward the head of the second stairway, two running men appeared. They were dressed in greasy overalls. Both carried sawed-off automatic rifles.

They saw him at the same instant he saw them. His hastily flung shot sent them dodging back into the black mouth of the stairway. But now that means of escape was cut off.

Van’s eyes roved the room desperately. The windows, he saw, had heavy steel mesh across them. If he ducked in among the cars he would only be prolonging his murder. The men above, already at the top of the stairway, would hunt him down and slaughter him.

Then he saw the open door of the big elevator and made a quick decision. It still stood at the fourth-floor landing with the sedan that had brought Van and the others from the river in front of it. It was slow, ponderous, but it offered momentary refuge.

VAN leaped in, jerked the inside handle that snapped the two sliding doors shut. Bullets smashed against them even as they came together. Van’s fingers touched the elevator control, and the big cage began to move slowly down.

He didn’t stop it till it reached street level. But the instant he opened the sliding doors a couple of inches he realized again that he was trapped. The dial on the outside revealed to Bowers’s men below that the cage had descended. They were watching and knew that the fugitive had arrived. Bowers’s telephoned warning had made them alert.

A stream of slugs smashed into the doors as Van partly opened them. He closed them again with a quick jab of the handle; and lead continued to come through the door panels till Van, to save himself from quick annihilation, had to touch the control lever again and start the car up. As he paused at the second floor the hopelessness of his situation was borne home to him even more keenly. Once more that dial outside betrayed him. There were men watching there, too, eager to put him on the spot. He was like an animal being hunted, cornered, with no way for escape. He could run the cage up and down; but, at whatever floor he stopped the killers would know it. He would be met by a hail of lead if he tried to step out, and if he stayed in the cage they would get him sooner or later.

Already he heard men hammering on the fourth-floor door in the big shaft high above him. Once they got that open they could fire down through the open top of the cage.

There was no panic in Van’s mind as he considered his peril. He clearly saw that force was futile now, that his only possible hope of saving himself lay in somehow outwitting his would-be slayers. But how? What possible trick could he use to divert the killers’ attention long enough to give him a chance to escape?

The sides of the big cage were open except for a sheet-iron safety wall about five feet high. It was the regular type of car elevator Van had seen in many garages. He might be able to leave it, climb up or down the shaft on the steel cables, but if he did so what would it avail?

It was then that the Phantom devised a subtle play. Those dials outside, telling the killers just what floor he was on had been his chief undoing. Except for them he might have escaped by taking the watching guards by surprise. Why not turn those betraying dials into an asset?

Van’s eyes were bright with excitement as he let the big elevator move up. The men above, hammering at the sliding doors to burst them in, would watch his progress on the dial, and think that in his panic he had utterly lost his head. Those on the first, second, and third floors, would follow the upward progress of the cage also.

And Van made his big play now, his carefully thought-out chess move on a board of life and death. He was staring aloft, watching the big counterweights in their grooved track at the side of the shaft come down. They would pass between the elevator cage and the wall, huge bars of tongued pig-iron which partially balanced the weight of the cage and took some of the load off the hoisting cables operated by electrically driven gears above. There was room between the elevator and the shaft wall for a man’s body to slip through.

Van left the control lever on; crossed the floor of the cage swiftly; and, grasping the overhead steel braces, drew himself up to the top of the five-foot safety wall. Here he waited till the car had passed the second floor and the big counterweights had come parallel with it. They went down as the cage went up. Van knew that the principle of all elevators was the same.

It was dangerous business dropping down off the narrow cage rim to the greasy top of the descending counterweights. Though the cage’s speed seemed slow, the combined upward and downward speed as it and the counterweights passed was perilously rapid!

Van swung his body over, clutched the counterweight cable, and slid down it to the top of the pig-iron bars between the wall and the elevator cage. The cage continued up as Van went down.

And now the clever strategy of his move was apparent. For the killers on the various floors were watching the dials. There was a burst of firing high on the fourth floor as the emergency control switch stopped the elevator when it reached its point of maximum upward movement. Bowers’s men thought their quarry had returned in his panic. They thought they had him this time.

And those watching on the floors below and seeing that the hand on the dial pointed to 4 relaxed their watchfulness. The kill would be made, they thought, where the chase had first started. But Dick Van Loan was clinging to the counterweight now at street level.

He climbed off silently, crossed the elevator pit, and approached the inside handle of the door again. He opened it cautiously, inch by inch, but now there was no burst of firing.

The gunmen below had moved away from the elevator exit. One was standing with his back turned, looking up the side stairway. Another had gone to the street door in front. The rest were not in sight.

Van pressed down on the handle, drew the doors wide, and stepped out. The sound of them made the nearest killer whirl. Van’s bullet caught him in the shoulder and spun him around.

The man in front cried out, tried to get his gun into action. Van’s savagely slammed shots unnerved him, made him fumble and lose his aim. Van was upon him in almost an instant, and the man was staggering back.

Van’s gun streaked flame again, flinging hot lead against the hands that held the machine-gun. The man dropped his weapon with a shrill scream of terror and dangled bloody wrists. Van was by him and out the street door in a second, leaving the bedlam of the garage behind.

UNDER its grotesque disguise of Dopey, the Phantom’s face was hawklike. His eyes were snapping. He had escaped, but he must not lose the trail of the killers. He sensed what their next move would be. Having failed to get their victim, knowing that their hideout had been discovered they would leave the garage as rats leave a sinking ship.

And Van was right. He had no more than reached the corner of the dark block when, looking behind him, he saw the big outside door of the garage slide back. A moment later a car came out, filled with men.

Van’s own car was miles away. No use to summon the police now. The murderers would be away before they got here. Van did the one thing he could – ran on till he saw a cruising nighthawk taxi. He leaped in, thrust a bill under the driver’s nose.

“Back,” he barked, “the way I came. There’s a car I want you to follow.”

They reached the street where the garage was located just as the last of three cars roared out. It turned away from the direction in which the taxi was headed. And, as they passed the garage, Van saw that these reckless desperate men had fired the place, just as they had the speedboat. A drum of white gas had been opened and a match applied. Flames were seething inside as the taxi whirled by.

There was only one car visible now, the last one in the rear. Its red tail-light was like some satanic thing beckoning them on. It fled through the almost deserted streets of the night-darkened city, for this was the hour just before dawn when even New York seems dead. The taximan was crouched over his wheel, knowing that something was up, bent on earning the money Van had given him.

He didn’t see, as Van did, the streaking black shape that came from a side street. Van drew in his breath, and the skin of his scalp felt suddenly tight. For a car without lights, one of those which had fled the garage, nosed out from a spot where it had been lurking.

Murderers’ strategy! Bowers had known that the man who had impersonated Dopey was some sort of detective. He had anticipated that when they left the garage they would be followed. And the first car out had been told to wait and cover the rear.

Van reached forward through the taxi’s partitioned window and twisted the wheel just in time. The driver hadn’t seen death coming, so intent was he on that bobbing light ahead. He cried out as Van’s muscular fingers wrenched the wheel from him.

The taxi swung in toward the curb, away from the hurtling black shape beside it. The blasting stream of machine-gun fire that was meant to rake it from front to rear missed its angle, and instead merely ripped the back tires to ribbons. This and the taximan’s hastily jammed brakes swung the cab squalling around.

The other car shot by. One bullet from the killers’ machine-gun caught the taximan in the side. He screamed with the sudden pain of it and fell forward across the wheel as the cab reared up on the sidewalk and turned over with a shattering crash.