COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Originally published in Secret Agent “X” Magazine Volume 6, Number 2 (September 1935).
This edition copyright © 2004 by Wildside Press.
All rights reserved.
Published by Wildside Press LLC.
www.wildsidebooks.com
CHAPTER I
HELL ON WHEELS
It was an afternoon in late spring and from a cloudless sky, the sun beat shimmering rays on the stream of motor cars that flowed sluggishly along the narrow canyon between the rows of tall buildings. Along the sidewalks, men and women, many of the richly attired, hurried about their business and pleasure. It was a street of wealth, a main stem of American finance.
But the men and women in the street seemed oblivious to the criminal monster who preyed like a vampire upon this veritable artery of wealth. Had they noticed the faces of the men in the great black touring car that cruised along slowly with the traffic, they might have lost some of their sense of security. For these men were grim-faced police—one of many specially picked squadrons that had been patrolling the streets day and night, waiting for the radio call to duty—and probably to their own destruction.
The man at the wheel of the squad car was young for a position that involved so much responsibility. His face told of many anxious moments, of the torment of trying to fathom the unfathomable. He steered the car without apparent effort, yet his every nerve was keyed to a high pitch. His brilliant eyes strained ahead; yet sometimes sought the rear vision mirror, watching for that with which human forces seemed powerless to cope.
Suddenly, from the radio speaker came the voice of the police announcer. At the first word, the driver of the squad car detected a different note in the man’s voice. The drab monotone was gone; rather the announcer’s voice was colored with a tremor of excitement and dread. He was exercising his duty in transmitting the message that had come to him, but he seemed to know that in doing so he was sending some of his companions to their doom.
“Special cruiser twenty-four . . . Calling special cruiser twenty-four,” came from the loudspeaker. “Proceed at once to the Krausman store. Robbery going on. Robbery going on at Krausman store . . . Number one-three . . . Number one-three.”
The last group of figures was simply a code which the department used to identify the activities of a mysterious criminal gang which had terrorized the city with daring thefts accompanied by what amounted to nothing short of wholesale butchery.
As the driver of the squad car set his siren going, another very human appeal came from the radio loudspeaker. For a moment, the vast police organization was forgotten. It was simply one anxious father speaking to his son: “For the love of God, watch your step, Jimmy!”
The jaw of the young man at the wheel of the squad car was thrust far forward, as his foot came down heavily upon the accelerator. The police announcer was an elderly man who had been pronounced unfit for active service. It was his son who manned the wheel of Special Cruiser Twenty-four. Duty had made heavy demands upon father and son. The anxiety of the father could well be imagined. He might just as well have pronounced his own son’s death sentence.
A wide lane in the traffic appeared miraculously before the speeding, screaming squad car. The police sat on the edge of the cushions. Their knuckles whitened as they clenched the butts of heavy revolvers. Now and again one of the men would send a strained glance back through the rear window.
Suddenly, the man beside the young driver pinched his companion s arm.
“It’s coming!” His voice was hard and brittle, strained to the breaking point. The driver’s lower jaw protruded a bit more. He uttered a heartening oath through clenched teeth. His eyes flashed upward toward the rear vision mirror. The stretch of cleared street behind them was broken by a sinister blot of speeding destruction. A long-nosed streamlined roadster, black as midnight was rapidly overhauling them.
* * * *
The police car was still three blocks from the scene of the robbery and the car behind them seemed to have no speed limit. Nor did the driver of the black roadster have any compassion for human life. The police cruiser swerved sharply to avoid hitting a careless pedestrian. A split second later, the black roadster bore down upon the frightened man. The pedestrian became panic stricken, put out both arms in a ridiculously futile effort to halt the speeding car, and in the next moment was knocked flat—a piteous blot that lay deathly still on the pavement.
The roadster was within a few feet of the squad car. Through the rear window, the police could see the two men crouched low and motionless in the cockpit. With a dexterous yank on the wheel, the driver of the police car sent the cruiser far to the left, trying to block off the black speed demon. But the driver of the roadster was a match for any man. As the police car swerved to the left, the roadster swung to the right. With a sudden almost unbelievable burst of speed, the roadster pulled alongside. The ugly black snout of a machine gun protruded over the door of the racer.
“Let ’em have it!” shouted a policeman. He leaned out so far that he almost touched the black destroyer. His revolver blasted at the noxious face of the man at the wheel. At such short range he couldn’t have missed.
The staccato voice of the machine gun shattered the roar of the two overtaxed motors. Leaden hell raked the police cruiser from stem to stern. One policeman, who had been daringly balanced far out over the door of the car, pitched over the side and beneath the grinding wheels of the black juggernaut. The young driver jerked suddenly upright. A slug had drilled his chest. His teeth ground together with a nerve-shattering sound that he never heard.
The steering wheel spun in his hands, completely out of control. His pain-taut right leg crammed every ounce of gas into the powerful motor. The police car broke into a rubber-burning skid, careened across the street, caromed against a car, hurtled over the curb, to crush innocent bystanders beneath its bounding wheels. Screams from a hundred throats filled the street with terrific clamor. The police cruiser slammed broadside through the glass window of a department store and crumpled against a solid wall, a mass of wreckage.
But the roar of the black roadster dinned in the distance. Though the driver had received at least two shots that would have ordinarily proved fatal, the car sped unerringly onward in its mad flight of destruction, to disappear up an alley some blocks away.
Hysterical screams, frantic cries for help, drowned out the groans of the maimed that the killers’ car had left in its wake. The sidewalk was strewn with corpses. Hoarse-voiced traffic police battled their way through the panicky throng toward the wreckage in front of the department store. A policeman, who had been thrown from the wrecked car, struggled to his feet. Both of his hands clutched at his side, in an instinctive but hopeless effort to stanch the blood that flowed from a jagged wound. He tottered forward to fall at the feet of a traffic policeman.
The traffic cop knelt. His arms went about the shoulders of the fallen man. His fingers clenched tightly as if he hoped by some superhuman effort to check the ebbing life. The wounded man opened his eyes and recognized the man who held him.
“Fergeson,” came his husky whisper, “that—that man in that roadster! The man with the machine gun. I shot him—shot right through him. He was Mack O’Brien’s big gunman. He was Slash Carmody in the flesh!”
The traffic policeman stared incredulously at the wounded man. For Slash Carmody, killer formally employed by one of the underworld barons, had died in the electric chair in Sing Sing not more than forty-eight hours ago.
* * * *
Two blocks farther up the street from the point of the police car disaster was the famous Krausman Jewelry Store. A few minutes before the police cruiser had received its instructions to proceed to the jeweler’s, Mr. Peter Krausman was sitting in his office, placidly smoking a thick, mahogany-colored cigar. He was a large, swarthy-skinned man with an unpleasantly crooked nose. Replacing his somber Oxford-gray garments with something brighter, and adding the flash of gold rings bobbing at