"028 (B088) - The Roar Devil (1935-06) - Lester Dent" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

Doc Savage's trilling, like the note of some exotic tropical bird, came out briefly. It persisted, a delicate vibration almost too nebulous for the ear to catch, then faded into infinity.
The bony Johnny looked puzzled. Doc explained.
"That address," said the bronze man, "Is Dove Zachies's country estate."
"Dove Zachies - I'll be superamalgamated! In-deed I will!"
Doc Savage said, "Come on!"
A policeman stopped them once as they drove north. He was a rookie, and the special license plates on Doc Savage's lean, gloomy-colored roadster meant nothing to him, he said. Making eighty miles an hour on a boulevard did. The license plates meant something, too, after he called his district chief. He was all apologies as he let them go.
Doc Savage and Johnny left the somber roadster some distance from their destination, walked a hundred yards and found the coupй in which Monk and Ham had ridden.
Johnny looked the car over and said, "An unpropitious omen."
Doc Savage did not comment
"There is a possibility that Dove Zachies is the Roar Devil, and trying to cover it up," Johnny said.
"He came to me and said he wanted me to get the Roar Devil," Doc said. "He would hardly sic us on himself."
"There are ways of condoning that angle," Johnny said. "He might have phenagled to steer suspicion from himself."
"It may come out in the wash," Doc told him.
The gate to Dove Zachies's pretentious estate was open.
There was a dead man inside the gate.
THE dead man sat with his back to a tree. He had both hands clamped over his middle, and the hands were red with a redness that had leaked through them and had soaked the man's legs and puddled between them.
A gun and a flashlight lay near the man. The gun was a Luger, and the man had a Luger holster under his coat. There was also a worn place at his belt where the flashlight had dangled from a snap and ring. There was a package of French cigarettes in the dead man's pockets, and French cigarette butts about the gate. Some of the stubs had been there for days.
"Watchman," Doc Savage said. "Do not try to move him. They used a knife on him and he's about ready to fall apart."
Bright lights inside the house made it look big and white. The front door was off its hinges. Two of the front windows were broken out.
There was another dead man inside the door, and he had been shot. The stitched pattern on his soggy chest indicated a machine gun.
In the dining mom, they found two coats hanging neatly on the back of a chair, Johnny looked at them. He used very small words when he spoke.
"Ham's coat," he said, and pointed at the other garment. "This one is Monk's. Look at the manner in which Monks is torn. They had trouble. Probably they were captured."
Doc Savage went on through the house, opened a door, and was unexpectedly confronting the cloudy night, although the door had opened into what had once been a kitchen. The whole rear of the house was gone, blown away.
The bronze man surveyed the damage appraisingly, noting that the floor had been blown downward in a manner which indicated the explosion had occurred inside the room.
"Grenade," he said. "A large one."
"I'll be superamalgamated!" Johnny made vague gestures, and fingered the monocle which dangled from a ribbon and had been stowed in the handkerchief pocket of his coat. "This explosion! It must have been heard fifteen miles away!"
He glanced about, then indicated numerous empty cartridges.
"Shooting and no one heard it and gave an alarm," he said. "Ditto for the explosion. That is strange."
Johnny did not ordinarily speak this many sentences without at least one which could not be translated without a dictionary. Possibly that was because his big words were a form of showmanship, and he knew better than to try to impress Doc Savage.
Doc Savage replied nothing, but went back into the dining room. He turned off the lights.
From a pocket, the bronze man drew a device which might have been a miniature camera, except that the large lens was almost black in hue. He flicked a switch on the side of this. A faint singing sound came from the apparatus, a note which might have been made by a high-pitched vibrator.
Doc pointed the instrument about the room. It gave off no visible light. But several times, objects glowed weirdly under its spell. Two stray aspirin tablets, for instance, became small phosphorescent spots.
Then a sentence in writing leaped out distinctly.
DOC SAVAGE went closer to the writing with the apparatus - it was merely a lantern for the projecting of so-called "black light," or ultra-violet rays, of a wave length invisible to a normal human eye.
The writing was in secret chalk, a chalk which took advantage of the property, well known to scientists, which many substances have of phosphorescing, or glowing, when exposed to the black light. The appearance of this chalk was innocent, and it left a mark almost impossible to detect by ordinary methods. Doc Savage's aides each carried it.
The letters were big and distinctive.
"Monk's handwriting," Doc said.
The bronze man and Johnny studied the words:
ZACHIES THINKS V. VENABLE MEAR IS ROAR DEVIL.
ALL STILL A MYSTERY.
WE GOT GLOMMED.
"He has a quaint way of saying he and Ham were taken prisoner," Johnny said dryly. "Wonder what happened after he wrote that."
Doc Savage began going over the house with more care. Bullets had made holes in the windows or taken the glass out entirely. A man had bled a little lake in one room. Three times the bronze man found bullets which were flattened and mutilated as if they had encountered bulletproof vests.
The ultra-violet lantern was still in use. On the basement floor, it unearthed another message:
FIREWORKS - ROAR DEVIL, I THINK.
ZACHIES GOING KILL US AND BLOW.
There was no more at that spot. Johnny was a tower of gloom as they continued their hunt. Adjoining the cellar was a semi-basement garage. In front of the door, as if he had been dropped there while the door was opened - the door had been smashed - was written:
FRYING PAN INTO - ROAR DEVIL GOT US.
Johnny gasped delightedly, "So Zachies did not kill them, after all. Probably he did not have time."
Doc Savage moved into the garage.