"Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 041 - The Black Spot" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

been received there. In this room had been formed campaigns of adventure reaching into the uttermost parts
of the world.

Sometimes a telephone message started Doc Savage and his five men upon quests strange and wide. But
none had ever been stranger than that already recorded in the voice of Patricia Savage on the dictaphone
record of the telephone.

Monk perceived such a record had been made. It was a rule that the first man to arrive would take the
message. Usually this would then await the coming of Doc Savage.

But at the first words pouring into his furry ear, Monk twisted his ugly face into an even uglier grimace. The
apelike chemist sensed danger. This apparently threatened Pat Savage. Monk’s regard for Doc’s beautiful
cousin stirred an immediate deep emotion.

"Dang everything!" he muttered. "Some day she’s goin’ to get in a jam she won’t get out of! An’ Doc ain’t even
in town!"

But Doc Savage was in Manhattan. At that moment he was moving toward his headquarters. But Monk was
not aware of this. He did not know where to reach the remarkable man of bronze.

"All over some buzzard of a millionaire!" piped Monk, shifting the recording needle and listening again to the
bumping disruption of the circuit at the end. "An’ somebody’s grabbed Pat!"

He had heard the slapping commotion when the phone at the Vandersleeve mansion had been snatched from
Pat’s hand.

Monk thumbed through a directory of Westchester County. The location of the Vandersleeve estate was
easily established. Monk went into one of the back rooms. When he returned, there was a bulge under one
arm. He was equipped with an automatic superfiring pistol and various other defensive devices.

Monk then called a certain exclusive apartment residence club in upper Manhattan. The voice replying was
acidly sharp with sleep and annoyance.

"I’d know that monkey squeal in any zoo!" it snapped. "And anybody else would have too many brains to
wake up a man in the middle of the night. Now I’m going back to bed!"

"Listen, you slobberin’ mouthpiece!" squeaked Monk. "Pat’s gone an’ got herself in a jam! It’s a murder, four
of ‘em! They got Pat an’—"

At the exclusive club end of the telephone wire Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks, known as "Ham"
to his companions and friends, cut into Monk’s rather jumbled words.

"How did you know she was grabbed, you raving ape?" he said, as he cooled down. "You don’t know if she
was murdered because she was grabbed? It doesn’t make sense! How do you know that?"

"If you’d shut up long enough to listen!" howled Monk. "I know she ain’t been murdered because she told me,
an’ I think she was only grabbed!"

Ham let out a sarcastic groan at his end of the wire.