Bones Don't Lie Page 13

  Then he had fallen, all in one piece, in the dirt on the other side of that flat, red-glowing steel sheet. And Bixler was shouting in a bull voice of rage and frustration from the other side of the roll table.

  Ray picked himself up hastily, gasping, almost sick from shock and exertion. For an instant he thought Bixler was going to risk the leap after him. The burly, blue-uniformed figure did hesitate momentarily. Then Bixler thought better of the reckless impulse and raced back toward the catwalk. Workmen on the other side of the sheet mill were looking up from their labor, mouths gaping at the scene just enacted before their eyes.

  His narrow escape filled Ray with a sudden dread of the confined mill structures. He headed for the open, toward the cinder dumps and billet piles. His suicidal leap across the flying shears had given him a greatly increased lead over his pursuer. He hoped fervently that the faint moonlight would be insufficient to reveal him again to Bixler.

  The splice bar mill was dark. Evidently its run of bars had been completed and work shut down temporarily before starting some other railroad’s order. Ray remembered how he used to get rail joints, splice bars as they were called in the mills, by the carload lot when he had worked for Transcontinental.

  In those days he had gangs of men loading the cars for him, while he sometimes caught one of his brief naps in the rookery of dingy offices on the upper floor of the mill building. Those offices, when the mill was not in operation pending a change-over of rolls, were a deserted place.

  It occurred to Ray, in a flash of inspiration, that this might be an ideal place for him to hide, if Bixler did not see him go there.

  He thought he was successful. In darkness like the inside of a bat roost, Ray located the cupped wooden stairs leading from the bottom portion of the splice bar mill to the upstairs offices. He risked a match for an instant at the head of the steps.

  The tiny flare showed him a small barren room, just to the right of the stair landing. There was nothing in it except an old battered desk, thick with dust, and an old leather couch like the one in Christopher Ashley’s office.

  Evidently, this place had not been used for a long time. Scraps of steel were scattered on the floor; defective splice bars, rejects from some past inspection, lay along the walls. Some of these rejects, it occurred to Ray sadly, might even be relics of his own happier days as a Transcontinental inspector.

  He shook out the match, stretched full length on the couch. His lungs were still laboring painfully from his long sprint, and his stomach felt cloudy, unsettled. He marveled that neither his discovery of Tracy’s headless corpse nor his own plunge across the flying shears had made him actually sick.

  Just when his breathing was under control once more and he was congratulating himself upon having eluded Bixler, a dim light filtered into the room from below the stairs. It wavered for a moment, then heavy footsteps sounded on the wooden treads. The flashlight beam grew stronger.

  Hastily, Ray slipped from the couch to the floor, squeezing beneath the sagging springs. He was just in time. Peering from his place of concealment, he saw a big form loom from the stair landing. Ray’s prone position gave him a worm’s-eye view of Bixler, gigantic, formidable, yet at the same time insubstantial in the diffused glow of the flashlight.

  He shrank back as close to the wall as he could, not daring to breathe. Bixler’s heavy tread made the ancient flooring tremble. The flashlight beam almost touched Ray with its probing finger as it swung around briefly.

  Then Bixler went into the room adjoining. Ray could hear the big cop moving around all the empty offices in the old rookery. His nerves were relaxing again when a new thought threw him into a fresh agony of apprehension.

  His footprints in the heavy dust were bound to show, straight from the door to in front of the couch where he had wiped up the place with his clothes while crawling beneath it.

  It was miraculous Bixler had not found him at once. The reason, Ray knew, was simply that the man had not yet taken time for a careful search. He was making a hurried first survey. And when he failed to find his victim, he would retrace his steps, looking more carefully in each empty office.

  The fact that Bixler had come to the splice bar mill showed that either the treacherous moonlight or the match he had lighted had betrayed Ray. If the burly cop found him beneath the couch, it required little imagination to know what would happen.

  Sweat burst out in big globules on Ray’s forehead. He faced a veritable Hobson’s choice. If he remained where he was, Bixler would almost certainly return to blast him into ribbons. If he tried to leave the place, the company cop could scarcely fail to hear him moving over the creaky floors.

  Action, Ray decided, was preferable to cowering rabbit-like, awaiting the slow approach of the inevitable. At least if he were on his feet, he would have the chance to grapple with Bixler in a final effort to save his life, although the outcome of such a struggle was subject to little doubt. Bixler was a powerful bruiser. Ray, slim and small-honed, would be like Tom Thumb in the grasp of the ogre.

  Swiftly he wriggled from his hiding place and crossed the room on all fours. Bixler, with his light, was in the room farthest from the stairs. Ray came to his feet, crept to the landing. He tested each step like a swimmer in icy water. Then, gaining confidence as he went down, he moved more swiftly. Two-thirds of the way down a board screeched agonized protest.

  Bixler was at the stair head almost instantly. His flashlight beam speared Ray like a butterfly on a pin. The crack of his revolver echoed through the empty offices like the detonation of high explosive.

  Ray took the remaining steps in one wild leap, as Bixler hammered down behind him. Then there were cinders under his feet again. He turned back toward the mill buildings, stumbled on uneven ground and fell sprawling.

  By the time he regained his feet, Bixler had cut between him and his line of retreat. Ray swerved toward the coal docks, avoiding the blast furnaces.

  There were many men around the furnaces. If Bixler saw him go there, it would be possible to phone ahead from a plant connection in the splice bar mill. Then, Ray knew, he might find himself bottled up, with the odds against him overwhelming.

  But before he realized it, Ray was pocketed, his line of flight blocked except for the coal docks and the inlet. Aside from the short stretch along the docks themselves, the Ironton Works, even along the curve of the waterway by the Bessemer and Open Hearth, was surrounded completely by high fences topped with barbed wire.

  Ray remembered the gurgling suck of black, oily water against the slimy wharf piling under the drag of the heavy current. The tidal inlet formed a raceway too swift even for the most powerful swimmer to risk the quarter mile crossing.

  Better to turn and grapple with Bixler, he decided, than to suffocate in the scum and filth of what was no better than an open sewer. Still running, Ray bent to snatch a big lump of cinder from the ground. It would be better than no weapon at all if he weren’t successful in eluding Bixler.

  A small concrete building like a pump house stood just back from the docks, housing a battery of transformers for the power lines overhead. Clusters of heavy cables hung in a graceful catenary curve from the lattice-work of transmission towers above.

  Ray ducked into the concrete room and looked around frantically, seeking a place to hide. The walls seemed stern and pitiless in their implacable smoothness. But there were dark shadows behind the row of transformers which might offer temporary protection. He slipped into them just as Bixler turned the corner of the transformer station. Instinctively, Ray shrank closer to the wall, trying to make himself one with it. Shock mingled with relief as he felt it give way against his back. A narrow black opening yawned in the deepest shadow. He stepped into it as “Windpipe” Bixler came through the door.

  Chapter Twelve

  Behind Ray, the opening through which he had come was a faint yellow-gray outline as Bixler’s flashlight circled the
transformer room. Ahead was total blackness.

  He felt his way forward, putting half a dozen steps between himself and the menace of Bixler’s gun. His hands touched lead-covered cables…a number of them, hunched together.

  There were pipes also, together with the power cables, along a concrete shelf which dipped on a steep angle into the earth. Beside the shelf, the space was narrow. There was just room enough for a man to squeeze through, not quite enough for him to stand erect.

  At last Ray knew how Glenn Cannon had managed to enter and leave the Ironton Works without being seen. Undoubtedly, he reasoned, this small tunnel carried power lines to the old blast furnaces across the inlet, probably connected with the substation over there.

  The blast furnaces, long outmoded, had been stripped of everything worth salvage and abandoned years ago. Now they were slowly rusting into oblivion. But the conduits, with the narrow tunnel providing access for a linesman in case of trouble, still supplied some of Ironton’s power requirements—a fact largely forgotten by all save the plant’s electricians, and by Cannon.

  The light from Bixler’s flash had vanished. Probably the company cop was roaming the area near the coal docks, wondering how his quarry had managed to vanish. Set back behind the rows of transformers as it was, the slit-like tunnel entrance easily escaped attention unless one happened to face it squarely.

  Ray’s sense of liberation was almost intoxicating. All he had to do now was follow the tunnel beneath the waters of the inlet and he would be safe at the abandoned blast furnaces, free of the Ironton Works.

  He made his way forward, stooping, hand against the concrete wall for guidance. It was some three-eighths of a mile across the inlet at this point. The tunnel’s downward dip leveled off after the first two hundred feet.

  The tomblike blackness held a damp, musty smell of cobwebs and decay. The air was fetid from lack of adequate ventilation. When he had ventured what he judged was a third of the way across, Ray decided to risk a match.

  The feeble flame showed him only a twelve-foot stretch, walled off at each end with sable gloom. There was nothing but cold, blank concrete and the lead-covered conduits on their ledge. The space above the pipes was thick with cobwebs, soot-laden even here, underground. The footway, however, had been brushed clear, evidently by the passage of Glenn Cannon’s body.

  The match flickered out. Ray moved along. Twenty minutes later he emerged from blackness like a mole from an underground burrow.

  His deductions had been correct. The tunnel opened into a one-room concrete building like the one near the coal docks on the other side of the inlet. And overhead transmission towers carried the wires away toward the substation.

  Silhouetted against the water by the dying moon, the abandoned furnaces with their batteries of stoves loomed blackly like the high, crenellated wall of a medieval fortress. To Ray, after his swift alternations between hope and despair, their grotesque unreality was no greater than the complete unreality of the entire universe.

  The experiences through which he had passed so swiftly were all incredible. A succession of pictures, unbelievable yet true, passed before his inner vision: the iron cage of the penitentiary; that night on the crowded train on the way to Ironton, with its dreams of clearing his reputation; his interview with Leonard Tracy; the General Superintendents unanticipated cordiality; the Open Hearth; Walter Keene’s dead body with the shattered skull which seemed intact; General Ulysses G. Flint and his shrewd, penetrating, black eyes; his hairline escape at the rail mill; the checker-work laboratory below Number Twelve furnace; and finally Leonard Tracy’s handsome face staring sightlessly from the dirt and cinders.

  How long had it been since Tracy had risen from tire swanky, circular desk to greet him with outstretched hand? Only three days ago. Three days! And now Tracy was gone and Ray himself was a hunted fugitive.

  The thought cooled Ray’s initial feeling of elation over his escape. Now, for the first time, he realized the full menace of the trap into which he had walked with wide open eyes.

  Examined coldly, his actions seemed highly questionable. By running from the scene of Leonard Tracy’s murder, he had virtually admitted his own guilt. Would anyone, even U. G. Flint, believe that Bixler had really intended to shoot him in the back?

  His flight, Ray realized, was almost as incriminating as a written confession. All his efforts to clear himself from complicity in the wreck of The Prairie Comet had only involved him more and more deeply in a mesh of crime. If he gave himself up now to the police, he would most certainly be convicted of Tracy’s murder. The very least which could happen to him would be the revocation of his parole and another two or three years in the penitentiary.

  Suffering a complete reaction to his previous lift of spirits, Ray even found himself wondering if it might not have been better to have gone down inside the gates of Ironton with a slug from Bixler’s revolver in his back.

  His chin came up. Such thoughts were sheer defeatism. He was guilty of no crime. It was his word against the word of “Windpipe” Bixler, and fortunately, Ulysses G. Flint knew of Bixler’s previous attempts against Ray’s life. The General was his best, if not his only, chance of clearing himself.

  Almost at once, Ray decided he must attempt to see Flint. The General should be told about these latest developments. Furthermore, a police dragnet would be put out for the supposed slayer of Leonard Tracy as soon as Bixler made his lying report. In that case, the most unlikely spot the authorities would look for Ray was in the company of U. G. Flint.

  Men were working at the power substation. Ray caught glimpses of them occasionally as they passed under glaring lights near the structural lattice-work of the substation transmission towers. He felt their eyes watching him as he made his way along the line of towering, rusty, blast furnace stoves.

  He shook himself angrily. Of course he was completely invisible in the darkness beneath the abandoned furnaces. This was no time to lose his nerve. Nothing but continued courage, even a certain degree of daring, could possibly avert complete disaster.

  Some thousand feet behind the old furnaces, a high board fence, surmounted with barbed wire, enclosed the property of American-Consolidated Steel. Time and neglect had rotted the hoards. Ray kicked one loose and squeezed through to the street beyond.

  He found himself in a fourth-rate business section. His route to the nearest street car line led past pool-rooms, second-hand shops and cheap eating places. In spite of his continued feeling that everyone was looking at him, nobody actually gave him a second glance. A man in soiled work clothes was no rarity in this portion of the city.

  But at the George Washington Hotel, the situation would be reversed. Ray knew he would he inviting attention and possible trouble if he barged into that gilt-and-plush lobby in greasy jeans. Yet he could not risk a return to his rooming house. Bixler had probably already given the alarm, and the police would be sure to look for him first thing at the dreary room.

  He solved this problem by buying a fairly presentable business suit in one of the innumerable, late-open, second-hand stores, with money remaining from his pawned wrist watch. The gray color of the suit he selected would help disguise its somewhat frayed coat sleeves and trouser cuffs unless he were subject to minute inspection. That, he felt, was unlikely.

  In the back room of the shop, he changed, washed his face and hands, and wrapped his work clothes in a bundle which he left to he picked up later. Then he went on, caught a street car and rode downtown.

  He called Flint on a house phone in the hotel lobby. After a short wait the switchboard girl said, “Sorry, 17-D does not answer.”

  Ray turned to the room desk. The General’s key was in the mail box. Ray glanced up at the clock over the marble counter. The hands stood at eight-fifty-three. The fact struck him with a sense of surprise. After what he had been through, midnight would have seemed more reasonable.

  Probably the
General had lingered at the plant, or maybe he was having a leisurely dinner. The best thing would be to wait.

  He crossed to the newsstand, bought an evening paper and settled himself in a chair where he could see the desk and the elevators. The General would have to stop at the desk for his key. Ray spread the paper, screening himself behind it as he waited and watched.

  In about twenty minutes, Ray’s heart gave a leap and then began to pound heavily. A tall man had come into the lobby. Those sharp, wedge-shaped features belonged unmistakably to Lieutenant Lambert of Homicide. Ray peered guardedly over the edge of his paper as the police detective approached the desk clerk and spoke with the man.

  Ray saw the clerk turn to the mail boxes and then back to Lambert. Evidently he was informing the policeman that U. G. Flint was not in. And Lambert, obviously reaching the same decision Ray had reached, walked over toward where Ray was sitting. For a keenly painful instant Ray feared the detective was about to occupy the adjoining chair.

  But Lambert finally seated himself a short distance in front of Ray. Facing the desk, the man’s back was toward Ray.

  Ray got up quickly, turned through a red-carpeted corridor and went out a side entrance to the street. The alarm then had been given and the entire police organization was on the alert. And that meant he was in constantly increasing danger whatever he did.

  There was only one sensible conclusion. He would have to hide until such time as he could safely get in touch with U. G. Flint. But where? He thought suddenly of the abandoned blast furnaces where the tunnel under the inlet emerged. Inside one of those furnaces he would have a hiding place where no one would ever think to look.

  Ray caught a street car back in that direction. He’d spend the night in the deserted plant, he decided, and try again in the morning to reach the General. In the meantime, he’d get something to eat. He had passed up his dinner for his interrupted effort at searching the test laboratory. Now his stomach was reminding him most uncomfortably of the omission.