Part 23
Billy Kane was across the threshold now; and now, rising to his knees, he groped out for the edge of the door, found it, and, as he slammed it shut, it seemed to cut in two, as a knife might cut it, the sudden, white, piercing ray of a flashlight that leaped out from the interior of the warehouse. And then in another second he had shot the bolt home in its grooves, and, in the darkness, leaning heavily for an instant against the door to recover himself, he stared down the black passage for the girl, and could see nothing.
There came an abortive rush against the door; snarls and oaths came muffled from within. He moved a step forward along the passage. They were a negligible quantity in there now. The door would hold, and when they succeeded in getting out and making their way along the side of the dock perhaps, they would be more concerned in getting to cover themselves than anything else; and besides they would have a wounded man to hamper their movements. It was she now, the Woman in Black, that concerned him.
“Where are you?” he called quickly. “Where are you?”
A draft of air touched his face. The front door at the farther end of the passage was being opened.
“I am here, Bundy.”
It was her voice, but there was something of cold, merciless forbidding in it. He halted instinctively. He did not quite understand.
“Bundy, are you listening?” came the level tones again. “This is the end, absolutely and finally the end to-night. You have saved my life, but I owe you no thanks for that. You saved it, after hiring thugs to take it, you thing of loathing, because you dared do nothing else, since you say you believe the police got wind enough of this thing tonight to scare you off. Very well, Bundy—but there is more, isn’t there, that the police do not know? Well, they will know it, and certain secrets in that den of yours, the moment I can reach them. I have warned you often enough. I am through, Bundy, this is the end of the Rat to-night, nothing shall stop that—but I am still a fool. I am still giving you warning of what I mean to do now. I am still giving you a chance to save yourself if you can; the rather slim chance that the police will not be able to run the man who was known as the Rat to earth! And I am giving you that chance because—well because, even in spite of yourself, I am still alive.”
“No!” he cried. “You do not understand. Wait!” He was groping down the black passage, as he heard the front door shut quickly, and heard a footstep running, receding, outside. “Wait!” he cried again. “For God’s sake, wait!”
There was no answer. He knew there would be none. He had heard her running away out there, hadn’t he? He reached the door, and looked out—and hung there hesitant—and called again—and there was no answer. He listened. He could not hear her footsteps any more. There was no sound from anywhere, not even from that warehouse door behind him. They weren’t hammering on that any more.
And then Billy Kane laughed in a short, bitter, mirthless way, and started, running at top speed, in the direction in which he had left his purloined and dilapidated car. The end! The end of the Rat! He laughed again in the same bitter mirth, as he ran. It was the end of more than that! It was the end of hope—of her—of that love that had come to him upon the thresholds of these strange doors of the night. It was the end of Billy Kane! And whether as the Rat now, or as Billy Kane, the police would be equally hard upon his trail. He stood in far worse case now than on the night of David Ellsworth’s murder, for now the underworld, that would be combed for the Rat, and where the Rat was too well known to have it offer the slightest hope of escaping detection, was closed to him as a refuge. He knew what she meant to do—to tell her story to the police, to expose all the criminal acts and affiliations of the bona fide Rat, and to lead them to the Rat’s den, and expose the secrets that she had so often hinted were hidden there.
He clenched his hands as he ran. The end! No! Not yet! Not until they had him, and they had not got him yet! He did not know which way to turn; but while he still had his freedom there was still the hope of running down the murderer of David Ellsworth—and there were the proceeds of that robbery now, most of them, in the Rat’s den. That was what seemed to stand out as immediately vital now—to get those things—that money and those rubies. He had staked everything on the hope that some day he could hand over to justice both the proceeds of that crime and the murderer as well—hand them over _together_, as a complete vindication of his own name—and even now, in this hour that seemed blackest of all, he still dared to cling to that hope. He knew who the murderer was, and he had already recovered a large share of what had been stolen. He still hoped to find the murderer, and he still hoped to find the remainder of those rubies, and so carry out his original plan. His jaws locked. His mind was made up. He would go! And, yes, he had far better than an even chance of getting there in time. She would take longer to reach the police and lead them to the den than it would take him to reach it—thanks to the car that, grim irony! he had stolen on her account. Afterward his position would be desperate enough; but now, without an instant’s loss of time, he had to gain the den and get away again before they trapped him there.
He reached the car. The old night watchman had evidently retired inside the building again, for there was no sign of the man. He experienced a certain sense of relief at this, as he cranked the obsolete machine; and then he was in the driver’s seat again, and the car was roaring along the road. He drove fast, with mad haste, with reckless disregard for the ill-lighted road. There could be no accident comparable in disaster to his failure to put the miles behind him swiftly enough to insure him the few minutes leeway he asked for in the den.
He bent over the wheel, tense, rigid, strained. The minutes sped away. A glimmer of hope came to him for that “afterward.” He could use the car again; get out of the city again before the chase got too hot. He could certainly hide in that way during the night, and that would give him the night in which to think. He had not time to think now—only that as he drew in toward the centre of the city he must keep as much as possible to the unfrequented streets, both because he must ignore such a thing as speed laws, and because he was driving a stolen car.
XXVI—THE LAST PORTAL
Billy Kane had no means of knowing how long he had been, when he finally leaped from the car at the corner of the lane on the street at the rear of the den. He knew only that, beyond any question of doubt or uncertainty, he had outdistanced her. With a quick glance around him to make sure that he was not observed, he slipped into the lane; and in an instant more, through the shed, and the underground tunnel, and the secret door that so craftily opened on the board joints of the rough panelling, he had gained the interior of the den. He ran across it, turned on the dangling incandescent over the rickety table, and running to the street door made sure that it was locked.
He turned then, pushed the bed aside, and pulled up the plank in the flooring that he had loosened once in his search for the secret hiding places of the room, and that had since served him in that capacity as a private depository of his own. From the aperture he lifted out the hand bag containing the banknotes stolen from the Ellsworth vault, and the red flannel sack containing the rubies, which he had torn from around the neck of the Man with the Crutch last night, replaced the plank, set the bed back in its original position, and carried the hand bag and sack to the table. He opened the bag, tossed in the red flannel sack—and stood for an instant eyeing the bag with a frown of distrust. He remembered that it did not close very well, that he had bent the catches with his steel jimmy that night when he had forced the bag open in the room of the Man with the Crutch, and that it was now quite liable to gape apart without warning—in which case, should the contents be seen by anyone, and they could not help but be seen if such an accident should occur in the presence of anyone within eyeshot, it would be likely to prove, not only awkward, but disastrous for the possessor of the bag. His frown cleared. There was still room in the bag for, say, a shirt; and, than a shirt there was nothing better to disguise the contents underneath.
He walked over to the old bureau, that was flanked on one side by the secret door to the den, and on the other by the cretonne hanging that, stretched diagonally across the corner of the room, served the Rat as a wardrobe. There was the shirt that he had worn on the night when he had first come here, the night he had been wounded by the police. Whitie Jack had washed the blood stains out, and had shoved it in the top bureau drawer.
He pulled the drawer open, bent over it, reached in for the shirt, straightened up—and the shirt dropped from his fingers. He did not move. Something cold, and round, and hard was pressed none too gently against the nape of his neck. His eyes had lifted to the mirror in front of him mechanically, and he stood there staring into it now like a man dazed and numbed. An arm was stretched out from behind the cretonne curtains, and a hand held a revolver against his head. It was like some uncanny moving picture that he was watching. For now the cretonne hanging moved; and now a figure moved out from behind the hanging, and stood behind him, Billy Kane, and stared, too, into the mirror, over his, Billy Kane’s, shoulder. There were two faces in the glass now, two faces that in form and features seemed identical—or else it was some strange mirage that caused a double reflection of his own face. And then one of the faces smiled malevolently, leeringly. It wasn’t his own face that smiled. He wasn’t smiling—though his lips moved.
“The Rat!” he said, below his breath.
He felt a hand slip into his pocket, and remove his automatic. And then the other spoke:
“Remarkable resemblance, isn’t it—Billy Kane? And the recognition appears to be mutual—Billy Kane! I’ve been waiting here quite a while for you this evening.”
Billy Kane did not answer. The Rat! The Rat was back! It was the moment, arrived at last, that had haunted him from the moment he had taken upon himself the other’s personality here in the underworld; but though he was more at the other’s mercy with that revolver muzzle boring into his neck, more helpless than he had thought to be when this time should arrive, more powerless where, instead, he had told himself a hundred times that at the worst it could be but a fight man to man, he found himself far more unmoved now than he had anticipated he would be. He found himself curiously composed. There seemed even a grim, sardonic humor stirring in his soul. What did it matter now? To-night he had no further use for the Rat’s mantle—she had seen to that by now. To-night the whole house of cards had toppled anyway, and the ultimate worst had happened, save only that the police had not yet got their steel bracelets around his wrists. And yet there was a significance in the cold menace of the other’s tone, and a still deeper significance, that he did not like, in the other’s ostentatious repetition of his, Billy Kane’s, name. It was obvious that Billy Kane was no stranger to the Rat!
“Get back to that table, and sit down there!” ordered the Rat curtly.
Billy Kane, because he had no choice, obeyed. It was like some weird, extravagant hallucination of the brain. He was looking up from his chair into what seemed to be his own face—only as he studied it now, fascinated by it, he saw what no mirror had ever shown him was a part of his own identity. The face was a little older, a little more drawn, and there was an expression in the eyes, a smoldering something, a devil’s malignity that burned out through the half-closed lids, leaving the pupils like fever spots behind. And he remembered now that she had commented upon the freshness of his face on that first night when they had met.
“You fool!” sneered the Rat suddenly. “So you played the Rat, did you? And did you think I didn’t know? Well, you seem to have liked it—Billy Kane—and so I guess you’d better finish out the act, and play it until the end. You can manage that, can’t you—say, for another ten minutes—until the Rat is dead!”
Billy Kane’s hands tightened on the table edge. It was not only the words, it was the eyes, and the face that were working now, that seemed to possess some deadly eloquence.
“What do you mean?” Billy Kane steadied his voice.
“It won’t take long to tell you,” said the Rat roughly. “You’ve been here long enough to know that apart from the old cobbler and his wife upstairs, who mind their own business and are always deaf when they don’t want to hear, this place is sound-proof to revolver shots. Well, the game is up to-night. Your game—and my game! I’ve got one or two little things to do here, and then I’m going; but I’m going to leave the Rat behind—dead.”
Billy Kane’s fingers began to drum a light tattoo on the table. It was strange that he could force his fingers to do that with an air of such apparent unconcern. He was laboring under no delusions. He was fully conscious that there was no bluff in the other’s words, that he was actually sitting there and facing death in the most literal sense of the term. The Rat’s reputation was quite enough in itself to make it certain that the man would not hesitate in putting his threat into execution. And then, besides, there were strange stirrings in his mind now that were not comforting things. The Rat, cognizant of it all the time, had deliberately let him, Billy Kane, play the role—and the drama was to end with the Rat’s death. It seemed horribly logical. It would let the Rat out of _her_ clutches to-night, for instance, and leave only a dead Rat as prey for the police. He started involuntarily. Was that it? His fingers stopped their movements. Suppose he warned the Rat that the police were coming now? No! That would only cause the Rat to hurry—and to shoot the sooner. Well then, suppose the police found _two_ Rats here? It would not save Billy Kane, but it would end the career of one of the most infamous scoundrels in the United States—and it would pay his debt to her! If he could only stave the man off a little, fence for time!
He could have laughed out wildly at the mocking irony of it. He was praying now for the police to come! She would lead them, or some of them, through that secret door, wouldn’t she?—though they would guard both doors, take no chances, even while they would hardly expect to find anyone here. The Rat was standing with his back to the secret door, and Billy Kane’s eyes swept past the other now in a well-simulated vacant, wavering way—and fell again upon the Rat.
The man was leaning a little farther over the table now, his lips parted in a vicious smile. It was as though, innate in the other, was an unholy joy to be derived from a victim’s plight, a joy that he sought to augment by making his victim writhe the more if he could.
“And so you played the Rat, did you?” The Rat was sneering again. “Well, you found out a lot more than was good for you, didn’t you? There was a woman, wasn’t there? Maybe she didn’t introduce herself because she thought you knew her well enough; but maybe you’re entitled to know something about her, because she’s one of the reasons why you’re going to snuff out in a few minutes.” His voice rose suddenly in a furious burst of blasphemy. “Blast her!” he snarled. “She went too far! She thought she could make me dance every time she cracked her little whip, did she? She’ll wish now, if there’s any wishing where she’s gone, that she’d stayed up on the Avenue with the rest of the swells where she belongs, and left her infernal, nosey charities on the East Side alone. Margaret Blaine—the banker’s daughter! Ha, ha! She had it in for me because a girl she was interested in down here went and jumped in the river. See? She swore she’d put me through one way or another for that. And then she stumbled on a pal of mine the night he croaked off, and found some papers on him that put me to the bad for fair. And that wised her up to a lot more. And then, curse her, she tumbled to the game here, and—well, I guess you know the hand she played.” He laughed raucously. “I guess you’d ought to! But you needn’t worry about it any more! She’s gone out—Billy Kane—understand? She went out—for keeps—at ten o’clock to-night.”
Billy Kane’s eyes stole to the secret door again. He remembered the fascination with which he had watched it slowly open on the night he had lain there on the bed, and Karlin, in the hands of the police now, had sat at the bedside, and Red Vallon had been here at the table. And it seemed now as though the door moved again as it had moved that night. But he could not be sure. Perhaps it was his imagination that was father to the wish—and he dared not look steadily, or too long in that direction.
He brushed his hand across his eyes. He understood well enough now why the Rat had been indifferent to what Shaky Liz, or the Cherub, or any of them, might hold over him—there would be no Rat, if he, Billy Kane, in the Rat’s stead, were murdered. And the Rat believed, of course, that she—her name was Margaret—Margaret Blaine—that she was dead. But he, Billy Kane, was playing for time, wasn’t he? And the Rat, in his hideous propensity for a cat-and-mouse game, seemed quite willing to talk.
“You killed her!” Billy Kane’s ejaculation was one of stunned incredulity. “But—but she threatened me, when she thought I was you, by saying that if anything happened to her the evidence against you would be produced just the same.”
“Sure, she did!” leered the Rat. “In twenty-four hours after her disappearance. And it’ll be twenty-four hours all right before they have any proof of that. It wasn’t pulled off where a howl would go up ten minutes after she snuffed out! Sure, in twenty-four hours! Well, I’m in no hurry, am I? In twenty-four _minutes_ the Rat—that’s you—won’t need to care what busts loose! It’ll save _me_ a lot of trouble if they find the Rat sprawled out on the floor with a bullet through him, won’t it?”
The door! Had it moved inward a bare fraction of an inch, as it had that other night? There would have been time by now, just time, for her and the police to have got here. Was that a widening crack along that panel there—or only a shadow flung with taunting malice by the murky light? No—it moved now! He was sure of it. It moved!
He forced himself to laugh in a short, nervous way.
“I don’t see how that lets you out,” he mumbled. “What’s to become of you if the Rat’s found dead?”
The Rat was moving back from the table to the side wall of the den.
“I’ll show you,” said the Rat, with an ugly grin. “And don’t move—you understand? I’m a dead shot, and I’m not risking anything by being a few feet farther away. You’d only go out a little sooner, and miss something that’ll maybe sweeten your last moments—see?” His revolver still covering Billy Kane, he raised his left hand and pressed against the wall. A small panel door swung outward. “There’s nothing in there!” mocked the Rat. “That’s the secret she was forever talking about having discovered, and that’s the place she looted all right, and where she got the dope about a lot of our plans, and kept me from wising up the crowd about it in order to save my own skin. But there’s a thing or two she didn’t know.” His hand crept farther along the wall, and pressed suddenly against it again, and now a full board-length of the panelling slid away. Something metallic fell with a thud to the floor—and then Billy Kane was on his feet, clinging with a fierce, unconscious grip to the table.
He had forgotten the police and that secret door at the far end of the room, forgotten the peril in which he stood, forgotten that ugly black muzzle of a revolver in the other’s hand. His mind and brain seemed to be reeling. Some inhuman devil’s trick was being played upon him. That was one of those iron crutch shafts, painted to resemble grained wood, that the Rat was picking up—yes, and fitting it now with deft, accustomed fingers to the armpiece! The Rat—the Man with the Crutch—the murderer of David Ellsworth—the man whose very rôle he had taken upon himself and played!
“You!” he cried, and swayed at the table. And then passion seized him. “You hound of hell!” he shouted hoarsely. “The Man with the Crutch—it was you who killed David Ellsworth!”
“Sit down!” The Rat’s lips were thinned, merciless; the revolver edged forward. “Well, what about it! Why don’t you say Peters, too? You stuck your nose pretty deep into that!”
Billy Kane mechanically sank back in his chair.
“So you’ve got it, have you?” jeered the Rat. “Sure, the Man with the Crutch was me! And you, you fool, through your cursed interference with Red Vallon, put the police on my trail for Peters’ murder. Well, I’m going to let you be the Man with the Crutch too—as well as the Rat. That’ll let me out on both counts!” He stood the crutch up against the wall, and from the opening drew forth some clothes and flung them down beside the crutch. “Get the idea? This is the costume that goes with the crutch—sort of reserve stock. Understand? It wasn’t always convenient to come here as the Rat, or leave here as the Man with the Crutch—or the other way around, if you like. I’ll leave the stuff there where it’ll show up, and the police can put two and two together the same as you have. And that answers your question as to what is to become of me. I am a gentleman of several parts, and I can spare _two_ of them. What’s left is none of your business, and anyway I’m getting tired of this, and I’m pretty near ready to go. But there’s one thing more—there were some rubies you were looking for, weren’t there, besides the ones you’ve been taking charge of and so kindly placed in that bag there a few minutes ago without giving me the trouble of making you hand them over?” Again his left hand, thrust back of him, sought the interior of the opening, and came out with a number of small plush trays piled one on top of another, the topmost flashing and scintillating now with its score of fiery, blood-red stones. “You were looking for these, weren’t you?” prodded the Rat, with a chuckle. “Well, you had ’em here with you all the time!”
Billy Kane was fighting desperately for self-control. Could they hear outside there? The man was condemning himself out of his own mouth! God, could they _hear_ out there—did they understand that this man had murdered David Ellsworth, and that Billy Kane was clear! He met the Rat’s eyes with deliberate defiance now. More! Everything! The man must be led into telling everything—he had not told enough yet to make it sure—and perhaps they had not heard it all.
“And Peters,” he rasped out. “You killed Peters, too—Peters, who helped you kill David Ellsworth! Weren’t you satisfied with your share, that you had to steal his?”
The Rat had advanced to the table, and, setting down the trays, always with his revolver covering Billy Kane, had begun to pour the contents of one tray at a time into the open hand bag. He stopped now, and stared at Billy Kane in a sort of contemptuous surprise.