Van closed and locked the door behind him against the battery of curious stares. He switched on the overhead lights that threw their pale glow down onto the black, oily surface of the pool. He went to the wall, found the electric button behind the loose molding. He gave the signals Guido had revealed Then, muscles tense and rigid, he took his place in the chair.
HE waited six minutes, almost giving up hope, before the first sluggish bubble burst on the pool’s surface. It seemed to wink at Dick Van Loan like a mocking eye. Then the water grew agitated. There was that same feeling that hellish subterranean forces were at work. More bubbles appeared. And suddenly the black helmet lifted above the water, the round, sinister goggle glass pointed at Van.
“Your report, Blackie!”
Prepared as he was for it, the sepulchral tones of that disguised voice made Van jump. He gripped the aims of his chair as Guido had the night previous. He hunched forward, drawing his face into lines of fear. He could dimly see the glitter of eyes behind that goggle glass, sinister, calculating, watching his every move.
A sense of panic came for a moment that his disguise might have failed. But the helmet didn’t submerge. The strange eyes continued to watch him. Van made his own voice sound as much like Guido’s as he could.
“Give me a little more time, Chief – just a little more time, and I’ll get him! Blackwell, I mean. Even the cops don’t know where he is. But I know my boys will find him. Then -” Van made a stabbing gesture with his finger.
LAUGHTER, harsh, cold, came from the helmeted head. “You can’t find Blackwell, and you hounded young Winstead so that the boy took poison. What was the idea, Blackie, in setting some of your men to watch Winstead? Were you trying in some way to doublecross me?”
“Hell, no, Chief! You said – that is – I figured we’d better keep a close watch on him after what you said last night.”
“You’re lying, Blackie! I know you had other reasons for spying on Winstead. I’d wash my hands of you and your bunch of degenerates, turn you all over to the police, except that there is work still to be done.”
Van leaned forward. “Yes, Chief, anything!”
He was watching the face of his wrist watch. The hour hand had crept past two. Detectives would be battering at the doors in another nine minutes. And, with them close by, there was danger any moment that some alarm might sound. The Phantom’s right hand tensed to dart for his automatic. But his ears strained to catch the Chief’s next words.
“Eben Gray is still alive,” the voice went on, “and old Esmond Caulder is clinging to existence on his deathbed. His leechlike hold must be loosened. He must be helped into the Great Beyond if necessary. Then there is Judd Moxley, whose sentence will be up shortly. Yes, Blackie, bungling as you are, I still have work for you.”
“You’re gonna finish ‘em all, Chief?” Van made his voice sound relieved, eager. He couldn’t quite fathom the helmeted killer’s new leniency toward Guido, and the Chief’s words seemed indecisive. Was he deliberately throwing up some sort of smoke screen? The Phantom wondered.
But Van’s acting was cut short by the sudden clamor of a bell. It sounded out beyond the billiard room in some distant part of the house. It was loud enough to echo raucously in the gym’s high ceiling. On top of it men’s voices sounded in an excited tumult.
The helmeted figure in the pool had frozen. The half-hidden eyes continued to peer at Van. Then laughter rumbled, more harsh, more mocking than any that had gone before.
“That can mean only one thing, Blackie! The police have come, led here by the Phantom! The Phantom – who’s not supposed to know anything about you! Good-by, Blackie, you monkey-brained fool! May you have an easy trip to Hell!”
In that instant before the shoulders and helmeted head began the downward movement into the pool, Van’s.45 automatic appeared in his hand. The gun belched flame. The report sounded like a thunder clap in that tiled chamber. A white chip flew from the front of the Chief’s round observation glass. The helmeted head bobbed back a few inches under the impact of the bullet.
But Van was bitterly disappointed. That first shot told him that the glass was convex and had a lenslike thickness, It could be chipped by lead. It couldn’t be shattered or pierced. Another shot brought a second white pockmark. The head bobbed again. But now it was submerging and, between Van’s bullets, came the mocking, gloating voice.
“Blackie wouldn’t have done that! Blackie’s a coward! Good-by to you, too, Phantom!”
Rage, a feeling of helplessness shook Dick Van Loan under the lash of that taunting voice. He aimed straight at those vanishing shoulders, heard bullets slap against case-hardened steel. And he emptied his clip to the accompaniment of jeering laughter.
The head was almost gone now, a black, sinister blob barely showing above the water. Satan himself seemed to be sinking into the pool. And, goaded by the knowledge of his failure, Van did a suicidal thing.
In one movement he peeled off the outer clothing of Blackie Guido. In the next he dropped his gun on the chair and leaped toward the pool. A burst of gunfire sounded from the billiard room as his body arched up and down. The police had arrived, were breaking into this den of human jackals. But the worst criminal of all was escaping before Van’s eyes.
He plunged through space in a clean dive with his arms stretched straight toward the man who mocked him. His own head struck almost under the shadow of that goggling glass eye. He went on down through the fetid, stale water till his hands locked around a metal-armored form. He clung with reckless desperation, clung, and was dragged many feet below the surface.
For the pool was deep, deeper than Van had realized. His feet and knees brushed an iron ladder. He tried to thrust his shoes between the rungs, tried to stop the Chief’s descent. But the gravitational pull of the steel-weighted suit was too much for the Phantom. He reeled sideward off the ladder with the Chief on top of him. He fell six feet farther into a nightmare world of stagnant water. He struck, and it seemed that all the breath was being crushed out of him.
But he still had a grip on that thrashing body. His smarting eyes opened. In the dim glow that penetrated downward from the overhead lights he saw a twisting air line. He tried to reach it, tear it from the back of the Chief’s helmet. But the man in the suit struck at him.
JUST in the nick of time Van caught a blurred flash of steel. The Chief had a knife. He had drawn it from his belt. He was lunging at Van with it. The bulky suit made his aim awkward; but Van barely escaped. He felt the blade slice his shoulder; knew that the monster he was fighting was trying to drive it straight into his back.
Van’s fingers clenched over a steel-armored wrist. He held on with a grip of death. His face was close to the chipped lens of the goggle glass. Even now it seemed to him he could see the flash of sinister eyes. The eyes of an octopus! The eyes of death looking at him! And Dick Van Loan realized that his lungs were almost bursting.
He was a good swimmer, had trained hours on end in all the niceties of aquatics. But the only air he had was what he’d come down with. And half of that had been squeezed from his lips in that first plunging fall.
The man in the diving suit seemed to sense Van’s peril. Instead of trying to break away, the Chief locked his left arm around Van’s body. While his right sought to thrust the knife in, he held Van savagely. And the sheer ponderousness of his movements was now in the Chief’s favor.
The suit’s steel armor weighted Van down like reptilian scales. He tried to break loose, and the Chief only clutched tighter. Van knew he was weakening. He dared not free his right hand from the other’s right wrist.
And yet, without his right arm to aid him, he was powerless to break away. Blood from his shoulder wound made a filmy plume behind him. The Phantom fought with aching lungs, pounding heartbeats, and with each fraction of a second bringing him nearer death.