Free Doc Savage: The Secret of Satan's Spine (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage Book 15) by Kenneth Robeson, Lester Dent, Will Murray Page A

for Shreveport at once!”
    “The mysterious blonde is undoubtedly in danger,” returned Doc Savage, “but she has not been taken to Louisiana.”
    “But the note says—”
    “No time to explain,” rapped Doc Savage. “Even less time to waste. Come on.”

Chapter VII
    THE NORTHERN STAR
    WHEN MONK MAYFAIR awoke, he did not at first feel the pain at the back of his thick skull. His small eyes snapped open, looking momentarily unfocused. Blinking, he found himself staring at an unfamiliar ceiling. He sat up, looked around.
    Only then did he become aware of a throbbing at both temples. Grabbing his blunt skull, he let out a low, anguished growl like a bulldog suffering from a hangover.
    In this way, Monk discovered that he had a pounding headache.
    The headache was of secondary importance, however, because the homely chemist immediately recognized his surroundings as the stateroom cabin of a ship of some sort.
    Rolling off his bunk, Monk found his feet, but his wobbly knees knocked together alarmingly, and he immediately sat back down.
    Monk grabbed his head again and gave out another groan, and the sound would have done credit to a disturbed bull.
    “Where the heck am I?” he muttered to himself.
    The homely chemist tried to remember the last thing that happened to him. His thoughts went to his shoulder blades, which still ached somewhat from being prodded by cold steel gun muzzles. Monk recalled being at the mercy of the man who called himself Raymond Lee, and that he had been on the point of being taken into the basement of a phony Old Sailors Home to be executed.
    The basement door had exploded outward. After that, it was as if a cyclone had entered the house….
    A vivid impression of fast-moving thunderbolt resembling Doc Savage charging about the house leaped into his mind. That was about all he could remember of the wild series of events that followed.
    Monk, of course, knew nothing about having been blackjacked, except his searching fingers located a moist, sticky patch at the back of his head, where his rusty hair was short and bristly, and soon discovered what appeared to be some type of bandage.
    The hairy chemist added two and two and decided, “Either Doc rescued me, or them guys changed their minds and hauled me off to this place, whatever it is.”
    That Monk was on a ship seemed evident. Wrongdoers he had gone up against before sometimes executed wildly imaginative schemes. Just because he woke up in what appeared to be a stateroom did not make it so. For all Monk knew, this was the basement of that very same house, tricked out to look like a ship’s cabin for some peculiar reason.
    Finding his feet again, Monk stumbled bowlegged to the door, which proved to be locked, as well as blocked by a dark curtain. There was a porthole beside it, but the thick glass was painted over, a wartime precaution Monk knew was calculated to reduce the number of visible lights on vessels operating in war zones—which constituted the entirety of the Atlantic Ocean these days. Digging into his pocket, he produced a key ring and employed the brassy teeth of one to scrape out a peephole. Peering out, the hairy chemist saw daylight and a forest of masts and cranes that made him think he was not in any basement, but tied up at a dock somewhere.
    Monk tried the door, but it refused to open.
    “Locked from the outside, dang it,” he mumbled to himself. “That’s gotta mean I’m somebody’s prisoner.”
    Monk began wondering what happened to Doc Savage, his erstwhile rescuer. He tried pounding on the door, just to see what would happen.
    Not long after, someone unlatched it. Much to the hairy chemist’s slack-jawed astonishment, Doc Savage and Ham Brooks entered.
    “Doc!”
    “LOWER your voice, Monk,” admonished the bronze man.
    Ham slipped in, carefully shut the door, as Doc Savage asked, “How is your head feeling?”
    “Like a shell burst in slow-motion,” complained Monk.
    “You were bludgeoned,” Doc