The Avenger 1 - Justice, Inc. (15 page)

“No rod,” he said, “The guy’s a sap.”

The tall man jerked his head to another of the dining-room chairs. There were two in the set of eight that had arms. Mac sat in one. Benson was to sit in the other.

He sat down. Again, it would have been crazy not to. And Benson didn’t do crazy things. From behind a rope was looped around his body, and he was all through.

They tied him at wrists and ankles and waist to the chair, as MacMurdie was tied. The Scots eyes were terrible in their fury and self-reproach as he watched. One of the killers grinned and leveled his gun.

The tall man knocked his arm aside.

“You dummy! If somebody found a slug in one of ’em, the whole show would be off.”

So they didn’t shoot the gray man with the white face that, even at such a moment, did not move a muscle. And that was their mistake.

“Scatter around, you guys. You know what to do.”

The men left, swiftly, going out different doors. Each door was bolted as they went. Benson and the Scot could possibly move around a little, taking the chairs with them, but that, the gang thought, wouldn’t do any good with the doors locked.

And that was another mistake.

The moment they were alone, Benson began shoving his chair. With his ankles tied to the chair legs, he could only move the chair by pushing, a little at a time, with the tips of his toes. It was like trying to push an automobile only with the tips of your fingers. But Benson had steel cables for muscles. The calves of his legs rippled—and the chair moved along the floor.

He got to MacMurdie and edged around so that his left side was at the Scot’s right. Then he tipped back in his chair. Not just a little—all the way back.

The chair banged to the floor and left him with his head down and his legs up. His left leg, strapped to the chair leg, was almost parallel with MacMurdie’s right arm, strapped to the arm of the chair.

One of the doors opened in a hurry as a man, drawn by the sound of the falling chair, poked his head in to be sure everything was all right. The man grinned murderously at Benson’s helpless, upside-down position, and went out again.

But if Benson’s position was helpless at the moment, it was designed to bring help swiftly. And the quickwitted Scot caught on at once.

MacMurdie could move his hand only a little, what with the rope around his wrist. But he could move it enough to inch Benson’s trousers leg up over his calf—and get at Ike, the razorlike throwing dagger, at the bulge of Benson’s leg.

He slashed the rope at Benson’s left ankle; then, as Benson whirled the chair around with his free leg, cut the rope at his right. Legs untied, by a miracle of coordination, Benson tipped upright again, chair and all.

They were free in half a minute after that.

“Mon, I’m so sorry I dragged ye here,” Mac whispered, when his gag was off. “They caught me. I got loose for a minute and got to a phone. I didn’t realize ’twas just what they wanted—for me to call you.”

“Forget it, Mac,” Benson said. “We’d better get out the window—”

The swinging door from the kitchen flew open. A man stood on the threshold, startled eyes lining on Benson’s chest over the sights of an automatic. Behind the man something blue and misty curled up in the kitchen.

Benson’s arm came forward with seemingly no back-swing as a preliminary at all. Ike flew from his whipping hand. The slim, deadly needle of steel with the light, hollow handle, streaked almost as fast as a bullet toward the man in the doorway.

The man had been squeezing the trigger. He tried to shoot and side-step, too, and accomplished nothing constructive in either direction. His shot missed the man with the white, dead face, and his body did not miss Ike. The knife ended its whispering flight in the fleshy part of the man’s right arm.

“Pete—” the man yelled.

MacMurdie’s mallet-like, bony fist got him then. The Scot knocked him cold, but the harm was done. There were running steps.

No time for the window, now. Benson and MacMurdie backed up to a door apiece, so that the swinging panels would hide their bodies, and waited. And as they waited they smelled smoke and heard the ominous crackle of flames licking at dry wood.

They didn’t wait long. The other three men were in the room in answer to the cry for help in only a few seconds. All came in the door behind which Benson lurked.

The tall man snapped his gun up to kill the Scot. Benson’s flashing toe cracked his wrist and sent the gun flying. Another shot at MacMurdie, too hastily, and whirled to shoot Benson down. He went down himself, with a broken jaw. The third man ran.

“Get him!”

MacMurdie didn’t need the command. The Scot’s bony figure was flying after the fellow. His huge feet were eating up the hallway three yards to the gunman’s one. He got him at the front door. The man went down—and stayed down.

And then it was time to get out of there.

In four different places, the gang had set the Andrews house afire. The house, of wood throughout with a shingled exterior, would go up in twenty minutes or less, razed to the foundations. To speed the fire, gasoline had been used. That was why the men hadn’t shot MacMurdie or Benson. The two were supposed to have been consumed untraceably in the flames. But their bodies might be found, and bullets in them would have tipped the show that the deaths were murder and not accidental, due to fire.

“Out!” snapped Mac, fumbling with the front door.

“These men, Mac!”

On the Scot’s face was a terrible look. He stared at the nearest flames, and he thought of his drugstore, bombed with his wife and boy in it. Then he thought of the trip to the undertaker for wife and son.

“Let ’em burn!” he rasped. “Death’s too good for rats like these!”

“But death by fire, Mac—”

“It’s still too good for ’em. Come on out!”

Benson caught the Scot’s furious arm.

“Come along. We’ll carry them out.”

“I’ll na’ have naught to do wi’ the skurlies!” swore the Scot, burr broadening with the stress of the moment.

But in the flaming gray eyes of Benson was command. And in a moment MacMurdie shrugged.

“Ye’re a fool, mon! They’d have done for ye. Now ’tis providence that their own fire should do for them.”

They carried the four out. Down the street a fire siren screamed. Benson laid the four on the lawn and went through their pockets, hands moving so fast they seemed two pale blurs.

There was only one thing he bothered to take from any of them; only one thing of significance. That was a postcard. There was a picture of blue water and an impossibly beautiful island on the card. On the other side, under special-delivery stamp, which is a rarity on a postcard, were two words:

Insulin. Fast.

It was signed “Murdock.”

The two left. As the fire engines drew up before the Andrews home, which was too far gone already to be saved, Benson and MacMurdie were speeding toward the hotel in the fast roadster.

There Benson picked up the telephone. As he used it, he stared at the postcard. The picture was of some island called Farquer’s Knob. But the postmark was Isle Royale.

Benson called Mrs. Martineau’s home and got the name of her regular physician. Then he called the physician. He repeated the process with Andrews, Vincent and Hickock. And there he stopped and stared at Mac.

“Got it,” he said. “Lawrence Hickock suffers from diabetes—has to have insulin.”

He looked again at the card.

“Hickock, a prisoner of this gang, must have insulin or die. So they’ve sent for some. Sent the message from Isle Royale, which is near Kingston, Canada, in the Thousand Island district. The hide-out will be near there Mac. This clue is going to do the trick, I think. And we’d never have gotten it if we hadn’t dragged those rats out of the fire they richly deserved to die in. Virtue sometimes
is
its own reward.”

On the Buffalo-Montreal plane, from which Smitty had been dropped with nothing but two thousand feet of air beneath him and the dark lake, there was scurrying activity. The man with the black pads of hair on his knuckles had seen, far ahead, a tiny pinpoint of light.

That light was the beacon pointing to the gang’s secret lair.

“O.K.,” he grunted.

The man with the perpetual, greasy smile, and another, went to the trunk in the tail. They opened it. The bound, gagged figure of a man showed in the trunk. But the man needn’t have been gagged. He was elderly, frail-looking, and was mercifully unconscious. It was Arnold Leon.

They lifted Leon from the trunk, and put a cork life preserver around his spare shoulders.

“Hurry it! Almost there!” called the pilot through the open front-compartment door, over the motors’ drone.

Hastily they strapped a parachute over Leon’s body. They carried him back to the trapdoor, which two other men already had open.

“Now!” called the pilot. The pinpoint of light was directly underneath.

They let the unconscious man slide down the chute formed by the slanting door.

“Hope that parachute opens all right,” said the man with the meaningless smile uneasily.

“They’ve always opened before. I guess this one will now.”

It had opened as they spoke, though, already far astern, it couldn’t be seen. Leon was dropping toward the surface of Lake Ontario, far below.

And after the huge white mushroom from which dangled Arnold Leon, another, darker shape was plummeting!

Smitty, when he had asked MacMurdie to draw the undercarriage of the S404 strictly to scale, had laid his desperate plan on one thing—the forward-slanting brace of the rear wheel making a tricycle landing gear for the plane. That brace, he believed, could be reached from the rear end of the trapdoor.

He had held his breath when the chloroform was jammed to mouth and nose. But even at that, he had gotten enough of the stuff at the end, when he couldn’t hold on any longer, to fog his brain with beginning unconsciousness.

The deadly slide down the door, however, had cleared his brain again. He was sliding, feet first, on his side. He cleared the door—and whirled.

The plane, traveling better than two hundred feet a second, whipped overhead the instant the air resistance slowed his own initial momentum. But even at that, Smitty caught the rear wheel brace by little more than the tips of his fingers. The screaming gale promptly snapped him back so that he trailed almost straight out like a pennant. But then he had his enormous hands squarely on the brace; and when those hands caught hold of something, they held.

He hung there, great muscles quivering with the strain, till he got over his sick feeling. One thing to plan a try like this—another entirely when it came to putting it into operation! Then he performed the appalling feat of hanging by one great hand while with the other he tore off his coat and a mass of padding in the back.

He shifted hands, and got the coat off over the other sleeve. On his back was revealed a compact parachute. That, plus padding to hide the outlines, was the “hump” on his back. The hump had been only incidentally for a disguise.

He saw the trapdoor come down again. From his place up almost against the belly of the transport, he could not see in the door any more than those inside could see him on the outside. But in a moment he saw a bound body slide through.

The man dropped, and a white cloud of canvas billowed out and broke the fall. Smitty instantly dropped, too, and plummeted down after the white cloud.

“Whew!” he said, shaken and beaded with cold sweat. If ever a guy had looked Death squarely in the eyes—and spat in his face—

He rocked in the swing of his own parachute. This chute was not white. It was black. It blended against the sky so well that only by a blotting out of stars could an observer from below spot it. And there were no stars tonight. A June rain was brewing, and the sky was lowering and black.

A parachute seems to float slowly but it actually falls all too fast. In a very short time the white parachute settled to one side of an unconscious elderly man who splashed deep and then bobbed up on the cork preserver.