The Avenger 1 - Justice, Inc. (3 page)

He could move his facial flesh only with his fingers. And wherever he moved it—it stayed!

“I . . . I’m sorry I cried out,” faltered the nurse. “But you looked so . . . so
awful—”

A staff doctor came in.

“Ah! Conscious, eh? And how do we feel?”

Benson’s mind was as fast as his body. He’d been conscious only for a few minutes, and after a brain bout that had nearly cost his life. But in that short time he had realized two things.

He must gain strength as rapidly as possible and get out of here.

To get out, he must conceal his colossal agony at the fate of Alicia and little Alice, and indeed pretend as if they had never existed at all.

“I feel much better,” he said.

“Fine,” said the doctor. “Now as to the matter you were speaking of when we brought you—”

“That is all past,” said Benson firmly. He felt a knife turn in his heart—felt as if he were betraying the two who meant all of life to him. But it had to be done.

The doctor’s face cleared. “Good man!” he said in a different tone. “I knew you’d get over your delusion. We can have you out of here shortly, I think.”

In the doctor’s face, Benson saw what he had narrowly missed—detention in the violent ward, maniacs screaming all around him, a padded cell, perhaps. But he had missed it.

In the days that followed, he flexed his muscles and breathed deeply and ate all the rich broths and food they brought. He was storing up strength. And he thought, during the slow hours, tried vainly to figure it out.

What in Heaven’s name had happened to Alicia and little Alice? There had been no way for them to get out of that plane. Yet—they’d disappeared from it.

And
why?

During the days when he built strength back and fought to keep from really going insane with anguish, he asked that question a lot.

Why?

In what horrible criminal plot had he unwittingly thrust his family and himself when he shoved his way aboard that plane? He could not guess. But he knew it must be something gigantic; knew it must be something fiendish. And if he had suffered such an awful loss, there must be others threatened with the same. How many? There was no guessing.

He was discharged from the sanitarium. He had gone into the place a man. He came out a machine; a machine of ice and slow fire; a powerful engine geared to only two things—recovery of wife and child and destruction of the force that had acted so fantastically against them.

Benson even looked more like a thing of steel than a man.

Snow-white, his hair was, like chromium. His face, terrible in its utter lack of expression, was steely-white. His eyes, so colorless in his colorless face that you seemed to be looking far, far through them at a chill world of fog and ice, were like pale steel. Even the suit he’d worn in there carried the impression out. It was steely-gray.

At the Montreal airport, he staggered and almost collapsed as he saw a big plane with props idling on the runway. His eyes were dreadful in his white, still face. He knew he could never again look at a plane without feeling that terrific shock. But he also knew that he was going to have to use them—for fast moves of vengeance in the program to which he was dedicating himself.

The agent shrank back a little from the steely-gray figure, moistened his lips at the chill glare of the pale-gray eyes.

“Y-yes, sir,” he stammered. “There’s a seat in the Buffalo plane.”

“Thank you,” said Benson. His lips barely moved with the words. They seemed to come, of their own volition, from great, white, still spaces back of those pale and flaming eyes.

He went to the plane. Attendants made way for him and stared after him. But he paid no attention. Alone in the glacial, terrible world of his grief, he boarded the plane and roared back along the track of tragedy.

Never had a man chanced to be in less of a position to prove that he’d ever had a wife and daughter than Dick Benson.

For two years, since he had acquired his last half million in an Australian amethyst venture, he and his young wife and little Alice had played over a large part of the globe. Bermuda, Hawaii, California, Florida, Alaska—all had seen them. In Buffalo they’d stayed at a hotel for a few days. They had no locality, no neighbors—they’d been rich vagabonds.

But Benson had to get some place or person to prove his story so he could get the aid of the police.

He went to the hotel. The assistant manager said of course he’d met Mrs. Benson and the daughter. That was before they’d gone to Louisiana.

“What are you talking about?” snapped Benson.

The man flinched at the glare in the pale eyes.

“The clerk said that’s where they went.”

Benson went to the clerk who’d been on duty when they checked out.

Yes, he’d seen Mr. Benson go out with Mrs. Benson and the child. Then he’d gotten the forwarding letter.

“What letter?” said Benson, lips barely moving in his dead, white face.

“The letter Mrs. Benson wrote saying she was going to New Orleans and to forward mail to the Picayune Hotel there.”

“She went with me to Montreal.”

“Of course, sir, if you say so,” the clerk muttered.

Benson got hold of the cab driver who had taken them to the field.

“Yes, sir, you got in at the hotel with a lady and a little girl. I drove you to the airline ticket office downtown. You all got out there. The lady and the little girl didn’t get back into the cab with you. They stayed downtown.”

Benson’s hand, went out like a darting snake. He got the driver by the collar and those steely-slim fingers of his showed what just a little pressure would do.

“Please! You’re choking—” The driver stared into the appalling gray eyes with his own like those of a frightened rabbit. “I
swear
you went to the airport alone! I’d . . . I’d swear it in court!”

Benson marked him down for the future, and went to the Buffalo airport. Behind came a dark green sedan with three men in it, but he didn’t see that. He stared straight ahead, a gray steel bar of a man with pale and awful eyes staring into a future that held but one hope-finding again all that made life worth living for him.

At the airport, the agent moistened his lips as Dick Benson approached, moving on the balls of his feet, eyes alert and sinister as a jaguar’s.

“You remember me?” said Benson, lips hardly moving in his paralyzed, linen-white face.

The agent gulped. “Yes, sir,” he said, staring hard.

“I came in here with my wife and little girl, a month ago, to get places for Montreal.”

The agent was shivering as if with palsy. But he shook his head.

“I don’t remember that. I only remember you. You came in alone. There was a phone call about that from Montreal, later. And I said the same thing. You were alone—”

His voice trailed off. His face was literally green, but there was no shaking his story.

Again Benson realized what a terrible force there must be behind this. This man
knew
better. He
had
remembered the brown-eyed Alicia and the girl, Alice. His eyes showed it. But something—
something—
had him so frightened that even with Benson’s pale and flaming eyes on him, he lied. And the cab driver had lied.

Benson went out to the field, leaving the agent white and cowering in the office. Again, he stared, straight ahead, with visions of his wife and child filling his world. So he did not notice the three men from the dark sedan who went furtively into the office after he’d gone.

“O.K., pal,” one said to the shivering agent. “You know what happens to squealers.”

“I didn’t squeal!” the agent sobbed. “I didn’t say a word. I swore he’d come in alone. That
face
of his!”

The man in the lead thrust a gun against the agent’s belly.

“Which scares you most, pal, his face or this?”

But the reaction was not quite what the gunman had bargained for.

“I don’t know,” the man shivered. “The face . . . is almost as bad . . . as a gun!”

Outside, Benson went to the nearest hangar. A group of men there watched him approach. They stared curiously at the dead face, looked uneasily at the flaming ice of Benson’s eyes.

He stared at them collectively, and each man flinched a little when the cold gaze struck him.

“A month ago,” he said, lips curiously immobile in his paralyzed face, “I took a plane from this field for Montreal. I got aboard with my wife and small daughter. Do any of you remember?”

Slowly, they all shook their heads. Benson felt as if he were fighting fog, pillows, and substance that made no resistance to his hardest blows—and yet barred him like a stone wall. However, it was possible that these men, at least, were telling the truth. He didn’t remember seeing any of them that day.

Out on the field near the broad runway he saw a bony, knobby figure of a man with ears that stuck out like sails on each side of a thick-skinned red neck.

He remembered that man and hurried toward him through a red fog of torment.

“You,” he said, to the field attendant who had put him and his family aboard that day. For a moment he could not go on. This was his last chance. If
this
man lied—

The man moved slowly off, away from the hangars—and from his white-faced questioner. Benson went after him. The last notch of his iron will had been reached. He was ready to tear this tall, bony figure apart. He was ready to rend and slash—

“Easy, mon,” the attendant said out of the corner of his mouth. “I know what ye’d be asking me, and I’m moving from the hangars so nobody can hear. We can’t talk here. The field itself has ears. What hotel are ye stopping at?”

Benson told him. “You . . . you—”

“I’ll have something to tell ye, soon as I can get away from here.”

Benson literally staggered. A crack in this dreadful blackness at last!

“Hotel Ely,” he said. “Come fast, for the love of God!”

He went to the gate. He didn’t see the three men there, either. They drew a little closer. One got out a gun, but a second caught his arm. The second stared meaningly around at the airport, with frequent figures on it, and shook his head. This was no place to use a gun, his gesture said.

Benson got into his cab, blind with relief, and started off toward the Hotel Ely. He had his man, now. There was something honest in that Scotchman’s narrow, bitter face, with its stony blue eyes. He’d talk. Benson could go to the police now—

But even as he thought that, he knew he couldn’t. It was this one man’s word against a dozen others. No police force would believe so bizarre a tale, on that lopsided witnessing, that a man’s wife and daughter could disappear from a speeding airliner.

No, he’d have to go it alone. He knew that. And his steely body yearned savagely for the fight, while his mind raced on ahead to the slight hope that he’d get Alicia and little Alice back—

A green sedan shot past the cab, angled in, and the cab driver applied his brakes with a squeal of tortured rubber. Benson stared out.

He saw that the cab was in a deserted spot, on the outskirts of Buffalo, in a marsh flat with distant factories bounding it.

The sedan had deliberately forced the cab to the roadside. Benson saw that in a flash, and reached for his gun. But he had no gun. It had been taken from him at the Montreal sanitarium.