The Avenger 13 - Murder on Wheels (14 page)

Smitty’s rat-trap simile was now complete. He and Benson had stuck their heads in here. Now they weren’t going to be able to take them out again!

The flashlights gave dim illumination even to the far corners, there were so many of them. Among other things, they outlined Doris Jackson. So at least she was here, where Willis had said she was.

She was sitting on the filthy floor, thick with the coal dust of previous trips of this old scow. She was bound, again, and gagged. This time, instead of adhesive tape over her mouth, a dirty rag was used.

Three men with flashlights in one hand and guns in the other. Five with submachine guns! The leader of the cutthroat band, grinned with plenty of confidence at the giant and The Avenger.

Then his grin faded as his eyes rested on Benson. In his forehead, a slightly enlarged vein squirmed restlessly with bewilderment.

“Hey,” he said. “The big guy’s one of ’em, all right. But who’s this other one? We wanted the fella called Benson.”

“That’s him, ain’t it?” said another, staring at Benson.

“No. Benson’s got white hair—and a dead face. This guy ain’t got any hair at all, and his face moves.”

The Avenger’s features hadn’t moved much—had just become thinner-lipped and grimmer; but it was enough to reveal the difference from former days.

“Aw, that’s him, all right,” still another said. “Look at his eyes. No color in ’em. Like holes in his face. I’ve only seen one pair of eyes like that, ever.”

The Avenger spoke, quietly, confidently, as if there were an army unseen behind him.

“If it will rest your minds any, it is I, Benson. I don’t think you’d better use those guns.”

The men looked at each other in quick doubt. Benson seemed so calm, so sure. They had never seen any other man, faced with certain death, act like that. Even the big guy, Smitty, courageous as he was, had his eyes narrowed and was sort of waiting with bated breath for slugs to blast through him. But not the man with the pale eyes.

Then they rallied.

“Get it over with!” growled the leader, vein in his forehead jumping around. “Hey—”

The bulkhead door had opened a foot, and shots poured from the crack!

“What the—”

“The cops!”

“Douse the lights—”

One of the men dropped his machine gun and grabbed for his left arm, which was spouting red. Then the lights went out, and Benson and Smitty leaped—for the men, not away from them.

They had noted that all the shots came from just one gun. And whoever was at the door, as one lone person, was not going to be a factor in keeping these men cowed for very long. The odds were too great.

So Smitty and The Avenger began to whittle those odds down.

The big fellow felt a thigh, and compressed his fingers. A dreadful scream sounded out! Smitty could easily bend a silver dollar in his fingers, and flesh doesn’t offer the resistance that metal does.

He went on to somebody else, feeling around with his vast paws till they felt something. As he moved, he heard two smacking blows, like hitting a pillow with a whiplash, and then heard two men fall.

He knew that neither was Benson. The Avenger was demonstrating one of the many incredible abilities of his pale, deadly eyes. This was, an ability to see a little in the dark, like a feral animal. It gave him an immense advantage.

He saw, for example, that one of the men was thrusting a flashlight in front of him to take a chance and snap it on again. So he clipped that man just once in the side of the head. That once was enough!

He tripped another, saw Smitty with the neck of a man in each hand, and then Benson went on to where the girl was.

He picked her up and carried her to the bulkhead door. On the way he poked Smitty in the back twice. It was a signal meaning: Clear out with me, it’s all over.

Smitty flung from him the two he had been so enthusiastically working on, and darted to the door. Benson threw several of Mac’s little glass anaesthetic pellets into the space they had just quitted; then he slammed the door shut.

There were yells, then groans, then the thuds of bodies falling. The men in there would be no trouble to anyone for at least an hour.

Benson’s flash snapped on. He held it while he cut the girl’s bonds with his left hand. Then the flash rested on the wide eyes and thin face and wild hair of the man whose bullets had provided the distraction that saved them.

Will Willis.

Doris Jackson was sobbing and shivering, trying to control the hysteria rising from the relief from danger. Even at that she was beautiful, with her dark-blonde hair and her deep-blue eyes.

Smitty was looking at her admiringly. But Benson was not. His pale eyes were noting that Willis’s gun was being held in a peculiar way, half leveled, as if on the slightest provocation he would point it at
them!

“This time,” said The Avenger quietly, “you’ll come along with us. We have things to ask you—”

And the gun did level—at Benson’s hairless head.

“Sorry,” said Willis. And his wide, erratic eyes were frightening. “I’m not going anywhere with anybody. Stay just as you are while I leave—”

Benson’s foot shot out and up like the toe of a dancer.

It caught Willis’s wrist, and the gun spun up in an arc and came down again.

“Somebody,” said Benson evenly, lips a grim line, “is going to say something. We’ve been working in the dark on this case too long.”

“Put your h-hands up, M-Mr. Benson,” came Doris’s fear-trembling tone. “You t-too,” she said to Smitty.

She had picked up Willis’s gun and was aiming it at their heads. It was a terrifying thing to see how it shook in her hysterical hands and yet remained in a killing line. The two were probably in greater danger than they had been a moment ago.

Willis promptly turned and ran for the square of light coming in the open hatchway. He leaped, caught the edge and drew himself up and over. The sound of his steps died, and the girl kept on holding the gun till it was too late even to think of following Willis. Then she let the gun sag.

Smitty promptly grabbed it, and his great hands were impatient on her slim shoulders. Her good looks didn’t impress him at all, then.

“You little dope!” he raged. “Why did you do that? Don’t you know we might have learned something helpful to all concerned if we’d had a chance to talk to him?”

Doris made an even more maddening reply. That was, to burst into tears and cling, sobbing, to Smitty’s arm.

The Avenger, pale eyes icy in his newly normal and regular-featured face, went back into the other compartment. He bent over one gassed man after another, going through pockets in search of some helpful clue.

In the coat pocket of the leader, the man with the uneasy vein in his forehead, he found something that narrowed his colorless eyes and formed a harsh square of his jaw.

That was a stub of an indelible pencil. Blue. Benson whipped out the extortion note he had taken from Marr’s house without Marr’s knowing it.

The pencil was almost certainly the one that had written the note. So they took that man back to the temporary headquarters in Detroit for questioning.

The man was the fellow who had been shot through the arm by Will Willis. It was a clean hole. It was disinfected and treated by Dick Benson, himself, which was much more of an honor than the man deserved. For The Avenger was probably the world’s finest surgeon.

However, the wound, plus the loss of blood, plus the effects of that gassing back at the scow combined to put the leader out of this world for a while. Until next morning, in fact.

He was delirious part of the time, and so deeply asleep as to be almost unconscious the rest. Then, at about ten o’clock, some twenty hours after the scow episode, he opened his eyes, took some food and was all right. It was no longer inhumane to think of firing questions at him.

The Avenger prepared to do so.

Another strange thing had happened to Benson in that eerie ray chamber in the Marr plant. A thing that was just beginning to show up, now.

He had almost died under the excruciatingly painful effect of those rays designed to temper metal. His facial nerves had been shocked and revitalized with the bath of agony so that at last they were normal, alive again. And his thick white hair had fallen out.

Now, thirty-six hours after the terrible experience, his hair was growing in again; so at least it had not been a permanent injury to the hair follicles.

Benson’s scalp looked like the cheeks of a man with a heavy beard and in need of a shave. The scalp was bristly with close, virile new growth as the hair came back.

And it was coming out black!

A little earlier, Nellie had murmured to Smitty:

“I
knew
he must have been good-looking, once. Now—with his hair black and his face like a real face, again, instead of a mask—oh, boy!”

“Awww, look,” Smitty had mumbled. Then he had grinned at himself, realizing that he had actually started to be jealous. “But he’s the same chief,” he said.

And Benson was. Iron self-control kept his features almost as unrevealing as when they had been paralyzed. And there were still the pale, icy, deadly eyes, and the unswerving, unrelenting concentration on just one thing—the fighting of crime.

As he was doing now, in questioning this leader, whose forehead was made repulsive by the enlarged vein that squirmed there with his mental agitation.

“I’m not talking!” he said, as Benson came in, and before The Avenger had even opened his mouth. “I’m not saying a thing. I don’t know anything about anything!”

The colorless, grim eyes regarded him. He was still in some pain from his wound. He was greatly excited, and all the will in him was bent on refusing to talk.

The Avenger was the world’s greatest hypnotist. But with such a subject, even he could not hypnotize unaided.

“The ball, Smitty,” he said. “And Mac’s partial anaesthetic.”

Smitty went to the marvelously equipped portable laboratory and came back with the two things.

The ball was a sphere, about a foot in diameter, so covered with little round mirrors, like the facets of a great jewel, that all you could see was mirror when you looked at it.

The anaesthetic was one of Mac’s latest chemical concoctions. It was a bit like twilight sleep; it partially cut the brain from sensations of the body, and also sent the mind into a half-sleep where everything seemed dreamy and unimportant.

Benson suspended the ball in front of the leader’s face where he lay propped in bed. He twirled it, and it slowly revolved in front of the man’s eyes, casting little circles of reflected light dancing over walls and floor and ceiling.

“What’s that thing for, anyhow?” the man said fearfully. “What’re you going to do to me? You want me to look at that thing, don’t you? Well, I won’t! I tell you, I—”

Benson gave him a shot of the new anaesthetic, before the man had time to jerk his good arm away from the needle. His voice got less strenuous in about thirty seconds.

“I won’t look at the thing. I—”

His eyes were not wild and staring. They were getting sort of sleepy, and contented. And—they were looking at the slowly revolving ball. It was pretty hard for him to look at anything else.

The Avenger stood just behind the ball so that his pale, icy eyes peered down over it and into the man’s eyes. About five minutes passed, and then Benson judged the man was ripe.

“You will answer questions, now,” he said, voice level and calm.

“I will answer questions,” said the man, staring with vacant, contented eyes at the ball.

“Why have you made such efforts to hold the girl, Doris Jackson?” asked Benson.

“We were to get her father, through her.”

“The inventor? Phineas Jackson?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you want to get him?”

“To kill him,” said the man, staring at the ball.

“You and your gang stole the mystery Marr-Car, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“For yourselves?”

“No.”

“Whom did you steal it for? Whom did you turn it over to?”

“I don’t know who it is that wanted it,” said the man. “And we didn’t turn it over to anybody. Somebody stole it from us, just awhile ago.”

This was certainly surprising. The Avenger thought it over for a moment, eyes as pale and cold as the polar sea. Then he went on.

“Having stolen the Marr-Car, you wanted to kill the inventor, Jackson, so he couldn’t duplicate it for Marr again?”

“Yes. So we took his daughter, thinking we could get him into our mitts with her as bait. But he didn’t show up. Some old guy named Willis, maybe a friend of Jackson’s, came to help her, but that was all.”

“What do you know about Marr?”

“The guy that made the Marr-Car? Nothin’—except he’s the guy that made the Marr-Car.”

“You say you don’t know him; yet you wrote him that extortion note.”

“Who? Me? I never wrote anything to Marr in my life.”

Benson held out the note he had taken from the floor in Marr’s music room.

“You wrote this?”

“Never saw it before,” said the man.

Benson held out the stub of indelible pencil he had taken from the gang leader’s pocket.

“This is your pencil?”

“Well, I had it for a while. But it ain’t mine.”

“It wrote the note.”

“Did it?”

“What do you mean,” said Benson, “you had the pencil for a while but it isn’t yours?”

“Somebody sent it to me.”

“Sent it to you?”

“Yeah. In the mail. Day before yesterday. It was in a heavy envelope, addressed to me with no return address or name on it. I thought, at first, maybe it was some kind of little trick bomb. I got enemies, you see. So I soaked it and looked it over and saw it was just a pencil, all right. But that didn’t make sense. I just slipped it in my pocket, thinking maybe whoever had sent it would write another note sayin’ why. It seemed like it ought to be important, but I couldn’t figure out how. See?”

“That,” said Smitty, “is about the thinnest yarn I have ever heard.”

Yet, the man was under profound hypnosis, and, all were sure, was telling the truth so far as he knew it, without reservation.