The Avenger 13 - Murder on Wheels (9 page)

“We had a fight,” said Mac.

“Go on,” said Smitty unbelievingly. “I’ll bet you just tried to pick up the wrong girl.” Which was funny, applied to dour, homely MacMurdie.

“Ye mountain of larrrd,” Mac began. But the cold eyes of the chief recalled him to his reporting.

“We are still on the trail of news concerning a mystery car,” said Mac. “We got some news, too! Then, while we were pumping a workman who must be a lot better mechanic than he is a thinker, a gang jumped us.”

“Six of them,” said Josh, touching his swollen lip. “The reason was, they wanted to get that workman before he could say anything to us. It was near the factory where he works. The man got away, I’m glad to say. We managed to keep them too busy to follow. Then they started shooting. But a squad car showed up; so they beat it.”

“You say you
did
learn of a mystery car?” asked The Avenger. And the fact that he said nothing of the danger they had escaped did not mean that he wasn’t thinking of it. His eyes were not quite so icy as they regarded the battered pair.

“Yes,” said Mac. “Most of it came from that workman. Marcus Marr is the mon who put it out. His company’s been working on it secretly for a year and a half. It’s almost ready to market, and it’s a honey. There’s a new type Diesel motor, set over the rear axle instead of up front. It’s streamlined, teardrop shape. Twice the power of ordinary cars. But the most unusual thing about it is the steel it’s made of.”

Mac gingerly touched the lump on his head.

“They’ve found some new way of tempering steel at the Marr plant. It takes an ordinary good alloy and turns it into something as good as tungsten. The man said the new processing is the invention of a guy named Phineas Jackson. He’s head research worker for old Marr. Several of the new features on the mystery car, which they plan to call the Marr-Car, are his. Now—he has disappeared. Gone from his home. The plant can’t find him anywhere, and they’re going crazy about it. And that was all we’d learned when the gang broke up our tea party.”

Smitty said: “I don’t see how a new way of treating steel would be so important—”

But MacMurdie shook his head. He remembered the weird machine that had rammed and actually disabled Benson’s tanklike special car—and scarcely suffered dents in the process.

“It’s apparently the most marvelous thing ever discovered in automotive circles. It’s got the rest of the Detroit manufacturers wild. They can see themselves going out of business if—”

The phone rang. Benson picked it up.

“Send him up at once,” he said. And the three men noticed a glitter in his eyes that made them look like agate under white light.

“New development?” said Smitty.

“I think you might call it that,” said The Avenger quietly. “A visitor is on his way up. His name is Robert Mantis.”

“What?” yelped Smitty.

And then there was a knock at the door and they let him in.

Mantis’s pleasant, youthful face was twisted with worry and fear. And he, too, showed signs of having been knocked around recently, though not as recently as Mac and Josh.

“Mr. Benson!” he said. “Thank Heaven you’re in Detroit—and that I found you so quickly. We need your help.”

“We?” said The Avenger.

“Doris Jackson and I,” said Mantis. “I was taken prisoner in New York just after that fight near the trucks,” he said, looking at Smitty. “They carted me off to a warehouse or some place. A little while later the men came in with Doris. They’d got her somewhere. Their leader, a fellow who doesn’t look like much but is a rattlesnake if I ever saw one, was for torturing her to find what she knew. But they didn’t. I think a call from somewhere must have come for him, because he hurried out. If I ever get my hands on him—a man with a slightly enlarged vein in his forehead that moves when he’s angry or excited.”

Benson nodded. That checked. It was the man who had headed the little group of choice thugs at the hangar.

“Go on.”

“There isn’t much more to say,” Mantis replied. “We were held there for hours. I kept working at my bonds and finally got them off. We picked a time when no one was around, escaped and came here by plane. Here, by the luck of the devil, part of the gang spotted us again, and Doris was recaptured. I got away, but I hung around, hidden, and heard where they were going to take her. I know about where the place is. It’s a roadhouse, west of town, on the Ann Arbor road. I’ve heard of the place. The Red Dragon. Anything goes, there.”

Those pale, infallible eyes of The Avenger were staring at him.

“Is Doris Jackson related to a man named Phineas Jackson?” Benson asked.

“Why, yes,” said Mantis. “She’s his daughter. Do you know anything about Phineas Jackson?”

“Only that he’s an inventor,” Benson said. “Come on. I’ll go with you to the Red Dragon.”

“Alone?” said Mantis curiously.

“Yes. It’s better not to have too many on such an errand. Someone in the place would be sure to see a lot of people approaching—and be warned. Just the two of us have a large chance of getting in unnoticed.”

Benson called police headquarters.

“Richard Benson talking. Have you a gangster’s bullet-proofed car in your police garage?”

“Yes,” was the respectful reply. “We’ve got a sedan that Frankie Geraldi had done over. That’s the guy that got knocked off a couple weeks ago. It’s a regular fort on tires.”

“I’d like to use it, if I may.”

“Right. There’ll be some red tape with the D. A.’s office, but we’ll snap the car over to you first and go through the red tape later. Want any men, Mr. Benson?”

“No, thank you. Just the car.”

“You’ll let us in on—whatever it is you’re working on—as soon as you can?”

“Yes,” said Benson. “As soon as possible.”

In the nine-thousand-dollar job of Frankie Geraldi, deceased now and not needing any automobiles, The Avenger and Mantis rolled smoothly and ponderously down the Ann Arbor road.

“So Doris Jackson’s father,” said Benson quietly, “is the inventor of the steel processing in the new Marr-Car.”

Mantis stared quickly at him.

“You seem to know a lot. Yes, he is.”

“And you,” said Benson, “until just recently, worked for Ormsdale, in his competing plant.”

“Why, yes. That’s right.”

“Why did you leave him?”

Mantis shrugged.

“I wasn’t getting anywhere, with Ormsdale. I’m ambitious. I want to better myself. So I left his employ.”

There was silence, then, with The Avenger staring straight ahead with pale eyes that reflected no emotion whatever, and with Mantis jerking quick looks sideways at him now and then.

“I think the Red Dragon must be within a mile or so of here,” he said finally.

The Avenger nodded, paralyzed face as cold and moveless as glacier ice. He knew where the Red Dragon was. It was a hotbed of crime, and such spots were usually known to him pretty precisely.

He went on a half mile, and then stopped. There was a rutted lane leading off the highway into an orchard, used by the man owning the place only now and then when he wanted to drive his truck in and load it with apples.

Benson opened the gate, parked Frankie Geraldi’s car in the dark orchard and closed the gate again. Then the two climbed the inner-orchard fence and started across the fields to the Red Dragon.

They came to the back of the place.

There was a lot of light coming from the many windows of what was really nothing but a huge old farmhouse, turned into a country night spot. A lot of noise came from the windows, too—a nickel phonograph going full blast; loud voices and shrill laughter.

The Avenger mused aloud as the two crouched beyond the rear parking lot in the shadow of a car.

“The basement of such places is usually a storage space. With waiters and busboys going down constantly for liquor and other supplies, it is unlikely that a prisoner would be kept there. The first floor will have the bar and cafe room and kitchen. The second will have private rooms. That’s a possibility. But the attic rooms would be the most logical place—”

He took from his pocket a small round object like a dollar watch. But the stem of the watch was hollow. He gave this to Mantis.

“Stay out here. If you hear shooting or other disturbance, blow into this, and then run as fast as you can for the car. If you are pursued, lock the doors and sit tight. The body of that car should shield you from anything up to a full-size army machine gun.”

“You’ll need help—” began Mantis.

“I work best alone,” said The Avenger. And his voice brooked no back talk.

“What’s this thing?” said Mantis, looking at the watchlike arrangement.

“Siren,” said Benson. “When you blow into it, it makes a sound quite convincingly like a squad car. It should provide enough distraction to help, if I run into difficulties in the Red Dragon.”

He was gone, then. And Mantis stared wonderingly. Not once did he see The Avenger’s whip-cord body as he slid among the cars across the parking lot to the wall of the building. Few men alive could move more unnoticed than he.

There was no tree near enough to climb. There was no rain pipe strong enough to bear his weight to the attic or third floor.

Benson drew from around his waist a length of something that looked like catgut. It was a length of fine cable, made from steel-strong, specially treated silk. On the end of it, he attached a thin steel bar from which four smaller steel bars unfolded like four ribs of an umbrella when it is raised. It formed a nice little grappling hook, with a sheath of silk over the steel to keep it from making too much noise.

Surely, deftly, he tossed the hook up.

One of the grapples caught on the gutter of the roof, and an instant later he was going up the thin cable, hand over hand.

On the roof, he went to a dormer window that showed a dim light through a carefully drawn shade.

His deductions had been right. There was a crack in the shade, and through this he could see a pair of silk-clad ankles with rope around them. Doris Jackson was held prisoner in this room.

The Avenger put his forehead lightly against the pane. In this manner, the frontal bone became a sort of sounding-board to amplify any sounds in the place. But all he could hear was the breathing of one person—the girl. He slowly raised the window and held the shade aside.

A girl’s deep-blue eyes stared at him in terror and dawning hope. But a strip of adhesive tape gagged her cry. He stepped into the room.

Only then did he see that there were two prisoners there. The other was the man with the scraggly beard, Will Willis. He was gagged and bound, too.

The Avenger stepped to the door and listened. No sound. He went to the girl.

“I’m going to untie you and take the gag off,” he whispered. “Make no sound.”

She nodded, and her eyes showed that she was gaining her self-control again. Benson ripped the gag off and bent to unfasten the rope at her wrists and ankles.

And a voice said: “All right, monkey, just stand perfectly still, or I’ll put a coupla holes in your head.”

The door was shut, the window shade was motionless over the open window, there was no one in the room besides Benson and the two prisoners. He stayed the way he was, in a crouch over Doris Jackson, but his right hand furtively was touching his leg.

He saw the speaker, then.

There was a hole in the wall, up high—a little square section that hinged like a small trapdoor. This was open and a man’s head showed. And a gun was trained on The Avenger!

The man yelled: “Hey! Downstairs! Come up here, somebody!”

And from a slim holster on The Avenger’s leg below the knee flashed one of the world’s most curious guns.

It was a .22-caliber, with a butt so streamlined that the whole length seemed like a slightly bent section of slim blued pipe. There was a silencer on it of Benson’s own invention. He called the little gun Mike, and he could hit a fly with it at thirty feet.

The move was as fast as the dart of a snake; but no move could come entirely before the trigger-pressure of a man alert for one.

There was a yell and the roar of the man’s gun, and The Avenger staggered backward as a slug hit him in the chest just one inch below the top of the bulletproof garment. In that one inch lay the difference between life and death.

Lost in the echoing roar of the man’s gun came the whisper of Mike. And the fellow’s head suddenly disappeared from the opening, with a shallow gash on the top of it.

Benson didn’t take life. With Mike, he could snap a slug on the top of a skull, glancingly, so that it knocked a man out instead of killing him. Creased him, in a word, as he had done here.

But not soon enough! For the man had already yelled a warning, and there were pounding steps on stairs outside, hastened by the sound of the shot.

From his left leg, The Avenger whipped Ike, the second of his unique little weapons. This was a throwing knife with a hollow tube for a handle, with needle point and razor edge.

The sharp edge severed the bonds of Will Willis and the girl. And then there was the scrape of a key in the lock.

The door slammed open. A man came in, gun ready. He fired at The Avenger, which was a little like firing hastily at a shifting gray shadow. Mike spoke again! The man went down.