The Avenger 15 - House of Death (4 page)

“I would like to speak to Mr. Richard Benson. Is he there?”

“Yes,” said Josh pleasantly. “Just a minute, and he—”

There was a scream over the phone! It ripped into the transmitter at the other end with such frightened, horrible shrillness that Smitty and Nellie and Benson heard it twenty feet away.

Then there was silence. Josh jiggled the receiver. The line was dead; only the dial sound could be heard.

Without one word spoken, the four went into action.

Josh got the location of the phone over which the call had been made: a small hotel over near Gramercy Park. Nellie called headquarters to have a squad car rush there and place a man at front and back to guard the place and see that no one got away. Smitty and The Avenger raced for the automatic elevator and went to the basement.

A fleet of fifteen or twenty cars was there, each designed for a different, specific use. They got into a coupé that could do a hundred and twenty miles an hour and shot up a ramp and over the sidewalk.

The dark beauty, registered as Carol Haynes in the small hotel near Gramercy Park, had dragged her bureau across the door before phoning The Avenger. She had forgotten the window.

It is a common thing for people to forget windows when they are on the third floor or higher. And yet more windows than not have ledges or ornamental brickwork under them which make it quite easy to climb in, whether they are on the third floor or the thirtieth.

A man had climbed in the girl’s window while she was at the phone!

The man moved with a skill that would have been admirable in any other line of endeavor. He slunk up behind the girl at the phone with a silence unbroken even by the rustle of his clothes; he took good care that there was no such rustle. He even watched his breathing, making it slow and even, to avoid giving his presence away.

If it hadn’t been for just one thing that he forgot to watch, the girl would never have known what struck her.

That one thing was his shadow.

There was a lamp on the table near the window. It was by its rays that the girl had been studying the gold coin. That lamp, behind the skulking man, gave him away.

The girl saw a moving shadow, screamed wildly, and tried to turn. His hand snaked down with a blackjack, and she fell! The man picked up the phone and set it in place. Then he went to the door, rolled the bureau back, shouldered the girl, and went to the freight elevator.

Not for six minutes did the squad car, summoned by Nellie, get to the hotel. By that time, the man was four minutes gone, driving off with another man in a dimly lighted black sedan with the limp body of the girl in the rear.

And by that time Dick Benson had reached there, after a faster trip than any ambulance or police car could have made.

“Find out who called from what room,” he said to the giant. “By this time, whoever she screamed at is gone. Find out what you can.”

Smitty went into the hotel. Benson went to the curb east of the entrance. There was no doorman at this hotel, but a cab sat there at the curb with a driver in it.

“A car may have come out of this driveway, after picking up something brought down in the freight elevator back there,” he said.

The man looked at the small police insignia on The Avenger’s car, and then stared into the glacial depths of those colorless eyes. He was an intelligent man, and he promptly decided that this was a time to come clean.

“Yes, sir,” he nodded, “four or five minutes ago a car came out. Black sedan, Connecticut license, not going very fast. It went over to Fifth Avenue, and I just happened to see that it turned north. Two men in front, nobody in the rear as far as I could see. Right rear fender dented.”

The man earned a twenty-dollar bill for his fast description.

Dick Benson stepped to the man at the wheel of the squad car.

“Phone the bridges. Stop any black sedans with two men riding, Connecticut license, dented right rear fender.”

“Yes, sir,” said the man. But it is doubtful if Dick heard him. He was already stepping into the coupé. And at seventy miles an hour he headed north.

He had reserved for himself the most probable way out of the city to be taken by any car with a Connecticut license. That was via the Henry Hudson Parkway, which was reached at the north end of the Express Highway.

There is a toll bridge up there. Benson got to it in eighteen minutes. Not for another five did a black sedan, as described, show up. The driver handed out his dime and slowly, innocently, drove on with doom behind him in the guise of The Avenger!

It was about one-thirty in the morning, now. But it was such a pleasant night that there was a good deal of traffic on the wide new road leading north. It helped Benson disguise the fact that he was following the black sedan.

Not that such help was imperative. The Avenger could trail a car so that the car’s driver had scarcely a chance to suspect. First on one lane, then on the other, with cowl lights, then brights, then back to cowl lights, first near and then far back, and then letting a red light get between.

The chase went on for about fifteen miles, with the sedan going at a decorous forty miles an hour.

Once Benson saw the man beside the driver slither over the back of the front seat of the sedan and drop into the rear. He stayed there after that, as if something back there had suddenly made his attention vital.

Then the car abruptly swerved to the right, off the main road and down a rutted area that was lined with dump trucks and steam shovels and would, in the near future, be another new road feeding off to the east.

Benson went past this and came back across open land on foot. It was all parkway along here, dark with lusty new-planted trees, and with no one at all around. He was puzzled as to the move. This was a blind alley for a car. It had a dead end. Why . . .

The answer came in a moment. There was another car in there. It had been waiting for the first. In it were six men. They were piling out as Benson got to a clump of trees about twenty yards from the cars.

The eight men began talking together in low tones; then the two from the sedan reached in and dragged out the body of a girl.

Some of these eight had flat, Slavic faces; some had fair hair and almost Prussian characteristics. But they all had one thing in common. They were foreign-looking.

The two started to load the girl into the larger sedan that had been there first. And then it developed that this meeting place was an unfortunate idea.

Still another car whirled into the wide dirt plateau destined to be a road and traffic circle.

Dick had noticed a car ahead of the one he had trailed. It had occurred to him that perhaps this car had something to do with the chase; you can trail from ahead as well as behind. Then, when the black sedan swirled in and he himself stopped, he had seen the other go peacefully on and decided that he was wrong.

It seemed he had not been wrong. The other car had simply sped to the next crosscut, or perhaps cut right across the center parkway to get on the backtrack, and had returned here as fast as its driver could take it.

From the car suddenly lanced red streaks, and there was a sound of submachine guns. Three of the men from the first two cars fell. The rest dropped and began pouring back lead. Evidently, the third car was not bullet-proofed, for the men in it got out in a hurry.

Benson was in a position to see them, even though the others could not.

These men, too, were foreigners. But of a different brand. They were Orientals. The Avenger, able almost always to pick a man’s race, saw Mongol cheekbones, Eurasian blends of feature, and several Arabs.

It developed into the most vicious fight imaginable. The two gangs blasted away at each other with the abandon of two patrol parties on a battle front. Now and then, a man yelled, or moaned, and sagged out of the fight; and the cars, used as barriers by the combatants, began to resemble perambulating Swiss cheeses.

Benson was undisturbed by the slaughter. It was gang against gang, with plenty of time before a patrol car could hear, or be summoned, and interfere.

He hoped the mutual massacre would be complete. But in the meantime there was a point to rectify.

That was the girl.

The car into which she had been loaded was down on four flat, bullet-drilled tires. Behind it was a man carefully firing first from around the front end, then from the rear; another man lay with sightless eyes turned up to the stars, not doing anything at all.

Benson reached to the calf of his right leg and from a slim holster, there, drew Mike.

Mike was a special little .22. It was so streamlined and sleek that its butt was more like a slight bend in a length of blued pipe than a handle; and its cylinder held only four bullets, for smallness and compactness. Mike was silenced so that its report was only a whisper from a deadly small muzzle.

Mike whispered now, and the man left alive behind the car went down. But he was not dead.

Richard Benson did not kill. With Mike, he knocked out his adversaries by “creasing” them: glancing a bullet off the exact top of the skull, so that the man was knocked cold instead of dead.

It was an eighth-inch shot that perhaps no other marksman on earth could have duplicated. He made it now.

The man dropped; there was no sound of Mike’s whispered
spattt
over the other noises of battle. Benson went to that side of the car, opened it, and took from the rear the body that had been placed there.

The girl was still alive. Her breathing fanned Benson’s cheek. He started to his coupé with her, and then saw something in a reflection of a headlight glare that made him pause.

The Oriental-looking crew was getting ahead of the other gang. It looked like sure success for them; there were five of them left and only three of the other band.

What Benson saw that made him halt with the girl in his arms was the action of one of those three survivors.

The man took something out of his pocket, held it to his lips, and then, with an effort obvious even at that distance and in dim light, swallowed it.

Benson laid the girl down and went back.

The Avenger habitually wore inconspicuous gray suits, which made him look more like a gray steel bar than a human being. But in dozens of pockets and compartments of those suits he carried an assortment of weapons and devices that did not show from the outside at all.

He whipped one out now, a thirty-foot length of some kind of shiny cord that looked as if perhaps it had been made from piano wire. It was not metallic, however. It was a thin line of a material made of a plastic that was Benson’s own discovery. It would hold three hundred pounds and was as pliable as silk.

This went out in a long, graceful loop.

The loop bit around the neck of the man who had put on the swallowing act, and in about six seconds the man was at Benson’s side, still trying frantically to get the thing off while he was being reeled in. A fist smashed his jaw.

The shots stopped. Two of the fighters had seen the man stagger swiftly backward into the night, with a suggestion of a line or something taut behind him. Something was very strong . . .

The Avenger was only an average-sized person, but he put the girl under his left arm, picked up the man by his belt with his right, and ran—not walked—to his coupé.

He was driving off when the survivors of the two gangs, working in unison now, poured bullets after him.

MacMurdie’s drugstore, on Waverly Place, looked like an average drugstore, but emphatically wasn’t. Behind the ordinary-looking store, there was a back room twice as big. A steel door cut this room off.

In the room were two laboratories. Along one side was electrical apparatus used by Smitty in his experiments and new discoveries. Along the other side was a chemical set-up not to be outclassed in even the big commercial labs. And on this side, Fergus MacMurdie worked.

He was working there, now, on an anesthetic that would kill pain instantly by local application without—as it did now—killing the flesh it touched, too. He had been working on it for a long time.

Mac’s tragedy—a criminal tragedy which had irreparably seared his, like Benson’s, life—showed in his bleak, bitter blue eyes. He had feet almost as big as Josh’s, bone mallets of fists, a sandy-red hide with big dim freckles just underneath, and ears that stood out like sails.