The Avenger 17 - Nevlo (5 page)

She heard a scream rip out in the rumble of traffic sounds, then another, and another. But after the first high, awful cry, the screams sounded only in her own ears. And they sounded so because they were her own.

No one else heard them because a roar of noise drowned every other sound on the street.

She had seen Bill’s body move a little, as if he had put his foot on the starter. Then there had been blue flame a full story high, blossoming from the car! And, after that, no more car.

Where the car had been, was a solid, mushrooming pall of black smoke!

The roar of the explosion boomed down the canyon of the street. There was a clang as the hood of the car fell half a block away.

Then Janet heard her own screams again. But only for a few seconds. Nerves can only stand such a shock for a few seconds.

Her screams died out as if she had been throttled; then, with her horrified eyes wide on that ugly smoke-growth that had been a car, she sagged to the sidewalk with blackness closing in on her . . .

“Easy does it, now. She just fainted, that’s all. At first I thought she’d been hit by a piece of metal or something when that car blew up. But she’s all right—”

Janet’s fluttering eyelids opened. She looked dazedly around.

She saw bottles and boxes and hot-water bags and cigarettes. She was in a drugstore. Towering over her was a good-natured-looking cop. But in his kindly face was a grim look, too, aftermath of the explosion.

“Coming around, huh, miss?” he said. “We carried you here to this store thinking we’d send for a doctor. But you don’t seem to need one. I’ll phone right away, though, if you’d like—”

“I don’t need a doctor,” Janet said.

Her voice was hoarse, tremulous. She was surprised, however, that she could talk at all.

“Any place you’d like to be taken, miss?”

Janet was incapable of thought. She was still seeing Bill’s car, with Bill in it, blown to bits when he pressed the starter. But, by a sort of instinct, she said the right thing.

She was supposed to go somewhere with something, at once, even though tragedy had just blasted her life.

Needles with roots. A diagram.

“No, I’m perfectly all right,” she heard herself say. “I’ll get a cab—”

“I’ll get one for you.”

The cop helped her out of the store. Leaning heavily on his arm, she went to the cab he summoned with his police whistle. She got in.

Only then did she think to look for the envelope Burton had given her.

Her handbag was gone, of course. But that didn’t matter. She had a few large bills in her stocking top, and the priceless envelope—at least, Bill had acted as if it were priceless—had been thrust into the bosom of her dress.

Her hand felt blindly, numbly, for it.

The envelope wasn’t there!

No telling how long she had lain on the sidewalk, with curious bystanders around her, before that policeman had carried her to the drugstore. No telling who had been among the bystanders.

But one thing was definite enough. The envelope with the rooted needles and the diagram had been stolen!

Janet Weems’s brain cracked definitely at that. She thought she fainted again. Anyway, a curtain seemed to descend over her senses.

She didn’t know that she got out of the cab at the airport, looking almost normal, and paid the driver. She didn’t know that she walked almost steadily into the airport’s administration building, bought a ticket for New York, and boarded a plane.

She knew none of these things, for her subconscious brain was taking over and urging her on the path that had been impressed upon her just before tragedy struck. Her conscious brain was off some place, treading the thin line between sanity and madness.

The buzzer made a discreet sound. The light winked over Telephone 6 on The Avenger’s desk.

There was no such thing as a jangling phone bell in this sanctum of the world’s most unique crime-fighter. There was a soft buzzer to draw attention, and then a light to show which telephone was being rung. For Dick Benson had a battery of phones on his desk that would almost have made the phones in a broker’s office look scant.

Benson picked the instrument up in slim, white, steel-strong fingers.

“Yes?” he said.

“General Hospital calling Mr. Benson,” a voice sounded over the wire.

The Avenger’s cold, pale eyes took on a look of glacier ice under a midnight sun.

It was said of Benson that he had no fear. And that was probably true in a personal fashion. But it was not true that he was without
all
fear.

Dick feared for his associates’ safety. He always carried this fear with him. The courageous little band ran such terrible risks at all times that Dick was constantly fearing to pick up a phone and hear just this sort of thing: “So-and-so Hospital calling. There is a Mr. Smith here—” Or MacMurdie or Josh or Rosabel or Nellie—

But this was not that dreaded occasion.

“There is a girl here by the name of Janet Weems, as far as we can tell from an engraved pin, who wants to speak to Mr. Benson.”

“Benson talking,” said The Avenger. “Put her on the wire.”

“I’m afraid that is impossible, sir,” came the voice. “Miss Weems is very ill. I’m afraid you will have to come here.”

“What does she want to see me about?”

There was a hesitation. Then the voice said, “We really don’t know. Miss Weems is delirious. But over and over she calls your name. Dr. Daggit, of our staff, said to phone and ask if you would come; be believes Miss Weems might be helped by your visit.”

“I’ll be over at once, of course,” said Benson quietly.

He hung up, and turned to the big cabinet containing a twin to the marvelous television set in Mac’s drugstore.

“Smitty! Benson calling. Smitty! Smitty—”

In about six seconds the giant’s voice sounded over his belt radio. This was a two-way set so small that it could be worn unnoticed at the waist in a thin, form-fitting metal case no larger than a cigar case. Smitty was the designer of this, too, and all the little crew wore them.

“Right, chief,” rumbled the giant.

“Smitty, meet me at General Hospital, at once.”

Smitty pulled up at the broad entrance of the hospital a minute after The Avenger got there. They went in and were shown to the office of Dr. Daggit.

Daggit, a thin, serious-looking man with a surgeon’s hands and a brain doctor’s sardonic eye, shook his head when Miss Weems’s name was mentioned.

“I hesitated whether to call you or not,” he admitted. “The girl is completely irrational. I doubt very much whether she will have anything coherent to tell you when you do see her. Yet, as you were told over the phone, she is so desperately anxious to talk to you that we thought a visit might help her.”

“Is there any clue at all to what she wishes to see me about?” asked Benson.

Daggit shrugged.

“She keeps talking about an envelope. She never describes it; doesn’t say what’s in it. There is simply, it seems, an envelope.”

“Was an envelope found in her personal possessions?”

Daggit stared curiously, and with a little inward shiver, at the appalling, colorless eyes of this man whom he knew not alone as a crime fighter, but also as a brain specialist far superior to himself.

“She had no personal possessions,” he said. “Not even a handbag. Certainly no envelope.”

“Let’s have a talk with her,” said Dick.

They went to a room, Smitty hulking gigantic in The Avenger’s wake, Daggit leading the way.

“She’s pretty,” said Smitty, looking down at the girl who stared back, vacant-eyed, from the bed. “And she must have had an awful bad knock recently,” he added, looking, at her tapering fingers, which picked aimlessly at a covering sheet.

“Miss Weems,” said The Avenger, voice compelling, vibrant.

The vacant, deep-brown eyes turned toward him. His pale eyes stared down.

“I am Richard Benson. You wanted to see me.”

Almost, for an instant, there was a glint of reason in the blank, beautiful eyes. But then they wandered again, and the trembling fingers worried the sheet.

“Needles,” she said.

Daggit looked at Benson.

“I don’t know what that means,” he whispered. “But she hasn’t mentioned needles before—”

“Needles,” came her voice. “Needles with roots. In the envelope.”

“What about the needles?” Dick said, his voice hypnotic. But there is no hypnosis of a person without a will of his own.

“In the envelope. A diagram. Needles with roots. Have to get through to Benson. Must see Benson. What will I tell him, Bill?” She screamed. “It exploded! It exploded. He’s dead!”

“You must get through to Benson,” The Avenger repeated. “Yes. That’s right. And when you see him you are to tell him—what?”

But it was over. She wasn’t going to talk any more.

She turned her pretty face away, and her hands were stilled.

The Avenger straightened up.

“I think she’ll come out of this pretty soon,” he said to Dr. Daggit. “I defer to your more thorough examination, of course. But it seems to me there is no indication of brain fever or anything with lasting effects. Simply amnesia resulting from a great shock—”

There was a heavy clanging sound from the door.

“Good heavens!” exclaimed Daggit.

The Avenger said nothing. He moved, quick as fluid light, toward the one window of the room. No need to tell Benson what had happened; he knew.

General Hospital is equipped to handle mental cases.

Janet Weems, brought into the place either delirious or more permanently mentally deranged, had been taken to a room equipped to take care of violent patients.

It was equipped with a solid metal door outside the regular wooden one, which could be slid closed if necessary.

That outer metal door had just been banged shut. Hard!

Daggit’s exclamation had been one of sheer surprise, not of apprehension. But The Avenger had leaped for the window because he was much more than surprised. He knew that the closing of the door could not have been an accident. It must have been deliberate. But the window—

He had almost reached it when there was a snap here, too, and from a slot in the sill a metal plate covered the glass pane.

The metal was to keep raving maniacs from breaking the glass and injuring themselves, just as the metal door was to keep them from breaking out and injuring others.

But the steel of the barriers made no distinctions. Sane or insane, anyone in the room would be hopelessly kept in that room when the plates banged shut.

Daggit grabbed for the room phone. “Operator. Operator!”

The line was dead. The wire had been cut just outside the wall somewhere.

“I . . . I seem to have trouble in breathing—” Daggit said.

Dick Benson had noted the difficulty a few seconds before the doctor. Gas had been let into this room, from some opening, with the closing of door and window.

They were caught in a trap, to die of gas, unless—

“Smitty!” said Benson.

He didn’t say any more. He nodded his black-cropped head toward the window, and the giant went to it, picking up a chair as he moved.

Benson took a handkerchief from his pocket and went to the bed. He pressed it over the nostrils and mouth of the girl there, who made no protest but only looked at him with blank, grave eyes.