The Avenger 18 - Death in Slow Motion (10 page)

On the near corner of the street intersection down from the alley on which was the rear-house, there was a newsstand.

The boy-tending it was one of the few youngsters who did not know about The Avenger. But he was a sharp-eyed lad, and the dour Scot with the bleak but honest eyes won his confidence in a moment.

“Sure,” said the lad, “I know that falling-down old packing box where Old Mitch lives. Boy, if a fire ever got going on that crate—”

“Do you know who lives in it?” asked Mac.

“Yeah! I’ve seen all of ’em coming and going enough to get wise to the layout. There’s four rooms, see? Two upstairs and two down. They’re all rented. The two upstairs have outside stairways in the back, so each can have a private entrance. One stairway comes down on the left side to a kind of walk to the alley, and one comes down the right side to another walk. And each of the two downstairs rooms has its door.”

Mac nodded; he had observed those four entrances for the four rooms.

“Old Mitch lives in the right-hand room downstairs,” the boy continued. “Over him lives some woman. Scrubwoman, I guess; she looks like it. Downstairs on the left, there’s a guy I’ve only seen a coupla times. But I know about him. He’s a pick-pocket. Johnny the Dip, he’s called. Over him is a guy who buys papers from me. He has a twisted leg and works in an office somewhere.”

Mac nodded again. It all checked with what he knew, except for this Johnny the Dip. That occupant, he hadn’t known of before. But that explained the massive locks on the one door, the portal beside Old Mitch’s.

A crook would quite logically have heavy locks to stall any unexpected raid till he could destroy evidence.

Mac thanked the lad, told him to say nothing of the questioning or of his presence around there and went into the alley.

It was nearly dusk, now. And in the alley it was quite dark.

The dour Scot went to a point beyond the rear-house, which was without lights anywhere, and settled down on his haunches behind a barricade formed of two battered refuse cans.

He drew out a small camera that was the finest made and which had several of Benson’s ideas incorporated in it. The result was a camera to turn a photographer green with envy.

To the camera, Mac attached a small battery flashbulb.

He waited, unseen there; and as he waited, he went over the short list of occupants in his mind. An old tramp, who could hardly be called a tramp as long as he had the determination to house himself with his own efforts, no matter how squalid his, shelter was. A woman who looked like a scrubwoman. A bookkeeper a cut above such a neighborhood, but living in it so that his wife could rid herself of lung trouble in Arizona. And a pickpocket.

Quite an assortment.

The old man had inadvertently gotten a touch of the malady from which workmen were dying like flies. At the gasket factory? Possibly. From his ingrate son, who dressed well and drove a new small car but gave his old father blows instead of support? Perhaps, though there had been nothing wrong with the son at that factory. From one of the other three in the rear house? That seemed the most logical of all.

Mac tensed. There had been steps in the alley toward the street. One of the occupants of the rickety house was approaching. He looked over the two refuse cans.

It was dark, but his eyes were accustomed to it. Dimly he saw a dapper figure coming toward him. The figure went to the door beside Old Mitch’s, and there was a clink as many keys jangled on a key ring.

Johnny the Dip.

Mac stood up, deliberately making a noise as he did it. The man at the door with the massive locks whirled in alarm.

There was a blinding flash, and Mac had a perfect picture of the fellow, face-on, at close range.

And also, abruptly, Mac had a whole lot of trouble on his hands.

Men suddenly appeared in the alley as if they had sprung from the very cobbles. Johnny the Dip was yelling, but these men made no noise. Like deaf-mutes, they closed in on Mac!

At first, they made no effort to use guns. Quite obviously, noise was the last thing they wanted. They waded in, five to one, with bare fists instead.

It was the kind of fight that would ordinarily have delighted Mac’s gloomy soul, for he loved nothing better than to tear and batter with bare hands at the human rats he had dedicated his life to thwarting.

It did not delight him, now. The thing that had tightened his lips and put the grim look in his eyes back at Bleek Street, a thing he had been aware of for several hours, was really hitting him now.

The slow-motion doom!

Mac had picked it up in Old Mitch’s hovel, or wherever, along with Smitty. Only it hadn’t affected him as swiftly as it had the giant. Mac was a sick man, too, and the sickness showed in this fight.

He got a man in the jaw with a right hook so slow that the fellow saw it coming in time to duck a little and was not knocked out.

He got another in the stomach and doubled him over, but not for keeps. He swung a third time and missed his target completely. And then they had him down.

Only the darkness saved him.

They were trying to kick his head and hammer it with blackjacks. Hands tore at his throat. Other hands ripped at his pockets and his clothing. Nothing bigger than a dime could have escaped the search.

Only the darkness saved him? Well, that was true for the moment. In the end, the real savior was the newsboy at the corner.

The lad heard Johnny the Dip’s first yells and ran to the alley mouth. All he could see was a struggling, silent knot, but that was enough. His shrilling whistle was as loud as any cop’s, and it brought the Cops in a hurry.

Mac swam back from semi-unconsciousness to consciousness to find a burly cop on each side of him, helping him stand erect.

The Scot’s clothes were ripped and ready for the ragbag, because of the violent search the gang had made for the flashlight camera. Everything on him had gone in that search.

But the camera hadn’t gone!

“Just a holdup in the darkness of this alley,” he mumbled. He was tempted to tell enough to have Johnny the Dip hauled out of the adjacent rear-house and taken to headquarters for a work-out. But he had an idea The Avenger was not ready for a raid on the place, yet. So he did not mention it.

The cops helped him out of the alley and to their squad car. But not before Mac had retrieved the camera which the deaf-mute gang had obviously been willing to commit murder for.

He retrieved it from one of the refuse cans, into which he had tossed it right after snapping the shot. Then he went, walking like a figure in a slow-motion movie, with the helpful police.

Dick Benson conducted one final test on the blood sample taken from the dying workman. It was a test that few of the big commercial laboratories were equipped to make—a test for molecular structure.

In that test, The Avenger had discovered a curious thing, but one which did nothing to clear up the mystery. The molecular structure of the red corpuscles was different from the norm. But what that difference meant, he still didn’t know.

“I’m beginning to realize,” he said to Nellie Gray, “that we’ve met the most intelligent of all our adversaries. Somebody is a genius, even if a warped one.”

“Still no hint?” asked Nellie. Her soft red upper lip was caught between her white teeth. Smitty was ill, three hundred pounds of rebellious invalid due to die—unless some clue to the nature of this dreadful ailment could be discovered.

“Still no real hint,” said Benson. “All I know is what everyone else knows. It is a form of anaemia hitherto unknown. That is proven by the way the red corpuscles have disintegrated.”

“Well,” said Nellie, “leaving aside for the moment the problem of what this is—how could it be spread through a whole factory in a few seconds and affect every soul there?”

Benson replied: “It did not affect every soul, in every factory.”

Nellie’s lovely blue eyes asked the question that her lips did not.

“In one factory,” said Benson, “just one department was affected. In another, the factory was affected, but not the general office. In the third, office, plant and everything else was affected.”

Nellie’s eyes kept on asking questions. The Avenger took three diagrams from the top drawer of his desk.

The diagrams showed three factory buildings. One was Wardwear’s central plant. Another was Quill’s main plant. The third was the Manhattan Gasket Company’s plant.

“These lines,” said The Avenger quietly, “show the ventilating systems.”

So then Nellie got it.

“Blown through the air ducts!”

“Definitely!” said Dick. “Wardwear’s plant has four separate circuits, one for each floor. Quill’s has one big system, which, however, takes care of only the plant. He never bothered to put ventilating into the general office space. Manhattan Gasket has a system taking care of the entire building.”

“It checks perfectly,” said Nellie, nodding her blond head.

“Yes. One floor at Wardwear, the crude-rubber department, was affected. The plant but not the office force at Quill’s was overcome. At the gasket plant, all were knocked out. In each case, it follows the ventilating circuits. Ventilator fans in rubber factories are very powerful, in order to take care of the rubber dust, so the unseen peril was swiftly scattered in each case.”

“What unseen peril?” demanded Nellie.

Benson shook his head.

“And how was it introduced into the ventilating systems? The man in the truck at the Manhattan plant, for instance, was searched before being allowed in, and nothing was found on him.”

“It would seem that the search wasn’t as thorough as it should have been,” retorted The Avenger.

“You were going to inject some of that blood sample into a rabbit,” said Nellie. “Did you?”

“Yes,” said Benson. “The results were faint, but unmistakable. Slow disintegration of the red corpuscles. And also, a touch of that slow motion that is so peculiar. Definitely, the motor nerve system as well as the blood is affected. And that is all the experiment revealed.”

The door opened.

“Mac!” said Nellie. “Were you run through a nutcracker—”

She stopped exclaiming over the state of Mac’s features, worked on by the gang in the alley. Something more important than that was wrong with Mac.

He walked toward Dick, moving as slowly as a man in a nightmare with lead tied to his feet. And The Avenger got to his feet in one flowing move, eyes like brilliant agates.

“You, too, Mac?” he said.

“ ’Twould seem so, Muster Benson,” said Mac. “But I got the picture you wanted. One of the rear-house residents. An eminent citizen by the name of Johnny the Dip.”

The Scotchman reeled and almost collapsed.

So then he found himself shortly in a bed near the one in which Smitty mountainously protested. And up in the big top-floor room, The Avenger walked back and forth from front to rear with eyes so terrible that they made even Nellie shiver a little and with that in his tread which suggested a powerful animal, caged for the first time in its existence.

Smitty stricken—and now Mac. Two of his men afflicted with this thing, as terrible as it was bizarre, and for which no cure had been found. Two of his aides doomed slowly to waste away and die, unless this mystery could be solved.