The Avenger 2 - The Yellow Hoard (7 page)

Doolen chewed his lip for a while, then shrugged. “I suppose you’re right. Well, here’s the list.” He wrote rapidly on a sheet of paper, and handed it to Benson.

Benson took it, thanked Doolen, and left. He stepped out of the apartment building door, a limber steel bar of a man—and instantly leaped sideways a dozen yards and back into an areaway with the explosive swiftness of a rocket projectile.

He was protected there from the explosion.

Probably any other man alive would have been killed on Doolen’s doorstep. But Benson’s almost colorless eyes had saved him more than once by their instantaneous grasp of separate pictures and their equally instantaneous fitting of them together into a clear and significant whole.

He had seen the coupé twenty yards from the door and noted that though it was empty the motor was idling. He had seen a man in a brown cap standing just beyond the coupé, near the radiator, and had noted that the man was a little crouched as if ready to duck down behind the bulk of the car. He had seen the man’s hand start up and back the instant he, Benson, appeared on the walk. Up and back in a throwing gesture.

As the man’s hand had flashed forward, Benson had made his unbelievably swift dash.

Toward
the thrower—not away from him.

Over his head, as he darted forward, Benson had seen a queer object sail on its flight toward the doorway. He had seen that it was small, longer than thick, and rounded at the ends. It was a dull-gray color. It looked like a large peanut, complete with shell.

Then, as he whipped around the building recess into the areaway, there was a terrific explosion. The “peanut” had struck the walk in front of the door.

Windows tinkled down in pieces for many feet around. A crater appeared in the solid cement of the walk. The entire doorway of the apartment building was blown back, leaving only a great jagged hole. All this from a small gray thing, hardly larger than a man’s thumb.

Benson leaped out of the areaway. Again his eyes caught, in a twentieth of a second, a complete picture. But this was not a picture of danger. It was one of tragedy and horror. And at the same instant his eardrums recovered from the violence of the blast and pathetic sounds came to him.

There had been a woman and child, and an elderly man, on the walk not far from the doorway. The man was down—and he had no face! The woman was down, too, and the child, by some freak spared from death, was trying to reach her hands and was crying for her to answer. She would never answer anyone again, and she had no hands to reach.

These people hadn’t seen the move of the man in the brown cap in time to take shelter, as Benson had. Probably they hadn’t seen him at all.

Benson was streaking for the coupé, eyes awful in his white and moveless face. Death rode in those almost colorless wells.

The man in the brown cap was behind the wheel. The motor was roaring under his frantic foot, and gears clashed. The back of the coupé was dented in as if by a gigantic hammer, from the explosion, but the car would run enough to get him away from there. And that was what he was devoting every energy to doing, right now.

The car slid away from the curb. But Benson was on the running board. He got the door open. The frenzied driver had a gun on his knees as he drove. He whipped it toward the man with the flaming pale eyes, and fired. The slug ripped the side of Benson’s dark-gray coat, but his lithe twist saved further damage. He caught the man’s arm and yanked him bodily out of the car. The coupé, driverless, crashed into the rear of a parked truck. Benson and the man rolled in the street.

The man got up, dazed, and leaped for Benson. And Benson struck.

At the last moment, the gray fox of a man pulled his punch a little. If he hadn’t, he would have broken the neck of the killer in the brown cap.

He wanted to break the man’s neck. If ever a man had deserved death—but, dead, he’d be no good to anyone. Alive—he might be.

Benson scooped up the man’s limp body, and ran with it to his old car with the mighty, special motor under the shabby hood. He got away as police sirens sounded at the far end of the street.

In the huge room on the third floor of Benson’s unique headquarters in Bleek Street, were Nellie Gray, Smitty, and MacMurdie.

The girl, slim and dainty and pink-and-white as a Dresden doll, was staring around as she had several times before.

“To get a layout like this,” she said, “you must rob the United States mint itself about twice a year.”

Mac had just come from his store. He stared at Smitty, with his sandy ropes of eyebrows going up over his frosty-blue eyes, and his sandy-red hair wrinkling down on his freckled forehead.

“She thinks we’re crooks,” the giant Smitty explained.

Nellie sniffed.

“She thinks we’re the ones who are after the Mexican bricks,” Smitty added.

MacMurdie shook his dour Scots head.

“She’s seen the chief, and still thinks we’re crooks?” He took a step toward Nellie. “Whoosh! Ye’re a very suspectin’ kind of gurrrl, I’m thinkin’.”

“Suppose,” said Nellie Gray, “you stop where you are, my Scots friend. You could shoot me, from a distance, but you won’t, because you want me alive to question me. But you’d better not lay a hand on me.”

“Take the advice, Mac,” said Smitty, grinning. “She looks little and harmless, with those big innocent eyes. But she can toss men around like a juggler keeping three billiard balls in the air at the same tune.”

“Ye’re joking,” said Mac, staring at the slim and dainty-looking Nellie Gray.

“Try it,” said Smitty.

“See here!” snapped Nellie, with glints in the “big innocent” eyes. “I’m no guinea pig to experiment on.”

But Mac was curious. He grabbed her left arm, just to see what in the world Smitty was talking about.

He saw. Stars.

Nellie Gray whirled. Mac, feet in a forward line from his last step, perforce whirled, too. He was in balance frontward and backward, but not sideways. He toppled sideways, pawing the air with his free hand as he swayed. But Nellie didn’t stop there. She kept right on turning, and Mac, with one ankle swept from under him by a dainty No. 3 patent-leather pump, loosed her arm before his own should break and smashed in a long slide on the floor against the carved leg of a davenport.

He got up, rubbing his arm, too incredulous to be angry.

“Whoosh!” he said, staring at the softly rounded, slim figure with bulging blue eyes. “Ye didn’t do that! Ye couldn’t have! It would take a man’s strength to toss my weight like that.”

“A man’s strength did it,” said Nellie.

“Whose? Not Smitty. He was clear over there all the time—”

“You did it,” said Nellie. “Yours was the man’s strength that tossed you. You lunged at me like a clumsy ox, and I added a little new direction to your weight and the strength of your lunge and, like the song says, you came out there.”

“They call it jujitsu, Mac,” said Smitty.

“If ye don’t wipe the grin off yer silly face, ye overgrown clown,” burred Mac, “I’ll wipe it off for ye!”

“You mean you will if you get our little friend to help you,” taunted Smitty.

The Scot was about to retort to that one when the door opened. All three swung toward it.

Benson came in. His eyes were pale holes of fury in his white, dead face. But, as always, the face itself could express none of that fury. And its very immobility was more frightening than any grimace of anger could have been.

Hauled along by one hand as easily as if he’d been a child, was a man in a brown cap. He was half again as big as Benson, but his wildest twisting and fighting couldn’t shake the gray man’s one-handed grip by a hair. Indeed, the gray steel figure seemed hardly aware that the man
was
fighting and twisting.

Quality in muscle, as well as quantity! Now and then a man appears whose muscle fiber, ounce for ounce, is so much more powerful than that of ordinary men that he seems of another race. Benson was such a man.

Eyes flaming so that even Smitty and Mac felt chill shivers run up and down their spines, Benson flipped his wrist. The man with the cap shot away from him, half turned as he tried to catch his balance, and ended up against the back of a great leather chair.

“Sit there,” said Benson, voice silken and quiet, but with something in it that again sent shivers down the spines of Mac and Smitty.

The man glared around the tremendous room like a mad rabbit in a death trap. He calculated the chance of making a break for the door, looked into the almost colorless eyes of death set in a dead, white face, and decided to do as he was told. He sat.

“Who’s your friend?” said Smitty, looming gigantic over the cowering man in the big chair.

Benson, lips barely moving in his paralyzed face, told them who his friend was—and what he had done.

Mac and Smitty went white with fury. And from the lips of the still unreconciled girl was wrung a gasp of pity.

“He threw a bomb that killed an old man and a young mother who just happened to be walking near?” Smitty ground out. “Why, I’ll—”

He got one enormous hand on the man’s throat. His hand went almost completely around it.

A terrified squeak came from the man’s lips. His eyes, insane with terror, stared up and up Smitty’s vast bulk. Six feet nine and as big as the side of a barn. Then his eyes popped half out as Smitty just started to squeeze.

“No!” snapped Benson.

Smitty reluctantly—very reluctantly—opened his ponderous fingers.

“I want him alive. He’ll tell us things before we’re through. You see—the explosion was caused by one of the little peanut-things he tossed. He’ll explain, in due time.”

Nellie, eyes wide on the cowering man who could throw death and destruction around so heedlessly in his effort to kill the white-faced man, said:

“Why didn’t you turn him over to the police, at once? He’s the murderer of two people. Caught red-handed.”

“He’d be out on bail in a day or less,” said Benson.

“A proven murderer?” said Nellie. “There is no bail in such cases. As I should know!”

“There is no proof of murder.”

“You saw him, with your own eyes.”

“Simply my word against his. One against one. The law could not convict on that.”

Benson went to a corner, where a queer thing of bars was standing. It looked like a gigantic canary cage.

“The law, my dear, has perhaps necessarily become a very involved and complicated thing. So complicated that sometimes it can’t function according to the fines of justice. As in this case, where money could bail this man out and let him escape. That’s why our little firm of Justice & Co. has been formed. Come here, you!”

The last words were to the man who sat in the chair and gasped for breath, staring with terrified eyes at Smitty.