The Avenger 21 - The Happy Killers (12 page)

The Avenger!

There’d been no sign of him in the house; no sound from him anywhere. The members of Justice, Inc. talked as if they had a feeling that Dick Benson was immortal. That he couldn’t be killed. But each knew differently. They knew that some day knife or bullet or rope would cut The Avenger’s career short.

Was this the time?

They spread through the house, calling, hunting frenziedly. No sign of the man with the coal-black hair. No trace of the man with the deadly, icy eyes.

They found Brown.

“This man is a hospital case,” snapped Mac. “We’ve got to get him to an emergency operating room quick.”

“But the chief!” snapped Cole.

Benson wasn’t there, that was all. The gang had gone somewhere. And with them—dead or alive—must be The Avenger.

Feeling numb and dead, as if the mainspring had broken in each of them, they went out with Brown, to drive him to the nearest hospital. They pinned their hopes on Brown. When he regained consciousness and told what he knew—

But this hope was dashed. The doctor at the hospital said: “He may die. I don’t know. It’s a bad skull fracture. In any event, it may be days before he recovers consciousness.”

The members of Justice, Inc. used gas, themselves, very frequently. With their aversion to taking life, they had found that the best way to knock out criminal opponents harmlessly was with gas.

MacMurdie, chemical genius, had concocted a number of weird gases and with each had worked up chemical antidotes, so that the gases could be used by the little band without rendering them unconscious, too. Finally, the brilliant Scot had combined these into a chemical filter that would absorb
any
gas.

Now, each of The Avenger’s crew was always with prepared little nose plugs, saturated with this all-purpose chemical. Also, the men constantly had their coat lapels treated with it, and Nellie and Rosabel their handkerchiefs.

When the laughing murderer sent gas under the door of the wine cellar, it promptly anaesthetized Xenan and plunged Brown into deeper unconsciousness. But not The Avenger. The instant the acrid fumes stung Benson’s nostrils, he simply held his coat lapel up to his nose and breathed through that.

When the man came in and got Xenan, at the end of ten minutes, The Avenger could have felled him with ease. But it suited Dick’s purpose better to feign unconsciousness till the man had gone. Then, moving like a pale-eyed tiger, The Avenger slid to the fourth basement door, the tunnel door, and ran silently out to the garage.

The door out there was closed, too. He opened it an inch, saw three men straining to hold upright the vast, inert weight of the giant Smitty while they fastened him with heavy skid chains to hooks in the garage wall.

Dick’s eyes were as grim as polar ice under a pale moon, and for an instant it looked as if he would drop everything and rescue his man. But that would obviously have tipped his hand, so he went on. Behind the backs of the straining men he padded soundlessly to the rear of a big car lurking there in the garage. He opened the rear compartment and got inside it, leaving it open a bit in order to see.

After quite a while he heard more men enter the garage, coming from the house. They were not laughing so hard, but there were still the maniacal chuckles to be heard. The car sagged with their weight, and Dick tensed his iron muscles for a desperate fight if necessary.

There was Xenan. It was pretty certain that these men were carting him away somewhere. It would have been natural if they’d crammed the millionaire into the car’s trunk; and if they tried that, Benson would be discovered. And you can’t go into action very readily from so small a space.

However, the gang apparently decided to ride Xenan in the car, for presently the motor leaped to life. Dick felt the sedan back out of the garage. It whirled, started forward. He felt it jounce as it left the driveway and turned down the street.

There was a long ride, during which The Avenger flexed his supple muscles scientifically to keep them at top pitch in spite of his cramped position. And “top pitch” for Dick Benson meant something!

Now and then, a person is born with muscles that seem to be of a special quality, so that ounce for ounce they are many times stronger than ordinary muscle fiber. Benson’s iron body was like this. The Avenger was no more than average height and weighed about a hundred and sixty-five pounds; but even the giant Smitty, with all his tremendous strength, could not bring him to his knees.

The car was miles away from Xenan’s house, now. There had been many curves and twists, and the car had bumped and jounced over many types of roads, hard-topped, dirt, gravel. These were back roads. And the car had turned north on leaving the house and had kept that general direction.

They’d come far north, then, into rural Connecticut, over back roads.

Finally the car stopped, and The Avenger tensed again. But it was still, it seemed, not the end of the journey. He heard another motor, off to the left. The men had joined other men here.

During the ride The Avenger had heard nothing but the loud singing of the tires so close to his ears. He could faintly hear voices. But no laughter. The bizarre drug of Harry Tate’s invention had lost its effectiveness, it seemed. It did not last long.

Benson, for all the marvelous keenness of his jungle-developed hearing, only managed to catch a few words in a mumble of voices.

“—Nailen. Meet us—”

That was all.

There was a slam of car doors off to the left where that idling motor sounded, the noise of a car being backed around and driven down the road. Then the sedan came to life, too, and took up its northward journey.

This time, just before it stopped, The Avenger heard the hollow rumble of boards under the wheels. And darkness, covering the crack through which he could see a little, told that the car had been driven inside a building. They were at their destination.

The men got out. Benson heard Xenan’s dazed voice just once, “Say! Where—” Then it was silent; the sound of footsteps died away. There was utter stillness.

For at least ten minutes The Avenger stayed warily in the trunk. He heard crickets, and now and then a bird. No sound of traffic; no human noises. This must be deep country.

Dick’s steely hand raised the lid, ready for explosive action, but he found that none was needed. He got out. He was in a space that stabled two other cars besides this one, and also a queer light truck with solid sides and no rear window.

The sliding door of the place wasn’t quite shut. Dick looked out the crack and saw a large expanse of weedy lawn, heavily studded with big trees. Also, he saw a man walking slowly but methodically back and forth across the rear of a huge house. In fact, a house too big to be a house; it was a small inn or something.

The Avenger’s gaze went beyond the man who was doing sentry duty, beyond the tree-set grounds and to a wall. It was a high wall, sheer, unclimbable, and the sun glistened on broken glass set in its top. The place was as closed in and closely guarded as a jail.

With comprehension glittering in his big, colorless, inhuman eyes, The Avenger stepped to the odd truck. There was a small wood panel, of the removable type, set in the left door. It said, “McCoomb’s Private Sanitarium.”

Benson went back to the garage door and watched the sentry at the back of the sanitarium building, timing his trips. He saw that at regular intervals another man stepped into sight and out again at the right-hand corner of the house. Another sentry.

The Avenger got the timing of both, picked an instant when both would be faced in the opposite direction for the longest amount of time; then he darted to the nearest tree.

Trees were friends to The Avenger. He had mapped jungles, explored wildernesses, and sought for treasure in places where no white foot had ever trod before. He was at home in the wilds as few natives ever are. Added to this was his great strength, which could whirl his average-size body through incredible acrobatics as a giant truck motor might power a small sedan chassis.

In a few seconds The Avenger was thirty feet up the tree he had chosen, leaning against its bole so that a person would have had to look squarely at him to see him. And people don’t normally lift their gazes that high.

From there, Dick could see into the second and third-story windows of the sanitarium. He saw no one.

Into room after room his probing, pale eyes stared; and each was vacant and bare, looking as if it hadn’t been occupied for a long time.

In fact, the whole building looked as if it had lain vacant a long time, and then had been picked up quite recently for some specific purpose—a purpose temporary enough so that it wasn’t found worthwhile to renovate or repair.

Benson swung silently from the branches of this tree to those of the next. The big trees formed almost a solid second floor to the grounds; and along this aerial second floor The Avenger moved at will, while under him four men did solemn “guard” duty.

He was able to look into every room in the place, save a couple on the ground floor which had shades drawn. And he saw that, barring possible patients on the ground floor, McCoomb’s Sanitarium seemed to have just one customer.

In a third-floor room near the corner was one occupant. The room was almost as vacant as the others, but at least the bed was made up instead of being bare-springed and rusting. On this bed was a figure in a strait-jacket.

The Avenger got as close to this window as he could. The nearest branch was ten feet from the building. It was pushing luck and skill a long way to try to leap across that distance to the sill without being seen from below. But Dick jumped anyway.

Clinging rubber soles thudded lightly and exactly on the sill. Steely fingers caught the sash in time to stop the backward reaction. The Avenger opened the window and walked in.

The man on the bed was Harry Tate.

“Benson!” Tate said. He looked as if he’d have liked to shout it, but he spoke almost in a whisper. “Thank heavens you’re here.”

Harry Tate was in a bad way. His vague, dreamy eyes were filled with fear. The fresh scars on his face could mean only one thing: cigarette ends had been pressed there. He had been tortured.

He saw The Avenger’s pale eyes on the burns.

“They wanted more of my laughing-gas derivative,” he said. “When I wouldn’t make any more up, they tried to force me to.”

Benson only nodded, eyes steely slits in his masklike face. He began to unlace the straitjacket which held Tate so helpless.

“Don’t let them get me again,” Tate whimpered. “Did you get in here without being seen? Are you sure?”

“I hope I did,” was all Benson offered. “You left the house with quite a bit of the nitrous-oxide pills. Weren’t there enough for this gang?”

“Apparently not,” said Tate, moving his arms. “They wanted more.”

“Is this the same crowd that robbed the safe?” Benson knew that it wasn’t the same. He knew that there were two gangs somehow mixed up in this—Beak Nailen’s and another. Recent events had proved that. But he wanted to see what Tate would say.

Tate had nothing to say at all. He only shrugged and said he didn’t know.

When Benson had Tate’s ankles almost loose, he said: “You wouldn’t be in this mess if you hadn’t sneaked away from Brown’s house. Why did you do that?”

“Brown asked me to,” said Tate. “And what he asks, I do. I owe him everything.”

“Brown told you to steal away from the police?”

“Yes. He told me to bring a fresh supply of the anaesthetic pills with me.”

“Was it Brown who had you brought here?”

Tate looked distressed. “I hope not! I’ve always thought he was tops. Now, if he had this cutthroat crew kidnap me and bring me here and treat me like this—” He shook his head. “I can’t believe that, Mr. Benson. I think someone else found out I was leaving and hired a crew to pick me up. I was jumped about a half mile from the house and thrown into a car.”

“Who else could find out Brown had asked you to leave? I imagine he’d keep it secret.”

“I don’t know. He might have told his daughter, that would be all. And surely
she
isn’t mixed up in this.”

“ ‘This’?” The Avenger shot out. “What do you mean, ‘this’? ‘This’ what?”

If Tate was acting, he was doing it well. He sighed and shook his head. “I wish you’d tell me. I go along, working on a new anaesthetic, and all of a sudden Brown’s safe is robbed and all hell begins to pop. I don’t get it—”

He broke off and listened. The Avenger had been straining his ears for a half minute already. He had heard steps outside, far down the corridor, but coming near.

“Can you use your muscles?” he said in a low tone to Tate. “Circulation restored?”

Tate nodded, looking scared but resolute. Benson went to the window. Keeping to one side, he looked out. There seemed to be no one watching. He looked directly out and down—

There was a sound like that of a giant typewriter, and the eaves over his head began to crumble like the edges of a cake in a rain! Directly underneath the window was stationed a man with the latest in machine guns.

Benson whirled toward the door. To the right, down the corridor, someone yelled, “O.K., break it open!”

To the left came an answer, “Let’s go.”

The Avenger
had
been seen, in that last long jump to the window sill. And silently, efficiently, the gang had prepared a trap for him. Exit out the window was impossible. And the hall was full of men!

A new sound broke out. It was a high-pitched laugh. It was joined in a devil’s chorus by others, in a few seconds. Tate moistened his lips.

“They’ve taken some of the stuff. Makes a rat as brave as a lion. You can’t hurt them; they’re stronger than they have any right to be. And they’d as soon kill as—”

There was a bang against the door. It trembled from top to bottom. Someone had a log for a battering ram, out there in the hall.

Bang!
Shrieking laughter greeted the appearance of a crack in the panel. The door couldn’t last another half minute, at that rate. Tate stared at Benson with the wild terror of a trapped animal.