The Avenger 21 - The Happy Killers (13 page)

The Avenger put his lips close to Tate’s ear.

“We can’t both get away from here. But I think you can, if you act fast. While I keep them busy, you jump across the hall to the opposite room and shut and lock the door. Go out the window on that side and run. I don’t think there will be men stationed over there; they’re all in on this attack.”

Before Tate had time to say anything, Dick went to the door.

Bang!
The panel was split badly, now. Enough so that Dick could see out a very little. He saw a backward surge of movement as the ram was brought back for another blow. He turned key and knob in the door and stood flattened against the wall beside it.

Bang—

The door burst off one hinge. But it did more. It flew inward so fast that it almost went on out through the wall on the back swing. And a half dozen men braced for a hard impact tumbled forward, with their hard-swung heavy log, like half a dozen tenpins.

Yelling, laughing even then, as if this was the funniest thing ever, they piled in a tangle on the floor. The Avenger leaped over two of them into the hall. Three men were out there, upright, because there’d been no room for them to help with the ram.

They had their guns drawn, and a second after The Avenger catapulted into the hall, two shot at him. One slug hit his body, protected by the bulletproof celluglass. The other slug—

The first man who had shot screamed with sobbing laughter and fell to the floor with almost his whole throat torn out by the shot of his pal. The other two stared, laughed wildly, and swung on Benson again. But the diversion was the finish for them.

The Avenger got one of them with a blow to the jaw that sent him ten feet down the hall—and out of this world. The other, he caught by the neck.

“Run!” he snapped to Tate, who was standing just outside the door, paralyzed with fear.

Benson’s fingers found a nerve center in the man’s throat and he pressed. The fellow sagged. By now, two from within the room, yelling with laughter, were coming for Tate.

At this, Tate woke up. He jumped for the door across the hall, swung it open, and ducked into the room there. He slammed the door and the lock clicked. Benson heard the window go up, then didn’t hear anything more but the insane laughter as the whole devil’s crew of them jumped him.

He actually stood them off for a minute. Two went down, in spite of the fact that the stuff they were doped with made them thrice as hard to knock out as normal men.

Dick got another in the side so hard that he felt ribs crack under his knuckles. But then he was through. The blackjacks and clubbed guns, raining for his head, caught up with him. He fell!

It looked for a moment as if this gang would beat him to pieces, to a pulp, laughing like murderous robots as they did so. But one of them got in front of the prone body and held up his hand.

“Ho-ho-ho! We’re not to kill him. Not yet. Ha-ha!”

They picked him up. There were six of them left. Six against one. They carried him down the stairs and out to the yard. There, one of them lifted a heavy iron lid, like a manhole cover.

A pit was revealed, about six by eight and buried five feet deep. It was lined with concrete. Its purpose was revealed when filtering daylight showed a big pump. This was the water supply for the sanitarium, which was beyond the reach of any town water.

The laughing killers threw Benson into the pit. They put the lid down again. Then one of their number went to the garage. He drove out the truck, and ran it across the weedy lawn to the covered pit. Then he stopped it, carefully, so that a rear wheel was on the iron cover.

With the entire weight of the truck holding down the cover, the men left, still laughing like fiends. It was as tight as Alcatraz, that little prison they’d devised on the spur of the moment.

In the pit, The Avenger read the story all too easily from the sounds. The vibration of the ground as a car drove overhead, the sound of the motor, the distressed creak of the iron lid as the great weight came to a stop on it—these outlined a graphic picture.

But Dick dismissed this from his mind for a moment. When he was tossed in, he had landed on something soft, yet unyielding. He felt for his small torch, found it worked all right and turned its beam on the thing.

If he was disappointed, the only thing to indicate that emotion was the slightly increased glitter in his glacial, colorless eyes. His face expressed nothing.

The stirring thing in the pit was Tate!

They’d caught him outside the window.

Tate moaned. “I think I’ve got a broken ankle from the jump,” he said. “And I nearly fell on top of two men who were out there. They are too smart for us.”

Benson didn’t comment on that. He looked at the ankle. Badly sprained, but not broken. Swiftly, methodically, he bound it with strips from his undershirt. Tate stared.

“You’d think I was going to use this,” he said at last. “You’d think I was going some place on it.”

“You are,” Benson said quietly.

“With that lid overhead held down as it is? I don’t know what they put on it, but I could fairly feel it give.”

“There’s a wheel of a car on it,” said Benson.

“And you think we can lift
that
off and—”

“We couldn’t possibly lift it up,” said The Avenger, and his voice and face were never more expressionless, “but we should be able to pull it down—break the lid—with so much weight on it.”

The handle on the lid was an upside-down U of iron. The ends were threaded and had nuts on them. And with the lid in place, the U collapsed down against the thing so that the ends stuck down four or five inches. Benson gripped these.

“Hang onto my legs so I don’t just lift myself when I pull down.”

Shaking his head, patently sure no such crazy thing could work, Tate grabbed Dick’s corded legs. The Avenger pulled.

There was an audible creak, the iron had dipped down a little in the middle, and then both Benson’s and Tate’s bodies swung upward with the terrific pulling power of The Avenger’s arms.

“Hook your feet under the pump. That’s bolted down,” Benson said.

Tate did so. The Avenger exerted his magnificent strength again. There was a thin shriek of metal, then a crack like a pistol shot. The lid was cast iron. It wasn’t meant to bend. It broke.

The two halves fell clanging to the pit floor, and instead of the lid a wheel and tire suddenly showed, pressing down almost to the axle into the hole.

“We’re as bad off as we were before,” Tate began. Then he saw that they weren’t.

The tire, spread as it was by the pressure, didn’t block the opening the way the lid had. There was just room for a small and agile man to squeeze up between the edge of the opening and the tire. Benson did so. He held his hand down and hauled Tate up.

Tate blinked with the sudden sunlight, and with a vast admiration.

“I can see why you’re so famous,” he said. “Anybody on earth would have thought we’d never get out—”

“No time for that,” said Benson. “We have to find that gang again. They went to meet someone. A man named Nailen, I think, from something I heard on the way here.”

Tate’s forehead wrinkled thoughtfully. “Say! Yes! That
is
the name. After the two at the window nailed me, one said, ‘Dump him in the pump; do it quick. We’re to go after Nailen with the other guys.’ ”

Dick nodded. He could fill in the few words, now, that he had heard while he’d been in the trunk, when his car stopped beside another.

The full sentences must have been: “We’re after Nailen. Meet us at his place.”

But there was no clue as to where that place was.

Dick asked Tate if he had heard anything that might shed light on that, and the young chemist shook his head. He had not.

The Avenger helped him into the truck cab, careful of his bad ankle. Then Benson hooked his dime-size transmitter to his belt radio. He knew even without testing it that it would work all right in spite of the way he had been tumbled around. It took almost a direct hit with a bullet to put one of Smitty’s little gems out of commission.

He got Bleek Street after a minute.

“Chief!” came Mac’s voice, tiny in the receiver but registering a wild joy unlike the taciturn Scot’s normal lack of emotion. “Muster Benson! We thought ye—”

“I’m all right,” The Avenger said. “Some of our jovial murderers have gone laughing on their way to tangle with Beak Nailen’s crew. We want them, and we want the Nailen gang. Has there been any word yet about Nailen?”

“There has,” said Mac. “The police have no word about them. But we just had a report from a Queens newsboy—said he’d seen Nailen go into a big apartment building there.”

“Which boy?” said The Avenger.

“Turkey Doolittle,” Mac replied.

“See that he gets anything he wants. What address in Queens?”

Mac’s tiny voice gave the answer. “Meet me there, all of you,” Dick said.

He put the receiver and transmitter away in a vest pocket. Tate was gaping at him in bewilderment. He’d heard the small voice, too, but it didn’t mean much to him.

The Avenger raced the truck motor hard and let the clutch out fast. The rear axle creaked and the truck lifted almost out of the hole that the one rear wheel was in. At the second try, it heaved from the pit opening and started across the lawn.

Tate said, puzzled, “If the gang that got me isn’t the one that robbed the safe—what gang is it?”

Benson said nothing. Eyes jewel-bright, he raced the truck south from the weedy, deserted sanitarium.

“I don’t get any part of this,” Tate complained.

“It isn’t as complicated as it looks,” The Avenger said. But that was all.

Night was falling when the windowless light truck, once used for transporting straitjacket cases to McCoorab’s Sanitarium, came to a stop a block from the Queens address given by Turkey Doolittle. Benson spoke into the transmitter of his belt radio.

“Benson calling. Smitty, Mac—any of you around the Queens address yet?”

It was Mac who answered with the information that they had reached the place just a moment ago and had stopped out of sight a block in the other direction.

The two parties got together.

They were a grim group now: The Avenger, Wilson, Smitty, Mac, and Tate. That is, everyone was grim but Tate. He wasn’t really in on this, as the others were.

“I talked to Turkey,” said Smitty. “Bright kid. However, he naturally doesn’t know what apartment Nailen is hiding in. Just the building.”

“Is Nailen alone?”

“No,” said Smitty. “There are three men with him, according to Turkey—a very tall, very thin guy, a chubby fellow with a baby face, and a wispy little guy with gray hair.”

The Avenger searched the filing cabinet of his marvelous memory.

“That’s all there is to the Nailen gang,” he said, “unless he has gathered new recruits. Nailen was never a big shot and never had a big mob. When we get these four, we have the works.”

It was noticeable that Dick didn’t say “if”; he said “when.” There were no “ifs” when The Avenger was on the trail.

At the instruction of Benson, Cole and Smitty went one by one to the vestibule of the building, as unobtrusively as possible. The gang from the sanitarium had quite a head start; it was possible that they were already here. If so, it was no use warning them that Justice, Inc., had arrived.

Mac, also at Benson’s instruction, stayed with Tate in a dark doorway across the street to warn of enemy approach or, if necessary, to rush in as reinforcements, if the rest stayed longer than they should in Nailen’s place.

The building where Nailen was hiding out was huge. It must have had a hundred apartments in it. The names under the bells in the big vestibule stretched all along the wall, set close together. The three men divided them and began looking. It was Smitty who found it.

“Amos Beaker,” he said. “Beak Nailen—Beak—Beaker. It’s a chance. Anyhow, we can’t search every apartment in the place. Might as well try this first.”

Benson’s head, with its virile close crop of coal-black hair that contrasted so strangely with the pale eyes, nodded agreement. The three went upstairs, instead of in an elevator, to the sixth-floor rear, which was the indicated position of the Beaker apartment, according to its position in the list downstairs.

They listened at the heavy stair door. There were many sounds—the building was about ninety-eight percent full—but there were none that seemed to come from the corridor itself.

They stepped into the hall. Working with the wordless precision that comes of long cooperation, they split and went to various rear doors. It was Cole who raised his hand. Still without a word, the other two came to the door in front of which he had halted.

They stared at the little name card next to the door: “Amos Beaker.” Furthermore, it was written in a backward-slanting longhand, as was the name on the plate in the vestibule.

The Avenger got out a listening device, similar to the one Josh had used at Xenan’s palatial home, and fastened the vacuum cup to the panel.

He shook his head to the others, pale eyes like chromium chips in his immobile face. No sound, the shake of the head meant. And yet there should be sound—
some
sound—of a person’s breathing, if nothing else, unless the apartment was not that of Nailen, or unless something had alarmed the men and they had fled.

Benson worked with the lock. This was a new building and the locks were good. It took over three minutes to open the door.

There was a large living room opening off a small, neat foyer. There were several doors around the living room, each newly varnished and shiny and untouched. The floor of the room and foyer was the same way—brand-new, shiny, with no trace of anyone’s having walked on it or of furniture having been placed on it.

The apartment was vacant, looking as if it had never been used.

The tension went out of Cole and Smitty.

“Nuts!” said Smitty. “Wrong name. Amos Beaker is plainly not Beak Nailen. And Amos Beaker has plainly moved out, without taking his name from the vestibule—”