The Avenger 21 - The Happy Killers (3 page)

There followed a silence in which the purr of the teletype in the far corner seemed loud. Then The Avenger said evenly, “You don’t know any more of the composition of this formula than you have told me?”

“No,” sighed Brown. “I’d tell you if I knew. But I don’t know. I’ve seen what the pills can do. Harry warned me of the tremendous importance of the formula in its present uncompleted state. That’s all I know.”

He looked pleadingly at The Avenger.

“But you see why this is no ordinary theft? You see why every effort must be made to get the papers from my safe back before the formula is discovered for what it is? My only hope is that it can be recovered without even the police seeing it. Otherwise, the secret might leak out.”

The slim but steel-strong finger of The Avenger pressed a buzzer on his desk.

“We’ll do what we can,” he said.

A secondary headquarters for Justice, Inc., was the drugstore of Fergus MacMurdie, not far from Bleek Street. The store looked like any other drugstore from the front. There were the standard counters with the standard contents. There was the usual soda fountain. But the back room of the store was twice as large as the front, and it was not at all standard.

Each half was a beautifully equipped laboratory. One half went in for electrical and radio apparatus of all sorts. The other half was a chemist’s paradise.

Fergus MacMurdie, nominal proprietor of the store, was the chemist concerned. Few in the world could equal his ability; and many weird concoctions had been turned out in his test tubes and beakers. The other half of the big room belonged to Smitty, electrical wizard, who was another member of The Avenger’s band.

Mac was in the front of the store with Cole Wilson, Justice, Inc.’s newest member, at about the time Dillingham Brown was talking to Dick Benson on Bleek Street. It was too bad that MacMurdie and Wilson couldn’t have overheard that talk; they would not have been so unprepared for what was about to happen to them.

“Ye’ll drive me into bankruptcy,” Mac was saying to Cole. “Josh comes in and laps up maple-nut sundaes—on the house. Ye come in and fill your pockets with candy—on the house. Ye’re a bunch of deadheads.”

Mac was very tall, and very sandy of hair and eyebrows, very homely and very Scotch. He had coarse reddish skin with great freckles just underneath the surface. But one look into his frosty, bleak blue eyes and you didn’t laugh at his appearance.

“Trouble with you,” retorted Cole Wilson equably, “is that you’d rather lose your right arm than a nickel.”

Cole was as handsome as Mac was homely. Cole had dark thick hair which he never covered with a hat, and had an Indian straightness of feature and litheness of body. He was a good man to have beside you in a fight.

“Trouble with you,” he went on, “is that you pinch every penny till Lincoln thinks it’s the Civil War all over again.”

“Is that so?” snapped Mac. “If ye’d stop spendin’ all ye get yer hands on, ye’d maybe have a little put by for yer old age. Like me.”

Cole laughed. “Go on. None of us will have an old age. You know that. Working for a boss like The Avenger doesn’t tend to make you live long!”

This was so true that the bony Scot was stuck for a further retort. But even if he’d thought of one, he wouldn’t have had time to make it. For it was then that the curious thing occurred. Curious? No, that’s a mild word. It was a mad thing; a crazed, frightening, incredible thing.

Looking through the show window, Mac saw a man on the sidewalk who seemed to have just heard the world’s funniest joke. He was laughing so that tears were streaming down his face. He was hooting with laughter so that everyone in earshot was turning to look, and it could even be heard, a little, inside the store.

Mac scratched his sandy thatch, interested but not warned in any way. “Where’d the mon come from?” he wondered aloud. “I didn’t see him walk up.”

The reason for that was that the laughing man had just stepped out of a car, which had paused at the curb and then darted off instantly. Mac hadn’t been watching the street closely enough to see the car, so the effect was as if the man had suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

Cole watched the fellow and grinned a little in sympathy.

“He must have seen or heard something screamingly funny in the last couple of minutes.”

Mac, looking harder now, shook his head. Mac was an accredited physician as well as a foremost pharmacist. His eye took on the glint of a diagnostician’s.

“ ’Tis not norrmal laughter,” burred the Scot. “Somethin’ ails the mon—”

“Looks like he’s coming in here,” Cole interrupted.

The man, still laughing so that he was crying, started for the drugstore door. As he opened it his wild laughter hit full on the eardrums of Mac and Cole. And it didn’t sound at all funny.

“Ha-ha-ha!” laughed the man, staring, with eyes that were distinctly unhumorous, at the two men. “Ho-ho!”

Laughing, he drew a gun!

“Watch him!”
yelled Cole.
“Duck!”

The warning was unnecessary. Completely bewildered, but seeing death in the man’s eyes and reacting with the instant efficiency that all of The Avenger’s aides displayed in time of peril, Mac was on the floor behind the soda fountain.

“Ho-ho-ho. Hee-hee,” laughed the man with the gun.

He leaned over the fountain and fired twice at Mac’s fleeing shape.

It was weird, uncanny! Quite apart from the real danger of flying lead, it sent shivers of fear up and down Mac’s spine. The shouts of laughter, as if at some exquisite joke. The ripples and waves of mirth. And in the midst of this—eyes that were crazed with the urge to murder!

“Ho-ho-ho,” roared the man, shooting into the end counter, behind which Mac had crawled.

Cole acted then from the opposite side of the room. He picked up the first thing at hand on a counter, and threw it. It was a pint-size, cheap vacuum bottle. It hit the laughing murderer squarely on the temple, broke, and sliced a deep gash there.

Again the ripple of supernatural fear ran down their spines. It was a nasty gash; it should have been very painful. But the laughing gunman didn’t even seem to know he’d been cut. He choked with laughter and sent two more slugs into the counter that hid the Scot. Then he whirled toward Cole.

He was a little late with this move. Cole was already in mid-air, leaping like a giant cat for the man. A slug almost parted his thick dark hair for him; then the man was down, banging his head against the floor so that it sounded like a dropped melon.

Even this didn’t seem to faze him. The man laughed as if it were the funniest thing that had happened yet and looped a savage right toward Wilson’s face. Cole barely managed to get out of the way of the blow and slammed a fist against the man’s jaw.

It rocked the fellow’s head till it looked as if his neck were broken. It should have knocked out a heavyweight champion. But this fellow, undersized if anything, and not looking at all strong, kept right on hitting back.

“What in the worrld!” burred Mac, staring.

“Gas him!” gasped Wilson, struggling to keep from being thrown off. “Do something!”

“Watch ye’rsel’,” was Mac’s response.

The Scot tossed something that looked like a little silver pill.

It was a glass pellet with an anaesthetic gas of his own devising that would knock out a horse in about three seconds. Cole buried his nose in the lapel of his coat, chemically treated to act as an impromptu mask against the gas. He breathed through this as the laughing man inhaled the gas from the broken pellet and promptiy slipped into unconsciousness. And there was a shattered silence in the store.

Cole got up from the limp figure and looked dazedly at Mac, who shook his head to express his own bewilderment.

“A mon comes in here cold, laughin’ like a loon—and tries to murrder us,” the Scot burred. “It just doesn’t make sense.”

“Either a lunatic or all hopped up,” was Cole’s verdict. “Probably the latter. He looks like a professional gunman.”

They examined the prone figure. The man was undersized and ratlike, with cheap flashy clothes and the soft, uncalloused hands of one who does not toil for a living. Mac took his pulse and found it rapid and steady. He lifted the eyelids and stared into pupil-contracted eyes.

“Some sort of drug,” he nodded. “But I wonder what the joke was that made him laugh so much.”

“Let’s take him to the back room, wait till he comes to, and find out,” suggested Cole. “We’ll—”

He lifted his head and listened intently. A soft buzzing sound was coming from the back room in question.

“The boss wants us,” he said. “That’s the television buzzer. Bleek Street’s calling.”

Mac nodded. “You take care of our laughing friend, Cole. I’ll see what’s up.”

At the end of the big back room was a large case containing the world’s finest television set. An invention of Smitty’s, it beat the finest commercial products by far. Normally, it was kept tuned to the Bleek Street sender; and when The Avenger wanted someone in Mac’s drugstore, that little buzzer sounded.

The screen on the front of the cabinet was glowing as Mac walked up to it.

“Go ahead, Muster Benson,” the Scot said into the transmitter.

But it was not the immobile countenance and pale, deadly eyes of The Avenger that showed. In the screen appeared the good-natured face of Smitty; and in Smitty’s face was an excitement to match Mac’s own.

Smitty’s full name was Algernon Heathcote Smith, but only close friends could call him that without getting mauled. And no one in his right mind would risk getting mauled by Smitty. He was six feet nine, weighed close to three hundred pounds, all of it bone and brawn, and had a chest so bulging that his arms couldn’t hang down straight. He had innocent blue eyes and a good-humored face. And he was dynamite on legs!

Smitty’s usual companion was a small and dainty person who made such contrast with his giant size that passers-by snickered to see them together. This was Nellie Gray, a valuable aid of The Avenger. Nellie was barely five feet tall, barely a hundred pounds heavy, and looked as if an unkind word would make her cry for an hour. Actually she could throw grown men around with her jujitsu and wrestling tricks, and could shoot and box like a marine.

She and Smitty had been on the second floor of the Bleek Street place when Benson rang for them, after Brown had had his talk. They came up fast, sensing a fight. Both of them lived for the battles with the underworld that made Justice, Inc. so feared. Nellie’s gentle, dreamy-eyed, archaeologist father had been murdered by crooks after secret treasure which he knew about. Smitty had once been framed into prison by a suave criminal. Hence, both burned with a permanent revenge and were never completely happy unless they were making some human rat regret that he’d been born.

The pale glint in The Avenger’s icy eyes told them something was up, all right.

Benson sketched what Brown had told him.

“Let me get it straight,” said the giant Smitty, at the conclusion. He frowned incredulously. “You mean somebody named Harry Tate has cooked up a stew that makes a man want to go out and murder somebody? And laugh while he does it?”

“That’s approximately right,” said Benson. Even Smitty and Nellie couldn’t read the thought behind his motionless features.

“That’s pretty hard to swallow,” Nellie objected. “What kind of stuff could do that?”

“Brown said it was a concentrated form of laughing gas. It was intended to take the place of a standard anaesthetic, to be administered in pill form. But instead of rendering the subject unconscious, it merely makes him insensitive to pain. And also, in some fashion, it stirs up all his murderous instincts.”

“So if you gave somebody one of those pills,” said Smitty, “and then commanded him to go out and murder someone, he’d do it—and laugh while he did it. Wow! That’s no kind of pill to have in the hands of a bunch of crooks.”

“If there is such a pill,” said little Nellie.

The Avenger nodded toward the big television cabinet which matched the one in Mac’s drugstore. “I think Wilson and Mac are at the store,” he said. “Contact them, Smitty, and get them over here.”

“I still say it’s impossible,” the little blond said stubbornly. “There isn’t any such—”

Then Smitty got his reply from Mac. The Scot’s bony features showed on the screen. And, as if in direct answer to Nellie’s doubts, Mac blurted out:

“Say! We just had a queerrr and unnatural occurrence. A mon came into the drugstore, laughin’ like he was about to bust, and tried to murder Wilson and me.”

“What?”
cried Nellie.

Smitty gaped at the reflection of Mac’s homely mug. The Avenger said nothing; he simply stared with eyes like pale jewels in their brilliance.

“Didn’t ye hear me?” snapped Mac peevishly. “I said a mon seemed to think it was a great joke to kill Cole and me.”

The Avenger spoke from the desk. “Did you get him, Mac?”

“Yes, Muster Benson. Cole has him in the front of the store. Wait a minute.”

Smitty and Benson and Nellie could hear a faint howl; Cole Wilson’s voice. Then Mac came scowling back to the screen.