The Avenger 21 - The Happy Killers (9 page)

It was a few minutes later that Josh’s guarded words came over The Avenger’s belt radio.

“I followed Brown. He left a few minutes after you did, and went to Westchester. Great big home. Makes his own house look like somebody’s garage. The name of the man who owns the house is Xenan. I’m going to try to find out what goes on.”

The radio went dead.

Brown
had
been in a hurry when he left his house. He’d gone like the wind to the great home from which Josh furtively reported. Josh had had the devil of a time keeping him in sight. Brown’s stop in Xenan’s gravel driveway was so abrupt that the tires of his car had slid a dozen yards.

Josh left his car half a block down and went toward the Xenan grounds like a black shadow in the black night. He reached the hedge just in time to see Brown hurrying in the doorway, and passing a surprised-looking servant. It was then that he’d radioed Benson.

After that, Josh squeezed through the hedge and went toward the house.

Halfway there, he stopped, and his head went back in a strained, listening way. He thought for a minute that he had heard something that he distinctly did not want to hear. A high, thin laugh from somewhere in the blackness beyond the house.

He listened for a full minute, with sweat cold on the palms of his hands. But he didn’t hear it again. He decided that he hadn’t heard it in the first place. It had been so faint, it must have been his imagination.

He went on to the house.

Xenan’s house was a mansion. It must have had forty rooms in it, Josh decided. He wanted to overhear what Brown and Xenan were talking about; but he didn’t see how he was going to know which of the many chambers they were in without getting into the house himself.

That looked harder than getting into the Bank of England.

Then Josh saw light blaze in a series of windows on the first floor and to the left. He went there and looked in a window that had countless small panes, leaded, like the windows of a church.

He was looking into a sort of lounging room. Probably it was considered small in this place of vast drawing rooms and reception halls; but it was big enough to effectively dwarf the two men in it.

These two men were Brown and a fellow a bit younger, with iron-gray streaks in dark, bushy hair, and with a hawk nose and ruthless jaw that proclaimed him as the mansion’s owner, William Xenan. You could look at that powerfully chiseled face and see how the man had risen in six short years from being Dillingham Brown’s well-to-do partner to being one of the richest men in America.

Through a small pane, Josh saw Brown shake his fist at Xenan, and then, suddenly, draw a gun! He held the gun poked into Xenan’s stomach. The look on his face showed that he was not fooling. The look on Xenan’s face showed that he knew it.

Josh reached into a pocket and whipped out a listening device which The Avenger had invented. It was simple in appearance, a kind of vacuum cup with a wire trailing from it. The principle of the stethoscope had been used, plus the amplifying power of the tiny tubes in Smitty’s belt radios.

Josh coupled the wire to his radio receiver, affixed the suction cup to the window, and listened. The voices of the two in the room leaped into audibility.

“Keep your voice down, you fool!” Xenan said to Brown. “There are a dozen servants in the house, and every one of them listens at keyholes.”

“I will not keep my voice down!” Brown said harshly. But he did lower it, perhaps without realizing. “I want to know—”

“
I
want to know why you burst into my house and shove a gun in my stomach!” snapped Xenan.

“You haven’t the faintest idea, of course,” Brown said sarcastically. “You devil! For fifteen years you’ve—” He stopped, and made a palpable effort for self-control.

Josh practically crawled inside the listening cup, he was so eager to hear. He had a hunch he was on the edge of discoveries that would solve this whole case. But he was not to hear any more.

The next sound he heard was not from inside the house. It was from outside. It came from a little behind him, and this time it was unmistakable. No imagination this time.

It was a high, wheezing laugh, as if someone had just heard the funniest joke ever told. It was joined by the laughter of others. How many others, there was no way of telling.

Josh whirled, with the listening device hanging from the window. He saw dark forms leaping toward him in the night. And as they came these men laughed; laughed till shivers ran down his spine.

Josh breathed sharply and did some leaping himself. Toward the hedge. But more dark forms darted up in front of him. He tried to swerve back again, toward the house. A laughing maniac tripped him. Two more men lit on top of him, chuckling with laughter, wheezing with laughter.

Josh could fight like a panther when he had to. He did so now, flailing out with powerful fists, knocking the two off him.

He got to one knee, heard glass crashing. He looked toward the house. The window at which he had listened had been smashed in. He saw three laughing figures climb into the lighted-room and start for the two men within.

Then he didn’t see any more.

One of the men he had hit came boring in again. The man had a dislocated jaw, but seemed not even to know it. He struck at Josh with a clubbed gun. It nicked Josh’s head.

He swung again and this time connected more squarely. A couple of million Japanese lanterns caught fire in Josh’s head and then burst, leaving behind it the blackness of unconsciousness.

Josh had been taken for quite a long ride. He knew that, in a hazy kind of way. He had been dumped somewhere at the end of it, and then somebody had kicked him in the head. At least it had felt like that; and if he ever caught the guy, he was going to make him sorry.

He’d slid into unconsciousness again, after that. Now, he was coming out of it.

The first thing he listened for was the terrible, maniacal laughing. He didn’t hear any. In fact, he didn’t hear anything at all, for a moment.

Then he heard soft breathing, right next to him.

He opened his eyes with a jerk. There was a person next to him, all right. But not a dangerous one. It was a girl, quite pale but quite good-looking, who regarded him with big scared eyes over a broad strip of adhesive tape which kept her from crying out. She had ash-blond hair and wide, amber-colored eyes.

Josh tried to say something and realized there was adhesive tape over his mouth, too. He could feel the sting and draw of the stuff now that his mind was called to it.

He took stock of the situation in which he found himself, and discovered that he was sitting on a cement floor. Probably it was a basement floor, because he saw no windows and the only light in the place came from a hanging electric bulb.

He was handcuffed, he found, and the links between the cuffs were passed around a steam or water pipe next to a wall so that he couldn’t have moved away without taking the pipe with him. His legs were not bound. Why should they have been? He wasn’t going anywhere.

This was the way the laughing murderers had left him. Josh wondered who the girl was. He hadn’t met Edna Brown, yet, so he didn’t know that this was she.

She couldn’t get her gag off because her hands were bound behind her with telephone wire. But Josh could hold his face close to the pipe and rip his off with ease. It was a bad sign. It told that the men who had imprisoned him and the girl here didn’t care if they got rid of the gags or not; didn’t care if they yelled their heads off. That meant they must be a long way from help.

Overhead, Josh could hear someone moving around. He listened apprehensively for the terrible laughter, but there still was none. Instead, he heard somebody moaning, and then heard somebody else growl, “Oh, shut it off, will you?”

The words were muted through the floor, but the fact that they could be heard at all indicated a cheap construction.

Looking around, Josh saw that the cement floor and walls were quite new-looking, as was the electric cord on which the light was dangling. He guessed they were in the basement of a brand-new subdivision house somewhere, the kind they put up by the hundred and sell on easy terms.

Josh leaned his cheek hard against the pipe, got an end of the adhesive gag in his cuffed hands, and ripped it off with a backward yank of his head. He breathed deeply with relief, and turned to look at the girl again.

“Want your gag off?” he said in a low tone.

She nodded vigorously. She was sitting, her back to the wall, about a yard away. She inched toward him, got her face within reach, then winced as the adhesive came off.

“Who are you?”

Josh told her his name. “With Richard Benson,” he added, realizing a moment later that this probably wouldn’t mean anything to the girl.

However, it apparently did. It apparently meant a lot.

She said, “Oh!” as if he’d hit her.

After a moment, in which she regarded him in a curious sort of way, Josh said, “If you could get your wrists within reach, I might be able to untie you.”

She tried it. She strained till her face was flushed, and till she was out of breath. Then she relaxed. There was no way for her to reach her bonds. She sat back and closed her eyes.

“Why have they got you here?” Josh asked.

She kept her eyes closed. At first, he didn’t think she was going to answer.

“I don’t know,” she said finally.

“Who are these laughing hyenas?”

“I don’t know that either,” she said. But from something in her tone, Josh gathered that she
did
know. Or that at least she could do some close guessing.

He gave up questioning her and looked at the pipe.

If he could unscrew that, he could slip the loop of the handcuffs over it and be free—

There wasn’t a chance of unscrewing the pipe. But there was no reason why he shouldn’t
pretend
to unscrew it. They might hear upstairs and rush down to investigate.

Josh stood upright, with a bit of effort. The ceiling was so low that his head almost touched it. The girl watched him with fearful, perplexed eyes. He turned his hands a little, letting the handcuff links scrape around the pipe. It sounded very much as if it were being unscrewed; and the grating noise should carry all over the house on radiators and pipes.

Josh had made the methodical, regular grating noise only three or four times when there was a yell upstairs. “Hey, what goes on in the basement?”

“What do you mean, goes on? What could go on, the way those two are taken care of?”

“Sounds like that string bean down there was working on the pipe. Unscrewing it!”

“Nobody could unscrew that—”

“Anyway, you go and have a look. Fast!” Josh stood perfectly still as the basement door was wrenched open and somebody tumbled down the stairs. A flat-faced fellow with a toothpick between his lips stopped at the foot of the stairs, looked belligerently at Josh, and then came toward him. Josh looked blankly at the wall and stood with his huge feet close to the pipe, as if hiding the base of it.

“What’re you doin’ down here?” the flat-faced man challenged.

“Nuthin’,” said Josh, slipping into the slow, dimwitted drawl he used when he wanted to get somebody off guard.

“Are you unscrewing that pipe?”

“Ah guess nobody could unscrew that pipe,” Josh said, moving his feet closer to the base of it.

“What are you trying to hide, there?” the man said, catching the small movement. “Let’s have a look. Maybe you
are
working it loose.”

He took a compact blackjack out of his pocket and stepped close to the pipe and Josh.

“Move those feet of yours,” he commanded. “I want a look. A good look.”

Josh stood still. The man prodded him with the blackjack.

“Come on. Move!”

Pretending great reluctance, Josh moved his feet from the base of the pipe. The man bent down close to get “a good look.”

Josh brought his bound hands down the pipe like lightning, and with all his strength. There was a clunk as the left cuff hit solidly on the back of the man’s skull. And that was that.

He sagged to the floor, and Josh grunted with triumph and stooped down. He could just get his hands on the man’s coat. With the power of his fingers alone, he inched the body along till the pockets came within reach.

“Hey, Harry,” someone called upstairs. “Find anything?”

Josh felt frantically in a coat pocket. They’d come down here fast when they found no one answered that call. But if he could get the handcuff key—

There was no key in that pocket. In fact it was two to one this man didn’t have the key at all; there were at least two more men upstairs. Josh began edging the limp body around to get at the other coat pocket. And something fell from a vest pocket attached to a thin chain. It was the key.

“Harry!” came the yell from upstairs, with more urgency.

Josh got the key between his solid teeth and inserted it in the lock. He turned his head. There was a
click!

More swift steps sounded on the basement stairs. A man lit on the cement floor after taking the last four steps at a single jump. He stared, bug-eyed at the unconscious figure on the floor, gaped at Josh, then reached frantically for a gun.