The Avenger 24 - Midnight Murder (13 page)

A long, irregular tangle of bushes, vines and small trees was all you saw. In daytime, you’d have probably seen more; but day or night, this was all you’d have seen from the air. It was only after looking a long time that you saw there was a certain regularity about the tangle.

Then, after noting the regularity, you began to notice that many of the stems of trees and branches, oddly, didn’t seem to go all the way to the ground. They appeared to end in midair, twenty feet up.

Finally, you saw that this tangle was netting, branches, other debris, spread over the wings of a bi-motored plane about the size of a medium bomber.

“Hope we never run into anyone smarter than that fat elephant, Merto, or that murderous fashion plate, Gerry,” Nellie whispered sincerely. “I guess we beat them out here. They don’t seem to be around any—”

She stopped abruptly, and the three stared at the half-ruined shack that had been a thirty-foot hangar.

A moment ago, it had been a lifeless, dark, abandoned huddle of boards. Now, a thin crack of light showed on the pasture side. The crack of light widened, was blotted out by a man’s form, then narrowed and went out. A door had opened and shut.

The man came straight toward them, and they would have thought he’d seen them except that he raised no outcry and was strolling easily. Then they got it. He was coming to relieve the guard who had had the misfortune to connect with one of Smitty’s shoes.

Josh took this one. He waited where the other man had been.

“Pete,” called the approaching man in a low tone as he got near.

“Yeah,” whispered Josh.

“Where are— Oh, there. Run on in with the rest. I’ll take it. Get some sleep. Plane’s checked, everything’s set. We oughta be shoving from here in less than three hours, the fat boy thinks.”

“O.K.,” said Josh. And his long arms shot out.

This one kicked around a little as the hands around his throat tightened. But it was over soon. Josh laid him down on the ground, broke a sleep pellet under his nostrils that would keep him out for forty-five minutes or so.

The three went on to the hangar, approaching it at the rear.

The gang had that building blacked out as expertly as the big plane was camouflaged. Even when they got right next to it, they couldn’t see a single hairline of light anywhere. Which meant that they couldn’t see into the building, either.

Smitty took one of the little amplifiers from his pocket and pressed it to the boards. Sound leaped to his ears.

“You all know what to do,” came Merto’s wheezy voice. “Surround that laboratory building so no one can get in or out. Gerry and I will go into it and get the detector. Then we come back here and take off in the plane. If any of us are delayed, or if one group is split from another, travel back here separately, and we’ll meet here.”

“O.K.,” said somebody.

“Everything is all ready,” came Gerry’s drawling, indolent voice. “There is no chance of a slip-up—”

That was all Smitty heard from inside the building. Because, just then, a lot of sounds from outside—from behind them in the woods to be exact—took the minds of the three off everything else.

Somebody back there began yelling like a crazy man. And he started running across the end of the field and toward the hangar. To increase the noise he was making to the utmost, the man pointed a gun in the air and began firing.

“Beat it!” snapped Smitty. “They’ll come out fast. And if they catch us—”

They came out of the hangar fast, all right. And the way they came out was one more evidence of the perverted generalship of their leaders. No confusion, no aimlessness. A door opened in back, where it had seemed there was no door. Men poured out. A door in front, noticed by the three a few minutes before, snapped open. More men poured out.

They ran to surround the building in a big circle, with the main body forming two reaching arms—a kind of pincer around the source of all the noise.

There was just one way for Nellie and Smitty and Josh to run—toward the sound, too, where there was the only one spot in the swiftly formed circle. The three raced toward the madman.

He turned out to be not so crazy after all.

His gun snapped down and aimed at them.

“Oh, no you don’t!” he snarled. “Stand where you—”

Josh left the ground in a flat, long dive that was a beautiful thing. His head caught the man in the stomach, and both fell. Josh was the only one who got up.

The three started running again. Nellie ran with eyes wide and bewildered. In one flash, she thought she had recognized the man back there. She had thought it was the indolently murderous Gerry!

Not a fashion plate now, and no longer lazily elegant. His face had been contorted with fear and anxiety, and his clothes were ripped and dirtied. He had been beside himself with terror—if it was Gerry.

“We’ll have to fight clear,” snapped Smitty.

The slight delay with the shouting man had been just enough to let half a dozen of the gangsters get ahead of them. The half dozen stood in line now, blocking the way to the safety of the woods.

The three veered right. No soap. Men there, too. Left—the same. There was no fighting a way clear, here!

A tight circle formed around the three members of Justice, Inc. The circle bristled with guns. They were caught!

One of the men said, with his eyes wide, “Hey, these snoopers are either ghosts or oughta be! How’d they get out of that room back in town?”

“And how’d they trail us here?” snarled another.

A third said, “Boy, is the fat guy going to loose something fancy in the way of cuss words when he sees ’em.”

Nellie and Josh and Smitty said nothing. There was nothing to say. Through sheer, unavoidable bad luck, they had been trapped at about the worst time possible in their entire careers. They marched silently ahead of enough machine guns to sink a destroyer. One of the men carried the man Josh had knocked out.

They herded the three into the hangar.

There was a large room formed within the original hangar space. This inner room was formed of hanging blankets and blackout cloth, which was why no light showed out. In here were Merto, the indolent, elegant figure with the long cigarette holder and Molly Carroll.

Nellie stared at the figure with the cigarette holder with her blue eyes fairly popping out of her head. She’d been sure that had been Gerry, much disheveled and frantic, outside.

But here was Gerry inside!

The elephantine Merto stared at his three prisoners a long time, while the thugs waited for the explosion. But no fancy profanity came.

Merto’s cocksure, arrogant eyes had lost their placid confidence when these three were shoved into the hangar. He glared at them with amazement, which turned to something very much like fear.

“I am beginning to believe,” he said slowly, glaring at the three, “that there is much fact behind the reputations of the members of your band. I am beginning to believe that you are really as dangerous as you are said to be. How did you get out of that gas chamber?”

“Crawled through the keyhole,” said Nellie. “We can change shape at will, and become insects, bats, whatever you like. Booh!”

It wasn’t funny. Nothing about this slow, fat man with the lean, fast brain was funny. He kept on glaring at them for a moment, then turned slowly to the figure beside him. He stared a long time at his companion.

“You, Gerry, locked that door yourself. I saw you do it. There was no chance for a slip—”

Merto stopped with a little indrawn hiss of breath. His eyes were riveted, not on his companion’s face, but on his left wrist. The wrist behind the hand manipulating the long cigarette holder.

Nellie’s eyes followed the fat man’s fascinated, almost horrified stare. She saw in that wrist, not quite covered by a coat sleeve carefully pulled down to its maximum a deep and livid bruise.

The fat man breathed out something in Italian. It was something like a prayer. Then one of the blanket walls wavered, lifted up, and a man staggered into the inclosed space. It was the one Josh had butted. He had come to, but he looked pretty sick.

And this man was indubitably Gerry. He wasn’t the debonaire, arrogant, nerveless Gerry they’d seen before. He was bruised and battered; he was frankly and terribly afraid. He kept a long way from his double.

“Shoot him!” he begged. “K-kill him! Before he gets the lot of us! That man . . . that—”

His voice trembled into silence. But Merto stared at the fake Gerry for a while before moving. The Avenger!

“So—you let us take you at Vogel’s house. You deliberately permitted us to nail your wrists in the door. You let us believe you were dead, then trailed us—”

“He was in the luggage c-compartment of our c-car,” said the disheveled Gerry. “Right with us in our own car! When we got to the Long Island place, you went in ahead, leaving me in the garage. He got me then. He tied me up and put me in the loft over the car space. Then he propped me up and made up to resemble me. He shot some drug in his face that seemed to deaden the nerves, and made the flesh like m-modeling clay. He had little contact lenses to fit over his eyeballs, with pupils painted on them the color of mine.”

Merto slowly shook his head.

“I believe all I’ve ever heard of you,” he said. “I have seen disguises. I have used them, and well. But I have never seen anything like this.”

“Kill them! At once!” begged Gerry. “Every minute they stay alive is just one more minute we’re in danger!”

Merto nodded, eyes wide and fear-glazed. And a man afraid is a man to fear.

“Stand where you are. Ten of you men with machine guns cover them. Don’t take your eyes off them for a second.”

His gaze flicked on Molly Carroll. His jaw set.

“You!” he snapped. “Get in there with them.”

“Wait a minute!” said Smitty. “A helpless girl? You aren’t going to gun her down, too?”

“She’s not so helpless,” snarled Merto. “The only way you could have tracked us here so fast is through her. She must have found a chance to phone from our Long Island place. Get in there. You were ‘forcibly taken to Vogel’s,’ eh? And I believed it!”

There was good stuff in Molly Carroll. Her legs wobbled and she was sheet-white, but she walked to the others.

One of the thugs, a little duller of wit than the rest, said, “I thought she was in with us, boss.”

“I thought we might use her,” said Merto. “But it hasn’t worked out. And she knows too much to live.”

Only with Nellie, Smitty, Josh, Molly and the substitute “Gerry” covered with the many guns, did Merto take his eyes off them.

“There will be no loopholes this time,” he said grimly. “I will oversee this myself. Gerry, see that the cars are ready. The rest of you men, save for these ten, go out with Gerry and get in the cars. We will follow at once.”

Six or seven men, and the mussed-up edition of Gerry, went out. Merto drew a gun from his shoulder holster.

“Looks like this is it,” said Nellie to Smitty. She was white to the lips but perfectly controlled.

“Looks like it,” nodded the giant. “You’re not so bad, half-pint.”

“You’re pretty swell yourself, big, strong and stupid,” said Nellie. “I wouldn’t admit it ordinarily, but at a time like this—”

Merto snapped: “Pour it into them! Fire!”

The closed-in place became a hell of sound. You couldn’t hear yourself think as guns blazed on and on, dozens of shots, hundreds of shots, seeking head and limbs and bodies of the five victims! The light dimmed with smoke till you could hardly see.

With the first shots, they had fallen. Smitty had jerked and half gotten up, then had sunk down again. They all lay in a heap.

Even this did not satisfy the personal vengeance of the fear-crazed fat man. He held his hand up to stop the firing—no shout could have been heard.

His own gun bucked in his hand as if of its own volition, as he sent an unaimed, venomous shot at the heap of bodies. It came as a sort of deadly period to the long sentence of machine-gun shots.

Josh’s inert leg twitched a little. The right leg, it was, below the protection of his celluglass undergarment. Red welled up through the fabric of his trousers, and slowly dripped to join a sort of communal pool coming from the whole heap.

“All right,” said Merto. His voice was tired more than triumphant. He’d had a bad scare; for once in his life he’d had fear ground into him.

He went out of the building with the men. Outside, he said:

“You two men stay with the plane and watch it. All the rest—come with me to the laboratory.”

Night silence had succeeded the shots. It was deathly still. Then, from the edge of the field came the sound of cars and the further sound of their progress.

The sounds died in the distance. There was only an occasional sputter from the kerosene lamp on the table that lighted the place. Outside, near the camouflaged plane, the two guards were talking, paying no attention to the hangar, of course.

At the bottom of the lifeless heap, the fake Gerry opened his eyes. He stirred. The rest moved dazedly enough for him to crawl clear. He sat up and took from his eyeballs the tissue-thin lenses, painted with pupils similar in color to Gerry’s.

The Avenger’s pale, icy eyes stared forth.

Smitty got up then, and Nellie. They solemnly pinched each other. Josh sat on the floor with both hands squeezed tight around his right thigh over the spot where the blood welled out.

“We’re dead,” said Nellie. “It isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. You look pretty natural, and as soon as I powder my nose—”

“Why aren’t we dead?” Smitty demanded of the man in Gerry’s clothes, and with Gerry’s face, though not with his eyes, now. “I sure thought I was when those guns talked. It was no act, my falling. I thought sure I was dead. Then I started to get up, realized there was something funny, and played dead. But why aren’t we—”

“I have been with that gang for hours as one of their leaders,” said The Avenger, voice as cold and calm as his colorless eyes. “In that time it was not difficult to substitute blanks for real cartridges in every machine gun, automatic, and revolver they had.”