The Avenger 24 - Midnight Murder (7 page)

This was a walkup type that should have stairs to the top and then a trap to the roof. That is, it would if it ran true to type.

It did, they found when they’d gone in the narrow door beside the store’s show window. They went up through the trap, dropped a floor to the roof of the yellow-front, and went through the trapdoor there.

They stood in an upper hallway.

The air of the place was one of mustiness, desolation and disuse. Also, there was not a sound. You’d swear no one had been in here for months.

And perhaps no one had! The driver said he’d let Wight out here. He hadn’t said he had seen Wight go in.

Nellie and Smitty glanced at each other and, without need of words, co-operated in searching the place.

The stairs and halls here were in the center of the building instead of on the side, as in the narrower structure next door. They went downstairs. At the top hall, they went from door to door-Nellie going into the rooms on the left and Smitty taking the ones on the right.

They covered the top floor and found nothing. They covered half the second floor and found nothing. Then Smitty felt the mild shock at his waist indicating a call on his belt radio. He put the receiver to his ear.

“In here!” came the tapped message. Nellie had found something and didn’t want to raise her voice about it, just in case listening ears were around.

The giant went across the hall into the room she’d last entered. She stood near the boarded-up window, and, in the faint gloom of daylight that penetrated cracks, Smitty saw what she’d found.

There were several empty cans. Corned-beef cans. There were crumbs and three empty milk bottles. There was a box placed against a wall in such a way as to indicate that it had been used as a chair.

The dregs in one of the milk bottles were fresh and not at all hardened. Someone had been in here for many hours, recently.

Smitty’s glance, and Nellie’s, said the same thing. Take it easy. Be more careful than ever, from now on.

They went to the door, Smitty looming colossal beside the tiny blonde. Smitty poked his head out warily, just a little, to see that the hall was clear.

Instantly, he started to duck back, but he wasn’t quite quick enough. Something slammed down on his head like a falling brick chimney! He fell.

Nellie’s hand darted for a special little pocket where she kept some of the anaesthetic pills. A man’s hand caught her wrist in time to prevent this.

There were four men. The man who caught Nellie looked pretty confident about it. Why not? He was a burly fellow, weighing perhaps a hundred and ninety, and here was a fragile girl.

He learned the next instant not to judge by weight.

Nellie’s free hand caught the hand over her wrist. She twisted sharply, yanked up and forward, and bent her small body. The startled guy shot over her shoulder like a stone from a slingshot and smacked his chin on the floor.

He sat up, shaking his head. The diminutive blonde, like an enraged hummingbird went for another of the four—the one who had conked Smitty.

Nellie ribbed the big fellow every chance she got. She sounded as if she had no use for him at all. But let anyone else pick on the giant, and there was action!

She grabbed the man by his coat lapels, pulled down hard with her left hand and swung up hard with her right. The right was doubled into a fist that was small and pink but very hard. It hit the descending jaw with a crack like that of a .22 rifle, and this man sat down also.

Then three more men appeared from the gloom, which was hardly fair. Nellie had whittled down the odds till—for a minute, at least, when the floored two would be able to get up again—they were only two to one. Now, they were five to one again. It was annoying.

Nellie ducked and went for a third man. But they’d had their lesson, now. Three of them piled on her, and she went down.

But as she went down, Smitty came up. And that fixed that!

Smitty was aggravated by the blow on the head, anyhow. He didn’t like to be hit on the head. When he saw Nellie being pawed around by three men, the aggravation changed to sinister fury. He roared out something or other that probably could not have been published and grabbed a pair of handy ankles as he rose from the floor.

The owner of the ankles, of course, smacked down as the giant got up. He began screaming at the grip of the vast hands on his legs. And in between screams, there was a sort of clicking sound. Smitty had a vague idea that one or more ankle bones had broken under his fingers, but he didn’t pay much attention. Things were always breaking under his fingers.

He stepped to the struggling knot on the floor and banged down, using the man in his hands as a living club. Or, rather, as you’d use a length of wet towel to swat somebody with.

The man he swung was motionless, now, with blood coming from his mouth and nose. The one hit by him relaxed promptly and lay still, too.

Three shots came in quick succession from the fifth man, who was carefully preserving his hide by remaining six feet from the melee. Smitty jerked three times as bullets hit him in the side. They couldn’t penetrate his celluglass garment, but they could and did bang him like hammer blows.

The giant turned once, hard, as a hammer thrower turns. He released his limp club and the man flew headfirst through the air and knocked the gunman down.

A yell came from somewhere below.

“Lam! Everybody! Those shots’ll bring plenty of trouble!”

Four men were able to move. They raced out the door. The door slammed as Smitty reached to help Nellie up. He charged at it, with the little blonde beside him.

The door was locked. So Smitty walked through it! Few doors could stand the shock of those tremendous shoulders with almost three hundred solid pounds behind them.

Nellie followed him through the splinters, and they raced for the stairs and down. Here there was another door, across the foot of the stairs where there was no business being a door at all. Some special installation of years past. And this one, closed against them, was a bit tougher. It was of the sliding variety, was of oak, and was pretty thick.

Smitty banged into it as he had the other. Then he rubbed his shoulder and looked at a faint crack. He tried it again, and the crack grew distressingly little.

“Hold it,” said Nellie, digging in her handbag, which was attached to her belt by a slim ornamental chain so that she wouldn’t lose it in such scrimmages as she just had.

She came out with one of the small explosive pellets. The capsules containing the special powder were of hardened gelatin. She held it a moment in the pink palm of her warm little hand, and then was able to roll the thing out into a slim tube.

She put this in the keyhole of the door, stood back, and tossed her shoe at it.

It went up with a roar, and the door dissolved into a hundred shreds. The pellets were harmless when exploding free in open air, but confined tightly they shattered as any other explosive must.

The two raced into the first-floor hall, then turned and leaped back for the stairs.

The hall next to the boarded-up front doorway was an inferno. Whoever had yelled down here had tossed fire bombs—almost certainly magnesium or thermite bombs to mushroom so swiftly—and now there was flame between them and the street exit.

Smitty leaped back up the stairs and to the nearest front room, with Nellie at his heels. He looked through a crack between boards and groaned in exasperation.

Half a dozen men down in the street were getting into a car as fast as possible. Two of them were carrying another man. This man, hatless and with a bruised face, had hair that was thinning in front and heavy in the back. He had a beard. He was tall and thin.

“Rew Wight!” exclaimed Smitty. “They had him here all the time, maybe in the basement. They’re getting away with him.”

He began hammering at the boards with fists like giant sledges. One ripped in half and fell into the street. Nellie tossed something. It looked like a small paper sack, and it went squish on top of the gangsters’ sedan and stayed there. Like a sack full of jelly.

Then the car roared off, and by the time Smitty had enough of the boards out to lower Nellie through so she could drop to the walk, and then follow himself, at least four minutes had passed.

“Gone! Got away!” raged Smitty.

A squad car roared up. Far down the street was the wail of a fire siren; smoke was pouring through the cracks over the fake boarding on the door.

Smitty leaped to the car. He was known by sight to most New York cops.

“Some guys on the second-floor front,” he said. “Crooks. Nail them!”

Then he went on to where he had left the coupé, with Nellie beside him. But at the door of the coupé, he slowed.

“Why am I in such a rush?” he growled. “We aren’t going anywhere. Those so-and-sos got away clean. No chance to trace them after all this time has passed.”

“Oh, yes, there is!” said Nellie. “You know that little sack I tossed? It has some of that new stuff of Mac’s in it. You know, the stuff he was talking about yesterday.”

Smitty nodded.

“You mean the liquescent pigment that dissolves slowly when it is exposed to air?”

“That’s the stuff. Nice, conspicuous orange-yellow. Some of it was in that little sack. I think maybe we can trace them by it.”

“Now and then,” said the giant grudgingly, “you almost act as if you had a brain under all that lovely yellow hair.”

You could follow the car with that yellow stuff, all right. Every hundred yards or so there was a plop like that of thick yellow paint, as big as a half dollar, in the street.

The only trouble was that the drops were so far apart that, while you could follow at a good rate of speed, you couldn’t tell where corners had been turned. You were apt to go shooting on, find no more spots, and have to turn back and investigate the last intersection, first to the left and then to the right, to pick up the trail again. Which took time. They’d have to tell Mac that; have him regulate the stuff, so that it dissolved and dripped about twice as fast.

Smitty and Nellie were half an hour behind their quarry by the time they got to the exclusive and expensive suburb of Westchester.

It was lucky they had the indisputable proof of the tracking paint to show where the car had stopped. Otherwise, they never would have believed it, because the destination was a millionaireish-looking house with at least twenty rooms and a four-car garage..

The evidence was conclusive, however. They saw, as they rolled slowly past, that there was a splash at the curb showing that several drops had had time to plop down while the crooks’ car waited here. The car was now in the commodious garage in the rear.

Smitty went on around the corner and stopped.

“Rear?” said Smitty.

Nellie nodded thoughtfully.

“There are a lot of bushes and shrubs set next to the house wall. And maybe basement windows. If we can get in the plantings, and if there is a basement window handy, we could work on it without being seen.”

They went through two backyards, clearing the first by inches ahead of a vicious watchdog. They got to the shrubbery next to the wall of the house that was their goal. They could only hope they’d been unobserved; they’d had to cover some large clear spaces.

There was a basement window, all right. And it had bars over it like something out of Sing Sing. Nellie looked doubtfully at the one-inch bars and then at Smitty. The giant shrugged as if to say: “Well, at least I can try.”

He got a bar in each hamlike hand and heaved backward. No soap. He sat down with his feet against the wall and pulled with all the enormous strength of shoulders, arms, legs and chest muscles. There was a thin, strained squeal, and the bars came out of the masonry at the top. One at a time, he bent them down, and there was room for Nellie to get in. A third one, and there was room for him, too.

“Too bad you can’t think with your back,” was Nellie’s only comment. “You’d have almost average intelligence, then.”

But there was a nice shine in her eyes as she whispered the insult.

They looked around, saw that they seemed to be unobserved, and slid down into the basement of the luxurious house.

They heard faint voices upstairs, from through the floor. They saw that they’d descended into a playroom, with Ping-pong table, billiard table, and other recreational facilities. Then they saw a man, bound and gagged, lying on a leather divan.

It was Rew Wight.

Over the gag, his eyes peered at them in an uncertain, myopic way. Smitty remembered the glasses Wight was supposed to wear. Either they’d been taken away from him, or they had been broken when he was captured.

They went to him. Smitty put his finger to his lips for silence; then they untied Wight and took the gag from his face. He sat up on the divan and began rubbing his wrists and ankles. Smitty put his lips to Nellie’s ear.

“Take care of him. I’m going to explore around.”

Nellie stayed with Wight, and Smitty tiptoed to the basement stairs and up them. He put his ear to the door. He heard voices the other side of the door.

“—little blonde number sure threw you around pretty,” someone jeered.

“How was I to know she’s a female wrestler, or circus strong woman, or something?” was the fevered retort. “You’d have been fooled, too.”

Smitty waited to hear steps indicating that the men out there were going somewhere else. But he didn’t hear them. Instead, after a minute, he heard suppressed sounds in the basement behind him.

Nellie and Wight probably whispering to each other, he thought. But the sounds went on, and there was a funny quality in them. After a while, Smitty turned and stole inquiringly back down to the game room.

He would have roared with laughter if he’d been able to—and if the situation wasn’t really too serious for laughter. As it was, serious or not, his moonface went red with the effort to strangle his explosions.

Nellie wasn’t whispering to anyone. She was probably saying things to herself that were not a hundred percent ladylike. You couldn’t tell, because you couldn’t see her lips, or any other part of her face, or any of her body from the waist up.