The Avenger 24 - Midnight Murder (8 page)

Nellie had a potato sack, or something of the kind, drawn tightly down over her head, with her hands writhing furiously under the edge as they sought to grip it and raise it off. But the sack held her arms so tightly to her sides that she couldn’t bend them to do so.

There was no sign of Rew Wight.

Smitty lifted off the sack. Nellie glared wildly at him, and wildly around. Then her eyes darted to the window.

“He got away!” she whispered explosively. “I heard him. Out the window.”

Smitty looked politely inquiring, face still beet-red with suppressed amusement. Nellie went fire-red at the look.

“You’d have been taken in, too,” she whispered savagely. “The . . . skurlie!” She couldn’t think of any better term at the moment than Fergus MacMurdie’s epithet for hoodlums. “He brought this sack out from under him. He’d been lying on it. He whispered, ‘This is what they blindfolded me with when we drove here, so I wouldn’t see where we were going.’ ”

Nellie’s eyes were blue flames. “I leaned close to hear him, and he drew it down over my shoulder. That’s gratitude for you! Naturally, I wasn’t expecting anything but thanks, so I wasn’t on guard. If I ever get my hands on him—” Lights flashed on all over the place. And suddenly, it wasn’t funny any more. Not at all funny!

Four men came from the stairs. Every one of them held a sawed-oft shotgun. A fifth came slowly from behind them. He seemed to do everything slowly, indolently. When he talked, his voice was drawling, too, and beautifully polished and correct.

“I would advise you,” he said, “to be very, very obedient. We have surmised that you wear some sort of bulletproof protection, so, as you will note, these guns are leveled at your heads.”

He looked at the divan where Rew Wight had been, and at the pieces of rope cut from Wight’s ankles and arms. His face didn’t change at all; his voice simply grew a little more impersonally icy.

“Walk upstairs ahead of us,” the man said. “And don’t assume that we would hesitate to risk the noise of gunplay. These walls are quite satisfyingly soundproof.”

They were; Nellie and Smitty decided, two of the nastiest crooks they’d ever seen. That was because they were two such obviously competent crooks.

The man who had directed them up from the basement was young, handsome in a magazine-illustration sort of way. He was dressed and groomed like a hotel manager. He had a cigarette in a holder. The cigarette was a long one with an initial on it instead of a brand name; and the holder was six inches long at least, very old, and made of jade.

The other man, who was apparently head of the thugs that had tangled several times with Justice, Inc., was middle-aged, tall, and tremendously fat. He must have weighed nearly as much as Smitty, though, of course, it was distributed much less effectively. The fat man had a placid, philosophical expression on his face. A sort of gruesome expression. You could imagine him looking philosophical and placid, while he watched someone being flayed alive before his eyes.

The young man drawled indolently. “Where did your pals take Rew Wight? We want him.”

“Pals?” echoed Smitty. “Take Wight?”

Nellie glanced at him, and in the look was volume. Smitty got it fast.

This crew had no idea that Wight had escaped on his own. They were, of course, sure that friends of the giant’s and the tiny blonde’s had waited outside and were now driving off somewhere with the captured man. Just as well to let them think this, too. If they knew the truth, they’d scatter right now in all directions, on the hunt, and might pick up Wight again. If they thought he’d been taken somewhere, they would waste time trying to find out the destination.

That is, from their angle it would be time wasted. From Nellie’s and Smitty’s, it might be time a lot more unhealthy than just “wasted.”

“Did they take Wight to your Bleek Street fortress?” asked the tall, elegant young leader.

Smitty suddenly decided on truth as being the best of all misleaders, here. That is, truth with a confused air.

“Nobody took him anywhere,” he said promptly, looking very, very innocent. “He went under his own power. We don’t know where.”

“That is likely,” said the young man ironically, “with both of you right next to him and easily able to prevent it. You helped Wight out the window and your friends got away with him while we were all intent on the burglar alarm that told us we had visitors in the basement. Now—where was he taken?”

Smitty said nothing. The young man indolently twisted the cigarette butt from his holder.

“Aw, this is no way to put the question,” growled one of the gunmen in the big room. “We oughta—”

Hardly seeming to look, with no expression at all on his pale, good-looking face, the icily correct young fellow flipped the smoldering cigarette butt.

It hit the objector right in the left eye. Sparks showered. It must have hurt. The man almost dropped his gun. He clawed frantically at his eye with one hand, while he retrieved the gun with the other.

“We like to talk to friends without broken bones, if necessary,” said the young fellow silkily. “I’m sure you won’t mind.”

“No-no, of course not,” moaned the man. He was bent double, hand clapped to his eye.

There were eleven other men, all with guns, in the room. They could have riddled their two dictatorial leaders at any moment. But there was plainly no rebellion in any of them, either. These two leaders were that kind of men.

It didn’t look so good to Nellie and Smitty.

The fat man was sitting in a leather chair that, big as it was, could barely hold his bulk. His hands were clasped peacefully over his vast paunch.

“Perhaps,” he said, in a wheezy, jovial voice, “we don’t need to know where they took Wight. Perhaps they know the whereabouts of the object we were trying to make Wight get for us. After all, we can do without Wight. Personally, I didn’t care much for the fellow, did you?”

The young Bond Street model fitted another cigarette into his holder. He nodded.

He said to Smitty, “We know there is another model of the device that was in Wayne Carroll’s plane. It is somewhere in New York. Perhaps in a safe-deposit box. If you can tell us where it is—or where Wight now is—it will save you a great deal of inconvenience.”

“Now, you’re way over my head,” said Smitty. “I don’t know what the thing is you’re talking about, how many of them there are, or where any of them are kept.”

“An honest man,” sighed the fat man. “Well, honest men have certain fundamental traits. One is a disinclination to see the female of the species in distress. If we questioned the young lady . . . er . . . emphatically, and let this large young man watch us do so, interesting results might be obtained.”

Smitty seemed to swell to twice his size, which was impressive enough to start with. The nearest thugs stepped hastily away from him, guns and all.

“I guarantee they’d be interesting,” Smitty gritted out.

The sleek young man with the overgrown cigarette holder took a small puff.

“We can always do that,” he said. “Let’s try a less clumsy method, first. We have plenty of time, as long as we hold these two as hostages. Suppose we get in touch with the Bleek Street headquarters of this misguided chap, Benson, and offer to trade two of his friends for the information we desire?”

“Holy smoke!” said one of the gang, with sweat forming on his forehead. “Have you got any idea what you’re sayin’?”

“Yeah,” said another, looking even more distressed. “I’d rather climb into a lion’s cage and walk up and spit in the big cat’s eye than phone The Avenger and tell him we got a couple buddies of his on ice.”

The young fellow looked at the fat man, with one eyebrow raised slightly in a bored way.

“This Benson fellow seems to be rather respected. We are pretty frightened, aren’t we, Merto?”

“Terrified! Utterly terrified!” murmured the fat man sleepily. “Your idea is a good one, Gerry. Have a man phone from a public pay station, many miles from here—leaving it in a hurry, of course—and we’ll see if a trade can be made.”

Red was creeping up Smitty’s throat and face at this attitude toward his chief, Richard Benson. It wasn’t one that was encountered very often. Only crooks who were very stupid or who were not familiar with the United States would make such an estimate.

Smitty said afterward he would never have taken such a chance if he hadn’t been blind mad.

“I’ll do the phoning myself, Merto,” slim, indolent Gerry said.

He took two steps toward the door—and Smitty got to the fat man.

No one who didn’t know the giant ever believed he could move so fast. People didn’t stop to figure it out; they just looked at that tremendous hulk of muscle and gristle and bone and took it for granted that he would be muscle bound and slow.

Actually, Smitty could move like a streak of light when necessity required. In one enormous bound, he got to the sleepily seated Merto and caught the fat, jowled throat from behind. It was so sudden, so incredible, that even the indolent fellow with the long cigarette holder stared with gaping jaws for an instant. Then his jaws clicked shut.

But he did not reach for his gun. He raised his hand quickly when half a dozen guns in the hands of the less intelligent thugs aimed for Smitty—and Merto.

“My mother told me,” said Smitty, “never to deal with underlings. Always go to the man at the top.”

His huge fingers were biting into the fat neck. Merto had nerve—no denying that. He sat there calmly, though his face went rather pale. The giant, crouched behind the chair with only his hands showing, could not be shot unless Merto were shot first. Merto knew that.

Then his pale face got mottled in color as Smitty’s hands squeezed ever so little.

“You will do as I say,” the giant said, “or I’ll break your friend’s neck. If you’ve noticed the bent bars at the basement window, you’ll believe I’m able to do that quite easily.”

“I think I’d do as he says, Gerry,” Merto said.

“Nellie,” Smitty said, “step into the hall. Find a room that looks pretty tight.”

The little blonde went to the door of the big living room. The gangsters were livid as she walked past their guns, so close that she nearly brushed against a couple of muzzles. Their fingers positively trembled on the triggers.

She was back in a minute.

“There’s a library,” she said. “It has a trick window, small and high up near the ceiling. The door is good.”

“Lead the way to the library, Gerry,” said Smitty. “The rest, follow. Go on!”

A single, short choked sound was wrenched from Merto’s lips. Gerry took a thoughtful puff at his cigarette, then led the way to the library. Nellie followed the last man, and the giant came after her, with Merto as a shield. The easy way he swung Merto’s ponderous weight around seemed to hold a dreadful fascination for the gangsters.

Nellie shut the door on them and shot a heavy, iron bolt.

Then they walked out of the house, with Merto ahead of Smitty.

“We’ll add him to our collection,” said the giant. “I think we ought to stuff him.”

“He’s stuffed already,” said Nellie venomously. Then, “Smitty, I think we’d better hurry. Our fat friend looks too smug and satisfied, somehow. I have a hunch—”

Her hunch was too quickly verified. Shots rang out behind them and from across the street. Bullets swept around them in a leaden hail. Two got Smitty and one knocked the breath from Nellie, under her celluglass protection.

Like good generals, Merto and Gerry hadn’t had all their men in the one place. There were others in the house next door and in one of the houses across the street.

“Beat it!” Smitty roared.

He thrust Merto, who had turned from protection to handicap, hard from him and raced for the corner with Nellie. They rounded it and got into their car.

“Now let them shoot,” said Nellie behind the bulletproof glass. “I’ll get Bleek Street and then the police. We’ll round up the whole lot of them. We’ll wait here and trail them if they try to get away—”

Car after car roared out of the driveway of Merto and Gerry’s place. Five in all. They went west, and Nellie and Smitty raced after them, with Nellie calling Bleek Street. But they were never to trail the gang. Again the generalship of Gerry and Merto showed up.

One of the cars dropped behind. Smitty fought the wheel of the coupé to try to duck it. But the car backed in a screaming half circle that blocked the narrow residence street, and Smitty couldn’t avoid the crash.

You could have heard it for a block. It fixed the coupé up, heavy as it was, so that it wouldn’t follow anything anywhere till a thorough repair job had been done on it.

The driver of the other car was out just before the crash and was running after the other four. There had been just the one man in it; the car was a sacrifice job only. The man leaped into the last car, and the procession roared away.

“Something tells me we won’t see any of them around here again,” said Smitty, sighing.

“And I did so want the big fat one for a desk ornament,” mourned Nellie.

“You’ll get him,” Smitty said. “Something also tells me they won’t be so indifferent about Justice, Inc., again!”