The Avenger 35 - The Iron Skull (12 page)

“One thing after another,” complained Smitty as he threw himself to the floor of Dr. Steinbrunner’s office.

Shards of broken glass were flying around, snow and wind swirling into the room.

The man who’d fired at Smitty tried again. “Take that, jerk!”

This slug thunked into the wooden desk.

“That’s one of the birds who jumped me in the warehouse,” Smitty said to himself. “They must have gone outside for something and then noticed what I was up to in here. I got to get into the habit of pulling the shades.”

With a roar, he suddenly grabbed up a heavy wooden chair and tossed it directly at the broken window the man was shooting through.

The chair whizzed through the window, knocking out what was left of the glass.

“Unk!” said the gunman as all four legs of the chair hit him in the torso.

“Look out below, Hutchison or Harris or whichever one you are!” Smitty took a running jump and dived head first out of the window.

His right hand held the .38. As he was hurtling through the air he got off a shot at the second gunman, who was standing back a few feet from the ruined window.

The slug didn’t connect, but it made the man flinch and duck to one side. Unfortunately, it also caused him to bang into a tree trunk.

While the fellow was still woozy, Smitty grabbed hold of the front of his red mackinaw and threw several punches into his face.

That produced unconsciousness.

Smitty let him drop into the snow. “They must have got a cut rate on them red coats. They all got ’em.”

The other one, either Hutchison or Harris, was still disentangling himself from the hurled chair.

The giant took care of him with two well-delivered blows to the chin.

“Now I think I’ll follow up on that bug I planted in Nevins’s car and see where Dick and Nellie ended up,” Smitty decided. He glanced down at the two sprawled-out gunmen. “Wonder how I’d look in a red coat like that.”

Narrow wheel marks in the snow. The Iron Skull had, very recently, rolled along this amusement part street. Rolled by the boarded-up Freak Arcade and the weight-guessing booth, past the salt-water taffy shop and around the corner.

The Avenger followed in his wake, his unique .22 pistol in his hand.

“He must have some emergency escape plan worked out,” he said to himself. “Possibly a car hidden up here in one of these buildings. And there’s still the man who was on the front gate to give him a hand.”

The Avenger stopped at the end of the street and listened. Then he went around the corner.

There were the tracks. The Iron Skull had passed down this lane, too.
Authentic Egyptian Dancing Girls! Straight From Cairo!
proclaimed a battered sign.
Are You Man Enough To Rassle Norbert The Mighty?
asked another sign.
Horrors Of War Museum! Gruesome Scenes from Ethiopia! Spain! Poland! Children Admitted FREE!

“A little behind the times, that museum,” said the Avenger as he tracked the Iron Skull along the dead street.

The deserted amusement park was filled with silence and darkness.

There was a faint creaking to his right. Only the horses on the merry-go-round, frozen in their galloping poses, shaken now by the night wind.

Silence again.

Then all at once a thin beam of scarlet light came sizzling down from up on his left.

It hit a spot on the wooden front of a Coney Island Red Hot stand about five inches from Benson’s head. The words Red Hot burned away as the beam ate through the wood.

The Avenger flattened out on the snow and fired his pistol up toward the spot where the spurt of deadly light had originated.

Through the darkness and falling snow he made out the seated figure of the Iron Skull. He had wheeled himself out onto a balcony of the Sea Life Museum.

The Iron Skull cried out in pain as the Avenger’s shot creased his flesh shoulder. He wheeled himself back and out of range.

“Got a ray gun of some kind built into that metal hand of his,” said Benson, rising. He ran across the street to the main entrance of the museum.

Kicking the door open, he stood back.

Nothing happened.

The Avenger crossed into the dark building, alert.

There was still a strong briny sea smell in the big room. Large glass-walled tanks lined the high room, all empty and dried out.

Terrors of the Deep
said a sign over the arched staircase which led upstairs.

“Stairs are too obvious.” Benson got used to the darkness and then ran over to a post which supported the cut-away second floor.

Shinnying up the pole, he swung over the wooden guard rail and onto the landing.

Something went rolling down a hallway up ahead of him. It was the Iron Skull’s wheelchair.

Ducking low, the Avenger inched toward the chair. It had come to rest near a high window which looked out onto a boat lagoon.

He had covered about fifteen feet when he realized that the wheelchair was empty. The Iron Skull was no longer in it.

Crackling out of the darkness on his right a wedge of burning light came. It cut across his cheek, burning away flesh, turning the left-behind skin black.

Benson fired twice into the dark.

Something fell.

Pressing himself against the nearest wall, the Avenger waited.

Nearly a half-minute later, the Iron Skull went tottering toward the high window. He grabbed hold of his wheelchair and sent it careening at the Avenger. Then he jumped through the window.

Glass went kaleidoscoping out into the night.

As he moved closer to the window the Avenger became aware of spots of something black on the dark floor. Blood. So he had wounded the Iron Skull.

He stepped to the sill of the broken window and peered out.

A burning shaft of light came shooting up from a few feet below.

Instead of pulling back, the Avenger threw himself out of the window.

The Iron Skull had apparently landed on a balcony a few feet below the window and had waited there to take another shot at Benson with the lethal ray from his metal hand.

The Avenger missed the balcony and fell on down into the black chilly water of the boat lagoon.

He stayed under for several seconds, frog-kicking away from the spot where he’d gone in. There were two flat-bottomed boats a few yards away. The Avenger came up on the far side of these, treading water.

The water was boiling about twenty feet in front of him. The Iron Skull was still on his balcony, using now the ray that emanated from his eye socket.

Then the glowing eye flickered and went dead. The Iron Skull’s lethal ray was apparently not capable of sustained power. This was one defective feature Blau-Montag could not blame on someone else’s stupidity. He pushed his way through a small window off the balcopy and went back into the museum.

Benson swam across the lagoon and pulled himself out on the boarding wharf.

“Joined the Polar Bear Club, Richard?” Cole, grinning, was standing a few feet away.

“He’s in that building there,” said the Avenger. “If we—”

“Holy moley!” said Cole.

The sea museum had begun to burn. Flames were eating at its walls already. Black smoke was corkscrewing out of the broken window.

“He must have fired it himself,” said Benson, running along the wharf.

“One of his fingers may have a built-in lighter,” suggested Cole, jogging alongside him.

The fire was taking hold incredibly fast. Already the walls seemed more scarlet flame than wood.

“I’ll see if I can—”

Cole caught hold of Benson’s arm. “Richard, even you aren’t going to be able to go in there. Another minute and the whole place is going to be blazing.”

The Avenger allowed his grinning lieutenant to stop him. “You’re right, Cole.” He shook his head. “I didn’t think he was a man to take his own life.”

“Suicide is quite a fad among foreign agents,” said Cole. “We’ve run into it before.”

“A brilliant man,” said the Avenger.

“He was Ulrich Blau-Montag,” said Cole, “or what was left of him.”

“Yes, he told me.”

The museum now was one single pillar of fire, roaring up thirty feet into the black of the night.

Nearby, the giant plaster clown seemed to be laughing at the Iron Skull’s funeral pyre.

Smitty was puzzled. He walked along the block again, eyeing the destination his tracking box had led him to. Directly across the street from him was a small garage-gas station, operated solely, it appeared, by a little gray-haired old lady. “She don’t look like no robot manufacturer,” he said to himself.

The old lady was dressed in overalls and a ski parka. She was pumping gas for an elderly Plymouth and was obviously the person referred to in the garage’s name—Granny’s Auto Repair.

Smitty crossed the street and glanced at the lighted garage. “Yeah, there’s the jalopy Nevins was driving . . . Hey! It’s all banged up.”

“All my receipts are already at the Merchants & Carpenters Bank,” the old lady called to him as her customer drove out.

“Huh?” The giant halted beside a gas pump.

“If you’re a stickup artist,” Granny told him, “I want you to know there’s hardly any money or ration stamps around. In fact, I’m just closing for supper.”

“Aw, I ain’t no crook,” Smitty assured her. “What I was curious about is that car, the dark sedan you got up on the rack over there. Think it belongs to a pal of mine I’m looking for.”

“Fellow took a skid out on the highway.”

“What sort of guy?”

“Didn’t see him personal. He had a pleasant speaking voice on the phone. Asked me to have his car picked up and hauled in here to fix,” the little old lady explained. “I had my nephew, Merle, drive out and get it. Fellow left us twenty dollars hid in the sun visor.”

“Yeah, he’s a swell guy that way.” Obviously Nevins must have had an accident while the Avenger and Nellie were on his tail. After the accident, the Avenger had arranged to have the man’s car hauled away. But where was Nevins now? And where were the Avenger and Nellie?

“. . . told him I couldn’t work on his car until maybe next week, since Merle doesn’t know his ear from his elbow when it comes to repairs. Got to do everything myself. This fellow said that was perfectly okay with—”

“Thanks a lot, Granny,” said Smitty. “You been a big help.”

He hurried back to his car to get in touch with Nellie on his two-way radio.

“Huh?”

“I said,” repeated Nellie into her speaker, “there’s a hot time in the old town tonight, as in the famed old ballad.”

“Don’t go talking like Cole at a time like this,” admonished Smitty. “What’s up?”

Nellie was sitting in the parked car. From here she could see the fire that was eating at the amusement park. “The joint’s on fire.”

“What joint?”

“An old shut-down amusement park called Westlake Playland,” the little blonde told him. “Our friend the Iron Skull apparently had his headquarters down underneath the place.”

“What happened to that Nevins bozo?”

“I’ve got him right . . . Hey, there goes another fire truck! That makes four of ’em.”

“Where’s Dick?”

“He impersonated Nevins . . . did a terrific job, I think . . . and went in to beard the Skull in his lair,” explained Nellie. “That was about an hour ago.”

“What about Mac and the rest?”

“I imagine Richard has rescued them by now.” Nellie turned the handle of her door. “I’m not sure exactly why the whole place seems to be burning down, but I’m going to hotfoot it, if you’ll pardon the expression, down there and find out. You in one piece, by the way?”

“Oh, yeah, you know me,” came the giant’s voice out of her two-way radio. “Couple punks tried to chop me up with an ax and another guy, named either Hutchison or Harris, I never found out which, took a potshot at me. But outside of that, it’s been a pretty uneventful afternoon.”

“Things may be more interesting over this way. Come on over,” she invited and told him how to get to the burning amusement park.

Cole wiped his hands on a spangled piece of cloth he’d found in one of the park booths. He was smeared with soot and mud. “Not so much as a bolt,” he said to Josh.

He and the Negro were standing a few yards from the now black remains of the museum the Iron Skull had set afire. Everything hereabouts was sooty and wet. The last of the firemen had just departed.