The Avenger 4 - The Devil’s Horns (10 page)

Smitty reached for a gun.

“No, you don’t,” came a voice. And a gun muzzle jammed into his side.

The voice was the voice of the red-headed helper, and the gun was in his hand. Smitty turned toward him.

The youngster’s eyes were feverish, frightened, but resolute. His hand, Smitty could feel, was shaking a little. A shaking finger on a trigger is a deadly thing.

“So you’re in with the gang,” Smitty said.

“That’s right,” said the youngster, trying to bluster even while his voice trembled.

“Pretty new at it, aren’t you?” said Smitty calmly.

“Well, what the hell. You have to start sometime. I’m not going to drive a truck at forty per all my life.”

Two men came out of the sedan, with tommy guns. From a dark corner nearby, came four more men, also armed. They swarmed up the cab.

“Out, you two!” one snarled, poking his gun toward the giant.

“I’ve got him covered, Tony,” quavered the redhead.

“Oh, hello kid,” said Tony. “You get out, too. Pete, take the truck and go fast and far.”

Smitty got out, with a flock of guns on him. It was all right. He’d had orders to get himself captured. The Avenger had wanted him to, so that he could see who was in this racket crowd, and perhaps learn a bit about the higher-ups. The giant was fast and agile. He could have taken that gun from the shaking youngster beside him in the cab if he’d wanted to. He might even have beaten the situation here, with incentive enough.

The redhead got out, too. One of the men got into the truck, jammed it clear of the half-wrecked little sedan. It thundered down the street, veering off into darker streets at the next corner.

And the men with Smitty and the red-headed kid just waited. That was funny. Smitty couldn’t figure that one out.

“Where the hell are they?” snarled the one the kid had called Tony. Then he shot into the air.

From down the street came the answering wail of a police-car siren, as it rushed to investigate.

“Fade—Manks, Bert and Sling.”

Three of the five racketeers went back to the dark corner from which they had emerged. There was the purr of a motor, as they got away from there. Tony, and another, continued to hold guns on Smitty.

Covering him that way, Tony reached with his left hand into a side pocket and got out an automatic.

“Tony,” gulped the red-headed tyro in crime, “the cops! Don’t you think we ought to lam?”

“Nope,” said Tony. “That ain’t the plan.”

And he shot the kid through the heart with the automatic in his left hand.

It was the most barbarous, coldblooded, unexpected thing that could be imagined. Tony and his pal stared down at the dead youngster, so swiftly trapped in the crime net he had helped to fashion. Smitty stared, too, then roared.

“Why, you—”

The automatic was wrenched from Tony’s hand, and nestled in Smitty’s huge one. Smitty snapped the trigger at Tony.

And nothing happened.

“Thanks,” said Tony. “Nice prints on that gat, now.”

Then the cop car came up.

Two plain-clothes men jumped out. They covered the three, with special reference
to the
giant. Smitty was at sea. He couldn’t understand—

“This guy crashed my car,” Tony said calmly to the two detectives. “He was in a truck with this red-headed kid and another guy. He and the red-headed kid climbed down; then the other guy ran off in the truck. Hit-and-run. This big guy yanked a gun on us when we started to say it was his fault. The red-headed kid tried to side with us, so the big guy shot him. Then we covered him till the cops could come. Look! He’s got the murder gun still in his hand.”

Smitty dropped the automatic as if it had burned him.

“All right, you, come along with us,” said one of the detectives. He didn’t bluster. It would have sounded better if he had.

“You don’t believe a thin-air yarn like that, do you?” said Smitty hotly.

The detective looked at the gun on the pavement, and at the dead boy with the bullet hole in his heart.

“Come along!”

“These are the guys you ought to take,” snapped Smitty, pointing to Tony and his pal. “They rammed my truck on purpose to stop it. They got me out at gun point, and then one of them went off with the truck. These two must have criminal records—”

Smitty stopped, at a sudden unpleasant thought.

“Come along, I said!”

Inwardly raging, Smitty got into the squad car. He might have disarmed the redhead in the cab. He might even have gotten away from the gang, if he’d tried.

But he couldn’t beat these two steady, alert police guns.

The Avenger had said to get taken by the gang. But the gang had been much too smart. So now he was taken by the police, with a murder frame tightly tied around his neck. And in this town, where police and mayor seemed to be owned by the very element they were supposed to fight, the future looked black indeed.

Then there was that other thing that had Smitty so badly worried—

That came out in about three hours, after he’d been taken to headquarters.

Smitty had started his career as an electrical engineer, graduating with high honors from Massachusetts Tech. He had started with a big electrical corporation, working in their laboratory on television. Some platinum disappeared from the laboratory, and they nailed
him
for it. The real thief had managed to palm it off on the giant. He had spent a year in jail for another man’s crime, and afterward had been unable to get decent work until Benson met him and took him on as crime fighter.

So Smitty had a prison record, and it came out, from New York, with the first of the routine police wires to the headquarters of other towns.

Captain Harrigo nodded, very much pleased.

“Sent up for larceny,” he said. “Now caught after murdering a guy. We’ll have some action to give the folks who think we’ve been laying down on the truck racket.”

Smitty didn’t say anything. It wouldn’t have done any good.

The decent people of Ashton City had been raising the devil because the police force, for reasons best known to themselves, had gotten nowhere with the rackets. Now, here was a convenient goat. The papers would come out with an account of a racketeer held for murder. The police department would be white-washed a little. Everything would be fine.

Except for the man unfortunate enough to be the goat!

“Come along,” said Harrigo. “We’ll put you in a nice, comfortable cell. And then in a few weeks we’ll lead you out to a nice, comfortable chair, with electricity to keep you warm.”

Every one of The Avenger’s aides had suffered from the murderous greed of criminals.

Nellie’s kindly professor father had been murdered for the secret, which he held, of the hiding place of the great lost gold hoard of the Aztecs. Nellie and Benson knew where that gold hoard was, now, and could draw on it whenever they pleased, as on a tremendous bank account. But that didn’t give Nellie back her father, so Nellie was a little fury against all murderers everywhere.

Josh and Rosabel had seen two of the kindliest men who ever lived, their inventor-employers, shot down to get from them inventions valuable to crime. So Josh and Rosabel counted that day lost when they could not strike a blow against the underworld in general.

Smitty, as has been said, had spent a year in prison and had his future blasted because of the frame of a thief.

But none of them, save Richard Henry Benson himself, had suffered such horror from organized crime as had the dour Scotchman, Fergus MacMurdie.

Benson had lost his wife and small daughter to crime. But MacMurdie had lost equally as much. His wife and small son had been blown to bits by a racket bomb. So MacMurdie lived only when he was fighting some criminal syndicate. As he was doing now.

The Avenger had ordered him to get what he could on the two-weeks-old murder of Judge Martineau. Then Benson had radioed Mac the tip Nellie had gotten at the nightclub: Judge Martineau had been shot down in the Friday the Thirteenth Club, by the side of the pretty but unscrupulous brunette dancer, Lila Belle.

Mac had circulated around the Friday the Thirteenth Club, with his thrifty Scotch soul outraged at seeing such wads of money recklessly badgered about on roulette tables and other gaming devices. He hadn’t picked up anything. So shortly after two o’clock in the morning, he decided to work on the Lila Belle angle.

He took a bus, opening an old-fashioned little snap-purse when the conductor came around, and grudgingly taking out a dime. Mac could have the money he wanted from The Avenger, any time he desired it. But it went against his grain to waste even a penny.

He got off the bus at the street number listed as Miss Belle’s. That number belonged to a towering apartment building not far from Groman’s. It was Ashton City’s newest and tallest—fifteen stories high.

The dour Scot considered. There was a lobby. There were people in it. And he wanted to get into the dancer’s place unseen.

A phone call to her apartment had revealed that she was never home till after her turn at a nightclub competing with Sisco’s Gray Dragon. It had also revealed that her apartment number was 1414.

Mac’s eyes went to the fire escape at the side of the building. In a minute he had followed his eyes and was on it. He paddled up fourteen floors on his enormous feet.

There was a steel door from the hallway to escape. He took out a stout, old-fashioned jackknife. The door was fastened, as customary, by a bolt worked by a pushbar on the inside. He inserted the knife blade between door jamb and door, lifted the bolt by main force, flipping down the bar inside as he did so, and then was in the hall.

Any one of The Avenger’s aides could handle any lock not specially built. Mac got Lila Belle’s door open in about four minutes, and stepped into an ornate living room, bristling with nightclub dolls and artificial flowers and pink, long window drapes and such other spinach.

Mac got swiftly to work. He wanted to get out of there fast. If he were picked up for breaking and entering, in this town, it would be bad.

He went first to a spindle-legged desk and worked deftly through it, not disturbing the contents enough so that evidence of a search would remain. He was looking for something, anything, relevant to the night Judge Martineau was shot.

He found a bale of letters from indiscreet rich men of the town. He found a deadly-looking little .25 automatic, which he took the precaution of unloading. And then he found a bank book.

The book showed a deposit, just two weeks ago, of one thousand dollars.

Payment for her part in smearing Martineau’s good name on the night of the murder? It looked like it. Mac finished with the desk and went to the bedroom.

This place was even more cloying in its over-feminine fanciness. He grimaced, and searched with big, bony hands through frills and furbelows. He found one more thing.

In the dressing case, in the bottom of a jewel box with a lock that a child could have picked, was a folded paper. The paper said:

Good work, toots. Here’s the grand.

J.M.S.

Sometimes shrewd, ruthless men are betrayed by habit. It apparently was John M. Singell’s habit to initial things leaving his desk. So he had initialed this, without thinking. And Lila Belle, like a good, careful crook, had saved the little note for future emergencies.

Mac put the note in his pocket—and heard voices.

The next instant, he heard a door open—the door leading from the hallway into the apartment, here. So Lila Belle never got home before three! Well, this was one night she was breaking the rules. And with her was some gentleman friend.

Mac, lips taut, flattened against the bedroom wall, near the door. But the bedroom would be the first place the girl would come on arriving home.

The two hadn’t turned the lights on yet. Mac, unbelievably silent and fast on his Gargantuan feet, slid back into the living room and to one of the windows. There was no way out there, but the drapes—

He stood behind one of the heavy, pink things—and the light went on.

Between drape and wall there was an inch crack. Mac peered through this. He saw a girl of twenty-four or so, but looking older by reason of the hard line bracketing her mouth. In spite of the line, however, she was very pretty, with creamy shoulders rising bare from a low-cut gown revealed when she took her fur coat off.