The Avenger 9 - Tuned for Murder (18 page)

Benson tried a third blow, and Smitty’s huge hand caught his arm. It was like catching and holding a steel bar, but the giant held it till he could get his other arm around Benson’s middle. Then he squeezed, like a great bear.

Benson’s head went back, neck cording with his effort. His arms spread out at the sides and he twisted just a little in the terrific grip!

“Gosh!” breathed Fats again.

No man could break that gigantic grip. But—The Avenger did it. He twisted again, got one hand loose long enough to whip it up behind the giant’s back and find a nerve spot at the base of the skull. Smitty staggered and let Benson slide free.

The Avenger bored in once more. Smitty’s fist raised to smash down on the top of his head. Benson ducked sideways with his fluid swiftness—but not quite far enough! The fist crashed on the cap of his left shoulder, and even though Benson had rolled with the blow, his left arm hung limp from that moment.

When wounded or outnumbered, attack. That was The Avenger’s slogan, and he followed it, now. He leaped for Smitty almost before the giant had brought his arm back from the crippling blow. Leaped for him and tried to get the deadly neck pressure, again.

The giant could have killed him, now. But there was something lacking in the heavy swing with which he hurled the white-faced Avenger off of him. There was a certain spirit and ferocity gone, and there was also, for the first time, some expression on his face. He stared around—

“What—” began Kopell.

The narrow-jawed man snarled, “Hey! I believe the guy is maybe snappin’ out of it—”

Benson crouched where he had ended after Smitty’s wild swing. And in his pale, inexorably eyes was a queer glint of satisfaction. It was too bad for the gang that they couldn’t see that pale glint, and know by some sort of sorcery what had caused it.

Benson hadn’t attacked the giant with any intent to overcome him. If he had, there might have been a different outcome. And Benson’s left arm wasn’t nearly as numbed as its posture indicated. It was all pretense. All an act to permit him to do one thing. And that thing he had done!

At the very first of the fight, Benson’s deft hand had slipped into Smitty’s pocket and closed on the black disk he knew must be there, keeping the giant in submission.

He had withdrawn the disk and thrown it down the chasm by a furtive movement entirely lost in the ferocity of the fight he was staging. Then he had prolonged the fight only in order to let Smitty’s mind clear.

Now, it was clearing.

The Avenger’s aides had minds and bodies very nearly as fleet as the gray steel man’s own. The gang was beginning to catch on—but Nellie and Mac and Josh
knew.
And in an instant they had begun to act on that knowledge, with the unspoken unity that made them such a perfect small crime-fighting corps.

They began to separate, moving unobtrusively so as not to attract attention.

They didn’t have to try. The gang didn’t have much attention to spare for them. They were too occupied with watching the giant who was changing so disconcertingly. One of the men leveled his gun at Smitty’s great back.

The reaction to that came from a source almost completely forgotten by Benson’s aides, as well as by the mob.

Dr. Markham was about as frightened as an intelligent man can be, but he was not too frightened to have been looking for a weapon ever since the change in Smitty began to become apparent. Not having been able to find any missile, he had jerked off his shoe.

The shoe hurtled neatly forward and caught the man aiming the gun at Smitty squarely at the back of his head. It wasn’t much of a blow, but it jerked his finger convulsively before it was ready to constrict on the trigger, and sent the shot into the floor.

The shot started it. Things had gone wrong with Kopell’s joke. There was no use fooling around any longer. Shoot these mugs, and be done with it.

But then the unobtrusive moves of Mac and Josh and Nellie showed their value. None of them were where the gang had left them, in a little knot by the chasm. They were all over the place.

And next to the wall, the guy with the prematurely white hair and the death-pale eyes was stooping to get at something at the calves of his legs.

Kopell cursed and raised a tommy gun to finish The Avenger off with a burst. As he did so, an automatic spoke behind him as one of the men fired at Mac.

But the shot at Mac went wild because Josh was on the shooter’s back a fraction of a second before it was aimed. And a man who was following the Negro’s shifting body with a gun muzzle, had to hold his fire because he was afraid he’d shoot his pal.

Kopell, meanwhile, was too busy to see that the diminutive Nellie Gray was streaking toward him like a blond rocket. He had The Avenger over his sights, and then he didn’t have anybody over them. He was doing a kind of pinwheel imitation in midair, with his right arm as the axle and his body as the wheel. Nellie had exerted a little deft pressure at just the right spot, and his own weight and strength had been used against him to do the rest.

There was shooting all over the place. But the gang were shooting, they began to think, at ghosts. Highly co-operative ghosts. When you aimed at one, something smacked you from side or rear. When you whirled, the one you’d aimed at, first, slugged you unconscious.

Kopell had retained his grip on the submachine gun when he fell. Nellie’s high, sharp heel persuaded his hand to relax. She stooped for it, but he managed to bat it out of both their reaches.

Then Smitty was in the fight. With a roar that still had a note of bewilderment in it as to how he had gotten here and what he had been about to do when he unaccountably regained his senses, he jumped at three of Kopell’s men who happened to be standing in a little knot.

One yelled and fired, and the slug got the giant in the leg. Another fired—and drilled one of his own pals just beyond Smitty’s flying form, in the back of the neck. Then the giant was on them, and those three weren’t doing any more shooting. Smitty couldn’t stand any more, but he could, and did, put his vast arms around all three and drag them helpless to the floor in his own fall.

And, now, another ghastly thing was happening. A man of Kopell’s, with no one near him at all, sank to the floor without a sound or a further move. There was a gash on the exact top of his head as if he had been blackjacked—but there wasn’t a soul around to blackjack him.

Another, ten feet from him, fell with the same kind of gash on his head, and Kopell’s crew began yelling like maniacs! Somehow, although it couldn’t possibly have happened, the tables were being turned on them.

The big fellow who looked like Gargantua turned dumbly for Kopell, to see what was to be done. He saw Kopell being thrown a second time by a little bit of a blonde who looked as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, saw the blonde reach for Kopell’s tommy gun.

Gargantua aimed from the hip for a quick shot that would put a hole in the pretty head under the silky blond hair. And with the move he screamed something and dropped his gun, to stare in agonized bewilderment at his hand.

There was a slim, needle-pointed dagger in his hand, transfixing it neatly.

The Avenger had gone to work with his weapons.

Benson had probably the strangest pair of weapons the world holds. He kept them strapped in slim sheaths on right and left calf, below the knee. He called one Mike and the other, Ike.

Mike was a streamlined, special .22 revolver with a tiny cylinder holding only four cartridges and with a specially devised silencer on it. With this, The Avenger “creased” enemies; smashing a slug across the top of their heads so that they would be knocked unconscious but not killed.

Ike was the dagger which Gargantua found transfixing his hand before he could shoot at Nellie—a throwing knife with a hollow tube for a handle with which Benson could hit a flyspeck from twenty feet.

Nellie had her hands on the submachine gun, now. Kopell saw it, and leaped for her with a savage yell. His feet were aimed at her head, to crush her skull. But he had jumped too fast to reckon his distance properly, and to realize just how close Nellie was to the edge of the deep chasm.

Nellie twisted aside like a blond shadow, so that the flying feet missed their cruel aim. Kopell went right on, hands clawing as he lit, but not stopping his slide in the dirt.

His body hurtled over the edge. For an instant he clung with just his fingertips, hanging over the brink of the cleft with the dank, cold air whipping up around him from the secret river far, far below.

His scream was a ghastly thing in the closed cellar. Then it was receding as his body plummeted down. Quite a joker, Kopell. A grim joker! But death had proved the grimmest and most effective joker of all, and had directed his jest at Kopell.

A man racing from the infuriated pursuit of Mac, turned to fire at him. And there was a burst from Kopell’s gun. The slugs shaved his head and knocked craters in the basement wall beside him. The man gasped at the unexpectedness of it, then yelled hoarsely as he realized how close the marksmanship had been.

“Drop the gun,” said Nellie Gray. “Or next time I’ll shoot your ears off. And I can do just that!”

There was silence where there had been pandemonium.

Four men lay unconscious on the floor. Gargantua was groaning and nursing his streaming hand. Kopell was floating down a subterranean river. The young man with the old eyes, the man with the narrow jaw and the fellow with the slant, Mongol eyes, were released from Smitty’s tremendous embrace to join Fats—facing Nellie’s submachine gun.

“And that’s that,” said Nellie. “Where’s the chief?”

Benson was no longer in the basement room. But Nellie didn’t look very hard. Her eyes caught the red stream welling from Smitty’s columnar leg.

“Smitty!” she gasped. “Smitty! Are you hurt badly?”

“Just a scratch,” said Smitty through set teeth. “Keep your eyes on your work, will you, you frivolous blond nuisance?”

Nellie jerked her gun back in line in time to avert incipient rebellion on the part of the four she covered.

In Cranlowe’s library over their heads, the masked young man was exhorting the inventor who, with wide eyes, was writing out that formula. It was an intricate thing, taking time.

“Hurry, Cranlowe!” the masked man snapped. “That shooting downstairs— Something’s gone wrong! Some piece of careless—some stupid blunder— Hurry up!”

Cranlowe made a last symbol on the paper, and stopped.

“That’s all there is to it? The formula is complete?”

“Yes,” said Cranlowe.

The masked man stooped, took the paper so swiftly from under Cranlowe’s hand that he almost tore it, and whirled to run, stuffing the precious formula in his pocket as he did so.

He stopped at once and stood very still.

In the doorway stood a man whose hair was snow-white, though the man was obviously young. From a death-white face that moved not at all, pale and deadly eyes peered at the blue silk handkerchief acting as a mask. The man was not big, but he seemed to fill the doorway as he stood there.

“Who—who are you?” said the masked man, mechanically. He was stalling while his right hand, still up from putting the formula in his inner coat pocket, strayed slowly toward a holster under his left arm.

“You know who I am,” said The Avenger. “I’ll have the formula, please, Grace.”

“Grace! Grace? Why are you calling me by a girl’s name?”

“Stanley Grace,” Benson corrected, quietly.

“Why, you’re mad!” The hand was touching the gun butt, now. “You’re—”

“Who could be in a position to dominate Jenner so easily and constantly? His secretary. Who could have witnessed the experiment with the vibrator to kill bacteria, in the Garfield Gear plant? The president’s secretary. It was apparent from the beginning that you were behind this, Grace.”

“And now I’m beaten, eh?” said Grace, shoulders drooping while his hand, slowly, unobtrusively, drew the gun free from its holster. Why, the white-haired man didn’t even have a weapon in his hand!

“Now you’re beaten,” nodded The Avenger. “You’ve moved heaven and earth to get that formula. And now you’re caught with it. And downstairs is an underworld gang that will go up for kidnaping to the last man—Miss Gray knows where Robert Cranlowe is being held, and can take the police there. It’s all over, Grace.”

With his left hand, Grace reached up and slipped off his mask, revealing the high-bridged nose and pale, almost delicate face. The move was to distract his captor so that he could get that gun still a little farther into the clear.

“A proposition, Benson,” he said, pleadingly. “This high-explosive formula is worth more millions than any one man can spend. Let me go, and we’ll split the money which some nation will pay for it. I’ll give you a duplicate of it, right now, to prove that I’m not trying to put anything over on you.”

The gun was ready to whip out. The man in the doorway was surely doomed. Yet, Grace felt a chill steal up his spine.

The Avenger looked like the figure of Fate, herself, as he stood there, empty-handed, pale eyes flaring like chips of ice in an arctic dawn.

But it seemed that he was not quite empty-handed after all. Not quite!

A subtle change was stealing over Grace’s weakly aristocratic face. It was becoming—blanker! Mounting triumph, even hatred, died slowly on his countenance.

Benson’s left hand moved a little, within itself. It was enough to tell the tale to Grace, whose hand had moved that same way many times.

“Damn you!” he screamed. “You’ve got . . . a disk.”

“Of course,” said Benson. His voice was not a fraction of a tone different. “Didn’t Jenner, at your command, put one into my pocket in his office?”

“You’ve . . . got . . . a . . . disk—”

Sweat was standing out on Grace’s forehead as he fought the swift numbing of his will power. He got the gun out of its holster. But his hand was moving more and more slowly. And it stopped with the muzzle barely freed.

“I’ll . . . get . . . you—”

With the last remnant of his will, Grace tried to pull the trigger. He did not know the gun was pointed, not at The Avenger, but down at his own abdomen in his lax and will-less hand.