The Avenger 1 - Justice, Inc. (10 page)

Fifteen minutes later his car, a fast roadster he’d bought early that morning, slid to a stop in front of the Leon residence. He saw the town car in front of the garage and as he went toward it, he saw the huge chauffeur hurrying from the rear door of the house, shedding his livery coat as he walked.

Benson stopped in front of him. “Just a minute,” he said.

The man stopped and stared down at him.

Thirteen years before, in Alaska, Benson had known a man called Bull Red. He was just under seven feet tall, with a leonine mane of red hair, and bent crowbars with his bare hands without bothering to brace them over his knee. Not since the days of Bull Red had Benson seen such size as he saw now, in this chauffeur.

“All right, what do you want?” snapped the huge fellow, holding his coat over his arm.

“You’re the chauffeur for Mr. Leon?” Benson said.

There was black fury in the giant’s eyes. And something else. The ordinary person would see in the big fellow a moon-faced guy with mild china-blue eyes who was as stupid as he was enormous. But Benson saw deeper. He saw a fast brain concealed under the phlegmatic, full face, and plenty of intelligence in the far depths of the china-blue eyes.

“I was
the driver for Mr. Leon,” the man snapped. “I was just fired!”

“Oh?” said Benson. “You mean, when you got back from Lansing’s house?”

The giant glared. “How do you know I was there? And what’s it to you?”

“I know you were there because I saw you,” said Benson calmly. “And it’s this to me: there’s a mystery about that house and I want to solve it.”

The giant crouched a little, as if the words had been blows.

“So!” he said. “You’re a cop! Well, you won’t get
me
for the boss’ disappearance!”

He leaped at Benson as he spoke.

Benson had been sure, on eyeing all that vast bulk, that the man would be so muscle-bound that he’d have about the agility of a snowplow. Bull Red had been slowed by being muscle-bound. But this man jumped at him as swiftly and certainly as if he’d been a flyweight boxer!

Fast as Benson was himself, he had time only to get his right hand up, and jerk his head to one side as a fist like a side of beef swept by. It was lucky he got the hand up for the giant’s vast hand caught his left shoulder.

The big fellow had time for only one short press of his huge fingers, but that almost did for the fast gray fox of a man with the dead, still face. Then Benson’s free right hand got a fold of flesh and muscle under the giant’s extended left armpit in a police grip that is warranted to make any man howl. He twisted with his steel-wire fingers.

The big fellow gasped and let go. Benson’s hand shot up from the armpit to the column of a throat. He bent his back like a fast gray cat, and the giant rolled over it like an avalanche and crashed to the graveled drive.

It would have done for most, but this man got up as lithely as if he’d weighed a third what he actually did. He flashed for Benson again, less recklessly this time, with the black fury higher in his eyes—but with something like respect there, too.

From the house behind them some woman was screaming.

“Police! Get the police! He kidnapped my father! Now he’s murdering somebody!
Police!”

Benson feinted from the tremendous arms that were reaching for him; but fast as he was, the big fellow was almost as fast. He got Benson’s right wrist in a bone-crushing grip, and twisted his arm up behind him.

Then he put his right arm, as huge as a flexible tree trunk, around Benson with his doubled fist in the middle of his back and began breaking the gray man with the dead, white face in two.

Quality in muscle, as well as quantity! The giant weighed nearly twice as much as Benson, and he was putting forth his full strength in an effort to crack Benson’s spine. But into the gray man’s steel cables of sinew surged the explosive, mysterious power that makes the muscle fiber of a rare few far superior, ounce for ounce, to that of ordinary men.

For a few seconds he actually stopped that appalling pressure on his back. Like a steel bar, bending thus far and no farther, he quivered there in the big man’s crushing grip. But it could only last a few seconds, and Benson knew it. So he risked everything on a single throw.

Deliberately exposing himself even more to the terrible pressure, he twisted enough to get his left arm loose, and brought his hand up to the back of the giant’s neck. There, with blackness fogging his brain and with his final reserve of strength almost gone, he pressed deep on either side of the spinal column with thumb and second finger.

For a full five seconds the giant made no sound, and there was no slackening of his terrific grip. Benson, with the black fog almost overwhelming him, and with his own muscles failing perceptibly, wondered in a dim corner of his brain at the giant’s resistance to that deadly grip. Was that vast bulk made of metal? Were there no ropes of nerves there, as in other men, to cut off consciousness as they were pressed?

Then, all at once, like a falling tree, the big fellow sagged. His arms slid from their hold, and he slumped to his knees, shaking his head like a stricken bull to clear his vision.

Benson reeled to the town car and leaned against a fender to get his own strength back. And in the silence, the screams of the woman from the house were apparent to the ears of both once more.

“Police! Police!”

The big fellow spoke, kneeling in the gravel, staring with utter unbelief at the comparatively small man who had beaten him, staring with something like awe at the white, set face which even now expressed no emotion whatever.

“You’re the only man,” he said hoarsely, “who ever got away from me, once I got my hands on him!”

Panting, Benson didn’t answer. It had been the nearest thing in his life. He concentrated on getting his strength back.

“All right,” the big fellow said, getting to legs that shook under him like uncertain tree trunks. “You can take me in. Any cop that can do that to me—”

“I’m not a cop,” said Benson.

“You’re not?” said the giant. “Why, I thought you’d trailed me here to arrest me because my boss, Leon, disappeared from the house where I’d driven him—”

“Leon gone?” Benson snapped, straightening. “Your employer, too? Is every influential person in the city menaced by this thing? Tell me what you can—”

“All right. But make it some place else, fast,” said the giant, “before the cops do come in answer to Miss Leon’s screaming. Because if they come, they’ll get me for the boss’ disappearance—and they’ll make it stick!”

The giant was bursting out of the largest ready-made suit Benson had been able to get in Buffalo. But it would have to do till a tailor could make up a suit to order.

“Or maybe ’tis a tent maker we’ll have to call in for ye,” said MacMurdie, frosty blue eyes traveling over the great body.

The three were in Benson’s hotel suite. Benson was staring with gray gimlet eyes at the giant’s mild-seeming china-blue ones.

“Your employer just walked into that house, belonging to John Lansing, and didn’t come out again?” Benson repeated.

The big fellow nodded.

“And you came back in a hurry and reported it to his daughter, and she hysterically discharged you, and indicated that she was going to hand you over to the police.”

“Yes,” said the giant, voice too high for his bulk.

“Why was she so sure you had something to do with the kidnaping? For kidnapping’s what it must have been.”

The big fellow reddened. “Because I’ve been in jail,” he said defiantly.

Benson’s gray eyes probed deep. He didn’t see the sly shrewdness of the criminal in the china-blue eyes. All he saw was a huge fellow, a lot smarter than he appeared to be, who would be as decent a citizen as anyone else—unless he were roused.

“Care to explain the jail sentence?” he said.

“I was framed,” said the giant. “It was with a big electrical-equipment corporation. I’m an electrical engineer. Graduated from Massachusetts Tech. I was working on television, and some platinum disappeared from the laboratory. Eight thousand dollars’ worth. They nailed
me
for it, and I got a year in the pen. I’d have gotten ten, only the evidence was so clouded the conviction wasn’t clear. I couldn’t get a regular job after that. All I could get was a job as chauffeur to Mr. Leon, who overlooked my past. Then something has to go and happen to him! If I’m ever tagged as the last man to see him alive, with my jail record, I’ll go up for kidnaping as sure as there’s a ceiling over our heads.”

“That’s why you charged at me the minute I opened my mouth to ask you a question?”

“That’s why. I thought you were a cop and I didn’t dare let a cop take me.”

“What’s your name?”

The giant stared at the pale-gray eyes with his ears slowly reddening.

“Algernon Heathcote Smith,” he said in a stifled voice.

MacMurdie stared at the almost three hundred pounds of brawn with his frosty blue eyes widening. Then for the first time Benson heard him laugh.

“Algie!” the Scot hooted. “Algie! Heathcote! Why—”

The giant’s body rippled toward him, and MacMurdie became discreetly silent. The big fellow faced Benson again.

“The name’s Smitty to my friends,” he said. And he added dangerously, “Most people try to be friends with me.

“I wouldn’t doubt it,” said Benson, ice-gray eyes traveling over the unbelievable mountain of sinew. “So you’re out of a job, Smitty. And you can drive, and you’re an electrical engineer with enough technical training to be working on television. Would you like to work for me? I think I could use you.”

“I’d like it very much.”

“Whoosh,
chief!” exclaimed MacMurdie. “We don’t need the help of little boys. You and I can—”

Smitty’s ingenuous blue eyes went his way again, and MacMurdie once more relapsed into thoughtful silence.

“What work is it you want me to do?” Smitty asked the gray man with the immobile white face.

“Dangerous work,” said Benson. “I wouldn’t blame you if you decided against taking it when you’ve heard about it. We’re fighting against some organized gang of criminals so daring that men like your employer, Leon, and like Lawrence Hickock, seem menaced—along with Heaven knows how many lesser lives. A gang so powerful that the police seem helpless to hold any of the lesser killers turned in to them. A gang so clever that even now, after strenuous efforts, we hardly know more concerning their eventual murderous goal than we did when we started out. Quite possibly one or all of us may be killed before we’re through. That’s the work, Smitty. Care to take it on?”

The giant’s moon-full face with the china-blue eyes, for once, expressed the keen intelligence and firm will that dwelt behind the not-very-bright-looking exterior.

“I’d count it a rare privilege to help you in such work, sir,” he said. “And now, if you wouldn’t mind telling me more—”

Benson told the story from the start, eyes like tortured gray steel in a face that could not move a muscle to express the agony of recounting that dreadful starting episode in the plane. And Smitty listened with fury and sympathy to the clipped words of his new chief.