The Avenger 1 - Justice, Inc. (12 page)

Benson got to the window he had entered. But after a little pause, he did not go out. He went down more stairs instead.

“When you go into a place where you have the least suspicion of bein’ watched, son,
don’t come out the same hole you went in!”

A so-called Arizona bad man, whose “badness” usually resulted in the death of somebody long overripe for death, had tipped Benson to that little piece of advice years ago, when Benson was still in his teens but was taking his place just the same as a grown man in a tough country.

Benson calmly walked down the main hall of the big house to the front door. He opened the portal. The back of the arguing servant was toward him. The reporters gaped.

“Well, what do you know!” exclaimed one.

The servant whirled, saw Benson, and squealed:

“How dare you enter this house against orders? And how did you get in, anyway? If someone let you in the back door, after all the commands—”

His voice was interrupted by a double roar of heavy-caliber automatics, sounding almost as one. A .45 slug spat into stone within three inches of Benson’s head. At the same time one of the reporters gave a scream of pain and sagged to the ground, where he clawed at his leg, from which blood was spouting from a hole above the knee.

Had Benson come out the window, where the two men had their guns trained as accurately as though held in a testing vise, he would have died. As it was, reappearing suddenly and unexpectedly from the point least foreseen by Pete and his pal, their hastily aimed guns had missed. And they got no second shots.

Benson, with the first bark of the heavy automatics, had leaped to one side and was gone, behind a bank of bushes. He whipped Ike, the slim, razorlike throwing dagger from its sheath below his left knee, and slashed off a branch of one of the bushes. He threw the branch. It hit in another clump of bushes thirty feet farther on.

“There he is,” yelled a voice from the door, as the far clump of bushes quivered with the thrown branch.

And in the little summerhouse, Pete and the other gunman jerked their automatics toward that bush. Benson slipped Mike, the tiny, silenced .22 from its leg sheath. He aimed with care, but only for a half-second, and squeezed the trigger.

There was a soft
spat,
hardly louder than the
phutt
of an air gun. And Pete, with two inches of head showing above the summerhouse rail, went down. His companion stared at him with his mouth open. What had hit Pete? And from where?

Blood trickled slowly down Pete’s forehead from above the hairline. The other man stared around in terror—then went down himself as there was a second soft
spat
from Mike.

Benson, with the woodcraft of an Indian, stole from the spot and from the grounds unseen.

“So you killed them both,” said Smitty, back at the hotel. Benson had returned well before the mentioned hour. Smitty’s eyes were wholly approving as he said the words.

“I didn’t kill them,” said Benson, face still and calm as a snow-whitened pond. “I merely left them unconscious, for the police to take for the wounding of that reporter. I creased them, if you know what that means.”

Smitty nodded.

“When a bullet hits a man a glancing blow on the top of his head, instead of drilling the head itself, that man is knocked cold instead of being killed. He is ‘creased.’ I’ve heard of it, but always as a freak accident. I didn’t know anyone was good enough with a gun to shoot that fine on purpose.”

Benson shrugged a little.

“Any man who can hit a dime at fifty paces can do it. It’s not too difficult.”

“It sounds miraculous to me,” said the giant. “But—why
didn’t
you kill them? They certainly deserved it.”

Benson’s ice-gray eyes narrowed.

“Ever kill a man, Smitty?”

“No.”

“Well, I had to, once. In Tahiti. I swore I’d never kill again, if I could possibly avoid it. And to help avoid it, I practiced with Mike till I could hit that dime at that fifty paces.”

Benson’s eyes changed expression. His face could not change; it was a dead thing. So the gray flame of his pale, deadly eyes seemed to be gaining more expressiveness than eyes ordinarily have, in compensation.

He stared at Smitty.

“Any phone calls while I was gone?”

The giant shook his head. “Were you expecting any?”

“Expecting?” said Benson, tortured words slipping from lips that showed no torture. “No, Smitty. Hoping? Yes. I am still hoping that my wife and girl are alive. I am still hoping I’ll get a demand for money in exchange for their lives. If I do—well, I have several million dollars, and the crooks can have it all, if they give Alicia and Alice back to me. After that—I’ll wind them up or die trying! But first they can have all I’ve got if they’ll return those two, alive.”

“There was no phone call,” said Smitty gently.

The door opened, and MacMurdie came in. The dour Scot was much excited about something.

“Reportin’ from the airport,” he said, with his Scotch burr more pronounced than ever. “There’s things afoot, Muster Benson. New devilry.”

The pale-gray eyes drilled into MacMurdie’s frosty blue ones.

“The crowd that was on the plane with you that night have booked the same plane again tonight—for Montreal,” said Mac.

Benson’s body was as still as his face. Smitty stared at the Scot and then whistled. MacMurdie said:

“Another trip with . . . something . . . bound for . . . somewhere, I’m thinkin’. The plane with the trapdoor. Now what’ll be dropped tonight?”

“A man,” said Benson, voice as even and expressionless as his features. “That’s what will be dropped. And I think the man will be Leon, your ex-employer, Smitty!”

Benson summed it up.

“Lawrence Hickock is gone, and no one knows where. Arnold Leon has disappeared. Mrs. Martineau the same—she has been missing even longer than Hickock. According to the newspapers, Stephen Vincent has also vanished. Perhaps others have, too. All those people seem to have one common comiection. They either own stock in, or run, the Buffalo Tap & Die Works.”

Benson continued: “The gang that takes over the Buffalo-Montreal plane periodically is connected with those disappearances, so I think we can accept almost as proven fact the theory that the gang kidnaps these wealthy, influential people and, one by one, drops them through the trapdoor of that plane to some unknown destination. That is what is carried aboard in the trunk each trip—a living, human body. That is what is dropped. And that is why they had to dispose of my wife and girl. The gang didn’t dare have a living soul witness what went out that trapdoor.”

“You mean, they just drop them?” said MacMurdie, blue eyes blazing. “Or do ye think they use parachutes?”

“Parachutes, I think,” said Benson. “There would seem to be no point in going to such elaborate lengths just to kill their victims by dropping them in Lake Ontario. There are far easier ways to murder. No, they must ’chute the victims down, and hold them alive somewhere. And tonight, you say, Mac, the gang has booked the Montreal plane for one more run?”

“That’s right, Muster Benson.”

“Well, we’ve gone at least a little way in our journey of vengeance. I think we can go a little distance further and make a good guess at where the victims are dropped.”

Benson opened a large map and pored over it with face bleak and white and dead but gray eyes alive. The map was of the eastern Great Lakes region. He pointed to the head of Lake Ontario, with Canada on one side and the United States on the other.

“I have figured the speed of the plane as well as I could,” he said, clipped words rattling from still, immobile lips, “and I think the ship was about over the Thousand Islands region when I last saw my wife and girl. The Thousand Islands! There’s a labyrinth for you! In that wilderness of water and rock, a hundred hiding places might be found where a gang would be safe from the law indefinitely. That is where I think our eventual goal lies. That is where I believe these missing persons are being held. Always assuming they aren’t dead, of course.”

MacMurdie, the careful Scot, went to the map with his lips pursed. No yes-man, MacMurdie. The chief’s idea seemed sound to him. But he wanted to verify it a little.

“The Montreal air line runs like so,” he said.

He traced a line from Buffalo to Montreal, and noted where it hit the St. Lawrence River. Then he nodded to Benson.

“It runs over the Thousand Islands. That’ll be the place. But as ye say, it’s a labyrinth. How would we ever get an idea as to what part of the Islands these skurlies’ll be hidin’ it?”

Benson shook his head a little, pale eyes flaming with concentrated thought.

But it was Smitty, the good-natured looking, moonfaced giant who had an idea first.

“I’ve got it!” he said so suddenly that MacMurdie jumped and turned resentful blue eyes on the big fellow.

‘What have ye got, mon?” he snapped. “The little crawlin’ things in your bonnet?”

“You say the plane takes the gang again tonight. And you, sir”—the giant turned to Benson—“have told us how your tragedy and your entrance into this business came from forcing your way into the plane with your wife and child that night. Well, I could perhaps locate their hide-out in the island myself, like this.”

He spoke eight words. Benson’s eyes seemed to go more colorless than ever, and to become, if possible, brighter. MacMurdie stared open-jawed.

“Whoosh!”
the Scot said finally. “ ’Tis suicide, mon! Ye can’t do a thing like that!”

“No, Smitty,” Benson said. “I can’t permit anything like that.”

“I could do it,” insisted the giant. “That is, I think I could. You!” He stared at MacMurdie. “What plane will they be taking?”

“The S404, of course. The one with the trapdoor.”

“You know that plane?”

“Like the inside of my hand.”

“Draw the undercarriage. And draw it to scale! Because I’m going to do this—and if your drawing isn’t right I’ll come back from the grave and haunt you.”

“If anything goes wrong ye won’t have a grave,” said the Scot somberly. “Ye’ll be buried in black water in the Ontario.”

The Scot was drawing the under carriage of the S404, and being very careful about it.

In Benson’s pale and deadly eyes, as they rested on the giant Smitty, was a look not seen there since his hair had whitened and his face died. But he was shaking his head.

“I told you, Smitty, I won’t permit it.”

The big fellow stared back at him.

“And I’m telling you, sir I’m going to do it. It’s the answer, if I can stay alive.”

“No!”

“You can’t stop me. You downed me once, but you can’t do it again. And the only way you can keep me from trying is to get me down and strap me to the floor.”

The eyes, pale, but seeming composed of living flame, dwelt on the big fellow’s face. There was no seeming stupidity in the moon countenance now. It was vital with intelligence and with resolve. Benson’s hand rested on the vast shoulder for just an instant.

“You can have anything I’ve got, if you pull out of this, Smitty.”

“I don’t want anything but just to work for you.”

Mac passed over his careful drawing.

“Ye’re a suicidal fool, Smitty. But ye have your points, you overgrown gorilla. Though, of course, ye haven’t a chance in this.”

“You’re a wet blanket, Scotch,” said Smitty, studying the drawing.

And then he was gone, with Benson staring after him with that strange light in his eyes, and MacMurdie’s sandy ropes of eyebrows pulled down low.

“I wouldn’t tell him to his face,” Mac said, “but he’s a very brave mon.”

Benson only nodded.

“And I wouldn’t want to be the man he’s after,” added the Scot dourly.