The Avenger 13 - Murder on Wheels (4 page)

So Smitty swung into action, too!

From his vest pockets, he jerked two little glass globes about the size of prunes. He snapped one at the cab with the three men in it and the other at the top of the neighboring truck. The two globes seemed to burst at about the same time.

After the thundering of the explosion and the deadly crack of guns, the soft plop of the two globes didn’t sound like much. But sound had nothing to do with efficiency, in this case.

Inside those little globes was a gas of the devising of Fergus MacMurdie, chemical expert of The Avenger’s band. The stuff couldn’t be seen or smelled; but it could sure act! A whiff of it would knock a man out for two hours.

The two on top of the truck whiffed—and promptly lay down as if suddenly very tired. One had been aiming a shot as he did so, and the bullet went glancing off the fender of the truck and wound up in the street.

But the three in the cab weren’t so much affected. They were farther from Smitty and at an angle that had made it difficult to aim precisely.

They must have gotten just a faint touch of it, for one of them clawed at his throat and the other had to prop his head up with his cupped hand as if he were extremely sleepy all of a sudden. But the man at the wheel was at least able to drive.

And did.

Up against something they couldn’t understand, with the first plain chance at the death of their quarry muffed, they got out of there, slamming over bits of the touring car on their way.

“Mantis!” yelled Smitty.

From all the business places along the street heads were poking and people were running. And the last thing Smitty wanted then was to be delayed by crowds. He wanted to get Robert Mantis—whose precaution in asking for a companion on the trip to the station to meet Doris Jackson had certainly been justified.

But Mantis wasn’t anywhere in view.

A squad car roared up, coming the wrong way down the one-way street. Two men came at Smitty with drawn guns.

Then they put the guns up.

The Avenger was fast becoming a legend in New York. All the cops knew him. And the whole force was rapidly beginning to know Benson’s aides by sight, too. To have seen gigantic Smitty once was to remember him for all time. And these two detectives had seen him before.

“These two,” jerked Smitty, pointing to the two on the truck top. “Put them on ice, will you? And if it’s all right with you, I’ll beat it. Work to do, fast. I’ll be at Bleek Street if you want me.”

He legged it to Seventh Avenue and hailed a cab. There was no use hunting around for Mantis. If the fellow hadn’t showed up by now, after Smitty’s two stentorian yells, it meant that he was way out of earshot and still going.

Which was suspicious.

Smitty was trying to puzzle out how the devil the men had known they were coming down that cross street on the way to Seventh Avenue, so that they could be there ahead of them to ambush them.

They could have been ahead of the touring car, and have been forewarned when Mantis pulled to the left to make a turn. And Smitty remembered they had waited for a long red light before turning. That would have given the gunmen time to prepare their trap.

Or they could have been tipped off, somehow, by Mantis that this was the street he was going to cross on. Only—it had been Smitty who suggested that street.

He finally decided the men must have been ahead and had anticipated their turn.

But the giant still felt pretty suspicious about that guy, Mantis!

Smitty’s cab was down the ramp almost to the door that led from the taxi lane into the Pennsylvania Station when he saw the other cab.

It was just leaving the door, and there was a girl in it. Smitty looked at his watch. He was three minutes past the time Mantis had said he was to meet Doris Jackson.

He looked at the girl.

She had hair of the dark-gold shade that makes it hard to tell if a girl is blond or brunet. Her eyes, he thought, were deep-blue, though it was hard to see them close enough to be sure. Anyhow, Smitty decided to take a chance and follow that cab because he had an idea the girl was Doris Jackson.

“And an extra five if you keep it in sight,” he snapped to the cab driver, after other instructions.

The driver nodded, with a look announcing that for an extra five he’d keep a stratosphere plane in sight with that cab of his.

The taxi ahead pulled out of the ramp and wheeled north. Smitty followed. The taxi went to the left and, after a while, went up on the elevated Express Highway that leads to the Henry Hudson Parkway. Smitty still followed.

Up in the low Hundreds the cab swung off to Riverside Drive.

Here, relics of their kind, a few vast old mansions still frowned out over the Hudson River. And the greatest of these was a gray-stone castle, built by a railroad emperor in 1890 and now owned by Marcus Marr, who was similarly an emperor in business. The motor business, to be exact.

He was that Marcus Marr who turned out more low-priced cars than any other single manufacturer; he even pressed the giant automobile corporations pretty hard. He was that Marr who owned plants all over the United States, railroads, boat lines through the Great Lakes, iron mines, coal mines—well, emperor is the right term.

Amazingly, the cab bearing the girl seemed about to head for the Marr mansion. The driver looked behind to see that the street was clear, put out his hand and started to cramp the wheel.

Smitty had noticed that a large, old, independent cab was right behind the girl’s cab when it swung off the Parkway. At first, his eyes had narrowed alertly. Then they had gone unconcerned again when he saw that the cab was seemingly empty, save for the driver. It had seemed only like a good break that he had a car between himself and his quarry.

But suddenly he saw that his first suspicions had been the correct ones!

In the back of the cab appeared three heads. Men had been bending down to give the cab just that empty look. They straightened up, now, just as the old cab leaped for the girl’s taxi.

There was a howling clang as fenders locked and the girl’s cab was forced against a parked car. Then men leaped from the old cab—and kept on leaping till it looked like one of those scenes in an animated cartoon where a flivver stops and endless people get out of it.

Not three men, but five! Two had been in the jump seats, also keeping out of sight. They must have bumped heads to beat the band, Smitty thought. But he was thinking that with a pretty small corner of his mind, and meanwhile moving like an overgrown streak of light.

The door jerked open in his vast hand so fast it nearly went right on off its hinges. He got to the two cabs before the five men saw him. And one reason for that was the haste they were displaying to open the taxi door and drag the girl out!

They turned as Smitty reached them, and three guns jerked into line. One actually got off its first slug, and Smitty’s body jerked with the impact of a slug!

But under his suit was the bullet-proof celluglass garment of Benson’s invention which all the little band wore, so that the only thing Smitty got out of the direct hit in the stomach was a bruise.

The five from the old cab got a little more than that.

Smitty had never bothered to learn to box. He didn’t need to. When his enormous fists crashed forward with his near-three-hundred-pound body behind it, it went through any clever boxing guard anybody could put up.

His left thus smashed through the startled guard of one of the men and felled him. His right smacked the gun of the man who had fired right back in his face, so that he broke his own nose with it and dropped like tenpins in a bowling alley when the ball hits square. Then Smitty got two of the others by the neck.

He was so busy, and roaring so with the bull-elephant rage that was his in battle, that he didn’t hear the single muffled scream of the girl from the cab! Nor did he see her being dragged back to the old-style, independent taxi by the driver, who had not joined the fracas.

All he saw was a couple of guys who looked like rats to him; and all Smitty wanted was to get his hands on crooks that looked like human rodents. It was what he lived for.

With a neck in his right hand and another in his left, he swept his great arms together. There was a sickening smash as the two heads came together. And then the fifth and last man was running with his face white with fear and his mouth straining sideways as he tried for even more speed. Running from that terrifying giant who had piled four men in the street like sticks of cordwood in about ten seconds.

Then the old cab started down the street, and Smitty saw part of a dress trailing from a door that had been slammed too fast. And he didn’t see Doris Jackson around.

He yelled and raced back to his own cab.

The driver ducked up from under the dash and slid out of his car when he saw Smitty. He was having no part in any more of this, five dollars or no five dollars. So Smitty took the wheel, himself. It looked like the wheel of a kiddy car in his vast paws.

But he didn’t go any place.

That was certainly a moment for cabs! For a fourth appeared, now, and rammed ahead of Smitty and stopped. It had been lurking down the street, but the giant did not know that. All he knew was that his way was being blocked at a vital moment!

He sat on the horn, and the offending cab began to back up, cramping wheels to get innocently into a parking space at the curb.

“Get out of the way!” roared Smitty, seeing the old taxi whirl into the drive. “One more minute—”

The driver of the taxi in front got out and came back to give Smitty a piece of his mind instead of moving out of the way. So, by then, it was useless to try the chase any more, and Smitty saw a man in the back of this other cab. He went up to him, with blood in his eye. This was all too pat, this blockade.

The man in the body of the blocking car got out, looking bewildered and apologetic. He was young and had black eyes indicating a lot of gray matter behind them. His brown hair grew straight back from his forehead; and he moved like a man in fine command of his muscles.

But Smitty didn’t care about any of that.

“You stopped me from going after that cab!” he jerked out.

“Cab?” said the man. And Smitty had no way of knowing, naturally, that his name was Cole Wilson.

“The one with the girl in it!”

“Girl?” said the man.

Smitty’s big fist half swung, then stopped, because this
could
have been accidental.

“That girl was being kidnaped, in broad daylight!” he boomed. “And you stuck your nose in. I think you’re one of the gang!”

“Gang?” said the man. “Look here, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You stay here!” snapped Smitty.

He got into his cab. The street was clear enough to slide past the other taxi, now. He sped to the corner, on the thousand-to-one chance that he could still see the old cab.

He couldn’t. He came back—to see the blockading one just beating it around the far corner.

Smitty could have sat down and beat his huge chest.

He felt that he had muffed a whole lot of things in a very few seconds; and the fact that, looking back, he couldn’t see what he’d have done differently, didn’t make him feel any better. Even the sight of the four unconscious thugs on the street didn’t help.

He had been sent to escort a girl back to Bleek Street. He had followed her, instead, just to see if she was going directly to Justice, Inc. She hadn’t. So he had let her be taken away from him. So now what?

He looked at the Marr mansion, up the circular little drive in front of which he had thought her taxi was going. He saw that the windows were not shuttered.

Marcus Marr had many homes. This one in New York was the least occupied, used only on the rare occasions when the motor magnate was in the big city on some financial affair.

He was in it, now, it seemed, from the unshuttered look of the place. So Smitty advanced toward the iron-grilled door. He wanted to have a talk with Mr. Marcus Marr.

“That smooth-talking guy with the black eyes!” he was growling to himself as he rang a bronze bell, set in gray stone. He shouldn’t have given him a chance to duck—

“Yes?”

The door had opened and a dignified butler in knee pants looked in a snooty fashion at Smitty.

“I want to see Mr. Marr,” rumbled Smitty.

“I’m sorry, he’s not at home,” said the butler, starting to close the door.

Next instant he picked it out of his face. Smitty had given a gentle shove and stood inside.

“You can’t come in!” bleated the man. “You can’t—”

Smitty’s left hand got his coat collar, and he held the butler up as one would hold up a kitten by the scruff of the neck.

“Where is he?”

Into the butler’s eyes came a look of cunning.

“All right. Put me down. I’ll tell you where to get him.”

Smitty put him down.

“His den,” said the butler, rubbing his neck, “is on the second floor, at the rear of the hall.”

So Smitty went up the broad, curved staircase, emerged onto the second floor—and then ducked far to the right and lunged forward.

The duck got his head out of the way of a gun barrel that had been whistling toward it. The lunge presented his hands with a pair of ankles.

The cunning look had been put into the butler’s eyes by the fact that two guards were at the head of those stairs, standing just around the corner, out of sight. As Smitty had ascended, they had crouched; and one had leaped when he topped the staircase.

This one yelled as his ankles seemed to be detached from the rest of his legs by those tremendous hands. He dropped his gun. On the other side, his companion charged in and started kicking at Smitty’s head.

Smitty was mad anyway, and this double-dealing didn’t put him in a more amiable frame of mind.

He straightened up, bringing the ankles up with him, which dumped the owner of the ankles rather harshly on his head. He whirled the man like an Indian club, and a skull drove into an abdomen!

Then Smitty left the two on the floor and walked, not toward the rear of the hall, but toward the front. It was not his experience to find the rooms inhabited by the master of any house in the rear. They were usually in front.