The Avenger 13 - Murder on Wheels (5 page)

At the end of this hall there was a door. Smitty opened that door. A man, so thin that he looked transparent and with deep-set gray eyes like faint torches far back in his head, stared calmly at him.

“I’m Marr,” the elderly man said. “Who are you? Why have you forced your way in like this?”

In the face of this courteous but blank reception, Smitty had nothing to say for a minute. He stood on the threshold, marshaling his thoughts. Then he stepped in.

“I work for Richard Benson,” he said.

Marr didn’t pretend not to know that name. He nodded.

“I know of Mr. Benson. A power in the financial world at one time, I believe. And still extremely wealthy the rumor has it.”

The rumor was right. Benson had access, from a former adventure, to all the gold of the Aztecs, their main hoard, hidden from the Spanish invaders centuries ago. It was possible that he could lay his hands on more wealth than any other man on earth. But Smitty didn’t bother to say any of that.

“What interest,” said old Marr, “would Benson have in me, that he should send a man of his here?”

“He didn’t send me,” said Smitty. “I just came in. I came because a girl I was after seemed about to enter here, and then was kidnaped.”

“I thought I heard a shot a moment ago,” said Marr. “So a girl was kidnaped. Who?”

“All I know is, her name is Doris Jackson,” said the giant Smitty.

“Why was she kidnaped?”

“I don’t know that. She is supposed to have some message to give Mr. Benson. But we don’t know what message, because she has never gotten through to him. Now, she has been taken away—to shut her up, I guess.”

He glowered at Marr, and Marr stared evenly back, quite a gentle-looking old man for one so powerful.

“Who is she, anyway?” Smitty snapped. None of Benson’s aides were impressed much by wealth or the owners thereof. “Why was she coming here?”

“I have never met anyone named Doris Jackson,” said Marr. And Smitty was reluctantly persuaded that there was truth in his voice. “I have no notion why she should have been coming here. If, indeed, she was. Are you sure of that?”

Smitty wasn’t sure. She might have been going any place along here.

“Well,” he rumbled, feeling awkward, “do you know a guy named Robert Mantis, then?”

“Never heard of him,” replied Marr. And again Smitty was grudgingly convinced he was telling the truth.

He tried one more thing, on the slightest of hunches. He was still wondering about the man in the cab who had so innocently blocked his path, during the chase of the taxi with the girl in it.

“A young fellow,” he said, “with very black and very live-looking eyes. Has hair that grows back from his forehead on each side and down in a wide peak in front. He’s a little bigger than average, and he walks and moves like he’s powerfully strong. Kind of handsome. Know him?”

Now, the other two he had asked about, he had designated by name. Marr had denied knowing of them, and Smitty had believed him. This third party, Smitty could only describe—and not too completely at that.

Yet, he did
not
quite believe Marr, when the auto magnate said: “No, I don’t think I have ever seen a man like that.”

The giant couldn’t have told you why he got a different reaction from this denial.

Not a muscle of Marr’s face changed a line. His eyes didn’t waver or have any different shading. But Smitty had felt inclined to believe him before, and this time he didn’t feel so inclined.

But he didn’t know what he could do about it. You don’t wring answers from a man like Marcus Marr, and then call him a liar and cuff him around when you don’t feel like believing the answers.

“Thanks for letting me have a few minutes of your time,” Smitty said, baffled.

“Not at all,” said Marr courteously. He stared at the giant’s tremendous torso. “Do my guards need . . . er . . . hospital attention?”

“Who?” said Smitty absently. “Oh—the guards. I don’t think so. I was pretty easy on them.”

Which, the guards might have said, when they came to about twenty minutes later, was certainly a matter of opinion. Quite definitely, they didn’t think he had been easy on them.

Smitty sighed and went downstairs and to the iron-grilled street door. Once again, he failed to note a vindictively pleased glint in the eyes of the butler.

The butler had been staring out the glass of the door, between the ornamental iron bars, for the last few minutes. And he had seen something that made him look forward to the next few.

But Smitty didn’t sense that at all. He didn’t even look at the outraged butler; he just opened the door and stepped across the small circle toward his cab, still at the curb.

He did take the precaution to note that his driver was at the wheel. He was thinking exclusively of Marr when he muttered to the man: “Bleek Street, Justice, Inc.”

He opened the cab door.

A man stared up malevolently from the floor, and from the same direction a .45 automatic slanted at him. It pointed toward his head, not toward his chest, which had the celluglass garment under the coat to shield him from bullets. Nothing shielded his head!

“What—” mumbled Smitty, caught completely off base, for once.

“Stand easy, big boy,” said the man, gun and eyes not moving at all.

Smitty’s physical faculties were trained to take powerful advantage of the slightest relaxation of an enemy’s guard. So were the faculties of all The Avenger’s aides.

But sometimes that very power of concentration can be a drawback. As it was in this instance. Because Smitty was watching so hard for a break from the gunman with the .45 leveled at his head, he didn’t hear steps as men tiptoed behind him.

From the door, however, the butler saw the three men sneak up. He had seen them arrive in a sedan and hide between this building and the next, after which the sedan had slid on down the block. He hugged himself as he saw the men get right up behind Smitty.

“All right,” said the man in the cab. “Lean down and get in the cab, on the floor.”

Smitty leaned, all right. He thought it was the break he’d been after. He leaned toward the man like a falling tower, to grab at that gun. And the foremost of the three unseen behind him, struck hard.

Smitty kept on leaning forward, unconscious, with a spot on the top of his head that was going to be a turkey’s egg in a few minutes. And the four men laughed and slid his great bulk into the cab.

The man who had been in it in the first place sat up on the seat, with the unconscious Smitty crammed on the floor. The man said to the taxi driver:

“Get going. I’ll tell you where when we reach the Fifty-ninth Street bridge.”

“Yes, sir!” said the cabby. Awhile ago he had ducked out of his car, abandoning it because things had got so hot. Then he had fearfully returned, to wait behind the wheel for the giant to come out of Marr’s house, thinking it was safe. And
now
look what was happening!

Smitty, however, knew none of all this. He knew nothing of a long ride east and south. He was vaguely aware of having something smash on his head again. That was when the man in the seat above him saw a flutter of eyelids and swung his gun barrel in another vicious blow to keep the big boy out of this world.

Finally, he moaned and stirred, with no one to bop him for it. He opened his eyes and spent about ten minutes recovering from the physical illness that comes of such blows. His brain slowly cleared, and he began to be himself again.

But it didn’t look as if being himself was going to do him any good.

He was tied at wrists and ankles and knees. And his bound arms were further bound to his body by a coil of rope over his chest. A very little attempt at movement told him that.

He managed to sit up, and then was aware of a gag so that he couldn’t yell.

He had been socked while it was still daylight. It was dark now—or dusk, at least. He saw stars when he looked out a dirty small window from across the very wide room where he sat. And they were the stars of heaven and not from the smacks on the skull.

He was on a dirt floor, and there was no heat of any sort. But the night was warm. And the place was out in the open, for he heard no sound of cars or people. Instead, he heard the occasional twitter of night birds, and a whisper of the night breeze through weeds and tall grass.

Smitty’s hands had been bound behind him, and they would have to stay there, till the coil around his chest, binding his arms to his sides, was loosened.

So he proceeded to do something about it.

The men who had tied him had waited to tighten the loop until the unconscious giant had exhaled, in order to get the coil as tight as possible around him. That was ordinarily good tactics. But it was not so good when done to a man like Smitty. Not so good, that is, for the captors.

Smitty took a deep breath. His chest expansion normally was something hard to believe. When he exerted himself—

Around his vast chest, the stout rope creaked and protested. So Smitty took the deepest breath he was capable of, and his arms and shoulders strained as the body of a moth strains as it bursts from a cocoon.

The rope gave out a shrill zing, like a snapped piano wire. And that fixed the coil.

A good contortionist, with his hands bound at the wrists behind him, can work his body backward through the loop of his arms, so that his hands are in front. Smitty was a good contortionist for all his bulk.

With his hands at his waist, he proceeded to get in touch with Bleek Street.

Smitty was an electrical engineer almost without an equal. Among other things, he had designed a two-way radio set so small that it could be contained in a metal case scarcely larger than a cigar case. Each of The Avenger’s indomitable little band carried one of these concealed at his belt.

Smitty began tapping at his, now; and far off, in Bleek Street, the tappings came amplified from the big master set in the great top-floor room. They spelled a message in code.

Satisfied, the giant proceeded to shuck the rest of his bonds.

He had a little gadget in the way of a belt buckle that had tickled him like a kid when he had thought it up. And it came in handy now. It was an ordinary-looking buckle, though a little larger than most. But it had a tongue like an angry woman’s. Sharp.

The underside of the tongue was a knife edge. And when Smitty had fumbled it open with his middle fingernail, it locked out straight from the belt at his waist. Then it was just a matter of sawing the cords along the tiny, razor-sharp knife till they fell apart.

He untied his legs and got up, staggered a minute till dizziness passed, then walked around. He got it, now. He was in an unused hangar, and a glance out the window revealed a weed-grown level field that had once, in barnstorming days, been used as a landing field. Maybe it was used now, furtively, for all he knew.

He went to the wide doors, opened one enough to slide out, and closed it again. And not till then, as if the giant had a private Providence watching out for him, did the gang return.

He saw headlights of a car wobbling rapidly toward him as it came over the field, and he lay flat in the high grass and weeds. He saw men get out of the sedan and go to the hangar.

There was an enraged outcry when they found only cut and broken bonds in there. They came out like angry bees pouring from a hive.

Because it was so dark, Smitty couldn’t see that six men got out of the sedan and went into the hangar, and only four came out. All he knew was that a bunch entered and a bunch left.

He heard the men beating around the high grass, then saw them get into the car again, swearing, and saw the car drive off. Thinking he was alone in the field, he stood up and stretched his big arms.

It was Mac, at Bleek Street, who had heard Smitty’s tapped message.

Fergus MacMurdie had been with Benson a little longer than any other of The Avenger’s band. He was a tall, bony Scot with saillike ears, coarse sandy hair and bleak blue eyes. He had fists like bone mallets—and they could hit like mallets when Mac had a crook in front of him to smash.

And he lived to smash crooks.

“ ’Tis the big fella, Muster Benson,” the Scot said, after getting the code message. “He’s out somewhere, held by some mob. Somethin’ to do with this Jackson girrrl ye mentioned, no doubt. Ye said he had left here to get her at the Pennsylvania Station.”

“Yes,” said The Avenger, pale eyes staring thoughtfully at the big radio, lips barely moving with the word.

“I wonder where he’s held,” mused Mac. “We ought to dash after the overgrown lummox. But where do we dash to?”

“Clagget’s air field,” said Benson quietly. He had heard the taps as clearly as Mac, though he was many feet from the radio and the Scot was right next to it. Benson could hear a snake breathe a hundred yards away, Mac always said.

“How in the worrrld do ye know?” gasped Mac.

“Smitty’s thumbnail description of the big room with a dirt floor fits only one thing—airplane hangar. He says all he can hear is wind in weeds and high grass—open field—landing field. Probably abandoned or the weeds could not be allowed to grow. The directional finder points north, northeast. The range of his little radio is eighty miles or so, and this came in clear; so it couldn’t have been sent from much more than forty miles. The only abandoned field and hangar in that direction and at that range is Clagget’s.”

So the two went down to the basement, climbed into the heaviest sedan The Avenger had and rolled up the ramp and over the sidewalk. Behind them, steel doors automatically closed, making Bleek Street headquarters a fort again. And in the sedan, they were also in a fort. A small, rolling fort.

The car was so armored that it weighed close to four tons. Yet it had a motor that would tear it along at about a hundred miles an hour.

“Looks like ye’re expectin’ trouble, Muster Benson,” was Mac’s comment.

The Avenger nodded, face as cold and calm as ice under a polar dawn, colorless eyes like agate.

“There is still not the faintest clue as to why the girl, Doris Jackson, wants to see us so badly. But there are plenty of indications that it’s on some affair that’s very important. So important that murder means nothing to somebody opposing her. That means that it’s only good sense to take the heaviest car.”