The Avenger 2 - The Yellow Hoard (11 page)

Nellie Gray fainted, and lay in the back of the speeding sedan like a mishandled doll. She lay with her eyes partly opened, veiled by thick, dark lashes. That wasn’t unusual. Many times when people faint, their eyes remain partly open.

What
was
unusual in a person who had “fainted” was that Nellie was seeing perfectly through her lashes. She burned the faces she saw deep in her memory.

A dark-complexioned man with black eyes and hair who wore a black suit.

A fellow with sandy-red hair much like MacMurdie’s, but whose eyes were vicious and slitted, instead of honest, like the bitter Scotsman’s.

Two men who might have been brothers in their thin, stoop-shouldered build, with yellow-stained fingers and dull brown eyes and mouse-brown hair.

She knew she’d never forget those savage faces.

Back at Bleek Street, Benson didn’t waste time rebuking Smitty for letting Nellie Gray go out.

“I see how it is,” he said in his strong but silken-quiet voice. “You had little choice, Smitty. You had to let her be a fool, I guess, if she insisted on it.”

Strangely, Benson seemed to waste little time on trying to check up on Nellie’s path from the building, too. He seemed to dismiss her utterly from his mind. He went to the big canary cage.

The man inside crouched back as far as the bars would permit.

“You let me out of here!” he squalled. “I demand to be turned over to the cops!”

“Do you?” said Smitty, grinning.

The giant opened the barred door and brought the man out. He plumped him down in a chair.

“You lemme alone!” wailed the big bad man who hadn’t hesitated to take the life of an elderly man and a young mother in an attempt to murder Benson. “What are you goin’ to do to me? I want a lawyer!”

He was still yelling for a lawyer five minutes later when his eyes began to go blank. That was from the stuff Benson had injected into his arm. The drug perfected by MacMurdie, which produced a refined and improved kind of “twilight sleep.”

A little later, with the mirrored ball twirling dizzily before his blank eyes, and with his conscious mind held in thrall by the drug and his subconscious released to speak the truth as demanded, the man talked.

His name was Pinkie Huer. He had been brought to New York from Toledo several months ago to do odd jobs in crime for an underworld big shot named Frank Borg. Yesterday, Borg had given him one of those queer little peanut bombs and told him to trail a white-haired guy named Benson till he had a chance to blow him to pieces. The blowing had been unsuccessful.

No, Pinkie Huer didn’t know what the bomb was, nor where Borg had gotten it. No, he didn’t know anything about a larger plan in which Borg seemed to be acting, nor did he know if Borg had some superior over him who was unsuspected even by the rest of the underworld.

Borg put up at an old house near Sunset Boulevard on Long Island. Borg was an average-sized guy dark of skin and hair, with black eyes. Yes, his hair grew down a little on his forehead in a kind of a point. Yes, he wore dark suits and shirts a lot.

Benson’s pale eyes glittered into Smitty’s china-blue ones.

“That’s the man!”

Smitty nodded. “Know anything about him, chief?”

“Some,” said Benson in his deadly, smooth voice. “He is a sort of mercenary for hire in crime. He has a small gang and he hires out, gang and all, to anyone who wants a crooked job pulled. Anything. Including murder. Besides that, he is sort of armorer to the underworld. He supplies the gangs with guns and ammunition. Everything, from sub-machine guns to tear-gas bombs. No one knows where he picks the stuff up, but it’s always the latest thing in equipment.”

Benson turned to the man. He had a pudgy face, with lips a little too thick and nose a little too thin. His eyes were gray-brown, muddy-looking, and his hair was about the same.

Benson stood a mirror in front of the vacant-eyed crook’s chair, sat beside him so their two faces showed next to each other in the glass. Smitty brought him things as he crisply ordered them. Benson’s white, steely hands moved expertly.

And a miracle was accomplished.

Man of a thousand faces! Made that way by the terrific loss of his beloved wife and daughter that overnight had turned his black hair snow-white and paralyzed his facial muscles!

Benson deftly manipulated the dead flesh of his face. Where his fingers moved that flesh—it stayed. His countenance subtly altered under Smitty’s fascinated gaze. It became the face of the man named Pinkie Huer. The features became pudgy, formless. The lips were too thick and the nostrils too thin.

Benson selected two little glass shells only a few thousandths of an inch thick. On them were glazed pupils of about the same muddy brown as Huer’s. He slipped them over his flaming, pale eyeballs, and those eyes became blurry gray-brown. Hair was next. Nondescript brown hair, which Benson pulled on over his own shock of white hair.

Then shoes, with inch-and-a-half lifts in them; inflated rubber pads at shoulders and waist. Benson stood up. And Smitty whistled aloud. For it seemed that you were seeing double and one Pinkie Huer was sitting with blank, wide eyes while another was standing with taut erectness and purposeful jaw.

Benson relaxed his straight carriage, slouched a little, receded the square of his chin—and was a hundred-percent perfect.

“I’m going to the Long Island house. I’ll have to go it alone, of course, Smitty. If I’m not back within three hours, better get MacMurdie, and Hogarth from headquarters and come for investigation.”

“Can’t I go along now and maybe hide down the block from the house?” pleaded Smitty. “You’re going singlehanded into a whole nest of these rats. That’s not so good.”

“Investigate when I’ve been gone more than three hours, but not before,” said Benson.

And Smitty nodded regretful obedience. You didn’t argue with the gray steel man. At least not more than once!

Nellie Gray was resourceful, quick-witted, and had more nerve than most men. Also, she was utterly reckless in her bitter desire to bring her father’s murderer to justice. With that murder still fresh in her mind, she had felt that she didn’t care much whether she lived on or not.

But with all that, she was pretty pale now as she let herself realize just what a spot she had put herself into when she used herself as live bait for the gang.

She was in an old house somewhere on flat land, for although she had made the last of an hour’s trip with a bandage over her eyes, she had noted that the car moved without the rise or fall of hills. Near the sea, she had decided.

There were other houses near here, because she had heard children playing within five minutes of the car’s stop. But there were no neighbors within a block or so, she thought, because all she could see when she looked out the windows was trees.

This was a major hangout of the gang’s. That was apparent because so many men with old eyes in young faces, and with the bulges of guns at their armpits, were around. She had counted eight different men, coming and going, altogether.

But the four who had been in the car with her didn’t come or go. They stayed in the same big, bare first-floor room where she sat on a kitchen chair. They were the nucleus of the crew, evidently. And the black-haired man in the black suit was obviously the leader.

This one came toward her now, moving with a mincing, dandyish gait, and smiling too widely.

“Why don’t you tell us what we want to know?” he said. “Where’s the plate we thought was at Knight’s joint?”

Nellie said nothing. She looked around out of innocent, frightened-appearing gray eyes.

There was a man lounging in the hall doorway of the old living room. There were the two who looked like brothers leaning against the wall near her chair. And there was this smooth-spoken man with the shiny black hair and eyes, who was smiling at her like a cat about to eat a songbird.

She wasn’t tied in her chair. They hadn’t bothered to do that. Why tie one lone girl—particularly one who looked as small and soft and harmless as this one?

Which was an unarmed state of mind that Nellie had counted on when she hatched this mad scheme.

“Come on, talk!” barked the black-eyed man, losing his smile.

Nellie looked more scared to death than ever. But she tensed a little in the chair.

She had seen every member of the gang who counted. She could recognize them surely in a line-up. She knew where to direct the police for a raid that should bag the lot of them.

Now all she had to do was escape.

“Did Knight have one of those bricks, or didn’t he?” snapped the black-eyed man. “We went back to his place later, and saw where a board in the bathroom had been pried up. Was the thing under that board? If so, who took it? The white-haired guy?”

“I don’t know a thing,” said Nellie, voice small and meek.

“Yahh! Talk sense. You couldn’t help but know if the white-headed guy had it. You’ve been in his joint for over a day. Where’s he keep it?”

Nellie only shook her head, dainty body drooping, eyes wide and appealing.

The man stepped up within reach of her and drew his hand back to strike.

“Talk—or I’ll give you a crack!”

“Really, there’s nothing I can say—”

The other three men were watching with callous and expectant grins on their faces. The room was very still.

The black-eyed man’s hand lashed out to give the helpless girl an open-handed slap.

It was what Nellie had been waiting for.

Like light, her own tapering small hand flashed forward. Her fingers, so deceptively fragile-looking, closed on the black-eyed man’s wrist in a grip that brought a yelp of astonishment to this thin lips.

Nellie jerked forward and down, at the same time swinging like a figure in a lightning dance, to the right of her chair. The black-eyed man kept on coming, head down and helpless.

His head hit the chair back and he fell in a hopeless tangle with the thing.

Nellie was at the door, slim body moving like that of a whirling dervish. She didn’t think they’d shoot, because of the noise and the fact that they wanted information from her. But she took no chances.

Her slender figure seemed to be all over the place in a zigzag line as she went toward the door, where the man with the reddish hair had been lounging. He was positively gaping at her.