The Avenger 2 - The Yellow Hoard (13 page)

The two raced to the second floor and into a bedroom. Benson went to the window.

Three slugs fanned into the window jamb as he raised the pane. He leaped back toward the door. Bullets thudded through that, too. Men in the hall, men outside on the lawn.

“Caught!” was the word Nellie formed soundlessly on lips not so red as usual.

But Benson didn’t act as if he thought he was trapped.

The room was partly furnished, with an untidy and unmade bed along one wall, and a little marble-topped stand and a chair nearby.

Benson caught up the chair and smashed it against the side wall between this room and the next. The chair broke in his hands. But the wall—as flimsy as most inner partitions—buckled and broke through, too. Benson jabbed with the single chair leg left in his steely fingers.

The hole enlarged. He caught up the mattress from the bed and shoved it through the hole. Then he dropped matches on it, through the hole, till it blazed. Smoke began to roll up in billows.

Benson snatched the marble top from the little stand, and tossed it through the hole and through the window in the next room. Glass tinkled. Smoke began to curl out of the window in a black pillar.

It began to curl into the room he and Nellie were in, too. He caught up the blanket from the bed, moving with that incredible swiftness of his, and hung it over the hole. Now the next room could become an inferno before fire ate through the partition and began to threaten them.

It could become an inferno—and summon the fire department with the smoke billowing out the window.

The men in the hall didn’t know what had happened. They’d heard crashing sounds, and that was all. They kept on shooting around the lock of the door. But the men outside could understand.

“Borg!” one of them yelled up. “Come out! All you guys! He’s fired the joint! The whole neighborhood’ll be on our necks!”

The shooting in the hall ceased abruptly. There was the sound of running feet. Nellie opened the door, before Benson could stop her. A bullet from the stairs almost took a lock of her yellow-gold hair. The doorway was still covered.

From outside came the snarl of a starter and then the shriek of a motor raced almost beyond endurance. Benson angled to the window, with Nellie beside him. A car was streaking backward out of the garage in the rear of the house.

At the wheel was the man with the sandy-red hair.

“I thought you killed him!” gasped Nellie. “I saw you shoot him in the head.”

“Not
in
the head,” said Benson. In his expert hand, Mike, the silenced little .22, spat twice. In the driveway, the car skidded to a stop and swerved forward to dash to the street. Both bullets had hit a front tire. But the tire sagged only a little. It was bulletproof.

“Not
in
the head,” Benson said calmly. Flames crackled and roared in the next room. “I don’t kill, if I can help it. I shoot to knock a man out—to crease him. The bullet hits the top of the skull and bangs a man unconscious without murdering him. But it takes rather close shooting.”

His pale, deadly eyes looked almost apologetic.

“I had to shoot fast in the room downstairs. I must have been a sixteenth of an inch or so off, because the man shouldn’t have recovered so quickly.”

Men piled into the car till it settled almost on its tires. Seven, eight, nine, counting the driver. The car rocketed forward.

“They’re getting away!” wailed Nellie.

Benson’s basilisk eyes followed the car with regret but resignation in their lambent depths. There wasn’t much he could do to stop a getaway, in the face of such heavy odds. He shrugged.

“We’ll be able to leave this room now,” he said.

He walked to the door and opened it. No shot came. The man at the head of the stairs had joined the rest in their flight.

Down in the first-floor hall they found the second man Benson had creased with a .22 slug. He had been abandoned. There simply hadn’t been room for another soul in the overcrowded getaway car.

“This one, at least, we have,” Nellie Gray said.

Benson’s pale, icily composed gaze played over her vengefully pretty face. From the distance came the siren and bells of the fire department.

“So we have,” he said to Nellie. “And what do you suggest doing with him?”

“Turn him over to the police, of course,” flamed the girl. “I don’t understand you. You claim you’re interested in helping the cause of justice, but you won’t co-operate with the most powerful weapon justice has on its side—the police force.”

No flicker showed in the deadly, colorless eyes. No emotion was displayed in the quiet voice.

“Quite so, my dear,” Benson said. “We’ll turn him over to the police.”

There was a cracked mirror in the hall. Calmly, as though there were no such thing as a fire within many blocks, Benson turned to it. He took off the brown wig, disclosing his own silver-white shock. He worked at his face. The dead flesh stayed where it was prodded, like putty. And in a moment it had reassumed the features of Benson, instead of imitating the features of Pinkie Huer.

The steel-gray man was himself again.

A squad car was with the fire engines. As Benson and Nellie came from the door of the burning house, a Long Island detective jumped from the car. He raced toward them.

“In there,” said Benson, nodding to the hallway, “is a criminal. He participated in the kidnapping of this girl who is with me. He no doubt has a long record. It’s the chair for kidnapping in this State. I’d suggest that you arrest him and hold him without bail.”

The detective could see the prone body in the hall, through the open door. But his gaze snapped back to Benson’s expressionless, dead face.

“O.K. We take him. But we take you two, also, for a thorough investigation—”

“We haven’t time for that,” said Benson smoothly.

The detective glared at him. Benson was a little over-height because of the lifts in his shoes to give him some of Huer’s bulk, but still not a big man.

“So you haven’t got time!” he said sarcastically. “Who do you think you are?”

“Is there a two-way radio in your squad car?” said Benson smoothly.

“Yeah.”

Benson walked toward the car. The detective took an uncertain step toward him, then went on to retrieve the unconscious man in the thickening smoke of the hall. Benson got New York headquarters on the radio.

“The white-haired guy’s okay,” said the uniformed driver of the car when the detective came out with the unconscious man in his arms. “New York says so. And they say if he says to hold anybody, we better hold ’em.”

The detective glared, then shrugged.

“All right. You win. Must have a pull like the governor himself—”

He stopped, with the icily flaming eyes on him.

“I would suggest,” said Benson, “that you take extra-good care to guard this man.”

“Guard him?” said the detective, staring. “What could possibly happen to him in jail? Or on the way to jail?”

“That’s all I have to say,” Benson said smoothly. “Watch him as you’ve never guarded a prisoner before.”

The big black car that looked so old and innocent but had such a tremendous motor under its hood was nearly six blocks away. Benson had taken no chances on its being spotted by a lookout when he drove up as Pinkie Huer. He walked Nellie to it, and they drove to Bleek Street. On the way, she was silent, but glanced often with puzzled gray eyes at the enigmatic, powerful person beside her.

Up in the huge third-floor room, Smitty hurried toward them. His vast size made Benson look like a pygmy. Yet the gray steel man seemed, impossibly, to tower over the giant, such was the vitality expressed in his average-sized body.

“Chief! They’ve been calling from Long Island. And from New York headquarters.”

“Yes?” said Benson.

“Yes,” said the giant, words coming in a rush. “You turned some fellow over to the Long Island police, didn’t you?”

Nellie’s eyes widened. Benson only nodded.

“Well, the guy was shot. He was right in the police car, in front of the local jail. Somebody drilled him dead as a doornail—and they haven’t found out who.”

Benson glanced at Nellie Gray. She was biting her lips.

“To keep him from talking,” she said, gray-faced for a moment. “They knew they couldn’t get him out on bail, so they killed him for fear he’d talk.”

“Yes,” said Benson. “You see how much good it did to turn the man over to the police.”

Nellie was silent, shivering a little.

“That kind of thing,” said Benson in his silken voice, dead lips barely moving with the words, “is why Justice & Co. was formed. There are some things beyond the power of the police to handle. And from the start, it has been plain that the affair that cost your father his life is one of those things.”

Smitty was bursting with curiosity. Looking, with his ingenuous moon-face and china-blue eyes, like a slow-witted huge child, he stood literally on one foot and then the other.

“Did you find out anything, chief? Did your one-man raid on that gang do any good?”

Nellie had recovered her spirited composure. Her gray eyes rested distastefully on the giant.

“He got me out of there before I could get my silly self killed. That’s doing some good, isn’t it?”

“Is it?” said Smitty, with a twinkle in his deceptively dumb-looking blue eyes not matching the carelessness of his voice. “Seems to me when a person asks for a sock, she ought to be left to take it—and like it.”

“The trip out there resulted in very little, Smitty,” Benson said. “Just one thing, which Miss Gray overheard. The crowd is planning to blow up another building. This time by design, and not by accident.”

Smitty’s eyes lost their levity at once.

“Another—” His huge hands clenched. “Then there’ll be more deaths! More people blown to pieces as there were in Washington Square!”

“I’m afraid so,” said Benson somberly. “The worst of it is that no hint was dropped as to just what building figured in their plans. So it is impossible to move to forestall them. You can’t put a precautionary guard around every building in New York City!”

Upper Broadway, near Riverside Drive, is usually crowded at six in the evening. This particular section, this evening, was not.