The Avenger 2 - The Yellow Hoard (16 page)

His toe just touched the end of the tubing.

Sweat burst out on his forehead. If he moved so that the glass tube fell, it would probably break, and then he’d be done before he got started. With infinite care he moved the tubing.

It slid down from its upright position in the corner and fell. But it fell on his outstretched leg and did not break. A whistling sigh of relief came to Huer’s lips. He drew the tubing within reach with his toe.

With the crooked end of it around the leg of the table, he hauled table and phone and all to the cage. Then the phone was in his hand. He dialed desperately, got a number the police would have given much to know.

“Yeah, it’s Pinkie. Damn you, it’s really me—not the other guy. The white-haired mug has just left for Olin Chandler’s. Yeah, the guy who had one of the things you’re after. And do I know something about
that!
You can trap the white-headed guy there, if you work fast. After you’ve got him out of the way. for gosh sakes come up here and get me outta this bird cage before they bump me off or I go nuts!”

Huer pushed the table to its former position with the long tube, then slid the tube over the floor, with a flick of his wrist, till it lay under a far workbench as if it had fallen there unnoticed a long time ago and had nothing whatever to do with the man in the cage a full five yards away.

After that, Pinkie Huer relaxed and sat in the cage looking as innocent as it is possible for a man to look when he has the brand of Cain stamped in his face and vicious murder glinting permanently in his eyes.

At the Forty-second Street office of the zoning and city-planning engineer, Benson’s pale eyes bit like knives into the eyes of the girl at the information desk.

“Mr. Chandler just left here and went home?” he said.

“Yes, sir,” said the girl. Something in the silken voice of this man with the white, still face made her feel almost afraid. Certainly it made her feel very, very obedient.

“It’s not yet noon,” said Benson. “Is he accustomed to leaving his office and going home at this hour?”

“No, sir. But he just had a telephone call from the man at his apartment, asking him to come home in a hurry. I took the call, as I take all Mr. Chandler’s calls, and I recognized his servant’s voice before plugging in to Mr. Chandler’s desk. The man seemed very excited. Or maybe he was frightened about something.”

Benson turned from the desk. Then he was out, in the hall. The girl blinked. It hadn’t seemed to her that the man with the snow-white hair and pale eyes was running. Yet he’d got out the door faster than most men could if they’d been leaping for their lives.

The giant motor under the hood of the old-looking car thrummed with more than its usual lazy song as Benson went from Forty-second Street to Chandler’s address on West End. Half a dozen cops stared at the speeding car with the intention of chasing it, then saw the expressionless, chalk-white face over the steering wheel and did not. Benson hadn’t been in the big city long, but already word was trickling from precinct-station captains to plain-clothes men to rookies on the beat that the man who looked like a limber gray steel bear was to be let alone no matter how many ordinary ordinances he cracked.

There was a doorman in front of Chandler’s building entrance, talking to a pretty maid in a French lace apron and cap. Everything looked all right. But with the same uncanny speed with which he had left the zoning engineer’s office, Benson hurried into the building.

The elevators were automatic. He stepped into one and began rising.

The cage stopped at the eighth floor. Benson flashed open the door and stepped out. A gun ground into his side, held by a man who had stood so flattened against the wall next to the elevator doorway that only a crystal gazer could have known he was there.

“Keep your hands by your sides,” the man said to Benson in a low tone, “and walk to Chandler’s layout. If you yell, you’ll get it right now. If you don’t, you’ll live maybe another ten minutes. Take your choice!”

Chandler’s apartment was a former artist’s studio. It consisted mainly of one big, high room, with several smaller rooms off that. In the big room were the black-eyed man, the two human rats who looked like brothers, and the man with the reddish hair. Also Chandler.

The engineer sat in a big leather chair. A sheet had been brought from one of the bedrooms, twisted into a most efficient cord, and tied around his body and the chair. Easy to work loose if he’d been alone and unmolested. But he wasn’t. The man with the reddish hair sat across from him, about four feet, with gun drawn and leveled at Chandler’s body. Whenever Chandler moved a little, the gun moved, too.

In a far doorway lay Chandler’s servant, a thin man in a white jacket. The top of his head was crushed. He was still breathing, but a glance told that he wouldn’t keep on breathing very long. He was good as dead.

Chandler stared at Benson, white-lipped but calm.

“Sorry,” he said. “If I’d only had a chance to warn you—”

“Shut up!” snapped the black-eyed man. It was at the point of his gun that Benson had been driven in here.

Benson stared at him with eyes like ice in a chill dawn.

“You’re Borg,” he said.

“Frank Borg, if it’ll do you any good to know the full name in hell,” the black-eyed man retorted. “Now, listen, and get this the first time, because we want to leave here fast. You’ve got the brick from Alec Knight’s place. We want it. Step to that phone there, call your joint, and have somebody bring it here.”

Chandler’s eyes cried out “No” to Benson’s white, still face. The engineer shook his head urgently.

One of the ratlike brothers stepped to Chandler and gave him a hard, backhanded slap across the face.

“Keep your bill out of it!” he snarled. “Let the white-headed guy do his own thinkin’.”

Red leaped into Chandler’s cheek where he had been struck. He glared at the man with slitted, cold eyes, and then looked at Benson.

“Why,” said Benson, silken voice showing no more emotion in the death trap than his cold, dead face, “do you want an ordinary clay brick so badly?”

“Stop stallin’. You know as well as we do. We want the nice gold hicky inside it. We’ve got almost enough without it. Maybe entirely enough. But we want that
to
make sure. So you just pick up the phone and order it brought here.”

Benson was silent. Then he shrugged and nodded.

“All right.”

Chandler looked savagely, coldly contemptuous. Borg grinned with triumph. Then the grin faded.

“Don’t have that man-mountain of yours bring it,” he cautioned. “Tell the jane, Nellie Gray, to come with it.”

“She doesn’t know where I keep it,” said Benson.

“You can tell her over the phone, can’t you? Come on—get going!”

Borg moved to the phone with his gun solidly in Benson’s side. The ratlike brothers stayed close, too, guns in their hands. The fourth man remained where he was, gun and eyes closely covering the engineer tied in his chair by the sheet.

Benson picked up the phone, of the hand-set type. He dialed a number. Meanwhile, he did not look at Borg. There had been surrender in Benson’s voice. There was none in the pale blaze of his eyes.

“Smitty,” he said, evenly, when a man’s voice answered, “take an order.”

A mile away, in a garage that chanced to own the number Benson had dialed at random, a man said bewilderedly:

“Smitty? Who you callin’ Smitty? There ain’t nobody here by that name. This is Hoag’s Garage.”

“You know that brick, Smitty,” said Benson, keeping the receiver end of the phone tight to his ear so that Borg couldn’t overhear. “Well, have Miss Gray bring it to me at Chandler’s apartment right away. What? Oh! She isn’t?”

Benson half turned toward Borg.

“He says Miss Gray isn’t there at the moment. Do you want me to have him bring it?”

“Well—” began Borg.

What he had been going to say was never finished. With the natural little half-turn toward him, Benson had accomplished his purpose, to get the gun shifted just a little less solidly and surely from his ribs.

Now he arched his body like a snapped spring, flashed his right arm up and down, and jerked hard.

Borg’s gun belched, but the slug missed Benson in his lithe turn by three inches. And then Borg choked and twisted with a noose around his neck made by the telephone cord Benson had snapped around his throat.

“You guys—” Borg choked out. “Get him—”

But to get Benson, the three would have had to get Borg first. For he was between the gray steel man and their guns.

The phone cord ripped out of the box with the force of Borg’s struggle. Benson dropped the cord and got his left arm around Borg’s throat instead. His forearm, like ridged metal, was viselike against Borg’s Adam’s apple. His right hand sought and got Borg’s gun.

He faced the three gunmen, with Borg as an anguished human shield in front of him, and Borg’s automatic leveled first at one and then another of Borg’s men.

“Drop the guns,” Benson said, silken voice deadly, white face like a mask.

The two brothers might have obeyed, but the reddish-haired man thought too fast.

“Go to hell,” he said hoarsely. “You ain’t as bright as you think you are. You can’t call the cops, because the phone’s broken. You can’t kill us all, because in the time it takes you to plug one of us the other two can plug you through Borg.”

“No!
No!”
panted Borg, struggling in the iron grasp of the gray steel figure.

Benson tightened his arm pressure.

“I can break your neck easily,” he said, soft-voiced. “And I will, if you don’t stand still.”

Borg stood still. Benson’s deadly, colorless eyes dwelt on the three who stood with guns pointed at Borg—and hence at him, too. It looked like a stalemate.

Chandler’s voice sounded suddenly.

“I’m about free, Benson. Another minute and I’ll be out of this chair. When I get you, I’ll take their guns—”

“No, you won’t,” said the man with the reddish hair. “If you try
that,
we’ll plug the white-headed guy through Frankie, too. And then the one or two of us left will get you, Chandler.”

“When you get free,” Benson’s smooth tone capped the gunman’s rasping voice, “go to whatever room has a fire escape by the window. I’ll follow.”

The engineer was on his feet as Benson finished. He edged toward a door behind and to the right of the men Benson had covered.

“This room,” he called.

“Right,” said Benson.

The gray fox of a man backed toward the door Chandler held open. Borg backed involuntarily with him, held by the awful forearm around his throat. And the man with the sandy-red hair bit his lip indecisively.