The Avenger 34 - The Glass Man (4 page)

“You want me to sit in?”

“ ‘Horn in’ is the phrase, but if you want to . . . I got orders to cooperate with you.”

“What’s the address?”

“Might as well let me pick you up, if that damn car of mine’ll make it.”

“That’s very gracious of you,” said Nellie. “I’ll meet you in front of the hotel.”

She thought about Cole as she swiftly dressed. He could take care of himself, yes, and yet . . .

Mrs. Price didn’t cry. She was sitting straight in an imitation-leather chair in the den. Her face was pale, her voice slightly flat. “No,” she was saying, “I’m afraid that doesn’t mean anything to me.”

The local sheriff was a deeply tanned man in his early sixties, six feet tall and wide-shouldered. “Well,” he said, “it could be that that wasn’t what was said at all . . . This is such an odd case, could be nothing was really . . . When Mr. Ackroyd told us that that shopkeeper—his name’s Raoul Martinez, by the way—was sure he’d heard a voice saying, ‘This is for Rusty,’ we went and talked with him. He swears he heard a voice saying that to your husband while . . . well, saying it to him.”

“The name doesn’t mean anything,” said the thin, dark-haired woman.

“Rusty wouldn’t be the nickname of someone, a friend of your husband?” asked Pike, who was sitting uneasily in a sofa chair which was too low and too narrow for him.

Mrs. Price slowly shook her head. “Mostly my husband’s friends were teachers at the high school,” she said. “Even though By was born and raised in Nolansville he didn’t seem to have any long-time friends. There’s no one named Rusty among any of his friends, so far as I know.”

Nellie was leaning against the desk which had been Price’s. On the wall to her left hung several framed photos. “Aren’t these his friends?” she asked, pointing a thumb in the direction of the pictures.

“Once, I suppose. Those are mostly from his college days . . . the track team he was on, his fraternity. By never much talked about that part of his life. The pictures were put up years ago; this was his family’s house. He never got around to taking them down.”

Nellie walked over for a close look at one particular photo. It showed seven young men, all of them about eighteen or nineteen years old, standing in front of a white colonial-style fraternity house. It had been a bright day; they were squinting while they smiled and laughing at whoever had taken the picture.

“Got something?” inquired Pike.

A freckle-faced boy in the picture looked vaguely familiar, but Nellie didn’t know why. “No . . . not really.” The freckled boy had his arm around Byron Price. The little blonde reached out, lifted the framed photo off the wall, and checked its back. No identifying names were written there.

The sheriff watched her. “You sure you haven’t found something, miss?”

Shaking her head, Nellie held the picture toward Mrs. Price across the room. “Would you know any of these boys?”

“I’m afraid not. My folks are from Fort Collins, Colorado, originally. We didn’t move here until after I was out of college. That’s when I met By.”

“Might be I know some of them.” The sheriff came over to study the picture. “There’s Price, of course . . . and that chubby fellow there is Ted Napton and the tall, skinny lad on the end is Carson Bingham. Rest I don’t know.”

Nellie touched a fingertip to the chest of the freckled boy. “How about this one?”

Taking the picture, the sheriff brought it up close to his face. “Seems like I ought to know him . . . Nope, can’t place him. Napton owns one of the movie houses in town, so him I see every time some of the kids have a fight or slice up a few seats. Lots of the young fellows who went to college hereabouts didn’t settle here for life.”

“Might I take this picture, Mrs. Price?” asked Nellie.

“Yes, you can, though I don’t see how it will help.”

“Neither do I . . . yet.”

They left the widow a few minutes later. Pike dropped Nellie at the hotel. She asked at the desk if any word from Cole had come in. There were no messages. She went up to her room and waited.

And waited.

The invisible man came walking across the night desert. There was a sharp wind blowing over the scrubby ground, but it bothered him not at all. The formula took care of that.

Once more he held his hand up between his face and the night. The stars glistened brightly, the full moon glowed. It was as though he were made of glass. Of his flesh, bones, muscles, and all the other components of his body nothing was visible.

His brain, transparent in his transparent skull, took in all the images his unseen eyes picked up. But no one could see him.

He laughed. He was glad he’d taken the perfected formula and put it to his own uses.

“Why waste it on a bunch of soldiers?”

The war didn’t really mean much to him, nor its eventual outcome. Probably the United States would win; they usually did. It didn’t matter much.

Nothing mattered much.

Except justice.

That was what he was working for. Justice.

When he’d first come here to work on the project, his idea of justice had not been so strong. But once he’d realized that the formula could actually be worked out, his attitudes changed.

By becoming invisible he could deal out the justice they had coming. All six of them. Correction—all five of them, now.

And for each of them justice meant death.

The lights of the town showed up ahead. Such a calm, peaceful place, completely safe from the war.

But not safe from him.

Ted Napton surveyed the lobby. The wine-colored rug was threadbare in several places. There were a dozen brown spots where cigarettes had been dropped and left to burn out. In fact . . .

He trotted over, stooped carefully, and picked up the smoldering cigarette butt which had been tossed aside by one of his recent customers. The shiny tuxedo he wore—you had to wear a tux if you were a theater manager—was too tight. He carried the cigarette to a sand-filled urn near one of the movie theater’s exit doors.

Catching a glimpse of himself in one of the gilt-framed mirrors across the lobby, Napton frowned. He really was getting pretty heavy. Look at that double chin. He’d been on the boxing team in college, not so long ago. He was only thirty-five . . . well, thirty-six last month.

“I really ought to try a diet,” he told himself. “Eat nothing but cottage cheese and crackers for lunch or something.”

The candy counter attracted his eye. There were fewer and fewer items they could get to stock it anymore, no chewing gum at all lately. What was there made him feel hungry. Maybe one of the chocolate . . .

“You were just talking about a diet, remember?” he reminded himself.

Napton turned his back on the candy counter and the chunky adolescent girl in the blue satin uniform who attended it.

The decorative tiles were buckling around the ticket booth outside. A good dozen were missing.

“What a dump this is . . . the Rex Movie Palace. Some palace.”

His mistake had been staying in Nolansville. What could you expect in a town like this? Sure, things had picked up when the Army base came, and later that government setup out there.

“This isn’t New York, though. It isn’t Los Angeles.”

Look at the kind of movies they gave him to run.
The Purple Zombie;
that was supposed to be his A feature. With a flea-bitten, poverty-row Western and a Wonderman cartoon to fill out the bill.

“No use complaining. There’s nothing I can . . .”

He heard the glass doors open and turned to take the newcomer’s ticket.

No one there.

The door had opened and closed, though. He was certain of—

“Remember Rusty?”

A voice, but no one there to speak.

Napton glanced at the candy counter. The chunky girl was chewing on a candy apple, paying no attention to him.

He began to back across the lobby, across the worn rug.

“I’ve brought you justice.”

A hand grabbed his throat.

Napton couldn’t see the hand but he could feel the fingers tighten on his windpipe. Hitting out at the invisible hand, he tore himself from its grip.

“Police!” he yelled at the girl. “Call the sheriff!”

“Huh?” she asked, puzzled.

He pushed through a padded door and into the darkened theater.

Up on the screen a lovely girl was being pursued through a forlorn stretch of misty swamp by a walking dead man.

Napton trotted down the aisle as fast as he could manage.

There were only about twenty patrons watching the film, most of them high-school kids.

Puffing, Napton made it halfway down the aisle before a hand caught the back of his coat.

The much-worn material of the tuxedo ripped apart.

Napton shrugged out of the coat and got away again.

Then, as he neared the front of the theater, both invisible hands caught his shoulders and twisted him around. Before Napton could cry out further, one of the hands had him by the throat.

“Hey, sit down!”

“Down in front!”

“We wanna see the dame!”

The struggle was so close to the screen that Napton’s shadow was thrown up onto it. He thrashed wildly, trying to pry away the fingers. And behind him were the images of the zombie, dead eyes staring, and the desperate girl.

“The guy’s having a fit.”

“It’s Napton.”

“Hey, Nappy, you jitterbugging?”

Napton heard none of this. He heard only the invisible man saying, “This is for Rusty.”

Then he fell backward into blackness. He died as he hit the floor.

The movie went on.

Algernon Heathcote Smith, better known as Smitty, balanced the small black object on the palm of his hand. It was the size, and had the dimensions, of a child’s building block “This one’s even better than the last one,” he announced proudly. “Heck of a lot smaller, too.” He was a giant of a man, but a kind-hearted giant. His specialty was electrical engineering, and now and then he liked to tinker with something inconsequential.

Looking up from the maps and charts which he had spread out on the floor of the large Justice, Inc., office, Josh Newton asked, “What is it, another radio?”

Smitty tossed the small black object up toward the ceiling, caught it, and walked to the windows. The Venetian blinds were unlike those to be found in any other office in Manhattan, being made of bulletproof nickel-steel. “Look at that snow coming down on Bleek Street,” he said. “Bet it ain’t snowing in New Mexico.”

“Not the part Nellie and Cole are in,” said the black man. He’d been going over maps of the Nolansville area.

“I’m pretty sure,” said the giant, eyes still on the fast-falling snow, “Nellie’s too smart to fall for Cole’s line.”

“She’s too smart to fall for anything.”

“Yeah, she’s really a terrific dame.” He turned on a tiny switch on the little radio with his huge fingers. “I missed an episode this morning, don’t want to lose out on the afternoon rebroadcast.”

The radio said, “. . . again it’s time for the heartaches and triumphs of
The Romance of Mary Joyce, MD.
The everyday story of a lovely surgeon who . . .”

“You still following that soap opera?”

“It’s more than a soap opera, Josh, it’s a slice of life.”

“What end did they slice it off?”

“Naw, really, there’s something about this show.”

“. . . the glad news that little Jerry will walk again, though only for short distances. Meanwhile, Mary’s rival at the huge Civic General Hospital, the sultry Nurse Rodermann, has planted the seeds which will . . .”

“I’m glad little Jerry can walk,” said Smitty. “I was worried after they removed his toes.”

“Only one toe,” said Josh.

“Oh, that’s right.” Smitty dropped into a chair, resting the newly invented radio on his knee.

“. . . missing from the medicine cabinet in Mary Joyce’s tastefully furnished townhouse apartment. Can those be the very same pills which took the life of iceskating champ Nils . . .”

The door opened and a dark-haired young man came into the office. It was Richard Henry Benson, also known as the Avenger. There was something about the way he moved, about the glint in his eyes, which told you that this was no ordinary young man.