The Avenger 4 - The Devil’s Horns (12 page)

The right hand didn’t hit home at all. The giant had moved his head sideways three inches so the fist went harmlessly over his shoulder; then he had caught the fighter’s arm in a careless left hand.

The prize fighter yelled suddenly with anguish. The man with the apish grin jumped Smitty from the right,
and the
snakelike man, swearing, moved in from the left.

Smitty, still wearing his good-natured look, and with his moonface seeming amiable and slow-witted, smashed the man he held first to the left and then to the right. He handled the fighter’s body as if it had been a rag doll. A rag doll weighing practically nothing.

The fighter’s body knocked the snaky man back a yard and bowled the apish-looking one clear off his feet. With the last smack, Smitty indifferently opened his hands, and the boxer fell, too.

It wasn’t the end. All the other men in the yard were gaping at the amazing display of strength. The three bullies knew their power was slipping. If they let the giant get away with this, there would be no more rulership, no more juicy fines wrung out of them.

The man with the mashed nose bored in in a professional crouch. The snaky one slid close with a knife made out of a file. The third suddenly had a stabber in his hand made from a fork that had been straightened and left with only one sharp tine.

Smitty had never learned to box. He simply hadn’t bothered to. It had never been necessary. It wasn’t now. He let the prize fighter hit him in the chest, as a grown man plays with a child by letting it hit him as hard as it pleases. And while the man was thus engaged, Smitty reached out and seized hold of the left forearm the man had up in a supposedly efficient guard.

He broke the arm!

Then he caught the other two men and knocked their heads together, taking a light gash on the back of his hand from the file-knife as his sole punishment.

There was silence in the yard, and then an audible, concerted sigh.

“The guy’s an elephant,” somebody whispered at last.

Smitty stared at the whisperer with mildly surprised, slow-witted blue eyes. Then the guards came.

“All right, break it up. Break it up! Back into the building. And you—gorilla—you’ll catch it for this. Think we can have fights in here all the time?”

“They tried to hit me,” said Smitty mildly.

“You started it, tough mug. I saw the whole thing. Go on—into the building.”

Later in the day, Smitty watched the fading of winter daylight through the bars in his cell window. But he wasn’t seeing the daylight.

He was seeing a strong, wax-white face that never, in any set of circumstances, moved a muscle. Because it couldn’t change. He was looking into flaring, icy, colorless eyes under a thick shock of virile, snow-white hair.

Smitty was in a bad spot. But he could look at that mind’s-eye picture of The Avenger and feel that somehow he’d be gotten out of it. All The Avenger’s aides felt that way: that while Benson lived, they’d somehow be gotten out of the worst kind of jams. Which was one reason why they were willing to take such long chances.

Smitty suddenly heard a man clearing his throat in a meaningful sort of way. He turned from the window. He heard the sound again, from near the barred door.

He went there, covering the length of the cell in three short strides, squeezing between cot and wall. And he found that the throat-clearing came from the barred door of the cell next to his.

“Smith!”

It was a ghost of a whisper. The giant barely caught it.

“Stand next to your door so you can hear me, but pretend you aren’t listening.”

Smitty stood, vacant-eyed, next to his cell door. The whisper went on.

“You’ll have a mouthpiece, or friends, or somebody comin’ to see you. I want you to give ’em a message. I saw you knock Hammer and his two pals out, so I know you’re on the up and up.”

Smitty leaned against his door, and stretched his great arms as if sleepy. That was for the benefit of a man across the narrow corridor, who could see Smitty’s door—and the one next to it—if he looked.

“It’s about Judge Martineau,” the whisper came.

The giant almost grunted aloud with the mention of that name. The most important thing, The Avenger had said, on their calendar of investigation.

“The guys who did it, crossed me and put me in here,” the whisper went on. “I got a hunch I’ll never get out—even to go to a courtroom. So I’ll get back at ’em by tellin’ what I know. I drove the getaway car the night the judge was burned down in the Friday the Thirteenth Club. There were two guys in the car, but the one who went into the club and—”

There was a clang as the big lever at the end of the corridor threw the bars opening the cell doors. It was six o’clock, time to file down to dinner in the first-floor mess hall.

Smitty walked out with the rest. He flung one quick glance at the man in the cell next to his. He hadn’t noticed him before.

The man was slight, wiry, with a scarred, bitter face and sullen fright showing in his muddy-brown eyes. Smitty glanced swiftly away again so that no one should catch his look. The man with the scarred face was playing with death, even here in a jail, talking about the murder of the judge.

They went to the bare mess hall. They ate bean soup and potatoes and scraps of beef. They got up.

But they didn’t all get up!

There was sudden pandemonium, yells from the men, oaths from the guards, the bell clanging for the warden to hurry here.

Because one man stayed on his bench, sagging lower and lower over the long, raw wood table. As he sagged, blood in a torrent came from a hole in his side.

The man was Smitty’s cell neighbor, and he was dead when he finally rolled off the bench and hit the floor. Whatever he’d been going to say about the murder of Judge Martineau would never be said now.

Sardonically Smitty watched the frenzied activities of the guards. Some of those guards, he was sure, were in with Sisco’s crowd. He was therefore sure that no prisoner would ever be convicted of the murder of the man who had driven the getaway car.

The giant went back to his cell. He had come close to knowledge—and death had intervened.

It was shortly after “Lights Out” when a guard came to his cell, with the eyes of others curiously following him.

“All right, Smith, down to the office,” the guard said.

Wordlessly, the giant followed him down the corridor to the stairs, and then down to the front office of the grim stone building.

The warden was in there, and Captain of Detectives Harrigo.

Also there was a man, with greenish, dead-looking eyes, and a partially bald head. He looked spiderish, with dead, dry, long-fingered hands like tentacles.

“O.K., Sisco, I’ll run along,” said Harrigo. He waved and went out. And Smitty stared first at Sisco, the man with the greenish eyes, and then at the warden.

The warden was chewing his lips.

“Pretty irregular,” he complained, “taking this guy out like this.”

Smitty was almost bowled over. A murder suspect, refused bail, refused even a chance to phone anybody, could be sprung by even this politician and crook, Sisco? It didn’t seem credible. Yet it looked as if that were the case.

“The D.A.,” said the warden, “could raise the roof about it.”

“The D.A. hasn’t got the sense to come in out of the rain,” said the man with the greenish eyes. “In fact, he hasn’t sense enough to be sure of knocking over a case—even when it’s all fixed.”

“But to let this guy out—” began the warden.

“I can get the pretty papers from Judge Broadbough, all nice and legal, if you insist,” Sisco said. But his tone was irritable to the point of menace. The warden hastily backed off his high horse.

“Not necessary at all,” he babbled. “Not at all! I know the judge, and I know you. But why do you want to take this guy—”

Suddenly, the warden stopped.

Sisco’s back was three quarters turned to Smitty. But the giant had just managed to catch the fleeting glance from politician to warden.

There was a volume to be read in that dangerous look. It meant: this man is not to be trusted to a murder trial because there’s just the chance that an incompetent district attorney might not convict. He will be taken out of here now, and will go for a nice long ride, with a ditch on a lonely road as his destination.

“Come with me, Mr. Smith,” Sisco said blandly, staring into the giant’s seemingly slow-witted moonface. Smitty’s china-blue eyes looked very bewildered, indeed. Also, a bit thankful.

“Where?” said Smitty. “And why?”

“Wherever you want to go,” said Sisco. “You’re free, sprung, out. A mistake has been made, and we’re setting it right. That’s all you need to know.”

“That’s sure swell of you,” mumbled Smitty, as if he had never caught that look of death. “You must be mighty powerful in this town if you got drag enough to get me out of here.”

The warden coughed nervously. Sisco laughed a little.

“I swing a little weight. And I might be able to use you in a job, if you want it.”

“Gee—yes!” said Smitty. “If—”

“Well, come along and we’ll talk it over in my car.”

Smitty followed Sisco out of the office, and out of the barred front gate that he hadn’t thought to emerge from for a long time. There was a car at the curb. He could barely see it in the darkness.

But he could see it plainly enough to know that it was—empty.

Now, the giant was at a loss.

He had known with sure knowledge that he was being taken out of here to be shot in a gang ride. He had left gladly, feeling that he had more chance against a brace of gunmen than legally behind bars of a penal institution.

But here he was being led to an empty sedan!

“Get in!” said Sisco.

And there was a curious change in his voice.

It had been dry, dead, evil. Now it had a new vibrancy and purpose. It was like a draft of cold spring water. It matched a dead-white face and pale, icily flaming eyes and a steel-gray figure of a man more like a machine than a man.

“Get in, quick!” snapped the cold, impersonal voice.

A car was drawing up behind the sedan. This car had four men in it, and they were staring curiously at the giant and the man with the greenish eyes.

Smitty got in. Quick! And the man who had delivered him so smoothly from a cell got away from there. Quick.

“Benson—” breathed Smitty, incredulously.

The Avenger, man of a thousand faces, took the greenish-pupiled eye lens from his cold, colorless eyes. They interfered a little with sight. He sent the sedan tearing ahead.

The most perfect of plans can be knocked out of line by some small bit of bad luck that the most brilliant person could not have foreseen. This was a case in point.

The Avenger had schemed brilliantly and perfectly to get Smitty out of trouble. He had marvelously played the part of Sisco.

But one bit of ill fortune had bobbed up.

The four men in the car that had stopped at the jail gate behind The Avenger’s car, just happened to be Sisco’s men. And Sisco’s men just happened to know where Sisco was at that moment.

Since the spot was a long way away from here, they knew that the man with the giant could not be Sisco, no matter how much he resembled him. So they acted accordingly!