The Avenger 4 - The Devil’s Horns (16 page)

Light bathed the room as a finger touched the switch near the door.

The finger had belonged to Buddy Wilson. And Wilson stood in the doorway, now, and stared at the colored man.

The gun in Wilson’s hand spoke once. And the tiny radio flew into pieces. The man’s girlish face, with the flat, hard eyes, didn’t change expression at all. The mouth, still bruised badly from the caress of MacMurdie’s bony knuckles, was a straight, hard line.

“Mah radio!” Josh exclaimed, trying to act it out. “You-all done ruined mah—”

“Shut it!” Wilson snarled. “I see you’re dressed to go out. So we’ll go! Some place where we can be nice and alone.”

Josh was a fast thinker, and a clever, educated man. But he couldn’t think his way out of this one.

“Come on, I said,” Wilson barked. “Or take it right now. I nearly got you in the library. I
have
got you now!”

Josh went to the door. Wilson retreated so that at no moment could the colored man have leaped for him. Josh, feet and legs feeling numb, went downstairs again. On the second floor, Judge Broadbough was standing, white and scared, in the doorway of his bedroom.

“Wilson,” he bleated. “What’s he done! What’s—”

“I’ll take care of this,” the gunman said. “This is in my department, too. Go back to bed—and you never saw me, and never saw this guy go out. See?”

Josh went ahead of the gun to the street door, out to a car at the curb. A man at the wheel grunted in surprise.

“I didn’t know we were going to have a passenger, Buddy.”

“I did—when I came here. So I catch him red-handed, snoopin’ around. So we got the passenger. You know where to go.”

The man at the wheel nodded. He started off, fast, as Wilson sat beside Josh with the gun in his ribs.

The car stopped in front of the largest of three big warehouses taking up with a fenced yard, a whole city block near the edge of town. A sign on the biggest building said: “Sweet Valley Contracting Co.” There wasn’t a soul in sight, and one dim street light far away was all that illumined the place.

Josh was prodded into the office of the building, through it, and into the basement of the warehouse behind it. But before this, Wilson had slipped a black mask over his face. Evidently, he trusted some of his own men, but he did not trust the men to be encountered around here.

Down in the basement, Wilson wasted no time.

There was a flat, wooden mixing tray on the basement floor. Nearby were several big, empty barrels. Wilson yelled and two men appeared.

The two stared at Wilson’s masked face, at the thin, gangling Negro, and at the big, flat mixing trough. Without a word they dumped cement, sand and water into the trough tray, and began to hoe it around.

“There’s a quarry, four miles out from here,” Wilson’s voice came from under the mask. “Far as we can tell, the thing hasn’t any bottom at all. When you get dumped in there, you just keep on going down and down. Especially if you’re in a barrel with concrete poured in around you.”

Josh said nothing at all. He was getting ready to make as much trouble as possible before his life was snuffed out. The skinny, long body was packed with power. The colored man, honor graduate from Tuskegee, could fight like a wild cat—and he meant to, now.

The outcome was a certainty. Wilson’s gun would belch a bullet, and Josh would fall dead. But he was hanged if he’d just stand and take it quietly. He
might
get in a lick or two first—

Suddenly a voice came from the far end of the basement, where stairs went up.

“Hold it!”

They all turned. But Josh knew even before turning who it was, and knew there was no hope here. Because he recognized a voice he’d heard at Broadbough’s. Norman Vautry’s voice.

A figure came from the bottom of the stairs. The man was hooded as Wilson was, but from under the mask came the newspaperman’s voice, again.

“This man got something very valuable from Broadbough before you took him out of there. Something very valuable! He hid it someplace. We’ve got to find out where before he goes into one of those barrels.”

Wilson’s flat, shark’s eyes glared at Josh through the eye-slits of his mask.

“Oh, he did, huh! Well, we can make him talk about it—”

“We’ll do better than that,” came Vautry’s voice. “We’ll take him back to Broadbough’s—and make him get the stuff himself, right now, from where he hid it.”

“But he can tell us, and we can come back here after we’ve got it, and fix him—”

“It would be dawn or later by then. And you won’t want to hold him here, in a barrel, till tomorrow night’s darkness. Too many of the men working around here in the day are honest.”

“Oh, all right,” Wilson said, mask stirring impatiently with the words. “I’ll—”

“I can take him; there are two men in my car.”

“If what he’s got is half as valuable as you say,” came Wilson’s cold, dangerous voice, “you better not make any slips.”

“You can be very sure of that,” was the meaningful reply.

A gun was in the other man’s hand. He waved with it. And Josh went back to the stairs and up again.

He went with alacrity. Down here, it was sure death within a few minutes. Leaving, he might have an hour more of living. Though with two men in a waiting car and this man, Vautry, beside him with a gun, Josh didn’t see that his position was much better—

He felt a cold gun butt in his astonished hand as they got to the head of the stairs. It was only by a great effort of will that he kept from exclaiming aloud. And it was only by a great effort that he kept from collapsing with relief.

The man who had gotten him so smoothly away was not Vautry—but The Avenger.

“I heard that shot shattering the radio,” Benson said. “I thought they’d bring you here, so—”

Steps sounded ahead of them. The steps were rapid and agitated.

There was a rather dim night-light in the cavernous warehouse. Josh saw a man coming toward them, taking a mask from his pocket and starting to put it on as he came.

The man was Norman Vautry.

Josh knew despair again. They had another building, with who knew how many men in it, to get through before getting to the street and freedom. And here appeared the very man, supposed to be masked beside him, at this moment! One Vautry meant deliverance.

Two meant instant death!

Again Josh, fast thinking and shrewd as he was, was utterly without hope. But the genius beside him was master of the situation.

The Avenger leaped back to the stairway, lifting his mask a little as he moved.

“Up here!” he yelled. “That guy wasn’t Vautry! He was a fake! I got him cornered up here now! Get him!”

There was a scramble from the basement. Meanwhile, Vautry, staring and struggling ineffectually to get his mask over his face, was doing some yelling of his own. But it went unheard.

He tried to get in the way of Josh and Benson as they raced toward the street. But though he might have a ruthless, double-crossing, keen brain, he was no man of action. Josh’s fist lashed out, and Vautry staggered back to the floor.

He was just getting up, dazedly, and Josh and Benson had just slipped into the next building, when Wilson got up onto the first floor. The killer’s eyes were like cold, shining grapes as they stared through the eye-slits at a man resembling Vautry and just getting up from the floor with a mask in his hand.

Not Vautry—an imposter—a fake—get him!

“No!” the newspaperman was screaming. “N—”

Long after the second bullet stopped all the man’s movements forever, Wilson methodically sent slugs ripping through his body. Guy calling himself The Avenger! Guy called man of a thousand faces! Sticking his bill in at Ashton City. Well,
this
would fix him! And
this—

MacMurdie had worked all day and evening, following the gratifying brush with Buddy Wilson in Lila Belle’s apartment, getting dope on John M. Singell, dubious politician and owner of the Sweet Valley Contracting Co.

He hadn’t gotten much. But one of the few stray bits was the information that Singell was a regular patron of Sisco’s Gray Dragon Club.

It was with no definite plan in mind, simply to check on Singell’s possible presence there, that MacMurdie went into the Gray Dragon at past two o’clock in the morning.

But afterward the bony Scot insisted that pure Providence had guided him. For he stepped into the café room just in time to see Nellie Gray, in a green gown, down the narrow corridor off the orchestra dais, being hustled into a doorway by Sisco!

The dour Scotchman’s bitter blue eyes burned. But his face gave away none of his thoughts. He had been following the head waiter to a corner table. He said:

“I’ll be with ye in just a minute.”

He walked to a row of phone booths where patrons could phone their wives that they had to stay late at the office on business, fished in his snap-clip purse till he found a nickel, grudgingly inserted it, and dialed the number of the hotel room Smitty had taken on first arriving in Ashton City.

Mac was as sparing with words as with pennies.

“Smitty, Gray Dragon. Come fast! I think Nellie’s in trouble.”

He hung up and went, smiling a little, to the table that had been cleared for him—

He hadn’t gotten to that table when the giant, two miles away, was out his door, putting on hat and overcoat as he ran.

Lie low, Benson had told him. There was still a murder charge hanging over him. The police—who fortunately didn’t know of this hotel room or the name he’d used to register—would be hot after him.

But that short call of Mac’s made everything different, of course. Nellie in danger! Smitty charged two blocks like a wild bull elephant till he saw a cab. The vehicle sagged under his weight as he hopped in.

Five minutes later he got out a block from the Dragon—and promptly ducked down an alley. A cop was standing at the nightclub entrance, talking to the doorman.

The alley led behind the Gray Dragon. There was a back door to the club kitchens. Off the corner of the building there was a window. Since the window was on the first floor, it was barred.

Smitty seized hold of the grating. The giant emitted a kind of enraged grunt, while his vast shoulders writhed and his huge back bowed.