The Avenger 4 - The Devil’s Horns (20 page)

The roof of the warehouse was of corrugated metal. The Avenger pointed to a square that was a little loose at the lower edge. Smitty, like a docile elephant, inserted his immense fingers in the crack, heaved, and bent the iron section up and away from the roof rafters as one would bend back the lid of a sardine can.

They dropped silently to a supporting beam below, and then climbed it upright. At the front of the warehouse, unseen in darkness, two men were talking in a low tone. Two gunmen watching the door, probably.

The three scourges of evil crept like shadows behind their backs, to the stairs, and down.

Here there was light, disclosing partitioned hugeness stacked with building materials. So here they had to go even more cautiously. The Avenger went first, pale eyes seeming to see all things at once; his gray steel figure moving with wraithlike noiselessness.

At the stair end of the basement, there was an open section with big iron drums in it. Between the wall of this, and the side wall, was a cement-block partition. Two doors in the partition indicated two tight-shut rooms taking up that walled-off length.

Steps on the stairs sent the three into the shadows under them. Through a crack in one of the risers, The Avenger’s pale, cold eyes peered out. He saw a man tap on the nearer of the two doors, saw the door open.

A masked head showed itself, there was an exchange of words. The door was closed again, and the man went back up the stairs. The Avenger’s keen ears heard a click, as the door was locked.

He slid from under the stairs, went past the locked door, with Smitty and Mac following closely. They could hear a faint hum of voices as they passed the door. Each thought the same thing: in that room were the four masked men who dominated the city. All four of them, conveniently in one spot!

Benson tried the heavy knob of the second door. The knob turned and the door opened. He swept a thin beam of light into it from his flash. The room was empty. There were no supplies, furniture, or anything else in it. Just a windowless cell, about fifteen feet by twenty, solid-walled, confronted him.

All three went in.

Now, for a moment without explanation and quite illogically, they could hear the voices of the masked four in the next room even more plainly than they had been able to in passing the door. You’d have thought they could hear more plainly through the wooden panels of a door.

A farther sweep of The Avenger’s light disclosed the reason.

High in one corner of the partitioning wall there was a foot-square grating. Through that came chinks of light—and the sound of the voices.

The Avenger pointed.

Smitty nodded, stood under the grating. He bent down, seized his chief’s ankles, and raised him up, easily and without a quiver of gigantic muscles.

Benson looked through the grating.

There were the four masked men, about an oval table—the target of all their efforts—the quadruple head of all the crime and murder and extortion in a city of half a million people!

The four were talking in such low tones that Benson couldn’t hear their words. But he made out the dry, deadly voice of Sisco, coming from under one of the masks, and the harsh, flat tone of Buddy Wilson from under another.

The Avenger pressed closer to the grating. In a very few minutes Cattridge, with trusted men, would smash a way in here, and the four supercriminals would end their careers behind police bars that no corrupt politics could swing open for them. But anything he could overhear now might help later—

It was then that Benson saw the drum.

It was one of the huge iron casks such as were stacked in the doorless space next to the room in which he looked, that had been rolled in here. It was near the end of the small meeting chamber. From it ran a one-inch pipe, with a valve.

The pipe ran toward the wall against which The Avenger was leaning, but he could not look down at a sharp-enough angle to see its terminal point.

Instantly Benson leaned down and tapped the giant’s hand to lower him.

He moved along the wall in the darkness, feeling with sensitive, steel-strong fingers. Mac, wondering what was up, heard his hands sliding lightly over the wall, low down. Then he heard a faint sniff as Benson, with jungle-trained nostrils that were as supernaturally keen as his other senses, sought after a faint odor.

“Yes,” Mac heard The Avenger whisper. “So that’s it.”

Mac heard a slight scrape, then Benson came back to where they stood, under the grating.

“Up again.”

Smitty raised Benson. The Avenger looked again into the next room—

It seemed that Mac wasn’t the only one who had heard the slight noise along the wall! When Benson stared through the grating a second time, he saw that the hooded heads of all four men faced him.

And then a laugh came from under one of the masks. The man who laughed shot out a hand. There was a loud, heavy click at the lock of the door behind The Avenger.

“Chief,” whispered Smitty. “Chief—did you hear that? I think we’re locked in here. I think some kind of trick catch has been thrown, and we’re trapped.”

The Avenger said nothing, but in his pale and relentless eyes was an awful urgency.

Mac came back from a leap to the door.

“They’ve got us,” the Scot whispered. “The door’s barred—”

The man in the next room stopped laughing.

“Are you at the grating, Benson?” he called. “But of course you are.” It was Sisco’s deadly voice. “You came here to spy on us, so naturally you’d go right to that room of your own free will, and not have to be thrown in!”

The Avenger said nothing. Like drawn steel blades, his deadly eyes peered through the steel grating.

“Do you know what room you’re in—you and your pals?” Sisco’s murderously exulting voice went on. “Our gas chamber, my white-haired friend. You’re familiar with chlorine gas, I suppose? Funny stuff. It’s a purifier—and at the same time it’s a fast and deadly poison. There is chlorine in this drum. We have a supply of it here for the municipal swimming pool to be built next year, at a hundred and fifty per cent profit. From the drum there’s a pipe going into your room. I’m going to turn the stuff on now! Sweet dreams.”

“Sisco!”

The Avenger’s voice snapped like a whip. There was in it such steely purpose, such strength, that Sisco found himself stopping as if jerked at the end of a string.

“I advise you not to turn that valve,” The Avenger said. “I advise it very strongly.”

Sisco’s laugh sounded again—but it was curiously hollow.

“You’re in a swell position to give advice!” he taunted.

“Cattridge and his men—the honest members of the force—are on their way here,” Benson said, with that calm and deady tone that never changed any more than did his immobile face. “At any moment you’ll hear shots upstairs, as he crashes into the warehouse from the street. You don’t want him to come just after you’ve turned that valve.”

Sisco’s laugh lost a little of its uncertainty. He had been puzzled, and vaguely alarmed at the reasonless note of authority in the calm voice. But now that the reason had come out, he could taunt again.

“Cattridge, eh?” he said. “So that’s your hope. You can kiss that goodbye. You didn’t talk to Cattridge when you called headquarters a while ago! He isn’t coming here with anybody. He hasn’t the slightest idea where you are!”

Sisco went toward the drum. Benson, with a move as swift as light, got out Mike, the silenced .22, The little gun spat all its four slugs, one after another, through the grating. But no opening was big enough for the barrel to swivel toward the men at the table, or toward Sisco. The slugs spanged into the door.

Sisco was laughing more loudly as his hand reached out to the valve controlling the deadly contents of the big drum.

“Keep it up, Benson,” he called. “Shoot all you like. You won’t have much more chance.”

“Once more, Sisco, I urge you not to turn that valve,” came The Avenger’s inhumanly calm, even voice.

“I’ll bet you do!” said Sisco. The man at the head of the table spoke at last. “Oh, turn it on,” he said. “Have it over with.” Sisco opened the valve with one quick turn and stepped from the container. He snapped a shutter over the grating. From the drum began pouring the quickly fatal chlorine.

From the room just described by Sisco as a lethal chamber came the light thud of Benson’s feet as he leaped down from Smitty’s grip.

Mac was battering at the hopelessly locked door.

“It’s all right, Mac,” came The Avenger’s calm voice in the darkness. “It’s all right.”

All right for the man with the white, dead face and the flaming, pale eyes, perhaps. All right for Mac and Smitty.

But not all right for the four masked men.

Chlorine, for the sake of compactness, is commonly handled in liquid form. With a strong affinity for hydrogen, it spreads instantly as a gas, in air or water, when released.

With the turn of the valve in the next room, liquid chlorine had spouted in a flood from the drum. But not into Sisco’s death chamber. The nightclub owner and racketeer had taken four steps from the drum when the scream of Buddy Wilson, public enemy, tore at his ears.

“Sisco! Turn it off quick!
It’s comin’ in here!”

Sisco jerked around with a suddenly pallid face. And then his yells chorused with the rest.

The one-inch pipe went from the drum to the wall, all right. It went through the slot in the base of the wall, freshly chipped out to receive it.

But it came back in again.

The one-inch pipe end in the next room had been bent around in a narrow U-turn by Benson’s powerful fingers.

The man with the white, awful face and the pale, inexorable eyes had been true to his code. He refused, personally, to take the lives of the lowest crooks. But he maneuvered them into positions where, by certain moves springing from hate or greed, they were apt to destroy themselves. He had done that now! With the bend of that pipe he had put the situation squarely up to those in the next room.

If they turned that valve to destroy The Avenger and his aides, they would destroy themselves.

And they had turned the valve!

A steady, hideous screaming was coming from Sisco’s lips. He tore his mask off and wrenched the valve shut. But it was much too late for that. A pool of liquid chlorine lay over the floor around him.

The liquid rose in a heavy fog, greenish, noxious, suffocating. The four in the room ran for the door, with Sisco jerking out his key as he leaped.

Sisco jammed the key in the lock and tried to turn it. It didn’t turn. Those four slugs from the Avenger’s little gun that had “harmlessly” slammed into the door had methodically ruined the lock.

Their cries were dreadful things to listen to. Through the steel shutter they’d snapped over the grating after the turn of the valve they came like the distant cries of souls in Hades.