The Avenger 7 - Stockholders in Death (15 page)

She shouldn’t have been in that bedroom. She should have been in her own room down a hall and around a corner, where she could have heard nothing whatever. But she was in the bedroom, and she was hearing things. Plenty!

“This sap, Tom Crimm, is too hot to hold,” Blinky was complaining. “We’ve got to rub him out, Nicky.”

“If we do that,” rumbled the mob leader, “our first plan is shot. Then we’d have no goat for the bank job.”

“You ain’t got one as it stands,” Blinky pointed out. “If Tom gets caught, he squeals. If he dies, we beat the rap on the bank stick-up any way we can. We’ve done it before; we can do it again. Let me go out to The Corners and turn the heat on him.”

There was silence from Nicky Luckow. Then:

“I’ve got one more play to try first,” the mobster rumbled. “I’m still laying for the kid brother. If we get him, we can swing back to the first idea: Turn Tom over to the cops, with his brother’s life snuffed out if he talks, and let him clear us on the bank job—”

Rosabel backed soundlessly away from the door. She had a report to make on this. She got the little radio from her waist as she backed away.

She touched a night table in the room, and held her breath as it teetered. But it did not fall, only made a little creaking sound and then settled upright. She went on, into the bathroom, and closed the door.

The tiny radio was warmed up by then. She whispered into it, “Rosabel calling. From Beatrice Luckow’s apartment.”

A little voice came from the set, just audible enough so that the compact earphones didn’t have to be used.

“It’s Josh, honey. Go ahead.”

“About Tom and Wayne Crimm,” Rosabel breathed into the transmitter. “Did you ever hear of a place called The Corners? I think it’s out of town somewhere, because one of the men spoke of going ‘out to The Corners—’ ”

Rosabel stopped talking, then. And she felt as if a spot between her shoulder blades were slowly turning to ice. It was doing that at the sudden touch of a hard, cold object.

That object was a gun muzzle.

She turned, and looked up into the dull stones that Luckow had for eyes.

Behind Luckow, in the bathroom doorway, were Blinky and Luckow’s sister, Beatrice. Blinky was snarling soundlessly at the pretty Negress crouched over her small radio. Beatrice was expressionlessly looking at her crimson fingernails.

“I thought you said this maid was all right,” Luckow rasped to his sister. “All right, huh? She’s a little spy.” His gun prodded painfully into Rosabel’s back. “Drop that radio or whatever it is.”

Rosabel’s hands opened. The curved metal case tinkled to the floor. Luckow smashed it flat with his foot.

“You spy,” he snarled. “Who are you working for? The cops? The white-haired guy? And what’d you spill before we heard that table creak and came in here?”

Rosabel said nothing. There was nothing to say.

Luckow jerked her to her feet.

“Well, it doesn’t matter whether you spilt or not. The important thing is, not to see if you’ll talk to me, but to make sure you won’t talk to anybody else. Take her to The Corners, Blinky—”

That was all Rosabel heard. Without warning, treacherously, Luckow’s fist flashed up in a cruel blow. It caught her flush on her rounded, firm jaw.

And miles away in Bleek Street, Josh went crazy.

He knew Rosabel wouldn’t have taken the risk of radioing unless she had something very important to talk about. And, once started, he knew she wouldn’t have stopped unless something terrible had happened.

Her voice had ceased almost in the middle of a word.

Then there had been a beginning sound like the crackling of a match box under a heel. That was when her radio case went under Luckow’s foot. That sound had stopped as the pressure crushed the radio’s internal workings.

Then silence.

That was why Wayne was alone at headquarters. Josh raced out of the place without a word to him, or a thought of anything but Rosabel’s safety.

The Corners! Josh didn’t know where it was. But he found out in a hurry.

It was a small, little-known roadhouse on a side road in New Jersey. Luckow had a half-interest in it.

Rosabel had mentioned the place, and Josh had no other lead to where she might be taken if she were caught. Of course, they might have killed her where they found her.

Shuddering, Josh dismissed that thought. He clung to the logical idea that they wouldn’t want to commit murder in the apartment of Luckow’s sister. And he sped for The Corners in The Avenger’s fastest car.

Josh was a very dark Negro, indeed, and he made it a habit to wear dark clothes. The result was that he could slip along in the darkness of night almost like an invisible man.

He left his car a half a mile from the roadhouse and made his way across open fields toward the rear of it. He was thinking grimly of the way his wife’s voice had abruptly stopped, and hoping that his hunch about her being brought to the place she’d mentioned was right.

The Corners was a huge old farmhouse remodeled into a mongrel thing with an electric sign in front. There was a parking lot at the side, in which were twenty-five or thirty cars.

Josh crossed the lot like a streak of darkness within darkness. He got to a big tree, whose upper branches scraped the side of the building.

Up there, on the third floor, were dormer windows. The biggest branch came within four feet of the central window.

Josh went up the tree like a great black cat. He poised a moment, then leaped the distance between tree branch and roof. He hit the roof with a little louder thud than he liked; so he reached out and caught one of the leafy twigs of the big bough. He drew these harshly over the shingles.

That was to tell anyone inside who might have heard the thud that it was caused by the butting of the branch. Then he went to the dormer windows, crawling along the gutter, and peered into one after another.

The fourth showed a small attic room with somebody in it. There were two people in it, to be accurate, a man and a woman. But at first Josh only saw the man.

It was Tom Crimm. On his face was a queer look. It was compounded of fear and anger, with a tragic expression of guilt and regret thrown in.

Then Josh saw the woman, and things began to whirl around in his head with angry confusion.

The woman was Rosabel. And Rosabel was tied so tightly that the cords sank deep into her wrists and ankles. There was a gag over her lips, too.

Josh stayed where he was for a moment, too wrathful to move. He saw Tom stride toward her, with a knife in his hand.

The look on Tom’s face was a clear record of the chaos and guilt in the brain behind it. He had wanted his gang tough, to smash the bank crowd. But in all his planning he hadn’t contemplated anything so extreme as this.

With a sweep of the knife, he slashed the rope at Rosabel’s wrists. Another took care of her ankles. Then he removed the gag. His hands were trembling as he did so.

“They were going to kill you!” he said indignantly. “I heard them. Going to murder you here, as soon as the roadhouse customers were gone for the night, so the shots wouldn’t be heard. Killing women! I didn’t intend to have anything like that happen.”

No one connected with Tom in all this had denied that he had a brain. It was just that he used it in the wrong way, breaking the law, himself, to get even with the lawbreakers.

He was beginning to see just what kind of force he had unleashed when he played into the hands of Nicky Luckow. Murdering women in cold blood! He had thought the murder of the watchman at the bank was the last straw. But this—this went beyond that.

He helped Rosabel to her feet. She flexed her arms as the circulation started to return.

“I’ll help you down the back way,” Tom said. Josh, on the roof outside, nodded the gratitude which he wasn’t able to voice. “You can slip off toward the highway—”

Josh saw Tom’s face suddenly go blank, then saw him make a quick move toward the door which stopped before he had gone two feet.

Josh couldn’t see the door from where he perched. But in a moment he saw the man who came from the doorway.

It was Luckow’s man, Blinky. And in his hand was an automatic.

“So you were going to help this little spy get away!” said Blinky, so softly that Josh barely heard. “I had an idea you’d be like that. You dumb punk!”

“Look here,” flamed Tom. “I expected some rough work when I came to you guys for help. I’ve gone through with my share of it and I haven’t kicked yet. But I’m kicking now! I won’t be part of the murder of women.”

“Won’t you?” said Blinky.

“No! Where’s Luckow? I want to see Luckow.”

“You’ll see him,” droned Blinky. “He ought to be here any minute. You’ll see him. Then, if your luck’s good, you can go from here to the chair. If it ain’t good, you’ll go out with the dame, here. Got that, you lily-handed amateur crook?”

Tom sneered.

“If you kill me, there’s no more chance for you to get that chunk of my father’s fortune in Ballandale stock. If you try to hand me over to the cops for the bank holdup, I’ll talk my head off.”

Blinky grinned.

“You wouldn’t talk.”

“Oh, no? There’s nothing you could do to stop me! There’s no threat you could hold over me that would—”

He stopped. His eyes widened.

“Look here!” he said hoarsely. “You haven’t any ideas about— Where’s my brother, Wayne?”

“I wouldn’t have the slightest idea,” said Blinky.

He struck, then. Because Tom had leaped. He flailed down with the gun and Tom slumped to the floor.

With the fall, Josh began edging in front of the window to leap in. But he heard a noise from the far end of the roof that made him jerk his head that way. He thought he saw another head down there, just ducking under the eaves.

He changed his mind about going into the room where Blinky was. He pussyfooted down the line to the next dormer window. It was dark behind that one.

At the other end of the room he distinctly heard a noise. And this time he definitely saw a head thrust up and then duck down again.

Somebody at each end of the roof. He slid into the darkened room next to the one in which Rosabel and Tom were. The minute he hit the floor he knew he had made a mistake. He sensed someone in there, close!

He didn’t get his psychic warning in time. The roof or something seemed to drop on his head and he went down.

A light snapped on. The catlike, mean-looking fellow called Tim stood and stared down at him. He nudged the unconscious Negro with a hard toe.

“Didn’t you ever hear of burglar alarms?” he jeered to the unresponsive ears. “That tree looks like an easy way to get into this joint. It ain’t the first time we’ve trapped a guy sneakin’ up it—and trippin’ the alarm as he went.”

He hauled Josh into the next room and dumped him next to Tom and Rosabel. Rosabel had been tied and gagged, again. She stared over the gag with horror in her eyes as she saw Josh’s plight.

Tom was still unconscious. But his lips moved a bit.

“Wayne—” was the word they formed. “Wayne—”

Josh wasn’t the only one who had gotten an urgent call at the Bleek Street headquarters. Sometime after Josh had left in such a hurry and while The Avenger was still being held at gunpoint, Wayne had received a telephone call. Benson discovered that about four minutes after finding evidences of the boy’s hurried departure.