The Avenger 19 - Pictures of Death (5 page)

Cole was the newest member of Justice, Inc. He was magnetic, husky, with wavy dark hair and romantic eyes. He was almost too good-looking; but his friends paid no attention to his good looks because they knew that he was a devil on wheels in any fight.

Cole was in the front of the store. Something in Mac’s voice told him there’d be no more routine business that night. He jumped to the store door and locked it, then clicked off the lights. No customers were in the store. This would keep any would-be customers out.

He raced back to the rear room to find Mac standing, fascinated, at the television screen. So Cole stared, too, and he heard and saw most of what had gone on at Bleek Street.

“My gosh!” he kept breathing as the play unrolled. “With a whiskey bottle full of nitro, this guy walks right in, and I guess he’s going to walk right out again with the picture. Look at the chief’s right hand!”

Both saw it—the little move of the thumb and third finger of Benson’s right hand. That was a code signal meaning: “Follow this man.”

The signal was hardly necessary. As Cole stared, he was reaching for his belt radio, the tiny two-way set of Smitty’s perfecting that allowed each member of the band to communicate with others no matter where they were.

He fastened the thin, curved case under his shirt at the belt.

“ ’Tis the picturrre,” burred Scotch MacMurdie. “That’s what he came for—”

“Of course,” said Cole impatiently. He didn’t know what this was about, where the chief had gotten a rolled-up canvas or what it meant; but he needed no one to point out that the picture was the reason for the invasion of Bleek Street.

Cole was on his way before the man paused in the stair doorway at Justice, Inc., with the flask menacingly raised. He reached the mouth of Bleek Street just as a car roared away from the curb.

Cole had just time to see that there was only one man in the car, the driver, and that he was a blond fellow. Then he whirled off after the man in his own car.

The car Cole was driving was a deceptive affair. The Avenger himself used it often, because its disguise was so good. It was a moderately priced, large sedan, about four years old. It was shabby and sedate. But under the weathered hood was a motor that would whirl the chassis along at over a hundred miles an hour.

It was lucky that Cole had such speed. He found out that he was going to need it.

The driver of the car ahead was in a hurry that took no account of laws. He went sixty miles an hour up Sixth Avenue and fifty across town to the elevated highway. Three times, he swung up over curbs and down sidewalks for a few yards to get through traffic jams taking up the whole street.

Cole swerved with him.

They reached the West Side Highway going north, and at this point the man ahead pushed it up to seventy-five. Cole dropped behind. He reflected resentfully that you never saw a traffic cop if you needed one. It would be a help if a motorcycle cop appeared and pinched this guy.

But then he remembered the hour, the one time in the twenty-four hours that a car had a slight chance of speeding like this and not being caught.

Cole kept on dropping behind. Till now, he’d had no chance to try to conceal the fact that he was pursuing the fellow ahead. Now, he tried to lull the man’s suspicions, if there were any to lull.

He began to think there were none. It seemed as if any man in such a frantic hurry to get away must have noticed the car hugging his tail. But this man acted as if unconscious of pursuit.

Or as if sure that at any time he could rid himself of such pursuit!

“I wonder,” said Cole Wilson, reflecting apprehensively along this line, “if he has got something that could stop me.”

A bomb, at least of the pineapple size commonly carried by crooks, wouldn’t do it. The old sedan was armored like a tank. Shots wouldn’t do it; the car was bulletproof. Then what?

Cole shrugged. He decided that nothing could shake his pursuit. He sped on in the wake of the other man, and now found he was doing eighty.

They went farther and farther uptown. Then they went around a traffic circle and down a small road. And there Cole found out the reason why the man ahead seemed so little bothered by a trailer.

His car approached a fork where five roads came together in a bewildering mess. There was no other car in sight. The man shot toward this many-pronged fork, and there was a sharp puff of sound from his car. Also, there was a cloud of black smoke.

He had raised a smoke screen, exactly as a destroyer at sea raises a smoke screen to hide itself or a battle ship. And he was being just as successful.

“Hey!” exclaimed Cole.

There had been a car. Now, there was a black cloud hiding the beginning of all the five roads.

“Jeu!”

There was no way on earth of telling which of the five roads his quarry had taken. This was why he had driven so confidently.

Cole slammed on his brakes, but such was his speed that he couldn’t stop till he was into the cloud. There, he stopped, all right. He hit a curb, glanced off and nuzzled to rest against a tree. He couldn’t see a thing, blinded in that smoke.

“I’ve muffed him,” he mourned disconsolately.

He rolled down the right-hand window to find out if he could see a little better with no glass between him and the smoke. He couldn’t. He got out. In a moment the smoke would clear; then he could see where he was in relation to the road and perhaps find out into which lane the other car had turned.

It was three or four minutes before he could see anything even dimly. Then, so close at hand that he almost jumped, he saw the other car!

It hadn’t taken any road at all. It had stopped right after throwing the smoke screen. Why? Well, Cole was to find that out in about a second.

He started impulsively toward the car, balling his fist to give the driver a good, persuasive clout!

Cole Wilson was a ball of fire in action. There was no member of Justice, Inc., who had performed more marvels than he had. But he had one fault.

He was impulsive.

Any other of the little band would have thought it out a minute before leaping toward the car. But not Cole. So he got into trouble.

“Stand perfectly still, please,” came a voice.

He whirled. Coming around the side of his own car was the man he was after.

The smoke had been, not an escape effort, but an attempt to lure him out of his own machine where he was accessible to trouble. And the attempt had succeeded.

“Turn around,” said the man.

He had an automatic that looked like a cannon. He was almost courteous, but there was impersonal murder in his tone.

Cole hesitated. There was still much smoke, but there was not too much murk for the man to drill him in the head quite easily if he wanted to.

Cole turned.

He knew the trick, of course. The man would prefer not to shoot if he didn’t have to. Better to club him down silently. So he was going to walk up behind Cole’s back, and slash the automatic down.

If Cole could spot the precise instant when the gun was upraised, and hence off line, he’d try a break.

He felt, rather than heard, the man’s cautious steps over the turf behind him. He thought he heard a rustle of fabric as the man’s arm raised, but he wasn’t sure. Not sure enough.

Sweat burst out on his forehead. It was a deadly guessing game. If he guessed wrong, he had his skull smashed, for he knew this fellow would play for keeps. If he guessed right—

He whirled and sprang. And the luck of The Avenger’s aides was with him. The gun was swung up for the blow.

Frantically, the man tried to get it down for a shot, but he was at least a half second too late. Then he grunted as a fist caught him in the middle and another tagged his jaw. Hard fingers tore the gun from his grasp, but he was at least able to twitch it away so Wilson couldn’t get it. It fell in the dark. Then it was man to man.

The fight that followed was a honey.

Cole was as fast as light, as tough as whipcord, and was now pretty sore. He would rather not go back to Bleek Street at all than go without the man he’d been sent for, and he fought with that grim thought in mind.

The blond fellow fought as though death were better than defeat. And as far as strength and swiftness went, he, too, was quite a battler.

He straightened from that first blow, and caught Cole over the heart with a right that made The Avenger’s man feel as if he’d been stabbed. Then he got one in on the side of Cole’s face that made him see stars.

Cole came back with a double jab to the middle again, and a short one straight up to the jaw. The man reeled backward. Cole followed, then felt a hand suddenly seize on his face, with fingers jabbing viciously for his eyes.

He had to back off or go blind. And as he backed, his opponent jumped like a tiger, caught him squarely around the waist and laid him on the ground like a falling tree. His hands went around Cole’s windpipe.

Cole wrenched at the iron fingers. He seemed to hear far-off bells ringing. Also, he seemed to hear something that acted on his flagging strength like a shot of adrenalin.

He seemed to hear men running toward them through the clearing, black smoke. Many men.

Cole stopped clawing at the throttling hands. He bent his arm back to get the last possible inch of distance for the blow and punched up at the man’s face. It was a ten-inch jab that a champion might have been proud of. It rocked the fellow’s head far back.

Wilson followed it with a second, felt the choking hands relax and threw the man off. One last punch ended in a sort of cracking sound. And it was Cole who delivered it.

He saw the blond guy fall limply. But now he heard the running steps close by. Without pause, he leaped for the man’s car. On the front seat was the rolled-up canvas. He snatched it and went back to his unconscious attacker.

“Harris,” a voice rumbled almost at his elbow. “Where are you? This damned smoke—”

Wilson picked up the man and sped with him to his own old sedan. He jammed the unconscious body into the right-hand side, then ran around to the driver’s seat.

They saw him, then. And he saw them. There were a dozen of them. More. Twenty at least, most with guns in their hands.

“It’s a young army,” rasped Cole. “What is all this?”

But it didn’t matter what it was. He had won. With exuberance in his grin and triumph in his pumping blood, he slammed the door shut and started the motor. Now to go back to Bleek Street with both man and painting—

One whiplike revolver shot robbed him of most of his victory!

Almost as it came, Cole suddenly remembered that the window on the unconscious man’s side was open. He had rolled it down to try to see through the smoke. He whipped across to roll up the bulletproof glass; but then the shot had come!

Cole cursed as he saw the blond fellow’s head jerk and saw that a bullet had drilled it squarely. Then he was ducking as more shots poured at the raising window. He got it up, and, after that, they could shoot all they pleased. But they’d got his prisoner first.

Soon, they saw that their shots were wasted, and they stopped firing. As mysteriously as they had appeared, they faded back into the night, and Cole was helpless to stop them.