The Avenger 22 - The Black Death (9 page)

There was a swift rattle of tools, and the car started to rise up under the urge of a jack. Then it stopped, and suddenly one of the rear doors opened.

Smitty and Nellie and Cole blinked into the pale, glacial eyes of The Avenger. They weren’t vacant now. They were terrible in their intensity and purpose.

“Chief!” yelled Smitty. “Thank heavens! We thought we heard the guys back there say they had you up a tree.”

The three of them were out now. They looked toward the front of the car and saw that their murderous chauffeur was the same way. Out! He lay beside his jack, with a blue egg on his jaw where The Avenger’s fist had struck.

“The only thing up the tree back there,” Benson said evenly, “is my coat, spread on a fork to look as if I were in it. I got to the next tree, then to one over the gate. As your car came out, I dropped and got on the rear bumper. Fortunately, it is a dark night.”

“That f-flat—” faltered Nellie.

“When I fell toward the front of the car I wedged a small capsule in the tread so that it would burst with the first revolution of the wheel. In the capsule was concentrated sulphuric acid.”

The colorless, icy eyes went to Smitty.

“Change the tire, Smitty, and drive to Bleek Street,” he said. “I’ll see the three of you there in a little while.”

“If you’re going to stay around here, you’ll need help,” Cole protested. “Let me—”

“I’ll see the three of you at Bleek Street soon,” said The Avenger calmly. They knew there was no changing that decision.

Benson picked up the unconscious driver and faded into the underbrush beside the road. He went to the car in which he and Cole had come to Hannon’s place.

The man muttered a little and moved. Dick’s fist struck with exactness of force and direction at his jaw again, and the man entered a second sleep. Then Benson took a small case, like an overnight bag, from the back of the car.

He opened it to disclose what was probably the world’s most complete makeup kit.

In the top tray were dozens of pairs of shell-thin little optical cups with different-colored pupils. Just under this were myriad little bottles of hair stain. Under that, in the bottom tray, were chemicals to draw and distort flesh, wax fillers, pads, all the aids of disguise. In the lid of the box was a mirror.

The Avenger propped the chauffeur up in the seat and set the box so the mirror was beside the man’s face. Then he changed coloring, conformation and expression, till his features were unbelievably like those of the gunman. Finally, he selected contact lenses to match the man’s muddy-brown eyes, and slid them over his pale, glacial orbs.

He got out a hypodermic needle and gave the unconscious man an injection that would keep him sleeping for four or five hours. Then he locked the car from the outside and walked slowly back toward Hannon’s estate.

As usual, everything The Avenger had recently done had a sound reason behind it. From the pretended brain injury to the present disguise and return into the enemy’s stronghold—all was done according to a pattern.

When Dick had come to in the tool house, he had regained consciousness completely and instantly, as he did when waking from a sound sleep. Like a jungle animal. And almost the first thing he’d seen, which none of the rest had, was a peephole in one wall. And in the peephole was an eye.

So they were observed. That was why he had pretended the injury that would make him seem harmless, and hence would make their captors tend to pay little attention to him in future action. For that reason, he had adopted the vacant stare. This also permitted him to listen with all his power of concentration and still not seem to be listening.

The Avenger’s hearing bordered on the miraculous. He could hear sounds so faint that none of his associates dreamed there were sounds at all.

And it seemed to him, there in that solid little stone cubicle, that he heard something down below him. Down under the seemingly solid stone floor.

He never had identified the sound or even been absolutely sure he’d heard it. Indeed, he might have been hearing only the pulse in his ears; after all, those two blows had been bad ones. But he
thought
he had heard something and wanted to investigate.

Also, on coming out of the tool house, he had looked at the lightning rods on the Hannon house and observed that they seemed just a little taller than they need be.

As if, just possibly, they were aerials, not just lightning rods.

Finally, the men back there had shot at him and Cole in the house, but refused to shoot outside on the grounds. In the house, the sound of shots would be unheard by anyone on the road. Outside, the same sound would be heard for a mile and would draw attention.

This, and the bread crumbs, indicated that this gang had used Hannon’s place for some time as a hideout and wanted to keep on using it. Therefore, they didn’t want to draw attention with shots.

It all added up to something that needed to be looked into.

The driver of the death car was supposed to dump the car at a distant place, then find his way back as best he could to report.

The Avenger figured that the trip, with a cab back to within half a mile of Hannon’s place, should take a little less than an hour. He waited till that time had passed, then walked up the road openly to the gate.

The man in the lodge house set the seal of approval on The Avenger’s disguise. He saw him walking up, came from the small building and opened the iron door within the gate. Dick stepped through. Full in the floodlight, he waited for the other man.

“Any trouble, Harry?” the man said to The Avenger, staring right at him without suspicion.

“Naw,” said Benson. “It went off like a clock.”

This was a ticklish moment. He could duplicate the man’s looks, but he hadn’t heard his voice. All he could do was speak rather thickly, huskily, and as little as possible.

“Hey, what’s wrong with your voice?” said the gate tender, scowling a little.

Benson remembered the blow to the throat he’d gotten in on one of the men in Hannon’s library during Cole’s ill-timed smoke attack.

“One of ’em slugged me in the neck, back in the house,” he said huskily. He felt gingerly at his throat. “Feels like my Adam’s apple is squashed into apple sauce.”

“Oh,” said the man, grinning.

Benson went on toward the house. Next time he spoke, he would make it a hoarse whisper. No one could identify that, or make comments on the sudden difference in Harry’s voice. He went to the back of the house. He passed something that made his eyes glint a little behind the disguising cups. It was his coat, hauled wrathfully down from the tree and ripped into shreds by the furious and baffled mobsters. He was in Harry’s coat, now. It fitted much too tightly across the shoulders, but he managed to squeeze into it.

Another man hailed him. He was going toward the rear door, too. In fact, Dick had waited under a tree till he caught someone going in. Undoubtedly, there was a code tap, and he had no way of knowing what it was.

Dick fell into step with this man near the rear door.

“How’d it go?” asked the man.

“Easy,” Benson said, in his hoarse whisper. He explained why he was talking that way.

The other man said: “I don’t like that so good. Those three we knocked off were The Avenger’s buddies.”

“So what?” said Benson in his husky whisper.

“So
what?
Cripes! Don’t you know about that guy? He’s dynamite. Hurt any of his pals, and you can’t run fast enough or far enough to get away. If we’d caught the guy up that tree, everything would be swell. As it is, I think it’d been better to let his buddies go, with him still on the loose.”

“What can one guy do against a whole mob?”

The man tapped on the kitchen door. Four shorts, one long. The door opened. A third man looked out, with a sawed-off shotgun in his hands. He relaxed as he saw the two.

Benson walked past him through the kitchen, still with the first man. They entered the hall. Benson started up the stairs.

In a big living room, opening off the hall, were four or five men. One of them was tall and stooped, with glasses over weak, vicious eyes. Benson recognized him as a gang leader named Suva, one of gangland’s murderers-for-hire. He’d caught a few glimpses of him before, but not enough to be sure.

Suva snapped: “Harry! Where you going?”

Benson pointed upstairs.

“Thought I told you to report to me when you got back. So you don’t report. You slide right on by and up to your room. Come here.”

Benson entered the room through the big hall door. He stood before Suva. The gang leader, with his command obeyed, was mollified a bit by the token of his importance.

“Did it go off all right?” he asked, in a different tone.

“Slick as grease,” whispered Benson.

“What’re you talking in the basement for? What’s wrong with your pipes?”

“Got socked in the Adam’s apple,” whispered Benson. “Anything else?”

“No. I just told you to report, that was all. Run along upstairs. There’s a game in the front room. Go and lose your dough like a sucker, the way you always do.”

Dick went up the stairs. There, he was confronted with trouble. This was a big house. Eight rooms opened off the second-floor hall. All eight doors were closed. Behind one would be the room in which Harry bunked. But Dick couldn’t know, of course, which this was.

Also, however, he couldn’t afford to fool around and reveal his ignorance by hesitating.

He chose the third door on the right, saw there was no light showing, and unhesitatingly opened it. He stepped into darkness. But the darkness didn’t last long. There was a click, light flooded the room, and two men looked at him over gun sights.

The guns were .45s and the trigger finger of each man was whitened with pressure!

The two men were in two beds, one on each side of the room. They were typical thugs, shifty-eyed, slit-mouthed, pallid.

“What’s the idea?” Benson whispered. “Put them rods down.”

The guns lowered.

“Harry!” snapped one of the men. “You damn fool. You know no door in this joint is opened without the knock. You oughta have your knob blown off.”

Benson impatiently tapped on the inside of the door. Four shorts and a long. “O.K. now?”

“Yeah, sure,” growled the man. “What’s the idea of the stage whisper?”

The Avenger repeated his story of being hit in the throat. He added, “Anyhow, what I got to say ought to be said in a whisper.”

“What’s that?”

“I got a plan to get some heavy dough for ourselves out of this and lam.”

The man farthest from the door gaped at him.

“You mean—cross Suva? And the big boss? You’re nuts.”

“All right. If you don’t want to hear. I sneaked in here first because I thought you two guys might be interested.”

Benson turned as if to go out again. One of the men said hastily, “Wait a minute.”

His tone was almost a whisper, too. Benson had hit the right note. Avarice. He could see their thoughts in their faces: Maybe this Harry did have a workable scheme. In that case, they might throw in with him. If he didn’t, they’d hear all about it, then turn him in to Suva.

He sat down on one of the beds. “Come on over,” he whispered to the second man. “We’ll talk low, not yell across a room.”

The other man came over and sat down, too.

“Now, my idea,” Benson whispered hoarsely, “is this—”

His hands shot out.

Each hand got a throat, and each hand was a terrible thing of steel, relentless, unbreakable.

Each of the two men was bigger than Benson. But neither of them, with all his frenzied strength, was able with two hands to loosen the grip of this strange man’s one. At the ends of his arms, rigid as bars of iron, they struggled without sound, weakened, hung limp.

The Avenger injected the same numbing drag into them that he had used on Harry. He put them in the room’s closet and locked the door. Then he straightened the beds to conceal the fact that the men had ever been in them.

He went to the window.

A tree was within reach. He got to the nearest branch, crouched there a moment like a baleful leopard, then dropped to the ground.

He went to the tool house.

A complicated system of locks held the door. It was so very complicated, indeed, that it told a story of things far more important than garden tools being kept within.

It took nearly ten minutes to pick the locks. Then Benson went once more into the stone cubicle. He got out his flashlight and rayed it over the floor.

A minute search failed to reveal any opening in that floor. If something under this place needed examination, at least the way was not through the floor.

The Avenger slid out into the night again and refastened the locks. He searched around the grounds in a circle whose central point was the garden house. Then he stopped.

Back of the place, thirty feet or more, was a heap of black earth and rotting leaves. A pile of natural fertilizer. A search around this turned up the kind of thing he’d been hunting.

There was an innocent-looking broken branch lying beside the pile. He pulled up on it, and the whole pile rose. It was only a camouflage for a trapdoor in the lawn. Stairs were revealed.