The Avenger 7 - Stockholders in Death (18 page)

There were two squad cars in Bleek Street. Behind each, police were crouching while they shot at various slinking forms that kept up a running fire in return.

The street was lighted better than most; Benson had seen to that. The lights revealed all The Avenger needed to know.

They revealed men that looked familiar to him.

First he saw two who had been in the car that had tried to bomb his own machine. He had later found who they worked for.

“Fiume’s gunmen,” he said.

Then he saw another pair, working side by side with the first.

“Luckow’s men!”

After that—

Mac rubbed his eyes as he stared out and down, and wondered if he were going crazy.

He saw a man with a white, still face and thick white hair. This man had a little, long-barreled .22 that from this distance, at least, looked remarkably like Mike. Then Mac saw a big fellow. Smitty! Finally he saw a bony, red-haired guy. Himself!

“What in the worrrld,” burred the bewildered Scot.

The Avenger’s eyes were suddenly frosty, grim.

“Fiume wants to get us. Luckow wants Tom Crimm—and would benefit by our deaths, also. So the two gangs have teamed up on us. And either Luckow or Fiume had the bright idea of drawing police here and, made up as members of Justice, they’re doing all too good a job. In the street lights, anyone would swear that Benson, MacMurdie and Smitty were out there shooting down the police. The whole New York force will be after us for this.”

“We’ve got to go out there!” blurted Smitty. “Those cops—they’re in a spot. We’ve got to help—”

He broke for the door, with Josh and Mac after him. The Avenger stayed at the window. For just then the scene outside had gone dark.

Someone down the block had shorted the street-light cable, plunging everything into blackness.

Benson sped for the door, and down the stairs after his aides, like a flying shadow. His swift mind had grasped the plan with the instant of the light failure.

Smitty was just opening the street door, with Josh and Mac close behind, when Benson got to the bottom of the stairs.

“Shut that door! Down! Fast!” he cracked out.

Almost with his words, came the sound of shots—and the splintering of bullets as they crashed around the three at the doorway.

At the same moment one of the squad cars wheeled so that its headlights arrowed across the street and played on the entrance.

Smitty had the door shut, then. The door was of steel so the death missiles outside were blocked. The giant stared at Benson.

“The lights went out so that the men in the street could slip away from the cops,” said The Avenger. “That way, the police will think the gunmen merely came in here, led by the three made up as us. They’ll be over here to arrest us as fast as they can make it.”

“But, chief,” said Mac. “We’ve got worrrk to do—and it’ll take us days to talk our way out of this, if indeed we can do it at all.”

“That’s their idea,” said Benson. “Fiume and Luckow have worked it quite cleverly. We have the police after us, now, as well as the gangs. And, yet, we haven’t an hour to lose in fruitless attempts to explain—”

There was an enraged banging on the door.

“Benson! Open this door in the name of the law!”

The Avenger nodded toward the basement stairs. There were ways out of Bleek Street that even the police didn’t know. And it was time to use one, now. And it was explained later about the killers disguised as Justice, Inc.—if, as Mac had said, you ever could explain such a thing.

There was a beautifully concealed opening from one end of the basement into the street tunnel in which ran electric cables and public utility steampipes. Benson herded everyone from the place and into it—Tom with his arm in a sling from his brother’s misguided bullet; Nellie Gray, Rosabel and Josh; Mac, Smitty and Wayne.

The tunnel led to another concealed opening a block and a half away. Through this opening they all emerged into a three-car garage that seemed to belong to the apartment building beside which it rested, but actually had no part in that building’s existence.

“Take the big car,” said Benson. “That will hold the lot of you. Go to the Minerva, up at the north dock. I’ll join you there soon.”

“Ye’re not going with us, now?” said Mac anxiously. The Scot was always more worried about The Avenger’s safety than his own.

“No,” said Benson, eyes like ice chips in his dead, white face. “I have another place or two to visit. But I will be with you on the steamer soon.”

He slid off into the night, a gray fox of a man who moved as soundlessly as a shadow over the street.

The Minerva, referred to by Benson, was the old freighter he owned, docked at the moment far up the Hudson for repairs. It would be an excellent place to stay under cover for a while.

Smitty drove the lot of them to a small boathouse down near the Battery. The boathouse belonged to Benson, though it was held in another name. The boat in the shed was The Avenger’s too.

It was a low, powerful craft. But the giant didn’t open her up. He might have attracted the attention of the river patrol if he had.

He sent the craft at a decorous pace up the river to the dock at which lay the Minerva.

Dock and freighter were in darkness save for one light where Benson’s watchman stayed. Smitty whistled twice, three times more. It was the signal to the watchman that he was to pick up his dinner pail and go home; that his boss wanted to do a few things around the dock that needed no witnessing.

Smitty saw the light go out. He gave the man five minutes to get away.

“All out and on board,” he said to the rest, in a low tone.

Wayne and Tom went first, with Wayne helping his older brother and flushing every time he saw the bullet-plugged arm Tom carried in a sling. Wayne’s own bullet.

Rosabel and Josh followed. Then Nellie and Mac climbed to the dock and went up the gangplank to the deck of the Minerva.

Smitty was left alone in the boat.

The giant lifted aside the grating in front of the engines and opened the low, flat hull. His big hand found the sea cock. Searchlights on the police boats might hit on the first launch moored beside the Minerva and give away the fact that someone was on board the old freighter. So he would sink the little craft to hide it. It could be raised later and cleaned out.

But first, before opening the valve and scuttling the fast launch, Smitty had to disconnect an automatic safety device that The Avenger had installed on all his boats, large and small.

That was a hook-up between sea valves and bulkheads which snapped the latter closed whenever the former were opened. Thus, if a valve were opened by mistake, or developed a defect, it would not inadvertently result in disaster.

It was just one more little example of how large a part methodical foresight played in The Avenger’s “luck.”

Smitty disconnected the safety-bulkhead device and opened the valve. The launch settled silently and swiftly under the surface. Smitty joined the rest on the Minerva’s deck.

They all went below, where a light could be turned on without its showing through any crevices outside. In the raw illumination of a single bulb their faces were strained.

Tom Crimm stared at them with lackluster eyes. He was pretty low; even lower than his remorse over the insanity of joining forces with a mobster like Luckow would tend to drive him.

“All of us have worked for days on this,” he burst out suddenly. “And what has been the result? No one has found out anything. We’re as far as ever from knowing who killed Dad, and the others. And tomorrow, in only a few hours, the Town Bank crowd will be saved by that meeting of Ballandale Glass stockholders. We’re beaten—”

Mac looked at Tom with a little sympathy deep under the bleakness in his blue eyes.

“Whoosh!” he said. “Ye’re too pessimistic, Tom. We know a lot about this, right now.”

Tom stopped, and bit his lips.

“Sorry. I know everything possible is being done to help Wayne and me.”

Nellie Gray smiled at him to show there were no hard feelings. She said to Mac:

“Some gang spy must have reported that all of us were gone from Bleek Street. Otherwise Wallach, and whoever was driving that death car, wouldn’t have dared come openly to the door to see if they could help Rath.”

Mac nodded.

“It’s my bet,” he mused, “that the skurlie drivin’ that car for Wallach is the man we want to get our hooks on. And it’s also my bet that the chief knows all about him right now.”

Louie Fiume and Nicky Luckow, birds of a feather, were at Beatrice Luckow’s apartment. They had come there, taking separate and circuitous routes, from Bleek Street. They lolled in easy-chairs, with cigarettes and drinks at hand, looking and feeling pretty pleased with themselves.

Beatrice, Luckow’s sister, didn’t show any feeling at all on her dark, pretty face. She was as expressionless as usual. Now and then she looked at Fiume. For the rest, she stared at her crimson-tinted fingernails and said nothing.

She had taken no other maid, after the exposure of Rosabel. The three were alone there.

At least, they thought they were alone.

“I guess we fixed up that Benson guy and his gang,” laughed Luckow, raising whiskey to his lips.

“ ‘We’?” said Fiume, darkly sardonic.

“Well, it was your scheme, of course,” Luckow said hastily. “And a smart one, too, fella. Making up three of the boys to look like Benson and two of his buddies and then popping off a coupla cops was the smartest thing I ever heard of.”

“Thanks,” said Fiume, still sardonic.

“You got the kind of brains this town needs,” Luckow said. “Let’s me and you go into partnership. We’ll run New York in a year.”

“It’s an idea,” said Fiume. “But first we got to get together on this Crimm business.”

“That’s in the bag,” said Luckow. “Benson and his crowd get burned down by the cops, with luck. If not, they will be thrown in the cooler for weeks. Till long after this goofy stockholder’s meeting tomorrow that’s supposed to mean so much. That’ll save the Town Bank pirates. And after that—well, we’re on Easy Street.”

“Yeah?” said Fiume skeptically.

“Why, sure,” said Luckow, looking surprised. “Like this: Wallach and Grand split millions on the stock deal, and more when they sell Crimm’s stock. They don’t know we know that, but we do. And that’s our stake. When they get the dough, we put the squeeze on them. Kick through or go to the chair for murder! Boy, we can bleed ’em of every dime they’ve got.”

“Nope,” said Fiume.

Luckow appeared more surprised than ever. Beatrice looked up from her tinted nails for a moment, too.

“We’ve been dopes,” said Fiume. “So the squeeze is out. Reason why? Because Wallach and Grand aren’t the boys responsible for this. They ain’t got the guts. They’re just stooges for somebody else. Somebody higher up.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m as sure as a guy can ever be when he knows something and can’t prove it. Those guys are dummies. There’s a biggie in the game above them. I don’t know who. But till we can get him, there’s no squeeze—”

Two men and a girl, thinking themselves alone.

But in the window outside, black with the darkness of pre-dawn, a face appeared for just an instant. The face was as cold and dead as the face of the winter moon. In it, two pale eyes rested briefly on Beatrice’s tinted nails.

A gray steel bar of a figure began to inch down a ledge from the Luckow window just after the word “squeeze.”

It was eighty feet to the ground, and the ledge from fire escape to window was less than two inches wide. But The Avenger negotiated it almost without thinking of what he was doing. His steely fingers hooked to slight niches in the tapestry-design brick of the apartment building, while his feet trod the ledge as surely as if it had been a floor.

Benson moved with his abdomen held out from the wall a little. That was because of the delicate apparatus hooked to his belt.

The world’s tiniest dictaphone was there, geared to an equally tiny record that was in tape instead of roll or disk form. On the tape was duly recorded the words that should—unless catastrophe occurred first—clear Benson and his aides with the police: