The Avenger 20 - The Green Killer (2 page)

Josh Newton was also an important member of Justice, Inc., though he didn’t look it. A gangling Negro, he looked sleepy and dull. But he was an honor graduate of Tuskegee Institute, and he could think as fast as he could fight in an emergency, which was extremely fast.

The passion of Josh’s life was maple-nut sundaes. He was now indulging in his fifth, at Mac’s soda fountain. And the Scot was moaning in anguish because these things cost money. Smitty was now on his third sundae. Smitty wasn’t such a maple-nut addict, but he liked to see Mac writhe at the loss of nickels from the drugstore till.

Smitty happened to be looking squarely out the front show window; and, when he stiffened a little, the other two turned to stare also.

They saw a man who looked so much like a monkey that the first thought was that a trained ape had escaped from a circus. Then they saw that it was indubitably a man, with the pallor of bad health whitening his face and with crooked, unsteady legs barely hitching him along.

After that, they saw the closed delivery van.

The van was dark and had lettering on the side, but the lettering was so faded that no one could make a complete name out of it. Which was probably intentional. It looked old, but it crept along the street with a noiseless smoothness indicating a fine motor.

It crept along in the wake of the man!

The three in the drugstore saw that the driver had his eyes hard on the apelike fellow and that a man next to the driver had one foot out of the cab as if preparing to leap.

And an instant after they saw these things, the man did leap.

The van was almost up to the limping sick man. The fellow with his foot on the running board leaped out. The driver stopped the van, and the rear doors of the thing flew open.

Two more men jumped out!

The three of them fanned toward the monkeylike figure. Their intention was unmistakable.

“A snatch!” gasped Smitty. “Right on crowded Sixth Avenue at ten in the evening!”

“Or a murder!” said Josh. He said it on the run. For with the first glimpse of the deadly three from the van, the members of Justice, Inc., were streaking for the street door.

They burst out onto the sidewalk. As they did so, one of the three men socked the apelike one on the head with a blackjack. The other two caught him on the fly, as it were, and jumped back toward the van with him.

They got to the van, too. And the third fellow jumped back to the cab. Van doors and cab door slammed shut as Josh and Mac and Smitty galloped up. The three scrabbled at the doors but couldn’t open them.

“By gosh, they’re getting away with it!” yelled Smitty, outraged.

The van had started.

“No, they aren’t,” snapped Mac. “Watch it!”

His hand shot forward in an expert throw.

A tiny object glistened in a glassy way as it arched toward the rear of the van. It hit the pavement almost under the rear wheels. It exploded with a
spanggg!
Next instant the two rear tires went
wheeee
as air rushed from them through a hundred jagged slits in the rubber. The tiny bomb had been a fragmentation affair of Mac’s devising that would knock even puncture-proof tires to ribbons.

The van wobbled violently. Mac threw again.

This time it was a little smoke bomb. It hit in front of the van and sent up a fog through which no driver could see. They heard the van crash unmusically into a parked car. They ran for it.

The smoke bomb had stopped the truck. That was on the credit side. On the debit side was the fact that if you could not see out of the cloud, you couldn’t see into it, either.

Smitty and Mac and Josh got to the van and found the three men in it gone. They had slipped off under cover of the smoke and were hopelessly gone by now.

“How about the poor mon they slugged?” said Mac.

Their victim was in the van. The men hadn’t attempted to carry the apelike figure with them in their frantic escape. He lay moaning on the floor of the truck.

There was a mob around the van, now, coughing in the smoke that clogged Sixth Avenue. Cops appeared in the murk.

“Back, everybody. Stand clear. What goes on here? What—”

“Oh, hello, Mr. MacMurdie,” said another cop as he caught sight of the Scot’s homely face and sail-like ears. The cop’s voice was respectful. Every officer in New York knew the members of Justice, Inc. Around the Sixth Avenue drugstore, which was a sort of second headquarters for the band of crime fighters, police knew them even better.

“What happened? Car afire?” the cop asked Mac.

The Scot explained what had happened. “The three skurlies got away in my smoke barrage. I think they went north on Sixth. Two had felt hats; the third wore a cap. Dark clothes.”

The officer ran north. The other one looked at the moaning, apelike fellow.

“I’ll take him to my store,” said Mac. “If he knows anythin’, or has anythin’ to report, we’ll turn him over to ye.”

The second cop nodded and chased after the first. Mac and Smitty and Josh went back to the store with the man.

The fellow was not unconscious, but obviously the knock on the head had been serious for him in his weakened condition.

“He’s a very sick mon,” Mac confirmed the man’s invalid appearance. “But what he’s sick of, I haven’t the faintest notion.”

The man, meanwhile, was babbling in semi-delirium.

“Don’t let them get me,” he whispered, staring wildly around. “They’ll kill me! Kill everybody!”

“You’re all right,” soothed Smitty. “Nobody can hurt you here.”

“The monkey disease,” whispered the man, paying no heed to the soothing words. “The two guards in the jungle. Emeralds! A bucket of emeralds!”

Josh and Smitty stared at Mac. This was queer, even for delirium.

“Who wants to kill you?” asked Mac.

The man stared through him.

“Kill everybody! Bucket of emeralds. The two jungle guards. The green killer!”

Smitty whistled. Then the giant took from a vest pocket a little black disk. It was no bigger than a quarter, but it was a perfect microphone. It was connected to a tiny, curved case at Smitty’s waist which housed the world’s smallest and best transmitting-receiving radio set, perfected by Smitty in his radio research.

“I think the chief would like to sit in on this,” he said. Then he spoke into the little mike. “Smitty calling. Chief—Smitty calling.”

Josh, meanwhile, blinked bewilderedly at Mac.

“What on earth do you suppose he means—‘Green killer. Bucket of emeralds. Jungle guards’?”

Mac shrugged. “Emeralds are green. So is the jungle. Maybe one or the other of them has almost caused the mon’s death. So he calls it, or them, the green killer.”

Smitty had by now contacted “the chief,” who happened to be none other than Richard Benson, more familiarly known as The Avenger.

“Yes,” came The Avenger’s cold, calm voice, after hearing the story, “bring him to Bleek Street. He sounds like a man in need of help.”

Mac closed the store for the night. The three went toward Smitty’s car, helping the sick, monkeylike man between them.

A uniformed patrolman hurried up to them.

“There’s something you guys might like to know,” he said. “It might tie in with this, though I can’t guess what ‘this’ could be. There’s a fella murdered up four blocks and halfway over to Seventh. Murphy found him a minute ago. Says he’s an Indian or something. His throat’s badly cut, but the Indian died of a head wound, and it looks as if his throat was cut
after
he was dead.”

“That’s funny,” said Smitty. He looked at Josh and Mac. “You two go on to Bleek Street, and I’ll join you later. I want a look at this dead Indian.”

They nodded and got into his car. Smitty turned north, to see what the dead Indian looked like and try to figure why his throat was cut in addition to a death wound on his head. If, indeed, this was the case; it takes a good man to know whether a cut has been made immediately after death instead of before. Murphy might have been wrong.

“Bucket of emeralds,” he heard the wounded man murmur as he turned from the car. “The green killer.”

Bleek Street is only a short block in extent, a back eddy of an avenue. But it had become might in the books of the police and of the underworld since The Avenger appeared on it. For Bleek Street is the headquarters of Justice, Inc.

The entire top floor of the three buildings on Bleek Street is one vast room, and here the members of Justice, Inc., meet. The Avenger was there when Josh and Mac came in with the apelike man. And with him was petite Nellie Gray and Rosabel Newton, Josh’s pretty wife.

Nellie Gray was the last person you’d expect to see connected with a crime-fighting organization. But the pretty blonde was as valuable to The Avenger as the giant Smitty himself. Many a burly crook had laid hands on Nellie—to wake up in a hospital a few hours later.

Nellie stared in perplexity mixed with sympathy at the man Mac and Josh brought in.

“Why, he looks like an ape,” she said, noting the way the man’s knuckles scraped the floor when he stood as straight as he could, and the way his red hair—it was flaming red—grew low on his forehead.

“And he’s sick,” she added, looking at his pallor and the emaciation of his limbs. “And hurt.”

Where the man had been hit, on the back of his head, blood was clotting. It was all over the neck of his coat and shirt, too.

As they stared, the man sagged on Mac’s supporting arm. He had passed out again.

“Natural enough,” shrugged the Scot, helping him to a divan. “The mon was nearly murdered.”

Benson bent over the man and applied first-aid treatment to him. The Avenger was the most unusual of all the unusual characters making up Justice, Inc.

Benson was a man of average build, but he could perform feats of Herculean strength that the giant Smitty found it difficult to emulate. He could move with a quickness that baffled the eye.

Now and then, rarely, an individual appears whose muscle seems to have a different
quality
from ordinary muscle, so that, ounce for ounce, it packs many times the wallop of ordinary human sinew. The Avenger was one of these rare individuals.

But more remarkable than his strength was his appearance.

On his well-shaped head the hair grew thick and virile and was inky, jet-black. In contrast, his eyes were so pale-gray as to seem wholly without color. In moments of stress, they were terrible eyes, like deadly, pale holes in his face. And his face was deadly, too, in its complete lack of emotion.

The simian chap on the divan stirred under The Avenger’s expert aid.

“It may be a few minutes before he can talk,” said Benson to Mac. “You say he was nearly murdered?”

“Yes.” The Scot frowned thoughtfully. “Another mon, only four blocks from there,
was
murdered. An Indian, the officer thought him to be. Smitty went to have a look and see if it was connected with the attack on this mon. The big fellow ought to be back any minute now with a report.”

Smitty had expected to be back any minute, too. When he went with the cop to look at the dead man, he expected that a couple of minutes would tell him all he needed to know.

He reached the areaway and shoved through the usual crowd. The dead man hadn’t been moved.

“Looks more like a monkey than a man,” the officer who had guided Smitty observed.

The giant nodded and marked down one similarity immediately. The man who had been yanked into the van looked like an ape. This dead man looked like an ape. There must be some connecting thread, because in all his life Smitty had never seen human beings as simian as these two.

“See his throat,” said the cop.

Smitty looked at the dead man’s throat, and quickly looked away. It had been gashed half through. But, as had been said, the real death wound appeared to be on the Indian’s head. The skull was caved in terribly.

“South American,” said Smitty, staring at the wizened little corpse. “I’d say from Brazil, at a guess. And he doesn’t look as if he’s used to wearing shoes much, either.”

That was true enough. The body was clad in an odd way—in all the correct garments, but incorrectly adjusted.

The native wasn’t used to buttons and shoelaces and such. Next to him lay a short, broad-bladed dagger with a double sawtoothed edge.