The Avenger 20 - The Green Killer (6 page)

If he had crossed the empty yard, in broad daylight, he’d have been sure to be seen, so he didn’t do this. He went to that four-story, empty building belonging to the yard, took out a pane of glass under cover of the shed’s shelter, and crawled inside.

When he emerged again, he was at the water’s edge, down the length of the building, right beside the boat’s rusty hull. A cargo door was open in the side of the iron cliff. He slid through that and into the thing.

There was a lookout, all right. It just happened that for a couple of minutes he had been engaged in loading and lighting his pipe, being careful to keep his head turned from the cargo door so smoke wouldn’t drift out and advertise that the supposedly abandoned hull was tenanted.

So he didn’t see Smitty. Not till too late, that is.

He turned with his mouth gaping in surprise so that the pipe dropped out; then he tried to yell as a vast and unexpected figure loomed between him and daylight.

Smitty hit him!

The giant’s horsepower was such that he didn’t have to bother to hit anybody with care or skill. He just hit. And the person on the receiving end stayed hit for a long time. A favorite blow of his was to smack straight down on top of a man’s head with his fist, like a sledge hitting the end of a stake. He did this, almost negligently, to the lookout. The man slithered to the rusted plates of the cargo hold and lay quite still.

Smitty went deeper into the gloom. Voices sounded from the stern. He groped back there. A bulkhead, closed, was between him and the voices. He could hear the voices, but not words.

He put the little pocket microphone of his belt radio to the bulkhead, clicked on a tiny amplifying combination, then was able to hear the words, too.

“No matter how you look at it, we have to get that crowd working for Benson,” somebody was saying. “We have to get Benson, too, before he gets to the Negro River.”

“Yeah?” came a sardonic reply. “That sounded easy when we were in Brazil. But we get up here and we hear a little more about the guy, and it don’t sound so easy any more. He’s a one-man army, I guess. And the gang working for him is no pushover, either. Even that little blonde gal is said to be a tornado when she gets going.”

“Hooey!” said the first voice. “Any time I can’t handle a dame, especially one no bigger’n a half-pint of beer, I’ll go into an old ladies’ home.”

Smitty growled deep in his throat. Whenever anything threatened little Nellie, the giant got as angry as an elephant defending its young.

“Well, there’s no use debating it,” came a third voice. “It’s got to be done. That crowd calling themselves Justice something-or-other could make a lot of trouble, so they have to be eliminated.”

“How about those damned little Indians?”

“We can handle them, all right. But we won’t even bother with ’em unless they get in our way. They’re after Benson, too, I guess. Maybe they’ll do some of our work for us.”

It was quite an interesting conversation, Smitty decided.

“Where’s this Heber?” growled one of the voices.

“He’s at Benson’s, now. Can’t get at him till he leaves the place. It’s harder to get into that Bleek Street joint than to break out of Leavenworth.”

A
very
interesting conversation, Smitty thought. But then came words that were much more interesting, but in a reverse kind of manner. Because they didn’t come from beyond the bulkhead.

They came from behind him!

“Turn around slowly,” said a voice. “Don’t try any funny stuff.”

Smitty disobeyed the first order, but obeyed the second. He turned fast—but then did not try anything.

The sawed-off shotgun was about a foot from his head. It was held in the hands of a big man who had a scar on the bridge of his nose and wore horn-rimmed glasses—the man that Bert Hatch had said was named Gleason. One of Gleason’s lenses seemed to be of plain glass, the other one was a reducing lens. That little tailor, Hatch, was an observant man.

With the big fellow was a smaller man who had dead-looking yellow hair. When he moved, he limped. Score another for Hatch’s description.

Smitty chewed his lips furiously. He was certainly caught off base. Unless that shotgun wavered a bit—

There wasn’t a waver in a carload, he decided, a minute later. The gun was rock-steady in a practiced hand. Smitty hadn’t a chance of trying a swift move.

The little fellow had opened the steel door by now.

“Back in,” ordered the big man with the glasses.

Smitty took a backward step.

The giant was perfectly familiar with boats, but in the stress of the moment he forgot the combing customarily at the bottom of nautical doors—a sort of six-inch-high sill of metal. He stumbled over that and fell straight back on his head.

The world blinked out like a light with the switch opened.

To give her credit, Nellie had really intended to follow orders when she was left in the shed behind the sheltering pile of lumber. She meant to stay there as a lookout while Smitty investigated the boat.

She didn’t want to stay. She wanted to be in with the big fellow. The tiny blonde, seemingly so fragile in her soft pink-and-whiteness, thrived on action that would have turned an average policeman’s hair gray.

But it was safer for Smitty to have a lookout here; and the safety of the looming mass of muscle was pretty precious to Nellie, though she’d have died rather than admit it openly.

However, circumstances combined to make her disobey.

First, two men stepped through the opening in the street side of the shed which Smitty had made by ripping the board off. Nellie had been apprehensive about that opening. It would have been better to shut the thing back up by replacing the board. But the plank had been too splintered by Smitty’s sinewy hands for that.

They’d had to leave the opening as it was, and now two of the gang had spied it and were prowling to investigate. One of the two was big, and had on horn-rimmed glasses. The other, smaller, was yellow-haired and limped. So Nellie spotted them.

The bigger man got out a shotgun as he climbed in, and he started grimly for the boat.

“So what do I do?” Nellie demanded of herself.

She could radio Bleek Street, but help couldn’t get here before those two got to the boat. She could yell a warning to Smitty, and probably get them both shot. Or she could tackle the two men herself.

In the little blonde’s purse, as in the pockets of the rest of Justice, Inc., were usually some of Mac’s anesthetic-gas pellets. These, broken at the feet of an enemy, put that enemy to sleep for several minutes. But this time Nellie did not have any of the pellets.

As she was wildly reflecting what to do, Nellie was tapping the little mike of her belt-radio.

“S . . . S . . . S . . .”

But Smitty didn’t answer his call letter. At that moment he was using his radio as a dictograph. But Nellie didn’t know that. All she knew was that he wasn’t answering, so she couldn’t warn him.

There was no help for it. She’d have to light into the two men, to stall for time, and almost certainly be captured. If they decided that she was the one who had, somehow, ripped the board off, they’d take her without caution to the boat, thus tipping the giant off and giving him a chance to knock them out.

The two men were almost out of the shed by now.

Nellie put her hand on top of the lumber pile for a fast start at them.

Then she jerked her hand away before contacting something there that was as hideous as a bad dream.

There was a spider on the pile of lumber. But what a spider! It was as large as a small saucer, covered with loathsome black hair, and with red streaks on its underside.

For a second she didn’t get the connection. Then she did. Another person might never have caught the real meaning of the presence of this spider here, but Nellie had a brain as quick as a steel trap under her silky blonde tresses.

A spider, bigger, more vicious-looking than any in this part of the world! Nellie remembered two tiny punctures, close together, on the creamy shoulder of the vacant-eyed girl at Bleek Street. She remembered the way the two punctures seemed to slant in toward each other.

She looked around the shed.

At the far end were two little monkeylike shapes, hardly to be made out in the shadows. Over them, on a rafter, was a third such shape.

She kept on looking. She spotted four more in the nearer rafters, and then—she jumped a foot—one lying like a snake on a beam almost directly over her head.

The two men she’d been so concerned with a moment ago were at the boat, now. They stepped into the cargo opening. But that was death at a little distance.

This other was death right at hand and immediate.

The little dark men, so skilled at concealment that in their native jungle a white man could go for days with dozens of them all around him and never see one, could perform almost impossible feats in civilization’s surroundings, too. They had slid in the opening, one by one, like shadows, without even Nellie’s hearing or seeing.

One of them had silently dropped that spider to take care of her. And it almost had!

The little monkey man above her had a bamboo tube to his lips. He’d seen her avoid the spider and was going to fix that up with a second form of silent death.

A poisoned dart!

Nellie made the leap over the lumber pile that she had intended to make a few minutes before. She lit on her small feet, and she lit running. Behind her there was a little tap as the dart hit wood beyond where she’d just been.

She ran straight toward the boat, zigzagging as she did so. Half a dozen deadly darts came within inches of her. Two she saw as they zinged beyond her, the rest she didn’t. She got to the boat, which was out of accurate dart range.

Behind her, in the shed, the little dark men swarmed to action. Like hopping apes, they came after her. Which was precisely what she had hoped for.

Already it had begun to look as though the Indians lurking so unaccustomedly around New York were the enemies of that other band of killers that had attacked Heber. So Nellie’s plan was simple: Set one gang against the other.

Of course, she and Smitty were apt to find themselves in the center, which wouldn’t be healthy. But it was the best plan she could cook up on the spur of the moment.

She swung into the ancient hull.

Smitty had done his back dive, and the two men had followed him in beyond the bulkhead. So, for the moment, Nellie had this space to herself.

Then the little monkey men swarmed in murderously. And silently. That silence was grisly. If only they’d made a noise, yelled or something. But they were as soundless as shadows and as purposeful as machines. They poured toward her.

A while ago Nellie had tried not to be discovered by the two white men. Now she wanted very badly to be discovered.

“Hey!” she yelled, as the little men swarmed in.

Beyond the bulkhead door, there was a smothered expletive. Then the big fellow with the glasses jumped back through the doorway, looking utterly amazed and completely savage. He jerked the gun toward Nellie, because hers was the first figure he saw.

He held the shot, while Nellie ducked frantically to the deck plates. Because by then he had seen the little men, too.

One girl. A lot of men. And now the men were streaming toward him, having instantly decided that he represented the greater danger. The man with the glasses instantly came to the same decision, and his gun went off, twice, with each barrel carefully aimed.

What happened to the two little monkey men, at whom the gun had been methodically aimed, is best left to the imagination. A shotgun at close range does ghastly things.

Nellie’s teeth ground on edge, and she looked toward the bulkhead instead of at the two who had been shot. She saw men tumble out from it at the sound of the shotgun, one after another, till the seven of them beside the leader looked like a regiment.

Men with poisoned darts faced men with guns! No one had time for the slender little figure of the girl who had drawn the monkey men here. She leaped for the doorway.

Behind her, shot after shot roared. She didn’t hear the response, but she could imagine it. The response would be the sinistering whispering of the tiny darts.

She almost tripped over Smitty in the uncertain light of a candle. But bent down over him, shook his vast shoulder, slapped at his cheeks to bring him out of it. He moved under his own power, or he didn’t move. Two men could hardly have carried his bulk, let alone one small girl.

Smitty groaned, and his eyes opened.

“Save me the next dance,” he mumbled. Then his eyes opened wider.

“Hey! What are you doing in here? I thought I told you— What’s all the shooting outside?”

“Stop the silly questions,” snapped Nellie, “and come on.”

“Where to?”

“Away from here, stupid.”

He got up, still reeling a bit. With her arm around him, they went to the door.

The space beyond was like a battlefield. Three of Gleason’s men were on the floor, with the dulling eyes of curare victims proclaiming their near-death. Five of the little dark-skinned men were with them.