The Avenger 24 - Midnight Murder (6 page)

“Anyway, they’re capable,” said the girl. “You’ll find out, in a minute.”

“Not so capable but what a handful of us captured ten of them a short while back. If you hadn’t released them, they’d be on their way to jail, right now.”

The girl looked at him in an odd sort of way; then a submachine gun let loose outside, sewing a seam of bullet holes waist-high along the barn. Molly dropped. So did Benson.

There was a sudden diversion. A high, shrill, outraged voice yelled outside, on the other side of the barn:

“Hey, there! Who are ye! Git out of my barn. What do ye think ye’re doin’ this time of night, playin’ cowboy around my pasture?”

The submachine gun had stopped with the yell. Benson went to the other side of the barn and looked out.

The farmer who owned the place was coming with a shotgun in his angry hands. He was in a nightshirt, and his legs were skinny, which is a humorous combination. He was at least sixty, with gray hair standing every which way, and he looked good and mad.

He rounded the corner so the gangsters saw him. One of them guffawed. Another said in a deadly tone, “Go ’way from here, grandpa, if you don’t want to get hurt.”

“Go ’way?” the old farmer shrilled. “Ye have the nerve to tell me to git out of my own pasture. Why—”

The man who had warned him was evidently tired of monkeying around. He raised an automatic and deliberately pulled the trigger.

But the farmer had fallen so the murderous slug whistled over his head. Fairly gibbering with rage, the old man rolled to a stump and got behind it. He moved plenty fast, and he had his gun unlimbered before he’d fairly hit.

The old twelve-gauge shotgun roared like a howitzer, and three of the gunmen shrieked in unholy agony and staggered toward the nearest car, so full of buckshot that they almost rattled when they moved.

“Why, you old—” screamed the man with the submachine gun. He trained the gun at the stump and bits of wood flew in a fountain. The indomitable answer was another terrific blast from the old shotgun—and the silencing of the submachine gun.

On The Avenger’s face, for one instant, was an expression. It was an expression of grim admiration, almost affection.

“Shotguns against machine guns,” he said, almost inaudibly. “Not all of us are soft or decadent in this country.”

He moved to help the courageous old fire-eater out there, even as he murmured this.

Through the knothole, he snapped a dozen pellets, one after another, as a boy snaps marbles. They lit in and around the gang. Some were sleep pellets, some tiny smoke bombs, some the harmless but tremendously explosive kind. He snapped out all he had.

It began to sound out there like a municipal Fourth-of-July celebration. The gunmen began screaming, sure they were at least half killed. Some sank to the ground and stayed there. The shotgun blazed again! The old farmer, in his fearless outrage, had slipped a couple of extra shells in his nightgown pocket, it seemed.

Benson caught the girl’s wrist again. She began fighting like a tigress. He picked her up, holding her wildly flailing arms to her sides in his grasp. He walked out the door and along the barn, shielded by the smoke, toward the road side of the structure.

There was one more car out there, now. No one had seen it steal across the fields, because it had come with the lights out and there had been a lot of distraction in other directions. But The Avenger’s quick ears had heard the motor.

The door opened for them. Mac was at the wheel. The rocket signal had caught his eye—and no doubt he’d heard the shooting—as he was on his way to town in The Avenger’s car.

“Watch her,” Benson said, heaving the girl in the back of the car. “Roll up the front glass to shut her in. If you have to, release a bit of anaesthetic gas to quiet her.”

He didn’t mean it, but figured just mention of this might calm the girl down. It did.

He went back to the fray and to the stump. The smoke was clearing now, and some of the gunmen saw him and cut loose. From Mac’s car came chattering fire. A machine gun was hidden under the leading edge of each front fender of that tricky buggy. The shells were harmless, but they could penetrate a half inch and sting pretty hard. Meanwhile, the recipient was sure he was killed.

Benson got to the farmer just as the old gun blazed away belligerently again. The pellets almost got Benson; the old man didn’t give a damn who strayed in his line of fire. Then The Avenger took the gun and started hauling the farmer toward Mac’s fortress on wheels.

“Leave me alone!” the man raged. “I don’t know who ye are, but lemme alone! I’ll clean up the whole worthless lot of them trespassers. I’ll—”

“Can’t leave you here with such a mob. Come on!”

“I tell ye—”

Another burst from Mac’s fender guns barely kept the gunmen on the ground and seeking cover. Benson and the farmer, made it to the car with slugs whistling all around them.

“We’ll drop you at the nearest State trooper’s office,” said Benson quietly. “You can ride back with them and see if you can catch any of these men. Thank you for saving my life back there.”

The farmer looked shrewdly at Benson.

“I guess I didn’t do much savin’. I guess it’s the other way around, bub. If I ever get my hands on them—”

The old battler was off again. And again that rare stirring of Benson’s masklike face proclaimed emotion.

The old man was going to be presented with the deed to the farm next to his—a rundown property he’d wanted for years to get hold of and put in shape—only he didn’t know that at the moment. The Avenger almost smiled. Bub!

Next morning, Smitty and Nellie got into the Bleek Street headquarters elevator together and went toward the basement. They were to get a car and see if they could locate Rew Wight. Spade had told The Avenger last night that Wight was in New York, and he couldn’t contact him about the plane crash because he didn’t know where Wight was staying.

Benson had been rather urgent about Smitty and Nellie finding Rew Wight as soon as possible.

“I think the chief suspects trouble,” Smitty said.

“What I like about you is your big brain,” Nellie said sweetly. “With submachines popping in all directions, and planes crashing, and guards being slugged and robbed of their uniforms, you think the chief suspects trouble. It’s wonderful!”

“I mean trouble connected with Wight’s stay in New York,” snapped Smitty. “You’re so poisonous you’d curl up and die if you ever scratched yourself with your own fingernail.”

“What master-minding did you do to arrive at the conclusion that Mr. Benson thinks Wight may be in trouble?”

“Wight’s in New York,” Smitty shrugged. “Spade doesn’t know where to get hold of him. But why hasn’t Wight gotten hold of Spade, by now, after seeing items about the plane crash in the newspapers and hearing about it on the radio? The only answer can be that Wight hasn’t seen or heard any such accounts. And to miss radio and papers these days, you’d have to be locked up in a cellar somewhere. And people don’t usually lock themselves in cellars.”

“So you think the chief thinks Wight’s a prisoner?” Nellie said.

Her tone was light, but the lightness was forced. She hadn’t thought that last one through herself. Not nearly as clearly as Smitty, anyhow. But she’d never have admitted that the giant was one up on her.

“Prisoner—or maybe murder,” said Smitty sourly. “What crate will we take?”

About thirty cars and light trucks were lined up in the basement, each with its specific function and equipment.

“We might as well just take that heap there,” said Nellie, “if you insist on using hoodlum expressions.” She pointed to a coupé.

She was in a riding mood this morning, it seemed. The giant grinned to himself. He knew how to stop that. He’d try the riding for a change.

“Certainly is a good-looking girl that Mac and the chief brought in last night,” he remarked.

Nellie stiffened at once, and color came to her cheeks.

“I must say I don’t know why you think she’s good-looking!” she snapped.

Smitty continued to grin inwardly. The half-pint blonde was as jealous as a little cat. Let the giant just look at another girl, and she unsheathed her claws. Actually, Smitty couldn’t see any other girl for dust, but he often pretended that he could.

“Of course, she’s good-looking,” he said earnestly.

He drove toward the basement door, up the ramp. An electric eye opened the door, and he rolled out on Bleek Street. Smoothly and automatically, the steel-shuttered door closed behind.

Nellie relapsed into icy dignity, broken only at the end of ten minutes’ ride up the express highway along the Hudson River.

“How are you going to set about locating Wight? Are you planning just to drive through the streets, yelling out the window, ‘Call for Mr. Rew Wight; call for Mr. Rew Wight’?”

“Say, now you have something there!” Smitty exclaimed. “That’s a swell idea.”

He rolled a window down, leaned out and roared, “Call for Mr. Rew Wight—”

“Oh, stop it!” snapped Nellie.

Smitty grinned.

He stopped the car beside the exclusive and expensive Ridgley Hotel, just off Central Park. Business was about to commence, and they didn’t clown when there were things to do.

“This is where Wight usually stops when he comes to town,” he explained in an entirely different tone of voice. “Spade couldn’t understand why he wasn’t here now. Maybe he has been here and gone again. Under queer circumstances.”

Nellie nodded. “I’ll take the desk. You take the cab stand.”

She stepped inside the lobby, with every male glance in range turning to follow her.

Smitty loomed beside the first cab in line.

“Justice, Inc.,” he said in a low tone. Every cabby in town knew those words.

“O.K.!” said the driver. “What’ll you have, tiny?”

“A Mr. Rew Wight. Inventory. Five feet eleven, thin, a little stooped, bifocals with both lenses extra powerful. Dark hair, thin in front and heavy in back like he needed a haircut. Iron-gray beard—”

“I know Mr. Wight, so I don’t need the description.” said the driver. “I hack him whenever he’s in town and I’m around. I ain’t see him since yesterday morning.”

“You saw him then?”

“Yeah. He’s been in town, all right.”

Smitty went on down the line. Some knew Wight, but the man who had last driven him only got it through the graphic, and detailed, description. This was the third cab from the last in line.

“I drove him,” the man said. “Yesterday, about noon. Bag with him. Thought he was going for a train, to leave town, but he had me take him to an East Side joint instead.”

“What joint?” said Smitty swiftly.

“Don’t remember the address. It’s a yellow-front brick building on Second Avenue, between Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth streets. East side of the street. I can’t just remember what kind of a building it was.”

The driver became richer by five dollars. Nellie came out of the lobby.

“He was here till yesterday just before noon,” she said. “Then he checked out. The clerk doesn’t know where he went—”

“I do,” said Smitty, opening the coupé’s door. “In you go.”

They started east and south.

Nellie made one more reference to the brazen creature Smitty had recklessly said was pretty.

“Did you know the chief checked on the number of the car that girl was driving and found out her last name?” she said.

“Nope,” said Smitty. “What is it?”

“Carroll,” said Nellie waspishly.

“Carroll? Carroll! I don’t know any— You mean, Carroll?”

“Yes. Same name as the pilot who crashed that plane so he could get away with a valuable invention. She’s his sister. Now, she turns up with a gang that goes after General Laboratories with submachine guns and things. The crook brother didn’t succeed; so now the crook sister picks up the threads and tries to steal the invention.”

“Regardless of her morals,” said Smitty, “she’s pr—”

He didn’t finish it. They were there. The car stopped a quarter block down from the only yellow-front building on the east side of Second Avenue between Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth streets.

The cab driver had been unable to remember the character of this building. That was probably because the building had no character at all.

It was an old-timer, slated to be torn down. The windows and doors were boarded up—at least the doors seemed to be solidly boarded up—and it was ready for the wreckers. In this stage, however, it was probably going to remain for a long time. No use tearing it down when materials for a new and modern building were impossible to get.

There was the usual number of people swarming on Second Avenue, which is quite a large number. Smitty and Nellie did not want to attract attention either of casual passers-by or of crooks.

Particularly of crooks.

To walk openly to the door and force a way in would have attracted plenty of attention, so they swung into the next building, after a long look had given them an idea of its interior architecture.

All the members of Justice, Inc., were as familiar with building plans as a city inspector. There are types of buildings. The building next to the boarded-up yellow-front was a four-story, narrow brick one with a store on the ground floor and the curtained windows of living quarters above.