The Avenger 1 - Justice, Inc. (19 page)

A swift burst of machine-gun fire had almost taken his nose off with its first emergence from the window.

He was free of his chains, but still a prisoner in the basement. He went back to the door, and banged against it with a pile-driver shoulder. Then he jumped warily aside. And it was well he did.

Lead poured through the wood in a solid stream following the impact of his shoulder. A man was posted out there with a machine gun.

Smitty, growling with baffled rage, leaned against the wall next to the door and waited. There seemed nothing else to do at the moment.

Outside, in the high weeds of what had once been a well-kept lawn, MacMurdie and Benson lay four yards apart after MacMurdie’s mistake in waving the weeds when there was no breeze to wave them normally.

Those pale, deadly eyes of Benson had seen the slip. On just such trifles as that, the gray-steel man had staked his life many times in his adventurous past.

“Left—fast!” he snapped in a low tone to MacMurdie, the instant he saw those weeds wave when they shouldn’t have been waving.

The two split right and left. Fortunately the breeze was blowing again, covering the weed movements. MacMurdie and Benson had hardly gotten their distance apart when there was a monotonous, terrible hammering as slugs came from a machine gun. The space between them—where they had been lying an instant before—spewed little gouts of dirt where bullets ripped. Weeds fell as if severed by tiny, unseen scythes in the hands of gnomes.

Then the leaden hail stopped. The two could only lie there and wonder if the man were coming, gun in hand, to see if he had hit anything. They couldn’t see over the weeds from where they lay, and didn’t dare raise their heads.

As a matter of fact, the man was coming. He went slowly, a few steps at a time, gun cradled and ready. He was beginning to think he’d shot at shadows. But he wanted to make sure.

MacMurdie turned his head to stare at Benson. The gray fox of a man could barely be seen through the few yards of weeds. The Scot felt a chill touch his spine. He himself was in mental agony, wondering if the man were sneaking up on them, wondering when he would feel machine-gun slugs plow into his back. He knew his face expressed all this. But Benson’s face did not—could not—express anything at all.

It was still, calm, terribly emotionless. The pale and deadly eyes flaming out of the face that was shaped to resemble another man’s, gave a ghastly effect. Like eyes peering from the grave. From another man’s grave!

And then, at a stroke, he saw the gray man’s stony calm shattered to bits.

From the house, high and terrible, came a woman’s scream. And Benson went all to pieces. Another scream sounded out, and Benson’s face, sweat-beaded, went down to grind into the earth.

A woman in terror—perhaps in torture! Was it—could it possibly be—Alicia? His wife—alive in there? The possibility was too much to be borne. Benson was a quivering and helpless bulk in the grip of an unendurable hope.

MacMurdie watched in growing horror. If the man with the gun
was
creeping up on them, Benson, in his present state, would prove as helpless as a child.

“Mon, mon, get yersel tagither!” MacMurdie begged soundlessly. And then he heard the weeds rustling not twenty feet away. And Benson, still a quivering wreck from that scream, had obviously not heard.

Mac’s groping hand closed on a rock the size of his fist. With a flick of his bony, powerful wrist, he snapped it as far to his left as he could. Which, since he dared not disturb the weeds with a full throw, was not far.

It stopped only a few feet away—and hell broke loose and shaved the dour Scot’s ear.

The machine gunner poured lead into the spot where the rock had waved the weeds for a full five seconds. Then stood—and watched. He was too old a hand to risk being gripped by the ankles if he went unwarily closer to whatever was disturbing the weeds.

The pause did the trick. There was suddenly a man’s faintly heard yell from within the house.

“Everybody! Down here! Quick! The big fellow’s loose!”

The man turned toward the house. Benson and Mac followed carefully.

The basement windows were at the sides of the house.

And anyone watching the doors from the
inside
would be apt to overlook a stealthy entrance from the
outside.

Benson waved to the Scot to come onto the porch. MacMurdie did so. He flattened against the wall while Benson tried the front doorknob. The door was unlocked.

With his pale and deadly eyes glittering like ice in a gray dawn, Benson stooped down and got Mike, the special little gun. He coolly opened the door.

There was a man in the front hall, with his back turned. He was watching in the wrong direction, it turned out. He whirled at Benson’s entrance.

His gun started to snap up, wavered as he saw the face of Murdock and the clothes Murdock had worn when he left in the motor cruiser.

“Murdock—” he said questioningly.

Then, with its soft, deadly spat, Mike spoke. The man went down, scalp deeply gashed on the top, knocked out, but not killed, by the stunning impact of the little slug glancing from bone.

They went down two steps of the winding stairs leading to the basement. There they halted as a burst of machine-gun fire sounded around the bend beneath them. Somebody shooting through the basement door? It sounded like it—

There were pounding steps in the hall, coming toward them. Men—too many to face, were converging from all the rest of the house to the basement.

A machine gun at the bottom of the stairs, men coming to the top. Benson’s pale eyes flamed lambently. He crept to the bend in the stairs, and leaped like a jaguar.

The machine gunner never knew what hit him. He was crouching on the bottom stair, gazing at the door, through which he had just poured a burst of lead at the battering impact of Smitty’s shoulder.

Benson lit on his back. His head banged against the door.

“Whitey!” yelled one of the men just starting down the steps. “What’s up? Is he getting out—”

Benson had the door bolt open. He flung the door open just as the first of the men got around the bend in the stairs and stopped talking as he saw MacMurdie and the white-haired man with the steely light eyes.

The two got into the basement just as slugs began to rip through the door they’d banged behind them. A huge hand fell on Benson’s shoulder. He started to whirl and hit, but stopped. His flashing brain told him there was only one hand that big; and only one “big fellow” the gang could yell about being loose.

Smitty! He’d gotten through!

Benson turned. He stared up into the giant’s moon-face with profound gratitude and admiration. But he only said:

“So now we’re
all
cooped up in here. But I guess the three of us can take them.”

Outside, Fair’s savage voice sounded: “Seven of us, with two Tommy guns, I guess we can take
them
all right. All together when I tell you—”

Benson leaped to one of the basement windows. As he moved, he ripped off Murdock’s old sweater. He draped it over the window, shutting out nearly all light.

Instantly, without a word said, Smitty went to the other window and shaded that with his shirt. He may have looked as slow-witted as he was big, with his full-moon face and his too-good-natured-looking, not-very-intelligent blue eyes. But actually his mind was as fast as his fists.

The basement door burst inward. The men outside jumped in yelling—and stopped in utter surprise.

They had jumped into blackness. The basement, in spite of a little light still leaking in the windows, was Stygian in comparison with the outer light. In that completely unexpected blackness, three men waited for them—one a giant who could throttle a man with one hand, another a man with death residing permanently in his flaming, almost colorless eyes, a third with great knobby fists like bone mallets.

“Back out!” one of them yelled, with the utter terror of a trapped animal. “I can’t find the light switch—”

There was a stampede, but they were not allowed to get out and scheme all over again. Smitty hit the group.

From the giant’s ankles dangled lengths of chain that struck at legs like the death scythes on the wheels of a Roman chariot. On his wrists were the metal cuffs, so that if a sledge-hammer blow of his fist missed its target in the darkness, the metal gyve was apt to slash straight across a face.

Beyond, Benson was at the door, keeping anyone from getting back out. Those pale eyes could see a little in the dark, like a cat’s. Methodically his lashing fists downed men escaping from the giant.

To Smitty’s left was MacMurdie, battering away with sanguine Scotch howls.

Three against seven. But you could have searched the country over and not have found another three like them. And with the darkness aiding them, and making the guns of the seven useless, they pared odds down—till no odds at all remained, and they alone were on their feet.

Benson went to the windows, white dead face as devoid of expression as a death mask. He took the coverings, and light came in.

All there gasped and looked hurriedly away from him. He lifted his hand to his face and discovered why. A blow in the fight had landed on the dead flesh of his right cheek. The flesh had taken the imprint of the fist, and had stayed flattened, making his countenance lopsided.

He massaged the insensitive, plastic cheek. It came into normal shape—but now one side of his face was in the cast of Murdock, and the other was in the mold of Benson.

“Bind them,” he said to Smitty and Mac. He didn’t care about his face. In all the world he only cared about one thing now. A woman had screamed. Was it Mrs. Martineau lying in a corner in a dead faint? Or was it—

He ran up to the first floor.

“Alicia!”

He ran through room after room, dim from the boarded windows.

“Alicia! Darling!”

He went to the second floor, the third, the attic. Room after room. And all were empty.

Then, slowly, moving wearily, he returned to the basement. The five kidnap victims crowded around him, thanking him for their delivery, promising him anything he wanted.

He looked at them without seeing them.

Buffalo.

Leon and Mrs. Martineau went to a hospital. Hickock and Vincent went to their homes. Andrews, whose home was burned, went to a hotel.

Benson left Smitty and MacMurdie at the hotel. Then the gray fox of a man with the pale and deadly eyes absented himself, with no word of explanation.

He was gone for over an hour. It was nearly nine in the evening before he came back, as enigmatically as he had left. He sat down near the telephone stand in the room, hand ready to pick up the instrument.

The bony Scot and the moon-faced giant were bursting with curiosity. MacMurdie cracked first.

“If ye don’t mind questions, Muster Benson—have ye found out anything?”

“The whole thing,” nodded Benson, hand near the phone. “Though a lot of it I’ve known, of course, for some time.

“Buffalo Tap & Die Works is the stake. Or, I should say, the cash reserve of Buffalo Tap & Die. By a freak of the recession, the total outstanding stock of the company has sunk to a value on the board of about five and a half million dollars. But the company actually has—aside from all its other assets—over fourteen million dollars in liquid cash in the bank! That means that you could buy the company on the stock market for five and a half million, throw the factory buildings and plant equipment away—and still get back fourteen millions by simply withdrawing the cash the company has deposited in the banks. A quick, sure profit of nearly nine million dollars.

“If the stockholders would sell at the present figure.

“The little stockholders could be frozen out easily. But the big stockholders, owning a majority of the stock, were a different proposition. Being in the main sound business people, they wouldn’t think of selling. So they were kidnapped and forced to sign ‘sell’ orders to their broker.

“That is what was behind these kidnappings and murders. Nine million in cash!”

MacMurdie whistled.

“Whoosh! Nine million dollars! Armies have been slaughtered for less than that. But who is the mon behind—”

The telephone rang. Benson snatched it up. A voice said quietly: “They’re there. They just went in. Their private office.”

Benson hung up, and rose, pale, deadly eyes flaming coldly.

“Come on. It’s the last act. We’ve got them.”

In the fast roadster, Benson drove toward the business district.

Both MacMurdie and Smitty stared at the dead, white face. Benson stared straight ahead, with words slipping from his almost moveless lips like slow, deadly knives.

“As you said, Smitty, they are rich, powerful, respected. They could hire brilliant legal talent, drag out a trial for months—perhaps even get off in the end by shoving all the charges on the cheap gunmen who did their dirty work for them. No, they will not be arrested.”

“Ye mean to kill them?” said MacMurdie, with entire approval in his harsh Scotch voice.

The deadly pale eyes flamed and dulled.