The Avenger 1 - Justice, Inc. (6 page)

At the Hotel Ely, MacMurdie waited in the lobby. He had gone to the address of the friend given him by Benson. Under his arm was a small but heavy package. MacMurdie did not know what was in the package. He was waiting for Benson to come and take it, and tell, if he pleased, what he’d found out at the flying field.

But Benson did not come. And MacMurdie’s dour blue eyes went more coldly blue than ever.

Something in the man with the dead, white face from which the pale eyes peered so icily, had got under the skin of the lonely Scot. He was as worried by Benson’s continued absence as he would be if he’d known the man for ten years instead of as many hours.

There was a commotion at the desk. MacMurdie looked in that direction. A taxicab driver was arguing with the clerk.

“—looked back into the rear, and the guy wasn’t there. All the way to the airport and back on the meter. I want my dough.”

MacMurdie got up and walked toward the desk. The clerk said something he couldn’t hear.

“He’s said to come here to the Hotel Ely. He must be registered here. Naw, I don’t know his name. But I want my dough for that trip to the airport and back.”

MacMurdie’s knobby, mallet-like hand came down on the driver’s shoulder.

“Who are ye talking about, mon?”

“Some guy, looked like he was from the West. Picked me up outside a tailor shop downtown here. Had me take him to the airport. Then he took a run-out powder somewhere between the gate and here. And I’m stuck for the fare.”

“What did he look like?”

“I don’t remember much, except his eyes. They were very light gray.”

MacMurdie’s bony hand tightened till the driver yelped, then loosened.

“Wha’ is the bill?”

“Four dollars and ten cents.”

MacMurdie got out an ancient leather purse, with a clip snap. He opened it, took out four one-dollar bills, a nickel and five pennies.

He counted it carefully into the man’s hands.

“You throw your dough around in tips, don’t you?” said the driver sarcastically.

“Only a fool is prodigal wi’ his money,” said the Scot. “And now ye can take
me
out to that airport, as fast as you can navigate.”

He handed the small, heavy package to the clerk.

“Keep this till Muster Benson and me return.”

He felt like adding dourly, “If we
do
return.” But he didn’t.

He entered the airport gate from the cab with his hat pulled down low. He had been fired from here. They’d not let him in if they saw him.

He got past the office all right, and out to the hangar. They were wheeling out one of the big ships. S402 was painted on her nose. One of the mechanics waved to the Scot. They’d all liked him when he worked here. But another of the men, a fellow with dark hair growing down on his forehead and mean dark eyes set too close together, backed out of MacMurdie’s sight and then began running toward the airport administration building.

MacMurdie went up to the plane. The man who had waved, grinned at him.

“So they bounced you, Mac?” he said. “What was wrong? Drunk again?”

“I don’t touch the spirit of the vine, as well ye know, Tommy,” MacMurdie said. “ ’Twas a personal disagreement. Is this the S402? And how did it get the duralumin patch in the wing, and Dunlop-tread tires on the landin’ wheels, like the S404?”

“Why, now that you mention it,” said Tommy, staring, “you’re right! That’s funny! A guy was painting around here the other day, freshening up the numbers. I wonder if the dope could have got the wrong— Hey, Stock.”

Stock was the boss mechanic. MacMurdie waited with muscles tense for the answer to the call. But there wasn’t any answer.

“Stock!”

“He ain’t here,” said another of the men, coming from under the transport’s wing. “Guy got sick in the hangar a while ago. Some bird I never saw before. And Stock took him out—to a doctor’s, I guess. Anyhow, he ain’t back.”

MacMurdie was listening as though life depended on catching every last syllable with his big, outstanding ears.

“Guy sick in the hangar? Who?”

“I don’t know. I tell you I never saw him before. Somebody in from off the street. He was hanging around this boat, the S402, last I saw him. Then Stock and another guy came out supporting him like he’d keeled over in a faint. Don’t know what happened or where they went, but Stock ain’t back yet—”

From the office came the agent and two men who kept their hands near their armpits. MacMurdie saw them out of the corners of his somber blue eyes. And MacMurdie left. Fast!

He moved toward the airport gate, and the three moved to intercept him. They got to the gate at about the same time.

“MacMurdie! What the devil are you doing—”

The Scot didn’t take time to reply to the agent. He didn’t wait for the hands of the other two men to be withdrawn from under their lapels.

The two were little and ratlike. They had only one thing to fight with—guns. And they were handicapped because they couldn’t quite make up their minds to use them in the presence of so many airport attendants.

So while they were chewing their lips, the Scot’s long, bony arms swept out.

Each hamlike hand got a man’s collar. He jerked the two forward, then flung them back, with his huge right foot in the path of their feet. They tripped against the agent. The three went down.

MacMurdie leaped into the cab.

“Away from here, mon! Fast!”

The cab started forward. In a minute MacMurdie would give a definite address. He thought he knew where to go next.

He knew Stock, the boss mechanic, pretty well. Knew him as thoroughly as he disliked him. Stock had a small farm ten miles out of town. A shack of a place. If the “guy who was sick” was Benson, as MacMurdie was sure, and if Stock and others wanted to get rid of him, it was quite likely they’d take him to that secluded, desolate farm.

MacMurdie leaned forward to tell the driver to go out there. But before he could do that, there was action from behind.

One of the ratlike little gunmen had his automatic braced on his forearm, pistol-gallery style. Its sight was square on the hat to be seen in the back window of the cab, now thirty yards away.

The man squeezed the trigger. There was a galvanic movement of the hat, and then it went slowly forward out of sight.

“There!” said the man. “That’ll fix ’im! Got him square through the head. That’ll learn guys to come poking around here on things that don’t concern them!”

Benson’s senses slowly returned to the tune of a swaying, bumping, rapid motion that at first he couldn’t recognize. Then he got it. He was in the speeding automobile. He kept his eyes closed because his head hurt so much that he didn’t want the shock of light added to them. Then he continued to keep them closed because a voice from just above him sounded out.

“Who do you suppose the rummy is?”

“How would I know?” snarled another voice from a little ahead of him.

But it was the first voice that shocked Benson instantly into full consciousness and threw the mental gears that sent his fast, precise brain instantly into full speed.

He remembered other words, at a world-shaking moment.

“You’re nuts, brother. You got on alone at Buffalo.”

Those words had been uttered by this voice that night when he’d come out of the men’s washroom to find his wife and child gone.

Very slowly, and only a little way, he opened his eyes.

He was jammed down on the floor in the back of a closed car. There was no light on the dash forward, but at intervals light from the street lamps came in the windows. He saw, on the back seat above him, a large, flabby man with a gun in his hand.

It was one of the men who had been on the Buffalo-Montreal plane—one who had insisted Benson never had a wife and child!

The man glanced down, and Benson quickly closed his eyes again. He was not bound, but the gun was very alert on him. Suicide to try anything now. In a moment it became even more suicidal to think of resistance, because the street lights stopped as the car left town and began rolling along country roads. Now Benson couldn’t even see the gun to grab for it.

“I wonder who this sucker is,” puzzled the flabby man in the back seat.

“Your guess’s good as mine,” said the driver.

“I thought for a minute I’d seen the guy before. But if I did, it must have been a long time ago. I don’t know any bloke with white hair and a face like that. Mebbe it’s some private dick I bumped into years ago.”

“Private dick’s a good gamble,” observed the driver, in his cruel, metallic voice. “Probably some guy hired by that mug, Benson.”

His words ended in a string of curses. And Benson digested the situation with his fast, flashing mind.

He had recognized the flabby man from the plane. But the man had not recognized him. The whitening of his hair, and the paralysis of his face, from the shock, had served him well in this case.

“Too bad you guys didn’t get Benson, too, there in the plane,” said the unseen driver.

Benson listened so hard it hurt. Shed light on that horrible night? Perhaps.

The flabby man grunted.

“If you’d been there you wouldn’t say that. The guy comes out with blood in his eye. See? And he’s got a mean eye, anyhow. Light gray. Gives you the creeps to look into ’em. He roars around for a while, lookin’ everywhere. And all the time he has a gun. See? Sure, we oughtta got him, too. And we would have. But not with that gun in his mitt. See? By the time Fred could get back from the pilot’s compartment and jump him, we’re over Montreal. Then we can’t drop him out. Somebody might spot us. And we can’t circle out to dump him in the open, because that might get somebody suspicious. All we can do is land with him—and make that story of ours stick. And we did, too.”

“Yeah. Sure, you did.” The driver’s voice was ironical. “You made it stick so hard the guy’s breakin’ his neck to find out what happened!”

“Well, how’d we know he had a lot of dough, and was a tough customer? He was just a sap who got in the way, to us. Like some others we’ve put
out
of the way before now—and a lot of others we’ll probably have to knock off before we’re through.”

“This is big stuff, ain’t it?” said the driver, with a note almost of fright in his voice.

“I’ll say it’s big! If the cops ever got a gander at it, they’d lay eggs! But there’s big guys behind it, so don’t go getting scared. We got a million dollars’ worth of protection any time we need it.”

“What’s it about, anyhow?” asked the driver.