The Avenger 1 - Justice, Inc. (9 page)

The gun jabbed forward still farther.

The explosion, muffled by the man’s clothes and body, wasn’t loud. The noise of the truck helped muffle it. And anyhow, there was no one around on that outlying street to hear.

The man sagged, with the chloroform rag dropping from his limp hand. He died staring at Pete’s face, unbelievingly, pleadingly. And Pete stared back with his mouth working.

In Pete’s eyes could be read regret—but also a fear of somebody or something so great that it made even the murder of an old pal a thing to be committed without question if that pal got nosy.

The truck went on, bearing the dead gunman and the unconscious rich man.

Benson was in his suite at the Hotel Ely. MacMurdie, who had been given a room adjoining, was in there, too. Benson was opening the small, heavy package MacMurdie had picked up for him yesterday.

The man with the still, white face took two things from a mass of wrappings. One was a knife, the other a gun. But they were like no knife or gun the dour Scot had ever seen before.

The knife was about eight inches long over all, and had practically no handle. The blade was double-edged, with a reinforcing spine down the middle. When Benson titled the weapon a bit, MacMurdie saw that the handle was a light, hollow tube.

“It’s a throwing knife I designed myself,” said Benson, lips barely moving with the words. He stared at the thing, eyes like frosty steel, face as dead as a mask of ice. “Heavy in the blade, light in the handle. Look.”

Benson held the knife, handle down, about shoulder-high, and dropped it. In midair the blade overbalanced the handle and came down point first. Even that short drop was enough to sink it lightly into the floor, so sharp was the point and so easily did it needle into the carpet.

Benson picked it up again and, it seemed without really looking, threw it. His arm didn’t even draw all the way back. It lashed forward in an abbreviated arc. And the knife, with a deadly swish, snipped a coat button off MacMudie’s breast, over his heart, and went on to sink two inches into the wood of the door a yard beyond.

“I’ve gone a little rusty,” Benson said. “But then it’s been three years since I used it—ten since a Javanese taught me the trick in Singapore. I’ll pick it up again.”

He took up the gun.

It was a .22, but that, the caliber, was the only thing standard about it. The barrel was almost as long as the barrel of a target pistol. The cylinder, to streamline the gun, was small and held only four cartridges. The butt slanted so that it was almost in a straight line with the barrel. Altogether, it was almost like a straight piece of blued steel tubing with a little bulge for a cylinder and a slight bend for a handle.

There was a silencer on it.

“I’ve never seen the like of them before,” said MacMurdie, staring at the two weapons.

“You’ll probably never see the like again,” Benson replied, clipped words sliding from immobile lips.

He rolled his trousers legs up to the knee. To the inside of the left calf he strapped a slim sheath, and in it he slid the razor-sharp knife. To the inside of the right calf, so that it conformed to the bulge of steely muscle there, he strapped an almost-as-slim holster into which he slipped the tiny gun.

“Mike and Ike,” he said, pale-gray eyes glittering with a deadly light. “Mike’s the gun. Ike’s the knife. They are true friends. They’ve saved my life a great many times. I’d thought I’d never need them again. But they come back into active service now.”

“Mon, ye couldn’t kill fast enough with that popgun, stacked against a .45, we’ll say. The big one would blast ye to bits before the little one could sting enough to take life.”

“I don’t kill with Mike,” retorted Benson. But he didn’t bother to explain at the moment.

“So the cab driver who took me and my wife to the airport that day can’t be traced,” he said.

“Right,” nodded MacMurdie glumly. “If he’s in town, he’s hidin’ out. He’s driving no cabs now.”

“I rather thought he’d be missing. They’re cleaning up the loose ends, Mac. The driver was a loose end. I, or some investigator in my employ, might get to him—and he might eventually talk. So he has been put out of the way. But the lead I got has turned into something.”

“Ye mean what ye heard the mon say in the car that took you to the farmhouse? The words, ‘Old Ironsides?”

“Yes,” said Benson. “I found out who Old Ironsides is. He’s Lawrence Hickock, a wealthy Buffalo businessman. He is president of a firm called the Buffalo Tap & Die Works. His nickname comes from his sideburns, old-fashioned, iron-gray, bushy.”

He walked to the closet, a lithe gray wolf of a man with only his deadly pale eyes alive in his white, dead face. He put on the hat that was subtly reinforced with wire to take and hold any shape he chose to give it. He donned the light spring topcoat that, at a second’s notice, would be altered to look like an entirely different garment.

“We progress, though slowly,” he told the Scot. “So far, we know this: The gang behind this has booked the Montreal plane several times to carry something no one is supposed to know anything about. That object or those objects—went in the trunk invariably accompanying the gang. At a certain spot it was taken from the trunk and dropped. Because they didn’t dare have my wife and child see what was dropped through the trapdoor, they . . . threw them out of the plane first, that night.”

MacMurdie was no yes-man. He shook his dour head.

“If they wanted to drop something some place, they would hire a private plane, wouldn’t they? Why take chances with a big public transport plane?”

“There’s an answer for that, too. They had several things to drop. That meant several trips. A chartered plane, going out quite a few times to the same spot, could be observed and perhaps questions asked about it. But no one would ever question the regular flight of a regular plane over a commercial route. It was smarter and less traceable to use that transport than to hire a plane.”

He went to the door. “Stay here for calls, Mac.” The brief agony that touched Benson’s eyes was a terrible thing. But the white, still face reflected no expression at all. “I’m still hoping there may be a ransom demand for Alicia and the girl. You’ll be here if it comes.”

“Ye’re going to see this mon, Hickock?”

“Yes,” said Benson, and went out with his lithe, smooth tread.

A call to Hickock’s office had disclosed the fact that he was not there. So Benson went to the magnate’s home.

Old Ironsides, named by the member of that gang! Was the man, so respected in town, so well-to-do, one of the powers behind this plot? Or was he a victim?

It soon developed that he was the latter. A victim!

A middle-aged woman with frantic brown eyes came to the door when Benson asked to see Mr. Hickock.

“You have word?” she said, voice trembling near hysteria. “You have word from my husband?”

“Isn’t he here?” countered Benson.

Mrs. Hickock stared at the dead face, looked deep into the fog-gray eyes. Then over her own eyes a veil seemed to lower.

“He isn’t at home just now,” she said, voice brittle and controlled with great effort.

“Do you know when he will return?”

“Soon, I imagine. I can take any message you have to give, and tell him when he comes. Is it personal or a business call?”

Benson’s pale eyes were boring into the veiled brown ones. They could read closed books, those eyes. Though, at that, this human document was not too closed.

Hickock not at home. His wife wild about it. Asking if he “had word” of her husband. It spelled a single sinister word—one that rends all the emotions and is usually hidden from the police till too late.

Kidnap!

“It’s a business call,” he said evenly. “I’ll come again, later.”

No use trying to question Mrs. Hickock. She’d refuse to answer while she had her composure, be too hysterical to answer coherently if questioning were pressed. Benson left.

But he only went as far as the corner.

There, he took out a small mirror and altered the lines of the dead flesh of his face. He had come as himself. Now he became a man with lean cheeks and heavy jowls, lips straight and a little cruel over a jaw with a bulbous tip. He turned the brim of his hat down in front, up high at sides and rear, so that it looked like something a fisherman ashore on a vacation might wear. He slipped into the topcoat wrong side out and presented a gaudy check to the world.

He went back to the Hickock grounds, and passed by the house. A groundsman was working at a flower plot near the garage. He went up to the man. At the rear window, the servant who had admitted Benson to see Mrs. Hickock looked out and saw him, but didn’t recognize him at all as the fellow who had just left.

The groundsman glanced at him, eyes curious at the interruption to his work.

“Well?” he said.

Benson said: “I came out here to get a little more information, if I can, about your employer, Mr. Hickock.”

The man just stared at him, face secretive. It was plain that he could keep his own counsel, and that of his employer.

“They tell me,” Benson went on, “that you were one of the last around here to see Mr. Hickock before he left the other day—and didn’t come back.”

“Who told you?” said the man suspiciously.

Benson jerked his head toward the big house. The man drew the natural conclusion. His face lost its guarded secretiveness. Something like relief came into his eyes.

“Oh! So they’ve decided at last to tell the cops, and you were sent out! That’s good. I don’t think people ought to keep these things quiet.”

“Very dangerous to,” agreed Benson. “Tell me what you know of the disappearance, will you?”

“I suppose they’ve told you most of it in the house,” the man said, shrugging his shoulders. “Three mornings ago, Mr. Hickock left for the office. But on the way he was going to stop off at the home of Mr. John Lansing. Mr. Lansing called at breakfast and asked him to. Anyhow, that’s what the second maid says. Mr. Hickock left, driving his own car, and that was the last of him.”

“He didn’t get to the office after the call to Mr. Lansing?”

“Nope. He left here—and disappeared, that’s all. But the call from Mr. Lansing must have been a stall. I hear they’ve called there a dozen times. There’s nobody home. Mr. Lansing himself is down in Florida, and has been for three months. His house seems to be all shut up.”

“They certainly delayed about calling the police,” said Benson expressionlessly.

The man shrugged again.

“You know how it is. His family’s wild. His friends and the guys who work for him are nuts. But everybody’s afraid to say a word to the cops for fear it’ll go hard with Old Ironsides. They’re just sittin’ around waiting for a ransom demand, I guess. Far’s I know, none has come yet.”

“So he went to John Lansing’s home,” Benson repeated.

He left, to go there himself.

He arrived just as a big town car with a giant of a man in chauffeur’s livery at the wheel, swirled out of the drive and began going like a comet away from the place. He took the car’s number.

Five minutes later, after observing the wrecked front door of Lansing’s place and confirming the report that the place was closed and tenantless, he phoned the motor bureau and found that the town car belonged to Arnold Leon.