The Avenger 12 - The Flame Breathers (6 page)

Dick Benson always carried with him a small but complete set of laboratory instruments so that, at a moment’s notice, he could conduct any but the most complicated tests.

To test for the presence of human blood is not very complicated. Nor is it complicated to test two specimens for similarity. At least, not to a genius like Benson.

Benson had tested the scrapings taken from the floor of the closed van where the wood was darkened in two different areas. Also, he had studied the bit of fused metal taken from the van; and he had decided that it was what was left of an upholstery button.

“The van,” he announced, “recently carried two bodies and what was left of that test car from the flat. These blood specimens are unlike, proving that they came from two people. So the two in the truck must have been badly wounded or they’re dead. Probably the latter.”

“ ’Tis nice work to decide all that, Muster Benson,” said Mac dourly. “But it doesn’t get us very far.”

The Scot was the most pessimistic soul alive. Unless he happened to be in a spot from which there seemed no possible escape from death. Then, with a crazy reversal of character, he was apt to be the most cheerful person on earth.

“We have no notion of who the two bodies in the van might have been,” he added gloomily.

“I think we have—on one, at least,” Benson said evenly. “The test car was wrecked deliberately. Therefore, it is reasonable to suppose that the driver was murdered to keep him from talking about the test. One of the bodies must have been that of the driver. The other? We can’t even guess, as yet. It couldn’t have been the pilot of the exploded plane. There were rather ghastly bits of evidence in the fragments I looked at that indicated the pilot met the same fate as his ship.”

Even Benson could not know of the newspaperman who had sneaked out to the flat and suffered the fate of the “jackrabbit.”

The Avenger picked up the phone and called the city motor bureau. Yes, they knew of a young fellow, test driver, who had been hired to drive a car yesterday. His name was Bud Reeder. He was good. No, they didn’t know if Bud had come back yet. They only happened to know about the test because the secretary of the motor club was slightly acquainted with him; the club had hired him once or twice to peg times and distances on advertised routes. He could usually be reached at Dutch Vassen’s garage.

Benson phoned the garage.

“No, Bud ain’t in,” came a coarse voice. “Yeah, he usually hangs around here, but I ain’t seen him since yesterday. He got a job yesterday, and mebbe he’s blowin’ his cash somewhere.”

“Do you know who hired him?” asked Benson.

“Nope,” came the voice. “But the landlady of his boarding house might.”

Benson called the number given. A woman answered in a vinegary voice.

“How should I know who hired him?” she shrilled. “He don’t tell me his affairs.”

Even over the telephone, The Avenger’s voice had the magic tone of authority. The woman calmed down after a moment.

“He might have gone to a place having something to do with somebody named Klaxon,” she admitted finally. “I heard him phone—just happened to, you understand. I ain’t the kind to listen to my guests when they answer the telephone. And I heard him repeat a name that sounded something like Klaxon when he first started talking.”

Smitty flipped through the phone book’s classified section of garages and automobile salesrooms. There was a Paxon Garage.

“We’ll try that,” said Benson, pale eyes like icy slits in his dead, white face.

It was approaching dusk. Paxon’s garage was a small building on the edge of town, designed to hold no more than twenty or twenty-five cars. It was a shabby looking place, and it seemed deserted at the moment.

However, Benson took no chances. He led the way to the rear of the building, moving shadowlike in the creeping dusk.

The garage was of planking, sheathed with imitation shingles of asbestos. Benson’s white, steely fingers ripped some of the asbestos pads off. Then he took two pellets from his pocket and a thing rather like an atomizer in appearance, save that instead of rubber bulb on it there was an open tube where a bulb should have been.

He partially crushed the two pellets together and dropped them into the receptacle of the atomizer. Then he put the end of the tube, opposite the small nozzle, into his mouth and blew.

The pellets began slowly to diminish in size as they gave off inflammable gases; and, with the oxygen of Benson’s breath mixing in, there was a spurt of blue flame from the nozzle. The apparatus was really a blow torch, so small that it could be carried, in parts, in two vest pockets.

Benson ran the intense tip of the flame in an oblong over the exposed planks of the garage’s back wall. The oblong tilted back in his hand like a door. It came out silently, and silently he laid it down.

Then he and Mac and Smitty stepped in.

Their wariness was justified. From somewhere in front of the dark building came a voice. A man was either talking on the telephone, or to some other person with him.

Mac’s hand suddenly found the arm of The Avenger. He pressed hard.

“Look, mon!”

Right next to where they had stepped in, at the rear of the little garage where it couldn’t be seen without a search, was a blackened twisted thing so fire-warped that you could hardly tell that it had once been chassis and motor block of an automobile.

“The test car,” whispered Benson.

He went to it, moving as only The Avenger could move, seeming to float swiftly over the concrete without sound. He started to examine it, but he seemed interested only in the rear end. His glance at the blackened motor block was very brief.

He was looking for traces of the car’s gasoline tank. And he wasn’t finding any. Yet there should have been traces. The metal shell of a tank shouldn’t disappear in even the hottest fire.

The three crouched quickly in the darkness. The voice of the man in front had stopped, and steps sounded. They saw him leave a tiny cubicle boarded off as an office. He came toward the rear of the place.

The three shifted a little as he came closer, trying to keep the test car’s chassis between them and him. He didn’t seem to suspect anything. He walked slowly, openly, toward the back, across the garage from them. Then he turned and seemed about to retrace his steps to the office.

There was a click and the garage was suddenly flooded with light! It struck the surprised three from every angle at once.

Smitty suddenly exclaimed aloud. He had turned, and had seen something.

“Oh-oh,” he said. “There’s that girl again.”

While they had watched the man drift aimlessly in their direction, another person had stolen silently toward them on the near side of the garage. They had been neatly flanked. And this other person, evidently the one to whom the man in front had been talking a moment ago, was the girl with the ink-black hair and the jet-black eyes who had gummed their play on the salt flat.

She stood facing them, in the glare of light, with the enormous gun in her steady small hand.

“Don’t move,” she warned. Then she raised her voice. “All right, Eddy, get the others.”

The man near the front reached into the first car at hand. He leaned on the horn button. Two short blasts and a long one resounded echoingly in the garage—and it also could be heard for some distance outside.

Benson’s hands commenced to stray innocently toward his collar. If a finger had touched a certain spot there, the garage would have been filled, in about four seconds, with an inky pall of smokelike gas that would have blinded the man and the girl. Most men would have allowed the move to be completed; you can’t hide a gun in a shirt collar.

The girl, however, was smarter than most men. Back on the salt flat, she must have seen that the collapse of the gunmen was preceded by an inconspicuous move of Benson’s hands.

“Keep your hands absolutely still,” she warned. “No, don’t even raise them over your head. Keep them absolutely as they are.”

Benson stayed as still as stone, eyes like chips of white steel. Mac and Smitty raged impotently beside him. And men began to pile in the front door of the garage.

There were about ten men. They came so quickly in answer to the horn signal as to suggest that their headquarters were in one of the buildings flanking the garage.

They glared at Mac and Smitty and Benson and began running purposefully toward them. Mac recognized half a dozen of the men they had gassed on the salt flat. The gunmen were pretty sore about that, it appeared.

However, this time the men did not attempt to shoot. With blackjacks and clubbed guns in their hands they prepared to surround the three and knock their heads out from between their ears.

The reason for the desire to avoid shooting was plain enough. This wasn’t deserted country; this was a city. And the noise of gunshots wouldn’t be easy to explain.

There is one thing about a large gang of men. They look imposing; but in such a number, there is always one chump who messes the works. It was so in this case.

A big fellow with a split ear was in the lead, snarling more ferociously than any of the others, eager to get in the first crack with the butt of his automatic.

He got there first, all right; half a dozen steps in the lead; And he swung at the first head to present itself—the sandy-thatched skull of MacMurdie.

At the same time, without realizing it, the man got between Mac and the girl with the gun.

It was the opening awaited.

With a snarl that made the gangster’s grimace seem like a weak grin, the Scot ducked the flashing gun barrel and surged forward. He got the gunman in the middle with a bony shoulder, and the man went flying back as if propelled by a giant sling shot. Went flying back, and caromed against the girl.

She cried, “Oh!” in a strangled way, as the breath was knocked out of her. And she dropped the gun.

From then on it was a shambles, with ten men against three, and all desirous of avoiding gunfire. The ten, of course, had no doubt as to the outcome. Not at first.

They were all over the three now! Mac went down with two men on top of him. Smitty, huge as he was, was knocked to his knees under the shock of a four-man wedge. The Avenger was the only one who remained erect, and he had a man clawing on his back and another trying to smash his white face flat with a blackjack!

The fight seemed over before it had fairly begun. Then, somehow, things seemed to happen!

MacMurdie could fight about as well on the floor as on his feet. His bone mallets of fists pistoned up at two savage faces. One suddenly sprouted a red mask and disappeared. The other was hidden abruptly in the crook of an arm to protect it from the Scot’s battering.

So Mac’s bony fingers got the throat under the face in a steel-cable sort of noose, and in a moment he was up and clear of the two.

Smitty hadn’t bothered to use his fists. On his vast knees, he was still almost head high with the men clubbing at him. He swept out his gorilla arms and gathered three of the four to him in an embrace that was an excellent counterpart of the embrace of an enraged grizzly bear.

With the three yelling against him and trying to keep their ribs from caving, the giant simply fell straight forward.

There was a squashing thud as one of the three broke the force of Smitty’s near-three-hundred-pound bulk as it smashed against the concrete floor. He didn’t move any more.

Smitty ceased his embrace and got an ankle in each hand. He swung, and the two remaining men did curious cartwheels sideways, smashing against the front of a car twenty feet away.

The fourth man was industriously clubbing for the big fellow’s head. He’d only hit glancingly, what with the fast shifting of bodies. But now he got a square sock on Smitty’s skull.

It should have felled an ox. The gunman stood expectantly, waiting for Smitty to fall. But, somehow, Smitty did not oblige.

Smitty shook his head, as if to clear it of fog, and blinked a couple of times. Then his face reddened.

He had been fighting almost impersonally till now, just doing a job in the most efficient manner possible. But that last crack had evidently made him very annoyed.

“Why you—” he bellowed.

At the look of him, the man screamed and ran. He scuttled between garage wall and the back of a big coupé and began clawing along cleaning rags and polish cans piled there in crazy disregard of all fire laws.

Smitty whirled to where Benson and Mac were.

The Avenger’s fists had accounted for two men. The man with the dead face and the icily flaming, pale eyes was standing almost erect, weaving like a dancer on the balls of his feet, with his fist licking out now and then like darting white flame.

When it went out, a man went down. Odds of ten to three, it seemed, were not enough. Not when the three were Mac and Smitty and Benson.

But, suddenly, the complexion of the struggle changed.

There was a sound like a riveting machine! Slugs screamed off the garage floor to plunk into the plank wall behind the three.

The man who had run yelling from Smitty and hidden between the wall and a parked coupé had picked a submachine gun out of the piles of rags. Throwing all desire for silence to the winds, he was intent on mowing the three down!