The Avenger 13 - Murder on Wheels (2 page)

“Why not?” he said. “Cole Wilson, friend of the family for most of his life, would want to protect Doris Jackson, wouldn’t he?”

“You weren’t on that train,” Doris jerked out. “So you couldn’t have followed me here. No one on earth knew I was coming; so you couldn’t have learned my plans and met me here. You must be at this place through coincidence. And coincidences are sometimes suspicious.”

“A suspicious nature usually defeats its own purpose,” said Cole Wilson. “I’d fight against being suspicious, if I were you.”

Doris looked as if about to make an angry reply; then she closed her lips firmly and turned. She went back toward the railroad station, across the dunes instead of down the road, because the great truck was still down that way. She didn’t want to be seen.

Behind her, Cole Wilson made no move to follow. He just stood there, face unreadable but keen, black eyes like polished jet, watching her slim, lovely form dwindle out of sight.

The deserted railroad station was in sight ahead of her when it happened.

Sound carries far over the dunes at dawn; and this sound carried to her ears from back there near the closed truck and Cole Wilson and the freak automobile. But she paid no attention to it. If there had been just one shot, she would have. But there were half a dozen shots, and they were so regularly spaced that she thought it was the truck backfiring and went right on.

It was not backfiring. It was deliberate, spaced firing from a .45 automatic! A man had slunk behind a dune till almost beside the streamlined, freak automobile and then had straightened up and poured lead into the driver.

The driver, just settling behind the wheel to go back to the truck, never had a chance and never made a sound. He slumped in the seat, executed at dawn as surely as though stood against a wall! The man with the gun hauled the body out, climbed behind the wheel, himself, and drove the car fast along the road to the north.

The big closed truck started. It raced with sudden frenzy after the stolen mystery machine but was losing two yards in every five, even when it got up to seventy miles an hour.

But all these things, the girl near the station did not know. Even if she had been aware of the tragedy, it would have been driven from her mind a moment later.

That was when the sedan slid to a stop beside her.

She heard the car only when it was within fifty yards of her because it was coming slowly with little motor noise, and a dirt road can mute tire sounds. She heard it and looked behind at a sedan with three men in it, two of whom held guns, and she started to run!

She raced off the road and to the east. So the car went off the road, too, plowing through sand in second gear, and it went after her like a hound after a fox. But the men did not fire.

Far up the track showed a plume of smoke. The next train due was coming down the shore to swing eventually into Gary and South Chicago. Her lips moved wildly, though no sound came out.

So near had safety been! If the sedan hadn’t showed till after she had gotten on the train—

She circled like a desperate rabbit, back toward the lake and the tracks. The car, fast even in sand but not so easily maneuvered, managed to get straightened out by a swearing driver and plunged in her tracks again.

She crossed the road and the train rails, toward a small culvert where a drainage ditch ran under the roadbed to the lake. She threw up both hands, screamed and leaped off the embankment toward the water.

Up the track, the approaching train slowed as the engineer saw some kind of trouble ahead. He also saw a sedan plunge toward the roadbed as if to climb onto bare rails just in time to be struck. But the driver of the car stopped with his nose almost on the track.

The three men leaped from the sedan and raced over the track just as the train hurtled at them with grinding brakes. They looked at the strip of beach and didn’t see the girl.

That was because the girl had crawled back under the track bed through the drainage culvert and now had the slowly rolling train between herself and the men. But they didn’t tumble to that for a minute. They waded into the water, guns glinting in the pink morning light, looking to see if she was swimming under water or something.

The engineer started up again at the sight of those guns. It looked like a potential holdup. The train began grinding south again, at a swifter and swifter pace. And then one of the three men saw the culvert.

They didn’t even swear, they were so mad. Nor did they hunt around any more. They got into the car, backed around, and began following that train.

They were right in their hunch. Doris Jackson was on it. She had jumped a car step like a lithe boy, as she emerged on the land side of the tracks. She went into a day coach, looking calm and fresh as if she had just stepped up here from a rear car. But she was inwardly shaking.

The sedan couldn’t follow the train very closely. The driver concentrated on being at each station when the train reached there, to see if the girl got off. And this was not enough. Because she didn’t get off at a station.

Outside Gary, there is a desolate marsh spot where the trains slow down for a long curve, and here Doris quitted the day coach. She lay in the long marsh grass for a time; then she went to the nearest highway and thumbed a ride east from a cheerful-looking elderly lady in a big car.

About midafternoon she took a cab from the outskirts of Detroit to a small hotel on Woodward Avenue. There, as soon as she got to her room, she put in a long-distance call to New York.

“Mr. Benson is not here, just now,” she heard a musical but somewhat mechanical voice say. “Do you wish to leave a message?”

The voice was mechanical because it came from a phonograph record that was geared to the telephone that had just rung. It was the voice of a girl named Nellie Gray, although Doris didn’t know that; nor, indeed, did she know Nellie.

All she knew, then, was extreme disappointment—and fear.

With despair in her heart, she had called Richard Henry Benson, known to the underworld as The Avenger. And he was not in his headquarters to answer. That was very bad for her.

It was evident that Doris Jackson hadn’t stayed in the hotel long. One small suitcase was enough to hold all the belongings she had there. She began to pack that suitcase now.

She was going to New York. No telling how long it would be before she could contact Mr. Benson on the phone. There was no sense in waiting. She might as well go there in person and talk to him.

She shut the suitcase on the last of her things, and went down the stairs to the lobby. She went to the cashier’s desk to pay her bill. It was while she was there that the man came up to her.

He was what you might call an anonymous person. That is, he didn’t look like anyone in particular, nor did he dress like anyone in particular. There was nothing about him to make him stand out. You’d never have noticed him in a crowd. Just one small detail made you stare, after you’d been talking to him for a moment. That was a large vein in his forehead that sort of squirmed around like a blue worm.

“You are Miss Doris Jackson, aren’t you?” the man said to her. She was jumpy and frightened, but there was nothing about this fellow to be scared of. His manner smoothed her down, and so did his pleasant voice.

“Yes,” she admitted.

“You want very much to see Richard Benson.”

“Why . . . why, yes. That’s right,” she gasped. “How did you know?”

He smiled. It was a friendly smile.

“You just phoned Mr. Benson and failed to reach him,” he said.

She nodded, round-eyed.

“He got in just after his secretary took your message that Miss Doris Jackson phoned and would come to New York in person to see him,” the man said.

Anyone knowing The Avenger and his band would have smelled a rat. It was quite obvious that the man knew nothing of Dick Benson and the headquarters of Justice, Inc. He didn’t know that the voice on the phone had been a recorded voice; and he had certainly erred in calling Nellie Gray a secretary. She was far more than that in The Avenger’s organization.

But, then, Doris didn’t know anything of Benson’s set-up, either.

“Mr. Benson traced your call here,” the man went on. “Then he phoned me at once to get in touch with you. I am an associate,” he added.

“How do I know that?” Doris said.

The man shrugged, still pleasant about it.

“Naturally you would be suspicious. But the very fact that I know about your phone call would indicate that I’m what I say I am, wouldn’t it?”

That seemed logical, on the surface at least. Doris started to pick up her bag and did not protest when he picked it up instead.

“I think,” he said, “I’d better escort you to New York. You’re in danger. You wouldn’t have called Mr. Benson, otherwise. So, I’ll be guard for you.”

“All right. I was going to take the plane. We can get a cab—”

“I have my own car out here. Two friends of mine are with me. I’ll tell them to get out, and we’ll drive to the airport. Meanwhile, you can tell me what’s on your mind.”

He laughed a little at her expression, and the little vein on his forehead squirmed.

“I can see by your expression that you’d rather talk only to Mr. Benson,” he said. “That’s all right with me. Here we are.”

They passed through the revolving door, and he put a hand under her elbow and steered her to a four-passenger coupé. She vaguely saw two men in the narrow rear seat, and then felt herself getting in as the “associate” of Mr. Benson opened the right-hand door.

He climbed behind the wheel and the car started. It started down the street—away from the airport! At first, Doris thought the man merely meant to turn around a block instead of making a U turn on crowded Woodward Avenue. But he kept on going.

“Say—” she began.

Then she stopped, cold all over. Because he was grinning a little, and it was not pleasant at all. She turned and really looked at the two behind, then, and saw what a little fool she had been.

They were two of the three who had been in that sedan on the other side of the State early that morning!

“Hi, toots,” said one. The other said nothing; he just flexed his hand a very little on the butt of the automatic he held across his knees.

Doris swallowed hard. She knew, now, what had happened. The man who had approached her in the lobby had been near enough to the switchboard to hear calls, or else had bribed the operator. Then he had acted to keep her from ever talking—to Benson or anybody else!

She had been a fool and it looked as if she were going to pay for it with her life!

“How did you get wise to the fact that something was going to happen on the dunes road this morning?” the man at the wheel asked, the vein in his forehead writhing as if it had life of its own.

Doris said nothing.

“Yeah, and just what are you wise to?” snapped one of the men in the back seat.

Doris made the same answer; in other words, no answer at all.

“O. K.,” grinned the man at the wheel. “Don’t talk if you don’t feel like it. It doesn’t make any real difference if we find out what you know. We just want to be sure nobody else does.”

The car was going as fast as the man could wheel it and not get unwelcome attentions from the police. It neared the vast expanse of the Marr automobile plant, one of the motor city’s biggest.

The car they were in was not a very expensive one, but it was a deluxe model of its make. There were two windshield wipers, two sunshades, two rear-view mirrors.

In the rear-view mirrow provided for the passenger on the front seat, Doris noticed that a car was coming after them pretty closely. It was a coupé. She couldn’t see who was in it and didn’t care very much who it was. It was the proximity of the coupé, itself, that interested her.

Doris had her feet straight out in front of her, under the dash. With her right foot she began tapping gently and rapidly against the side of the car.

It sounded amazingly like something the matter with a wheel. Something serious.

“Hey! What’s that?” said one of the two in the rear.

“Must be a wheel bearing,” scowled the man at the wheel. “Aw, let it go. We’ve got no time for—”

Doris was tapping her foot more loudly and was slowing the rhythm of it just a little as the man instinctively slowed speed.

“We can’t go along sounding like a snare drum,” he snarled. “Of all the rotten—”

He was going quite a little slower, now, and Doris’s left hand shot out.

The gearshift was on the steering column. She grabbed it with her palm braced hard against it, and with all her strength she shoved!

The bedlam made by shoving a car into reverse while it’s going ahead about twenty miles an hour is something that must be heard to be believed. Maybe a tooth or two went, probably not, the way they make cars, now. But everything locked from the fan at the front to the wheels in the rear.

The men raved curses and tried to recover their balance. The coupé behind honked loudly, and then plowed into their rear. A crowd started gathering at once; a couple of cops began running from far places. And one of the men in the rear swung his gun viciously to club Doris down!