The Avenger 18 - Death in Slow Motion (18 page)

“An oxide with an atom instead of a molecule of oxygen?” blinked Josh.

The Avenger enlightened him a little on that, too.

“An oxide is a combination of oxygen with a metal or metalloid, as a rule. In this case, the combination seems to have been completed with the rubber dust instead of a metalloid. That served two purposes: it gave the oxide the necessary complement and made detection almost impossible because rubber dust is expected to be floating around in a rubber shop. The oxide, as I said, was formed of incompleted molecules. Those incompleted molecules, introduced into the blood stream, instantly sought to combine with more oxygen to become the compound ordained by nature. Just as nature struggles constantly to fill a vacuum, so she always struggles to round out an unnatural or incompleted molecule. In this case, the struggle swiftly robbed the red blood corpuscles of their normal oxygen, producing an instantaneous, synthetic anaemia.” *

* (
The final nature of the oxide was later analyzed in full by Dick Benson, but was never published for fear it might be used again by criminals.
)

Josh blinked some more.

“The combination is subtle indeed,” said The Avenger. “The powdered emery abraids the lungs. The fine dust of the oxide and the benj is allowed to enter the blood from the lung surfaces. It keeps on seeping in for days, producing the slow motion and the eventual death which we have observed.”

“To be effective in an entire large factory,” said Josh, “a good deal of the stuff would have to be dumped into a ventilator system. And after the first catastrophe, the plants were well guarded. How could anybody carry a bundle that large and not be noticed?”

The Avenger’s colorless eyes were deadly agates.

“A very simple process was evolved for the transportation. A lot of hemp would have to be brought in to whatever laboratory was being used to produce this witch’s concoction. The transportation of that was easily solved, too.”

“I don’t see—”

“Can you remember,” said Dick slowly, “seeing a certain person always with a bundle in his arms?”

“A ragged bundle, with bits of string and ends of broken wood trailing from it?” said Benson.

“Why—” gulped Josh. “Why— Say! Yes! Old Mitch!”

“Right! Old Mitch seems always to have a bundle of pitiful odds and ends under his arm. Wood for his old stove, principally. He must have carried in a great deal of fuel in the short time since he first came to our attention. Which is rather odd, since the weather is warm. Surely he doesn’t use all that wood for cooking?”

Josh was dancing around as if he had grabbed hold of a shock machine.

“His supplies! Sure! He brought them in in that old bundle—”

“And took them out again in the same bundle,” said The Avenger. “Yet it occurred to none of us to wonder why he should be taking bundles out of his place as well as into them. An old tramp, with his toes sticking out of his shoes. Who would suspect anything wrong of such a character? Who would have anything but sympathy for his plight? And under the noses of everyone, he brought in his supplies and took out his finished product for others to distribute.”

“The rest in the rear-house,” yelped Josh. “They must all be just underlings, with Old Mitch as the boss.”

The Avenger’s black-thatched head was shaking.

“So many subtleties that it would hardly occur to anyone to delve into them,” he said. “Till just a few minutes ago, when I got the answer, there has been one question that has puzzled me more than almost any other. I went to the rear-house disguised as one of the tenants, Johnny the Dip. It was far too dark for even the most miraculous of eyes to have penetrated the disguise. Yet, the moment I entered the pickpocket’s room I was attacked by men who knew, instantly and surely, that I was not Johnny the Dip.”

Josh stared askance at the pallid, deathly eyes, feeling a tendency to shiver himself, in spite of his long association with their owner.

“Never has anyone seen any two occupants of the rear-house at the same time,” Dick said. “We have seen the bookkeeper alone, the pickpocket alone, the woman alone. But never any two together. And now the woman has disappeared as if the earth had swallowed her up.”

Josh almost got it but refused to believe it. His face said so.

“In other words,” said The Avenger quietly, “there is no woman, no pickpocket—who puzzled the police because they had no record of him—and no bookkeeper with a twisted leg. There is only Old Mitch. They are all Old Mitch, who, I’ll wager, is not as old as he seems.”

“B-but—” stammered Josh.

“Old Mitch would not want to go in and out of his place too often,” mused Benson. “But four people, a house filled with mythical tenants, could go in and out as often as desired with no one paying any attention. Also, any one character could utterly disappear at a moment’s notice if something slipped up, including the central one of Old Mitch himself. It must be that. It answers everything, including the question of the attack on me when I went there as Johnny the Dip. The attackers knew I wasn’t the pickpocket because there isn’t any such person!”

It was then that Josh felt the warning vibration of his belt radio. The Avenger didn’t have his on, so he didn’t get it. Josh went to the big radio in the top-floor room. A girl’s voice was whispering, urgently, warily.

“Josh, Nellie. Go ahead.”

“Josh, they’ve got us in a basement somewhere near the rear-house. Smitty and I, and Old Mitch—”

“Old Mitch!” said Josh. “You mean—prisoner?”

“Yes. A minute ago the gang came in and tied us up. I managed to get to Smitty’s radio, and I’m using it now. More men coming. I have to stop talking. But if the chief can locate this place, I think he can catch the whole gang and wipe up the entire affair—”

Her whisper stopped. The radio was dead.

“Come on!” said Benson.

“Old Mitch a prisoner!” exclaimed Josh, as he hurried after the gray fox of a man who could move so swiftly without seeming to exert any effort to do so. “Doesn’t that upset everything you—”

There wasn’t time to complete the question. Josh ran to keep up. The two shot to the basement in the elevator, and twenty seconds later The Avenger’s fastest car roared up the ramp, over the sidewalk and down Bleek Street.

It stopped, in record time, two blocks from the rear-house. The Avenger led the way, with Josh running to keep up, not to the alley, but to the street just south of the alley on which fronted the bigger, better structure behind which the rear-house squatted.

Bigger and better, but only by comparison.

The building taking up the front end of the lot was a boardinghouse type of building with dirt-littered steps on which sat a man in shirt sleeves, smoking a pipe.

The one man was the only sign of life in the place, and he didn’t stay there long. As Josh and Dick passed under the nearest street light, he saw them, got up swiftly and started inside.

A lookout posted there!

Josh, like a black snake, darted up the stairs and after him. He caught the man in a dingy hall and swung. He swung hard. There was a sound of bone on bone and the man fell without sound, knocked cold.

“All right now,” said Josh in a low tone.

He did not see a face at a door at the far end of the dim first-floor corridor. A face that disappeared instantly when the man fell from the knockout blow..

The Avenger joined Josh and led the way to the rear.

“Basement?” whispered Josh.

“Yes,” said The Avenger. “There will be a tunnel.”

Josh nodded. It was all clear to him, too, now.

The perfect set-up! In this supposed boardinghouse, any number of the foreign-born men, who acted like deaf-mutes, could stay without rousing neighborhood comment. In the rear, a shack occupied by four people even more poverty-stricken than those in the boardinghouse. And one man, pitied as an old bum who was too independent to ask for help, owning the works.

But Josh was still worrying over the reported fact that Old Mitch, too, was held prisoner.

As for Benson’s comment, there would certainly be an unseen method of getting from front to back. A tunnel.

Josh’s own humiliating experience of losing a man he was trailing proved that.

He had trailed Johnny the Dip to the poolroom, and lost him. Johnny the Dip had come back, had gone in the front building, then through a tunnel to the rear-house. There he had shed the make-up and gone out the rear-house again, disguised as the scrubwoman.

It had been known that the rear-house was watched when Josh and Rosabel and Nellie lurked in the alley. This method had been used to draw the watchers off one by one.

“Here we are,” Dick whispered.

An opened door showed stairs leading down. They descended. The basement seemed to be just what the basement of such a building should be—filthy, littered with refuse, with a rusted furnace in the center and stacks of baled newspaper piled perilously near. No one would have looked at that cellar and divined the secrets it held.

The Avenger halted under one of the two lights that hung at each end of the basement. Josh saw then that, dirty as the floor looked, there was actually no dust on it. Refuse, yes; but no dust. That was because dust might show tracks, and tracks might lead to a spot which it was desirable not to reveal.

Nevertheless, Dick bent closer to the floor, and those pale, infallible eyes of his searched slowly over it.

They found a faint fine where dust from outside had been deposited by many shoes on the otherwise dustless cement. He followed the line to the rear wall.

“Here we are,” he said.

There was a ragged crack that seemed just accidental in the end wall. But if you followed it, you saw that it made a complete, if very rough, oval.

Benson looked carefully along the wall, with his head within an inch of it. At that angle, his almost microscopic eyes saw a faint smudged area around a slight roughness in the cement.

He pressed in the center of the area.

The rough oval swung out. It revealed a dimly lit tunnel in the rock and earth of the back lot.

And it revealed what seemed to be a solid wall of gun muzzles!

Six or seven men were framed in that oval, low, high and higher so that each could get a clear space for a sub-machine gun. They had been silently stolidly waiting. Now, if either Josh or The Avenger moved a muscle, they could be blasted to bits. Even the celluglass garments could not stop machine-gun bullets at this close range, and, besides, some of the slugs would be sure to hit their heads.

The men came slowly out. They circled around the two; then one man jerked his head in a wordless command for Josh and Benson to precede them down the tunnel. They did so. Another solid, concealed door opened. They were thrust into a large basement room with their captors following and shutting the door after the lot of them. And the shutting of the ponderous door was accompanied by a solid thud like the knell of doom.

“Chief!” wailed Nellie, lying bound on the floor and staring up at Dick and Josh, whom she had drawn into a trap.

Benson said nothing. His eyes expressed nothing. His awesome, paralyzed face was like glacier ice as he let himself be prodded to where Smitty and Nellie and Old Mitch lay.

There had been about a dozen of the silent gang in the room before Dick and Josh were pushed in. They were at one end, by themselves, with guns in their hands but not bothering to level them. The captors of Benson and Josh walked over and joined them, leaving the prisoners by themselves. There was an air of hopeless waiting.

“Tough luck, chief,” said Smitty.

The giant’s thought was plain in his face. Every one of the little crime-fighting crew carried always the realization that by the very law of averages he would some day get into a jam from which there was no getting out again.

This looked like it!

Since the men in the room seemed to care little what the prisoners did, Dick experimented. He stooped and began to untie Nellie.

The men stared but made no move to stop him; so he went on from there. He loosed the bonds of the giant, Smitty. Then, with his slim, steely hands going deftly over the rag-clad body, he untied Old Mitch, too.