The Avenger 4 - The Devil’s Horns (19 page)

He studied the lettered dial. Twenty-six letters around the dial’s circle: the full alphabet.

“How are ye goin’ to open it?” burred Mac.

The Avenger’s hand went out with a steady sureness.

“It is man’s nature to be consistent. One of three word combinations, spelled out, will almost certainly be the key. The three are, of course: Third drawer, full moon, or devil’s horns.”

The key was the last.

Deftly and surely the powerful fingers of the man with the white, dead face and the terrible, colorless eyes, twirled the dial.

D,E,V,I,L,S,H,O,R,N,S.

With a ripple of the muscles of his unbelievably powerful shoulders, The Avenger pulled at the dial with the completion of the two words. And the whole concrete block into which the dial was set, moved out.

There was a slab of steel at least six inches thick, with a foot of concrete over it; the great slab being set on counterweights so that one man could swing it. Behind the slab was a square, concrete chamber about five feet cubed.

The eyes of The Avenger were like polished gray iron in a white light as he stared into the revealed space. And from the rest, peering over his shoulder along the beams of Mac’s flashlight, came a chorus of suppressed exclamations.

Twenty-six million dollars in baled hundred- and thousand-dollar bills, and in stack on stack of platinum disks, makes an impressive showing.

“I canna’ underrrrstand,” burred Mac, eyes popping.

But The Avenger, eyes blazing with cold anger as he stared at this miser’s hoard, could understand!

“I’ve had a suspicion of some such thing from the beginning,” he said, face like a white marble mask in the flashlight’s gleam. “Reform, eh? Clean up Ashton City?
This
is why we’re here.

“For years Oliver Groman led the wolf pack in Ashton City, taking in more than any of the rest of them with his graft, particularly graft connected with his contracting company. Then came the bootleg era—and the method the government used of jailing big crooks for income-tax evasion.

“It was unsafe to have receipts from graft and murder in banks or investments or anything else that could be traced. So Groman built this building. He had one of his crews secretly install this immense safe. In it, he put, in cash or in instantly salable platinum disks, nearly all of his crooked take. What’s more, his lieutenants, trusting him all too much, deposited their blood money with him, too.

“Groman had no intention of ever giving back a penny of the money. He was going to keep it all for himself, let the gang do what they would. But when the showdown finally came, Groman found himself getting old and unwell. So he sent us a call: would we come down and help an elderly man, who had reformed, clean up Ashton City? But what we were supposed to do was clean out Groman’s enemies for him so that for the rest of his life this loot would be safely his.

“Meanwhile, something might happen to Groman, and he wanted this to go to his children if it did. He had to leave word somehow that would direct them to this secret spot. He devised that cabalistic rigmarole of the devil’s horns and the full of the moon as the key to this safe. He gave a verbal hint of it, almost certainly, to his son, Ted, and put, in addition, the little note in the silver buffalo horns.

“The gang, forced by our arrival, started raising heaven and earth to get their money before it was too late. Hence, the repeated attacks on Groman, the attempt at bombing, all the rest of it. They weren’t trying to kill him because he had reformed and wanted to clean up the town. They were trying to kill him so they could get their millions back.”

Smitty, almost on hands and knees to get his huge bulk on a level with the five-foot strong room, said:

“But the contracting foreman! He had nothing to do with Sisco or the rest.”

“He didn’t,” agreed Benson. “He was an outsider. Undoubtedly he was in charge of the secret crew that installed this vault. He decided to try to rob it, was caught by someone, and killed. And that further enraged and worried Sisco and the rest. Here’s someone
new
coming along! Now their vast fortune is threatened not only by Groman, but by some third influence horning in. Now they
must
get their hands on it.”

“It looks,” said Nellie, “as if Terry Groman were playing against her father. I have seen her coming out of Sisco’s office, acting strangely.”

“That’s one of the confusing details still unexplained,” said The Avenger. “A duplicate made from her key, either with or without her consent, allowed Sisco’s men to get into the office over our heads. Probably there was a duplicate made of her front-door key, too. The result is that this building, supposed to be inaccessible, has been entered almost at will by Groman’s enemies—”

“Groman’s secretary, Hawley, must have been a stooge for Sisco,” said Josh.

“Undoubtedly! He found out about the devil’s horns and what they led to. But he was shot before he could get back to the gang with his knowledge. Dying, he traced out the two words—which wasn’t enough to mean anything to his employers.”

“Yes, but who killed Hawley—” Smitty began.

“Look!” came Rosabel’s sharp cry, cutting through the giant’s words. “Look!
We’re caught down here!”

They whirled with her words.

Behind them, the section of office flooring had risen soundlessly. It was four inches from the top when they turned.

Smitty lunged for it, covering the short space in the constricted well in a single swift move. But he wasn’t fast enough to get his big fingers in the diminishing crack. Which was probably just as well. Strong as he was, he probably could not have arrested that relentless upward surge. And that would have meant that his fingers would have been sliced off.

Mac’s dour voice sounded in the breathless silence.

“Nobody but Groman and his son know about this place. And Groman is hopelessly paralyzed and the son probably doesn’t yet know quite how to find it. We could die down here and lie around for years without a soul bein’ the wiser.”

The Avenger said nothing. Face immovable in the most terrible of crises, eyes like ice that no sun can ever reach and melt, he stared around their dreadful small prison, in which it looked as if bales of paper money and mounds of platinum disks would soon be their tombstones.

In a locked room in the basement of the rear warehouse in the Sweet Valley Contracting Co. yard, four masked men sat at an oval table.

At the head of the table sat the masked Ashton City big-business man whom nobody knew. At his left sat Sisco; at his right sat Buddy Wilson and John Singell.

“So now we get the set-up,” came Singell’s snarling voice from behind his mask. “That old weasel, Groman, got Benson in here to try to run us out before we could get our money!”

“Gentlemen,” came the suave voice of the man at the head of the table, “this gets us nowhere. We aren’t concerned with Richard Benson, but with the fact that he has us at the end of our rope. We can only guess at the damaging things in the documents taken from Judge Broadbough. The judge hasn’t told us all, I’m sure, but in his fright he has told us enough! Those papers, plus the things that have been ferreted out on the Martineau affair, put our entire organization on the spot—unless Benson can be stopped.”

“I’ve told you he can be,” Sisco’s dry and deadly voice came in answer. “And he will be—tonight! In just a little while—”

There was a triple tap at the locked, heavy door. Sisco rose and opened it. A man said something in a low tone, staring curiously at the mask.

Sisco relocked the door and came back. There was murderous triumph in his tread.

“The sergeant on the switchboard at headquarters reported,” he said. “Benson just phoned and asked to talk to Cattridge. He said for Cattridge to get a squad of men he knew he could trust and to come here to the warehouse in half an hour—and to
meet
him here. So the fake radio business fooled the white-headed guy, and he’s on his way now.”

“But Cattridge!” bleated Wilson. “If he’s gonna show up here—”

Sisco’s greenish eyes burned through the slits in his mask.

“Do you think for a minute that Benson really talked to Cattridge? That phone sergeant’s our man. He passed as Cattridge, and fooled the white-headed guy. He’s on his way here, thinking the cops will follow him shortly. He’ll find out—”

At that moment, Benson and Smitty and Mac were in a rented sedan speeding toward the construction company warehouse. Smitty was driving.

“I don’t get it!” Smitty said again, to the man with the wax-white face and colorless eyes. “Why weren’t we killed down in that pit? How did we ever get out of it?”

The Avenger’s hard, taut body swayed with the movements of the car, a figure of whipcord and gray steel.

“It was reasonable to suppose,” he said quietly, “that the man who had devised that complicated way of hiding his money, would also devise a way out, to guard against being trapped in the well some day, himself, by accident. We searched till we found the spot where the ‘devil’s horns’ contact brought the section of office flooring down again; then we went up with it, that’s all.”

“Yes,” said Smitty, “but why were we allowed that much time? Why didn’t whoever trapped us down there, kill us before we could find a way out? It should have been easy.”

“We weren’t killed for a very obvious reason, that will be explained later,” Benson said, pale eyes as unreadable as two brilliant moonstones.

Mac spoke up, dour, gloomy.

“I hope ye’re sure of your mon, Cattridge,” he said. “If Cattridge double-crosses us and doesn’t send a squad, there’s a guid chance we’ll never get out of this place we’re goin’ to, alive.”

“You couldn’t stand it if you weren’t allowed to croak every time we make a move, could you, you Scotch raven?” said Smitty.

“Ye haven’t brains enough to see the possibilities in a given situation,” retorted the Scot. “Bein’ just an overgrown ape, ye haven’t imagination. And it takes imagination to foresee trouble.”

“I don’t go hunting for trouble like you do!”

“Neither would King Kong go huntin’ trouble,” said Mac, as if the giant were a bitter enemy instead of an inseparable friend. “He hasn’t the sense.”

The car drew near the construction yard. Smitty put his foot on the brake and stopped the car around a corner where it would be out of sight.

“There’ll be plenty of guards around there, chief,” he said. “The masked four wouldn’t take chances of being picked up when they meet. They’ll have all the boys watching the entrances.”

The Avenger nodded, eyes like pale fire opals.

“So we won’t use the entrances, of course, Smitty.”

He led the way, in a wide sweep, around a block of dark factory buildings to the back of the construction supply yard. Here, the rear wall of the third warehouse, in the basement of which the masked men met, formed part of the yard wall.

At the corner of the building, just the other side of a heavy-wire fence, there was a pile of iron reinforcing bars for use with concrete. They were a dozen feet long, and ran an inch thick.

The Avenger looked up at the low slope of the warehouse roof, about twenty-five feet over their heads, and then at the pile of bars within the yard.

Very cautiously, since the wire might be electrically charged and set off a far alarm if touched, he drew two of the bars through the wide mesh.

“Can you bend them, Smitty?”

The giant grunted assent, his quick brain taking in his chiefs idea instantly.

He got the end of one of the bars in his huge right hand, planted the other hand a foot down the iron shank, and twisted. The end of the bar went around to form a hook. He bent the other end in a second hook, and into this, he fitted the bent end of the other bar.

Lashing the hooked ends of the bars together so that they could be lifted in one length without collapsing in the middle, he raised them straight up. Slowly, so that no clang of metal should give their presence away, he fished till he had the hooked end of the upper bar over the rough cornice of the warehouse roof.

He jerked down lightly to break the string, and the hooks settled into each other in the middle, metal to metal. Then the three ascended, hand over hand.