The Avenger 7 - Stockholders in Death (17 page)

He and Josh crouched behind it, with two feet of hard maple as a shield. The men at the door came toward the block, changed their minds as a bullet got one in the leg and another in the arm. They found shelter, too.

For the moment Tom and Josh could hold them off. But the moment couldn’t last long. There were too many of Luckow’s men around the place. In two minutes, or more, the three who had thought to escape death would be killed or captured again.

The shots Mac and Smitty kept hearing as they sped toward The Corners, came from the rear of the place. So they went to the front. And they didn’t exactly sneak in.

Smitty piled on the doorman, whose back was turned while he stared down the hall toward the rear. The doorman was six feet six, picked for his height and bulk. He looked like a child against Smitty’s six feet nine and his nearly three hundred pounds of brawn. He went down with a single blow. Smitty went on, with Mac behind him.

The hat-check girl began to scream like a calliope as the two men raced past and into the café rooms. Some of Luckow’s men hadn’t yet reached the kitchen. They whirled from the end door of the main room and began shooting at the giant and the sandy-haired Scot.

Mac picked up a heavy glass water pitcher and hurled it. It caught one of the men in the skull and he went down. Smitty didn’t bother with stuff as light as pitchers.

The giant picked up a chair and threw it the length of the room. It tangled up with another gunman’s arms. The two raced on.

Some of the bullets were thudding against their bodies, stopped by the celluglass garments. Their kick slowed Mac a little, but not Smitty.

There were still two Luckow men in the doorway of the short hall going back to the kitchen.

Smitty got the two as they turned in terror and tried to flee. His big hands each found a throat, and his great fingers squeezed.

Then he dropped the two limp bodies and picked up a table.

The patrons in the café room were yelling or screaming according to their sex. But none were trying to interfere. So the giant ignored them.

With the table before him, he started ramming down the hall to where he could see a knot of men still firing into the kitchen. The table was little use as a shield, but it did prevent those down there from seeing where the giant’s head was. His head, after all, was vulnerable.

The knot at the kitchen door had split by now. Some were still firing into the kitchen to try to get Tom and Josh. The others turned and tried to get the giant and the Scot who raced toward them behind the table in the giant’s hands.

Smitty kept right on going. He hit the knot of men as if he hadn’t been aware at all of their existence.

There were yells as Smitty did his best to squeeze seven men through a doorway that couldn’t have taken more than two at once. Bodies jammed and bones broke! It was as if a tank had hit the group.

No one of the seven was shooting, now. All were in a tangle of arms and legs that made them look like a heap of puppets carelessly piled in one disorderly snarl.

Smitty trod on the table, with men underneath it, as he forced his way into the kitchen. Mac came after him. A face showed before Smitty’s, disappeared again as a huge fist made a red mess of it.

“Door!” yelled Mac.

Rosabel and Tom and Josh ran for it. Smitty and Mac went behind them, covering them. From the jumble of men at the door, one propped on an elbow and carefully aimed at Mac.

Smitty’s hand jerked. The massive butcher’s block behind which Tom and Josh had crouched, suddenly seemed to come alive. It slid like a rocket across the floor and banged into the gunman; then Mac and the giant were outside with the others.

“Across the fields,” panted Josh, leading the way toward his car—and, though he didn’t know it—toward the one Mac and Smitty had come in, also.

The five began to run across fields.

There was a slow, vengefully careful shot. Tom yelled and clutched his arm.

“Down!” snapped Mac.

The five dropped. There was death behind them. They didn’t dare delay. But there was death in front of them, too, barring their path.

Another careful shot rang out. Smitty saw Tom’s hair stir, the bullet had been so close.

“The skurlies!” gritted Mac. “So they had guarrrds in the field, too.”

But Tom corrected that impression. Tom had seen the dark bulk of a car, in the field, itself, and then had got just a glimpse of a white face in the night.

“It’s Wayne!” he cried. “Wayne—this is Tom. Your brother. Come on, everybody, it’s all right—”

A careful shot interrupted him. He dropped in a hurry, with a gash in his side.

“Wayne—for Heaven’s sake! I told you this was Tom—”

“I know it!” came Wayne’s voice, husky with rage.

“But you’re shooting at me! You young fool—”

“I’m going to kill you, Tom,” raved Wayne’s voice. “You dirty murderer! So you wanted to get Dad’s killer, eh? You were very anxious to do that! You killed him, yourself! But you’ll pay for that. I’m going to shoot you if I die for it, myself!”

There was stunned silence. Then Mac’s voice.

“What’s the lad talkin’ about, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” shivered Tom. “But we’ve got to get out of here. That gang behind us will be along any second.”

Yes, they had to get out of there. But how? Their bodies would be silhouetted against the lights of the roadhouse if they rose up. Wayne was hidden by darkness and the bulk of a car. He could pick them all off if they tried to rush him.

“Wayne, listen to reason!” begged Tom.

The answer was a shot that almost took a piece out of his ear. Wayne was beyond all reason. He was a madman for the moment.

Then a new factor entered the picture; one that Mac had feared right along.

There was a scream of a police siren. A car’s headlights began jiggling crazily. A squad car was being driven over the field toward them. The sound of the shooting had finally drawn the attention of the State Police.

“What’ll we do?” panted Tom. “The police would shoot me on sight, if they caught me. And if we try to run, my own brother will kill me.”

There was no answer to that one as far as Mac or Smitty or Josh could figure out.

Blazing searchlights blared over the plowed ground.

“All right, everybody! Drop the guns. Hands up. You’re under arrest.”

“Hey—behind us—” yelled one of the men unseen behind the dazzling lights.

Still another car was jerking over the rough field. It was silhouetted in a beam of light as one of the flares was turned its way. And Smitty sighed in relief. That was the chief’s car! Benson was here, now.

The police didn’t share the knowledge of the newcomer’s identity. They fired at the car.

The slugs had no effect whatever. It raced toward them. From a little tube in front came something about the size of a grapefruit. It lobbed against the squad car. And from it, rose lazy loops of stuff like mist.

At almost the same moment Mac saw young Wayne fall. The searchlight revealed a small, neat gash on the top of Wayne’s head, put there by Mike, The Avenger’s deadly little .22.

Mac got up almost leisurely from the furrow in which he had lain.

“Everything’s all right, now,” he said. “We’re out of trouble. Let’s go!”

He walked toward Benson’s car, with the rest following. Tom stared in awe as Smitty picked up Wayne as if he had been a kitten; stared harder at four State cops lying as if peacefully asleep.

“Gas bomb,” said Mac briefly. “It puts a man out for ten or fifteen minutes, but doesn’t hurt him any.”

“Josh, take your car,” came Benson’s cold, calm voice. “Smitty, take the one you and Mac came in. Mac, drive Wayne’s car so it can’t be traced. I’ll drive mine. Back to Bleek Street.”

The little cavalcade moved away from The Corners—and death—with The Avenger in the lead.

Benson had meant to hypnotize the captured bank director, Robert Rath, and get some information from him on his return from The Corners. But one look into the second-floor office where he had been imprisoned showed that he’d get no information from Rath.

There was no way for Rath to escape from the room. But the man, crazed with fear, had found a way to escape from The Avenger and doom.

Rath had drawn a piece of the shattered desk glass hard across both wrists, severing the big veins there. He lay, now dead!

The giant Smitty was behind Benson, staring over his shoulder.

“Here’s one crook the State won’t have to bother with in court,” he said. “Good riddance.”

Benson shook his head, pale eyes icy in his white, death-mask countenance.

“I had counted on getting information from him,” he said. “And we need it badly. Tomorrow the stockholders’ meeting of Ballandale Glass Corp. is held. That will save Town Bank. We have to get them before the meeting.”

“Josh and Mac and I have been after Wallach and Grand and the others enough to know that the directors’ nerves have cracked wide open,” mused Smitty. “If you could pin down the one man responsible for the murders and the stock theft, their spines would melt like snow in the sun. Get the chief crook, and they’ll all go to pieces.”

“The name of the chief crook was what I hoped to get from Rath,” said Benson. His pale eyes glittered. “Well, there may be some record on our picture trap that will help. Josh must have developed the film by now. We’ll go and see if it has caught anything.”

The picture trap referred to a small section of outer wall of the building bearing the sign: JUSTICE. In that section of wall was a small round bit of glass in the middle of a tapestry-brick design that effectively concealed it.

The bit of glass was a telescopic lens on one of the world’s finest cameras. An electric eye controlled the shutter so that, if the device were set, a picture would be taken of anything moving in front of the lens. At night, pictures were taken by the aid of infrared rays.

Benson had set the camera trap before leaving on the heels of the misguided Wayne Crimm.

Josh had the film from the camera developed when The Avenger and Smitty got up to the great top-floor room. Benson, face a white mask, eyes like ice under a polar moon, extinguished the lights and projected the resultant pictures on the screen.

There were two of them. One had been caught when the front of a car crossed the path of the photo-electric cell and tripped the shutter. The other had been snapped when a man’s body had done the same thing.

The second showed the man, just getting out of the car, looking toward the doorway.

“Wallach!” said Mac. “He had the nerve to come here—”

“He no doubt learned of Rath’s impulsive visit,” came The Avenger’s cold voice in the dark. “When Rath didn’t come home again, he must have come here to find out what had happened to his fellow director. Wallach—and another.”

That was true. There was someone with Wallach; somebody who stayed in the car and whose face was hidden by Wallach’s shoulder.

Wayne Crimm was in the room, with a bandage on the top of his head where Mike’s bullet had creased him.

“That’s Tom’s car!” he blazed suddenly. “Then that must be Tom at the wheel—”

“Wayne,” came Benson’s voice. It was calm and quiet, but there was a lash of authority in it that would have quieted a far older and more reckless person than Wayne Crimm. “I have told you that your brother Tom really had a blow-out the night he was to meet your father. I checked on that early in the game. So the V in the tire of the death car must have been cut there deliberately by the same person who cut one—deeper, so as to cause a blow-out—in the tire of Tom’s car. As for your brother being at the wheel of that car—Tom was out at The Corners when this picture was taken.”

Wayne flushed miserably and was silent. He had made a diamond-studded fool of himself once tonight. He thought he’d better not do it a second time.

Benson flashed that picture off the screen and studied the first one.

This showed no person at all; was simply a shot of the front of the automobile in which Wallach—and someone else—had come to find out why Rath hadn’t left this building.

Into Benson’s colorless, deadly eyes, as he stared at this shot, came the cold brilliance that told that he now knew almost all that was necessary to be known about the case in hand.

And yet the front of the car looked ordinary enough.

There was a New York license plate, standard headlights, twin foglights underneath the headlights and a grilled radiator protector.

Benson’s eyes, like pale diamond drills, were on those fog lights.

In spite of the steep angle of the picture, it could be seen that the lights were on a bar just under the headlights, and that the bar, at the near end, was thickened in a sort of hinge arrangement.

“That would do it,” he said, voice low-pitched but vibrant.

What it was that would do it and what “it” was, his aides were not to find out. For at that moment a sound of shots came to them from the street outside. So many shots, so quickly spaced, that it indicated that quiet Bleek Street had suddenly turned into a battlefield.

Louie Fiume was a hard, smart killer. Benson could testify to that, after the various clever attempts on his life by the imported gangster. And The Avenger got another indication of it a moment after he looked out a window, with the rest, to see what the shooting was about.