The Avenger 15 - House of Death (8 page)

There wasn’t any rear entrance to the hotel; so The Avenger passed several hours quite calmly, sure of his man. And eventually, with dawn not far away, Shan came out again.

He had a suitcase with him, now; he was evidently leaving the city. He got into the car again and resumed his progress south and east. The river eventually stopped him.

There, Shan went gingerly out almost to the end of a dock. Two hundred yards out in the river a boat swung with riding lights all too dim in the darkness. From their position, the boat was a fairly large one, probably of the cruiser type.

Leaning over the side of the dock, Shan called a name softly. In a moment a head showed over the massive wooden stringers.

Shan talked for a moment, then handed down the suitcase and bent to climb down after it. There was a ladder there, it seemed.

Meanwhile, at right and left, more heads showed. There were two at the right and three at the left. These were furtive, and their owners crawled over the stringers like snakes. They leaped toward Shan!

The fight that followed was as fierce as it was short and relatively silent.

Shan had been crouching down when they jumped him. But far from allowing that to be a handicap, he made it a help. He shot upward with all the power of his bent thighs, and his head came up under a man’s jaw.

The man staggered back six steps and sat down. Then he went farther and lay down. And stayed there. He was knocked so cold it would be some time before he came to.

One of the others struck at Shan with a thing so short and unobtrusive that it couldn’t be seen in his fist. A sap. Another of the remaining four got his hands around Shan’s throat in a good, homey grip.

Shan ducked the blackjack and brought his knee into the strangler’s stomach.

The man’s breath whooshed out, and he doubled up and hugged himself with agonized arms while he fought for breath. Shan polished him off with a blow to the jaw.

Three against one now. And Shan was fighting like a wildcat—fighting the way a man fights when he sees death as the price of defeat.

One of the three got Shan down by lunging low against his legs. Shan brought his hand down on the back of the man’s neck in a rabbit punch, dazing him for a moment. The boot of another of the three cracked against Shan’s ear.

Shan was nearly stopped by that one, but he had sense enough left to grab the ankle over the heavy shoe and pull. There was a splash. The kicker was now kicking in the water.

Two to one. Admire Shan or not, you had to admit that he was putting up a vicious fight. But it was just about over.

The man to whom he had handed the suitcase came back up over the edge of the dock. It was complete treachery, for Shan had obviously trusted the fellow.

He came back over the stringer while Shan was looking the other way. There was a club in his hand. He walked up to Shan and socked him in the back of the head.

Then he lowered him into the boat.

It was almost as big as a lifeboat, instead of being a standard small dinghy. Besides Shan, the other five men, one still as unconscious as if dead, were crowded in. Then the boat pulled for the cruiser swinging idly out in the river.

The cruiser weighed anchor and split the pre-dawn darkness on its way to the open sea.

It was a boat built more for solidity than swank. It made about fourteen knots, was broad of beam, and was about sixty feet over all. There was a big cabin, a small deck forward, and a larger deck aft. Four men joined the occupants of the small boat on this afterdeck.

All ten of the men could, now, in the dimness of the running lights, be seen to be Oriental in type. There were several Arabs, several with Mongol cheekbones and eye-pits, and the rest with a Eurasian blend of many races.

But there was one thing all had in common. They looked as though they’d murder a blind cripple for a ten-cent piece.

From the cabin came still another man. This one was a cut above the crew. He was tall, fairly well-dressed, with an air of authority. He went to where Shan lay, beside the fellow whose jaw he had butted with his head.

He stood looking down for several moments, then looked at the nearest crew member.

“Bind him,” he said in Arabic. “Make sure the dog can not slip free.”

The man nodded. The tall leader turned.

And Shan leaped.

The man who had lied The Avenger into a murderer’s cell may have still been unconscious when he was carried aboard. He had been faking unconsciousness for some time while he lay there. He lit into the leader of this band with almost the ferocity and freshness he had displayed on the dock.

He seemed to know this man and to hate him as one man seldom hates another.

There was an insanity of rage in his dark eyes as he brought down a knife that the crew had carelessly neglected to take from his limp body. His mouth writhed like a thin red serpent in his distorted face.

The other man seemed almost as hate-filled. He ducked forward; the blade whistled down over his shoulder, and he caught Shan’s right arm. He brought the arm down hard over his upflung knee, as a person attempts to break a tough stick of wood.

Shan’s arm would have been broken like a stick, if he had not managed to jerk it half loose from the other’s grip before the vicious move could be completed.

Meanwhile, with the eyes of all busy with the fiercely fighting two, a hand came slowly up over the rail at the bow. It was not a large hand, but it gave an impression of being made of pale steel. Just the hand would have identified the owner to a great many people who had been unfortunate enough to feel its strength.

The Avenger had slid into the water and started swimming silently out to the cruiser the moment Shan handed his suitcase down, back at the dock.

The riding lights of the boat were the only ones around.

The cruiser was bound to be Shan’s destination; so Benson had decided to share with him his ride out to sea.

From the water he had stared back, with the pale eyes that could see so much better in darkness than those of most men, and he had caught glimpses of the fight. That was all right, too. There were few things that left The Avenger more indifferent than the murderous fighting of crooks among themselves. The more they killed each other off, the better he liked it. And regardless of the outcome, the survivors would almost certainly wind up in the cruiser.

Benson had reached slowly up and caught the flanges of the anchor at the bow, after the crew had raised it when the small boat was swung up. He had hung there while the cruiser made for the open sea, taking a good long time, so that his clothes would dry a bit and not betray him by dripping too much when finally he did come aboard.

Then the fight had broken out, and the sounds indicated a disturbance in which he should be able to get aboard without being observed.

Over the low rail his face could be seen, calm, crowded by the thick, black hair. His eyes were like narrowed chips of stainless steel. Then he was lying on the forward deck with the low front of the cabin hiding his lithe body.

On the afterdeck, the fight was, of course, once more going against Shan. He wanted to fight the leader alone, but naturally the gang wasn’t permitting that. And no man can face, bare-handed, odds of eleven to one.

Shan was bare-handed, now. A man with a broken nose and only half an ear had kicked the blade from Shan’s fingers when he overreached the leader and stabbed only empty air beyond the other’s shoulder.

The knife lay along the rail near the stern, glittering neglectedly as the men circled to get Shan without accidentally getting their chief first.

It was at this moment that the light rayed on.

The thing could not have been timed worse for The Avenger. He was crouched on the top of the cabin, making his way toward a boat swung between its davits. The boat had been covered with taut canvas, and he intended to get in it and lie hidden till the cruise, whatever its destination, was over.

But now this searchlight glared out, and squarely in its blazing white circle was Dick Benson.

He crouched there, frozen into immobility. And two of the men on the rear deck yelled. At the same time, still another dark-skinned, grinning murderer came from the cabin itself.

There had been a man at the wheel during all this. He had seen the figure rise over the bow, had watched through a darkened pane while Dick climbed to the cabin’s top, and then had switched on the searchlight. With the wheel hooked to keep the boat on its course, he joined the others.

Half the gang turned toward Benson. But then Benson wasn’t there any more.

One swift leap had taken him back where he came from, on the foredeck, where just his pale, deadly eyes showed over the cabin’s top. He took out Mike, the little silenced .22. And into his left hand slid Ike, the tiny gun’s companion in war.

Ike had been holstered below The Avenger’s left knee. It was a small throwing knife, blade-heavy, with a hollow tube for a handle. The point could have compared with the point of any needle, and you could shave with either razor edge. With it Benson could pin a fly to a wall twenty feet away.

The Avenger leveled Mike for a shot. And the leader’s voice cracked out.

“Wait! Let the man alone. It is only this one we fight.” The words ended in a yell, in some choice Arabic profanity, and then came the order: “Get this dog. But quietly.”

Blood streamed from a gash on the right side of the leader’s throat. In the distraction of Benson’s appearance, Shan had managed to get his knife from its resting place near the rail. He had made one last attempt on the leader’s life. The knife barely missed the big vein in the man’s throat when he frantically jerked aside from Shan’s rush.

It was literally a last attempt.

The men had fought to overpower Shan before. They waded in with knives and clubs. Shan kicked one in the jaw in a manner suggesting a broken neck, but then it was over. He fell with half a dozen blades in his body, and with his head clubbed almost out of human semblance!

The leader pressed a handkerchief to his bleeding neck and stepped over the dead man toward the cabin.

“Come aft,” he called in English to The Avenger. “You may keep your weapons. We have no quarrel with you—unless you were working for our enemy, here.”

Benson, not unnaturally, stayed where he was, cold eyes expressionless, features emotionless in the face of danger.

“You might as well come aft,” said the man, without apparent anger. “If you jump overboard, we can run you down or shoot you. If you put up a fight, eventually we can overpower you.”

The Avenger made no move to holster Mike and Ike, although the logic of what the man said was apparent. Benson had another weapon with him: small glass capsules of a powerful anesthetizing gas of MacMurdie’s devising. But the gas would be futile, used on the open deck of a boat at sea. The fumes would be blown away before the men were even made groggy by it.

“You may not have a quarrel with me,” came Dick’s voice, calm, even, icy. “But you would have an excellent reason for not wanting me to live. I have just seen your crew stab and club a man to death.”

“You have,” said the leader. “But you did not see a murder, as you are probably thinking you did.” He dabbed at his neck. “My men killed him before he could kill me. And they killed no honest man, but a criminal and an imposter.”

“Imposter?” repeated The Avenger, tonelessly.

“Yes. That man claimed to be Shan Haygar, of the Turkish Haygars. He was not. I am Shan Haygar!”

The other men were listening, some intently, showing that they understood English, some indifferently, indicating that it was an unknown tongue to them.

The Avenger holstered Mike and Ike.

If it occurred to him that these Haygars were about the hardest people to put a finger on that the world had ever seen, his eyes gave no sign of it. Haygar, Haygar, who’s a Haygar? It seemed as if dozens of people were running around calling themselves by that name, and then getting bumped off by other dozens insisting that they were genuine and the first ones frauds.

Benson went forward over the cabin’s top. It was quite true that, with a dozen men against him and no chance to use any of the weird devices he carried with him to fight crime, he was trapped. And even if he could have fought free, his main purpose of being aboard—to see where the boat was bound for—would be hopelessly frustrated.

While The Avenger was approaching, the leader was bent over the dead man with his hands flying over his stark form. He straightened up, and there was a glint as light touched a gold medallion in his dark hand.

He smiled at Benson.

“It looks pretty grisly, doesn’t it?” he said. “But believe me, justice has been done. And to show you how firmly I am convinced of that, I am now going to radio the harbor police.”

He stood aside, wordlessly taking it for granted that Dick would jump down beside him.

“Will you come into the cabin with me?”

Without waiting for an answer, he ducked and strode into the cabin. And Benson, not seeming to move swiftly, and yet covering space like flowing light, leaped featherlike to the deck and strode into the cabin.

It was the sort of thing he had waited for.

In that enclosed cabin with the man, he could use one of the glass capsules, if necessary, or capture him and hold him as hostage.

Benson stopped abruptly just inside the threshold. His icy eyes widened a little at the sight presenting itself.

Four men lay in there, bound and stacked like cord-wood. They glared at the man in front of Benson and strained wildly at their bonds.

Heavy arms encircled The Avenger from the rear, and the leader whirled and got him from the front.

For once, the man with the calm face and the thick shock of coal-black hair had been outmaneuvered. For a fraction of a second, all his attention had been riveted on the unexpected sight of the four bound men. And the leader of this crew of cutthroats had looked forward to that fraction of a second, counted on it, and stood ready to utilize it.

Benson’s arms strained swiftly apart, flinging the two clinging men off him as if they had been children. But it was too late.