The Avenger 23 - The Wilder Curse (8 page)

Smitty closed the trapdoor over his head as he lowered his bulk down the ladder. At least, he could shut off that betraying square of light. He looked down from it, and saw half a dozen private cars—and the big moving van. The van was near the center of the small garage.

The Avenger, Smitty saw, wasn’t going clear down to the cement floor. At least, he wasn’t that rash. He’d gone down to where he could reach a roof girder, and had swung out on that. Smitty joined him there.

They crouched on it, eight or nine feet under the curve of the roof and sixteen or eighteen feet from the floor.

Voices sounded from the front of the place. The garage office was there, flimsily walled off from the rest of the place. They couldn’t hear words, could just hear the voices. There seemed to be a lot of men in the office.

The Avenger worked his way to a point over the van. Smitty followed. About five of the ten minutes had passed since they’d told Beck to phone the police. And they weren’t caught, yet. It began to look pretty good. It began to look as though they’d free Mac and Cole, all right.

If the two were still alive to free.

The top of the van was close under their feet. Benson dropped soundlessly to it, with Smitty close behind. Dick softly tapped, “O.K.”

Inside the van the same code was repeated.

“O.K.”

The Avenger took out another of Mac’s gadgets—a midget blowtorch. With his body between the tiny bright flame and the office part of the garage, Benson burned a square in the top large enough for a body to pass through.

He looked in, played a small flashlight around.

The ray lit on the angry faces of Mac and Cole. The two lay on the van floor, securely bound; one of them must have tapped out the O.K. with his forehead.

The Avenger started to lower himself into the dark cave of the van. Smitty’s vast paw caught his chief’s shoulder for an instant, while he stared urgently at him.

Smitty’s tense look said,
“My gosh! Do you think you ought to go down in there? If they ever caught on, we’d be as helpless as rats in a trap.”

Benson kept on going down. And then Smitty yelled a warning, but it was too late!

A loop, seeming to come of itself from the dimness of the garage, lassoed his big shoulders, and he was yanked off the top of the van. An instant later, with the agility of a monkey, a figure substituted for him up there. This figure had a submachine gun cradled in its arm, and it pointed the thing at the hole.

Smitty tried to yell as he hit the floor, but for an instant the breath was knocked out of him. However, it didn’t matter that he couldn’t yell. He made noise enough for six without yelling. The Avenger could have been deaf, inside the van, and still have known that a lot was wrong.

First off, three men jumped Smitty, rising up from behind cars standing nearby.

The three were quite confident that they could handle him, big as he was. Why not? His arms were bound to his sides by the taut noose. Anyhow, guys as big as Smitty were always slow and muscle-bound, weren’t they?

But it seemed that they were not. Not always. And the noose around Smitty’s tree-trunk arms didn’t last long. It was only quarter-inch hemp.

Smitty heaved his great chest and bulged muscles of arms and shoulders as he did so. The rope parted just as two men tackled him from the waist up and a third put arms like a vise around his big legs.

“O.K.,” one sang out. “Tie him up—” The “up turned into an uppgh” as Smitty jerked one huge leg up. The man went up with it, further assisted by a knee under the chin. At the next instant, Smitty whirled like a giant top and the two men hanging onto his arms and shoulders were snapped off like the end-men of a big crack-the-whip.

Four more instantly piled on the giant, dropping the ropes with which they’d meant to bind him. Smitty went back a pace under their combined onslaught.

The big fellow had never learned to box. He’d never had to. He just hit, and whether the recipient of the blow had had his guard up or not made no difference. Frequently, Smitty knocked out a man with that man’s own fist, by slamming it back against his jaw.

He knocked out one of his attackers like this. Then he raised a tremendous left fist and brought it straight down like a hammer on a nail. The nail was the head of another of this gang that had been indiscreet enough to annoy Justice, Inc.

The man’s head seemed to sink clear down beneath the level of his collarbone, and he sagged, out of it for a good long time.

Now, however, another had crept behind him, and this one slugged him with a wrench or something. It staggered the giant. While he was off balance, three more dove at him. He fell over backwards like a falling tree, and at least four jumped on top of him. Maybe five. He was past counting.

They slugged at his head with gun butts and saps, as if they were beating a shark to death in the bottom of a boat. Smitty tried to roll with the blows a little, but didn’t miss them all. The already dim light in the place seemed to be dimming still more.

Smitty went limp.

He wasn’t actually out, but he would be in another ten seconds, so why keep on? Why not save himself a little bit by pretending?

“The big dope’s made of scrap iron or something,” one of the men complained bitterly. He kicked at Smitty’s head. “Don’t bother to rope him, now. He’ll stay put for a while. Just throw him into the van. If any heads stick out of the van, cut ’em off at the neck with slugs.”

Smitty’s big bulk was hauled back up to the van top with a rope thrown over the roof girders and handled by five men. Up there, the grinning monkey with the submachine gun steered the giant frame to the opening made by The Avenger.

They dropped Smitty unceremoniously through, and he lit on his head and shoulders on the van floor.

If he hadn’t been two thirds unconscious, and relaxed, he would have broken his neck. As it was, the shock did little more than snap him back to consciousness again.

“All set?” yelled someone outside, from a distance.

“All set,” was the answer.

“Then give ’em the works.”

The first voice outside, the one from a little distance, was composed to the point of indifference. It sounded slightly familiar. Even with his wits a bit addled, Smitty caught that faint familiarity. He thought The Avenger did, too.

Benson had his flashlight on, and it seemed that his deadly, colorless eyes were glittering more balefully than usual.

The voice went on.

“One of you in back, another in front. Guns trained. If anybody tries to get out of the van, pour lead. The rest of you, fix up the big bang.”

Feet scurried outside the van. Then came sloshing, dripping sounds along the van walls. With it came a raw, strong smell instantly identifiable as gasoline. They must be throwing it on with open buckets.

Somebody did something under the van, and there was the sound of a match striking.

“Give it about five minutes’ worth of fuse,” directed the voice.

Fuse! Some sort of explosive! Right under the van.

When the explosive let go, it would knock the truck up against the roof girders and splinter it like a match box. After that, it would burn like an oil-soaked torch.

Smitty looked at The Avenger. The pale eyes and masklike face showed no emotion at all. Smitty took off his coat, hunched the shoulder into a peak, and stuck the wadded fabric up through the hole in the van top.

There was a sound like a couple of hundred typewriters rolled into one. When Smitty pulled his coat down there was no shoulder left on it.

He looked at The Avenger again and found that Dick had shifted to the front of the van.

All during his fight outside the van, Smitty had wondered why The Avenger didn’t try to get out. Benson could have tossed a gas pellet out and put that guard by the hole to sleep, it seemed to Smitty.

Now, with his brain a bit clearer, Smitty knew why The Avenger hadn’t. It would have done no good. Put that one man to sleep, sure. But there were a dozen more to take his place, and the garage was too big to fill completely with gas and put them all out.

Dick Benson might have escaped, himself. But he hadn’t come here to do that. He had come to rescue Mac and Cole who were still tied up, by the way, since too much had happened to allow anyone time to untie them.

Smitty couldn’t see what The Avenger was doing at the front of the van. And he wished he could. He wished he could be sure that something
was
being done, because this was a deadly spot they were in.

The silence in the garage was sort of unhealthy, it was so complete. In it, Smitty could suddenly hear the sputter of a fuse.

Then there were running feet, the slam of the garage door at the front—and more silence.

“Chief,” said Smitty tensely, “we have to do something.”

“We cerrrtainly do,” burred the helpless MacMurdie, heaving at his bonds. “ ’Tis a sweet bonfire they’ve lit under us, Muster Benson.”

“Ever light a bonfire under a mule?” came The Avenger’s calm, even voice.

And what, wondered Smitty, did
that
have to do with the situation?

“Looks like a sure roasting for the mule—if he doesn’t move,” The Avenger’s calm voice went on. “So, he moves. We’ll do the same trick.”

As he concluded, a square of partition between van body and cab sagged back in his hands, and then the three in the van with him got the idea.

The van had been turned after it got inside the garage so that it nosed against a side wall. With a guard at the front of the garage and another at the back, the
sides
of the van were toward them.

The cab was deeply recessed, so that the two guards were unable to see into it from the sides.

They didn’t see The Avenger crawl through the front hole and settle down under the wheel. They might not have seen even from a better angle, as a matter of fact.

So they didn’t see. But they heard the starter grind, of course, and then heard the thunder of the motor. Yelling, they started pouring lead into the van, and into the cab, blindly through the sides. The slugs went in like cheese, but The Avenger did not give them time to nose around for victims.

With the first pop of the motor, he was in gear, and he made the truck leap back and around toward the rear door like an angry mustang.

The man there screamed in mortal fear as the great hulk leaped at him. He dropped his gun and scrambled to keep from being mashed like a pancake against the rear door.

Then the van leaped forward, toward the second guard, who was still shakily trying to shoot The Avenger through the windshield. Benson pressed hard down on the accelerator, motor shrieking in first gear.

The man at the front gave up, too, unnerved by the onrushing juggernaut. He jumped for his life. The van crashed the steel front door, then rolled through, taking bent door and most of the frame with it.

There was an ear-shattering bang behind the van, then the roar of flames.

The Avenger stopped the truck calmly by the curb, face and deadly eyes as expressionless as though he had just strolled out of a restaurant.

“Phew!”
said Cole shakily.

“Ditto,” said Mac.

Smitty looked at his big hands, laughed wryly at their tremor, then untied the two. When he looked up, The Avenger was gone.

Dick Benson came back as the three climbed out of the van. In the distance, fire sirens were shrieking. Dick started to the corner, around which he had left his car.

He was not alone. Dragged with him was the gangster who had been at the front door. The explosion had knocked him out, and Benson had gone back and neatly scooped him up. Now, with one bar-steel arm around the unconscious shoulders, The Avenger was walking along as effortlessly as though he were carrying a sawdust doll that weighed about two and a half pounds.

At the corner, Smitty suddenly exclaimed aloud and stared at a doorway.

Beck had stood in that doorway when they left him to go into the garage. Beck had been told to call the police if The Avenger and the others weren’t out in ten minutes.

Nearly twenty minutes had passed, and Beck had not done so. At least, there weren’t any police coming here, now, save those on the local beat in answer to the fire call.

And Beck himself was gone. He was nowhere around the place.

Back at Bleek Street, The Avenger took his prisoner to a small second-floor room instead of to the huge top-floor room.

The man was a perfect specimen of his ratlike kind. He had a gash for a mouth, a rat’s chin and forehead, a stringy, unmuscular body, and couldn’t have looked you squarely in the eye to save his life. He was the kind that is dangerous only when armed with a couple of guns. Then, with guns against unarmed people, he could be as brave as a lion!

The man kept wailing, “You lemme go. I want to be put in the coop. I wanna be arrested. Where’re the cops?”

He was not the first crook taken prisoner by The Avenger who, after one look into the glacial, pale eyes, bleated in terror to be arrested.

Benson paid no attention to the man. He was mixing a small beaker full of some red stuff that looked like blood. The thug’s eyes kept riveted to this, in fearful fascination.