The Avenger 16 - The Hate Master (16 page)

“The door!” bawled the bright guy outside. “Keep ’em in the house!”

Mac looked out the window and saw three men stand with guns out, guarding it. He saw men run to the front, and to the back doors.

And then, as he was thinking sourly what a nice little trap they’d fought their way into, he heard The Avenger’s quiet, icy-calm voice.

“This way.”

They went after the voice. Two figures loomed. But one was in the arms of the other. And it was not Benson who was being carried!

“You got him!” breathed Smitty. “You got Ritter!”

“Yes.”

“Fine.” Mac said. “Now all we have to do is get him out of here.”

Far off, a police siren was wailing. That squad car was coming back, after being lost by Nellie’s sedan.

“And fast, too!” said Mac.

They were following Dick as they spoke. They didn’t know where to, but they had followed him blindly before.

They went upstairs, to a back window. Down below was a roof—the garage. They dropped to that, handing Ritter down as if he had been a bundle of carpeting. The rear of the garage was almost in the water of the Hudson River.

They lowered themselves to the narrow strip between building and water. A man came around the end of the garage, but Josh fixed that. He leaped, struck; and the jaws that had been open for a shout clicked shut to a smack that would leave the victim unconscious for a good many minutes.

They circled through woods and shrubbery.

“How’d you do it, chief?” said Smitty.

“Ritter was leaning out a window, looking for the reason for the commotion.” The Avenger’s voice was as icily calm as his pale eyes. “The nerve pressure at the back of his neck put him out— This is where Nellie should be with the car.”

But Nellie wasn’t there with the car. The highway was deserted as far as they could see. And behind them began to swell the sound of furious pursuit, as men chased after the daring kidnapers of the nation’s No. 1 political figure.

When Benson and Mac and Smitty had left the car, Nellie had started to act precisely as commanded. But she had only started.

She was about to go into gear, after the three had rounded the bend, and was opening her red lips for a scream.

The scream came, all right, but it was real. Two men had suddenly bobbed up into sight beside her. And when she looked to her right, she saw three more on
that
side of the car.

Her scream was cut off by a hand clapping over her mouth.

The next thing Nellie knew was that she was lying on the car floor and someone had his foot on her neck. There were voices.

“Up this lane?”

“Yeah. Take the woods road just like we heard Benson tell the dame to do. But we’ll keep right on up the river, ditch the car, then heave the dame into the water about ten miles from here.” There was a chuckle. “The guys at the house will take care of Benson and the mugs with him. But if they don’t and Benson gets to where the car should be waitin’ for him—won’t he be surprised!”

“Smart of the boss to post a few of us at a distance from the house,” approved another voice. “It fixed Benson up, all right.”

Nellie’s returning consciousness was hastened by the words. She felt as if ice water were in her veins instead of blood.

When Dick reached the place where she should be waiting with the sedan—then what? He would be helpless without the fast car there, ready to escape in.

Nellie had made no move since her eyelids first fluttered. She lay there and thought as the ponderous sedan jounced along a narrow lane. Everything—absolutely everything—depended on her.

There were a lot of trick arrangements on that sedan. It was about the most completely equipped of all The Avenger’s cars, which was saying a lot.

Among other things, it had a perfect dual control.

Something is always apt to happen to a car driver in a gun battle, even with bulletproof windows. The Avenger had fixed it so the sedan could be driven from the rear seat if such a thing happened.

Lifting up the padded, concealed back of the front seat disclosed two knobs, a small lever and a button. The two knobs could be pulled in and out for brake and clutch action. The lever shifted gears and then, locked down, could be used to steer the car instead of a wheel. The button, pressed down, was the accelerator.

In the darkness of the rear Nellie furtively raised that panel cover on the back of the front seat and got her hand in on the controls.

The sedan slowed so suddenly and violently, as she pressed the brake knob, that all the men were thrown forward; and the one in the front seat smashed his head against the windshield.

“What the hell—” gasped the driver.

The rear controls were independent of the front ones. He had no clue as to what had happened.

Nellie gave them little time to think. She gave the steering lever a twist to the left.

“Hey! You’re going to ram that tr—”

The car did ram the tree, again throwing all the men forward with a jerk. The sedan was so heavily built, and was going so slowly along the narrow lane, that it didn’t get hurt. It pushed the four-inch sappling half down and stopped.

“What the hell kind of guys are these?” snapped one of the men, referring to Benson and his band. “They take a getaway car out with the brakes so bad they jam and the steering gear so out of kilter that you can’t hold the thing on the road.”

“Aw, tie it outside!” snapped another. “Buck, you’re the grease monkey of the crowd. Roll under and see what’s wrong.”

The man who had been driving swore and pushed his way under the car. Three of the others stood around with flashlights, leaving just one in the back with Nellie. It was what she had played for.

“How’s the dame?” called one of the men outside.

“O K,” said the man in the back seat. “What’s wrong with the bus? Find it?”

“I don’t see anything wrong,” came a snarl from underneath. “Brakes’re right. I’ll look at the tie rods—”

The man in the back seat yelled.

Nellie, as has been said, was a past mistress of jujitsu. She knew the exact spots in the calf of a leg where slim white fingers could press and cause excruciating agony.

So she pressed!

That was when the man had yelled. Next instant his yells came from outside the car instead of inside. Nellie had opened the door with her other hand, and one deft move, with more strength than you’d ever have suspected was in her slim arm, had rolled the fellow out.

Then the men were treated to the disturbing spectacle of a car seemingly driving itself rapidly away from them.

The sedan roared backward. Buck, under the car, yelled horribly as a wheel went over his ankle. Too bad, but it couldn’t be helped. The others jumped for the sedan. It shot forward, brushed two of them down like flies and roared away down the lane, still with no one in the driver’s seat!

Nellie had the controls well in hand, now. She stayed where she was, not wanting to take even the time to stop and get up front. So a few drivers on the highway saw an apparently empty sedan whirl left into the main pike, and then saw it shoot like a comet toward the Ritter estate.

That police siren was very near when Nellie skidded the sedan to a stop beside Benson and the others.

“In!” she panted.

They didn’t waste time. They piled Ritter into the back seat and climbed in around him. The Avenger himself took the wheel. And they got out of there.

“You gave us heart failure,” said Smitty reproachfully. “What did you do—go off somewhere to have a permanent?”

“A little delay,” was all Nellie said. Danger past was danger forgotten.

The lights of the city, and temporary safety, beckoned.

No one outside Justice, Inc., knew of the Justine Building. That is, no one knew of its connection with the man with the pale, deadly eyes and the icy calm.

It was a small office building downtown. The top three floors were kept by Benson. The rest, below, were rented carefully to tenants who never had a call to be in the place at night.

Behind normal-looking marble slabs of the corridor wall was an elevator, in addition to the regular four, that no one knew anything about. This went from the basement up to those three floors at the top. You could drive directly into the basement from the street, which Benson did.

They took Ritter from the car. Ritter was conscious, now, and the first thing he did was to yell at the top of his lungs and slug Smitty in the jaw.

Smitty didn’t mind the yell; the basement was soundproof. But the blow to the jaw, delivered with all the force a fairly athletic six-foot man could put behind it, stung him a little and hence annoyed him.

He picked Ritter up under his arm like a bale of straw and carried him there, kicking and cursing.

The elevator rose with them, and The Avenger stopped it at the top floor.

“I’ll stay up here with Ritter,” he said. “He may have something interesting to tell me. The rest of you go down to the next floor. Walk down. Don’t use the elevator— Something, Nellie?”

The diminutive blonde was looking as if she had been kicked in the ribs. And it developed there was something.

“Chief,” she gasped, “I just remembered. There was a bill for repairs in the glove compartment of the sedan. The bill was addressed to the Justine Building! And I think one of the men who caught me went through that glove compartment!”

Smitty whistled.

“Now
we’re in for it!” growled Mac.

“How did a thing like that get in the compartment?” wondered Josh. “That gang’ll be on us like a ton of lead as soon as those guys get back to Ritter’s house with the addressed bill. It’s like sending them an engraved invitation to come to the Justine Building.”

“We’d better take Ritter out of here,” said Smitty.

“No,” said The Avenger.

“But, chief—”

“We’ll stay right here. You all wait on the floor below. And don’t use that elevator; walk down.”

It wasn’t the first time he had given an unexplained command. But never had one been more mystifying.

The top floor of the small office building was fixed up as a commodious eight-room apartment. Benson sat with Ritter in the smallest of the rooms, near the back. Ritter sat bolt upright in a straight-backed chair. The Avenger sat at ease in a padded easy-chair.

“You fool!” sneered Ritter. “You’ll burn in the chair for this. You and all your friends.”

“Possibly,” said Benson.

“You can’t get away with kidnaping a presidential candidate.”

“After tonight, you won’t be a candidate,” said Benson.

“You think you can stop me?” snarled Ritter. “Why, you haven’t any proof of anything. If you think you can put me behind bars—”

“I haven’t bars in mind at all,” said Benson. “What I have in mind is your cure!”

There was thick, throbbing silence for a moment

“Cure?” said Ritter.

“Yes. You see, I don’t believe you’re the master mind behind this crime at all.”

Ritter didn’t say anything. He looked at The Avenger with hate-gleaming eyes.

“There was the affair of the dog,” said Benson calmly.

“If you mean the time I was disciplining my dog and your men caught me at it—”

“There was no ‘discipline’ about your treatment of the dog. Beating with a wire whip isn’t discipline; it is pure torture. The result of blind hatred. Since then, I’ve been convinced you were a pawn in this game and not the king. Someone is your master, and has injected
you
with carefully measured amounts of Morel’s hate serum as well as others.”

“You’re crazy,” said Ritter.

“You bear out my theory,” nodded Benson. “If you were guilty, you would be eager enough to have me think someone else was responsible and that you were an innocent victim. As it is, the man who calls the tune for you—shall we call him the Hate Master?—has you so thoroughly in his power that you try to protect him.”

Ritter laughed. It was a hard, jarring sound.

“Who do you think your ridiculous Hate Master is? Morel?”

“No, Morel is also a victim. He was taken and held so that he could manufacture more of the stuff, and its antidote, if needed. That he is a victim was proved by the fact that he actually tried to kill his own daughter. Only a maniac would try that.”

“Then who is it?”

“I don’t know,” said The Avenger frankly. “I have my suspicions, but I can’t prove them. I hope to know before the night is over, however—”

“You will know,” came a low, harsh voice, “right now. Just before I send you to hell!”

Ritter turned with a gasp. The Avenger turned slowly, calmly, though the increased glitter in his pale, deadly eyes attested to the fact that the interruption was a complete surprise to him.

A man had opened the door so silently that not one sound betrayed him. The man came easily into the room, with a sawed-off shotgun pointing straight at Dick Benson’s head.

Even at that moment, the man had what seemed to be a slight smile on his lips, and an almost kindly light in his eyes. Even at such a moment he handled his body in an almost obsequious way, as if he could never get over his training—which was that of a perfect servant.