The Avenger 16 - The Hate Master (3 page)

The blackness of night as well as the ebony of the river closed over the car and the graceful figure at its wheel.

The drugstore looked like any other drugstore to the casual customer.

There were counters with everything carried in a modern pharmacy. There was a long marble soda fountain. There was a pharmacist’s desk.

But this drugstore was really unique. That was because of the back room.

The store part was only about half the size of this rear room, which couldn’t be seen. An iron door barred a casual entrance.

In the rear, there was something that looked like a dual laboratory. In fact, it was a dual laboratory.

Along one wall was ranged all the equipment ever heard of for conducting chemical experiments. Along the other was complete paraphernalia for electrical and radio work. The chemical side belonged to Fergus MacMurdie, set up here in this store bought for him by Richard Benson, better known as The Avenger. The electrical side was the property of Algernon Heathcote Smith.

MacMurdie and Smith were not in the rear room that morning. They were in the front, the store part, at the soda fountain.

Mac wasn’t having sodas. Sodas cost money, even when you owned the fountain; and the Scot was as reluctant to let a nickel go to waste as most men are to part with a toe or a finger. He stood at the end of the fountain, tall and bony and gangling, with bleak blue eyes. He scowled at Smitty.

Algernon Heathcote Smith—but call him Smitty if you didn’t want to be taken apart—was a dainty little figure of a man, six feet nine inches tall, weighing nearly three hundred pounds.

“There ye go,” Mac said to Smitty. “Sluppin’ up all the profits of my fountain.”

“It’s only my third sundae,” said Smitty mildly. “Josh is the guy you ought to talk to.”

Josh was the man next to the giant. Josh Newton, as tall as Mac and even skinnier, was a Negro who looked dull and sleepy but was actually an honor graduate from Tuskegee Institute.

John was now well along in his seventh sundae.

These three men were integral parts of the indomitable little band known as Justice, Inc., which was getting to be known as the most efficient crime-fighting organization in the country. Perhaps in the world. A little band apart from the police, but as feared by the underworld as ever the police were feared, they carried their lives lightly in their hands from day to day.

At that moment a fourth member of The Avenger’s band came into this store which was often a gathering place when there was no work on hand.

This fourth man was Cole Wilson, the newest recruit to The Avenger’s battle standard. Wilson was lithe, with dark hair and black eyes, and was almost too good-looking. If Smitty hadn’t seen Cole in action and known he was almost as good in trouble as The Avenger himself, he might have disliked the good looks. As it was, he paid no attention to them.

Wilson came in a hurry, as he did most things. He was the quickest moving and the most impulsive of all the crew. In his hand was a newspaper, folded to a back page. And as he walked in the door, he started talking.

“Mac, Smitty, Josh—what would you do if a ferocious rabbit came after you?”

“A ferocious—
what?”
said Smitty, jaw dropping.

“Rabbit,” said Wilson, leaning against the fountain with them.

“Look,” said Mac dourly, “there’s been enough kiddin’ around here without ye to add your two cents’ worth.”

“I’m not kidding,” said Wilson. He ran his hand through his dark hair. He always went bareheaded. “Look here, in the paper.”

“Read it, Mac,” said Josh. I wouldn’t trust Cole to read the thing. He’d have a rabbit biting a lion, if we let him.”

So Mac read, and Smitty and Josh looked more and more amazed.

“ ‘If it is news for a man to bite a dog,’ ” Mac read, “ ‘what would it be called if a rabbit bit a dog? Yet, this apparently has happened out in Scarsdale where rabbits are tough and like their dogs done rare for dinner. This morning Patrolman Swinnerton phoned in the report that he had just driven three rabbits off a Scotch terrier—’ ” Mac glared at the paper. “That’s a lie! A Scottie? Neverrr!”

“Go on with the account,” said Smitty impatiently.

“Drove three rabbits off a terrier,” Mac went on, omitting the breed, “ ‘but not in time to save the dog, which had been slashed almost to ribbons by the maddened bunnies. The dog died shortly after, Patrolman Swinnerton said, and—’ ”

Mac snorted. “Some reporter’s havin’ fun kiddin’ the public,” he snapped.

“It’s true,” said Wilson. “I called the paper. The reporter handled the story lightly, of course. But it actually happened.”

“Three rabbits attacked a dog?”

“Attacked it and
killed
it,” said Cole, black eyes blazing. “Two people saw it beside Swinnerton.”

“I think they’re all nuts,” observed Josh, getting back to his maple-nut sundae. But Smitty shook his head. His eyes were bland and china-blue, and he looked as dim-witted as he was huge. But the looks were deceptive; Smitty was a very shrewd guy.

Shrewd enough always to ask questions when something unnatural happened. And this was certainly not a natural occurrence!

“Could rabbits get rabies or go loco some way?” he asked Mac. As one of the world’s best chemists, and a wizard at pharmacology, Mac would know those things.

“It’s possible,” said Mac.

“These rabbits didn’t have rabies,” said Wilson. “The reporter asked that, too.”

“Ferocious rabbits,” mused Josh, grinning. “That’s about as rare as warlike doves.”

“So rare,” said Wilson, soberly, “that I thought I’d like to run out to Scarsdale and look at the dog and maybe look around the spot where he was killed. Anybody want to go with me?”

“Yeah, me,” said Smitty.

“Fine,” snorted Mac. “When ye get there, shoot a rabbit for me, if ye’re not frightened. I’ll mount its head on my library wall.”

But Josh, for one, had stopped grinning. It was the business of The Avenger and his aides to question things that didn’t seem to have normal explanations. Some very odd and deadly plans had been discovered more than once by such investigations.

Smitty and Wilson went out to Scarsdale to police headquarters—and went out fast.

The giant was getting well known as an aide of the mighty Avenger. The sergeant at the desk nodded a respectful greeting and talked freely when Smitty asked about the dog.

“Craziest thing you ever heard of,” the sergeant said. “Rabbits killing a dog! But I guess it happened, all right. The dog’s down at the morgue. Usually, we’d have it carted off, but we thought maybe we ought to keep this one awhile in case any highbrow wanted to investigate.”

“Has anyone done so?” said Smitty.

“One guy showed up half an hour ago and wanted the dog’s body. He said he was the owner; but he didn’t give a good description, so we chased him. He was pretty mad about it, too. Wanted the remains mighty badly.”

Smitty and Wilson quickly looked at each other, then chased to the morgue.

The giant whistled softly as he stared at the little corpse spread on a slab usually reserved for human remains.

“You kind of forget,” said Wilson, “that a rabbit has very big, very sharp teeth. This would remind you, though!”

It certainly would. The paper had said the dog was slashed to ribbons. That had not been literary exaggeration.

The dead dog was sliced as if it had been attacked by knives. Its throat was a red mass; its furry body looked as if a wild cat had had access to it, for a long time, without interruption.

“And
rabbits
did that!” said Wilson. “Where was it that Swinnerton picked this up?” he asked the morgue attendant.

The man named a street. Smitty and Wilson went out there, with the picture of the mangled, furry body in their minds.

It was a quiet, residential street; distinctly not the sort of street where you’d expect this type of thing.

Wilson’s black eyes, alert and alive, found it first: a stained spot, near the curb in the middle of the block, where blood had been. The dog’s blood. The two ranged around, themselves a little like dogs on a scent. Smitty called; he had found several drops, fifty or sixty feet down the street.

Wilson joined the giant, but there were no more drops to trace. It was impossible to tell from which property the dog had come. And at police headquarters, they’d been told that the animal hadn’t been traced yet. There was no license on its collar.

That seemed the end as well as the beginning of their minor mystery. They went back to Mac’s drugstore.

They had just entered the store when Mac, at the iron door leading to the significant back room, called out:

“The chief! On the television set! Better hustle back in a hurry. When The Avenger calls, somethin’ important is usually up.”

It was in this case.

In the big rear room of the drugstore, at the end wall, were the two principal results of the chemical apparatus worked on by Mac and the electrical stuff manipulated by Smitty.

There, on Smitty’s side of the lab, was a big box with a three-foot-square screen over the front of it. This was the world’s finest television set, as far ahead of the best commercial sets as a powerful automobile is ahead of a buggy.

The set was connected constantly with the Bleek Street headquarters of The Avenger; it was the face of The Avenger that now formed in the screen.

It was a startlingly young face to belong to the man who was becoming a legend in police and crime circles, after having made several large fortunes and after having retired from business.

Richard Benson was in his early twenties. But the expression on his regularly chiseled features, and the lack of it in his pale, cold eyes, indicated a man much older in experience if not in years.

“Mac.” The Avenger’s lips seemed scarcely to move with the word.

“Yes, Muster Benson,” said MacMurdie.

“You and Wilson and Josh and Smitty had better come to Bleek Street at once.”

Smitty stared at the young, impassive face. Time was when that face had been paralyzed by a nerve shock, so that it was always as expressionless as a block of ice. Now it could express emotion—but seldom did.

The Avenger was still The Avenger, immobile of countenance, deadly cold of eye, the bane of the underworld.

“Chief!” said Wilson impulsively. “Smitty and I have just stumbled onto something. It’s something I think you ought to know about right away. Happened in Scarsdale. Smitty and I just got back from there. Rabbits killed a dog! Believe it or not—three rabbits went after a Scotch terrier—”

“I know,” said The Avenger quietly.

Wilson gaped at him. He could still be surprised by the fact that this man seemed always to know everything. But the knowledge in this case was explained in the next minute.

“The owner of that dog,” said The Avenger, “is at Bleek Street, now.”

His impassive face faded from the screen, and the set went dead.

“Sweet Sue!” said Wilson. “I don’t know anything I’d like more than to talk to that owner right now!”

The sentiment was exaggerated when he got to The Avenger’s headquarters. For Wilson was susceptible to feminine charms. And the owner of the dead Scottie had lots of them.

Bleek Street is only a short block long, dead-ended. One side is taken up by the windowless back of a vast storage warehouse. In the middle of the other side are three old, narrow, red-brick buildings, flanked by stores and a couple of small warehouses. All these were either owned or leased by Dick Benson, so that, in effect, he owned the block.

Behind their dingy facade, the three red-brick buildings had been thrown into one, and they were furnished as luxuriously as only a very wealthy man could have furnished them.

The vast top floor of the Bleek Street headquarters took up the whole third floor areas of all three buildings. Dick Benson was in here when the four arrived from Mac’s drugstore. And with him was the owner of the dead dog.

The owner was Lila Morel; and Wilson and Smitty looked with undisguised admiration at her dark hair and eyes and the beauty of her face and figure.

But her face was unduly pale right now. She looked grief-stricken—and frightened.

Benson sat at his great desk near one of the windows. Over this window, as over the others, nickel steel slats were set in imitation of Venetian-blind slats at a forty-five-degree angle so that bullets could not get in but light could. The slats sent bars of light over The Avenger’s strong face and left his pale, icy eyes in shadow.

“Miss Morel, these are four of my aides,” he said quietly. “Perhaps you had better tell them what you have told me.”

Lila told of her father, her father’s occupation—though each of them knew him by scientific repute—and sketched the location of their Maine laboratory. Also, she told how Morel had disappeared.

Mac’s sandy ropes of eyebrows drew together.

“Ye mean ye’r father walked into a high-fenced clearin’, with no way of gettin’ out, and disappeared?”

“That’s right,” said Lila, voice tense.

“Perhaps the gate,” began Wilson.

Lila shook her pretty head.

“The gate can be opened only from inside the laboratory. The mechanism there was untouched. So Dad didn’t leave by the gate.”

“You heard or saw nothing after he’d left the building?” asked Dick Benson, voice even and calm as always.

“Nothing,” said Lila. “Except—”

She shivered a little, and bit her lip as if uncertain whether to go on. Then she did, with a rush.

“About the time I think Dad must have gone out into the night, I heard a wolf howl, far off. And then, so close that it made me jump, seemingly right in the clearing, I heard another wolf.”

She looked at the five men with every drop of blood draining from her face.

“It was as if Dad had been changed into a wolf and taken away!”

Smitty felt the hair rise on his scalp. But he knew Dick Benson was not so affected by the words. The giant knew that The Avenger always sought a natural explanation for apparently supernatural things. Indeed, Dick now offered a logical guess.