The Avenger 18 - Death in Slow Motion (7 page)

So that was confirmed. Benson dispatched Mac and Smitty to see if they could find the truck. It had probably been abandoned by now, but there might be vital clues in it. Then he went back to the guard.

“You say there was no one at all in the yard save you and the other guard and the two from that truck?”

The guard started to shake his head, then paused.

“Say! There was one other person. I wonder—” He shrugged. “There was Old Mitch.”

“Old Mitch?”

“An old bum who makes his living off the streets and out of junk heaps. Comes around here every so often for what he can salvage. We let him take wood scraps and stuff. Crusty old guy, but he has more spunk than most.”

“Was he anywhere near that truck?”

“No,” said the guard, thinking back, detail by detail. “Let’s see. He was over there by that big crate. The young fella walked from the loading platform past it and—I remember. Old Mitch looked as if he’d like to kill him, and yet as if he was deathly afraid of him, too. Old Mitch hid behind the crate. I don’t think the young guy ever saw him.”

The Avenger’s cold and glacial eyes were unrevealing. He went to his car.

In the plant, he had learned the name of one workman near the time clock who had seen the young fellow from the truck. A man who had been hit particularly hard by the mysterious, slow-motion doom. The Avenger went to the address of that man.

The address was that of a run-down rooming house on West Ninth Street. The man lay in his room, second floor rear, with a doctor in attendance. He gasped for each breath; his color was dreadful. It didn’t need Dick Benson’s superlative knowledge and skill as a physician to know that death was close.

The doctor in attendance looked up as Dick opened the door, recognized the personage known for treatises and experiments throughout the medical world. They stepped into the hall.

“What do you make of it?” asked Dick Benson, after greetings had been exchanged.

The doctor chewed his lip.

“I don’t know, Mr. Benson. I simply don’t know. I would swear it was a particularly swift and deadly form of pernicious anaemia. But anaemia does not strike like this, all in a minute. The man is dying, right now!”

“Delirious?” asked The Avenger.

“No. Clear-headed as a well man. But he speaks, and moves, with curious slowness. His motor nerves seem to have been slowed up in their reactions to a fifth of normal.”

The Avenger went into the room. The dying man looked up with dumb appeal in his eyes. And Benson’s agate, pale eyes contained for an instant their rare look of impersonal but genuine kindliness.

“Can you talk a little?” he asked, quietly, voice like a tonic in its calm strength.

The man gritted his teeth and nodded.

“You saw the man from the truck, near the time clock, I understand,” said Benson. “Will you describe him?”

The Avenger got the best description yet.

The man seemed about twenty-five or six, but he may have been older. At least his eyes looked older, dark, narrowed, secretive, with a scar or something in the right eyebrow that parted it in the middle. Thin-lipped, average height and weight, smiling as if he always smiled no matter what the circumstances.

“I’m going to take a blood sample,” said Benson to the doctor. “Then I think we’d better take this man to the hospital. We may do something.” Though he knew there was nothing really to be done.

The doctor went downstairs to the hall phone and put in a call to the hospital. And the man with the icy, pale eyes proceeded to draw a little blood, pale blood from the dying man’s veins, into a small bottle.

He was just securing the stopper when the doctor came back in.

“An ambulance will be here in a few minutes,” the doctor said.

The few minutes passed, and far off there was the wail of a siren. The doctor didn’t hear. Only Benson, with his miraculous sense of hearing developed in a hundred wilderness and arctic places where he had wrested a large fortune before he entered the crime field, caught the distant, sighing sound.

“The ambulance,” he nodded. But then he stopped and listened again.

There had been a faint sound of bells mixed with the siren noise.

At the same moment his nostrils, keen as an animal’s, caught the scent of smoke—that deadliest of all smoke—with a smell of wood and varnish and rags mixed in. Then there was a sudden commotion from downstairs, and a frantic pounding of feet as the few in the house began stampeding for the sidewalk.

“For heaven’s sake—” gasped the doctor.

And from downstairs drifted the dread cry: “Fire!”

The Avenger was already at the door.

At that moment the stairs were clear enough so that he could have leaped through flame and smoke to safety. But his quick eyes saw at once that another thirty seconds would make the staircase an impossible path. He could get away; but the doctor and the sick man couldn’t!

He turned back into the room. And even as the door shut against the searing heat and choking smoke, the stairway became an inferno down which no man could go.

And the stairs were the only descent possible from that floor.

To find one light truck, among New York’s thousands of light trucks, after that truck has left a place nearly an hour ago and mingled with the teeming traffic in heaven knows what direction, would seem an impossibility.

But The Avenger’s indomitable little crime-fighting crew was geared in unusual ways to do unusual things. Mac and Smitty had a system. They felt that, though the odds were against them, they had at least a forty-percent chance of locating that vehicle.

At this part of the city there was a newsstand at practically every corner. The two went on foot to the next corner. Since the street in front of the factory was one way, east, that was the way that truck must have gone first, since the driver would scarcely care to make himself conspicuous by breaking laws.

Practically every newsboy in New York knew The Avenger and his aides. This one recognized Smitty by his vast bulk. Often the boys had helped, their sharp eyes and quick wits making them invaluable.

But this time Mac and Smitty drew blank. When Smitty described the truck they were after, the boy confessed that he hadn’t noticed it, though it must have passed his stand. There are so many trucks in New York.

So then, Mac went north on the intersecting street, and Smitty went south. Later, one of them would go on east and inquire. But that wasn’t necessary.

Smitty called Mac with his little belt radio, which was a tiny transmitting-and-receiving set, so small that it would fit in a curved metal container, worn at the waist.

“Struck oil,” said Smitty. “Back to this corner. The truck went south along here.”

Corner by corner they followed the truck’s progress, at each intersection with Smitty going east or west on the one-way west or east street approached, and with Mac going straight ahead.

There were two things that would have licked them, and which made the odds at least sixty percent against them.

One of these two things was the possibility that eventually the truck would get to one of the warehouse sections that hadn’t as many newsstands as in the city proper. The other was that the truck might leave the island by bridge or tube and so lose itself.

The first seemed to be the one that finally happened.

One last newsboy, staring with awe at Smitty’s gigantic frame, directed them down Eleventh Avenue. And then there were three long blocks with neither boy nor cop nor peddler’s stand that might have witnessed the flight of the brown closed truck.

“Sunk!” said Mac gloomily.

The Scot was the most pessimistic soul alive, usually. The only time he broke his pessimism was in situations so deadly that any other man alive would have despaired. Then in a crazily contradictory way, Mac positively chirped with optimism.

Smitty had come in the huge old coupé he usually drove. He and Mac were in it, now, driving slowly up the last-named street, Eleventh Avenue.

“We’ll never find the truck, now,” Mac went mournfully on. “But then, we didn’t have a chance from the beginnin’—”

He stopped as a hand like a dredge clamped over his left arm.

“Look,” said Smitty. “Isn’t that the truck?”

Mac stared east, as Smitty indicated.

There, half a block down and parked in front of a huge building that Mac recognized as the side wall of a great wholesale dry-goods firm, was a small truck. The truck was closed, and was brown in color.

“Well, maybe it is,” shrugged Mac. “No harm in trrryin’, Smitty.”

Smitty turned the nose of the heavy coupé, and it rolled toward the truck.

Well over an hour had passed since that truck had left the Manhattan Gasket Company’s gate. It must have gotten to this spot forty-five minutes ago.

Neither Mac nor the giant Smitty had the foggiest notion that there might be somebody in or with the truck, after all that time. Why would crooks stay with a stolen car for over three quarters of an hour before abandoning it?

The answer was that ninety-nine times out of a hundred they wouldn’t. But the hundredth time they might have foreseen exactly what was scheduled to happen here: a search of the truck for clues so exhaustive that the faintest trace of a fingerprint might be damaging. And that hundredth time they would go over the thing themselves, to eradicate clues, taking as many minutes to the job as their caution thought necessary.

The coupé rolled up toward the rear of the innocent-looking parked truck. Smitty slowed and was ready to stop.

“If we can just find a little sign as to where these skurlies might have gone from here—” Mac began.

And then the truck seemed to become one compact engine of death and destruction.

The rear doors swung open, and not one, but two submachine guns blasted at the coupé. Not one, but three grenades were tossed at the coupé.

The windshield was of bulletproof glass; but while it didn’t break, it certainly cracked. In five seconds it was covered with white patches and so irradiated with a million little cracks that you could no more see through it than you can see through frosted glass.

Smitty was blind, as far as seeing ahead of the car was concerned.

Then the three grenades went off!

One, landing right beside the car, exploded with a roar that could be heard for blocks. The coupé, weighing nearly three tons, leaped like a feather, sagged to the left and almost tipped on its side, then subsided.

The other two didn’t make much noise, but from them came a thick cloud of chlorine gas! And, because the day was windless, the gas just hung there.

The coupé, under its harmless-looking exterior of shabby paint and used respectability, was built like an army tank. That was why Smitty liked to use it.

But even the coupé could not stand this sort of concerted attack. It would be disabled in a few seconds. But Smitty meant to use those seconds well.

There was no time for him to yell a warning to Mac, but the warning wasn’t needed. There was rarely need for words between The Avenger and his aides, or one aide and another, in a tight fix. They worked like parts of a harmonious machine.

So Mac instinctively hung onto the edge of the seat with his left hand as the coupé, with Smitty’s foot to the floor on the accelerator, roared like a wounded rhinoceros straight ahead!

Smitty couldn’t see anything, but he remembered where the rear of that truck was; and that was the target of his mad plunge.

He made a bull’s-eye!

The heavy snout of the coupé jammed into the rear of the truck with a roar almost as loud as that of the grenade explosion. And with the moment of impact, Mac had the door on his side open and was rolling out.

His right hand had darted for the door handle, when his left clung to the seat edge in Smitty’s dash ahead.

He hit the street a half-second before the giant was out his side, but that was all. Both were on their feet together and leaping ahead so that they would have the blank side walls of the truck between themselves and whoever was inside.

The object of that charge with the coupé had been to knock everybody in the truck off his feet and to cork the rear opening so the men would be penned in there.