The Avenger 18 - Death in Slow Motion (9 page)

But Benson did not know these things. He didn’t know anything for quite a few minutes. Then consciousness returned, though he did not yet open his pale, deadly eyes.

In the first place, he wanted to overhear anything his captors might say, while they still thought him unconscious. In the second, he wanted to see if any bones were broken or cracked from that terrific embrace, before drawing attention to himself. Attention that was sure to be violent!

The first reason for pretending unconsciousness did not get him anywhere. Once, he did open his eyes enough to flick a gaze around through interlocking lashes. Three men were in the car with him. He saw the backs of two in front, and the feet of a third next to his head. The bells and siren told that he was still in the fire chiefs car.

But not with the chief, nor his men. They had undoubtedly been slugged somewhere and their car and equipment and uniforms taken.

However, none of these three said anything that The Avenger could overhear. They said nothing at all, not one word. Now and then, the man in the rear leaned over—Dick could feel the movement—and tapped one of the two in front, probably in some directing gesture. But there wasn’t a syllable spoken. The men might have been deaf and dumb.

The Avenger fared better with his second reason for lying low for a time. A cautious flexing of muscles and a slight movement of limbs, as if with the movement of the car, indicated no bones fractured. His chest was sore, but that was merely from bruises.

The red car’s siren stopped. Benson felt it wheel over hard as it rounded a sharp turn at high speed, then heard a hollow sound underneath and felt darkness through closed eyelids all around as it jammed into a small garage, a hiding place of some sort.

The Avenger was lifted from the red car and dumped roughly onto cement floor, with grease sliding under his limp hands. Again, he risked a slight look around.

The men, still without saying anything, were rapidly shedding uniforms and putting on street clothes.

Now, with the three busy with clothes and hopping around on one leg and then the other while they put pants on, would have been the best time for Dick to try a getaway. If he didn’t try now, the odds were that he’d be unable to later on.

But he waited just the same. It was Nellie Gray’s theory that her chief courted death rather than avoided it, and this instance would have confirmed that idea once more.

It seemed like sure death to wait. But The Avenger nevertheless decided to. He might learn something if he allowed himself to be carried farther, or he might locate one of the lairs of this gang.

They piled him into another car in the garage, an ordinary sedan. And then they were on the street again. This time the course was decorously slow, and there were no bells or sirens.

Still, the men said not one word. The Avenger lay in the bottom of the car, slackly, rolling with the sedan’s swerves. In a short time it stopped.

The Avenger felt the car sag as the man next to the driver got out. He heard five or six steps on cement sidewalk, then heard a metallic rumble like low thunder.

Dick Benson knew what that was.

It was a garage door of the steel, roll-up type. A garage door to be entered by a ramp across the sidewalk. This, the second stop, was almost certainly the end of the line. And it was almost equally certain that if that door ever rolled down again, with Benson behind it, it would also be the end of the line for him!

The Avenger sat up like a snake uncoiling.

So perfect had been his pretended unconsciousness that the move must have struck the man in the back seat like a movement from one dead. At any rate, his open mouth and astonishment-laden eyes indicated it.

There was a second before he had sense enough to snap the gun he held into line with Dick Benson’s head.

That second’s lapse was too bad for the man!

With a left hand like a blacksmith’s vise, Dick caught the fellow’s gun wrist. The gun squirmed inexorably off line, and the shot drew a choked gurgle as evidence that the man had shot his own pal, who had started to turn in alarm from the steering wheel.

Dick’s right fist flicked upward with careful precision. It caught the man on the law and knocked him out as surely and deftly as though he had been anaesthetized.

Men were pouring from the opened garage door. The Avenger caught a glimpse of a large, cavernous space with a truck or two in it. He caught that glimpse as he jerked the dead man away from the wheel and leaped over the back of the front seat to take his place.

He gunned the motor and the car started to roll.

Either these men were braver than most thugs, or they had heard of The Avenger’s cardinal trait: that he never, under any circumstances, took the life of a human. They jumped in front of the sedan which was roaring ahead like a juggernaut.

Benson jammed the brakes. If he hadn’t, bodies would have been tossed like broken wreckage in the car’s wake; and, quite possibly, sheer weight of dead human flesh would have stopped him, making violation of his principles fruitless, after all.

Before the car had entirely stopped going forward, there was a clash of gears, and it darted back on its own tracks.

The men who had been inside the building were all out here, now, making the place a good spot for Benson himself to be in.

He roared back over the sidewalk and into the garage, like a crab scuttling backward from attacking enemies. Before the sedan had quite screeched to a stop, Benson was out and hauling down the door.

Even for his lightning swiftness, there was barely time for the maneuver. As it was, the fleetest among the silent men reached the door, and his face grimaced death from a space about three feet wide from sidewalk threshold to the bottom of the steel sheet.

He drew back just in time to keep from having his neck broken. And Benson clicked the lock in place.

Calmly, he went to find a telephone. But before he found one, to dial police, he knew that his risk had been taken in vain.

This was no gang lair to raid. It was a legitimate place of business, “borrowed” by this gang just as they had borrowed the fire chief’s car and the chemical truck. Half a dozen bound truck drivers and warehouse men told that story wordlessly even before gags were removed and they sputtered forth the details of being slugged and tied.

Dick was to have been executed in here, at leisure and gang convenience, after which they would leave and never see the place again.

Once more The Avenger had drawn blank. But the glare in the pale, deathly eyes told that this defeat wasn’t going to stop him any more than men and machines could stop him.

The relationship between huge Smitty and petite, delicate-looking Nellie Gray defied analysis. To the eye, it might have looked as though they almost disliked each other. The little blond grenade was always ribbing the big fellow, and he was always snapping back.

But the rest of The Avenger’s little band had noticed long since that if little Nellie got into a jam, big Smitty acted like a frantic mother elephant till she had been rescued again. And if Smitty suffered reverses, little Nellie buzzed around like a frenzied, and quite dangerous, hornet till all was normal with the giant.

In fact, it looked as if these two liked each other very much, though steam winches couldn’t have drawn that admission from either of them.

Now, Nellie was just about going crazy because Smitty was in very serious trouble indeed.

Smitty was sick.

To say that Smitty was sick was equivalent to saying that the Washington Monument had just fallen over on its side or that the capitol dome had collapsed. Smitty just didn’t get sick. He was seemingly made out of scrap steel and old leather and well-seasoned rubber; he might get hurt but he never got sick.

But now he was ill, though still dragging around on his feet; and Nellie was almost going insane with worry.

Smitty’s sickness was precisely the same kind as that which had afflicted a lot of workmen in three rubber factories. And as far as was known, that sickness inevitably ended in death!

The affected rubber workmen were still slowly dying, half a dozen or so a day; and the combined medical skill of the country seemed unable to diagnose their malady, let alone cure it.

Sure, slow death. And now Smitty had it!

“Mac, we’ve got to do something!” cried Nellie.

Mac was as worried as the fragile-looking little blond. But he shook his sandy-thatched head in despair.

“What can we do? If even the chief can’t find out what’s wrong—”

And that incredible thing had happened. Dick Benson was probably the finest physician and diagnostician alive. And even he had been unable to tell just what was wrong with the giant.

Anaemia of some new, rare sort.

That was a certainty. Dick had been robbed of that bottle of blood which he had taken from the veins of the dying man just before the fire had been started at the rooming house. However, since he had taken the precaution to draw a little blood also into a small rubber bladder, worn next to his armpit for just such emergencies, the loss of the bottle hadn’t amounted to much.

He had analyzed that blood sample in every way known to the scientific world at large and also a few known only to himself.

Anaemia. Destruction of the red corpuscles. Very well. But how could anaemia, usually a gradual process, be induced with such lightning speed?

Smitty was not in bed. He was up and around. At the moment he was in the big top-floor room at Bleek Street with the others.

Dick Benson sat at his desk, eyes pale holes in his face as the brain behind them sought to wrest an answer out of this mystery. Smitty walked toward the desk, moving so slowly that Nellie almost cried. His moonface was drawn, and his eyes were dull.

“You ought to be off your feet,” said The Avenger. And few had ever heard such gentleness in his voice as there was now.

“No sense in that till it’s necessary,” said Smitty, words coming slowly and laboriously. “Any ideas, chief?”

“A few,” said Benson. His flaming, colorless eyes were fixed on the distance. “You were at the Manhattan Gasket factory. You might have gotten this there. But Mac and I were there, too, exposed in just the same way, and nothing has happened to us. Also, there have been watchmen there since the thing happened, and they have been all right. So I don’t think that’s the scene of the trouble.”

“That rear-house—” said Mac.

Benson’s black-cropped head nodded.

“You two called on Old Mitch. He was ill again, as you said he was the first time you saw him, when Josh tried to help him. Quite possibly, the unfortunate old fellow was stricken at that factory with a touch of the trouble. So perhaps you got it from Old Mitch, Smitty. But Mac was there, too, and he’s all right.”

For just an instant, so fleetingly that not even The Avenger caught it, there was a grim look in Mac’s eyes. But he only said:

“I wasn’t as near the old man as Smitty.”

Benson nodded absently, flaming brain so intent on problems that he was scarcely aware of his immediate surroundings.

“Again and again, threads lead back to that squalid rear-house,” he mused. “Twice the old fellow living there has been ill of the same malady as these workmen—”

He paused suddenly, then slowly went on.

“The old man’s son seems to be centrally involved in the mystery. And now, in his room, Smitty gets the same ailment.”

Josh Newton said quietly: “It looks as if the source of that disease, or whatever it is, is so close to Old Mitch that he has become a victim of it himself.”

“In any event,” nodded The Avenger, “the place warrants closer investigation.” He looked at Smitty. “Go to bed, now. That is an order. And, Rosabel, you be his nurse.”

Rosabel Newton, Josh’s pretty wife, who was as smart and well-educated as Josh himself, nodded.

“Awww—” said Smitty.

But the pale eyes did not relent; so he went meekly out, moving like a thing in a slow-motion picture, with Rosabel beside him.

The Avenger turned to Mac.

“Mac, I want you to go to the rear-house and get a picture of one of the occupants. Any one of them will do. Come back as soon as you can with it, and we’ll develop and enlarge it at once.”