The Avenger 19 - Pictures of Death (11 page)

They plunged into the barn. After the sun, the interior of the building was gloomy. It took a moment to see the man who had cried out frantically for help. Then they saw him, at the far side of the barn.

He was a stocky fellow in overalls, with dried blood on the side of his head. He lay on the dirt floor, with hands and legs tightly roped so that he couldn’t move.

Here was the caretaker.

Smitty reached the man in two jumps. He opened his knife as he bent down.

The man whispered. “Watch out! They’re—”

Nellie yelped a warning.

From the shadows came an avalanche of men! The avalanche went over Smitty like a landslide over a big tree; and he went down.

He heard Nellie call his name, then heard some man yell in a way that meant the little blonde had executed one of her efficient jujitsu tricks.

Usually when a man is down, with such odds against him, he is also out. But not Smitty. The big fellow fought almost as well from a prone position as he did on his feet.

Feet were searching for his head, earnestly trying to kick his brains out. He grabbed a couple of the feet and squeezed. The owners yelled as something like a vise made jelly of their toes, and they hopped off to sit down and moan.

Legs swarmed around as more men gathered to club at the prone giant. Smitty gathered as many legs in his vast arms as he could—and sat up. As he sat up, about four men sat down. Then he could rise.

He bellowed as he saw two men battering at Nellie. The diminutive blonde had ducked everything so far; then one of the two tagged her satiny cheek while she was engaged in tangling the other in his own feet.

Smitty tore loose from the rest and got to the man who had hit Nellie. The big fellow smacked this one so forcefully that he described an arc through a dozen feet of space and smashed against the barn wall so hard that a board came loose and fell outside.

Then the crew started shooting.

“Back of me!” roared Smitty.

Nellie got behind him. Smitty plunged forward, caught two men who were ahead of their fellows and held them in front of him, each encircled by a huge arm.

It wasn’t going to do the trick. It began to look as if they wouldn’t leave that barn alive!

This bunch of thugs had seen them enter the house. They had deliberately made the bound and helpless caretaker yell for help so Smitty and Nellie would come to his rescue; then they ambushed them.

Smitty felt a couple of giant punches in his left side. Two of the gang had worked around so they could shoot past their two kicking fellows and get at Smitty’s vast torso. The bulletproof celluglass had saved him. He heard Nellie say, “Oof!” and saw her almost fall as a slug hammered her sheathed body.

Five men were between Smitty and Nellie and the door to which they’d been backing. The giant glared at them and saw, over their shoulder, another man running toward the barn.

Smitty flung the two men he’d been holding, at the five, and dug into his pockets. He got a handful of little gas pellets and threw them.

But as he threw, he heard the running man outside yell: “Lam! It’s the law!”

The five stopped shooting at the big fellow and the blonde, and they duly “lammed.” They may not even have known any trouble in the form of anaesthetic pellets had been thrown in their vicinity; anyhow, they raced into the open before the fumes rose. So they were all right, and Nellie and Smitty got the dosage themselves.

This was all right, too. Each had a small noseclip to keep out such fumes, with a measured oxygen supply that would let them breathe till the fumes dissipated. But while they were putting these things on, something else unforeseen happened.

A blue-uniformed officer appeared in the barn doorway.

“Well, we’re sure glad to see you—” Smitty began. Then he stopped with a strangling cough. He shouldn’t have opened his mouth to talk in the midst of MacMurdie’s knock-out gas. But he would have stopped anyway, in surprise at what the officer did.

The rescuing cop made no response to Smitty’s welcome. As a greeting, he slid the barn door tightly shut, and the giant heard the creak of a hasp as the door was padlocked.

“Hey!” Smitty felt like yelling indignantly—but didn’t.

He went to the door and shook it violently. Two bullets ripped splinters from the door a foot from him.

He glared at Nellie. “The fools think we’re gunmen and are centering their attention on keeping us trapped in here while the real crooks get away!” his eyes said. But the small blonde’s eyes had a different expression.

Smitty went to the rear of the barn where his tremendous blow had knocked off a board with a man’s body. The instant he showed his big head at the tall, slender opening where the board had been, another burst of slugs sent him ducking back out of sight.

The gas had risen upward toward the lofty barn roof so that it was possible to take off the clips.

“Those idiots!” raved Smitty. “I never saw cops so dumb!”

“They’re not cops,” Nellie said. “That uniform—it’s the uniform of the New York police, not anything you’d see in rural Connecticut. They’re phonies.”

Smitty took a minute to digest that. So they were crooks. And the first set were crooks. Why had one set chased the other? Rival gangs, apparently, but—

Nellie had an eye to a knothole in the side of the barn toward the house.

“They’re going in the house,” she said. “We left the ‘Diabolo’ lying right on the hall floor where they can’t help but see it. That’s what they’re after, of course. Well, it’s gone now!”

Smitty began sniffing. There was still an acrid sting of the anaesthetic gas in the air. But this new odor went over that. A smell of fire!

At the same time the crackle of flames came to their ears, and gray smoke drifted in front of the knothole through which Nellie was staring.

For a moment, though, Nellie almost ignored the smoke. She had caught a glimpse of a dark, sleek man, one of the gang of pseudo-police, through the open doorway of the house. And she was remembering where she had seen that sinister playboy before.

Then Smitty was clutching at her arm.

“They’ve fired the barn!” he snapped. “We’ve got to get out of here!”

He picked up a four-foot length of log from the wood stacked for Vaughan’s fireplaces. He rammed the door, and again was answered by slugs ripping perilously close around him. He tried the siding at both ends and the back. Bullets!

“Get ready to dodge lead,” he called grimly to Nellie. Then he went on battering at the siding of one end, regardless of the bullets menacing him from outside. He was hit in the body half a dozen times. Splinters stung his head, where the real danger lay! There was no bulletproof celluglass over his skull.

Four boards came off under his pounding. The opening revealed three men crouched in tall grass and pouring lead at him.

“O.K.!” gasped Smitty through the gathering smoke. “Shooting or no shooting, we’re getting out—” His voice tailed off into silence, as he saw one of the three guards.

He was a man who must have weighed nearly three hundred pounds, with a blue-jowled face that Smitty knew he had seen before.

In the Pink Room of the Coyle Hotel.

The sound of shooting was drowned suddenly in a burst of sirens from three cars. Nellie sped back to her knothole.

“They’re leaving!” she cried. “They’re jumping into their cars as if the army was after them!”

She didn’t have to say it. Smitty had seen the three waddle toward the driveway at the warning sound of the horns. At least, the fat man had waddled, at an incredibly fast clip. The other two shoved to get ahead of him.

“Oh!” said Nellie suddenly in complete comprehension.

One car had appeared in the entrance of the driveway. From the leading edge of each front fender of this car came little rosy bursts of flame as twin machine guns, aimed wheel-high, swept a leaden hail at the tires of the three cars.

The tires stayed up. They were the military type, self-sealing, that could take indefinite piercing without harm. The three cars jounced over open fields for the road. And the one big limousine hesitated like a live thing, debating whether to go on after its quarry or stay to help Smitty and Nellie.

Nellie thought she could see rare uncertainty in the pale eyes of The Avenger at the wheel of the car. She screamed: “Don’t bother about us! We can get out! Nail those guys!”

It couldn’t be heard over the roar of the flames and through the thick windows of the car. So the limousine kept on to the barn. One rule was paramount in Ben’s career: The lives of his aides came first.

The car crashed through the sliding door as if it had been paper. Mac, eyes blazing, flung open the rear door.

“In!” he barked.

Nellie hopped in. But Smitty ran to where the bound caretaker still lay, with the unconscious member of the first gang—the one Smitty had smashed against the side of the barn—beside him. The big fellow hoisted them both into the rear of the car with Nellie and himself.

The car shot backward through the leaping flames to safety.

But the gang with the fat man and the sleek dark man had escaped.

“The picture?” said Benson calmly, face as calm as though nothing adventurous had occurred. “ ‘Diabolo’?”

“Gone by now,” sighed Smitty. “We left it so they could not miss finding it. So—”

“I’m not sure it’s gone,” Nellie interrupted. “I didn’t see it carried out by any of that bunch when they ran in answer to the siren warning.”

“Of course, they’d take it,” said Smitty. “That’s what they came for. Why wouldn’t they take it, with nothing to stop them?”

“It won’t hurt to look,” Nellie pointed out.

So she stepped into the hall.

The picture was there, on the hall floor.

“What in the blazes—” gaped Smitty.

The gang that had trapped them in the barn had raised Heaven and earth to get to this picture. Having gotten to it, they seemed suddenly to have decided they didn’t want it, after all. It was mad. Insane!

The Avenger took it with him. He took the unconscious member of the first gang in to Bleek Street, too, after tending the caretaker who had been slugged and bound.

The affair of the looted masterpieces was being beautifully consistent in one regard at least. It was continuing to yield absolutely no results to the most diligent investigating.

Back at headquarters, they tried to make something of a bunch of puzzling, apparently nonsensical crime pieces.

Just after they’d returned from Connecticut, Cole Wilson had called from Long Island that he was on his way back. So they could dismiss worry over his inexplicable and lengthy absence and devote their time to the puzzle.

The Avenger, in telling of what had happened to him and Mac at Vaughan’s penthouse, had described the sleek, dark leader.

Nellie nodded vigorously.

“I saw him, too. And I’ve seen him before. Not for long, but long enough so I ought to remember.”

“He gave his name as Addfield,” said Benson. “Probably an alias.”

That was enough for the half-pint blonde.

“I’ve got it! Smitty, you remember the dark fellow with the woman in white in the foyer of the Pink Room?”

“Yeah,” said Smitty.

“This must be that man! He gave his name then as Addington. Richard Addington. He and that woman were the only two who noticed when Teebo disappeared from in front of an open window.”

“Only the woman noticed it,” replied Smitty. “Addington claimed not to have seen anything.”

“Anyhow—that’s him. He’s in this up to his neck. Maybe he could tell how Teebo died.”

“If Teebo did die,” Smitty said slowly.

“Again?” sighed Nellie.

“Listen. Back at that barn I saw a fat guy. And if it wasn’t Teebo, I’m a gorilla.”

“That’s an unfortunate remark,” said Nellie, eyes going over Smitty’s mountainous bulk.

“Why, you little ingrate!” gasped Smitty. “After I saved your life back at that barn—”

“Go on. You’d be there yet if it hadn’t been for the boss. Save my life, indeed!”

The quiet but dominant voice of The Avenger recalled them to the task at hand.

“You say this Addington was in the foyer near Teebo at the time of Teebo’s disappearance?”