The Avenger 2 - The Yellow Hoard (12 page)

She started to slide past him, and he lunged. That, too, she was waiting for. After all, she was only a bit more than five feet tall, and weighed very little more than a hundred pounds. Brute strength she had not. She must fight with skill alone, vanquishing attackers by turning their own strength against them, as she had with MacMurdie at Bleek Street. She had to wait for an attack, or a lunge, such as this man executed.

She got his outstretched arm with two hands. She bent, angling from her slim waist. The whole thing was done with such flashing speed that no single move could be distinguished. You could only see that the man bent forward as the girl did, rolled over her hip like water over a smooth round boulder, and crashed to his back on the floor with a violence that shook the house.

That whole thing had been perfectly timed and exquisitely executed. The plan deserved to succeed. But it didn’t. One small bit of bad luck ruined it.

The man with the reddish hair had been lounging in the doorway with one hand, for no particular reason, on the knob of the partly opened door behind him. When he lunged forward, guided by Nellie’s slim hand, he pulled the door closed with him.

Just closed, not locked. But it was enough. If the door had remained open, the girl could have darted out of the room and down the hall with at least a chance of escape. As it was, while she wrenched at the knob to turn it and open the door again, the two who looked like brothers were on her.

One of them slashed viciously at her sleek blond head with the barrel of his gun. She half turned, grasped his wrist, and snapped his arm down over her slender shoulder. The man squealed. For an instant he thought his arm was broken.

The other had a rough arm around Nellie’s body. The black-haired man was beside him, with a blue bruise on his forehead where it had contacted the chair. He was snarling.

Four men against a girl.

She sat on the chair again, staring at them with flaming gray eyes while they stared back in savage amazement.

“She must be an acrobat,” rasped the man with the reddish hair, hand to his back where he’d smashed to the floor. “One half-pint dame like that make so much trouble. I’d never’ve believed it.”

“Tie her!” snarled the black-eyed man. “We don’t make the same mistakes twice!”

Treating her with as much respect as they would have shown a six-foot professional boxer, the men tied her to the chair.

She had had her chance, and lost.

A man came in with a gray felt hat on the back of his head. His lips were one-sided and his eyes had a wise-guy expression that you see on the faces of many in poolroom hangouts. Evidently he had just come to the house, for he looked in surprise at the bound girl and with a wide grin at the shaken-up men.

“For—” he snickered. “You don’t mean to say this jane tumbled you up like this?”

“Shut up!” the man with the sandy-red hair rasped out.

“Ootsy-kootsy,” sniggered the man with the gray felt hat, with his hand digging into the other’s rib.

Evidently his prankster’s thumb had located the most ticklish spot in those ribs before. The man with the reddish hair emitted the high, whinnying laugh of a person who is forced to cackle when he is tickled, whether he likes it or not.

Then the man swung at the jokester. “You dumb clown! Some day I’ll—”

“Shut up and relax, both of you,” said the black-eyed man. “You, life-of-the-party,” he said contemptuously to the man with the gray felt hat. “What’s the dope?”

“You mean on the building we’re gonna pineapple?”

“What do you think I mean? Sure.”

“Well, here’s the timing. We can’t get into the joint a minute later than six. Watchman has orders not to open up to the president himself after that. And at six in the evening there’s still bound to be some dopes in the building. It’s a business layout, you know.”

The black-eyed man nodded.

“Then it’ll be just too bad for the dopes,” he said coldly.

“We might,” said the man with the gray hat thoughtfully, “yell ‘Fire’ or something, to get the joint empty.”

“Getting soft in your old age?” jeered the black-eyed man. “We blow up the building at six. It’ll be just too bad for any people dumb enough to be hanging around there at that time of night!”

He turned away from the man and toward the girl.

“Now look, sister, I’m through monkeying. I want the answers to those questions of mine, and I want ’em fast. If you don’t give, you’re going to be buried looking like nothing human. See? Your own mother wouldn’t recognize the corpse—”

Again a man came into the room who evidently had just come from the outside and wasn’t in on the events of the living room. He was a little more than average size, with a pudgy face and thick lips under a nose that was too thin. He had on a brown cap, pushed carelessly back.

“Who’s your friend?” he began. Then he stopped stone-still halfway from the door and said excitedly: “Hey! It’s the dame from the white-haired guy’s outfit!”

“Thanks for the information, Pinkie,” the black-eyed man said sarcastically. “I wouldn’t have guessed where she was from if you hadn’t told me.” The black eyes stared at the newcomer like cold jet. “Well?”

The man with the brown cap fidgeted.

“Well, what, Frankie?”

“You know what, you nitwitted ape!”

“If you mean where have I been all this time—”

“I don’t care where you’ve been. You could be pushing up the daisies for all I care. I’m not interested in a guy called Pinkie Huer. I’m interested in a guy with white hair called Benson.”

“I missed him,” whined Pinkie Huer.

“You’re telling
me!
How you could be so awkward—”

“The white-headed guy must have had a tip-off,” said the man earnestly. “Anyhow, he ducked into an areaway when I tossed the thing you gave me. And then the guy got me.”

“Got you?”

“Yeah. That’s why I been so long gettin’ around. He nailed me, and took me to a goofy joint about as big as Grand Central Station, and held me there. I don’t know what he was goin’ to do, because I made a break while there wasn’t anybody around—”

“And came here?” yelled the black-eyed man, “You fool! If it was a stall—if you were followed—”

“Nobody trailed me. I thought of that. I doubled around for three hours on the way out, and when I got six blocks away I stopped the car and walked around another half-hour. I didn’t see a thing.”

“Well—” mumbled the black-eyed man, mollified.

“The white-headed guy treated me like some kind of a squirrel,” fumed Pinkie Huer. “He had some kind of a damn cage in the place. Like a big bird cage. He shut me in that. Like I was a canary or something!”

The prankster in the gray felt hat guffawed.

“Canary! Boy, that’s rich. Sing, canary. Ootsy-kootsy.”

His expert thumb dug abruptly into Pinkie Huer’s ribs.

There was a split second of silence. Then Pinkie Huer laughed. But not with his face.

His mouth was open and from it came the whinnying laugh of a person who has been tickled—but the face around the mouth didn’t change expression in the least.

Dead-faced he laughed for a minute, then stopped.

Two people in the room caught the odd lack of facial movement. One was quick-witted Nellie Gray. The other, unfortunately, was the black-eyed man.

“That,” the man said slowly, peering at Pinkie Huer’s face “is very, very funny.”

“Funny?” snarled Huer. “If you think it’s a joke for a ticklish guy to get jabbed in the ribs all the time—”

“That isn’t what I meant was funny,” said the leader, jetty eyes beginning to glitter. “Your face—poke him again, Joe.”

“Ootsy-kootsy,” said the man in the gray felt hat, who wasn’t getting the nuances of the situation at all.

Huer laughed. Bleated with open mouth—and with his face as set and devoid of all expression as a mask.

The black-eyed man leaped back. A gun appeared in his hand.

“This isn’t Pinkie Huer! Get him!”

The gun bucked in his hand and the room thundered to the echoes of the shot. But the man with the face like Huer’s was no longer standing where he had been. Like something in a moving picture run at five times normal speed, he had snapped a yard to the left. And with equal dizzying quickness, he leaped forward.

The black-eyed man tried to shoot again, and got a poke on the side of the head like the kick of a mule. A large mule. He fell backward, but not far. The man with Huer’s face caught his swaying body, whirled it around, and catapulted it against the two men who looked like brothers.

The two had been leaping forward almost side by side. One said, “Ooof!” Both sat down with the black-eyed man lying across their knees.

“Huer” bent like a snapped spring, and straightened again. In his right hand was something like a piece of blued steel tubing, slightly bent at the handle end. The little gun gave a hissing
spatt.
A small slug belched from the deadly mouth of Mike, the silenced, special gun.

The man with the reddish hair had his gun almost lined on Huer’s chest. But he fell as Mike spoke. Fell like a toppled log, with blood dripping from the top of his head.

The man whose face had been unable to crinkle with laughter when his mouth had, picked up Nellie Gray, chair and all. He sent the man with the gray felt hat flying back against the wall with a powerful shove of his right leg.

He got to the door, out, slammed it shut.

“Mr. . . . Benson?” faltered Nellie, still not sure.

Benson nodded. He had bolted the door when he slammed it. Shots were ripping through the panels as the men in the living room prepared to shoot their way out.

Benson’s hands flashed to his eyeballs, removed the little thin cups that had given him Huer’s eyes. Vision was impaired a little by them. He snapped Ike, the razor-sharp throwing knife, from its holster at his left calf. Three sweeps with it, and Nellie was free.

She stood up. Down the hall there were yells and steps of others coming to investigate the racket. The door opened and two men jammed into the hall.

Benson snapped a shot with Mike. One of the two went down with the top of his head suddenly a red smear. The other was shooting. Benson got Nellie around the banister of the nearby stairs and halfway up, out of the line of the shots.