The Avenger 23 - The Wilder Curse (12 page)

“Oh!” said Nellie. She went to the door which had just admitted her. She shook at it. It was so massive that she doubted if Smitty himself could have done anything about it.

“Did you phone me awhile ago, Cole?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“I was afraid not,” said Nellie.

“I haven’t phoned anyone or done anything,” Cole said. “A block from headquarters, I saw a woman in a taxi having a fainting spell or something. I jumped to the door and opened it, to help her, and a gun was stuck in my face. The ‘woman’ was a man in a dress. One of the oldest tricks in the world—and I fell for it.”

His voice was full of disgust.

“The gun slugged me. When I woke up, I was here, like this. In this animal house.”

“Animal house?” repeated Nellie.

“Use your nose,” said Cole.

Nellie sniffed. And now, with her mind on it, she caught it. An odor of something living, but not human. The smell of a den or lair. It made the chill touch her spine again.

“You might untie me,” said Cole. “I don’t think it would help any, but it would at least be more comfortable. The reason I don’t think it would help is that our friends—whoever they are—wouldn’t have left you in here unbound if they thought being loose would help us any.”

Nellie worked at his wire. She kept sniffing.

“I think maybe we’re going to be a meal for something,” said Cole.

The Avenger had said he was going to the public library. Evidently, Clarence Beck had thought he meant the big New York one on Fifth Avenue at Forty-second Street, for the blond youth looked surprised when Benson stopped his car in front of one of the small public libraries.

“Think they’ll have what you want here?” Beck said, in a naïve invitation for The Avenger to put into words just what he was after.

“I think so,” Benson said expressionlessly. “I want some local history. Probably there is more of it here in the locality than there would be downtown.”

Beck skipped alongside him as he went up the wide steps.

“If I can help you,” he said; “if I can look up anything for you—”

The Avenger said nothing.

It was quite a neat and sizeable library. There was a main room, two-storied, with books going up to the top and reached by narrow iron ramps to many shelves. It was patterned after the main library in that all around this big room were tiers of balconies, each a low floor crammed with books.

The book desk was in the center. The Avenger went to this with his smooth, catlike walk.

“I would like whatever books you have on history, typography or real-estate transactions of this immediate section,” he said. “Any books written before 1900.”

“All of them?” asked the librarian.

“All of them.”

Dick went to a long table, with the irrepressibly youthful Beck beside him.

In about ten minutes, an attendant came wheeling a book bin on silent rubber tires. There were several score books, all old. The Avenger looked these over rapidly, took out three, and began skimming through them.

As he did so, some curious things began happening behind his back.

A man in a dark-blue suit, a little the worse for wear, and a derby hat in the same condition, tiptoed from street door to librarian’s desk. He took every possible precaution to make no noise, a thing which naturally made the librarian, a woman of forty with fringy hair and glasses, stare at him with raised eyebrows. You’re supposed to be quiet in a library, but you don’t have to be
that
quiet.

He got to the desk. She started to say something. He put a thick finger to his lips. There was a pad of scratch paper and pen and ink on the desk. The man wrote, then handed the pad to the librarian.

She read the short message with eyes widening. Then she looked at The Avenger, bent over his book with the rare concentration that was one of his strengths. She looked at him with loathing, with positive horror. She nodded violently to the man.

Then the second curious thing happened.

In an elaborately careless way, stopping now and then to glance at the books nearest her on the shelves, she went to the rear of the big main room. There were two attendants there. She passed them smiling, saying something.

They looked at each other in a breathless, frightened kind of way and drifted toward the door. The librarian paused near two other small groups, and these groups, too, after a few seconds, walked slowly out of there. The librarian started to go back toward the door, too.

The Avenger, pale eyes brilliant on the rapidly turning pages of the last book he had selected, said to Beck in a low tone, “You’d better get out of here, fast.”

“Why, what do you mean?” said Beck.

“Something is about to happen. Everyone has been leaving. Haven’t you seen that? Leave here at once!”

“But what about you?”

“I’m prepared for trouble. I got ready for it when I noticed that we were followed here to the library.”

“Followed? We
were?
I didn’t notice that.”

“If you don’t leave at once,” said The Avenger, eyes on the book all the time as if he were aware of nothing but the printed page, “you may be carried out.”

“All right, I’ll leave. In a minute.”

Suddenly, Beck’s voice was entirely different. Suddenly it wasn’t ebullient and over-youthful any more. It was quite steady. And when Benson turned, he saw that Beck’s eyes were steady, too, and so was Beck’s hand, in which a gun was held.

The gun was pointed at The Avenger’s throat!

“Turn around, chair and all,” said Beck. “Sit with your back to me.”

Benson did so, pale eyes brilliant as ice in moonlight. The gun came lightly to rest on the back of his neck.

“I saw you ‘get prepared’ in the car,” Beck said. “You put quite a number of interesting and deadly little gadgets in your pockets, didn’t you? Well, I’m going to take them all out again. I’m going to give the men who are after you a nice, fair break. You can face them with empty hands, and we’ll see what the famous, and oh-so-pious, Avenger will do in a case like that.”

Cautiously, his hand went up. He clutched the collar of The Avenger’s coat and jerked downward, sliding the garment half down his arms and body and pinioning arms to sides. Then he began going through Benson’s intricately pocketed vest and dumping things out.

The coat trick is a good one. Yank a man’s coat halfway down his arms and he’s held as neatly as if in a straight jacket, particularly if it is buttoned, as Benson’s coat had been. It works with almost everyone.

But it didn’t work with The Avenger. Because the coat trick is a good one, and one that is widely known, the man with the colorless, deadly eyes and the steel spring body had long ago worked out a reply for it.

A very simple reply.

First, he jerked his body to the left, with no preliminary movement of any kind to warn the man behind him. Then he caught the wrist above the hand that was dipping into his vest pockets and after that he shot his body forward from the waist in a powerful catapulting action.

The instant shot that had come from Beck’s gun seared The Avenger’s neck, but that was all. There were no more shots, because then Beck himself shot forward over Dick’s shoulder in a great, awkward arc and crashed on his back on the floor. He was up and running in a single bounce. Running toward the door—and toward a group of at least a dozen men there!

Benson strained on the coat. It was fairly new and of good material, but it couldn’t stand that explosive strain of muscle. It is doubtful whether heavy canvas would have held up.

The coat fell from him, with all the buttons off the front and ripped from bottom to collar in the back. But the strain also ripped the vest, and it, too, dropped to the floor.

Meanwhile, the calm, colorless eyes had noted the odd way in which Beck was treated by the men at the door. As Beck had raced toward them, a couple had raised their guns and aimed at him. Which was strange. His actions had been that of a man in with the gang—another of their band. Yet, they uncertainly pointed guns at him.

However, none shot. They parted, with equal uncertainty, as if not knowing quite what to do about this fellow who had held a gun on a man they, too, were against. They let Beck go through and out the door.

Then they confronted The Avenger again. That is, they confronted the spot where Benson had been. That spot was empty now. Whatever the cause of their indecision about Beck, it had allowed The Avenger about five seconds in which to get somewhere else.

He had used the narrow margin of time to leap to the nearest book balcony, swing himself bodily up and over its low rail, and crouch there on the steel flooring between narrow partitions made up mainly of rows of books.

He’d had no time to pick up the pieces of the vest, which was a pity. Because in the vest’s various pockets were special crime-fighting inventions of his that would have made things very interesting for this gang which had the nerve to come into a public library after him in broad daylight and to take over the library for their own murderous purposes.

With the unique articles in the vest, he could have overpowered these twelve or fifteen men easily and quickly. It was what he had planned; indeed, it was the reason he’d let them come up on him like this.

But Beck had knocked his methodical plan into a cocked hat.

However, The Avenger wasn’t bare-handed by any means. His right hand went to a slim sheath at the calf of his right leg, and his left hand to a slightly dissimilar sheath at the calf of his left.

His right hand came out with a streamlined little .22 that looked more like a sleek length of slim pipe with a bend for a handle than a revolver. On the end was a silencer, of his own devising. This weapon, with grim affection, Benson called Mike.

In his left hand appeared a needle-sharp throwing knife with a hollow tube for a handle. This was known as Ike.

The Avenger crouched silently there. He heard one of the men yell, “He got away! It ain’t possible, but he did! Out! After him.”

Another, however, cut in with less excitement. “The guy couldn’t have got out. There’s just this one door and we’re plugging it. He must be on one of them balconies. Look around.”

The Avenger’s pale eyes glowed like glacial ice. He was going to have to fight his way clear—if he could. Some day he was going to get into a spot from which he couldn’t extricate himself. That conclusion, in a life as perilous as his, was foregone.

It might be that this was the spot. It remained to be seen.

He moved just a little and got Mike up and around a stack of books so that the little gun could level on the men near the door. The Avenger seemed to take no aim at all when Mike spoke.

To be precise, Mike didn’t speak so much as whisper. There was a little, subdued
“Phhht!”
And the man at the extreme left fell as if he were dead.

He was not dead. The Avenger never took life. To avoid doing so, he had practiced shooting for countless hours, till he could put a slug from Mike within a fraction of an inch of where he wanted it. And where he wanted it was on the exact top of a skull. That way, the slug grazed off the bone, knocking the owner of the skull unconscious, but not killing him. “Creasing” him was what an old-time Westerner would have called it.

When the man fell, the rest gaped at him in something like fear. They’d heard nothing, seen nothing. And their pal fell with blood trickling from the top of his head as though someone had clubbed him down.

Another man fell in the same way. And then the big fellow with the derby who seemed to be their leader, yelled: “Get behind something. Take cover! All of you!”

They scurried in various directions. But not before a third man had sprawled face forward on the smooth tile floor, out like a light.

The third shot had revealed The Avenger’s approximate position on the first balcony. The man in the derby raised up like a jack-in-the-box, and threw something.

The something hit about where Benson had shot from. There was a crashing bang as it exploded! Books showered in all directions, some almost whole, some torn to shreds. The flooring of the balcony gave way and slid down at this section. But Benson wasn’t on it.

With the last shot, he had raced silently down the balcony along the narrow lane at the rear.

The man in the derby swore as he saw no body in the ruins. He began tossing grenades like peanuts into a monkey cage.

Explosion after explosion banged out, as each little deadly bomb lit a few yards forward from the last one. But, each time, the flooring that came down descended empty of all but books and twisted plates of metal partition.

Then Mike spoke a fourth time. The man in the derby, raised for one more murderous toss, sagged back and down with a hole right in the crown of the derby where the top of his head should be. If his head had a dome on it higher than average estimation, he’d be something more than unconscious; that was a chance The Avenger had had to take.

The gang down there seemed to be out of bombs. But it was a draw; Dick was out of slugs. Ammunition for Mike was in his coat. And the little gun had a cylinder so small that it held only four cartridges, with number of bullets sacrificed to small and streamlined size.