The Avenger 32 - The Death Machine (12 page)

The fraternity president sat on the edge of the scarred desk underneath the empty wall bookcase. “Not surprised,” he said. “Munn was a strange guy. See, we didn’t initiate him in this chapter. He was a transfer student, from Arizona. We don’t have to take transfers unless all the guys like them, but with the war on we can’t be so selective.”

“Arizona,” said Cole. “That’s far enough away from here. And the chances of running into another Arizona student are not that great.”

“He could have been a ringer,” said Nellie.

“A safe bet,” answered Cole.

“Well, now as a matter of fact,” said Plaut, “we have another guy from Arizona right in the DT house. He and Munn came from the same little town, some hick town named Murphy’s Lunge. Murphy’s Lunge, Arizona, that’s some name for your hometown.”

“This second Arizona chap,” pursued Cole. “What’s he look like?”

“Bud Cranford? Big guy, wears his hair real short,” said Plaut. “Why? You don’t think—”

“Cole!” cried Nellie.

A hand had appeared at the window beside him. There was a revolver in the hand.

Bang!

Gruener’s revolver cut a red line across the night.

The Avenger was not where he had been. The slug did not touch him.

“You
were
followed,” whispered Gruener, who dropped to the ground. A tangle of brush made a partial shield for him.

Emmy Lou, crouched against the trunk of a tree, tried to spot Benson.

To their left the motor launches bobbed on the dark water.

They’d seen the Avenger at the edge of the pier. He was no longer there.

The girl snatched her revolver from out of her purse. Listening, she heard no sound which betrayed the whereabouts of the Avenger. The water rubbed at the wooden pier, the foghorns hooted far off.

“There!” said Gruener, firing again.

But he’d been mistaken.

“Take it easy, you fool,” Emmy Lou told him.

“You’re the fool. Leading him straight to us.”

“I told you! No one followed me!”

“We’ve got to get to that boat,” Gruener said in a harsh whisper. “We must—” He abruptly stopped speaking.

Emmy Lou looked back across the twenty feet of foggy darkness which separated them.

“Someone’s got . . . got me,” gasped Gruener. “Shoot. Save me.”

The girl ignored him. She left the shelter of the tree, went running to the pier.

“Wait a moment, Miss Dennim,” the Avenger said. He was there again, standing on the edge of the pier.

She said nothing. She didn’t even slow. She simply pulled the trigger.

Benson dodged to one side. He hung for several long seconds on the edge of the pier, then tumbled down into the chill water.

The girl ran out onto the pier, cast off one of the launches and jumped into it. She got the engine going, went roaring away from there.

White foam spewed up in her wake. Emmy Lou had no clear idea where she was going. Her only objective was to get away from there. Away from all this.

She became aware, after a moment, of a new sound behind her. It was another motorboat engine.

“Could that be Gruener?” she asked herself. “No, that guy had him pinned down. Then it has to be someone who wants me.”

She increased the speed of the launch.

The sound of pursuit did not diminish.

Finally she took a look back. Yes, there were the lights of another launch. And it seemed to be closing the distance between the two of them.

She fired a shot at her pursuer.

The Avenger kept his head low behind the windscreen of the motorboat. A bullet went spinning high overhead, doing no harm.

He’d swum under the pier after his unexpected plunge and come up beside the two remaining launches just as Emmy Lou had gone speeding away. He picked himself a boat and gave chase.

“That is one very self-sufficient young lady,” he told himself.

He was closing the gap between them.

This apparently annoyed the girl. She was looking back over her shoulder more and more, the lights of the Avenger’s boat showed him that.

Now, holding the wheel with one hand, she turned and stood up in the seat. She took more careful aim with her gun.

There was something looming up ahead in the fog-smeared water. Something big, drifting with no lights. An old wreck of a scow which had apparently drifted free of its moorings somewhere.

“Look out!” shouted Benson. “Look out right in front of you!”

She didn’t hear him above the roar of the two engines. Very deliberately she took aim.

But she never fired.

Her launch hit the derelict scow.

The boat seemed to climb up into the night. Straight up on a geyser of spray. Then it began to wobble and spin. The girl, blond hair streaming, was thrown from the craft.

She came plummeting down and smashed onto the scow.

Then the boat landed. It chewed the wooden scow to pieces.

Jagged pieces of wood tumbled upward, foam shot up.

There was an explosion next. Gas had spilled out of the motorboat tank and there’d been a spark. Just one spark, but it set the whole boat exploding. The water shook. The foam seemed to catch fire.

The Avenger turned his launch back toward the shore. There was no need to wait for the girl. He’d seen, in a final flash of fire, what the explosion had done to her.

Smitty was sitting on the pier, dangling his feet over the edge. “Geeze, that was something awful,” he said as Benson tied up the launch. “How about the girl?”

The Avenger shook his head.

“Too bad.” Smitty cleared his throat. “Well, anyhow, I got the monkey who was running this little factory here. He’s trussed up over there.”

“This looks to be the place where they manufactured the death machines.”

“Yeah, and I recognize this guy. Name’s Otto Gruener.”

“Certainly, I know who he is,” said Benson. “Very key man in our government’s project.”

“So they thought. Now it seems he’s got another government he’s fonder of.” Smitty glanced out at the Bay. The last of the flames were dying away.

Cole shoved Nellie to the floor an instant before the window glass smashed.

He was heading there himself when the slug hit him in the side.

“What the hell!” Plaut flipped himself over behind his desk.

There was only that one shot.

“I take it that was brother Cranford.” Cole rose from the frayed carpet. He sprinted across the room, took a quick preliminary look, and then dived out into the night.

“What the hell,” repeated the fraternity president, bringing his head up above desk level. “I saw him get shot.”

“Bulletproof vest,” explained Nellie. She followed Cole out the window.

“What an unusual couple,” said Plaut.

Cole was wearing the special celluglass vest used only by members of the Justice, Inc. team. It had kept the slug from doing him any serious harm. The force of the bullet’s impact, though, left his side sore.

A fact he was especially aware of now as he ran down hill after Cranford.

Someone must have mentioned to the young man that Cole and Nellie were asking about him and he’d decided on a rather forceful way to discourage them.

The wide-shouldered boy was a good runner. Cole had all he could do keeping the distance between them from growing. He hadn’t been able to shorten it.

Cranford went skidding around a corner.

Cole tried to pick up his pace.

Up on a balcony of a sorority house a girl in a silk bathrobe was listening to a Tommy Dorsey record on a windup phonograph.

The houses ended at the bottom of the hill. When Cole got around the corner there were trees and then a stretch of parking lot.

The lot was empty.

He waited at the edge of the stand of trees. Rubbing at the sore spot on his side, he surveyed the misty parking area. “The case of the vanishing collegian,” he said to himself.

Across the parking lot rose the football stadium. Dark, locked up.

“Did brother Cranford venture into the stadium?” Cole, getting his pistol out, started across the gravel.

Alert, ready to flatten out if anybody took a shot at him, he walked swiftly across to the nearest entrance gate.

The gate was of heavy wire, nearly ten feet high, padlocked and chained.

“Think you can make it over?” asked Nellie behind him.

“Ah, princess, I didn’t hear your elfin tread.”

“Is he inside there?”

“That’s my first choice for his probable location.”

“Okay, so let’s have a look.” She jumped, caught hold of the wire some six feet up, and began to climb.

Cole followed suit.

A moment later they were inside the stadium grounds. An arched entryway was a few feet away.

“Yon portal should lead out to the seats and the field,” said Cole.

“Hold on a minute,” said the girl. “Cranford was wearing some kind of athlete’s sweater, didn’t you say?”

“Yes, that is a fact.”

“What sport did he earn his letter in?”

“Football.”

“So maybe he’s not hiding out among the bleachers,” she suggested. “He might be holed up in a locker room or someplace like that.”

“An excellent thought, pixie.” Cole pointed to their left. “There’s a sign indicating how one might reach the bowels of the stadium and the locker rooms in question.”

Side by side they walked to the archway and went down a wide dark flight of stone steps.

Cole fished out his pocket flashlight, clicked it on, and sheltered the glow with his cupped palm.

They descended in silence. They arrived at another level, then went down another deep row of stone stairs. At last they were under the stadium.

“I get the feeling I’m going to be fed to the lions,” said Cole in a low voice. “In fact, it smells something like a lion pit down here.”

Down the end of a tile corridor was a metal door with the words Home Team stenciled across it. The door was a few inches open.

Somewhere beyond that door water was dripping slowly onto a stone floor.

Cole and Nellie stopped close to the open door.

“Wait here a minute,” he said next to her ear. He passed the flashlight to her, entered the locker room.

A thick blackness that smelled of perspiration and soap surrounded him. Cole took short careful steps. Then he stood perfectly still, breath held, and listened.

A very faint rattle to his right.

“Shower room,” Cole told himself. “Brother Cranford is hiding out in the shower room.”

Ducking down, his eyes getting used to the darkness now, he moved slowly in the direction of the dripping water.

Another faint rattle as Cranford shifted his position in the shower room.

As he eased toward the white door, Cole noticed a canvas truck filled with dirty towels. He grabbed up a handful, dashed to the door, grabbed it open and tossed the bundle far into the white-tiled room.

Cranford fired at the tumbling mass of towels.

And before he could turn again toward the door Cole was on top of him. He slapped the weapon from the young man’s hand.

Twisting away, Cranford slid across the tile floor.

Cole went after him, tackling him. The boy’s head cracked against the wall and then the floor. He passed out and from his relaxing right hand something fell.

It took Cole a moment to find it in the dimness. It was a poison capsule.

Don Early slowed down. There was something about the way they were looking at him, illuminated by the headlight beams of his parked car. Something especially about Smitty.

“I see you beat me to it again,” he said, saying what he’d intended to say when he’d first noticed them out there. But he no longer felt it was the thing to say.

There was something wrong. He sensed that.

“We found the joint where they been building them gadgets,” said Smitty by way of greeting. “And we nabbed the guy who—”

“What about Emmy Lou?”

The giant looked down at his big feet. “Well . . .”

“She’s dead,” the Avenger said.

Early had been afraid of that, anticipating that since he’d stepped from his car. And yet it hit him. He stood where he was, not moving, not saying anything.