The Avenger 9 - Tuned for Murder (6 page)

So the three running men didn’t yell again. There wasn’t time.

They dropped their guns, staggered a moment and then fell. They lay very, very still!

Benson and the other three put on nose-clip masks and walked over to them. They walked warily. Most men would have been careless; would have figured that they had won their battle and the danger was over. But not these four. Without a word being exchanged, they all had the same thoughts:

“The gun must have come here in some sort of vehicle. Where was their car? And was there another man in it and perhaps training gunsights on them?”

Nothing happened, however, and no sound could be heard. They bent over the three.

“So they tapped Sessel’s telephone wire, and knew we were coming!” said Smitty.

“And prepared a welcome committee,” nodded Benson. “In doing that, since they had failed, they did a stupid thing. We came here more or less blindly, not knowing if there was a real reason for investigation. Now we do know, since someone thought it important enough, to prevent investigation, to kill us before we could look around.”

“You knew something like this was ahead of us,” said Josh.

Again The Avenger nodded.

“The detour gag is a pretty old one. And so much a matter of routine to guard against that before we started I phoned the highway commission and found that there were no detours at present between New York and Garfield City. But I followed along the road pointed out by the fake sign to see if we could find out anything.”

“We don’t seem to be findin’ out much,” gloomed the pessimistic MacMurdie.

And, indeed, they didn’t seem to be.

The pockets of the three were all emptied now. In none of them was there an identifying article. Besides, all labels had been taken from their hats and clothing. It was the usual gangland preparation when gunmen departed for a risky job.

Benson stared at the guns. They were the standard tommy guns of the underworld and had no tale to tell. He went back to the felled trees. And there he found one object.

That object was a “pineapple” bomb which none of the three had kept his head enough to toss when the car unexpectedly drove straight at their ambush. It wouldn’t have mattered, anyhow. The big sedan could take such small bombs in its stride.

“Look at the fuse!” said Smitty.

On the metal fuse case were the letters:

GARFIELD GEAR

“That’s a standard army casing,” said Josh, eyes narrowing.

“Garfield Gear makes army and navy parts,” Benson said. “But I don’t know that one of their fuse casings means anything here. It might have been stolen, or bought from a crooked workman.”

They went back to the car. As they went, Mac cast murderous looks at the three men lying on the ground. They were rats. And Mac had a frenzied hatred of men who were in the rat class. As always, it wrenched him to leave adversaries lying loose. Yet he knew the realistic wisdom of the chief’s philosophy.

You couldn’t kill a defenseless man in cold blood, crook or not. You could turn them over to the police, but in jobs of the size The Avenger always tackled, there were bound to be superiors who could get them free on bail in a few hours.

Therefore, forget about them and concentrate solely on getting the superiors.

The four got into the sedan. Benson backed it onto the road, and they crossed the gully.

Ahead and to the right was the quarry they had noticed before the excitement at the gully. There had been a lot of quarries in their drive, and this seemed to be just one more. It was filled with water, and was quite pretty.

Josh and Mac and Smitty stared at it in relaxed appreciation as the sedan rolled along the road with only a thin guard rail between. Even Benson glanced at the little lake for an instant out of the corners of his pale, deadly eyes.

No man can be superhuman. The Avenger came about as close to it as a mortal can come. But even he was not infallible.

With the slight instant that his eyes were on the quarry lake, there was a berserk roar from the woods at their left. The roar of a heavy motor gunned to the full. Instantly Benson was vibrantly alert, again, but it was too late.

A heavy truck rocketed from the woods, down a lane so dim that it could only be seen when you were right at its mouth. It shot for the sedan. And its goal was absolutely assured.

There was a level, clear space at each side of the lane, where the truck could veer right or left if necessary. That meant that the sedan could stop still, back up, or shoot ahead—and still not get out of the way of the truck, which could change direction just as the sedan did.

Benson tried to shoot ahead. The sedan motor roared with as deep a note as that of the truck motor as it hurled toward the car.

The heavy front bumper of the truck ground into the left front fender of the sedan, forced the wheels hard right.

Benson fought the steering wheel. With the astounding power that lay in his lithe body, he jerked them back in line. But the elephant weight of the truck was still jammed against their side, straining, pushing.

For an instant it looked as if the eight thousand pounds of the sedan would be enough; as if the steel hands at the steering wheel would be enough. But the instant passed!

The sedan leaned through the guard rail. Two wheels slid over the sheer edge of the old quarry. The track seemed to squeal with triumph like a vast boar. And then the sedan went over, with the four men in it.

It hit the water with a great splash, and sank, wavering from side to side like a dropped coin as long as the eye could follow its subterranean course. Then the eye could no longer see the sinking bulk. After all, it was sixty-eight feet down at this point.

There was no sound. The ripples subsided on the surface of the water. Air bubbles came from the black depths. Then these ceased, too.

The jolly-looking fat man at the wheel of the truck chuckled a little. Then he backed the truck, heavy iron bumper-guard bent like a pretzel, from the water’s edge.

He ran back up the road to the gully, to see what had happened to the three men there; and, arriving, picked up their unconscious forms and put them in the truck. He went to the main highway and gathered up the false detour sign and the thug who had hidden it in the woods as soon as it had performed its task of turning Benson onto the side road.

Then, with all loose ends neatly gathered up, the fat man drove back to the penthouse apartment in Garfield City to collect the huge sum offered for killing The Avenger and his helpers.

Bit money! Easy money! The fat man chuckled as he thought just how easy it had been.

With the temporary mental lapse of the well-known banker, John Blandell, Garfield City seemed to have been let in for a series of lunatic occurrences.

There was Blandell’s weird act of giving away crisp one-dollar bills, in front of the bank.

There was the equally weird attempt of Henry Sessel to do a tap dance in the general office of the Garfield Gear Company.

There was the wholly incredible murder of the two men by Allen Wainwright—which was as outlandish as it would be for a Cabinet member to murder the President.

But the things didn’t stop there. They kept right on happening, only to less well-known personages.

The first succeeding thing was the utterly fantastic performance of an old man in a station wagon.

The old man was parked at the gate of the Garfield Gear Company yard. He was just sitting there in the station wagon. There were letters on the wagon’s side. They read:

CRANLOWE HEIGHTS

The old driver, a sturdy, rugged, gray-haired figure in livery, was staring unseeingly into space. But a glance at his face would have told you that he was neither simple-minded nor a woolgatherer. He was just relaxed, that was all, as a person tends to be when he is waiting for another person or for an answer to a message.

It was the latter the old man was waiting for. He had turned over to the gate guard an urgent letter. The letter had been taken to Mr. Jenner. Now the old man waited for a reply to it.

Near the straight, heavy wire of the fence, a mongrel dog happened to be prowling. The dog yawned, scratched at a flea, started to trot past the station wagon.

A bone, in the last stages of decomposition, attracted the dog, and he started toward it. Then he stopped.

He began to howl! It was a strange sound. It was the way a dog often bays at the moon, or in answer to shrill music.

Or it was like the dread sound a dog makes when there is death in the air.

The dog howled and scratched frantically at its ears. And the unseeing gaze of the old man at the wheel of the station wagon suddenly became really unseeing—and blank! It was as if the soul in him had abruptly died, leaving only the husk of him sitting there.

Down the street rolled a van. It was one of these things that travel coast to coast and look as big as a boxcar. A ten-wheeler. Garfield City, being on a big State highway, attracted a lot of vans like that; and they rolled past the Garfield plant because that was on the edge of the four-lane concrete strip.

The van rumbled forward at about twenty miles an hour over the local speed limit, which was thirty. And the old man in the station wagon stepped dreamily on the starter. The motor came to life. The man shoved into gear.

After that, no two versions agreed.

The gate guard said that the man simply rolled the station wagon right in front of the van, like a little boy darting from behind a parked car into the path of another speeding one.

But that wasn’t credible, of course; so other versions, sounding more natural, were considered and the guard’s view ignored. The emergency brake of the station wagon had come off, rolling the car in front of the van before the van driver could stop. The old man had shoved into second instead of reverse, when he meant to back around and swing into the gate. He had—

Oh, there were a lot of plausible-sounding theories. But they didn’t change the fact that the station-wagon driver had deliberately started his car and, open-eyed, driven it into the path of the grinding, roaring van.

Inside the Garfield plant, at the moment, something else was happening that might be looked on as equally odd, considering the man who was doing it and the implications of the act.

Jenner wasn’t reading the letter the old man had brought. He wasn’t in his office to read it. He was in the company stockroom.

He had walked in the doorway with a sober greeting to the stock clerk, and gone to the racks containing jigs and dies—master tools for stamping or drilling precision parts in quantity.

The stock clerk hung around till a call from a foreman for a drill rod drew him to the front. Then Jenner acted fast.

Looking around to be sure he was unobserved, the president of the company dipped into the pigeonhole containing a male and female die for one of the punch presses. They were small dies. He put them into his hip pockets where they wouldn’t sag enough to be noticeable. But first he took identical parts from the hip pockets and slid these new ones into the rack to replace the older, worn ones.

He turned around before the clerk had come back. No one in the vast plant could dream of the transfer. The finished hole punched in beryllium alloy by that press could be inspected as much as you pleased and found correct—because the precision gauge used for the measuring was not quite right either. Jenner had changed the gauges over a month ago.

The company president smiled pleasantly at the stock clerk, complimented him on the neatness and system with which he kept his stock, and left.

He went up to his office and was handed the letter delivered by the station-wagon driver.

The letter was from Jesse Cranlowe, and it asked what in the name of thunder had happened to the last royalty payment on torpedo parts made for the United States Government. Cranlowe wanted it, and wanted it badly.

Jenner called in Grace, and dictated smoothly to the pale, partially bald young man.