House of Death

CHAPTER IV The Shining Clan

It was about one-thirty in the morning, now. But it was such a pleasant night that there was a good deal of traffic on the wide new road leading north. It helped Benson disguise the fact that he was following the black sedan.

Not that such help was imperative. The Avenger could trail a car so that the car’s driver had scarcely a chance to suspect. First on one lane, then on the other, with cowl lights, then brights, then back to cowl lights, first near and then far back, and then letting a red light get between.

The chase went on for about fifteen miles, with the sedan going at a decorous forty miles an hour.

Once Benson saw the man beside the driver slither over the back of the front seat of the sedan and drop into the rear. He stayed there after that, as if something back there had suddenly made his attention vital.

Then the car abruptly swerved to the right, off the main road and down a rutted area that was lined with dump trucks and steam shovels and would, in the near future, be another new road feeding off to the east.

Benson went past this and came back across open land on foot. It was all parkway along here, dark with lusty new-planted trees, and with no one at all around. He was puzzled as to the move. This was a blind alley for a car. It had a dead end. Why…

The answer came in a moment. There was another car in there. It had been waiting for the first. In it were six men. They were piling out as Benson got to a clump of trees about twenty yards from the cars.

The eight men began talking together in low tones; then the two from the sedan reached in and dragged out the body of a girl.

Some of these eight had flat, Slavic faces; some had fair hair and almost Prussian characteristics. But they all had one thing in common. They were foreign-looking.

The two started to load the girl into the larger sedan that had been there first. And then it developed that this meeting place was an unfortunate idea.

Still another car whirled into the wide dirt plateau destined to be a road and traffic circle.

Dick had noticed a car ahead of the one he had trailed. It had occurred to him that perhaps this car had something to do with the chase; you can trail from ahead as well as behind. Then, when the black sedan swirled in and he himself stopped, he had seen the other go peacefully on and decided that he was wrong.

It seemed he had not been wrong. The other car had simply sped to the next crosscut, or perhaps cut right across the center parkway to get on the backtrack, and had returned here as fast as its driver could take it.

From the car suddenly lanced red streaks, and there was a sound of submachine guns. Three of the men from the first two cars fell. The rest dropped and began pouring back lead. Evidently, the third car was not bullet-proofed, for the men in it got out in a hurry.

Benson was in a position to see them, even though the others could not.

These men, too, were foreigners. But of a different brand. They were Orientals. The Avenger, able almost always to pick a man’s race, saw Mongol cheekbones, Eurasian blends of feature, and several Arabs.

It developed into the most vicious fight imaginable. The two gangs blasted away at each other with the abandon of two patrol parties on a battle front. Now and then, a man yelled, or moaned, and sagged out of the fight; and the cars, used as barriers by the combatants, began to resemble perambulating Swiss cheeses.

Benson was undisturbed by the slaughter. It was gang against gang, with plenty of time before a patrol car could hear, or be summoned, and interfere.

He hoped the mutual massacre would be complete. But in the meantime there was a point to rectify.

That was the girl.

The car into which she had been loaded was down on four flat, bullet-drilled tires. Behind it was a man carefully firing first from around the front end, then from the rear; another man lay with sightless eyes turned up to the stars, not doing anything at all.

Benson reached to the calf of his right leg and from a slim holster, there, drew Mike.

Mike was a special little .22. It was so streamlined and sleek that its butt was more like a slight bend in a length of blued pipe than a handle; and its cylinder held only four bullets, for smallness and compactness. Mike was silenced so that its report was only a whisper from a deadly small muzzle.

Mike whispered now, and the man left alive behind the car went down. But he was not dead.

Richard Benson did not kill. With Mike, he knocked out his adversaries by “creasing” them: glancing a bullet off the exact top of the skull, so that the man was knocked cold instead of dead.

It was an eighth-inch shot that perhaps no other marksman on earth could have duplicated. He made it now.

The man dropped; there was no sound of Mike’s whispered spattt over the other noises of battle. Benson went to that side of the car, opened it, and took from the rear the body that had been placed there.

The girl was still alive. Her breathing fanned Benson’s cheek. He started to his coupé with her, and then saw something in a reflection of a headlight glare that made him pause.

The Oriental-looking crew was getting ahead of the other gang. It looked like sure success for them; there were five of them left and only three of the other band.

What Benson saw that made him halt with the girl in his arms was the action of one of those three survivors.

The man took something out of his pocket, held it to his lips, and then, with an effort obvious even at that distance and in dim light, swallowed it.

Benson laid the girl down and went back.

The Avenger habitually wore inconspicuous gray suits, which made him look more like a gray steel bar than a human being. But in dozens of pockets and compartments of those suits he carried an assortment of weapons and devices that did not show from the outside at all.

He whipped one out now, a thirty-foot length of some kind of shiny cord that looked as if perhaps it had been made from piano wire. It was not metallic, however. It was a thin line of a material made of a plastic that was Benson’s own discovery. It would hold three hundred pounds and was as pliable as silk.

This went out in a long, graceful loop.

The loop bit around the neck of the man who had put on the swallowing act, and in about six seconds the man was at Benson’s side, still trying frantically to get the thing off while he was being reeled in. A fist smashed his jaw.

The shots stopped. Two of the fighters had seen the man stagger swiftly backward into the night, with a suggestion of a line or something taut behind him. Something was very strong…

The Avenger was only an average-sized person, but he put the girl under his left arm, picked up the man by his belt with his right, and ran — not walked — to his coupé.

He was driving off when the survivors of the two gangs, working in unison now, poured bullets after him.

MacMurdie’s drugstore, on Waverly Place, looked like an average drugstore, but emphatically wasn’t. Behind the ordinary-looking store, there was a back room twice as big. A steel door cut this room off.

In the room were two laboratories. Along one side was electrical apparatus used by Smitty in his experiments and new discoveries. Along the other side was a chemical set-up not to be outclassed in even the big commercial labs. And on this side, Fergus MacMurdie worked.

He was working there, now, on an anesthetic that would kill pain instantly by local application without — as it did now — killing the flesh it touched, too. He had been working on it for a long time.

Mac’s tragedy — a criminal tragedy which had irreparably seared his, like Benson’s, life — showed in his bleak, bitter blue eyes. He had feet almost as big as Josh’s, bone mallets of fists, a sandy-red hide with big dim freckles just underneath, and ears that stood out like sails.

“Whoosh!” exclaimed Mac aloud, after putting a drop of the unfinished anesthetic on the tail of an experimental rat and watching the tail shrivel. “‘Tis a fine substitute for sulphuric I’ve got — but no anesthetic. The devil take it!”

He started to work on a beaker of the stuff, then turned with a scowl. The big cabinet in the rear of the room was buzzing.

That cabinet, on Smitty’s side of the lab, was the last word in television sets, better than any the big corporations had yet produced. The buzz told that somebody wanted to talk to him on it.

Mac switched it on. In a big screen over the front of it a face formed. A full-moon face with wide, naïve eyes.

“Smitty!” snapped Mac. “Ye mountain of meat. D’ye know it’s after two in the mornin’? What d’ye mean by—?”

“Better get over to headquarters, Mac,” said Smitty, from the screen. “Looks like something’s breaking. The chief is out, but I’ve a hunch he’ll be back soon.”

“That’s different, mon,” said Mac. “I’ll be over at once.”

He reached there as Benson was rolling his car down the ramp to the basement garage.

Up in the big top-floor room, he looked at the girl, and at the Slavic-looking gangster snaked by the thin line from the middle of the gunfight.

The girl was moving under her own power, now, but the man was not. It seemed that Dick had struck a little harder than he intended, in the necessity for quick action back there off the parkway.

“Concussion,” judged MacMurdie.

Benson, an unparalleled physician himself, nodded.

“I’d judge so, too. I’m glad you’re here, Mac. I want you to work on him.”

“I’d rather work on the girrrl,” burred Mac, with a twinkle in his eyes that brought an answering wan smile to the lips of the dark-haired beauty.

“The man swallowed something,” said Benson. “Get a stomach pump and see what it was.”

“I can tell you that, I think,” said the girl. “It was a gold medallion.” She pointed to the coronetlike roll of her black hair, disarranged over the right ear. “I had it in my hair. While I was being driven in the car I felt a hand take it.”

“Gold medallion?” said Benson, turning his pale, agate-bright eyes on her.

“I — yes.” She stopped. “It was for the medallion that I was kidnapped, I think. It’s death! I had death in my hair.” She finished with the dramatic sense of her Latin ancestry.

“Why would the gold medallion be so important?”

The girl bit her lip.

“Will you think it terrible? I do not want to tell you. Not even you, Mr. Benson. Oh, I thank you so much for the quickness that let you trace me, and the cleverness that enabled you to rescue me.”

“You don’t care to tell me about the gold medallion?”

“Please. No. I tried to telephone you to ask you to hide me from death for forty-eight hours. Only that. Then I am to meet other members of my family, and I shall be safe.”

“Your family?”

The girl’s dark head went up and back.

“Very, very pretty,” whispered Smitty to Nellie.

The fragile-looking little blonde shot the girl a nasty glance and the giant a venomous one.

“Hm-m-m!” was all she said.

“I am from Spain. My name is Carmella Haygar,” the dark beauty said.

“Haygar?” repeated The Avenger, his eyes like chips of stainless steel in his calm face. “Of the international business-and-banking family of that name?”

“Yes.” There was regal bearing to Carmella’s head.

“A shining clan,” said The Avenger softly.

Some of the proud lift went from the dark head.

“It was a shining clan. Cut now — broken. Ruined! My branch of the family, the one that has lived in Spain for two hundred years, is typical. My father and brother were killed in the revolution there. Our fortune and lands were expropriated. I am the only one of the great Spanish Haygars left. I escaped to this country barely with my life and with a few meaningless keepsakes, such as the gold medallion I spoke of.”

“So meaningless,” snapped Nellie Gray in an aside to Smitty, “that men kill each other like flies to get it.”

The Avenger did not dwell on that fact.

“You are to meet others of the Haygar family in two days, you say?”

“Yes,” said the girl.

MacMurdie came in.

“Mon, even unconscious, he was reluctant to give it up,” he said. “But here it is.”

With an eager cry, Carmella took possession of the disk in Mac’s hand. The little gold medallion.

“May I see it?” said Dick, voice calm but compelling.

“Yes.” Carmella handed it to him. “Just a keepsake, as I said. But it is very valuable to me for… for sentimental reasons.”

The eyes of The Avenger expressed nothing as he examined the gold disk. They were as blank as bits of glacier ice, and as cold.