Murder on Wheels

CHAPTER III Headquarters for Trouble

Bleek Street, in New York, is only a short block long, but it looms big in the city’s importance.

One side of the block is taken up by the blank back of a great concrete warehouse. On the other side, are three old red brick buildings thrown into one, flanked to east and west by vacant stores and small storage buildings. All are owned or under lease to the man who makes the street so important, Richard Henry Benson.

The middle entrance of the three-in-one red brick building has a small sign over the door:

In other words, headquarters of The Avenger and his aides. In still other words, headquarters for trouble; it is to this door that more deadly trouble is brought than to any other in America.

Benson was up in the great top-floor room, taking up the entire third stories of all three remodeled buildings, now. With him were Nellie Gray, Smitty, Josh and Rosabel.

Nellie Gray was unobtrusively watching the chief, as he sat at his great desk checking over the final results of a multiple murder case he had just cleared up.

A most unusual man, this Benson. And a glance at him indicated the reason why he was called by the somewhat theatrical title, The Avenger, and why the underworld walked in such awe of him.

Though Dick Benson was only average in size, you knew from just looking at him that his body packed a whip-cord and steel-cable strength. His face was as dead as the frozen face of the moon, with the nerves so paralyzed by a previous nerve shock — the flesh so inelastic and immobile — that never could an expression register there.

But The Avenger’s eyes were his most salient feature. They were so light-gray as to be almost colorless — so pale as to seem to be holes in his dead face into which you could stare down at an icy, deadly glitter.

But Dick Benson was really a very young man. A very young man, even though the dead face below a shock of virile, snow-white hair made him seem much older.

Nellie Gray, dainty, demure blonde bombshell, was thinking something she had thought many times before. She was thinking of a thing that was very feminine, and that most women thought at sight of The Avenger. He must have been strikingly handsome before the terrific shock had so altered his face and hair. What a shame that he—

“Has that girl called again?” The Avenger asked, looking at Nellie so sharply and suddenly that she went slightly pink with the fear that he’d read her mind.

“The one who left her name on the phone record?” said Nellie. “No.”

“You’ve tried to trace her in Detroit?”

“I tried three times,” Josh Newton cut in.

Josh was a most amazing fellow. A tall and gangling Negro, he looked sleepy and dull-witted. But Josh was a highly educated and singularly intelligent man.

“She checked out of the Detroit hotel from which she phoned,” amplified Josh. “And no one there knows where she went—”

In the wall next to the door leading to the stairs suddenly glowed a pin point of red. At the same time, there was a soft buzz from a black box on a table.

The red glow indicated that someone in the vestibule downstairs was pressing the bell for admission. The black box — about the size and shape of a shoe box — was a remarkably fine, small television set designed by the radio wizard, Smitty. It showed whoever was in the vestibule.

The giant Smitty stepped to the box.

“Young fellow, looks decent enough, no warning from the electric eye of guns or other weapons on him,” he said.

The Avenger nodded his snow-white head, and Smitty pressed the vestibule lock release. In a moment their visitor was at the door. His eyes went curiously over the group, and then rested instinctively on Dick Benson’s awesome, dead face.

“You are Mr. Benson?”

The virile, thick shock of white hair nodded.

“I am Robert Mantis,” said the young man pleasantly. “I’m calling in behalf of a girl named Doris Jackson.”

It was typical of the absolute self-control and quick wit of all in that great room that no one showed an expression of any kind, though each knew that this was the name of the girl who had called so urgently awhile before.

“We would be glad to have Miss Jackson, herself, call,” said The Avenger, pale eyes drilling the brown eyes of Robert Mantis as if going right through them to the back of his skull.

“She intends doing just that,” said Mantis. “She asked me to come here first and make an appointment. I am to meet her at the Pennsylvania Station in”—he looked at his wristwatch—“just twenty-five minutes. She had intended taking a plane from Detroit to New York at first, but something changed her mind. Maybe she thought the airport would be watched.”

“She is in danger?”

“In great danger, I believe. In fact,” said Mantis, “I’m wondering if you can send someone to the station with me — in case of trouble.”

“You’re expecting trouble, then?” asked Benson, voice as cold and emotionless as his dead face was icy and without expression.

Mantis shrugged.

“They know where she is bound for. This place.”

“And who are ‘they’?”

“That I don’t know,” said Mantis. “Some enemies of Doris Jackson who evidently don’t want her to keep on living.”

“Go with him, Smitty,” said Benson, to the giant. “Then bring Miss Jackson here, at once, and we’ll hear what she has to say.”

Smitty and Mantis went out and down the stairs.

“Boy!” breathed Mantis, looking up at Smitty’s colossal spread of shoulders and the vast wall of his chest. “If there is trouble, I’d say you could take care of a lot of it!”

Behind them, Josh’s intelligent eyes went to The Avenger’s dead face.

“He certainly didn’t have much explanation to give,” said Josh.

The Avenger’s pale eyes were like diamond drills. He may have read a great deal from Mantis’s face and appearance. No one would ever know unless he chose to tell them.

At the street, Smitty said: “You came in a cab?”

“My own car,” said Mantis. “We can take that to the train.”

His car was a rather old touring job with the top down, and Smitty’s china-blue eyes clouded at the sight of that. The giant was used to riding behind bulletproof glass. The idea of having nothing but thin air between him and possible gun muzzles was one he didn’t like. But he got in beside Mantis.

First, though, he noticed that the car had a Michigan license.

Mantis backed around, because Bleek Street is a deadend street; then he started toward the north and south avenue on which Bleek Street opened.

“What’s Doris Jackson like?” Smitty asked.

“She’s young, about twenty-two. She has dark-gold hair and deep-blue eyes. She’s about the prettiest thing—”

Mantis looked embarrassed and shut up.

“You two?” said Smitty.

“Uh-huh, we’re going to be married.”

The giant looked sorely disappointed.

Tiny Nellie Gray, who looked as fragile as a porcelain doll and was actually able to throw strong men around like dumbbells with her knowledge of wrestling and jujitsu, was always ribbing Smitty, and a stranger might have thought she had absolutely no use for the big fellow. Friends, though, suspected that he was very close to her heart.

Similarly, it was pretty well agreed upon that Smitty thought the world began with Nellie’s tiny feet and ended in the blond crown of her head, about five feet up.

But that didn’t keep the giant from being very pleased indeed at the prospect of having other pretty girls around, unless they were attached to some one else — as this Doris Jackson seemed to be.

The touring car had swung north on the avenue.

“Better take Seventh,” said Smitty, and Mantis nodded and drove to that broad street. Rather, he drove cross-town toward it. He never did quite reach it!

Just before they got to Seventh Avenue, there was a jam of trucks loading and unloading; this was the wholesale section.

Great vans were backed in to the curb at an angle, and the street was narrow. To traverse it, you had to thread a zigzag path between these monster trucks. And with three more vans to pass, one of the monsters moved.

A ten-ton closed truck roared like a bull elephant and pulled away from the curb just in time to block the path of the touring car.

“What—” began Mantis.

“Out of the car!” yelled Smitty. “Quick—”

The big fellow could move like a slim kid when he had to. And he had to, now! For with the suddenly closed path had come an attack on all sides.

Sun glinted on several gun barrels! There were half a dozen roaring shots. But none of them got Smitty because he had vaulted the side of the car and was abruptly behind still another truck down the street. And none got Mantis because Mantis had rolled out his side, too, and was under the truck that had barred their way.

Now, Smitty could see what he was up against.

In the cab of the truck that had moved were three men, two of them with machine guns. The three were not in the kind of clothes you’d normally use for truck driving; so it looked as if they’d captured the thing from the regular crew.

Lying flat on top of the next monster were two more men, with one of them holding an automatic and the other cupping his hand around a thing about the shape of a lemon but bigger and glinting metallically!

The man threw the thing even as Smitty spotted it. Threw it at the old touring car, in the tonneau of which it lit squarely.

Then there wasn’t any more touring car.

After a roar that shook the eardrums, and a clanging of metal and cloud of dust, there were a lot of pieces in the street looking like a kid’s puzzle — and that was all!

“You didn’t get him!” yelled the other man on the truck top, suddenly spying Mantis under the next truck.

He began shooting down at him. At the same time, the men in the blocking truck began shooting, too — at Mantis and at Smitty. Or, rather, at Smitty’s columnar legs.

So Smitty swung into action, too!

From his vest pockets, he jerked two little glass globes about the size of prunes. He snapped one at the cab with the three men in it and the other at the top of the neighboring truck. The two globes seemed to burst at about the same time.

After the thundering of the explosion and the deadly crack of guns, the soft plop of the two globes didn’t sound like much. But sound had nothing to do with efficiency, in this case.

Inside those little globes was a gas of the devising of Fergus MacMurdie, chemical expert of The Avenger’s band. The stuff couldn’t be seen or smelled; but it could sure act! A whiff of it would knock a man out for two hours.

The two on top of the truck whiffed — and promptly lay down as if suddenly very tired. One had been aiming a shot as he did so, and the bullet went glancing off the fender of the truck and wound up in the street.

But the three in the cab weren’t so much affected. They were farther from Smitty and at an angle that had made it difficult to aim precisely.

They must have gotten just a faint touch of it, for one of them clawed at his throat and the other had to prop his head up with his cupped hand as if he were extremely sleepy all of a sudden. But the man at the wheel was at least able to drive.

And did.

Up against something they couldn’t understand, with the first plain chance at the death of their quarry muffed, they got out of there, slamming over bits of the touring car on their way.

“Mantis!” yelled Smitty.

From all the business places along the street heads were poking and people were running. And the last thing Smitty wanted then was to be delayed by crowds. He wanted to get Robert Mantis — whose precaution in asking for a companion on the trip to the station to meet Doris Jackson had certainly been justified.

But Mantis wasn’t anywhere in view.

A squad car roared up, coming the wrong way down the one-way street. Two men came at Smitty with drawn guns.

Then they put the guns up.

The Avenger was fast becoming a legend in New York. All the cops knew him. And the whole force was rapidly beginning to know Benson’s aides by sight, too. To have seen gigantic Smitty once was to remember him for all time. And these two detectives had seen him before.

“These two,” jerked Smitty, pointing to the two on the truck top. “Put them on ice, will you? And if it’s all right with you, I’ll beat it. Work to do, fast. I’ll be at Bleek Street if you want me.”

He legged it to Seventh Avenue and hailed a cab. There was no use hunting around for Mantis. If the fellow hadn’t showed up by now, after Smitty’s two stentorian yells, it meant that he was way out of earshot and still going.

Which was suspicious.

Smitty was trying to puzzle out how the devil the men had known they were coming down that cross street on the way to Seventh Avenue, so that they could be there ahead of them to ambush them.

They could have been ahead of the touring car, and have been forewarned when Mantis pulled to the left to make a turn. And Smitty remembered they had waited for a long red light before turning. That would have given the gunmen time to prepare their trap.

Or they could have been tipped off, somehow, by Mantis that this was the street he was going to cross on. Only — it had been Smitty who suggested that street.

He finally decided the men must have been ahead and had anticipated their turn.

But the giant still felt pretty suspicious about that guy, Mantis!