River of Ice

CHAPTER XIII The Missing Needle

There were just two things that could turn Smitty into a maniac. Ordinarily the giant was as even tempered as he was huge; but these two things could turn his disposition to acid. One was the use of his real name — either Heathcote or Algernon — instead of calling him Smitty. The other was — danger to Nellie.

That Nellie was in danger now was beyond doubt. The fragile looking blonde accepted ordinary dangers in her stride. It was urgent indeed when she broke down enough to yell for help. “Chief, we gotta do something!” cried Smitty. “We gotta do—”

Benson said nothing. He shifted the car into gear and began to lam toward lower Manhattan at seventy miles an hour. He could do that, because of the lateness of the night, the comparative freedom of traffic and the fact that the little private insignia on his cars just over the license plates were known to all cops and allowed him to break all ordinary traffic rules.

Seventy an hour — but toward what? “We gotta do something!” yelled Smitty. “Nellie’s in trouble and we don’t even know where she’s being held!”

“Yes, we do,” said The Avenger, tone quiet but deadly in its calm. Benson was as stirred as the giant, though he didn’t show it. The ice-eyed Avenger was the type of leader who inspired complete awe because he never let a follower down. When one of his reckless crew was in danger, everything else was stopped till that one was rescued. He was with his aides till death. In fact, he had once been with one — Josh Newton—beyond death. Electrocuted, indubitably a corpse, Josh had been brought back to life again by the marvelous skill of The Avenger.

“Nellie told us precisely where she was being held,” Benson said. “Clever place, too. One that wouldn’t ordinarily be thought of as a spot for a second crime.”

“A second crime?” said Smitty.

“Yes.” Benson twirled the wheel an inch and missed a ten-ton truck by about the same distance. “The first was murder.”

Smitty gaped at the white face and flaming, colorless eyes.

“Nellie said there was something with horns over her, and that the place had a beamed ceiling,” said Benson. “Smitty, you’ve seen a place with beamed ceilings recently.”

“I’ve seen a dozen places with beamed ceilings,” the giant said. “They’re a dime a dozen around New York.”

“Not places with beamed ceilings and also stuffed heads of animals around the walls,” The Avenger said.

Smitty yelped as if he had sat on something that squirmed. “Conroy’s place!”

“That’s right,” said Benson. “The rear library. The heads of lions, a zebra, tigers — and right over the divan the head of a North Woods moose. That’s the thing with horns she mentioned. A rather disconcerting thing to look up at, I’d say.”

“But Conroy’s place has been humming with cops,” the giant protested. “No one would stage a second crime there.”

“Why not? What better place to work in than one sealed by police and hence not to be entered by anyone? And at three o’clock in the morning, with all regular police routine concluded hours ago, the police themselves aren’t apt to come around.”

The car swerved into Fifth Avenue on screaming tires, righted itself, and went on its way, as silently as a shadow, to lower Fifth Avenue, where Conroy’s big apartment was located. And beside The Avenger, Smitty gnawed his vast knuckles in a frenzy of anger and hate and stored up an explosive wrath that was going to be very disruptive indeed when it was released in the midst of criminals.

But he wasn’t too insane with anger to make any false moves. “Quiet’s the word,” he said, when they’d neared the building door. “They’ll keep a sharp lookout on the chance that a cop might make a late call at the place where murder’s been done. And if the lookout spots us coming, the rats upstairs might kill Nellie.”

The Avenger nodded, and they looked at the walls of the buildings on each side of Conroy’s. The one to the south lacked just a story of being the same height. It was an older building, with ornamental stone curlicues under and over broad ledged windows. The two moved to that building. Smitty reached down, grasped Benson’s ankles, and lifted him at arm’s length up above his head. The Avenger caught the first window ledge; and from there on up, the two ascended each other’s bodies in a series of swift, giant steps that would have made a circus acrobat gasp.

From the roof, they could reach to the nearest window on the top floor of Conroy’s building. They were soon in a vacant apartment which Benson judged must be next to Conroy’s. They went to the hall, and The Avenger opened the door a crack.

Down the hall in front of Conroy’s apartment was a man, with his back to them. If anyone approached the street door, a man down there was to signal up at once. Then the attentive guard up here could pass the word, and whoever was in Conroy’s rooms could slide out, wait on a lower floor till the intruders had passed them on the way up, then get away through the street entrance.

Only, in this case, Benson and Smitty had thrown the methodical plan badly out of kilter by not approaching the street door at all. The man continued to stand with his back toward the two while Smitty stole down the corridor in his direction. The giant looked clumsy. You’d swear that bulk so vast as his must be muscle-bound, awkward and unable to move without all the noise usually attendant on a load of bricks. But he was as lithe as a stripling and could move almost as soundlessly as The Avenger when he wanted to.

He got to within a yard of the man before the fellow had any presentiment of danger. Then, when he turned, it was more on an uneasy hunch than because he had actually heard anything. His eyes went wide with amazement, and his mouth strained for a yell. But the yell never emerged.

A hand that was like a flexible ham was around his corded throat before a sound could come from his writhing lips. Another hand doubled into a colossal fist and poised above him. The fist smashed down. It was the giant’s favorite blow: to hit straight down on the top of a man’s head, like a great hammer sinking a railroad spike.

This time he hit a little harder than usual, with anguished thoughts of Nellie’s danger behind the blow. The writhing body instantly became corpse-still, and hung from the grip of his left hand like some queer and rotten fruit from a mighty bough. Smitty opened his hand and the man sagged to the floor.

Benson stepped to the door of Conroy’s apartment. The door was unlocked. The Avenger’s white head nodded. It would be unlocked so that, in case of an alarm, those within could make a quicker getaway. He opened this door an even smaller distance than he had opened the one down the hall. In through the crack, he inserted a dime-sized mirror on the end of a slim metal rod. It was very much like a tiny dentist’s mirror.

The mirror caught the reflection of a man standing just inside the doorway. This place was being guarded closely, very closely. Benson tilted the mirror till it caught a tiny segment of a man’s head. The back of his head. He had his back to the door. However, he was so close to it that if it were opened another two inches it would touch his body and give the show away. And if that happened — if he let out one whoop to warn the rest — Nellie…

Smitty shuddered and gnawed at his lip. But The Avenger had the answer. Very softly, he shut the door again. Then he tapped on the panels, hardly more than a touch. He flattened against the wall next to the door as he did so.

The man inside turned. With his marvelous hearing, Benson could catch the stir of his clothes through the panel. Then the door opened, and he poked his head out. “What’s—”

He never concluded the question he thought he was asking his pal outside. Benson’s steel-strong left hand went over his lips, while the wire-cable fingers of his right pressed at the back of his neck! The man flopped a little, then slumped. Benson laid him on the floor, careful that his shoes didn’t scrape and make a warning noise. The Avenger stared down at him for a moment, icy eyes as impersonal and calm as if he were looking down at nothing but the floor itself.

Smitty felt a bit like shivering himself. Never, in danger or rage, crisis or thought, could that face move. The paralyzed muscles made a permanent mask of it. The result was often bizarre. At a time of action, when anyone else would have shown extreme emotion, Benson showed none. It made The Avenger, at times, seem more like a vitalized, white-masked statue, a machine, rather than a thing of flesh and blood.

Benson went on down the hall of Conroy’s apartment. A thing with horns over her, in a room with beamed ceilings. And Conroy’s library, the room in which he had been killed by having a needle driven into his brain, was in the rear.

The door down there was wide open. Evidently the men in the room were so sure that no one could get past three guards in a row, that they hadn’t even bothered to close the door, let alone watch it. So Benson and Smitty looked in without hindrance. Looked in — and saw sheer horror!

There was Nellie, bound so that she could move nothing but her fingers, on the divan that a short time ago had been Conroy’s bier. There was the horned head above her, like the head of a god of sacrifice. And over Nellie bent a man with a hammer in his hand! Two other men watched the scene with as much intensity as the fellow with the hammer watched the bound girl. None of them thought of the door.

Nellie bound and a man with a queer small hammer in his hand! Smitty catapulted into the room as if he weighed thirty pounds instead of nearly three hundred. The three yelled and turned. But they had no chance.

Smitty dove at the nearest, swooping down under a gun that had been frantically drawn and inaccurately aimed. He got the man by the legs and half-straightened up, dumping him hard. But he didn’t let go. He whirled him around toward the other two! They went down as if hit by a steel ram. Smitty whirled again, and let go. The first man went head on, bodily, through the air. Went against a wall, and hadn’t the time to get his arms up. He hit head on, and there was a snap that was audible even over the rush Smitty was making toward the remaining two.

He got his vast right hand on the shoulder of the beady-eyed fellow who still held the hammer, and his left hand at the nape of the other man’s neck. The fellow with the hammer was flailing out with it, trying to hit Smitty on the head. The other man was jerking his gun around in a too-limited area and firing with every jerk!

Smitty’s teeth were showing in a sort of stark grin. A grin of death! The two men were dashed together, as the giant’s shoulders gave a convulsive heave. Their heads hit; and the sound was dreadful.

Benson walked to Nellie. Eight seconds ago there had been three live rats in here. Now there were three dead ones. And that was all of that.

Nellie shook her blonde head when The Avenger had released her from the divan and was working at the cords on her wrists and ankles. She stared at Smitty with wide eyes. “When you have a job to do, you don’t play around with it, do you?” she breathed, staring at the three hideously twisted shapes.

The Avenger stared sharply at her. The question had been about the type you’d expect from the honey haired bombshell at such a moment; but somehow Nellie’s tone was different than usual. It seemed dull, without her usual vivacity. And when she stood up and moved, her movements seemed just a little wooden.

Benson’s pale, infallible eyes went over the room. There was the queer little hammer — either one just like the hammer he had seen concealed in Mallory’s office, or the same identical one. There was a compass, with which you could measure an exact segment on a human skull. But the third thing he could not see.

The needle, the slim metal wedge to be driven into a brain according to the marvelous and diabolical directions of an ancient race. There didn’t seem to be any needle around!

“Those shots’ll draw a lot of people here,” said the giant, with a vast arm protectively around Nellie’s slim shoulders for an instant. “And that’s going to mean delay. We’d better beat it, hadn’t we?”

Benson nodded, and they went down the stairs. The Avenger went first. He didn’t waste time with the man at the door who, it appeared, hadn’t heard the shots down all those floors. Benson creased him with Mike, and the three went back to Bleek Street.

They got into the big top-floor room just in time to hear a faint crying, like the far cry of seagulls. But the cries didn’t come from any bird. They came from the big radio near the end window, which was always on and was always tuned to the crew’s own wave length.

Smitty got to the thing in a half dozen great strides. “It’s Josh!” he exclaimed. “Yelling something. He and Mac… in trouble—”

The sound merged into a far-off crackling, as if a berry crate had been stepped on. Then there was no sound at all, just the low-power hum of the radio itself.