Stockholders in Death

CHAPTER XII Dead or Alive

The colorless, infallible eyes of The Avenger had a glitter in them like that of gray-fogged glass. Things were rushing to a time limit.

Because of the deliberate rumors about Town Bank, there had been many withdrawals. And the directors couldn’t bolster up the bank’s liquid assets with their own money because Benson had driven their personal securities down to a point where it would be ruinous to sell them.

Town Bank and its unscrupulous executives were in a desperate position. But it looked as if, with ingenuity, it could last for another twenty-four hours before closing its doors.

And in another day the stockholders of Ballandale Glass Corp. had their meeting. At that meeting, the Town Bank directors, with Crimm’s big block of stock to give them a majority, could vote in a policy that would swiftly ruin the corporation.

Then, at once, they could sell that stock, as secretly and circuitously as it had been bought, and get the cash they needed to save the bank. After that, they would follow their original plan to wait till the corporation had smashed, buy the pieces for five cents on the dollar, and make millions by building the concern up again.

In twenty-four hours the stockholders’ meeting—

Then safety for the ruthless bank crew.

So The Avenger had to wind their clocks for them before that time had passed. And a day is not very long when you are confronted with an involved criminal mess.

Benson had a dozen plans in his flaming, cold brain. But with time pressing urgently, with a thousand things to be done, there had to be a bad break.

It was furnished by Tom Crimm.

Benson’s belt radio sent out its tiny, urgent signal. Benson listened to Rosabel’s voice.

Josh Newton’s pretty wife was still the “maid” for Luckow’s sister in her apartment. And she had something to say, now, that instantly took all The Avenger’s attention.

“They’ve got Tom?” he snapped back. “The police?”

“Yes,” came the small voice from the radio case. “He went out. Luckow and his sister had both told him not to. But he said he was going crazy cooped up; so he went out. A patrolman saw him. They’ve got him cornered in a garage on Amsterdam Avenue. Beatrice Luckow just came back from trailing him and phoned her brother. So I’m telling you the whole thing, just as she told it.”

“What garage?”

“I didn’t get that, Mr. Benson,” said Rosabel. “But I guess there won’t be any trouble finding it.”

Benson started for the door. No, there wouldn’t be much trouble in finding what hole they’d cornered Tom in.

Tom was wanted for two murders and bank robbery. A man wanted for all that is taken by the police — dead or alive! With a strong chance that it will be dead. The cops don’t mess with men as dangerous as that.

Tom had brains enough. He would realize that. He would know that if he tried to walk out and give himself up, chances were he’d be shot down by an excited rookie before he took two steps.

That meant one thing: He’d have to shoot it out with the police like any seasoned crook.

Dead or alive!

No, there’d be no trouble locating that garage. Just cruise up Amsterdam till you saw crowds of people held back by patrolmen, cops and plain-clothesmen shooting at windows from behind barricades.

And how anyone could enter a mess like that and come out unseen and unscathed with the man a hundred police were after, would seem to be an unanswerable question.

The Avenger got out his make-up kit and began to work with swift fingers.

Man of a Thousand Faces.

His fingers molded and prodded and shaped. In a moment he had a heavy, phlegmatic face. He had on his habitual gray, one of the dozens of suits that made him inconspicuous in a crowd. He just kept that on; but from a cabinet he got out a derby, a little worn.

He cut a cigar in half, steely fingers flying at their task. He lit the cigar stub, let it die out; then he clamped the long butt in his jaws.

He was a heavy-featured, heavy-footed plain-clothes-man with cigar butt and derby in about three and a half minutes.

He raced to the basement of the Bleek Street building and got into a fast car. He went up the ramp and over the sidewalk to the street with siren screaming.

There was a police star on the car. The Avenger had enough influence with the police department to have plastered all his cars with similar stars, if he had cared to. That was because he had worked with them so effectually in the past.

Now — and a regretful glint appeared in the cold, pale eyes — he was going to have to work against the police. He didn’t like that at all. But it was necessary, if Tom’s life were to be saved.

He screamed uptown, with his police badge getting him the right of way, and went up Amsterdam Avenue. Very soon he saw the commotion he’d anticipated.

It was even worse than he’d thought.

A gun battle, in mid-morning! There must have been ten thousand spectators, at a safe distance behind a cordon of cops. And there must have been a brigade of police. Out of that melee, The Avenger had to pick Tom Crimm.

He braked his car, with a squeal of tires, and shouldered through the crowd. He was so typically detective that no cop even thought of stopping him. He went to a knot of detectives behind a truck, and stared at the garage — a three-story building with half the front windows out.

“Down, you chump!” hissed one of the detectives. And a bullet from a top floor window came close to his head.

Instead of ducking, Benson walked toward the yawning street door of the garage

“Hey! Come back!” cried one of his fellow detectives — as they deemed themselves. “The guy’s crazy, in there! He’ll drill you in a dozen spots! Besides, the joint’s full of tear gas—”

The Avenger didn’t seem to be moving fast. Which was what had drawn the most urgent of the yells of warning. But just the same he was in that doorway before more than one more slug could be sent down at him — at a narrow miss.

Not too hard to get to the door. The reason none of the others had was because of the tear gas. They couldn’t have stood it. But Benson simply reached into a vest pocket, got out two plain glass, tissue-thin cups to slip over his pale eyeballs, and put them on to protect his eyes from the stinging gas. Then he raised the lapel of his coat and breathed through that. The lapel was chemically treated and was as good as a gas mask.

He went through the clouds of tear gas as if it had been fresh air — up to the second floor. It was from those windows that Tom, caught in his own tragic foolishness, had been firing.

Tom was choking and his eyes were streaming. But he could see an advancing figure, and he fired at it frantically. Three bullets hit Benson’s bulletproof, celluglass undergarment. Then The Avenger was up to the choking man.

His fist lashed out with delicate precision. Tom fell. The Avenger shouldered him and walked down to the first floor.

But not to the front.

There was a rear entrance onto a narrow areaway, from this particular garage. Benson unlocked and opened that, and came out with his burden in the midst of a cloud of gas.

There were men in here, too. For their benefit Benson coughed and wiped at his eyes. They stared at him with awe. None of them recognized him, but New York is a big place with lots of detectives; so none thought of that.

All they saw was one of their number, apparently an iron man who only coughed a little from gas that would have downed any one of them — and who even kept the butt of a cigar nonchalantly between his clenched teeth — coming out of a seething garage with a desperate man over his shoulder.

“Boy, you’ll get medals for this!” one of the uniformed men breathed. “Here, we’ll take the guy—”

“Too much trouble with the crowds if we have a parade,” growled Benson. “Keep up the show. I’ll take this man in, myself, sneak him out the areaway here. Then we won’t have a mob hanging on our necks and messing up the works.”

It was good sense. The men nodded, and Benson went to the areaway entrance alone, with Tom over his shoulder. His own car was around the corner on Amsterdam. There was a cab parked near here, though. It was empty. The driver was undoubtedly on Amsterdam watching the battle.

Benson calmly appropriated the cab, drove off in it with Tom still unconscious in the rear — and ran into more trouble than all the crowd and all the police had been.

There were men around there who wanted Tom as badly as the cops did, but who hadn’t been reckless enough to try to snatch him in that barrage. Those men belonged to the Luckow mob!

They simply couldn’t have Tom taken. He could talk too much. So they had hung around on the fringe, baffled and furious—

Till Luckow himself, from the corner, happened to see a man who was obviously a detective come out of the areaway carrying the fellow over whom all the shooting was occurring.

The Avenger couldn’t know that, however, not being a seer. He only knew that he had gone three blocks when a car overhauled the cab and bore down on him from the right. He speeded up, and the car beat him to it and got a little ahead.

Then another car took its place at the right of the cab. That one clanged into him and drove him to the curb. The one ahead cut across his path and stopped him with a jolt.

Benson was not in one of his bulletproofed jobs, now. He was in a standard cab that could be riddled like cheese.

He bent over in the seat, and opened the right front door of the cab. He rolled out of it and got behind an iron light-post.

Already men from the second car had the rear door open and were dragging Tom’s unconscious body out. Benson had Mike, the little, silenced .22, from its holster. Its deadly small message whispered out and one of the men dropped. Another joined him in a second or two, but that was all Benson could do.

It was one man against a mob; and even though that one man was The Avenger, himself, such were the odds that the mob could not fail to win out.

At least six men were firing methodically at the iron post that was all that stood between Benson and death. He couldn’t move a fraction of an inch from its shelter, to use Mike again, or attempt a suicidal move to recover Tom, or anything else.

He was caught there. And, caught, he could only listen while one of the cars drove off with Tom in it.

The other one did not drive off. And the fusillade of bullets continued. Ever a resourceful killer, Luckow had seen in this an excellent opportunity to get this guy with the dead face who was so dangerous. He had recognized Benson.

The bullets began coming from shallower angles as the men spread out and moved to get to one side where they could drill Benson. In a few more seconds they’d have him.

The Avenger didn’t dart either to right or left, as, of course, they had expected.

He leaped straight up.

There were ornamental side-arms on the light-post, up about ten feet. Benson caught one of those and swung, hard, straight toward the gang car which was still tangled with the taxi only a dozen feet away.

He shot over the heads of the amazed gangsters, hit the top of their sedan, and leaped down to the other side.

They still had him. They could swivel and pour lead at his running figure till one of the slugs found his unprotected head. But he didn’t have to run far.

A coupé shot up beside him, door opened.

Benson leaped in, with a move so swift and smooth that it was almost as if he had flowed in. There was a woman at the wheel of the coupé, so heavily veiled that even his keen eyes could not see her features.

Tom Crimm could have had a word to say about the veiled woman who had quite probably saved Benson’s life. But she was an enigma to The Avenger.

She had swirled into his orbit, picked him up, and was presently to swirl out again just as mysteriously.

About a dozen blocks from the taxi scene, she pulled to the curb.

“You had better get out here,” she said.

Her voice was cultured and low. Benson peered at the veil, his eyes like diamond drills.

“Please,” she murmured.

He got out. The Avenger never distressed a woman, particularly one who had helped him as this one had. He looked after her, as the coupé whirled off down the street. As he went on to Bleek Street, he noted down every detail of her appearance in memory; type of veil, clothes, shoes, tint of nail polish, shape of ears.

He kept thinking of her because she was a riddle; and The Avenger was always challenged by riddles.

At Bleek Street, however, thoughts of her were driven out swiftly. They were driven out by the specter of death!