Stockholders in Death

CHAPTER IX Human Tank

At the corner of Waverly Place and Sixth Avenue is the world’s strangest drugstore. Bought originally by Dick Benson, he had placed it in the proprietorship of his aide, a tall, dour Scotchman named Fergus MacMurdie.

The front of the store was like any other drugstore, but the rear three-fifths served as a dual laboratory. Down one side ranged benches containing transcendent paraphernalia belonging to the giant electrical engineer, Smitty. Along the other side was a complete laboratory in which MacMurdie conducted his chemical experiments.

Mac’s blue eyes were bitter, now, and flaming. He had been listening to the big, special radio in the laboratory. He had just heard one interrupted sentence on the radio’s special wavelength. Then he began transmitting himself, feverishly.

“Smitty! Smitty! Mac calling. Smitty!”

About five minutes passed before he got a reply.

“O.K. Mac. This is Smitty.”

“Ye overgrown clown,” burred Mac. “Why don’t ye pay some attention to the silly little belt radio ye’ve made us all wear? Where are ye?”

“Out near the Brooklyn Bird, checking on Luckow,” came the giant’s voice.

“Meet me at the Gailord Cement Plant, beyond Jackson Heights. Nellie — she’s in troub—”

Mac didn’t even bother to finish the word. He knew Smitty would already be on his way, radio disregarded.

Two things could turn the good-natured giant into a human landslide. One was calling him by his full name, Algernon Heathcote, instead of the nickname of Smitty. The other was — trouble threatening Nellie.

When that diminutive bundle of pertness was in peril, Smitty was like a mad bull elephant.

Mac got out to the vicinity of the cement plant almost as swiftly as if he had flown. He found Smitty lurking down the block from it, chewing his fingers in impatience. Smitty had been there for nearly eight minutes.

“You croaking Scotch raven!” he rumbled in a savage whisper. “Did you stop to change your suit, or what? I’ve been here an hour—”

“I didn’t call ye till thirty-five minutes ago, ye mountain of suet,” Mac snapped back. “And you were nearer, to start with— Sh-h-h.”

Down the block from the dark spot where they lurked, the plant gate was opening. Methodically, the man there was coming out to patrol the outside of the grounds as well as the inside.

The man came toward the two. A sort of growl rumbled in Smitty’s throat, and Mac felt profoundly thankful he wasn’t that man.

The fellow got within ten feet of them, then saw the Scot’s foot protruding from behind a big trash box. He stopped dead.

It wasn’t the first time the Scot’s huge feet had given him away. But in this case it didn’t matter.

Smitty came within a dozen pounds of weighing an even three hundred. But he was up and over that trash box like an agile boy. He got the man by the throat as a startled yell came to his lips.

Smitty didn’t bother to use both hands. Why should he? This guy was hardly six feet tall and didn’t weigh more than a hundred and ninety. A pigmy, that’s what he was.

The giant held the man rigid, at arm’s length, for a minute or so, then opened his huge hand. The man dropped like something loosed from the jaws of a dredge, and Mac and Smitty went to the gate.

The fellow had locked it when he came out. Smitty didn’t even bother to swear. He looked around, caught up a big beam, inserted the ends between the two-by-four slats of the gate.

There was a grinding wrench, and the gate came to pieces like wet paper.

“Smitty! The noise—” protested Mac.

“What’s the difference? The guy back there got out a yell. They’ll be coming to investigate anyhow—”

Two men did come, even as he spoke. Smitty and Mac crouched behind the cement-loaded truck till they were within arms’ length. Then Smitty straightened from his crouch.

To those two men it must have seemed as if he kept on going up for ten minutes. He seemed to tower above them in the darkness like a brick chimney. Then Smitty grabbed them.

A shoulder in each hand, a swing, two heads smashing together!

“Ye’re not leavin’ much for me to play with,” Mac complained bitterly.

He didn’t say any more. If he had, he would have addressed it to empty air. Smitty was galloping toward the plant building like an elephant whose young is threatened.

They reached the door. It happened to be unlocked.

Smitty burst into the plant, with Mac on his heels.

At a far corner, near a cubicle walled off for the superintendent’s office, were two men, a girl, several sacks of cement and a barrel.

A yell came from Smitty’s lips like nothing Mac had ever heard before. The giant went like an express train off rails toward the sinister tableau.

The man with Nellie dropped her arms, and the man with the club dropped that. Each drew a .45 and began firing with methodical and excellent aim.

Benson and his aides wore bullet-proof garments of The Avenger’s own devising. Made of woven strands of an incredibly tough and pliant plastic he called celluglass, it was transparent, light, but stronger than steel.

Smitty had on his, shielding him from throat to knees. But even at that, the kick of a .45 slug can stop the average man, whirl him around, club him hard.

However, Smitty was not an average man. He grunted with the shock of each terrific slug against his barrel chest, but kept right on. And the two began to look very scared indeed.

“He’s gotta vest on!” one of them squealed. “Get him in the head!”

This was different. Slugs in the head would kill. But Smitty didn’t falter. If anything, he speeded up, with his head moving from side to side on his vast shoulders, and his columnar legs carrying him in a zig-zag path.

He got to them, picked up one of the sacks of cement.

A sack of cement is not exactly a feather. But in the giant’s hands this one seemed so. Smitty threw the thing as if it had been a basketball. It caught one of the men on the chest and he fell with a broken back. The other man tried to run.

Off by the office door was still another man, one Smitty hadn’t seen at all. This man was on one knee, with his right hand braced on his left forearm. In the hand was a .44 revolver.

At that range, braced in a marksman’s pose, the man couldn’t miss his target: the giant’s head.

It was sure death for Smitty. Only a matter of seconds. But the giant didn’t know that. Nor did MacMurdie.

Mac was still near the door, busy himself. A man had scrambled in after them from the plant yard. Mac had knocked the gun from his hand and was now methodically reducing him to mincemeat with great knobs of fists that were like bone mallets.

Smitty got his hands on the second man, and for a moment he was comparatively still as he pressed great thumbs at the fellow’s windpipe. It was the instant for which the unseen, calm marksman was waiting.

His sights were on Smitty’s right ear. His finger was tightening.

There was a queer little spat. It was like a soft handclap, hardly heard at all in the place. But with the deadly little whisper, something happened to the marksman.

He sagged to the floor, and on the exact top of his head was a neat gash, as if he had been clubbed. Only there was no one around with a club.

His gun clattered as he fell, and Smitty’s attention was drawn at last. He stared almost stupidly at the person who had so nearly been his executioner, then whistled as he realized what a close call he’d had.

Mac came up dusting his hands from the encounter by the door. Mac saw the other prone man, the gash on his head.

“Oh, oh!” he said. “Mike did that. The chief’s here. Where are ye, Muster Benson?”

The Avenger carried two of the world’s oddest weapons. One was a deathly-sharp little throwing knife with a hollow tube for a handle. The other was a silenced little .22, so streamlined that it appeared to be a length of slim, blued steel pipe rather than a revolver. He carried the knife in a sheath below his left knee, and the gun holstered at his right calf. The knife he called, with grim affection, Ike. The gun was Mike.

Mac had seen the man drop, from a little distance, had heard the tiny spat of sound, and had seen the gash leap into being. Only one gun and one man could do that; Mike, in the hands of Dick Benson, who never killed but used his marvelous little gun only to knock enemies cold by “creasing” them.

The Avenger came toward Mac and Smitty from a door on the opposite side of the plant.

“So ye heard Nellie’s call, too,” said Mac.

Benson nodded, dead white face as emotionless as a mask of ice.

Smitty had Nellie in his arms and was bearing her toward the door. Mac caught up Wayne Crimm’s bound form.

“Now why,” the Scot mused, “did these skurlies kidnap the boy? If his father were alive, it might be they’d hold the boy’s life over his head to keep him from fightin’ the gang that stole his stock. But his father isn’t alive—”

“His brother, Tom is,” said Benson steadily.

Mac looked at him.

“News came over the teletype just as I was starting out,” said The Avenger. “Town Bank was held up, a protective association operative killed, the bank guard slugged and lying at the point of death. Tom Crimm was recognized as the leader of the bandit gang.”

“Whoosh!” exclaimed Mac, eyes round. “A cat’s-paw for Luckow! And a goat!”

“That’s right,” said Benson.

“And Wayne must have been taken to keep Tom from talkin’, and make him take the rap for the gang!”

“Yes. But we’ve got Wayne out of their hands, now.”

The Avenger went into the office. He picked up the phone and dialed the Brooklyn Bird, Luckow’s private number.

There was no time for a ring, when he heard the phone at that end being picked up. He spoke, tone as calm and measured as the voice of Fate, herself.

So it was that when Luckow started to dial, and to hand Tom over to the electric chair to clear himself and his gang, he heard the words that froze his reaching finger and sent fear to his heart such as he had never known before.

“This is Benson. We have taken Wayne from your men. Act accordingly with Tom Crimm.”