The Flame Breathers

CHAPTER XIII Rust-Red Lure

Richard Benson knew most things superlatively well. On financial matters and set-ups he was particularly well informed.

The rumor given him by the bony secretary, before he was shot, was the truth as the man saw it. Benson knew that. The bony man had been talking from a hypnotic trance, without the wit to withhold things or distort them.

He had said the rumor was that the vast holdings of the Henderlin Corp. were to be sold for ninety million dollars.

That struck a very false note to The Avenger.

Ninety million dollars? The sum was colossal to the average man. A tremendous sum of money. But for the Henderlin holdings it was ridiculous.

Those coal and oil properties, the many refineries and collieries, the distribution system formed all over the world were worth a sum almost beyond calculating. Three hundred million dollars would have been a low price. Why, then, should there be talk of selling the thing for a paltry ninety million?

The bony secretary, just as he had been giving a name, had met his end, the name as far as he had uttered it, had been “Lorens—”

There was only one Lorens in high finance. Lorens Singer.

The Avenger went to see Singer.

With his home blown to atoms, the financier had taken the top floor of a Fiftieth Street hotel which he owned. There was an elevator turned over to his exclusive use. A guard in plain clothes stood next to the door in the lobby, and another stayed next to the top-floor door, constantly. The other elevator doors, on the top floor, had been walled over, and the stairs had been locked off. Singer, after one attack, was taking no chances on another that might be more successful.

The man at the lobby door of the private elevator stood aside as Benson approached. He didn’t ask names or anything else. He was a veteran private detective in New York City and, as such, he knew a great deal about the man with the dead face and stainless steel chips of eyes.

Benson nodded to him and went up. The guard on the top floor went into the barred foyer; came out at once.

“Mr. Singer will see you immediately, sir. If you will step in here, please—”

“Here,” was a small room off the foyer. Benson went into it. In half a minute or so, he heard steps.

There are qualities about footsteps, almost as there are about faces, that tell a great deal to an observant person. These told Benson a lot.

The steps were hurried, and they were furtive. Very furtive! An ordinary person might not have heard them at all.

Benson shot from his chair in a fast, silent move and stood so that he could see into the foyer through a half-inch crack between door and jamb. He saw the man making the fast, secretive steps.

He was a small man, rather smaller than The Avenger himself, with curious ears. They were almost as pointed as the trimmed ears of a show dog.

The Avenger had a memory like a filing cabinet. He had seen this man before. He placed him in a second or two.

He had seen him driving away from the wreck of Lorens Singer’s home, alone in a sedan, with a look of apprehension and anger on his face.

The elevator door softly clanged, and the guard came to the room in which Benson had reseated himself in his chair.

“All right, sir.”

Singer was in the biggest of the suite of rooms. He had a desk there. He sat behind the desk, with papers piled high, taking up his work where the explosion had interrupted the routine.

His stern brown eyes lightened as they rested on The Avenger. He didn’t look as coldly furious, as ruthlessly intent on vengeance as he had that day beside the smoking ruins of his house.

Benson brought up the subject that had brought him here. The sale of the Henderlin holdings. Singer’s mouth opened a little with surprise.

“Me? Buy the Henderlin set-up? For ninety million? It’s ridiculous! It would be a great bargain at that price. But I don’t want it, even at a bargain.”

“There is no truth in the rumor, then?” Benson said evenly.

“Not an ounce of truth.”

“You could easily swing such a deal,” said Benson quietly.

“Oh, yes,” shrugged Singer, “I could swing it. But I don’t care to. I’m over fifty, Mr. Benson. I’m engaged in narrowing my business contacts so that I can go into semi-retirement. I wouldn’t dream of taking on a job like the ownership of the Henderlin Corp.”

The phone on his desk rang. Rather, one of the phones. There was a battery of them all along one end. Singer picked it up, spoke a few words and smiled when he hung up.

“It seems that rumor has been heard by others besides yourself, Mr. Benson. That was Roger Bainbridge, second vice president of Henderlin Corp. I’ll bet a hat he has come to me with the proposition that you just asked about. He had a please buy expression in his voice.”

“But you’re not going to?” inquired The Avenger, tone as expressionless as his dead, white face.

“Not a chance!”

Benson went out. There was no sign of the little man with the pointed ears, either in the foyer or in the hotel lobby downstairs. But he saw Roger Bainbridge as the man got into the elevator.

The Henderlin executive looked badly worried; looked as if he had indeed come to plead with Singer to buy, rather than put it as a straight business deal.

Benson walked out of the hotel — and the first thing his pale eyes rested on was a rust-colored dress!

There are always thousands of rust-red dresses being worn in a great city, at any season of the year. But The Avenger had an eye for color that was like an artist’s color chart. The exact shade of this dress was subtly different from that of most. Without making the move obvious, as if he had intended to go in that direction, anyhow, he walked toward the rust-red garment.

The wearer of the dress was walking quickly toward a roadster parked at the curb between two taxis. She was a pronounced brunette, with deep-black eyes and ink-black hair.

She was the girl who had faced Benson and Mac and Smitty at the Utah salt flat and again in the Salt Lake City garage.

She was also the person who had slammed and locked a door in The Avenger’s face when he raced toward it from the body of a freshly murdered man.

She drove off in the roadster, and Benson followed in a cab.

The girl had been coldly, murderously calm when Benson encountered her before. She did not seem that way now. Her face was paler than it should have been, and her black eyes were wide. She had been biting her red underlip when she got hastily into her car.

She had looked, indeed, as if she were terribly afraid of something; had looked as if she were in trouble.

The roadster went east, nearly to the East River. It was a section of warehouses and storage buildings, with not many people walking around.

The girl’s car stopped in front of a wholesale paper office. The driver of Benson’s cab stopped half a block behind, with a shrewdness indicating that the man had often trailed people.

The Avenger sat very still, eyes like polar ice. The girl had turned and was walking back along the sidewalk, toward his cab.

The taxi driver turned in the front seat, and grinned back at Benson. But under the grinning face, hidden from passersby by the man’s body, a gun poked over the back of the front seat! And the words that came from the man’s lips had nothing to do with his disarming grin.

“Listen, you, and listen hard, if you want to keep on livin’. Get out of the cab and walk to the nearest doorway, there. The storage building doorway. Don’t try to run away, and don’t try to yell for help or I’ll drill you. I’ll be at the wheel here, and I’ll have this rod on you every second. Understand?”

“I understand,” said Benson evenly.

The driver suddenly looked a great deal less sure of himself. He had seen many men with guns threatening them — death threatening them. The men had looked either scared or angry. Usually scared to death. But this man didn’t show any emotion at all.

His white, awesome countenance was as unmoved as a thing of wax. His eyes were as empty of human emotion as pools of ice water. His voice was even and calm.

The driver began to sweat a little. It was as if the man had some help near at hand — or some hidden source of strength that the driver didn’t know about. To hide his sudden fear, he snarled more savagely:

“Remember, one funny stunt and you get six or eight slugs around the spine!”

“Of course,” said The Avenger, voice seeming almost indifferent.

He got out of the cab and walked across the concrete to the designated doorway. The girl with the black eyes and hair got to him just as he did so. She didn’t look troubled or frightened any more.

She looked triumphant!

“Open the door,” she said, with a sweet smile for the benefit of any pedestrians who might glance their way, “and go in. I have a gun in my purse, and my hand is on the gun. I’ll shoot through the purse in a minute, if I have to.”

Benson only nodded. He opened the door and walked in as commanded. And, smoothly, the girl’s gun covered him as his movements took him out of range of the cab driver’s automatic.

The girl slammed the door. Benson was in the dimness of a huge room with no windows to let in daylight, and with only a few electric bulbs giving illumination.

The room was the receiving chamber of the storehouse. Here, furniture was covered and papered before being sent upstairs to rest in cool darkness till its owners wanted to get it out of storage again. There was a long, low workbench, among other things. Lined along this bench, grinning at the white-haired, dead-faced Avenger, were a dozen men.

Several of the men Benson recognized as among the gang in Utah. Notably the one who seemed to be the leader — a man so thin and tall and smooth-moving that he looked like a snake. He looked so much like a snake that you expected him to hiss instead of talk.

“Good work, kid,” said the man at the thin fellow’s right, directing his words to the girl with her purse jammed against Benson’s back.

The thin, snaky fellow nodded.

“As easy as that,” he murmured.

“Yes,” said the girl triumphantly. “As easy as that. I let him see me with a worried look on my face, and he came right after me — in the planted cab. I don’t think he’s so very smart.”

Benson stared at the men. They all had guns out. He couldn’t make a move, now.

However, he could have, either in the cab or on the way across the sidewalk.

The Avenger knew a trap a mile away. He spotted them infallibly.

And he usually walked right into them.

It was an axiom of Benson’s that in traps you often learn valuable things. Therefore, he rather sought traps than avoided them. Of course, it was a foregone conclusion that some day he was going to get into one he couldn’t get out of. Some day a trap would kill him.

It looked as if this might be that day!

The warehouse wall would cut off the sound of shots from people in the street. There were twelve or thirteen guns covering him. There’d be a chance if they left him Mike and Ike. But if they didn’t—

“Stand facing the wall,” said the thin, snaky thug. “Back to the room.”

Benson did as directed. Steps sounded behind him. Then a hand felt over him.

Out of the corners of his pale, deadly eyes, The Avenger saw men moving to right and left to cover him at all angles, so that the person searching him could not be held suddenly as a shield.

The searching hand covered body, throat, thighs — and kept on going down. And they found Mike and Ike!

Benson had two of the world’s oddest weapons.

One was a small throwing knife of his own design, with a point like a needle and an edge that could shame a razor for sharpness. It had a hollow tube for a handle so that it hurtled point-first like an arrow when he threw it. This was Ike.

The other was a little special .22 revolver, silenced, so streamlined that it looked like a slim bent length of blued pipe rather than a gun. The handle was the bend. The cylinder held only four cartridges. This was Mike.

He kept the two little weapons holstered at the calves of his legs, for the reasons that few searchers ever felt for guns below a man’s knees.

But this man had; and he had found the two.

“A pea-shooter, and a knittin’ needle!” the man said, staring at Mike and Ike. “What’s this guy think he could do with those, in a real battle?”

He’d have been surprised could he have seen some of the things The Avenger had done with Mike and Ike. But naturally Benson didn’t choose to enlighten him.

“So now what?” said the man who had searched.

“Toss him into the tank and leave him there till the big shot comes and tells us what to do with him,” said the man who, in his dark suit, looked like a particularly vicious black snake.

Every large storage building has a disinfecting tank. It is a steel chamber usually about six feet by twelve, with a hermetically sealed steel door. Into this are put pieces of furniture that are upholstered. Then poison gas is shot into the tank under great pressure, to kill moths and other vermin.

“That’s airtight,” pointed out the man who stood with Mike and Ike in his hands. “He’ll croak, without air.”

The black snake actually seemed to hiss it.

“So what? Maybe that’s what the boss intends. Maybe he’ll fill him full of chlorine under sixty pounds pressure. Who knows? And who cares?”

The safe-like door of the disinfecting tank was opened. Benson was thrust in. The door clanged, and he heard half a dozen big wingnuts screwed down hard on heavy bolts.

You learn a lot in a trap, sometimes. But there is always the chance that a trap will beat you, some day—

Benson’s slim, steel-strong hands went to his belt.

Smitty, radio electrical engineer par excellence had designed tiny radio receiving-and-transmitting set for The Avenger and his aides.

They were in thin, curved cases that fitted the waist.

The most observant eye could not discern them under normal clothing.

But a searching hand would be sure to feel one.

The man who had searched Benson had been astute enough to cull Mike and Ike from their hiding places. Yet he had not investigated the curved metal length under Benson’s belt. It seemed odd. You’d have thought he would at least have investigated it.

To The Avenger, the answer seemed plain enough, however. The gang wanted him to retain possession of the radio. They wanted him to call for help.

It would be an excellent way to trap not only The Avenger, but all his helpers!