Tuned for Murder

CHAPTER VI Into the Depths!

Dick Benson had made his millions by professional adventuring, in the days when he was a warm, normal human being, before crime’s tragedy had made him into a machine to fight crime.

In his teens he had spotted rubber in South American jungles, led native armies in Java, made aerial maps in the Congo. In his twenties he had mined amethysts in Australia and emeralds in Brazil; found gold in Alaska and diamonds in the Transvaal. He had done these things so successfully that while still a very young man he was very wealthy.

But the point was that Benson had made his life a series of narrow escapes from death. And in a routine like that, you get to such a fine point that almost no danger can approach you without some split-second warning.

The warning yell of Josh Newton was not needed by The Avenger.

About a second and a half before the Negro shouted, Benson had seen all that he needed to know with one quick flash of his colorless eyes.

He had seen three little glints of light on something metallic peeping over two logs that lay in a shallow V at the side of the road. He had seen the glints move ever so little to follow the movement of the car.

And his steely white finger had flashingly pressed a button.

The bulletproofed glass windows of the sedan could be rolled up and down by hand, like ordinary windows. But in time of emergency, they could be flashed into place.

With the press of that button, every open window of the sedan shot up into closed position with the release of powerful springs. And as they thudded into place, there was a sound like the beginning of a young war.

Three submachine guns poured streams of lead at the huge, old-looking car. And the car acted toward the lead pellets much as a duck’s back acts toward drops of rain.

There was a clangor like that of three riveting machines at work on a steel boiler. And the car rolled slowly and steadily along with no damage whatever, save for cloudy patches on the windows where the bullets struck.

The Avenger could have rolled on past with no discomfort. But he didn’t choose to do that.

He turned the wheel hard left, waddled the car up the dry gully like a tank, straight at the felled trees.

There were yells from the unseen gunners behind the tree trunks. They kept on firing at the pointed, armored snout of the car. Then, at the last minute, they broke and ran.

But they didn’t run far!

Benson and Smitty and Josh and Mac could have shot all three of them as easily as you’d shoot clay pigeons on a shooting range. But they didn’t. Benson, himself, never took a human life. His aides did now and then, when absolutely forced into it. But on this occasion they didn’t feel forced.

The Avenger’s white finger pressed another button.

From a small tube opening just under the breather-cap on the radiator, shot a slim little cylinder. It was like a miniature torpedo shooting from the tiny tube of a miniature sub.

The cylinder arced gracefully over the head of the running men, and plopped to the ground before them.

“Lam! Tear gas!” yelled Gargantua.

But the little cylinder didn’t contain anything so prosaic as tear gas. In it was a composition devised by Mac, who was one of the country’s finest chemists in addition to being a brilliant bacteriologist and pharmacist.

The gas in the tiny projectile was so powerful that a whiff knocked a man out for an hour; and so volatile that it could fill a ten-yard space in a little less than a second.

So the three running men didn’t yell again. There wasn’t time.

They dropped their guns, staggered a moment and then fell. They lay very, very still!

Benson and the other three put on nose-clip masks and walked over to them. They walked warily. Most men would have been careless; would have figured that they had won their battle and the danger was over. But not these four. Without a word being exchanged, they all had the same thoughts:

“The gun must have come here in some sort of vehicle. Where was their car? And was there another man in it and perhaps training gunsights on them?”

Nothing happened, however, and no sound could be heard. They bent over the three.

“So they tapped Sessel’s telephone wire, and knew we were coming!” said Smitty.

“And prepared a welcome committee,” nodded Benson. “In doing that, since they had failed, they did a stupid thing. We came here more or less blindly, not knowing if there was a real reason for investigation. Now we do know, since someone thought it important enough, to prevent investigation, to kill us before we could look around.”

“You knew something like this was ahead of us,” said Josh.

Again The Avenger nodded.

“The detour gag is a pretty old one. And so much a matter of routine to guard against that before we started I phoned the highway commission and found that there were no detours at present between New York and Garfield City. But I followed along the road pointed out by the fake sign to see if we could find out anything.”

“We don’t seem to be findin’ out much,” gloomed the pessimistic MacMurdie.

And, indeed, they didn’t seem to be.

The pockets of the three were all emptied now. In none of them was there an identifying article. Besides, all labels had been taken from their hats and clothing. It was the usual gangland preparation when gunmen departed for a risky job.

Benson stared at the guns. They were the standard tommy guns of the underworld and had no tale to tell. He went back to the felled trees. And there he found one object.

That object was a “pineapple” bomb which none of the three had kept his head enough to toss when the car unexpectedly drove straight at their ambush. It wouldn’t have mattered, anyhow. The big sedan could take such small bombs in its stride.

“Look at the fuse!” said Smitty.

On the metal fuse case were the letters:

“That’s a standard army casing,” said Josh, eyes narrowing.

“Garfield Gear makes army and navy parts,” Benson said. “But I don’t know that one of their fuse casings means anything here. It might have been stolen, or bought from a crooked workman.”

They went back to the car. As they went, Mac cast murderous looks at the three men lying on the ground. They were rats. And Mac had a frenzied hatred of men who were in the rat class. As always, it wrenched him to leave adversaries lying loose. Yet he knew the realistic wisdom of the chief’s philosophy.

You couldn’t kill a defenseless man in cold blood, crook or not. You could turn them over to the police, but in jobs of the size The Avenger always tackled, there were bound to be superiors who could get them free on bail in a few hours.

Therefore, forget about them and concentrate solely on getting the superiors.

The four got into the sedan. Benson backed it onto the road, and they crossed the gully.

Ahead and to the right was the quarry they had noticed before the excitement at the gully. There had been a lot of quarries in their drive, and this seemed to be just one more. It was filled with water, and was quite pretty.

Josh and Mac and Smitty stared at it in relaxed appreciation as the sedan rolled along the road with only a thin guard rail between. Even Benson glanced at the little lake for an instant out of the corners of his pale, deadly eyes.

No man can be superhuman. The Avenger came about as close to it as a mortal can come. But even he was not infallible.

With the slight instant that his eyes were on the quarry lake, there was a berserk roar from the woods at their left. The roar of a heavy motor gunned to the full. Instantly Benson was vibrantly alert, again, but it was too late.

A heavy truck rocketed from the woods, down a lane so dim that it could only be seen when you were right at its mouth. It shot for the sedan. And its goal was absolutely assured.

There was a level, clear space at each side of the lane, where the truck could veer right or left if necessary. That meant that the sedan could stop still, back up, or shoot ahead — and still not get out of the way of the truck, which could change direction just as the sedan did.

Benson tried to shoot ahead. The sedan motor roared with as deep a note as that of the truck motor as it hurled toward the car.

The heavy front bumper of the truck ground into the left front fender of the sedan, forced the wheels hard right.

Benson fought the steering wheel. With the astounding power that lay in his lithe body, he jerked them back in line. But the elephant weight of the truck was still jammed against their side, straining, pushing.

For an instant it looked as if the eight thousand pounds of the sedan would be enough; as if the steel hands at the steering wheel would be enough. But the instant passed!

The sedan leaned through the guard rail. Two wheels slid over the sheer edge of the old quarry. The track seemed to squeal with triumph like a vast boar. And then the sedan went over, with the four men in it.

It hit the water with a great splash, and sank, wavering from side to side like a dropped coin as long as the eye could follow its subterranean course. Then the eye could no longer see the sinking bulk. After all, it was sixty-eight feet down at this point.

There was no sound. The ripples subsided on the surface of the water. Air bubbles came from the black depths. Then these ceased, too.

The jolly-looking fat man at the wheel of the truck chuckled a little. Then he backed the truck, heavy iron bumper-guard bent like a pretzel, from the water’s edge.

He ran back up the road to the gully, to see what had happened to the three men there; and, arriving, picked up their unconscious forms and put them in the truck. He went to the main highway and gathered up the false detour sign and the thug who had hidden it in the woods as soon as it had performed its task of turning Benson onto the side road.

Then, with all loose ends neatly gathered up, the fat man drove back to the penthouse apartment in Garfield City to collect the huge sum offered for killing The Avenger and his helpers.

Bit money! Easy money! The fat man chuckled as he thought just how easy it had been.