The Avenger 4 - The Devil’s Horns (2 page)

The glaring, cold eyes of a person utterly without fear.

The instant readiness of a man to leap sideways or forward if ambush presents itself.

Thus could you read the physical tale of Richard Henry Benson, known as The Avenger. Adventurer, rich man, genius in a hundred lines, his life had been blasted when criminals had snatched his lovely wife and his small daughter.

So he had devoted his life from then on to fighting crime. He had become a machine, a nemesis to crooks.

And it was this man, this dynamo of action and quick thinking, whom the trio in the shadows thought of as just a little guy, easy to kill.

The Avenger was nearly at the building doorway, walking straight ahead, pale and frightening eyes for once not seeming all-seeing. And maybe the three would succeed, where a hundred others had failed. Maybe, with ignorance keeping their aim steady, they would actually—

“What—” whispered one of the men, perplexed. But he stopped even that bewildered wonder, as the answer came.

The man with the dead face and the snow-white hair had stopped his walking for a moment, and bent down. His hands moved quickly.

Tying his shoelace was the thought of the three.

The Avenger straightened, came on. Twenty feet from the entrance. Ten. Three trigger fingers tightened.

“Got him!” the leader of the three whispered soundlessly. Two more steps would take their victim to the spot closest, which had been picked as an execution point.

The man needn’t have bothered to be so careful to make his whisper soundless, to make no noise.

The Avenger had heard them a long time ago. And he had seen them an even longer time.

Dick Benson’s hearing was a marvelous thing. He had trusted his life to it in the wilderness of tropical jungles—and also in the wilderness of city streets. His sight was even more marvelous. Those colorless awe-inspiring eyes could take on telescopic power when necessary. Just as they could examine a close object with almost microscopic ability.

Right now, The Avenger could hear the suppressed breathing of the three in the cold and frosty night air. He could see the melting shadows of their bodies.

He knew their purpose. It was a plan any murderer might have made, if he knew his game. Let your victim get as close as possible.

The doorway was, of course, the spot; so, just before he reached it, he had leaned down as if to re-tie a shoelace.

The three killers were all set. Indeed, one shot roared out on the quiet street.

But the bullet didn’t reach its mark, because that mark suddenly wasn’t there any more. And for the same reason the other two guns didn’t speak yet.

With a movement absolutely incredible in its flowing quickness, the man with the dead face and the icy, colorless eyes, was back ten feet from the doorway—and was facing the three in the building shadow.

The Avenger’s left arm snapped up and back. There was a small, thin glitter from his hand. Then the glitter left the hand and traced a path through the night as straight as a bullet and almost as fast.

A path dead toward the three.

At almost the same instant, there was a muffled, whiplike spat from a queer thing in The Avenger’s right hand.

The results were as weird as they were unexpected.

One of the three gunmen screamed like a hurt woman, and he began frantically tearing at something embedded in the left forearm on which he had braced his gun.

Another of the three didn’t make any sound at all. He sank to the sidewalk like a tired old man and lay still with his gun slipping from lax fingers. He sank like a dead man, though he was not dead.

The Avenger, responsible for the deaths of a dozen crime geniuses with their scores of helpers, had a queer prejudice against taking life himself, no matter how richly that life deserved to be snuffed out. He had not taken one now. The man who had fallen had been shot deftly on the exact top of his skull. Had been creased so that the concussion of the slug knocked him cold but did not kill him.

The third of the murderously confident trio stared with gaping jaws at the screaming man on his left, then at the unconscious man on the walk on his right. Then, cursing, he fired three times at the slightly built man who had produced these impossible results.

But again the mark was, incredibly, not there.

Dick Benson had literally dodged bullets many times in his deadly career. He seemed to do so now, as if those appalling, icy eyes of his could see the slugs coming and get out of their way.

He was stepping rapidly from side to side, but you didn’t see his feet actually move. You thought that he was flowing, like a river of quicksilver.

As he moved, he drove toward the swearing, shooting gunman.

For half a dozen steps the man endured the charge. Then his nerve broke. He turned to run.

Benson’s swift flow seemed to accelerate endlessly. His feet made no sound now, but they covered two yards to the one traversed by the pounding feet of the killer.

The man yelled hoarsely, just once, as fingers of steel closed on his throat. Then he was silent, fighting with all his strength.

He was half again as big as Benson, but all his strength wasn’t half enough.

The Avenger held the bigger man as you would hold a child. His hands never wavered in their grip on the gunman’s throat. His cold, appalling eyes never blinked as they glared into the gunman’s convulsed face.

More terrible than anything else, perhaps, was the complete expressionlessness, even at such a time, of his white, dead face.

Like a mask, it seared itself into the killer’s glazing brain. He would never forget that awful impassivity at a moment when any other man would be grimacing with effort and rage.

The man’s struggle ceased. He sagged in Benson’s hands. He opened those hands and dropped him to the walk.

A patrolman was pounding up the street, drawn by the shooting. Benson, with moves like fast-motion pictures, went through the pockets of the two unconscious men. The screaming one who had torn at his forearm was gone, now.

Then the Avenger put away the two unique weapons he had used.

One, the knife he had thrown at the first man, lay on the walk where the recipient had blindly dropped it. The knife was slim, long-bladed, needle-sharp, with a hollow tube for a handle. It was a specially designed throwing-knife, and Benson called it, with grim affection, Ike.

He put Ike back in its sheath strapped to the calf of his left leg. Then he sheathed, at his right calf, the sinister little gun with which he had creased the second man. And that was as unique as the knife.

It was a .22 revolver, with only a slight bend for a handle and a cylinder, built small for streamlining, that held four cartridges. The gun was silenced. It looked like a plain piece of slim blued pipe, with a sleek, small bulge where the cylinder was, and a bit of a bend for a butt.

The Avenger called this second little aid of his, Mike.

The patrolman, panting, got to the scene as Benson had Ike and Mike put away. He stared at the two men on the walk, and then whirled to Benson.

“All right, you! To headquarters—”

Benson’s voice was smooth. But his eyes bit into the cop’s face like white acid.,

“There seems to have been a gangster’s battle here, officer,” he said. “I got here in time to see one man strangling another. The other hit him on top of the head, just as he was winning, and ran away. So—here are two unconscious men. I am only a witness.”

“Yeah! That’s a likely story! You—”

“I’ll be at Mr. Groman’s if you want me. My name is Benson.”

The patrolman hesitated. Groman’s name carried a lot of weight. He bit his lip, then gathered up the two killers. A squad car appeared down the street.

Benson was a master at psychology. Taking sure and instant advantage of the man’s uncertainty, he simply turned and walked toward the building entrance. The cop took a step after him, stopped.

The squad car screamed to a stop and the patrolman loaded the two in it.

Benson went on into the building. The two, he knew, were killers and probably had long records. But they would be released soon from cells on someone’s imperative orders. For Ashton City was a paradise for murderers.

That was why The Avenger was here.

Oliver Groman, for forty years the real boss of Ashton City, was a lion grown old and infirm, but he was still indomitable.

About sixty-five years old, he was a big man in spite of the stoop of years. His iron-gray hair was a mane on his big head. His seamed face was squarish and rugged. It made a mock of the invalid’s dressing gown he wore, as he sat behind his big square desk while The Avenger walked toward him with crisp, quick steps.

Groman made his home in the first two floors of his palatial apartment building. It gave him about twenty-five rooms, which were made into guests’ suites, and suites for himself and his son and daughter.

Only the rooms for the family were in use now.

The old lion was infirm indeed. His big left hand trembled incessantly, and it had to be lifted with his right when he wanted to move it. The left side of his face had a peculiar droop. The left eye was staring and dull.

Groman had had a stroke, a while ago, that paralyzed his left side. Benson had heard about that. But, just the same, the man was up, seated at his desk, smoking a black cigar which he clamped in the right corner of his thin-lipped mouth.

His gaze took in Benson’s dead, white face and the colorless, icy eyes; No man could look at The Avenger without a great deal of respect, and respect showed in the old lion’s face now.

“You are Benson?”

“Yes!”

Benson sat down. Even seated he was dynamic, seemed ready to explode into instant action.

“I can see how you have earned your reputation,” Groman said, left side of his mouth drooping and slurring the words. “And it is because of your reputation, of course, that I begged you to come here, asking you to come late at night so that no one would see you or know of your arrival.”

“It seems someone knew. And I was seen,” Benson said calmly.

“Those shots, then—”

“My visit to you wasn’t liked by somebody.”

Groman’s face convulsed with anger and perplexity.

“But how could anyone know of your coming? I told only my son and daughter of my decision to call you here.”

Benson said nothing. The gray steel figure never wasted words. He listened.

“My letter,” Groman said, “told most of the story. But I’ll clear it up in detail now.”

His big right hand clenched. The left hand was a flaccid lump on his desk, resting near a curious little inkwell in the shape of a buffalo’s head, in silver.

“As you probably know, Mr. Benson,” Groman went on, “I’ve been the boss of Ashton City for a long time. For forty years, to be exact. I was a very young man when I branched into the contracting business, and from that to politics.

“I’ve ruled this town, and I’ve ruled the hyenas who live off it. A lot of hard things are said about me by the average citizen, and I guess most of them are deserved. I’ve taken my share of the taxpayers’ money. I’ve lost most of it, but that isn’t what matters. I’ve been the leader of the hyenas, and I’ve shared their loot, but there are sides to the picture that few know about.