Читать книгу The Avenger - Justice, Inc. - Paul Barth Ernst - Страница 5

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Never had a man chanced to be in less of a position to prove that he’d ever had a wife and daughter than Dick Benson.

For two years, since he had acquired his last half million in an Australian amethyst venture, he and his young wife and little Alice had played over a large part of the globe. Bermuda, Hawaii, California, Florida, Alaska—all had seen them. In Buffalo they’d stayed at a hotel for a few days. They had no locality, no neighbors—they’d been rich vagabonds.

But Benson had to get some place or person to prove his story so he could get the aid of the police.

He went to the hotel. The assistant manager said of course he’d met Mrs. Benson and the daughter. That was before they’d gone to Louisiana.

“What are you talking about?” snapped Benson.

The man flinched at the glare in the pale eyes.

“The clerk said that’s where they went.”

Benson went to the clerk who’d been on duty when they checked out.

Yes, he’d seen Mr. Benson go out with Mrs. Benson and the child. Then he’d gotten the forwarding letter.

“What letter?” said Benson, lips barely moving in his dead, white face.

“The letter Mrs. Benson wrote saying she was going to New Orleans and to forward mail to the Picayune Hotel there.”

“She went with me to Montreal.”

“Of course, sir, if you say so,” the clerk muttered.

Benson got hold of the cab driver who had taken them to the field.

“Yes, sir, you got in at the hotel with a lady and a little girl. I drove you to the airline ticket office downtown. You all got out there. The lady and the little girl didn’t get back into the cab with you. They stayed downtown.”

Benson’s hand, went out like a darting snake. He got the driver by the collar and those steely-slim fingers of his showed what just a little pressure would do.

“Please! You’re choking—” The driver stared into the appalling gray eyes with his own like those of a frightened rabbit. “I swear you went to the airport alone! I’d... I’d swear it in court!”

Benson marked him down for the future, and went to the Buffalo airport. Behind came a dark green sedan with three men in it, but he didn’t see that. He stared straight ahead, a gray steel bar of a man with pale and awful eyes staring into a future that held but one hope—finding again all that made life worth living for him.

At the airport, the agent moistened his lips as Dick Benson approached, moving on the balls of his feet, eyes alert and sinister as a jaguar’s.

“You remember me?” said Benson, lips hardly moving in his paralyzed, linen-white face.

The agent gulped. “Yes, sir,” he said, staring hard.

“I came in here with my wife and little girl, a month ago, to get places for Montreal.”

The agent was shivering as if with palsy. But he shook his head.

“I don’t remember that. I only remember you. You came in alone. There was a phone call about that from Montreal, later. And I said the same thing. You were alone—”

His voice trailed off. His face was literally green, but there was no shaking his story.

Again Benson realized what a terrible force there must be behind this. This man knew better. He had remembered the brown-eyed Alicia and the girl, Alice. His eyes showed it. But something—something—had him so frightened that even with Benson’s pale and flaming eyes on him, he lied. And the cab driver had lied.

Benson went out to the field, leaving the agent white and cowering in the office. Again, he stared, straight ahead, with visions of his wife and child filling his world. So he did not notice the three men from the dark sedan who went furtively into the office after he’d gone.

“O.K., pal,” one said to the shivering agent. “You know what happens to squealers.”

“I didn’t squeal!” the agent sobbed. “I didn’t say a word. I swore he’d come in alone. That face of his!”

The man in the lead thrust a gun against the agent’s belly.

“Which scares you most, pal, his face or this?”

But the reaction was not quite what the gunman had bargained for.

“I don’t know,” the man shivered. “The face ... is almost as bad ... as a gun!”

Outside, Benson went to the nearest hangar. A group of men there watched him approach. They stared curiously at the dead face, looked uneasily at the flaming ice of Benson’s eyes.

He stared at them collectively, and each man flinched a little when the cold gaze struck him.

“A month ago,” he said, lips curiously immobile in his paralyzed face, “I took a plane from this field for Montreal. I got aboard with my wife and small daughter. Do any of you remember?”

Slowly, they all shook their heads. Benson felt as if he were fighting fog, pillows, and substance that made no resistance to his hardest blows—and yet barred him like a stone wall. However, it was possible that these men, at least, were telling the truth. He didn’t remember seeing any of them that day.

Out on the field near the broad runway he saw a bony, knobby figure of a man with ears that stuck out like sails on each side of a thick-skinned red neck.

He remembered that man and hurried toward him through a red fog of torment.

“You,” he said, to the field attendant who had put him and his family aboard that day. For a moment he could not go on. This was his last chance. If this man lied—

The man moved slowly off, away from the hangars—and from his white-faced questioner. Benson went after him. The last notch of his iron will had been reached. He was ready to tear this tall, bony figure apart. He was ready to rend and slash—

“Easy, mon,” the attendant said out of the corner of his mouth. “I know what ye’d be asking me, and I’m moving from the hangars so nobody can hear. We can’t talk here. The field itself has ears. What hotel are ye stopping at?”

Benson told him. “You ... you—”

“I’ll have something to tell ye, soon as I can get away from here.”

Benson literally staggered. A crack in this dreadful blackness at last!

“Hotel Ely,” he said. “Come fast, for the love of God!”

He went to the gate. He didn’t see the three men there, either. They drew a little closer. One got out a gun, but a second caught his arm. The second stared meaningly around at the airport, with frequent figures on it, and shook his head. This was no place to use a gun, his gesture said.

Benson got into his cab, blind with relief, and started off toward the Hotel Ely. He had his man, now. There was something honest in that Scotchman’s narrow, bitter face, with its stony blue eyes. He’d talk. Benson could go to the police now—

But even as he thought that, he knew he couldn’t. It was this one man’s word against a dozen others. No police force would believe so bizarre a tale, on that lopsided witnessing, that a man’s wife and daughter could disappear from a speeding airliner.

No, he’d have to go it alone. He knew that. And his steely body yearned savagely for the fight, while his mind raced on ahead to the slight hope that he’d get Alicia and little Alice back—

A green sedan shot past the cab, angled in, and the cab driver applied his brakes with a squeal of tortured rubber. Benson stared out.

He saw that the cab was in a deserted spot, on the outskirts of Buffalo, in a marsh flat with distant factories bounding it.

The sedan had deliberately forced the cab to the roadside. Benson saw that in a flash, and reached for his gun. But he had no gun. It had been taken from him at the Montreal sanitarium.

“Ram that car!” he snapped to the driver.

The man, wild with fear, either didn’t hear or didn’t obey. The cab slowed still more.

Benson reached through the front window, curled his hand around the man’s throat and jerked back. The driver’s foot slipped from the brake. The cab bounded forward.

In the sedan, two of the three men had guns out and windows rolled down. The driver saw the cab careen toward them as the brakes were released. He swerved wide to avoid it. The two men swerved wide to avoid it. The two men with the gun were jerked sideways so that their shots went wild.

The cab hit the sedan with a grinding roar.

Benson was out of it almost before the noise had died away, and was leaping for the sedan. Not away from it, and its guns, but toward it. In his pale-gray eyes there was a savage, icy smile at the prospect of at last coming to grips with something solid.

That cold and awful smile in the gray flame of his eyes was later to become a hallmark of Dick Benson. With death closing in on him, with the odds hopelessly against him, the smile would appear in the gray ice of his eyes, as though he welcomed death, or at least did not care a snap of his fingers if it struck.

The sedan had rocked away from the cab, almost tipped, then rocked back again on four wheels. And while the three men inside were still fighting for their balance, Benson had the rear door open and was in it.

Just an average-sized man—Richard Henry Benson. Five feet eight, certainly no more than a hundred and sixty pounds. Not at all a big man.

But there is quality as well as quantity to muscle. Ounce for ounce, some muscle tissue is twice as powerful as the ordinary. Now and then you get a man like Benson in whom, ounce for ounce, sinew and muscle are packed with force beyond any scientific explanation. And these rare men do things that are incredible to the average mortal.

With his left hand still on the door lock of the green sedan, Benson’s right lashed out. There was less than a ten-inch swing behind it. But his fist hit the jaw of the nearest man like a knob of iron on the end of an iron lance. The man fell back against his pal as if he had been shot.

Benson caught the wrist of the driver, who was hastily poking a gun over the back of the front seat at him. The gun exploded, but tore a harmless hole in the top of the sedan. One-handed, Benson twisted the arm he held. The driver moaned, then screamed and slumped in the seat.

Eyes like holes in glacier ice, Benson returned to the third man, who was clawing to get out from under the hampering bulk of his unconscious partner.

Unable to get his gun in line, the man kicked frantically at Benson’s head. And that was a mistake.

The slim and terrible right hand went out. The steely-white fingers caught the calf of the vicious leg. And Benson squeezed. That was all, just squeezed.

The man yelled out and dropped his gun. Up his body, from vital nerve points streamed pain too great to be borne. He yelled again and, yelling, dropped. He did not move when Benson took his hand away.

The cab driver came timorously closer. It was very still, there on the deserted section of road. Had anyone been around to hold a stop watch on the proceedings, he would have found that less than ten seconds had elapsed from the time Benson got the sedan door open to the time when the third man dropped senseless from the deft and awful pressure on the great nerves of his leg.

“Gee!” whispered the cab driver. He seemed to search for other words, staring, meanwhile, at the dead, white face of the man who had done these things—a face all the more awe-inspiring in that even at this crowded moment, not one line of it altered in the least. “Gee!”

Benson took the three to the Buffalo police station. Then he went to his hotel.

And in less than half an hour he got a phone call.

The three men had been sprung.

Someone—who, no one at headquarters knew—had sent one of Buffalo’s best lawyers to get writs of habeas corpus. Someone had put up cash bail as if thousands were small change.

And the three gunmen were free.

Benson hung up with pale-gray eyes like ice in a glacial dawn. Not the fault of the police. Some power too big even for them was behind all this. But he wouldn’t make this mistake again.

Because the police are sometimes hampered more than helped by law, those three had been turned loose. And Benson knew that he’d probably never see them again.