“The skurlies!” gritted Mac. “So they had guarrrds in the field, too.”
But Tom corrected that impression. Tom had seen the dark bulk of a car, in the field, itself, and then had got just a glimpse of a white face in the night.
“It’s Wayne!” he cried. “Wayne — this is Tom. Your brother. Come on, everybody, it’s all right—”
A careful shot interrupted him. He dropped in a hurry, with a gash in his side.
“Wayne — for Heaven’s sake! I told you this was Tom—”
“I know it!” came Wayne’s voice, husky with rage.
“But you’re shooting at me! You young fool—”
“I’m going to kill you, Tom,” raved Wayne’s voice. “You dirty murderer! So you wanted to get Dad’s killer, eh? You were very anxious to do that! You killed him, yourself! But you’ll pay for that. I’m going to shoot you if I die for it, myself!”
There was stunned silence. Then Mac’s voice.
“What’s the lad talkin’ about, anyway?”
“I don’t know,” shivered Tom. “But we’ve got to get out of here. That gang behind us will be along any second.”
Yes, they had to get out of there. But how? Their bodies would be silhouetted against the lights of the roadhouse if they rose up. Wayne was hidden by darkness and the bulk of a car. He could pick them all off if they tried to rush him.
“Wayne, listen to reason!” begged Tom.
The answer was a shot that almost took a piece out of his ear. Wayne was beyond all reason. He was a madman for the moment.
Then a new factor entered the picture; one that Mac had feared right along.
There was a scream of a police siren. A car’s headlights began jiggling crazily. A squad car was being driven over the field toward them. The sound of the shooting had finally drawn the attention of the State Police.
“What’ll we do?” panted Tom. “The police would shoot me on sight, if they caught me. And if we try to run, my own brother will kill me.”
There was no answer to that one as far as Mac or Smitty or Josh could figure out.
Blazing searchlights blared over the plowed ground.
“All right, everybody! Drop the guns. Hands up. You’re under arrest.”
“Hey — behind us—” yelled one of the men unseen behind the dazzling lights.
Still another car was jerking over the rough field. It was silhouetted in a beam of light as one of the flares was turned its way. And Smitty sighed in relief. That was the chief’s car! Benson was here, now.
The police didn’t share the knowledge of the newcomer’s identity. They fired at the car.
The slugs had no effect whatever. It raced toward them. From a little tube in front came something about the size of a grapefruit. It lobbed against the squad car. And from it, rose lazy loops of stuff like mist.
At almost the same moment Mac saw young Wayne fall. The searchlight revealed a small, neat gash on the top of Wayne’s head, put there by Mike, The Avenger’s deadly little .22.
Mac got up almost leisurely from the furrow in which he had lain.
“Everything’s all right, now,” he said. “We’re out of trouble. Let’s go!”
He walked toward Benson’s car, with the rest following. Tom stared in awe as Smitty picked up Wayne as if he had been a kitten; stared harder at four State cops lying as if peacefully asleep.
“Gas bomb,” said Mac briefly. “It puts a man out for ten or fifteen minutes, but doesn’t hurt him any.”
“Josh, take your car,” came Benson’s cold, calm voice. “Smitty, take the one you and Mac came in. Mac, drive Wayne’s car so it can’t be traced. I’ll drive mine. Back to Bleek Street.”
The little cavalcade moved away from The Corners — and death — with The Avenger in the lead.
Benson had meant to hypnotize the captured bank director, Robert Rath, and get some information from him on his return from The Corners. But one look into the second-floor office where he had been imprisoned showed that he’d get no information from Rath.
There was no way for Rath to escape from the room. But the man, crazed with fear, had found a way to escape from The Avenger and doom.
Rath had drawn a piece of the shattered desk glass hard across both wrists, severing the big veins there. He lay, now dead!
The giant Smitty was behind Benson, staring over his shoulder.
“Here’s one crook the State won’t have to bother with in court,” he said. “Good riddance.”
Benson shook his head, pale eyes icy in his white, death-mask countenance.
“I had counted on getting information from him,” he said. “And we need it badly. Tomorrow the stockholders’ meeting of Ballandale Glass Corp. is held. That will save Town Bank. We have to get them before the meeting.”
“Josh and Mac and I have been after Wallach and Grand and the others enough to know that the directors’ nerves have cracked wide open,” mused Smitty. “If you could pin down the one man responsible for the murders and the stock theft, their spines would melt like snow in the sun. Get the chief crook, and they’ll all go to pieces.”
“The name of the chief crook was what I hoped to get from Rath,” said Benson. His pale eyes glittered. “Well, there may be some record on our picture trap that will help. Josh must have developed the film by now. We’ll go and see if it has caught anything.”
The picture trap referred to a small section of outer wall of the building bearing the sign: JUSTICE. In that section of wall was a small round bit of glass in the middle of a tapestry-brick design that effectively concealed it.
The bit of glass was a telescopic lens on one of the world’s finest cameras. An electric eye controlled the shutter so that, if the device were set, a picture would be taken of anything moving in front of the lens. At night, pictures were taken by the aid of infrared rays.
Benson had set the camera trap before leaving on the heels of the misguided Wayne Crimm.
Josh had the film from the camera developed when The Avenger and Smitty got up to the great top-floor room. Benson, face a white mask, eyes like ice under a polar moon, extinguished the lights and projected the resultant pictures on the screen.
There were two of them. One had been caught when the front of a car crossed the path of the photo-electric cell and tripped the shutter. The other had been snapped when a man’s body had done the same thing.
The second showed the man, just getting out of the car, looking toward the doorway.
“Wallach!” said Mac. “He had the nerve to come here—”
“He no doubt learned of Rath’s impulsive visit,” came The Avenger’s cold voice in the dark. “When Rath didn’t come home again, he must have come here to find out what had happened to his fellow director. Wallach — and another.”
That was true. There was someone with Wallach; somebody who stayed in the car and whose face was hidden by Wallach’s shoulder.
Wayne Crimm was in the room, with a bandage on the top of his head where Mike’s bullet had creased him.
“That’s Tom’s car!” he blazed suddenly. “Then that must be Tom at the wheel—”
“Wayne,” came Benson’s voice. It was calm and quiet, but there was a lash of authority in it that would have quieted a far older and more reckless person than Wayne Crimm. “I have told you that your brother Tom really had a blow-out the night he was to meet your father. I checked on that early in the game. So the V in the tire of the death car must have been cut there deliberately by the same person who cut one — deeper, so as to cause a blow-out — in the tire of Tom’s car. As for your brother being at the wheel of that car — Tom was out at The Corners when this picture was taken.”
Wayne flushed miserably and was silent. He had made a diamond-studded fool of himself once tonight. He thought he’d better not do it a second time.