He torched the lock out in about three minutes; toward the end, it would not have been noticed. A sound from within would have drowned it.
That sound was a muffled screaming. A girl’s screaming.
Benson opened the door and stepped, as soundlessly as a gray shadow, into the big room. Two figures were at the far end, struggling. One was the girl with the black eyes and ink-dark hair. The other was the man with the sharp ears — Rann.
Rann, smirking, half angry and half entertained, had his left hand over the girl’s lips to muffle her cries and was drawing her close to him with a rough right arm. Benson stooped. Mike and Ike seemed to leap into his hands of their own volition.
“Rann,” Benson said.
The man with the pointed ears sprang from the girl as if she had burned him. Springing, he drew a gun. With the swiftness of long practice, he leveled it at The Avenger.
But the practiced swiftness was a slow thing compared to Benson’s move. His left hand had lashed out — and from it, like a tiny arrow from a bow, had lanced Ike.
The little knife sliced across Rann’s knuckles, and, with a gasp, he dropped the gun. Raging, he stooped to pick it up again, and a slug whispered from Mike’s silenced little muzzle.
Rann went down and stayed down. Blood came from his head.
The girl’s reaction to the downing of the man who had recently been her captor, was strange. She turned, raging like a tigress, toward Benson.
“You’ve killed him!” she panted. “How dare you kill him! All I’ve done — everything — done for nothing—”
She cracked, and began to laugh and cry in hysteria. Benson had a quick method for that. His hands seized her slim shoulders with a force that shocked her out of the attack. His eyes, like pools of ice water, seemed to drown her like a glacial flood. She shuddered a little and relaxed.
With Rann motionless on the floor, she seemed to have lost the mainspring of all her resolution. She answered dully, lifelessly, when The Avenger asked her name.
“Diana Borne,” she said.
“Why are you in this affair?”
“Because that man killed my brother.”
“Your brother?”
“Yes,” said Diana. “By brother is — was — a newspaper reporter. He got wind of a speed test to be made on a salt flat near Salt Lake City. He went out to it — and never came back! His body was found that night in a ditch, and there was a gun in his hand that spelled suicide to the police. I went to that flat and waited. I went alone, because the police were all through with a ‘suicide.’ My object was to kill the man who had murdered my brother, if he should come back to the murder scene. But finally you and your friends came down in a plane, and then a lot of other men—”
“So, to ingratiate yourself with the gang, you tried to turn us over to them?” said Benson.
“Yes. And it worked. Even if you got away. I told them I was sent by their superior — not knowing who this superior of theirs might be. And it worked. They took me as one of them. Then my plans were changed. I knew if one of a gang like this had killed my brother, it was simply at the orders of a higher-up. I meant to get that higher-up. I came east with the gang, worked with them, all to the end of learning that this man”—she stared at Rann—“was the superior in question. I got him here to kill him, after taking him from your colossal friend in a cab. But he got my gun and held me prisoner. Just the same, I’d have gotten him, if you hadn’t killed—”
“He isn’t dead,” said The Avenger.
“Not— But you shot him! In the head!”
“I creased him,” said Benson. “A shot on the top of the skull, placed just right, will knock a man out with its glancing blow; but it will not kill him.”
“Then give me that gun—” stormed Diana, reaching for Mike.
She was stopped first by the icy glitter of refusal in Benson’s pale eyes, and second by the sound of steps.
The steps came from outside, on the stairs.
Like a gray flash, The Avenger was at the door. He peered out the hole made when the lock was burned out.
The man who made the sounds was one of those who had attacked Singer and himself at the abandoned factory after Singer’s men had left.
Softly, silently, Benson slid the inner bolt on the door. The man was knocking before he had finished the move. He tried the door, knocked again and finally left.
The girl drew a deep breath. She had looked through the hole over Benson’s shoulder.
“I’m glad he left,” she whispered. “That’s one of the crew working for the Henderlin crowd. They’re all killers.”
Benson had his tiny radio out, and was signaling Bleek Street.
“Smitty? You and Josh and Mac come here at once. The loft building, Smitty, where you trailed Rann. No, don’t take the secret exit. Come right out on the street. The armored sedan will keep the bullets of that gang outside from you. Come at once!”
He turned back to the girl.
“How do you know about the coal and oil crowd?”
“I trailed Rann to the Henderlin place several times, after I’d found out he was the man I wanted. I never could get quite near enough to use my gun. Or rather, my brother’s gun. I almost got him the day he killed the vice president, and the secretary. And you almost got me! I thought I might get him the night I drove the Henderlin detective to Bleek Street to lead your men to that house in New Jersey. Instead, some other man named Xisco showed up and killed the detective.”
“That was your car my men heard drive off, then.”
“I guess so.”
“After that?” said Benson, cold eyes like stainless steel chips in his paralyzed face.
“I found Rann again. He was apparently playing both Lorens Singer and the Henderlin Corp. I just watched both places till I picked up his trail. But the gang was getting suspicious. To allay that suspicion, I lured you to the warehouse for them. You were just another person to me. I didn’t care much what happened to you if I could get the man who got my brother.”
Benson looked at the black hair and eyes.
“Indian blood?” he said.
“Yes,” was her proud reply. “I— Oh! Stop him!”
Rann had come to. Suddenly he was on his feet and racing for the door. But The Avenger had caught the slight difference in breathing a minute ago and was ready. He simply put his foot out. Rann smashed to the floor again, sat up rubbing his shoulder.
And at the door, a stealthy finger was poking like a small snake through the hole where the lock had been burned out. The finger felt inquiringly for the inside bolt The Avenger had slid.
But the man with the white hair and deadly, pale eyes had turned his back by then, so that the finger wasn’t in his range of vision!
CHAPTER XVIII
Finger Of Doom!
“For a man who has murdered so many of his fellows,” said Benson, staring at the little fellow who sat on the floor and rubbed his shoulder, “you don’t look very impressive. Yet you’ve certainly earned the chair. Veck, Wencilau, Sodolow, the Henderlin detective, the vice president of Henderlin Corp. and his secretary—”
“What are you talking about? You’re crazy!”
“You’re the laboratory worker who killed the four Polish scientists, disguised as a different person each time. One of the disguises carried with it the name Xisco. Your ears give you away. There are other Bertillon measurements besides the ones for ears. Didn’t you know that? You shouldn’t have pinned such faith on four completely different sets of ears. The very coincidence of four small men with extremely distinctive ears gave you away.”