There was a split second of silence. Then Pinkie Huer laughed. But not with his face.
His mouth was open and from it came the whinnying laugh of a person who has been tickled — but the face around the mouth didn’t change expression in the least.
Dead-faced he laughed for a minute, then stopped.
Two people in the room caught the odd lack of facial movement. One was quick-witted Nellie Gray. The other, unfortunately, was the black-eyed man.
“That,” the man said slowly, peering at Pinkie Huer’s face “is very, very funny.”
“Funny?” snarled Huer. “If you think it’s a joke for a ticklish guy to get jabbed in the ribs all the time—”
“That isn’t what I meant was funny,” said the leader, jetty eyes beginning to glitter. “Your face — poke him again, Joe.”
“Ootsy-kootsy,” said the man in the gray felt hat, who wasn’t getting the nuances of the situation at all.
Huer laughed. Bleated with open mouth — and with his face as set and devoid of all expression as a mask.
The black-eyed man leaped back. A gun appeared in his hand.
“This isn’t Pinkie Huer! Get him!”
CHAPTER XI
“Huer” — In A Hurry
The gun bucked in his hand and the room thundered to the echoes of the shot. But the man with the face like Huer’s was no longer standing where he had been. Like something in a moving picture run at five times normal speed, he had snapped a yard to the left. And with equal dizzying quickness, he leaped forward.
The black-eyed man tried to shoot again, and got a poke on the side of the head like the kick of a mule. A large mule. He fell backward, but not far. The man with Huer’s face caught his swaying body, whirled it around, and catapulted it against the two men who looked like brothers.
The two had been leaping forward almost side by side. One said, “Ooof!” Both sat down with the black-eyed man lying across their knees.
“Huer” bent like a snapped spring, and straightened again. In his right hand was something like a piece of blued steel tubing, slightly bent at the handle end. The little gun gave a hissing spatt. A small slug belched from the deadly mouth of Mike, the silenced, special gun.
The man with the reddish hair had his gun almost lined on Huer’s chest. But he fell as Mike spoke. Fell like a toppled log, with blood dripping from the top of his head.
The man whose face had been unable to crinkle with laughter when his mouth had, picked up Nellie Gray, chair and all. He sent the man with the gray felt hat flying back against the wall with a powerful shove of his right leg.
He got to the door, out, slammed it shut.
“Mr.… Benson?” faltered Nellie, still not sure.
Benson nodded. He had bolted the door when he slammed it. Shots were ripping through the panels as the men in the living room prepared to shoot their way out.
Benson’s hands flashed to his eyeballs, removed the little thin cups that had given him Huer’s eyes. Vision was impaired a little by them. He snapped Ike, the razor-sharp throwing knife, from its holster at his left calf. Three sweeps with it, and Nellie was free.
She stood up. Down the hall there were yells and steps of others coming to investigate the racket. The door opened and two men jammed into the hall.
Benson snapped a shot with Mike. One of the two went down with the top of his head suddenly a red smear. The other was shooting. Benson got Nellie around the banister of the nearby stairs and halfway up, out of the line of the shots.
The two raced to the second floor and into a bedroom. Benson went to the window.
Three slugs fanned into the window jamb as he raised the pane. He leaped back toward the door. Bullets thudded through that, too. Men in the hall, men outside on the lawn.
“Caught!” was the word Nellie formed soundlessly on lips not so red as usual.
But Benson didn’t act as if he thought he was trapped.
The room was partly furnished, with an untidy and unmade bed along one wall, and a little marble-topped stand and a chair nearby.
Benson caught up the chair and smashed it against the side wall between this room and the next. The chair broke in his hands. But the wall — as flimsy as most inner partitions — buckled and broke through, too. Benson jabbed with the single chair leg left in his steely fingers.
The hole enlarged. He caught up the mattress from the bed and shoved it through the hole. Then he dropped matches on it, through the hole, till it blazed. Smoke began to roll up in billows.
Benson snatched the marble top from the little stand, and tossed it through the hole and through the window in the next room. Glass tinkled. Smoke began to curl out of the window in a black pillar.
It began to curl into the room he and Nellie were in, too. He caught up the blanket from the bed, moving with that incredible swiftness of his, and hung it over the hole. Now the next room could become an inferno before fire ate through the partition and began to threaten them.
It could become an inferno — and summon the fire department with the smoke billowing out the window.
The men in the hall didn’t know what had happened. They’d heard crashing sounds, and that was all. They kept on shooting around the lock of the door. But the men outside could understand.
“Borg!” one of them yelled up. “Come out! All you guys! He’s fired the joint! The whole neighborhood’ll be on our necks!”
The shooting in the hall ceased abruptly. There was the sound of running feet. Nellie opened the door, before Benson could stop her. A bullet from the stairs almost took a lock of her yellow-gold hair. The doorway was still covered.
From outside came the snarl of a starter and then the shriek of a motor raced almost beyond endurance. Benson angled to the window, with Nellie beside him. A car was streaking backward out of the garage in the rear of the house.
At the wheel was the man with the sandy-red hair.
“I thought you killed him!” gasped Nellie. “I saw you shoot him in the head.”
“Not in the head,” said Benson. In his expert hand, Mike, the silenced little .22, spat twice. In the driveway, the car skidded to a stop and swerved forward to dash to the street. Both bullets had hit a front tire. But the tire sagged only a little. It was bulletproof.
“Not in the head,” Benson said calmly. Flames crackled and roared in the next room. “I don’t kill, if I can help it. I shoot to knock a man out — to crease him. The bullet hits the top of the skull and bangs a man unconscious without murdering him. But it takes rather close shooting.”
His pale, deadly eyes looked almost apologetic.
“I had to shoot fast in the room downstairs. I must have been a sixteenth of an inch or so off, because the man shouldn’t have recovered so quickly.”
Men piled into the car till it settled almost on its tires. Seven, eight, nine, counting the driver. The car rocketed forward.
“They’re getting away!” wailed Nellie.
Benson’s basilisk eyes followed the car with regret but resignation in their lambent depths. There wasn’t much he could do to stop a getaway, in the face of such heavy odds. He shrugged.
“We’ll be able to leave this room now,” he said.
He walked to the door and opened it. No shot came. The man at the head of the stairs had joined the rest in their flight.
Down in the first-floor hall they found the second man Benson had creased with a .22 slug. He had been abandoned. There simply hadn’t been room for another soul in the overcrowded getaway car.
“This one, at least, we have,” Nellie Gray said.
Benson’s pale, icily composed gaze played over her vengefully pretty face. From the distance came the siren and bells of the fire department.