His hand flashed out with the speed of a striking snake, gripped the man’s wrist. The man let out a smothered, harsh cry. His companion fell on top of Agent “X.” Together they pressed him to the cold, wet sand, while the man with the blackjack tried to free his wrist and swing a death-dealing blow.
Agent “X,” interpreter of men’s motives, read murder in the silent, tigerish attack of these two. They had come upon him looking at the camera, caught him prowling, snooping. He was to be destroyed as a menace to some criminal plot.
Sensing his closeness to death, Agent “X” summoned his keenest faculties, mental and physical. The man’s blackjack might not be the only weapon.
With his free hand, Agent “X” struck a crashing blow at the nearest man’s face. He couldn’t see any features. There was only a black head outlined against the faint grayness of the sky.
The man grunted, relaxed his clutch. Agent “X” twisted again with a motion like a steel spring released. His fingers still gripped the wrist of the blackjack holder. The man cursed, relaxed his clutch on the weapon. Agent “X” broke free, leaped to his feet and kicked the blackjack toward the water.
Both men rushed him, tried to force him toward the surf. The clenched fist of one caught him in the jaw, snapping his head back. He struck out again, and knocked one of the men in the sand; then he leaped away and ran in a zigzag course up the beach. As he did so there was the thudding report of a silenced gun and a bullet screamed close to his head. The next moment he was in the black shadows under the broken piles of an old pier.
The two men ran up the beach and stood in the shadows of a shed. He couldn’t see their faces. Their voices were two low for him to hear. It was only his phenomenally keen eyesight that made it possible for him to see their outlines at all.
At a fast stride they struck off along the beach, keeping close to the wharves and sheds, keeping away from the lighter sand. But the Agent followed as persistently as he had trailed Detective Banton. Perhaps, for all he could tell, one of them was Banton.
He held his breath a moment later. The two men leaped up on a wharf that ran out into the harbor. He heard the creak of boards faintly under their feet. He followed, creeping along the wharf, stopping often to get the men’s silhouettes against the faint grayness of the horizon.
A covered yacht, apparently out of commission and laid up for the season, was snugged fast to the side of this wharf. In an instant the two murderous figures blended with the darker shadow of this and disappeared.
Agent “X’s” pulses hammered. He believed he was close to the secret of the murderer’s hideout. But, when he approached the yacht in the darkness, he could see nothing except boarded doors and carefully closed canvas coverings. To flash a light would be suicide. He had a feeling that eyes were straining there in the darkness.
He thought of Banton. Was one of these men the agency detective, and if not, had Banton gone back to the city?
He left the wharf and went back into the town. It was now pitch dark. But he located Detective Banton’s flivver, just backing out of the side street. Banton at the wheel.
Agent “X’s” face furrowed. If the yacht he had seen was the hiding-place of stolen loot there must be other accomplices in the city, and he didn’t want to strike till he could bring about the round-up of the whole murderous gang. If one or more escaped, the death-torch terrors might continue. The inner hunch which had so often directed him along the right track urged him to stick to Banton’s trail.
He got into his own car and followed the detective back to town. But he was not even careful now to keep the red tail-light of Banton’s car in sight. A daring plan had suggested itself. Two men whose addresses he knew would be offered jobs as gunmen in the mysterious gang that Banton was about to assemble—“Slats” Becker and Tony Garino. Becker was almost a head shorter than the Agent, but Garino was approximately his size.
Back in town he drove swiftly to the neighborhood where Garino was lurking, hiding from the police after the kidnapping of the commissioner. Knowing the greediness of the man, Agent “X” felt certain that he would not turn down Banton’s offer.
The place where Garino stayed like a wolf in hiding was a shabby rooming house in a tough neighborhood, a rooming house kept by a woman who specialized in the harboring of criminals.
The location of every room was familiar to Agent “X.” It was here that he had come to get in touch with Tony Garino, Monk Magurren, and the others in the first place.
He parked his car and moved forward confidently now. Diving through an alley, he crossed several cluttered back yards by the simple expedient of vaulting over their fences. He counted the fences, came at last to a yard where he stayed.
There was a light in the basement of the house. A witchlike old woman was puttering around in a dirty kitchen. But it was a room in the third floor that held the eye of Agent “X.” A light burned in this. There was a crack beneath the shade. It was the room where Tony Garino dwelt.
With the silence and agility of an ape, Agent “X” crept forward and drew himself up to the first platform of the rusty fire escape that snaked down the rear of the house. He ascended cautiously, testing each rung of the iron ladder to be sure that no squeaking bar betrayed him.
Just under the window of the third floor he paused. Raising his head he looked inside. He had come in good time.
Tony Garino, the white-faced black-haired gangster, was in earnest confab with one of Detective Banton’s men. They were just finishing their deal apparently. A hundred-dollar bill changed hands. Banton’s man handed the gangster a slip of paper. Garino talked with much gesticulating of his hands.
Ten minutes passed during which the Agent got hints through a lot of vivid pantomime. Then Banton’s man left. The actions of Garino showed that he was getting ready to leave at once, too.
He went to a shabby bureau, took a big automatic from a drawer, examined the clip, and shoved the gun into his coat. He knelt before the rusty gas stove that heated the room, turned it out, and, after it had cooled a moment, ran his fingers over the blackened burner. With the soot he had collected he made smudges on his face.
This clumsy attempt of Garino’s at disguise brought a sardonic gleam to the Agent’s eyes. The gangster was trying to guard against recognition by the police. But, to the Man of a Thousand Faces, it seemed rather ridiculous.
THE Secret Agent descended the fire escape as silently as he had come up it, crossed fences, and turned into the street. Garino was just coming out the door of the rooming house as he did so. He set off at a brisk pace up the street keeping well into the shadows.
Agent “X” followed, ducked through a side street, skirted ahead of Garino, and waited beside a porch stoop, as silent as the night itself. In the Agent’s hand now was the small, gleaming cylinder of a hypodermic needle. The reservoir of the instrument contained a highly concentrated, liquid anesthetizing narcotic of his own mixing.
Tony Garino never knew what had happened to him. The arm that flashed out of the shadows, the point of the needle that pierced his skin, were synchronized like an act in some well-rehearsed play.
Garino was drawn into the shadows and deposited with his back against the stoop just as the drug in his veins began to thrust him down into the depths of unconsciousness.
Leaving him there, Agent “X,” as though nothing had happened, came out of the street and walked swiftly to the spot where he had parked his car. He drove ahead to a point opposite the place where he had left Garino and stopped close to the curb.
A moment he scanned the street in both directions. A single pedestrian was hurrying along.