“Gailord Cement Co.,” she read over the closed gate. She saw a man stalking back and forth through the gate’s pickets, knew she couldn’t get in that way.
But she had to get in there, somehow. Wayne Crimm was in there. And he had been entrusted to her capable hands when Benson left headquarters.
She saw three other men in the small plant yard. And at sight of all those odds, her hand went to her slender waist.
At his belt, each member of The Avenger’s little crew carried a transmitting and receiving radio set hardly larger than a good-sized metal cigar case.
Nellie got hers out, now.
“Smitty,” she whispered into it, when she had tuned to their own special wavelength. “Mac. It’s Nellie. I need help. Come at once. Gailord Cement Plant, beyond Jackson Heights. Mac, Smitty, come at once. Gailord Cement Plant—”
“Better walk around outside the fence,” one of the three in the yard growled to the man at the gate. “See that nobody trailed that guy.”
Nellie crouched low. She was in a dark dress and blended with the night. She saw the gate open, saw the man come out.
When the gate closed again, Nellie was on the inside. There was a truck at the gate, under shelter, loaded with bags of cement to go out first thing in the morning.
With a courage few men would have displayed, Nellie had managed to slide almost between the legs of the man coming out and get under the truck before he or the other three could see her.
She could see the dim columns of their legs, in the darkness, where they stood at the side of the truck within a yard of her.
“We’ll keep on prowlin’ the yard,” one of the three said. “This is important. Luckow said so.”
The three separated. One went right, one left, and one straight ahead toward the shadowy outlines of the cement plant itself.
On the theory that the safest place to be when someone is hunting for you is right behind him, Nellie followed that third man. Toward the building.
She kept within ten feet of him, like a lovely little wraith in the blackness. She didn’t veer till he had gotten to the factory wall.
There she slipped to the side, through a small door.
Down through a great, piled room, she saw a glint of light. She went toward it and found herself looking into a small office, probably that of the plant superintendent. There were three men in there.
Two were sitting far back in swivel-chairs, with their feet on the desk. The third huddled in a corner with a gag over his lips and with so many ropes around arms and legs and body that he looked like a mummy.
That third man was young Wayne Crimm.
“Do we give him the usual?” said one of the men, jerking his head toward Wayne. “Cement coffin?”
The words were all too graphic. He meant, would they put Wayne in a barrel, pour cement around him and then sink him in the Atlantic some night.
“I guess so, after a while,” the other man said. “But not right away. We hold him on ice, for now.”
Nellie started a little in the darkness outside the door. But that was all she did do — just start a bit. She knew that any further move would mean her death.
For a gun had suddenly, without warning, been thrust against her side!
“Havin’ a good time, kid?” snarled a voice above her.
She looked up. She hadn’t been as smart as she’d thought. The man from the gate was there, with a .38 in his hand. He must have spotted her taxi, slugged the driver and rolled him off into an alley; then he had returned to see who had come here in the cab. At least, she hoped that the driver had only been slugged—
“Hey!” yelled one of the men in the office, feet slapping to the floor in alarm. “Who’s out there?”
“Me,” sung out the man. “Just caught up with a visitor. In there, you!”
Nellie marched into the office with the gun prodding her shapely back.
But the other one stared at Nellie’s blond loveliness with no spark of anything but lust for murder in his cold eyes. There was going to be immediate use for a cement coffin, after all.
Unless, Nellie thought frantically, that brief radio S.O.S. of hers had been heard.
CHAPTER IX
Human Tank
At the corner of Waverly Place and Sixth Avenue is the world’s strangest drugstore. Bought originally by Dick Benson, he had placed it in the proprietorship of his aide, a tall, dour Scotchman named Fergus MacMurdie.
The front of the store was like any other drugstore, but the rear three-fifths served as a dual laboratory. Down one side ranged benches containing transcendent paraphernalia belonging to the giant electrical engineer, Smitty. Along the other side was a complete laboratory in which MacMurdie conducted his chemical experiments.
Mac’s blue eyes were bitter, now, and flaming. He had been listening to the big, special radio in the laboratory. He had just heard one interrupted sentence on the radio’s special wavelength. Then he began transmitting himself, feverishly.
“Smitty! Smitty! Mac calling. Smitty!”
About five minutes passed before he got a reply.
“O.K. Mac. This is Smitty.”
“Ye overgrown clown,” burred Mac. “Why don’t ye pay some attention to the silly little belt radio ye’ve made us all wear? Where are ye?”
“Out near the Brooklyn Bird, checking on Luckow,” came the giant’s voice.
“Meet me at the Gailord Cement Plant, beyond Jackson Heights. Nellie — she’s in troub—”
Mac didn’t even bother to finish the word. He knew Smitty would already be on his way, radio disregarded.
Two things could turn the good-natured giant into a human landslide. One was calling him by his full name, Algernon Heathcote, instead of the nickname of Smitty. The other was — trouble threatening Nellie.
When that diminutive bundle of pertness was in peril, Smitty was like a mad bull elephant.
Mac got out to the vicinity of the cement plant almost as swiftly as if he had flown. He found Smitty lurking down the block from it, chewing his fingers in impatience. Smitty had been there for nearly eight minutes.
“You croaking Scotch raven!” he rumbled in a savage whisper. “Did you stop to change your suit, or what? I’ve been here an hour—”
“I didn’t call ye till thirty-five minutes ago, ye mountain of suet,” Mac snapped back. “And you were nearer, to start with— Sh-h-h.”
Down the block from the dark spot where they lurked, the plant gate was opening. Methodically, the man there was coming out to patrol the outside of the grounds as well as the inside.
The man came toward the two. A sort of growl rumbled in Smitty’s throat, and Mac felt profoundly thankful he wasn’t that man.
The fellow got within ten feet of them, then saw the Scot’s foot protruding from behind a big trash box. He stopped dead.
It wasn’t the first time the Scot’s huge feet had given him away. But in this case it didn’t matter.
Smitty came within a dozen pounds of weighing an even three hundred. But he was up and over that trash box like an agile boy. He got the man by the throat as a startled yell came to his lips.
Smitty didn’t bother to use both hands. Why should he? This guy was hardly six feet tall and didn’t weigh more than a hundred and ninety. A pigmy, that’s what he was.
The giant held the man rigid, at arm’s length, for a minute or so, then opened his huge hand. The man dropped like something loosed from the jaws of a dredge, and Mac and Smitty went to the gate.
The fellow had locked it when he came out. Smitty didn’t even bother to swear. He looked around, caught up a big beam, inserted the ends between the two-by-four slats of the gate.
There was a grinding wrench, and the gate came to pieces like wet paper.