He went through the clouds of tear gas as if it had been fresh air — up to the second floor. It was from those windows that Tom, caught in his own tragic foolishness, had been firing.
Tom was choking and his eyes were streaming. But he could see an advancing figure, and he fired at it frantically. Three bullets hit Benson’s bulletproof, celluglass undergarment. Then The Avenger was up to the choking man.
His fist lashed out with delicate precision. Tom fell. The Avenger shouldered him and walked down to the first floor.
But not to the front.
There was a rear entrance onto a narrow areaway, from this particular garage. Benson unlocked and opened that, and came out with his burden in the midst of a cloud of gas.
There were men in here, too. For their benefit Benson coughed and wiped at his eyes. They stared at him with awe. None of them recognized him, but New York is a big place with lots of detectives; so none thought of that.
All they saw was one of their number, apparently an iron man who only coughed a little from gas that would have downed any one of them — and who even kept the butt of a cigar nonchalantly between his clenched teeth — coming out of a seething garage with a desperate man over his shoulder.
“Boy, you’ll get medals for this!” one of the uniformed men breathed. “Here, we’ll take the guy—”
“Too much trouble with the crowds if we have a parade,” growled Benson. “Keep up the show. I’ll take this man in, myself, sneak him out the areaway here. Then we won’t have a mob hanging on our necks and messing up the works.”
It was good sense. The men nodded, and Benson went to the areaway entrance alone, with Tom over his shoulder. His own car was around the corner on Amsterdam. There was a cab parked near here, though. It was empty. The driver was undoubtedly on Amsterdam watching the battle.
Benson calmly appropriated the cab, drove off in it with Tom still unconscious in the rear — and ran into more trouble than all the crowd and all the police had been.
There were men around there who wanted Tom as badly as the cops did, but who hadn’t been reckless enough to try to snatch him in that barrage. Those men belonged to the Luckow mob!
They simply couldn’t have Tom taken. He could talk too much. So they had hung around on the fringe, baffled and furious—
Till Luckow himself, from the corner, happened to see a man who was obviously a detective come out of the areaway carrying the fellow over whom all the shooting was occurring.
The Avenger couldn’t know that, however, not being a seer. He only knew that he had gone three blocks when a car overhauled the cab and bore down on him from the right. He speeded up, and the car beat him to it and got a little ahead.
Then another car took its place at the right of the cab. That one clanged into him and drove him to the curb. The one ahead cut across his path and stopped him with a jolt.
Benson was not in one of his bulletproofed jobs, now. He was in a standard cab that could be riddled like cheese.
He bent over in the seat, and opened the right front door of the cab. He rolled out of it and got behind an iron light-post.
Already men from the second car had the rear door open and were dragging Tom’s unconscious body out. Benson had Mike, the little, silenced .22, from its holster. Its deadly small message whispered out and one of the men dropped. Another joined him in a second or two, but that was all Benson could do.
It was one man against a mob; and even though that one man was The Avenger, himself, such were the odds that the mob could not fail to win out.
At least six men were firing methodically at the iron post that was all that stood between Benson and death. He couldn’t move a fraction of an inch from its shelter, to use Mike again, or attempt a suicidal move to recover Tom, or anything else.
He was caught there. And, caught, he could only listen while one of the cars drove off with Tom in it.
The other one did not drive off. And the fusillade of bullets continued. Ever a resourceful killer, Luckow had seen in this an excellent opportunity to get this guy with the dead face who was so dangerous. He had recognized Benson.
The bullets began coming from shallower angles as the men spread out and moved to get to one side where they could drill Benson. In a few more seconds they’d have him.
The Avenger didn’t dart either to right or left, as, of course, they had expected.
He leaped straight up.
There were ornamental side-arms on the light-post, up about ten feet. Benson caught one of those and swung, hard, straight toward the gang car which was still tangled with the taxi only a dozen feet away.
He shot over the heads of the amazed gangsters, hit the top of their sedan, and leaped down to the other side.
They still had him. They could swivel and pour lead at his running figure till one of the slugs found his unprotected head. But he didn’t have to run far.
A coupé shot up beside him, door opened.
Benson leaped in, with a move so swift and smooth that it was almost as if he had flowed in. There was a woman at the wheel of the coupé, so heavily veiled that even his keen eyes could not see her features.
Tom Crimm could have had a word to say about the veiled woman who had quite probably saved Benson’s life. But she was an enigma to The Avenger.
She had swirled into his orbit, picked him up, and was presently to swirl out again just as mysteriously.
About a dozen blocks from the taxi scene, she pulled to the curb.
“You had better get out here,” she said.
Her voice was cultured and low. Benson peered at the veil, his eyes like diamond drills.
“Please,” she murmured.
He got out. The Avenger never distressed a woman, particularly one who had helped him as this one had. He looked after her, as the coupé whirled off down the street. As he went on to Bleek Street, he noted down every detail of her appearance in memory; type of veil, clothes, shoes, tint of nail polish, shape of ears.
He kept thinking of her because she was a riddle; and The Avenger was always challenged by riddles.
At Bleek Street, however, thoughts of her were driven out swiftly. They were driven out by the specter of death!
CHAPTER XIII
Desperate Call
Wayne Crimm was young enough to take things at their face value. He was young enough to believe what a man’s lips said without looking into his eyes to check the truth of the statement. Also, he was still impressed by a man’s worldly position more than he, himself, realized.
Wayne was alone at Bleek Street when the buzzer announced someone in the vestibule downstairs. He had seen the aides of The Avenger work the release lever, after observing whoever rang the bell on their special television set. He went through the same motions and saw Robert Rath, downstairs. So he let him up.
Wayne met Rath at the second floor. And Wayne met Rath with a gun in his hand and fury and wariness in his blue eyes. This man was one of the little set who was responsible for his father’s death and the loss of his father’s fortune. If he tried just one trick—
But Rath tried no tricks.
The bank director was only a shadow of his normal, loud-spoken, plump self. He was shivering and pale, and in his eyes was fear and contrition. It was the sight of these things in his face that had impelled Wayne to let him up from the vestibule.
“Wayne,” Rath said, glancing around as if afraid of being overheard even in this sanctum, “I’ve got to see Mr. Benson. Is he in?”
“What do you want to see him about?” snapped Wayne.