The Corners! Josh didn’t know where it was. But he found out in a hurry.
It was a small, little-known roadhouse on a side road in New Jersey. Luckow had a half-interest in it.
Rosabel had mentioned the place, and Josh had no other lead to where she might be taken if she were caught. Of course, they might have killed her where they found her.
Shuddering, Josh dismissed that thought. He clung to the logical idea that they wouldn’t want to commit murder in the apartment of Luckow’s sister. And he sped for The Corners in The Avenger’s fastest car.
Josh was a very dark Negro, indeed, and he made it a habit to wear dark clothes. The result was that he could slip along in the darkness of night almost like an invisible man.
He left his car a half a mile from the roadhouse and made his way across open fields toward the rear of it. He was thinking grimly of the way his wife’s voice had abruptly stopped, and hoping that his hunch about her being brought to the place she’d mentioned was right.
The Corners was a huge old farmhouse remodeled into a mongrel thing with an electric sign in front. There was a parking lot at the side, in which were twenty-five or thirty cars.
Josh crossed the lot like a streak of darkness within darkness. He got to a big tree, whose upper branches scraped the side of the building.
Up there, on the third floor, were dormer windows. The biggest branch came within four feet of the central window.
Josh went up the tree like a great black cat. He poised a moment, then leaped the distance between tree branch and roof. He hit the roof with a little louder thud than he liked; so he reached out and caught one of the leafy twigs of the big bough. He drew these harshly over the shingles.
That was to tell anyone inside who might have heard the thud that it was caused by the butting of the branch. Then he went to the dormer windows, crawling along the gutter, and peered into one after another.
The fourth showed a small attic room with somebody in it. There were two people in it, to be accurate, a man and a woman. But at first Josh only saw the man.
It was Tom Crimm. On his face was a queer look. It was compounded of fear and anger, with a tragic expression of guilt and regret thrown in.
Then Josh saw the woman, and things began to whirl around in his head with angry confusion.
The woman was Rosabel. And Rosabel was tied so tightly that the cords sank deep into her wrists and ankles. There was a gag over her lips, too.
Josh stayed where he was for a moment, too wrathful to move. He saw Tom stride toward her, with a knife in his hand.
The look on Tom’s face was a clear record of the chaos and guilt in the brain behind it. He had wanted his gang tough, to smash the bank crowd. But in all his planning he hadn’t contemplated anything so extreme as this.
With a sweep of the knife, he slashed the rope at Rosabel’s wrists. Another took care of her ankles. Then he removed the gag. His hands were trembling as he did so.
“They were going to kill you!” he said indignantly. “I heard them. Going to murder you here, as soon as the roadhouse customers were gone for the night, so the shots wouldn’t be heard. Killing women! I didn’t intend to have anything like that happen.”
No one connected with Tom in all this had denied that he had a brain. It was just that he used it in the wrong way, breaking the law, himself, to get even with the lawbreakers.
He was beginning to see just what kind of force he had unleashed when he played into the hands of Nicky Luckow. Murdering women in cold blood! He had thought the murder of the watchman at the bank was the last straw. But this — this went beyond that.
He helped Rosabel to her feet. She flexed her arms as the circulation started to return.
“I’ll help you down the back way,” Tom said. Josh, on the roof outside, nodded the gratitude which he wasn’t able to voice. “You can slip off toward the highway—”
Josh saw Tom’s face suddenly go blank, then saw him make a quick move toward the door which stopped before he had gone two feet.
Josh couldn’t see the door from where he perched. But in a moment he saw the man who came from the doorway.
It was Luckow’s man, Blinky. And in his hand was an automatic.
“So you were going to help this little spy get away!” said Blinky, so softly that Josh barely heard. “I had an idea you’d be like that. You dumb punk!”
“Look here,” flamed Tom. “I expected some rough work when I came to you guys for help. I’ve gone through with my share of it and I haven’t kicked yet. But I’m kicking now! I won’t be part of the murder of women.”
“Won’t you?” said Blinky.
“No! Where’s Luckow? I want to see Luckow.”
“You’ll see him,” droned Blinky. “He ought to be here any minute. You’ll see him. Then, if your luck’s good, you can go from here to the chair. If it ain’t good, you’ll go out with the dame, here. Got that, you lily-handed amateur crook?”
Tom sneered.
“If you kill me, there’s no more chance for you to get that chunk of my father’s fortune in Ballandale stock. If you try to hand me over to the cops for the bank holdup, I’ll talk my head off.”
Blinky grinned.
“You wouldn’t talk.”
“Oh, no? There’s nothing you could do to stop me! There’s no threat you could hold over me that would—”
He stopped. His eyes widened.
“Look here!” he said hoarsely. “You haven’t any ideas about— Where’s my brother, Wayne?”
“I wouldn’t have the slightest idea,” said Blinky.
He struck, then. Because Tom had leaped. He flailed down with the gun and Tom slumped to the floor.
With the fall, Josh began edging in front of the window to leap in. But he heard a noise from the far end of the roof that made him jerk his head that way. He thought he saw another head down there, just ducking under the eaves.
He changed his mind about going into the room where Blinky was. He pussyfooted down the line to the next dormer window. It was dark behind that one.
At the other end of the room he distinctly heard a noise. And this time he definitely saw a head thrust up and then duck down again.
Somebody at each end of the roof. He slid into the darkened room next to the one in which Rosabel and Tom were. The minute he hit the floor he knew he had made a mistake. He sensed someone in there, close!
He didn’t get his psychic warning in time. The roof or something seemed to drop on his head and he went down.
A light snapped on. The catlike, mean-looking fellow called Tim stood and stared down at him. He nudged the unconscious Negro with a hard toe.
“Didn’t you ever hear of burglar alarms?” he jeered to the unresponsive ears. “That tree looks like an easy way to get into this joint. It ain’t the first time we’ve trapped a guy sneakin’ up it — and trippin’ the alarm as he went.”
He hauled Josh into the next room and dumped him next to Tom and Rosabel. Rosabel had been tied and gagged, again. She stared over the gag with horror in her eyes as she saw Josh’s plight.
Tom was still unconscious. But his lips moved a bit.
“Wayne—” was the word they formed. “Wayne—”
Josh wasn’t the only one who had gotten an urgent call at the Bleek Street headquarters. Sometime after Josh had left in such a hurry and while The Avenger was still being held at gunpoint, Wayne had received a telephone call. Benson discovered that about four minutes after finding evidences of the boy’s hurried departure.
To each phone at the Bleek Street place was wired a recording device which made a small record of every conversation carried on. And the most recently recorded conversation revealed itself to Benson’s ear like this:
“Hello.” Voice furtive and disguised. “I want to speak to Wayne Crimm.”