The man needn’t have bothered to be so careful to make his whisper soundless, to make no noise.
The Avenger had heard them a long time ago. And he had seen them an even longer time.
Dick Benson’s hearing was a marvelous thing. He had trusted his life to it in the wilderness of tropical jungles — and also in the wilderness of city streets. His sight was even more marvelous. Those colorless awe-inspiring eyes could take on telescopic power when necessary. Just as they could examine a close object with almost microscopic ability.
Right now, The Avenger could hear the suppressed breathing of the three in the cold and frosty night air. He could see the melting shadows of their bodies.
He knew their purpose. It was a plan any murderer might have made, if he knew his game. Let your victim get as close as possible.
The doorway was, of course, the spot; so, just before he reached it, he had leaned down as if to re-tie a shoelace.
The three killers were all set. Indeed, one shot roared out on the quiet street.
But the bullet didn’t reach its mark, because that mark suddenly wasn’t there any more. And for the same reason the other two guns didn’t speak yet.
With a movement absolutely incredible in its flowing quickness, the man with the dead face and the icy, colorless eyes, was back ten feet from the doorway — and was facing the three in the building shadow.
The Avenger’s left arm snapped up and back. There was a small, thin glitter from his hand. Then the glitter left the hand and traced a path through the night as straight as a bullet and almost as fast.
A path dead toward the three.
At almost the same instant, there was a muffled, whiplike spat from a queer thing in The Avenger’s right hand.
The results were as weird as they were unexpected.
One of the three gunmen screamed like a hurt woman, and he began frantically tearing at something embedded in the left forearm on which he had braced his gun.
Another of the three didn’t make any sound at all. He sank to the sidewalk like a tired old man and lay still with his gun slipping from lax fingers. He sank like a dead man, though he was not dead.
The Avenger, responsible for the deaths of a dozen crime geniuses with their scores of helpers, had a queer prejudice against taking life himself, no matter how richly that life deserved to be snuffed out. He had not taken one now. The man who had fallen had been shot deftly on the exact top of his skull. Had been creased so that the concussion of the slug knocked him cold but did not kill him.
The third of the murderously confident trio stared with gaping jaws at the screaming man on his left, then at the unconscious man on the walk on his right. Then, cursing, he fired three times at the slightly built man who had produced these impossible results.
But again the mark was, incredibly, not there.
Dick Benson had literally dodged bullets many times in his deadly career. He seemed to do so now, as if those appalling, icy eyes of his could see the slugs coming and get out of their way.
He was stepping rapidly from side to side, but you didn’t see his feet actually move. You thought that he was flowing, like a river of quicksilver.
As he moved, he drove toward the swearing, shooting gunman.
For half a dozen steps the man endured the charge. Then his nerve broke. He turned to run.
Benson’s swift flow seemed to accelerate endlessly. His feet made no sound now, but they covered two yards to the one traversed by the pounding feet of the killer.
The man yelled hoarsely, just once, as fingers of steel closed on his throat. Then he was silent, fighting with all his strength.
He was half again as big as Benson, but all his strength wasn’t half enough.
The Avenger held the bigger man as you would hold a child. His hands never wavered in their grip on the gunman’s throat. His cold, appalling eyes never blinked as they glared into the gunman’s convulsed face.
More terrible than anything else, perhaps, was the complete expressionlessness, even at such a time, of his white, dead face.
Like a mask, it seared itself into the killer’s glazing brain. He would never forget that awful impassivity at a moment when any other man would be grimacing with effort and rage.
The man’s struggle ceased. He sagged in Benson’s hands. He opened those hands and dropped him to the walk.
A patrolman was pounding up the street, drawn by the shooting. Benson, with moves like fast-motion pictures, went through the pockets of the two unconscious men. The screaming one who had torn at his forearm was gone, now.
Then the Avenger put away the two unique weapons he had used.
One, the knife he had thrown at the first man, lay on the walk where the recipient had blindly dropped it. The knife was slim, long-bladed, needle-sharp, with a hollow tube for a handle. It was a specially designed throwing-knife, and Benson called it, with grim affection, Ike.
He put Ike back in its sheath strapped to the calf of his left leg. Then he sheathed, at his right calf, the sinister little gun with which he had creased the second man. And that was as unique as the knife.
It was a .22 revolver, with only a slight bend for a handle and a cylinder, built small for streamlining, that held four cartridges. The gun was silenced. It looked like a plain piece of slim blued pipe, with a sleek, small bulge where the cylinder was, and a bit of a bend for a butt.
The Avenger called this second little aid of his, Mike.
The patrolman, panting, got to the scene as Benson had Ike and Mike put away. He stared at the two men on the walk, and then whirled to Benson.
“All right, you! To headquarters—”
Benson’s voice was smooth. But his eyes bit into the cop’s face like white acid.,
“There seems to have been a gangster’s battle here, officer,” he said. “I got here in time to see one man strangling another. The other hit him on top of the head, just as he was winning, and ran away. So — here are two unconscious men. I am only a witness.”
“Yeah! That’s a likely story! You—”
“I’ll be at Mr. Groman’s if you want me. My name is Benson.”
The patrolman hesitated. Groman’s name carried a lot of weight. He bit his lip, then gathered up the two killers. A squad car appeared down the street.
Benson was a master at psychology. Taking sure and instant advantage of the man’s uncertainty, he simply turned and walked toward the building entrance. The cop took a step after him, stopped.
The squad car screamed to a stop and the patrolman loaded the two in it.
Benson went on into the building. The two, he knew, were killers and probably had long records. But they would be released soon from cells on someone’s imperative orders. For Ashton City was a paradise for murderers.
That was why The Avenger was here.
CHAPTER II
Crooks vs. Crooks
Oliver Groman, for forty years the real boss of Ashton City, was a lion grown old and infirm, but he was still indomitable.
About sixty-five years old, he was a big man in spite of the stoop of years. His iron-gray hair was a mane on his big head. His seamed face was squarish and rugged. It made a mock of the invalid’s dressing gown he wore, as he sat behind his big square desk while The Avenger walked toward him with crisp, quick steps.
Groman made his home in the first two floors of his palatial apartment building. It gave him about twenty-five rooms, which were made into guests’ suites, and suites for himself and his son and daughter.
Only the rooms for the family were in use now.
The old lion was infirm indeed. His big left hand trembled incessantly, and it had to be lifted with his right when he wanted to move it. The left side of his face had a peculiar droop. The left eye was staring and dull.