“I’m sorry, Mr. Withers, but as I told you—”
“Who? This isn’t anybody named Withers. My name is Mason. I’m buyer for the Washington Department Store. I’d like you to run over here now, if you will, and show me your line. It’s a little late, but—”
Gottlieb scowled. He knew some young fellows in Washington. By now he had decided that these phone calls were a practical joke of some of his joking friends. So he just hung up.
He was getting kind of stubborn about not leaving his office now. He was stubborn anyway. Two phone calls and a belated visit by a scrub woman.
It was almost eleven o’clock.
The door opened. His back was toward it; so he did not see the movement.
Through the doorway slid a figure, careful to make no noise. It was the scrub woman again. But in her hand was a heavy .45 automatic, and in her eyes was murder.
But it wasn’t “her” eyes. It was “his.” For now you could see that this was a man dressed in woman’s clothes.
Gottlieb turned a page of his new prospect list. He bent over a map of the city. He was listing each name in a certain section, so that he could avoid all unnecessary traveling around in calling on prospects.
The woman’s figure was right behind him. The hand with the gun in it, raised.
Perhaps Gottlieb heard something, at that last moment. Perhaps he merely meant to get up and get a drink of water from the cooler behind him. Anyhow, he started to turn.
The move was never completed. The gun flailed down. There was a horrible dull thump. Gottlieb slid from chair to floor, with a deep crease in his skull!
The man with the gun wiped the barrel on Gottlieb’s coat. Then the killer went back to the door of the sample room. He turned the light out in there. He returned to the corridor door, turned out the office light, too, and left.
He didn’t look around. He didn’t take anything.
He just struck murderously, turned out lights, and left.
In the darkness the little toy panda stared with unfeeling button eyes through the sample-room doorway at the dead body of Gottlieb.
In the hideout where Burnside had been — and from which he and Josh had been snatched — Mac and Smitty stared at the cryptic message left behind by Josh.
Four pennies an the handkerchief torn in half.
But it wasn’t so cryptic. The Avenger had gotten the message in a flash, and had been so sure that Mac or Smitty would, too, that he hadn’t even bothered to tell it to Rosabel.
Four pennies and the handkerchief torn in half, half. To anyone at all familiar with Washington, that was crystal-clear.
The dark street near the Bureau of Engraving—4½ Street.
That was pretty vague. Josh had overheard his captors say that he was to be taken to 4½ Street, but either hadn’t overheard the address, too, or had been unable to figure a message to leave that was that explicit.
Mac and Smitty set out for the street named.
The dour Scot’s bleak blue eyes flamed with the light of battle, and the giant Smitty’s vast shoulders hunched in the same anticipation. When one of The Avenger’s little crew was in a jam, the rest sprang to the rescue. But even without so compelling a motivation, they would have sprung.
They didn’t like men who resembled rats — as all crooks do. They were always ready to smash them.
At the beginning of 4½ Street, they got out of their car. They started prowling down the walk.
A little later this street was to be widened and made beautiful. But now it was a dank runway of old buildings, badly lighted.
Mac saw the things first.
In catching Josh Newton, the gang of cutthroats who had murdered Coolie had caught a black panther. They didn’t know it, for Josh made it a policy to look sleepy and dumb. But it was only an effective guise.
There had been ingenuity in leaving that handkerchief-and-penny message. There was more ingenuity in marking the exact spot on the street. Yet it had been easy to do.
Josh, dragged along from car to house, had simply stepped out of his shoes.
There they were, at the edge of the walk in front of a totally darkened house a block and a half from the beginning of 4½ Street. And the Scot had no difficulty in recognizing them as Josh’s. They were too big to belong to anybody else.
Mac nudged the giant, Smitty, and pointed. Smitty nodded. The two started toward the entrance. Then they vaulted a rickety little picket fence and crouched in darkness in the next yard.
A man was coming out of the dark house. He walked slowly to the street, looking around as he did so. The men inside had finally seen that Josh wasn’t wearing shoes, apparently, and had sent someone out to see of they were lying around the house. They’d tumbled to his trick.
The man got to the sidewalk, grunted a little as he saw the shoes, and bent down to pick them up. Smitty took that moment to act!
It wasn’t a very complicated action. The giant, who had moved near to the man, simply leaned over the picket fence and brought his left fist down like a vast mallet on a nailhead. But the nail was the skull of the man with the shoes in his hand.
The man’s head seemed to sink clear down into his chest under that incredible blow. Then he went down, himself, and stayed down.
Smitty reached over the fence, picked up the body in one hand and lifted it over the pickets. He dumped it in the darkness and went on, with the Scot at his heels, to the entrance of the house from which the man had come.
The door was unlocked. The fellow hadn’t intended to be out long, so he hadn’t turned the key. Smitty and Mac stepped silently into a narrow little hallway.
The hall was dark. But from a door down the hall and to the right came light. The window there was probably covered with a blanket, for the two hadn’t seen light in any of the windows outside.
Smitty’s vast paw touched Mac’s arm as they were passing a darkened door on their way to the lighted one. Mac stopped as the giant did. They listened, and heard hoarse breathing.
They turned into the room.
There was a short, soft series of tappings. And Mac went to them and leaned down.
The taps had spelled, in code, “Josh.”
Mac felt around. He felt a gag and rope. He untied the rope and slid up the gag. Josh stretched his cramped body, and used his tongue. “Mac?”
“Yes,” the Scot whispered. “Smitty’s in here with me.”
“I could only hope— Couldn’t see in the dark — I tapped just on the chance.” He sighed. “I was afraid they’d found my shoes and picked them up. They didn’t see they were gone for a long time, because they dumped me in here in the dark. Then a man came in with a flash, a few minutes ago—”
“Smitty hammered his head flat,” said Mac. “Come on! Follow us out of here—”
Just sneak in, untie Josh and sneak out again with him. But it wasn’t to be as simple as that. Suddenly, lights flashed on in the room.
Smitty got an instant’s glimpse of a man in the doorway, gaping in stunned surprise at three men where he had expected only one. Then he whipped out an automatic.
Smitty reached up. He didn’t have to jump to reach the ceiling. He could touch almost any ceiling quite easily, with his six-foot-nine elevation.
He reached up and slapped the electric-light bulb seven ways from Sunday. It plopped into a million pieces. The light went out. Blackness resulted, split by three red streaks as the man in the doorway fired three times.
The three men in the room weren’t where they’d been when the light went out; so none of the slugs rang a bell. And there wasn’t a fourth slug because Smitty had reached the door and slammed it shut so hard that it carried the man in the doorway with it, to bang him against the opposite wall of the hall outside.
“The window!” yelled Smitty. “Out the window.”
But he grabbed an arm of Josh and of Mac and kept them from following the loud command.