Nellie spoke to Smitty. “Mr. Benson has said several times that I’m not being held here. That I’m free to come and go as I choose.”
“That’s right,” said Smitty, eyes blue and ingenuous in his good-natured, full-moon face. “Say, you aren’t still suspicious of us?”
“No. Not any more.”
“Then why,” said Smitty, “did you ask if you could go out?”
“Because that’s what I want to do,” said Nellie. “And I wasn’t sure you wouldn’t try to stop me.”
“You want to go out!” gasped Smitty.
“Yes.”
“But you know the situation. It would be very dangerous for you to go roaming around alone! We’re up against a gang of killers. They’ve already tried twice to get you — once at the school, once when you were leaving police headquarters with the chief. And you’d go out and expose yourself to a third attempt!”
“I don’t think there’d be so much danger,” said Nellie pensively.
Smitty snorted explosively.
“Anyway, I want to go out. Will you let me?”
Smitty came and stood over her, gigantic, so muscled that his arms hung crooked at his sides like the arms of a gorilla. He made her appear smaller and daintier than ever.
“You put me in a spot,” he complained. “Sure, you’re free. I haven’t any orders to keep you from leaving. But hanged if I’d allow you to go out and maybe get snatched or knocked off before you’d gone two blocks. There’s a healthy chance this gang knows where our headquarters is and are watching it. They know the chief’s interest by now — and tried to bomb him.” Smitty’s eyes went venomously to the big canary cage in the corner where the bomber was sitting dejectedly on a wooden stool and peering through the bars.
“Then I’m not free!” said Nellie.
“I didn’t say that,” Smitty mumbled, with a harassed look.
“If you won’t let me go out, I’m not free. And if I’m being held a prisoner—”
“Oh, for gosh sake!” said Smitty. “Can’t you understand I’m just trying to keep you in for your own good?”
Nellie stood up. She could have walked under the giant’s outstretched arm and had plenty of room to spare. But she was in thorough, feminine command of the situation.
“Since you haven’t orders to keep me in, I’ll go out,” she said.
“But look here—” Smitty began hoarsely.
“I think my things are on the floor below. Goodbye.”
She went to the stairs leading down from the third floor headquarters.
“But—”
Smitty took a step toward her. Stopped. Started. Stopped.
She smiled sweetly at the giant, and went on down.
On the street, her smile became set and fixed on her full red lips. For her plan was indeed a desperate one.
Police, Benson, everyone, seemed to have made no real progress in finding her father’s murderer. And she burned to have that man found — and electrocuted! So she was going to try a little investigating on her own hook.
This gang wanted her. That was proven. They wanted her, probably, to wring information from her about the bricks. All right, let them catch her! Let them take her to wherever they hung out. There, she’d see just who were in the gang, so she could later identify them. She’d escape, and lead police back to wherever they’d taken her. They could capture the whole lot of them in one stroke.
Of course, it might not be quite as easy as that, to escape from them. But she was willing to gamble on that recklessly slim chance. She might look like a Dresden doll, but she had the will of a man as big as Smitty himself, and she was r’arin’ for action.
She thought the fact that the gang wanted her so badly would insure it. And — she was right.
She had gone three blocks, toward a cab stand, when she saw a man seem to detach himself from a doorway in which he had been leaning. She went on, got into a cab, and saw in the rear-view mirror that a long, dark sedan had slid to a stop a block in her wake. It was too far to see if the man was in it, but he probably was. And in addition, she could see the heads and hats of three others.
Four men against one girl. That should give them odds enough, Nellie thought, with a bitter quirk of her red lips.
“Where you want to go, miss?” the driver said.
Nellie didn’t think it mattered much. She didn’t think she’d be allowed to get to any address she wanted to mention. But she had to act natural.
“Drive north on Ninth Avenue,” she said. “To Forty-second Street.”
The cab started off. The sedan behind crept closer, almost at once. There’d never be a better spot for trouble than the warehouse and wholesale district they were in right now.
Nellie saw it coming.
“Look out!” she screamed to the driver, taking a firm grip on the seat herself. “From the left—”
With a motor scream like that of a charging animal, the sedan had shot abreast of them and veered powerfully to the right.
“Hey—” flared the taxi driver.
That was all. The sedan had his cab pinned against the curb like a bug under a student’s thumb. And the man was hanging over the wheel, knocked out when his head hit the window upright on the left.
Nellie wrenched at the door, screaming. But in the midst of a lot of wild acting, her eyes were cool and calculating. She had to act as if this were terrifying and unexpected, so the men would not suspect a trap. That was all.
They got her and dragged her from the cab, pulling her clutching fingers loose from the door handle. People were beginning to run up. They got her into the sedan. It screamed off, with the right front fender scraping the tire, crumpled down by the accident.
Nellie Gray fainted, and lay in the back of the speeding sedan like a mishandled doll. She lay with her eyes partly opened, veiled by thick, dark lashes. That wasn’t unusual. Many times when people faint, their eyes remain partly open.
What was unusual in a person who had “fainted” was that Nellie was seeing perfectly through her lashes. She burned the faces she saw deep in her memory.
A dark-complexioned man with black eyes and hair who wore a black suit.
A fellow with sandy-red hair much like MacMurdie’s, but whose eyes were vicious and slitted, instead of honest, like the bitter Scotsman’s.
Two men who might have been brothers in their thin, stoop-shouldered build, with yellow-stained fingers and dull brown eyes and mouse-brown hair.
She knew she’d never forget those savage faces.
Back at Bleek Street, Benson didn’t waste time rebuking Smitty for letting Nellie Gray go out.
“I see how it is,” he said in his strong but silken-quiet voice. “You had little choice, Smitty. You had to let her be a fool, I guess, if she insisted on it.”
Strangely, Benson seemed to waste little time on trying to check up on Nellie’s path from the building, too. He seemed to dismiss her utterly from his mind. He went to the big canary cage.
The man inside crouched back as far as the bars would permit.
“You let me out of here!” he squalled. “I demand to be turned over to the cops!”
“Do you?” said Smitty, grinning.
The giant opened the barred door and brought the man out. He plumped him down in a chair.
“You lemme alone!” wailed the big bad man who hadn’t hesitated to take the life of an elderly man and a young mother in an attempt to murder Benson. “What are you goin’ to do to me? I want a lawyer!”
He was still yelling for a lawyer five minutes later when his eyes began to go blank. That was from the stuff Benson had injected into his arm. The drug perfected by MacMurdie, which produced a refined and improved kind of “twilight sleep.”