Dick took a big seven-passenger sedan. It was the largest and most heavily armored of his fleet of cars. It weighed nearly ten thousand pounds, but you wouldn’t know it; it looked like any other big sedan. Only the tires gave it away, with a careful study. The tires, slightly bigger than they should have been, were truck tires.
Mac sat in front with The Avenger. Smitty and Nellie were in the back. Josh would be in there on the return trip. And, with luck, Ritter. But there was still a vacancy.
“Cole ought to be with us,” sighed Smitty. “Was he any different last time you looked at him, chief?”
“Still in the coma,” said The Avenger, spinning the huge car through traffic as though it had been a motorcycle.
“Where do we go with Ritter?” asked Nellie. “We can’t go back to Bleek Street. It’s too well-known that Bleek Street is our headquarters, and there’s too much chance that something may go wrong enough for us to be linked up with this.”
“We’ll take Ritter to the Justine Building.”
“If we get him,” said Mac dourly. Mac was the pessimist of the band.
“We’ll get him,” said The Avenger quietly. “Rosabel will send Lila there, too, in a little while. We’ll all stay at the Justine Building for a time.”
There was silence, then, till they got near the estate of Edwin Ritter, presidential candidate.
The Avenger stopped the car. In that filing cabinet he had for a brain was a complete layout of this section of the country. He knew that the road gate to Ritter’s twenty-acre place was between a quarter and a half mile up the highway. He knew that a hundred yards ahead, around a bend, was a secondary road; that off the road to the left, four miles down, was a tiny woods lane that circled back once more to this main pike.
“We’ll get out here,” he said quietly. “No, not you, Nellie. You’re to get that squad car out of trouble.”
He took pencil and paper from his pocket and drew for Nellie the surrounding roads, from the map of his mind.
“When we have gotten around the bend, ahead, give us five minutes. Then fire this gun four times and scream. Make it good and loud. After that, drive around the bend, going slowly. The police will come in a hurry in that squad car to investigate the scream and the shooting. As soon as you see them, drive into this road, go till you hit the little woods lane, turn into that and circle back. Don’t let anything stop you because we’re depending on you to pick us up. And we’ll want to leave in a hurry.”
Nellie nodded her dainty blond head and took the wheel, looking smaller and more fragile than ever in the vast sedan.
The rest went on.
It was about seven minutes later that the shots and the scream rang out. In something like forty seconds, the wail of a police siren sounded, and the squad car from Ritter’s gate dashed by at seventy miles per hour or better.
Mac and Smitty and The Avenger emerged from behind a high hedge at the corner of Ritter’s grounds and went toward the house.
“Hey,” said Smitty uneasily, “there was something odd about that yelp of Nellie’s. It sounded like the real thing to me, instead of a fake.”
“She was supposed to make it good,” shrugged Mac.
“She wouldn’t really be in trouble back there, would she?” worried the giant.
“No time to think about that now,” said Mac. “Come on.”
They had timed it so that dusk was falling, now. Dusk, that tricky light, or half light, which is almost as easy to move in unobserved as the darkness of night itself.
The big house was before them, blazing with lights. At the door, they could see two men. A man swung around the corner of the house at a slow pace, walked like a sentry past the side of the place and disappeared around the other corner.
“I should say he has got the place guarded,” muttered Smitty.
The three stole to the side of the house, from bush to bush. They stopped under a big buttonwood tree. They said nothing now, not even wanting to risk a whisper. But words were not needed. The window here was their goal.
The Avenger felt at his pocket.
They had come with about all the equipment they had, to face this large crew of thugs guarding Ritter. One of the many small pieces was a glass-cutting gadget. Benson cut a small circle from the window with a diamond point and pulled it towards him with a tiny rubber suction cup so that it wouldn’t fall inside and rouse inquiry by breaking.
He reached in. Mac and Smitty were careless enough to watch him for a moment instead of their surroundings. They jumped a foot when there was a sudden smack almost at their elbows. The smack was followed by a double thud, then silence.
They all whirled. Josh grinned at them; and at his feet was a man, knocked cold. Smitty nodded silent thanks to Josh — and to Lady Luck.
They’d slipped up enough so that one of the many men around here had seen them at the window, had started to raise a yell, and then had been downed by Josh. He’d happened to stop under this tree and Josh had dropped and felled the man in his fall.
