Read Online The Avenger 10 - The Smiling Dogs by Kenneth Robeson - Free Book Online Page A

dreadful vehicle with the grated windows. He heard the little man say: “My, but it’s fortunate this was discovered! Think of having the nation’s affairs handled by a crazy man! A United States Senator, gone mad in office!”
    “Sometimes I think they’re all a little nuts,” observed the big man, dumping Burnside into the wagon.
    Burnside was stirring again; but it did him no good, then, because the door at the end had clanged shut on him. It sounded to the anguished Senator like the big iron asylum gates which would also presently clang shut on him. Unless he could beat this—somehow.
    “Just make yourself comfortable, Senator,” chirped birdlike Dr. Sherman. He had climbed into the rear of the ambulance with Burnside. So had the big man in white, who now glowered at him, plainly ready to sock him again if he tried any tricks.
    Burnside couldn’t see the driver. There was a little window in the front wall of the padded truck, but the man at the wheel was sitting to the left of it, out of his range of vision. All he knew was that there was a driver, because the car was moving.
    “Look, here,” the Senator said to Sherman. “This is all pretty ridiculous. I don’t care what Fram told you, it isn’t true.”
    “Of course, it isn’t,” said the little psychiatrist, beaming.
    “The things I told Fram were about a friend of mine,” said Burnside.
    “Of course. About a friend of yours.”
    The ambulance slowed, then stopped.
    The little doctor hopped to the small front window, opened it a crack, and said to the driver: “What’s up? Why are you stopping?”
    “Dr. Fram is out here. He wants to go with us, I guess,” Burnside heard the driver reply.
    Then the car sagged a little as a man got on. Burnside saw the back of someone’s back, beside the driver. The car started on—
    Afterward, Burnside never knew exactly what had happened. For that matter, neither did the husky man in white, nor little Dr. Sherman.
    The driver of the car with the grated windows had stopped for the man with the trim goatee and the mustache that looked waxed but wasn’t. Dr. Fram nodded pleasantly to him and climbed up beside him.
    Fram had touched his goatee gently with his middle finger. Then, after the car had rolled several blocks along Massachusetts Avenue, things happened in that front seat too swiftly for the driver to keep pace.
    Dr. Fram’s left hand shot out and clamped over the driver’s neck—from the rear, instead of the front. That was because the hand was not concerned with throttling the driver, but with finding certain nerve cables there.
    That the questing fingers found the right place, the driver could have testified, because in a second things began to go black before his eyes.
    Dr. Fram’s right hand caught the wheel after the car had wobbled once, and kept it on a straight path. The driver slumped behind the wheel.
    There was a deft exchange, in which the man with the neat goatee pulled the driver’s unconscious form out from behind the wheel and onto the floor, and then slid over himself.
    But behind, the three men in the body of the ambulance did not know these things.
    They had felt it when the car swerved, and merely thought that the driver was wheeling to avoid hitting something in the street. After that they felt nothing—except a sudden, overpowering sleepiness.
    Burnside and the man in white let their heads nod with nothing but a dull wonder in their eyes that they should become sleepy at such a time. But birdlike little Dr. Sherman fought wildly against the slumbrous feeling. With his medical training, it had penetrated instantly into his numbing brain that something was very wrong.
    The startled knowledge didn’t save him. His figure joined the other two on the floor. And the car rolled smoothly over Washington streets with three in the back who slept so deeply they might have been dead.

    Burnside opened his eyes some time later to find himself in a small room that looked much like a