Read Online The Avenger 22 - The Black Death by Kenneth Robeson - Free Book Online Page B

it.
    To capture The Avenger with as little noise as possible, obviously.
    At the gate, a man stepped from the little house, also grinning evilly. The gate swung open. The gang seemed to have taken over John Jay Hannon’s house entirely. With the consent of the eminent inventor? There was no way of telling.
    The car rolled into the curving road and started for “the river. You know the place—where it’s good and deep.”

CHAPTER VIII

Another Man’s Face
    The Avenger was back there, hopelessly surrounded and outnumbered. Cole and Nellie and Smitty were in a death car, being driven to a watery grave!
    “The stock of Justice, Inc.,” said Nellie, “seems to be at a very low ebb at the moment.”
    Just how low was indicated by the lightness of her tone. Every member of The Avenger’s little band lived with death always at his elbow and used to its presence. But they all knew that sometime death would get nearer than their elbow. It would get them by the throat! You can’t live forever in a constant war with the underworld.
    Quite often, death seemed about to snatch them; and when this happened, instead of sitting down and moaning about it, the little crew made jokes about it. The worse the predicament, the lighter the tone.
    And Nellie’s tone now was very light indeed.
    “Well, it’s nice to be driven to the cemetery in style,” said Cole, glancing around at the luxurious flittings of the car. He had dabbed the blood from his face and was about recovered from the brush with the men.
    “Swellest hearse I’ve ever seen,” nodded Smitty.
    Suddenly there was a movement of the driver’s arm and a click. Thin steel shutters walled off the windows of the car.
    “Like the back of a dog catcher’s truck,” growled Cole. “This guy Hannon sure had his house and apartment and car and everything else fitted up to trap people. He was certainly a suspicious duck.”
    “Maybe with reason,” shrugged Smitty. “Everybody after his inventions all the time. And now it looks as if somebody has murdered him for one—which Miller said he hadn’t even perfected. The television scrambler.”
    “Unless,” said Cole, “this Miller guy was mistaken and Hannon did perfect it after Miller left his employ.”
    Nellie was the first to notice the change. She blinked sleepily, then sat bolt upright.
    “Good heavens! This is like the back of a dog catcher’s truck! That thug up there is shooting carbon monoxide in here from the motor exhaust. Going to kill us with monoxide, then drown us in thirty or forty feet of water.”
    They got out their nose clips and put them on. The clips might or might not protect them till they got to the river, depending on how long that took. But there was certainly no use just lying down and dying ahead of time.
    The driver looked up in his rearview mirror and grinned bleakly back at them. There was no steel shutter over the glass separating front from rear.
    Then his grin faded and suddenly the front of the car sagged in a curious way and the rumble and thump of a flat tire boomed out.
    Faintly through the front glass they heard the driver swearing furiously. Then he hopped out of the car in a hurry. His haste was obvious. Here he was, less than half a mile from his starting point, and had a flat to fix with a car full of prisoners. If a cop ever caught up to him and got curious about the shuttered windows—
    There was a swift rattle of tools, and the car started to rise up under the urge of a jack. Then it stopped, and suddenly one of the rear doors opened.
    Smitty and Nellie and Cole blinked into the pale, glacial eyes of The Avenger. They weren’t vacant now. They were terrible in their intensity and purpose.
    “Chief!” yelled Smitty. “Thank heavens! We thought we heard the guys back there say they had you up a tree.”
    The three of them were out now. They looked toward the front of the car and saw that their murderous chauffeur was the same way. Out! He lay beside his jack, with a blue