Read Online The Avenger 24 - Midnight Murder by Kenneth Robeson - Free Book Online

intelligence, then.”
    But there was a nice shine in her eyes as she whispered the insult.
    They looked around, saw that they seemed to be unobserved, and slid down into the basement of the luxurious house.
    They heard faint voices upstairs, from through the floor. They saw that they’d descended into a playroom, with Ping-pong table, billiard table, and other recreational facilities. Then they saw a man, bound and gagged, lying on a leather divan.
    It was Rew Wight.
    Over the gag, his eyes peered at them in an uncertain, myopic way. Smitty remembered the glasses Wight was supposed to wear. Either they’d been taken away from him, or they had been broken when he was captured.
    They went to him. Smitty put his finger to his lips for silence; then they untied Wight and took the gag from his face. He sat up on the divan and began rubbing his wrists and ankles. Smitty put his lips to Nellie’s ear.
    “Take care of him. I’m going to explore around.”
    Nellie stayed with Wight, and Smitty tiptoed to the basement stairs and up them. He put his ear to the door. He heard voices the other side of the door.
    “—little blonde number sure threw you around pretty,” someone jeered.
    “How was I to know she’s a female wrestler, or circus strong woman, or something?” was the fevered retort. “You’d have been fooled, too.”
    Smitty waited to hear steps indicating that the men out there were going somewhere else. But he didn’t hear them. Instead, after a minute, he heard suppressed sounds in the basement behind him.
    Nellie and Wight probably whispering to each other, he thought. But the sounds went on, and there was a funny quality in them. After a while, Smitty turned and stole inquiringly back down to the game room.
    He would have roared with laughter if he’d been able to—and if the situation wasn’t really too serious for laughter. As it was, serious or not, his moonface went red with the effort to strangle his explosions.
    Nellie wasn’t whispering to anyone. She was probably saying things to herself that were not a hundred percent ladylike. You couldn’t tell, because you couldn’t see her lips, or any other part of her face, or any of her body from the waist up.
    Nellie had a potato sack, or something of the kind, drawn tightly down over her head, with her hands writhing furiously under the edge as they sought to grip it and raise it off. But the sack held her arms so tightly to her sides that she couldn’t bend them to do so.
    There was no sign of Rew Wight.
    Smitty lifted off the sack. Nellie glared wildly at him, and wildly around. Then her eyes darted to the window.
    “He got away!” she whispered explosively. “I heard him. Out the window.”
    Smitty looked politely inquiring, face still beet-red with suppressed amusement. Nellie went fire-red at the look.
    “You’d have been taken in, too,” she whispered savagely. “The . . . skurlie!” She couldn’t think of any better term at the moment than Fergus MacMurdie’s epithet for hoodlums. “He brought this sack out from under him. He’d been lying on it. He whispered, ‘This is what they blindfolded me with when we drove here, so I wouldn’t see where we were going.’ ”
    Nellie’s eyes were blue flames. “I leaned close to hear him, and he drew it down over my shoulder. That’s gratitude for you! Naturally, I wasn’t expecting anything but thanks, so I wasn’t on guard. If I ever get my hands on him—” Lights flashed on all over the place. And suddenly, it wasn’t funny any more. Not at all funny!
    Four men came from the stairs. Every one of them held a sawed-oft shotgun. A fifth came slowly from behind them. He seemed to do everything slowly, indolently. When he talked, his voice was drawling, too, and beautifully polished and correct.
    “I would advise you,” he said, “to be very, very obedient. We have surmised that you wear some sort of bulletproof protection, so, as you will note, these guns are leveled at your