Read Online The Avenger 7 - Stockholders in Death by Kenneth Robeson - Free Book Online Page A

we can turn the kid in, now, as well as before.”
    “Better make it fast,” pleaded Blinky. “The guys at the bank know Tom, and they can maybe describe one of us enough for the cops to catch on. Tom Crimm and some of the Luckow mob! They’ll go over your joints for Tom. If they find him, we’ll all take a rap.”
    Luckow shook his head.
    “They won’t find him. Because I’m turning him in, right now. It’ll clear us. And he’ll never talk.”
    “You got his brother?” said Blinky.
    “Yes,” said Luckow. “We picked up Wayne Crimm while you were out. I got the call just after I came here from the apartment. So I turn Tom in right now. If he tries to squeal, his kid brother dies. He’ll take the rap!”
    Luckow picked up his phone and started to dial headquarters. Tom would be tossed neatly to the wolves. He’d be picked up at a distance with some of the bank cash on him—
    Luckow’s dialing finger stopped as if frozen. He gripped the phone convulsively and listened with something like fear on his hard, flat face.

CHAPTER VIII

Cement Coffin!
    The sleek, streamlined little gang of killers that had been called into action by Grand, after The Avenger burst into the conference room, were dead sure that Benson, in his ruined sedan, was as good as a mangled corpse right now.
    Why shouldn’t they be? His car had been rammed so hard and so deftly that it couldn’t possibly move under its own power. Under it was the bomb, with the fuse terribly close to the detonation point. If the man with the white hair and the steely eyes tried to flee from the sedan, they could cut down on him with their machine guns.
    The man at the wheel of the killer car slid into reverse and tried to whirl back away from the doomed car.
    And couldn’t!
    From The Avenger’s sedan slid four steel bars with hooks at the ends. One of the four found the front bumper of the gangster’s car. There were yells from the car.
    “Pike! Get going! That thing’ll go up in a second!”
    “Break loose from the guy’s can!”
    “Get going!”
    The man at the wheel charged forward with a clang against the disabled sedan, and backed up furiously. The steel hook held.
    They’d set a trap under an enemy’s car and, due to this damned gadget sliding from under his chassis, were firmly hooked to death, themselves.
    All five of the men in the murder car were screaming. Pike, at the wheel, dared not monkey around any more. He gave her the gun, in reverse. The car sped backward, away from the bomb.
    It dragged The Avenger’s car back from the bomb, too.
    The thing went off with a terrific roar. Both cars bucked and jumped.
    And then the five saw that the car they’d been helplessly coupled to was empty.
    The man with the deadpan face was gone. The death trap that had been so sure—was sprung.
    “He got away while we were shakin’ around in the pineapple blast,” snarled Pike. “Where is he? Where’d he go?”
    But he could ask that question till he was blue in the face, and get no answer. Not on Bleek Street.
    As has been said, The Avenger figuratively owned the street. And in the buildings lining his side of it, there were more trick exits and entrances than anyone could ever dream of, unless he were a member of the little band calling itself Justice, Inc.
    Benson had slid into one of these entrances.
    Calmly, he made his way to the central cluster of buildings and up to his third-floor headquarters, leaving the band outside to slink off with a damaged car, before police came in answer to that blast.
    Josh was up in the big room. Nellie had been there, too. She wasn’t there now. Nor was young Wayne Crimm, who had been staying there.
    “Nellie left, after Mr. Crimm,” said Josh, when The Avenger inquired about them. “Mr. Crimm insisted on going out, late as it was, and in a little while Nellie went out, too.”

    Wayne Crimm had been thinking a lot, while he was up in The Avenger’s safe headquarters. One of the things he had been thinking