Free The Avenger 13 - Murder on Wheels by Kenneth Robeson Page A

run through a meat grinder. Mac had a blue eye and an egg on his forehead. Josh walked with a limp and was dabbing at a cut on his cheek, in addition to having a swollen lip.
    “We had a fight,” said Mac.
    “Go on,” said Smitty unbelievingly. “I’ll bet you just tried to pick up the wrong girl.” Which was funny, applied to dour, homely MacMurdie.
    “Ye mountain of larrrd,” Mac began. But the cold eyes of the chief recalled him to his reporting.
    “We are still on the trail of news concerning a mystery car,” said Mac. “We got some news, too! Then, while we were pumping a workman who must be a lot better mechanic than he is a thinker, a gang jumped us.”
    “Six of them,” said Josh, touching his swollen lip. “The reason was, they wanted to get that workman before he could say anything to us. It was near the factory where he works. The man got away, I’m glad to say. We managed to keep them too busy to follow. Then they started shooting. But a squad car showed up; so they beat it.”
    “You say you did learn of a mystery car?” asked The Avenger. And the fact that he said nothing of the danger they had escaped did not mean that he wasn’t thinking of it. His eyes were not quite so icy as they regarded the battered pair.
    “Yes,” said Mac. “Most of it came from that workman. Marcus Marr is the mon who put it out. His company’s been working on it secretly for a year and a half. It’s almost ready to market, and it’s a honey. There’s a new type Diesel motor, set over the rear axle instead of up front. It’s streamlined, teardrop shape. Twice the power of ordinary cars. But the most unusual thing about it is the steel it’s made of.”
    Mac gingerly touched the lump on his head.
    “They’ve found some new way of tempering steel at the Marr plant. It takes an ordinary good alloy and turns it into something as good as tungsten. The man said the new processing is the invention of a guy named Phineas Jackson. He’s head research worker for old Marr. Several of the new features on the mystery car, which they plan to call the Marr-Car, are his. Now—he has disappeared. Gone from his home. The plant can’t find him anywhere, and they’re going crazy about it. And that was all we’d learned when the gang broke up our tea party.”
    Smitty said: “I don’t see how a new way of treating steel would be so important—”
    But MacMurdie shook his head. He remembered the weird machine that had rammed and actually disabled Benson’s tanklike special car—and scarcely suffered dents in the process.
    “It’s apparently the most marvelous thing ever discovered in automotive circles. It’s got the rest of the Detroit manufacturers wild. They can see themselves going out of business if—”
    The phone rang. Benson picked it up.
    “Send him up at once,” he said. And the three men noticed a glitter in his eyes that made them look like agate under white light.
    “New development?” said Smitty.
    “I think you might call it that,” said The Avenger quietly. “A visitor is on his way up. His name is Robert Mantis.”
    “What?” yelped Smitty.
    And then there was a knock at the door and they let him in.
    Mantis’s pleasant, youthful face was twisted with worry and fear. And he, too, showed signs of having been knocked around recently, though not as recently as Mac and Josh.
    “Mr. Benson!” he said. “Thank Heaven you’re in Detroit—and that I found you so quickly. We need your help.”
    “We?” said The Avenger.
    “Doris Jackson and I,” said Mantis. “I was taken prisoner in New York just after that fight near the trucks,” he said, looking at Smitty. “They carted me off to a warehouse or some place. A little while later the men came in with Doris. They’d got her somewhere. Their leader, a fellow who doesn’t look like much but is a rattlesnake if I ever saw one, was for torturing her to find what she knew. But they didn’t. I think a call from somewhere must have come