Free The Avenger 21 - The Happy Killers by Kenneth Robeson Page B

of the stuff now that his mind was called to it.
    He took stock of the situation in which he found himself, and discovered that he was sitting on a cement floor. Probably it was a basement floor, because he saw no windows and the only light in the place came from a hanging electric bulb.
    He was handcuffed, he found, and the links between the cuffs were passed around a steam or water pipe next to a wall so that he couldn’t have moved away without taking the pipe with him. His legs were not bound. Why should they have been? He wasn’t going anywhere.
    This was the way the laughing murderers had left him. Josh wondered who the girl was. He hadn’t met Edna Brown, yet, so he didn’t know that this was she.
    She couldn’t get her gag off because her hands were bound behind her with telephone wire. But Josh could hold his face close to the pipe and rip his off with ease. It was a bad sign. It told that the men who had imprisoned him and the girl here didn’t care if they got rid of the gags or not; didn’t care if they yelled their heads off. That meant they must be a long way from help.
    Overhead, Josh could hear someone moving around. He listened apprehensively for the terrible laughter, but there still was none. Instead, he heard somebody moaning, and then heard somebody else growl, “Oh, shut it off, will you?”
    The words were muted through the floor, but the fact that they could be heard at all indicated a cheap construction.
    Looking around, Josh saw that the cement floor and walls were quite new-looking, as was the electric cord on which the light was dangling. He guessed they were in the basement of a brand-new subdivision house somewhere, the kind they put up by the hundred and sell on easy terms.
    Josh leaned his cheek hard against the pipe, got an end of the adhesive gag in his cuffed hands, and ripped it off with a backward yank of his head. He breathed deeply with relief, and turned to look at the girl again.
    “Want your gag off?” he said in a low tone.
    She nodded vigorously. She was sitting, her back to the wall, about a yard away. She inched toward him, got her face within reach, then winced as the adhesive came off.
    “Who are you?”
    Josh told her his name. “With Richard Benson,” he added, realizing a moment later that this probably wouldn’t mean anything to the girl.
    However, it apparently did. It apparently meant a lot.
    She said, “Oh!” as if he’d hit her.
    After a moment, in which she regarded him in a curious sort of way, Josh said, “If you could get your wrists within reach, I might be able to untie you.”
    She tried it. She strained till her face was flushed, and till she was out of breath. Then she relaxed. There was no way for her to reach her bonds. She sat back and closed her eyes.
    “Why have they got you here?” Josh asked.
    She kept her eyes closed. At first, he didn’t think she was going to answer.
    “I don’t know,” she said finally.
    “Who are these laughing hyenas?”
    “I don’t know that either,” she said. But from something in her tone, Josh gathered that she did know. Or that at least she could do some close guessing.
    He gave up questioning her and looked at the pipe.
    If he could unscrew that, he could slip the loop of the handcuffs over it and be free—
    There wasn’t a chance of unscrewing the pipe. But there was no reason why he shouldn’t pretend to unscrew it. They might hear upstairs and rush down to investigate.
    Josh stood upright, with a bit of effort. The ceiling was so low that his head almost touched it. The girl watched him with fearful, perplexed eyes. He turned his hands a little, letting the handcuff links scrape around the pipe. It sounded very much as if it were being unscrewed; and the grating noise should carry all over the house on radiators and pipes.
    Josh had made the methodical, regular grating noise only three or four times when there was a yell upstairs. “Hey, what goes on in the basement?”
    “What do you mean,