Free The Avenger 23 - The Wilder Curse by Kenneth Robeson

he stares hard enough, just as well as you can hypnotize him by forcing him to stare into your eyes.
    By tricking the man into staring hard at the vial of red liquid, The Avenger had induced him to hypnotize himself. He sat there now in a deep trance.
    Dick set the unused beaker down on a table and faced the gunman.
    “You allowed us to follow that van to get us into a trap, didn’t you?” Benson said.
    “Yeah,” said the man.
    “How did you know we’d follow?”
    “We saw the guy with the big ears tap on his little trick radio,” said the man. Mac glared at the reference to his outstanding organs of hearing.
    “We let him tap,” the man went on. “Then we dropped one of them little sleep pills of his—whatever they are—every so often, so you could get a line on us.”
    “The van was stolen, I suppose.”
    “Yeah,” said the man.
    “The garage? Did you overpower the regular garage men so you could use the place?”
    “No. They helped us,” said the man. “They seemed to be in on it.”
    “Who owns it?”
    “Guy named Sliver, or Silver, or somethin’ like that. I’ve never seen him.”
    “Is he the head of your gang? Is he the man you’re working for?”
    “I don’t know who we work for.”
    “Who pays you off?”
    “Some big guy from the West Coast,” said the man. “I’d never seen him before.”
    “Was he the one who directed operations at the garage?”
    “Yeah,” said the man.
    Smitty said in a low tone, “That’s the one who tried to shoot you in Dan Moran’s office last night. I thought his voice was familiar; after a while, I placed it.”
    The Avenger nodded so mechanically that Smitty suddenly realized Dick had recognized that voice all along. The giant subsided. Benson went on.
    “The idea was to blow up the truck and let it burn, then say a careless driver had lit a cigarette near the open gas tank, wasn’t it?” he said to the man.
    “Somethin’ like that,” the man replied. “An accident. Get rid of the lot of you and no kickbacks.”
    “But who,” persisted Benson, “wants all this done?”
    The man simply didn’t know. He was a small cog in a large and deadly machine, the nature of which was still deeply shrouded in mystery.
    The Avenger looked at Cole Wilson.
    “Might as well take him to headquarters,” he said.
    He clapped his hands sharply. The gangster woke with a jerk. He stared wildly at them.
    “What’d you do to me?” he yelled. “You . . . you— That red stuff! Did you make me take it? You got no right—”
    Wilson walked him out of the room. Mac, pacing up and down thoughtfully, said, “This Clarence Beck—Carl Foley’s nephew—I keep thinkin’ of him, Muster Benson. He may be the reason Cole and I got trapped, back at the Foley house.”
    The Scot scowled dourly.
    “He left us at the front door and said he wanted to make a phone call. But maybe the young mon made his call before, to these skurlies, tellin’ ’em to back their van up to the Foley place and take us for a ride. Then maybe he faked the phone call, so he wouldn’t be with us when we were snatched.”
    “It’s possible,” said The Avenger expressionlessly.
    “And look how he ran out on us,” said Smitty. “He didn’t call the cops. Instead, after we’d got into the garage, he beat it off some place.”
    “Far as that goes,” Mac picked it up, “he might even be the mon behind his uncle’s murder. No doubt, he gets quite an inheritance. And he’s bubble-brained enough to try almost anythin’—”
    The Scot’s voice trailed off as he saw that Benson was deep in thoughts of his own. Out of this abstraction, after a moment, two words came.
    “Silver,” said The Avenger slowly, pale eyes like diamond probes in their concentration. “Silver.”
    “Eh?” said Mac. Then: “Oh!”
    Their hoodlum guest had said that garage was owned by someone named Silver, or Sliver.
    “Could that name be Sillers?” said The Avenger. “Andrew Sillers of Thornton