Free The Avenger 5 - The Frosted Death by Kenneth Robeson Page A

at the store entrance, right on crowded Sixth Avenue, in clear daylight. They’d follow him, of course, he reasoned, and try for him in a less conspicuous spot. And that was all right. If they followed him, Mac would have a better chance.
    He hadn’t realized the caliber and fanaticism of the men they were up against. And so he didn’t have a chance at all!
    The moment he stepped from the store, a man who had been standing flat against the wall clubbed him down with a gun barrel. Josh hadn’t even had time to see him out of the corners of his eyes.
    There were dozens of people within a few yards. Most of them saw the act. Most of them yelled or screamed. The man didn’t seem to mind it a bit. As if he were alone on a desert island, he calmly gathered Josh up and carried him toward a sedan that swirled with machinelike precision to the curb.
    Three other men, who had been the loungers noticed by Josh at the fountain, came at once to the car. They didn’t pay any attention to the crowd, either, till two men more daring than most in such emergencies, tried to hold them while yelling at a cop down the block. Then the men with the phlegmatic, foreign-featured faces coolly clubbed them down, then went on to the car.
    The door slammed with a thump, and the sedan drove off. The patrolman, taking in the situation at a glance, knelt and sent shot after shot at the car. It didn’t even hasten its pace. It was as bulletproofed as a tank. It went around the corner and was gone—with Josh and one of the two jars that meant salvation for a great city.

    Mac, mercifully, didn’t know of the swift tragedy in the front of the store. He was going through a tunnel from the rear.
    The tunnel, a corridor in the basement of the building behind the store, opened onto Waverly Place, around the corner from Sixth Avenue. It was customarily used by The Avenger when he came to see Mac; so few knew of it.
    The men loitering near its street door didn’t actually know of it. They were just part of a corps that was acting with all the military precision of an army in battle.
    Yes, there were men near the door of the corridor. But there were also men clear around on Fifth Avenue, and more men were stationed on the street north of Waverly Place.
    The entire block had been surrounded, coldly, methodically, to guard against just such an exit as Mac was trying to make from some unknown, secret areaway.
    However, because the men nearest the exit didn’t know of its precise meaning, Mac got a little farther than Josh had. He stepped from the tunnel and got twenty feet toward a cab when the men saw him. Then, without a sound, they rushed him.
    Mac had seen a lot of criminal activities. But he had never seen anything like this. For it exceeded the merely criminal. It entered the realm of war, of the military. These men weren’t just a gang, they were parts of a machine, with no thought for themselves at all if only their objective could be gained.
    Two of the three reached him at the same time. Mac knocked one down with his bony fist that was like a mallet swung at the end of his long arm. He tripped the second—and staggered back to his knees under the impact of the third.
    He was up again as if on springs. He managed to elude clutching, clawing hands, and raced toward the other side of the street, and down toward Fifth Avenue. He changed his course in the middle of the street and doubled back again.
    One of the square-shouldered men with close-cropped hair was waiting for him on the opposite sidewalk. As Mac turned, the man whipped out a gun, and braced it on his left forearm, evidently deciding that bullets, would be the best remedy in the situation.
    At this moment a plain-clothes man, who had seen the lawless attack with mouth open in incredulity at its utter boldness, hit the man in a flying tackle. The gunman went down with his gun flying from him.
    Mac didn’t even see that. He was too busy trying to thread a way past two more men between him and