Free The Avenger 18 - Death in Slow Motion by Kenneth Robeson Page B

range.
    And also, abruptly, Mac had a whole lot of trouble on his hands.

    Men suddenly appeared in the alley as if they had sprung from the very cobbles. Johnny the Dip was yelling, but these men made no noise. Like deaf-mutes, they closed in on Mac!
    At first, they made no effort to use guns. Quite obviously, noise was the last thing they wanted. They waded in, five to one, with bare fists instead.
    It was the kind of fight that would ordinarily have delighted Mac’s gloomy soul, for he loved nothing better than to tear and batter with bare hands at the human rats he had dedicated his life to thwarting.
    It did not delight him, now. The thing that had tightened his lips and put the grim look in his eyes back at Bleek Street, a thing he had been aware of for several hours, was really hitting him now.
    The slow-motion doom!
    Mac had picked it up in Old Mitch’s hovel, or wherever, along with Smitty. Only it hadn’t affected him as swiftly as it had the giant. Mac was a sick man, too, and the sickness showed in this fight.
    He got a man in the jaw with a right hook so slow that the fellow saw it coming in time to duck a little and was not knocked out.
    He got another in the stomach and doubled him over, but not for keeps. He swung a third time and missed his target completely. And then they had him down.
    Only the darkness saved him.
    They were trying to kick his head and hammer it with blackjacks. Hands tore at his throat. Other hands ripped at his pockets and his clothing. Nothing bigger than a dime could have escaped the search.
    Only the darkness saved him? Well, that was true for the moment. In the end, the real savior was the newsboy at the corner.
    The lad heard Johnny the Dip’s first yells and ran to the alley mouth. All he could see was a struggling, silent knot, but that was enough. His shrilling whistle was as loud as any cop’s, and it brought the Cops in a hurry.
    Mac swam back from semi-unconsciousness to consciousness to find a burly cop on each side of him, helping him stand erect.
    The Scot’s clothes were ripped and ready for the ragbag, because of the violent search the gang had made for the flashlight camera. Everything on him had gone in that search.
    But the camera hadn’t gone!
    “Just a holdup in the darkness of this alley,” he mumbled. He was tempted to tell enough to have Johnny the Dip hauled out of the adjacent rear-house and taken to headquarters for a work-out. But he had an idea The Avenger was not ready for a raid on the place, yet. So he did not mention it.
    The cops helped him out of the alley and to their squad car. But not before Mac had retrieved the camera which the deaf-mute gang had obviously been willing to commit murder for.
    He retrieved it from one of the refuse cans, into which he had tossed it right after snapping the shot. Then he went, walking like a figure in a slow-motion movie, with the helpful police.

CHAPTER X

Blood Killer
    Dick Benson conducted one final test on the blood sample taken from the dying workman. It was a test that few of the big commercial laboratories were equipped to make—a test for molecular structure.
    In that test, The Avenger had discovered a curious thing, but one which did nothing to clear up the mystery. The molecular structure of the red corpuscles was different from the norm. But what that difference meant, he still didn’t know.
    “I’m beginning to realize,” he said to Nellie Gray, “that we’ve met the most intelligent of all our adversaries. Somebody is a genius, even if a warped one.”
    “Still no hint?” asked Nellie. Her soft red upper lip was caught between her white teeth. Smitty was ill, three hundred pounds of rebellious invalid due to die—unless some clue to the nature of this dreadful ailment could be discovered.
    “Still no real hint,” said Benson. “All I know is what everyone else knows. It is a form of anaemia hitherto unknown. That is proven by the way the red corpuscles have