Free The Avenger 1 - Justice, Inc. by Kenneth Robeson Page A

charged at me the minute I opened my mouth to ask you a question?”
    “That’s why. I thought you were a cop and I didn’t dare let a cop take me.”
    “What’s your name?”
    The giant stared at the pale-gray eyes with his ears slowly reddening.
    “Algernon Heathcote Smith,” he said in a stifled voice.
    MacMurdie stared at the almost three hundred pounds of brawn with his frosty blue eyes widening. Then for the first time Benson heard him laugh.
    “Algie!” the Scot hooted. “Algie! Heathcote! Why—”
    The giant’s body rippled toward him, and MacMurdie became discreetly silent. The big fellow faced Benson again.
    “The name’s Smitty to my friends,” he said. And he added dangerously, “Most people try to be friends with me.
    “I wouldn’t doubt it,” said Benson, ice-gray eyes traveling over the unbelievable mountain of sinew. “So you’re out of a job, Smitty. And you can drive, and you’re an electrical engineer with enough technical training to be working on television. Would you like to work for me? I think I could use you.”
    “I’d like it very much.”
    “Whoosh, chief!” exclaimed MacMurdie. “We don’t need the help of little boys. You and I can—”
    Smitty’s ingenuous blue eyes went his way again, and MacMurdie once more relapsed into thoughtful silence.
    “What work is it you want me to do?” Smitty asked the gray man with the immobile white face.
    “Dangerous work,” said Benson. “I wouldn’t blame you if you decided against taking it when you’ve heard about it. We’re fighting against some organized gang of criminals so daring that men like your employer, Leon, and like Lawrence Hickock, seem menaced—along with Heaven knows how many lesser lives. A gang so powerful that the police seem helpless to hold any of the lesser killers turned in to them. A gang so clever that even now, after strenuous efforts, we hardly know more concerning their eventual murderous goal than we did when we started out. Quite possibly one or all of us may be killed before we’re through. That’s the work, Smitty. Care to take it on?”
    The giant’s moon-full face with the china-blue eyes, for once, expressed the keen intelligence and firm will that dwelt behind the not-very-bright-looking exterior.
    “I’d count it a rare privilege to help you in such work, sir,” he said. “And now, if you wouldn’t mind telling me more—”
    Benson told the story from the start, eyes like tortured gray steel in a face that could not move a muscle to express the agony of recounting that dreadful starting episode in the plane. And Smitty listened with fury and sympathy to the clipped words of his new chief.

    Mystery can work in opposite directions. If Benson had been unable to get far, as yet, toward the core of the grim mystery that had been exploded into his life with the disappearance of wife and child, so, too, had the men against whom he was fighting been unable to penetrate the mystery of who was beginning to get so close to their mongrel heels.
    Pete, from the light truck that had borne Leon away to an unknown destination, and the slack-lipped driver of that truck, still with his inevitable cigarette drooping from the corner of his loose mouth, talked it over a bit.
    They were in a cheap boardinghouse room kept in Pete’s name.
    “It’s that guy, Benson, of course, who’s behind the monkeyin’ around,” Pete said. “But where’s Benson keeping himself? Benson’s a black-haired young fella. All we’ve seen around is a white-haired guy with a face like something dug up from a grave at midnight. I tell you, the boss is getting kinda worried about it.”
    “Who is the boss?” mused the slack-lipped driver.
    Pete turned baleful eyes on him. The man hastily backtracked.
    “Look, I ain’t sayin’ I’m going to nose around and find out things—like the guy you had to knock off in the truck. I’m just a little curious—see? Don’t get me wrong. If you know anything about this,