Free The Avenger 22 - The Black Death by Kenneth Robeson Page A

the house, but refused to shoot outside on the grounds. In the house, the sound of shots would be unheard by anyone on the road. Outside, the same sound would be heard for a mile and would draw attention.
    This, and the bread crumbs, indicated that this gang had used Hannon’s place for some time as a hideout and wanted to keep on using it. Therefore, they didn’t want to draw attention with shots.
    It all added up to something that needed to be looked into.
    The driver of the death car was supposed to dump the car at a distant place, then find his way back as best he could to report.
    The Avenger figured that the trip, with a cab back to within half a mile of Hannon’s place, should take a little less than an hour. He waited till that time had passed, then walked up the road openly to the gate.
    The man in the lodge house set the seal of approval on The Avenger’s disguise. He saw him walking up, came from the small building and opened the iron door within the gate. Dick stepped through. Full in the floodlight, he waited for the other man.
    “Any trouble, Harry?” the man said to The Avenger, staring right at him without suspicion.
    “Naw,” said Benson. “It went off like a clock.”
    This was a ticklish moment. He could duplicate the man’s looks, but he hadn’t heard his voice. All he could do was speak rather thickly, huskily, and as little as possible.
    “Hey, what’s wrong with your voice?” said the gate tender, scowling a little.
    Benson remembered the blow to the throat he’d gotten in on one of the men in Hannon’s library during Cole’s ill-timed smoke attack.
    “One of ’em slugged me in the neck, back in the house,” he said huskily. He felt gingerly at his throat. “Feels like my Adam’s apple is squashed into apple sauce.”
    “Oh,” said the man, grinning.
    Benson went on toward the house. Next time he spoke, he would make it a hoarse whisper. No one could identify that, or make comments on the sudden difference in Harry’s voice. He went to the back of the house. He passed something that made his eyes glint a little behind the disguising cups. It was his coat, hauled wrathfully down from the tree and ripped into shreds by the furious and baffled mobsters. He was in Harry’s coat, now. It fitted much too tightly across the shoulders, but he managed to squeeze into it.
    Another man hailed him. He was going toward the rear door, too. In fact, Dick had waited under a tree till he caught someone going in. Undoubtedly, there was a code tap, and he had no way of knowing what it was.
    Dick fell into step with this man near the rear door.
    “How’d it go?” asked the man.
    “Easy,” Benson said, in his hoarse whisper. He explained why he was talking that way.
    The other man said: “I don’t like that so good. Those three we knocked off were The Avenger’s buddies.”
    “So what?” said Benson in his husky whisper.
    “So what? Cripes! Don’t you know about that guy? He’s dynamite. Hurt any of his pals, and you can’t run fast enough or far enough to get away. If we’d caught the guy up that tree, everything would be swell. As it is, I think it’d been better to let his buddies go, with him still on the loose.”
    “What can one guy do against a whole mob?”
    The man tapped on the kitchen door. Four shorts, one long. The door opened. A third man looked out, with a sawed-off shotgun in his hands. He relaxed as he saw the two.
    Benson walked past him through the kitchen, still with the first man. They entered the hall. Benson started up the stairs.
    In a big living room, opening off the hall, were four or five men. One of them was tall and stooped, with glasses over weak, vicious eyes. Benson recognized him as a gang leader named Suva, one of gangland’s murderers-for-hire. He’d caught a few glimpses of him before, but not enough to be sure.
    Suva snapped: “Harry! Where you going?”
    Benson pointed upstairs.
    “Thought I told you to report to me when you got back. So you