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

don’t report. You slide right on by and up to your room. Come here.”
    Benson entered the room through the big hall door. He stood before Suva. The gang leader, with his command obeyed, was mollified a bit by the token of his importance.
    “Did it go off all right?” he asked, in a different tone.
    “Slick as grease,” whispered Benson.
    “What’re you talking in the basement for? What’s wrong with your pipes?”
    “Got socked in the Adam’s apple,” whispered Benson. “Anything else?”
    “No. I just told you to report, that was all. Run along upstairs. There’s a game in the front room. Go and lose your dough like a sucker, the way you always do.”
    Dick went up the stairs. There, he was confronted with trouble. This was a big house. Eight rooms opened off the second-floor hall. All eight doors were closed. Behind one would be the room in which Harry bunked. But Dick couldn’t know, of course, which this was.
    Also, however, he couldn’t afford to fool around and reveal his ignorance by hesitating.
    He chose the third door on the right, saw there was no light showing, and unhesitatingly opened it. He stepped into darkness. But the darkness didn’t last long. There was a click, light flooded the room, and two men looked at him over gun sights.
    The guns were .45s and the trigger finger of each man was whitened with pressure!

CHAPTER IX

Underground Crypt
    The two men were in two beds, one on each side of the room. They were typical thugs, shifty-eyed, slit-mouthed, pallid.
    “What’s the idea?” Benson whispered. “Put them rods down.”
    The guns lowered.
    “Harry!” snapped one of the men. “You damn fool. You know no door in this joint is opened without the knock. You oughta have your knob blown off.”
    Benson impatiently tapped on the inside of the door. Four shorts and a long. “O.K. now?”
    “Yeah, sure,” growled the man. “What’s the idea of the stage whisper?”
    The Avenger repeated his story of being hit in the throat. He added, “Anyhow, what I got to say ought to be said in a whisper.”
    “What’s that?”
    “I got a plan to get some heavy dough for ourselves out of this and lam.”
    The man farthest from the door gaped at him.
    “You mean—cross Suva? And the big boss? You’re nuts.”
    “All right. If you don’t want to hear. I sneaked in here first because I thought you two guys might be interested.”
    Benson turned as if to go out again. One of the men said hastily, “Wait a minute.”
    His tone was almost a whisper, too. Benson had hit the right note. Avarice. He could see their thoughts in their faces: Maybe this Harry did have a workable scheme. In that case, they might throw in with him. If he didn’t, they’d hear all about it, then turn him in to Suva.
    He sat down on one of the beds. “Come on over,” he whispered to the second man. “We’ll talk low, not yell across a room.”
    The other man came over and sat down, too.
    “Now, my idea,” Benson whispered hoarsely, “is this—”
    His hands shot out.
    Each hand got a throat, and each hand was a terrible thing of steel, relentless, unbreakable.
    Each of the two men was bigger than Benson. But neither of them, with all his frenzied strength, was able with two hands to loosen the grip of this strange man’s one. At the ends of his arms, rigid as bars of iron, they struggled without sound, weakened, hung limp.
    The Avenger injected the same numbing drag into them that he had used on Harry. He put them in the room’s closet and locked the door. Then he straightened the beds to conceal the fact that the men had ever been in them.
    He went to the window.
    A tree was within reach. He got to the nearest branch, crouched there a moment like a baleful leopard, then dropped to the ground.
    He went to the tool house.
    A complicated system of locks held the door. It was so very complicated, indeed, that it told a story of things far more important than garden tools being kept within.
    It took nearly ten