Free The Avenger 4 - The Devil’s Horns by Kenneth Robeson Page A

up.
    Two plain-clothes men jumped out. They covered the three, with special reference to the giant. Smitty was at sea. He couldn’t understand—
    “This guy crashed my car,” Tony said calmly to the two detectives. “He was in a truck with this red-headed kid and another guy. He and the red-headed kid climbed down; then the other guy ran off in the truck. Hit-and-run. This big guy yanked a gun on us when we started to say it was his fault. The red-headed kid tried to side with us, so the big guy shot him. Then we covered him till the cops could come. Look! He’s got the murder gun still in his hand.”
    Smitty dropped the automatic as if it had burned him.
    “All right, you, come along with us,” said one of the detectives. He didn’t bluster. It would have sounded better if he had.
    “You don’t believe a thin-air yarn like that, do you?” said Smitty hotly.
    The detective looked at the gun on the pavement, and at the dead boy with the bullet hole in his heart.
    “Come along!”
    “These are the guys you ought to take,” snapped Smitty, pointing to Tony and his pal. “They rammed my truck on purpose to stop it. They got me out at gun point, and then one of them went off with the truck. These two must have criminal records—”
    Smitty stopped, at a sudden unpleasant thought.
    “Come along, I said!”
    Inwardly raging, Smitty got into the squad car. He might have disarmed the redhead in the cab. He might even have gotten away from the gang, if he’d tried.
    But he couldn’t beat these two steady, alert police guns.
    The Avenger had said to get taken by the gang. But the gang had been much too smart. So now he was taken by the police, with a murder frame tightly tied around his neck. And in this town, where police and mayor seemed to be owned by the very element they were supposed to fight, the future looked black indeed.
    Then there was that other thing that had Smitty so badly worried—
    That came out in about three hours, after he’d been taken to headquarters.
    Smitty had started his career as an electrical engineer, graduating with high honors from Massachusetts Tech. He had started with a big electrical corporation, working in their laboratory on television. Some platinum disappeared from the laboratory, and they nailed him for it. The real thief had managed to palm it off on the giant. He had spent a year in jail for another man’s crime, and afterward had been unable to get decent work until Benson met him and took him on as crime fighter.
    So Smitty had a prison record, and it came out, from New York, with the first of the routine police wires to the headquarters of other towns.
    Captain Harrigo nodded, very much pleased.
    “Sent up for larceny,” he said. “Now caught after murdering a guy. We’ll have some action to give the folks who think we’ve been laying down on the truck racket.”
    Smitty didn’t say anything. It wouldn’t have done any good.
    The decent people of Ashton City had been raising the devil because the police force, for reasons best known to themselves, had gotten nowhere with the rackets. Now, here was a convenient goat. The papers would come out with an account of a racketeer held for murder. The police department would be white-washed a little. Everything would be fine.
    Except for the man unfortunate enough to be the goat!
    “Come along,” said Harrigo. “We’ll put you in a nice, comfortable cell. And then in a few weeks we’ll lead you out to a nice, comfortable chair, with electricity to keep you warm.”

CHAPTER IX

The Masked Men!
    Every one of The Avenger’s aides had suffered from the murderous greed of criminals.
    Nellie’s kindly professor father had been murdered for the secret, which he held, of the hiding place of the great lost gold hoard of the Aztecs. Nellie and Benson knew where that gold hoard was, now, and could draw on it whenever they pleased, as on a tremendous bank account. But that didn’t give Nellie back her father, so Nellie was a