Free The Avenger 19 - Pictures of Death by Kenneth Robeson Page A

funny, and I canna’ believe he’d take to wings and a harp in any confounded shower cabinet.”

    The water went over his chin, which means that the chief by now would be holding his breath with his face submerged.
    Then Mac caught the meaning of Benson’s foot moving.
    “The drain!”
    And even as he thought it, he felt current around his ankles, and the water level began to recede rapidly, though the flood continued to pour from the overhead nozzle.
    There was a porcelain hand grip waist high in the wall of the cabinet. The Avenger tapped with fingertips to MacMurdie’s palm, “Kneel down with me.”
    They couldn’t exactly kneel. The space of the cabinet was too cramped. But they could sag straight down with hinged legs, now that the water was almost out of the cabinet that had so nearly proved to be their coffin. Benson got his face to the hand grip and managed to slide his gag off.
    “They stuffed a towel down the drain to stop it up,” Dick said, voice as emotionless as if he were talking about an electric-light bill. “However, they didn’t think to screw the metal grill back in place. I got a shoe off and managed to fish the towel out with my toes.”
    Mac croaked into his gag. What he wanted to say, and couldn’t, was: “Sure. Just like that. As if just anybody who tried it could reach down two or three inches and clamp onto a bit of cloth hard enough to draw it up, after the way that gang must have jammed it down to make it a water-tight plug! And all with just the strength in his toes!”
    There might be another man living whose steel muscles were so trained, even to the sinew of his feet, that he could perform a miracle like that. But Mac would have to see this other man to believe it.
    The Avenger’s arms and hands were working, now, and the Scot knew they’d soon be free.
    Benson’s hands were of the slim, rarely supple type that could be so held as to be but a fraction of an inch larger than the wrists above. Therefore, he could work out of almost any rope bonds if given time—which he was now given because death by drowning no longer threatened.
    Mac felt Benson’s arms suddenly move free, and after that he himself was untied. The Avenger broke the plate-glass cabinet door because that handle, too, had been taken off by the methodical killers, so it couldn’t be opened from inside.
    “The murderin’ skurlies!” were Mac’s words. “The cold-blooded torturers! The murrr—”
    “Good way to kill us noiselessly and meanwhile have plenty of time to escape,” Dick said, almost approvingly.
    His tone was as calm as ever. Would anything ever break this man’s iron repression? Mac wondered. But it left a man ice-cold to reason clearly in an emergency.

    Benson started toward the door to the outer stairs, and he started fast.
    “Connecticut,” he said over his shoulder. But that was enough for Mac.
    The “Diabolo” had not been in Vaughan’s office vault. It had not been here. There was one other likely place for it, and that was Vaughan’s Connecticut home.
    The sleek, dark man and his gang would have the sense to figure that out in a hurry and must, even now, be on their way up there. And in the Connecticut place this crew—eight of them—would find Smitty and Nellie, unwarned, ripe for the trap!

CHAPTER IX

Crooks vs. Crooks
    It was a very nice afternoon for a drive to the country. Nellie and Smitty were not expecting any trouble. So they made a jaunt of it, though they let no grass grow under the wheels.
    Vaughan’s country place looked peaceful and inviting in the warm afternoon sun. There was a big L-shaped house. There was a garage and also a small barn, for the place had been a working farm.
    Smitty pressed the front doorbell with a ponderous finger. They both heard the bell ring inside, but there was no answer to the summons.
    “There must be somebody here,” said Nellie.
    “Well, if there is, he’s in a coma,” retorted Smitty, jabbing the bell again. “Maybe