Free The Avenger 7 - Stockholders in Death by Kenneth Robeson

something had gone wrong and that her trailing was justified.
    She followed in her own cab.
    The trailing extended for a period of nearly an hour. Then, far out on Long Island, the cab she was after stopped in front of a small factory with a high, gray tower.
    The driver of the perpetually chartered taxi was a trusted man directly employed by The Avenger.
    “I’ll go in with you,” he said.
    Nellie Gray was hardly more than five feet high, and looked as fragile as a pink-and-white statuette of fine porcelain. But she was a little blond bombshell who asked no help from any man.
    “No, Bill,” she said. “You stay out here. I may come out of that place fast and need you with motor running to get me away.”
    Bill, husky cabby, didn’t like that. But he chewed his lips over it in silent worry as Nellie slipped from the rear and went to the gate of the place.
    “Gailord Cement Co.,” she read over the closed gate. She saw a man stalking back and forth through the gate’s pickets, knew she couldn’t get in that way.
    But she had to get in there, somehow. Wayne Crimm was in there. And he had been entrusted to her capable hands when Benson left headquarters.
    She saw three other men in the small plant yard. And at sight of all those odds, her hand went to her slender waist.
    At his belt, each member of The Avenger’s little crew carried a transmitting and receiving radio set hardly larger than a good-sized metal cigar case.
    Nellie got hers out, now.
    “Smitty,” she whispered into it, when she had tuned to their own special wavelength. “Mac. It’s Nellie. I need help. Come at once. Gailord Cement Plant, beyond Jackson Heights. Mac, Smitty, come at once. Gailord Cement Plant—”
    “Better walk around outside the fence,” one of the three in the yard growled to the man at the gate. “See that nobody trailed that guy.”
    Nellie crouched low. She was in a dark dress and blended with the night. She saw the gate open, saw the man come out.

    When the gate closed again, Nellie was on the inside. There was a truck at the gate, under shelter, loaded with bags of cement to go out first thing in the morning.
    With a courage few men would have displayed, Nellie had managed to slide almost between the legs of the man coming out and get under the truck before he or the other three could see her.
    She could see the dim columns of their legs, in the darkness, where they stood at the side of the truck within a yard of her.
    “We’ll keep on prowlin’ the yard,” one of the three said. “This is important. Luckow said so.”
    The three separated. One went right, one left, and one straight ahead toward the shadowy outlines of the cement plant itself.
    On the theory that the safest place to be when someone is hunting for you is right behind him, Nellie followed that third man. Toward the building.
    She kept within ten feet of him, like a lovely little wraith in the blackness. She didn’t veer till he had gotten to the factory wall.
    There she slipped to the side, through a small door.
    Down through a great, piled room, she saw a glint of light. She went toward it and found herself looking into a small office, probably that of the plant superintendent. There were three men in there.
    Two were sitting far back in swivel-chairs, with their feet on the desk. The third huddled in a corner with a gag over his lips and with so many ropes around arms and legs and body that he looked like a mummy.
    That third man was young Wayne Crimm.
    “Do we give him the usual?” said one of the men, jerking his head toward Wayne. “Cement coffin?”
    The words were all too graphic. He meant, would they put Wayne in a barrel, pour cement around him and then sink him in the Atlantic some night.
    “I guess so, after a while,” the other man said. “But not right away. We hold him on ice, for now.”
    Nellie started a little in the darkness outside the door. But that was all she did do—just start a bit. She knew that any further move would