Free The Avenger 7 - Stockholders in Death by Kenneth Robeson Page B

This guy was hardly six feet tall and didn’t weigh more than a hundred and ninety. A pigmy, that’s what he was.
    The giant held the man rigid, at arm’s length, for a minute or so, then opened his huge hand. The man dropped like something loosed from the jaws of a dredge, and Mac and Smitty went to the gate.
    The fellow had locked it when he came out. Smitty didn’t even bother to swear. He looked around, caught up a big beam, inserted the ends between the two-by-four slats of the gate.
    There was a grinding wrench, and the gate came to pieces like wet paper.
    “Smitty! The noise—” protested Mac.
    “What’s the difference? The guy back there got out a yell. They’ll be coming to investigate anyhow—”
    Two men did come, even as he spoke. Smitty and Mac crouched behind the cement-loaded truck till they were within arms’ length. Then Smitty straightened from his crouch.
    To those two men it must have seemed as if he kept on going up for ten minutes. He seemed to tower above them in the darkness like a brick chimney. Then Smitty grabbed them.
    A shoulder in each hand, a swing, two heads smashing together!
    “Ye’re not leavin’ much for me to play with,” Mac complained bitterly.
    He didn’t say any more. If he had, he would have addressed it to empty air. Smitty was galloping toward the plant building like an elephant whose young is threatened.
    They reached the door. It happened to be unlocked.

    Smitty burst into the plant, with Mac on his heels.
    At a far corner, near a cubicle walled off for the superintendent’s office, were two men, a girl, several sacks of cement and a barrel.
    A yell came from Smitty’s lips like nothing Mac had ever heard before. The giant went like an express train off rails toward the sinister tableau.
    The man with Nellie dropped her arms, and the man with the club dropped that. Each drew a .45 and began firing with methodical and excellent aim.
    Benson and his aides wore bullet-proof garments of The Avenger’s own devising. Made of woven strands of an incredibly tough and pliant plastic he called celluglass, it was transparent, light, but stronger than steel.
    Smitty had on his, shielding him from throat to knees. But even at that, the kick of a .45 slug can stop the average man, whirl him around, club him hard.
    However, Smitty was not an average man. He grunted with the shock of each terrific slug against his barrel chest, but kept right on. And the two began to look very scared indeed.
    “He’s gotta vest on!” one of them squealed. “Get him in the head!”
    This was different. Slugs in the head would kill. But Smitty didn’t falter. If anything, he speeded up, with his head moving from side to side on his vast shoulders, and his columnar legs carrying him in a zig-zag path.
    He got to them, picked up one of the sacks of cement.
    A sack of cement is not exactly a feather. But in the giant’s hands this one seemed so. Smitty threw the thing as if it had been a basketball. It caught one of the men on the chest and he fell with a broken back. The other man tried to run.
    Off by the office door was still another man, one Smitty hadn’t seen at all. This man was on one knee, with his right hand braced on his left forearm. In the hand was a .44 revolver.
    At that range, braced in a marksman’s pose, the man couldn’t miss his target: the giant’s head.
    It was sure death for Smitty. Only a matter of seconds. But the giant didn’t know that. Nor did MacMurdie.
    Mac was still near the door, busy himself. A man had scrambled in after them from the plant yard. Mac had knocked the gun from his hand and was now methodically reducing him to mincemeat with great knobs of fists that were like bone mallets.
    Smitty got his hands on the second man, and for a moment he was comparatively still as he pressed great thumbs at the fellow’s windpipe. It was the instant for which the unseen, calm marksman was waiting.
    His sights were on Smitty’s right ear. His finger was