The Avenger 12 - The Flame Breathers Read Online Free PDF Page A

murderer,” said the driver, tugging off his crash helmet.
    Over the rim of the flat appeared a truck. It was a closed van, fairly large. It came toward them with a swift silence, indicating an expensive make.
    The man next to the driver of the van had a gun in his hands, too. The fellow beside the test driver stared at him as the van slid to a stop beside the big sedan. Stared and winked a little toward the angry young driver.
    “Hi, George,” he said. “Heard a shot back there. What’s it all about?”
    “Oh, that.” The man beside the driver laughed easily. “Just took a pot at a jackrabbit to kill time. Why?”
    “Just wondered,” said the other fellow.
    The driver stared from one bland face to the other, looked a little sheepish and put the helmet back on. He climbed into the sedan.
    “I’ll make three runs,” he said. “One to warm her up good; one back against this little west breeze, and the last as fast as she’ll take it.”
    “O.K.,” said the man with the rifle.
    The big sedan slid off. And the man stared from it to the men in the cab of the van.
    “The jackrabbit,” said the fellow called George, “is inside.”
    The jackrabbit lay on the floor of the closed track—a thin, youngish chap with a sardonic look. He was a reporter from a Salt Lake City paper. He had gotten wind of a mysterious assignment given the well-known kid at the wheel of the sedan. Some speed test to be kept a deep secret. He had followed the youngster out here. He might have a wasted trip; he might get a scoop.
    It had looked like a wasted trip when he came close enough to see the car on the flat. An ordinary large sedan. No sensation here.
    Suddenly he was staring into a gun muzzle, and then at a hard face above it.
    “Well, buddy?”
    The reporter had tried a feeble grin but it hadn’t come off. There was death in this man’s eyes!
    “I’m walking overland,” he had said. “Hitchhiking. Lost my way. If you can direct me to the nearest main highway . . .”
    He had stopped. The man was looking at his shoes, which had only a little dust on them, at his clothes, which were too good for a hitchhiker’s.
    “For heaven’s sake!” the reporter said hoarsely, when the eyes swung up to meet his gaze again. “Don’t—”
    That was when the test driver had heard the shot.
    If the youngster had stayed around just a moment longer he would have seen the first red trickle begin to drip from a spot on the van’s floor near the tailboard. But he had started the car too fast for that.
    Behind the wheel, the first thing the kid noticed was the speedometer.
    It could register up to four hundred miles an hour.
    The next thing he noticed was the gear ratio.
    The man with the rifle had said the car was geared up, but the test driver hadn’t expected anything like this. The lowest he could idle, even in first gear, was fourteen miles an hour. At that speed the car buckled gently with each slow beat of the motor.
    At ninety, he stopped going in second speed simply because there didn’t seem any sense in going faster before shifting to high. But at ninety, in second, the motor under that standard hood was just beginning to turn over nicely. He could feel that.
    “O.K.,” he said. “They’ve geared the living hell out of her. But wait till a hundred and fifty mile breeze pushes against her. The motor’ll stall then. It just can’t have the guts, at this ratio.”
    So he stepped her up to a hundred and fifty miles an hour—and had a pickup left that threw him back in the seat. A pickup that slipped the car up to two hundred before he knew what had happened.
    The test driver’s face began to take on an almost frightened look. Knowing cars and motors, he knew that this simply could not be. There was something of the supernatural about it!
    He turned at the end of the flat, and came back. He stepped on it a bit more. The car hit two hundred and thirty.
    The test driver had never before eased up on an accelerator. But at that