The Avenger 13 - Murder on Wheels Read Online Free PDF Page A

thinking that with a pretty small corner of his mind, and meanwhile moving like an overgrown streak of light.
    The door jerked open in his vast hand so fast it nearly went right on off its hinges. He got to the two cabs before the five men saw him. And one reason for that was the haste they were displaying to open the taxi door and drag the girl out!
    They turned as Smitty reached them, and three guns jerked into line. One actually got off its first slug, and Smitty’s body jerked with the impact of a slug!
    But under his suit was the bullet-proof celluglass garment of Benson’s invention which all the little band wore, so that the only thing Smitty got out of the direct hit in the stomach was a bruise.
    The five from the old cab got a little more than that.
    Smitty had never bothered to learn to box. He didn’t need to. When his enormous fists crashed forward with his near-three-hundred-pound body behind it, it went through any clever boxing guard anybody could put up.
    His left thus smashed through the startled guard of one of the men and felled him. His right smacked the gun of the man who had fired right back in his face, so that he broke his own nose with it and dropped like tenpins in a bowling alley when the ball hits square. Then Smitty got two of the others by the neck.
    He was so busy, and roaring so with the bull-elephant rage that was his in battle, that he didn’t hear the single muffled scream of the girl from the cab! Nor did he see her being dragged back to the old-style, independent taxi by the driver, who had not joined the fracas.
    All he saw was a couple of guys who looked like rats to him; and all Smitty wanted was to get his hands on crooks that looked like human rodents. It was what he lived for.
    With a neck in his right hand and another in his left, he swept his great arms together. There was a sickening smash as the two heads came together. And then the fifth and last man was running with his face white with fear and his mouth straining sideways as he tried for even more speed. Running from that terrifying giant who had piled four men in the street like sticks of cordwood in about ten seconds.
    Then the old cab started down the street, and Smitty saw part of a dress trailing from a door that had been slammed too fast. And he didn’t see Doris Jackson around.
    He yelled and raced back to his own cab.
    The driver ducked up from under the dash and slid out of his car when he saw Smitty. He was having no part in any more of this, five dollars or no five dollars. So Smitty took the wheel, himself. It looked like the wheel of a kiddy car in his vast paws.
    But he didn’t go any place.
    That was certainly a moment for cabs! For a fourth appeared, now, and rammed ahead of Smitty and stopped. It had been lurking down the street, but the giant did not know that. All he knew was that his way was being blocked at a vital moment!
    He sat on the horn, and the offending cab began to back up, cramping wheels to get innocently into a parking space at the curb.
    “Get out of the way!” roared Smitty, seeing the old taxi whirl into the drive. “One more minute—”
    The driver of the taxi in front got out and came back to give Smitty a piece of his mind instead of moving out of the way. So, by then, it was useless to try the chase any more, and Smitty saw a man in the back of this other cab. He went up to him, with blood in his eye. This was all too pat, this blockade.
    The man in the body of the blocking car got out, looking bewildered and apologetic. He was young and had black eyes indicating a lot of gray matter behind them. His brown hair grew straight back from his forehead; and he moved like a man in fine command of his muscles.
    But Smitty didn’t care about any of that.
    “You stopped me from going after that cab!” he jerked out.
    “Cab?” said the man. And Smitty had no way of knowing, naturally, that his name was Cole Wilson.
    “The one with the girl in it!”
    “Girl?” said the