The Avenger 15 - House of Death Read Online Free PDF Page A

another car in there. It had been waiting for the first. In it were six men. They were piling out as Benson got to a clump of trees about twenty yards from the cars.
    The eight men began talking together in low tones; then the two from the sedan reached in and dragged out the body of a girl.
    Some of these eight had flat, Slavic faces; some had fair hair and almost Prussian characteristics. But they all had one thing in common. They were foreign-looking.
    The two started to load the girl into the larger sedan that had been there first. And then it developed that this meeting place was an unfortunate idea.
    Still another car whirled into the wide dirt plateau destined to be a road and traffic circle.
    Dick had noticed a car ahead of the one he had trailed. It had occurred to him that perhaps this car had something to do with the chase; you can trail from ahead as well as behind. Then, when the black sedan swirled in and he himself stopped, he had seen the other go peacefully on and decided that he was wrong.
    It seemed he had not been wrong. The other car had simply sped to the next crosscut, or perhaps cut right across the center parkway to get on the backtrack, and had returned here as fast as its driver could take it.
    From the car suddenly lanced red streaks, and there was a sound of submachine guns. Three of the men from the first two cars fell. The rest dropped and began pouring back lead. Evidently, the third car was not bullet-proofed, for the men in it got out in a hurry.
    Benson was in a position to see them, even though the others could not.
    These men, too, were foreigners. But of a different brand. They were Orientals. The Avenger, able almost always to pick a man’s race, saw Mongol cheekbones, Eurasian blends of feature, and several Arabs.
    It developed into the most vicious fight imaginable. The two gangs blasted away at each other with the abandon of two patrol parties on a battle front. Now and then, a man yelled, or moaned, and sagged out of the fight; and the cars, used as barriers by the combatants, began to resemble perambulating Swiss cheeses.
    Benson was undisturbed by the slaughter. It was gang against gang, with plenty of time before a patrol car could hear, or be summoned, and interfere.
    He hoped the mutual massacre would be complete. But in the meantime there was a point to rectify.
    That was the girl.
    The car into which she had been loaded was down on four flat, bullet-drilled tires. Behind it was a man carefully firing first from around the front end, then from the rear; another man lay with sightless eyes turned up to the stars, not doing anything at all.
    Benson reached to the calf of his right leg and from a slim holster, there, drew Mike.
    Mike was a special little .22. It was so streamlined and sleek that its butt was more like a slight bend in a length of blued pipe than a handle; and its cylinder held only four bullets, for smallness and compactness. Mike was silenced so that its report was only a whisper from a deadly small muzzle.
    Mike whispered now, and the man left alive behind the car went down. But he was not dead.
    Richard Benson did not kill. With Mike, he knocked out his adversaries by “creasing” them: glancing a bullet off the exact top of the skull, so that the man was knocked cold instead of dead.
    It was an eighth-inch shot that perhaps no other marksman on earth could have duplicated. He made it now.
    The man dropped; there was no sound of Mike’s whispered spattt over the other noises of battle. Benson went to that side of the car, opened it, and took from the rear the body that had been placed there.
    The girl was still alive. Her breathing fanned Benson’s cheek. He started to his coupé with her, and then saw something in a reflection of a headlight glare that made him pause.
    The Oriental-looking crew was getting ahead of the other gang. It looked like sure success for them; there were five of them left and only three of the other band.
    What Benson saw that made