The Avenger 15 - House of Death Read Online Free PDF

him halt with the girl in his arms was the action of one of those three survivors.
    The man took something out of his pocket, held it to his lips, and then, with an effort obvious even at that distance and in dim light, swallowed it.
    Benson laid the girl down and went back.
    The Avenger habitually wore inconspicuous gray suits, which made him look more like a gray steel bar than a human being. But in dozens of pockets and compartments of those suits he carried an assortment of weapons and devices that did not show from the outside at all.
    He whipped one out now, a thirty-foot length of some kind of shiny cord that looked as if perhaps it had been made from piano wire. It was not metallic, however. It was a thin line of a material made of a plastic that was Benson’s own discovery. It would hold three hundred pounds and was as pliable as silk.
    This went out in a long, graceful loop.
    The loop bit around the neck of the man who had put on the swallowing act, and in about six seconds the man was at Benson’s side, still trying frantically to get the thing off while he was being reeled in. A fist smashed his jaw.
    The shots stopped. Two of the fighters had seen the man stagger swiftly backward into the night, with a suggestion of a line or something taut behind him. Something was very strong . . .
    The Avenger was only an average-sized person, but he put the girl under his left arm, picked up the man by his belt with his right, and ran—not walked—to his coupé.
    He was driving off when the survivors of the two gangs, working in unison now, poured bullets after him.

    MacMurdie’s drugstore, on Waverly Place, looked like an average drugstore, but emphatically wasn’t. Behind the ordinary-looking store, there was a back room twice as big. A steel door cut this room off.
    In the room were two laboratories. Along one side was electrical apparatus used by Smitty in his experiments and new discoveries. Along the other side was a chemical set-up not to be outclassed in even the big commercial labs. And on this side, Fergus MacMurdie worked.
    He was working there, now, on an anesthetic that would kill pain instantly by local application without—as it did now—killing the flesh it touched, too. He had been working on it for a long time.
    Mac’s tragedy—a criminal tragedy which had irreparably seared his, like Benson’s, life—showed in his bleak, bitter blue eyes. He had feet almost as big as Josh’s, bone mallets of fists, a sandy-red hide with big dim freckles just underneath, and ears that stood out like sails.
    “Whoosh!” exclaimed Mac aloud, after putting a drop of the unfinished anesthetic on the tail of an experimental rat and watching the tail shrivel. “‘Tis a fine substitute for sulphuric I’ve got—but no anesthetic. The devil take it!”
    He started to work on a beaker of the stuff, then turned with a scowl. The big cabinet in the rear of the room was buzzing.
    That cabinet, on Smitty’s side of the lab, was the last word in television sets, better than any the big corporations had yet produced. The buzz told that somebody wanted to talk to him on it.
    Mac switched it on. In a big screen over the front of it a face formed. A full-moon face with wide, naïve eyes.
    “Smitty!” snapped Mac. “Ye mountain of meat. D’ye know it’s after two in the mornin’? What d’ye mean by—?”
    “Better get over to headquarters, Mac,” said Smitty, from the screen. “Looks like something’s breaking. The chief is out, but I’ve a hunch he’ll be back soon.”
    “That’s different, mon,” said Mac. “I’ll be over at once.”
    He reached there as Benson was rolling his car down the ramp to the basement garage.
    Up in the big top-floor room, he looked at the girl, and at the Slavic-looking gangster snaked by the thin line from the middle of the gunfight.
    The girl was moving under her own power, now, but the man was not. It seemed that Dick had struck a little harder than he intended, in the