The Avenger 17 - Nevlo Read Online Free PDF

Janet heard her own screams again. But only for a few seconds. Nerves can only stand such a shock for a few seconds.
    Her screams died out as if she had been throttled; then, with her horrified eyes wide on that ugly smoke-growth that had been a car, she sagged to the sidewalk with blackness closing in on her . . .

    “Easy does it, now. She just fainted, that’s all. At first I thought she’d been hit by a piece of metal or something when that car blew up. But she’s all right—”
    Janet’s fluttering eyelids opened. She looked dazedly around.
    She saw bottles and boxes and hot-water bags and cigarettes. She was in a drugstore. Towering over her was a good-natured-looking cop. But in his kindly face was a grim look, too, aftermath of the explosion.
    “Coming around, huh, miss?” he said. “We carried you here to this store thinking we’d send for a doctor. But you don’t seem to need one. I’ll phone right away, though, if you’d like—”
    “I don’t need a doctor,” Janet said.
    Her voice was hoarse, tremulous. She was surprised, however, that she could talk at all.
    “Any place you’d like to be taken, miss?”
    Janet was incapable of thought. She was still seeing Bill’s car, with Bill in it, blown to bits when he pressed the starter. But, by a sort of instinct, she said the right thing.
    She was supposed to go somewhere with something, at once, even though tragedy had just blasted her life.
    Needles with roots. A diagram.
    “No, I’m perfectly all right,” she heard herself say. “I’ll get a cab—”
    “I’ll get one for you.”
    The cop helped her out of the store. Leaning heavily on his arm, she went to the cab he summoned with his police whistle. She got in.
    Only then did she think to look for the envelope Burton had given her.
    Her handbag was gone, of course. But that didn’t matter. She had a few large bills in her stocking top, and the priceless envelope—at least, Bill had acted as if it were priceless—had been thrust into the bosom of her dress.
    Her hand felt blindly, numbly, for it.
    The envelope wasn’t there!
    No telling how long she had lain on the sidewalk, with curious bystanders around her, before that policeman had carried her to the drugstore. No telling who had been among the bystanders.
    But one thing was definite enough. The envelope with the rooted needles and the diagram had been stolen!
    Janet Weems’s brain cracked definitely at that. She thought she fainted again. Anyway, a curtain seemed to descend over her senses.
    She didn’t know that she got out of the cab at the airport, looking almost normal, and paid the driver. She didn’t know that she walked almost steadily into the airport’s administration building, bought a ticket for New York, and boarded a plane.
    She knew none of these things, for her subconscious brain was taking over and urging her on the path that had been impressed upon her just before tragedy struck. Her conscious brain was off some place, treading the thin line between sanity and madness.

CHAPTER V

Death Out of Marville
    The buzzer made a discreet sound. The light winked over Telephone 6 on The Avenger’s desk.
    There was no such thing as a jangling phone bell in this sanctum of the world’s most unique crime-fighter. There was a soft buzzer to draw attention, and then a light to show which telephone was being rung. For Dick Benson had a battery of phones on his desk that would almost have made the phones in a broker’s office look scant.
    Benson picked the instrument up in slim, white, steel-strong fingers.
    “Yes?” he said.
    “General Hospital calling Mr. Benson,” a voice sounded over the wire.
    The Avenger’s cold, pale eyes took on a look of glacier ice under a midnight sun.
    It was said of Benson that he had no fear. And that was probably true in a personal fashion. But it was not true that he was without all fear.
    Dick feared for his associates’ safety. He always carried this fear with him. The courageous little