The Avenger 19 - Pictures of Death Read Online Free PDF

code signal meaning: “Follow this man.”
    The signal was hardly necessary. As Cole stared, he was reaching for his belt radio, the tiny two-way set of Smitty’s perfecting that allowed each member of the band to communicate with others no matter where they were.
    He fastened the thin, curved case under his shirt at the belt.
    “ ’Tis the picturrre,” burred Scotch MacMurdie. “That’s what he came for—”
    “Of course,” said Cole impatiently. He didn’t know what this was about, where the chief had gotten a rolled-up canvas or what it meant; but he needed no one to point out that the picture was the reason for the invasion of Bleek Street.
    Cole was on his way before the man paused in the stair doorway at Justice, Inc., with the flask menacingly raised. He reached the mouth of Bleek Street just as a car roared away from the curb.

    Cole had just time to see that there was only one man in the car, the driver, and that he was a blond fellow. Then he whirled off after the man in his own car.
    The car Cole was driving was a deceptive affair. The Avenger himself used it often, because its disguise was so good. It was a moderately priced, large sedan, about four years old. It was shabby and sedate. But under the weathered hood was a motor that would whirl the chassis along at over a hundred miles an hour.
    It was lucky that Cole had such speed. He found out that he was going to need it.
    The driver of the car ahead was in a hurry that took no account of laws. He went sixty miles an hour up Sixth Avenue and fifty across town to the elevated highway. Three times, he swung up over curbs and down sidewalks for a few yards to get through traffic jams taking up the whole street.
    Cole swerved with him.
    They reached the West Side Highway going north, and at this point the man ahead pushed it up to seventy-five. Cole dropped behind. He reflected resentfully that you never saw a traffic cop if you needed one. It would be a help if a motorcycle cop appeared and pinched this guy.
    But then he remembered the hour, the one time in the twenty-four hours that a car had a slight chance of speeding like this and not being caught.
    Cole kept on dropping behind. Till now, he’d had no chance to try to conceal the fact that he was pursuing the fellow ahead. Now, he tried to lull the man’s suspicions, if there were any to lull.
    He began to think there were none. It seemed as if any man in such a frantic hurry to get away must have noticed the car hugging his tail. But this man acted as if unconscious of pursuit.
    Or as if sure that at any time he could rid himself of such pursuit!
    “I wonder,” said Cole Wilson, reflecting apprehensively along this line, “if he has got something that could stop me.”
    A bomb, at least of the pineapple size commonly carried by crooks, wouldn’t do it. The old sedan was armored like a tank. Shots wouldn’t do it; the car was bulletproof. Then what?
    Cole shrugged. He decided that nothing could shake his pursuit. He sped on in the wake of the other man, and now found he was doing eighty.
    They went farther and farther uptown. Then they went around a traffic circle and down a small road. And there Cole found out the reason why the man ahead seemed so little bothered by a trailer.
    His car approached a fork where five roads came together in a bewildering mess. There was no other car in sight. The man shot toward this many-pronged fork, and there was a sharp puff of sound from his car. Also, there was a cloud of black smoke.
    He had raised a smoke screen, exactly as a destroyer at sea raises a smoke screen to hide itself or a battle ship. And he was being just as successful.
    “Hey!” exclaimed Cole.
    There had been a car. Now, there was a black cloud hiding the beginning of all the five roads.
    “Jeu!”
    There was no way on earth of telling which of the five roads his quarry had taken. This was why he had driven so confidently.
    Cole slammed on his brakes, but such was his speed that he