The Avenger 12 - The Flame Breathers Read Online Free

can ye tell that?” demanded MacMurdie. Smitty looked as though he was about to ask the same thing.
    “A common type of explosion acts in the direction of greatest resistance,” said Benson. “In this case, it would expend its main energy downward. And this explosion did no such thing. It seems to have blown in all directions with about equal force. Some gases act that way, but no solids such as might have packed a bomb—”
    He stopped and his eyes took on their diamond-drill look.
    The police were doing a good job of keeping people back, but they seemed to have missed one person.
    This was a little man with one outstanding feature: his ears. He had even bigger ears than MacMurdie, and they stood out at an even squarer angle from his head. They looked like rabbit ears, cut off and rounded a little.
    Like an inquisitive rabbit the man was poking around the debris at the far end, and being careful to avoid the eyes of the cops.
    Benson grabbed him by the arm.
    “Ouch! Let me go!” the man said, in a foreign accent. “What do you want to squeeze my arm in two for?”
    “What are you doing here?” The Avenger said.
    “If you’re a policeman, I’m just looking around to get a souvenir,” said the little man with the big ears.
    “And if I’m not?” said Benson, pale eyes seeming to go right through the man’s skull.
    “Then I’m not a souvenir hunter,” admitted the man. He stared hard at the white, dead face. “I guess you aren’t a policeman. Don’t turn me into the regulars, please. Not, at least till I’ve had a chance to look around.”
    “Why do you want to look around?”
    “I want to clear up the death of Veck,” the little man said, with a purposeful look forming around his jaw. He had an amazingly forceful jaw. “I don’t think the police are ever going to clear it up; so I’m going to try it myself.”
    “Why?”
    The little man’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down.
    “Because I thought Veck was the finest person who ever lived,” he said. “I used to work for him. He was a great man. Now I have just one desire in life—to get whoever is responsible for his death.”
    “What did you expect to find here?”
    “I don’t know,” said the man. “But I’m familiar with laboratories, having helped Veck in his for so long. I just thought I might find something out of the way.”
    “And did you?”
    “No.”
    “What’s your name?”
    “Xisco,” said the little man. “Pronounced Z, but spelled with an X. Charlie Xisco.”
    Smitty and Mac looked at each other. There was a fishy smell somewhere here, they thought. But neither had a chance to say so. One of the guards came swiftly toward them, stared sternly at Xisco, but delivered his message without verbally chiding the little man with the big ears for being where he had no business to be.
    “Just got a call from the hospital, sir,” he said to The Avenger. “The person there is regaining consciousness a little sooner than was expected. And he can’t last long because he was very badly hurt in the explosion.”
    “I’ll go at once,” said The Avenger.
    Xisco caught his arm like a drowning man.
    “Somebody escaped from this wreck alive? Someone was here when it happened and may talk now? Let me go with you! Please! He’ll surely know something, and I must hear! Please!”
    For about a second and a half the pale, deadly eyes raked the little man’s face.
    “All right,” Benson said. “Come along.”

    At the hospital there was feverish suspense. The chief of police was in the dying plainclothesman’s room. So were two captains and a lieutenant of detectives. When The Avenger came in with his two aides and Xisco, the room began to look like a convention hall. But it didn’t make much difference to the man in bed.
    He was going to die anyway. The rattling of his breath and the terrible color of his face told that. The center of attention, with everyone staring intently at him, he didn’t know but what he was alone.
    No