The Avenger 7 - Stockholders in Death Read Online Free Page B

for me. Well, I can wipe my own nose.”
    The chill, pale eyes daunted Tom; but he kept on, working himself up into a fury.
    “What’s your racket, anyhow? Everybody’s got one. So what’s yours? Think you can get all my father’s money, if you recover it? This stuff of working just to help people in distress is the bunk. I don’t believe it for a minute.”
    “I knew you had sense, the first time I saw you,” a voice purred from the doorway.
    Tom and The Avenger turned. Nicky Luckow was coming in on padded, soundless feet, like a great cat. His dull eyes turned on Benson.
    “I’ve heard of you,” he said. “I have the same ideas as Tom, here. What’s your racket, pal? Why the sympathy for the underdog?”
    “I don’t believe you’d care to hear about that,” said Benson, eyes like ice chips, face as emotionless as the face of the moon. He had lost! He’d known it the moment he looked into Tom’s cynical, dark eyes, and noted the wise sneer on his lips when he spoke of rackets.
    There were steps in the hall. A lot of steps. Nicky Luckow’s hand slid from his coat pocket. There was a belly gun in it—a squat, small thing designed to blow a man’s abdomen into a streaming red crater.
    “The boys will be glad to hear anything you’d care to say about anything,” purred Luckow. “They’ll be glad—”
    There were at least a dozen men in the corridor. The many steps told that. And there the mob leader stood, to hold The Avenger at gunpoint till the gang could get in here. Benson shrugged. His stainless steel chips of eyes reflected on the odds coming to face him, and in their cold depths was a calm decision that it was too much trouble to deal with them.
    Benson’s foot flashed up and out.
    The Avenger had learned about all the arts of fighting, both officially and defensively, that there were. One was la savate, originating in Paris among the Apaches.
    Luckow had been warily watching the pale and deadly eyes; so the movement of Benson’s foot didn’t catch his vision till it was almost to his waist. And then there wasn’t time to do anything about it.
    The toe of Benson’s shoe cracked on his wrist, and the runt weapon spanged against the far wall. Luckow snarled, and leaped.
    Benson’s fist went out. It didn’t seem to travel more than four or five inches. But Luckow stopped as if he had banged into a stone wall. Stopped, and sagged to the floor.
    The Avenger went to the window.
    “I’d appreciate it if you would visit me. Bleek Street is the address,” he said to Tom Crimm.
    Tom’s sneer was shaken, but it was still in place on his lips. And the skepticism was undiminished in his eyes.
    Benson opened the window. Down in the street, a few people stared up at the sound of the window’s opening. More stared swiftly, when a man with a white, dead face and snow-white but virile hair dropped from that window like a trained acrobat, lighting like a feather on the sidewalk.
    The Avenger drove away with his pale eyes somber. He lived only to fight crime—and to help people threatened by crime’s clutches. But it’s difficult to help a person who refuses to be helped.
    Benson had a stop to make before going back to Bleek Street. He went to the Crimm home, near the East River. He located the scene where a mad car had charged again and again at a sick, elderly man.
    There were only few faint traces of tire tracks around there. Walking people had obliterated most of them. But one short length provided something interesting.
    It would seem that the automobile that had chased Joseph Crimm had a distinctive peculiarity about its right rear tire.
    There was a deep V-cut in that tire, according to the bit of track left.

CHAPTER IV

Wanted—For Murder
    The night after Joseph Crimm died, at almost the same late hour there was a light in the solid stone building of the Town Bank, on upper Broadway.
    The light was in the small conference room. It illuminated five men, huddled around a big oval table at one