The Avenger 9 - Tuned for Murder Read Online Free Page B

and has been from the inventor’s start. What that means—if anything—we’ll have to find out when we get to Garfield City. Which should be”—he glanced at the electric clock in the dash—“in about twenty-five minutes.”

    Others were calculating the speed of the huge car. These others had learned when The Avenger left New York, and had timed his speed by clocking him from the big city to Westport, a town halfway to Garfield City.
    They had learned of Benson’s intended visit by the simple procedure of tapping the telephone from Blandell’s house when Sessel phoned for help.
    “He’ll be here in about twenty-five minutes,” one of the men said, almost like an eerie echo of the white-haired man’s voice miles away.
    “Gosh! It just ain’t possible for a guy to roll a car that fast!” exclaimed another. There were five of them. They were in a large, duplex room in the tower apartment of the nineteen-story Garfield Point Hotel. It was a lavishly appointed place, with expensive fittings. The men didn’t go very well with it. The interior decorator who had furnished it evidently hadn’t realized that gunmen would be using the apartment.
    There was a slouching, narrow-jawed fellow with a felt hat on the back of his head; a slant-eyed man who had drawn only the worst points from forbears of various nationalities; a youngster with old, savage eyes; a fat man who looked jolly till you stared at his deadly, dope-diminished pupils; and a grinning ape of a man who might appropriately have been named Gargantua.
    “The guy’d have to be doin’ better than ninety an hour to come that fast,” argued the narrow-jawed thug.
    “Nearly a hundred,” corrected the jolly-looking fat man.
    “But, look! Nobody can make that on a public road—”
    “You don’t seem to have heard who was doing the driving,” snapped the youngster with the old eyes. “The Avenger. Now, do you get it?”
    “No! Who’s The Avenger?”
    The other four stared at him open-mouthed.
    “Well, I knew you were dumb,” said the fat man, not looking jolly for the moment. “But I didn’t know you were that dumb! ‘Who’s The Avenger?’ he asks.”
    “All right, who is he?”
    “First you take the Feds at Washington and roll ’em all up in a lump,” said the young fellow with the old eyes. “Then you take all the best detectives in the country and add ’em. Then take a big-shot scientist from about every line you can think of. Bundle ’em all up into one guy and add J. P. Morgan. Then you’ve got The Avenger.”
    “Nuts!” said the narrow-jawed man. “Nobody could be that hot.”
    The grim looks of the others—almost as if he had uttered some kind of blasphemy—subtly changed his mind.
    He cleared his throat.
    “That’s why we got such strict orders to knock him off, huh?” he said, in a different tone.
    “Yeah! And that’s why we get such heavy dough if we manage it,” said the fat man. “Believe me, we’ll have earned it!”
    “Aw, we can’t miss, the way Kopell’s planned it,” said Gargantua. “But hadn’t we better get goin’?”
    The fat man looked with deadly eyes at his watch.
    “Yeah! Take us about fifteen minutes to get out there, and a couple more to fix things for ’em.”
    They piled out of the room and down to the street. There, a heavy closed truck waited for them. Two got in the cab, and the other three in the rear. In the closed back of the truck there was a freshly painted detour sign.
    The sign read:
    ROUTE 232 CLOSED
TURN RIGHT FOR GARFIELD CITY
TEMPORARY 232
    The sign was nailed to a sawhorse of the type used by road gangs, ready to be placed.

    The truck drove out of town, and four miles along the main route. There it dropped the sign and one of the men.
    The truck turned back a quarter of a mile, passing a narrow dirt road to the right as it did so. It went on just a little farther to a lane to the right. The lane was hardly more than a pair of ruts running through woods. But the truck