The Avenger 10 - The Smiling Dogs by Kenneth Robeson Read Free Book Online Page A

behind the door, or flattened against the walls. Benson would have seen them if they had. No, they had crouched on top of things, above normal eye level, so that even The Avenger had been thrown off guard for a second or two.
    Down from a tier of cages leaped one. From the top of a filing cabinet came another. And from the top of a big crate like a piano box came a third. The three hit Benson in one solid scramble. And Benson went down! Even the giant Smitty would have been bowled over by that unexpected mass impact.
    To the three attackers, it must have looked as if it were in the bag. Three against one, and that one taken completely by surprise. But the odds were not quite as uneven as they appeared. Not when the one on the receiving end was The Avenger.
    Benson had been jumped by groups before. He now acted with the swift method of long training. First he allowed himself to fall relaxed, when it became plain that he was going to have to fall anyway. That saved broken bones. Then, on the floor, he began to fight!
    His steely left hand got hold of a thigh. His fingers sought the hollow just above the kneecap and squeezed.
    Nerves as big as pencil leads are near the surface there. His fingers got the right spot with a surgeon’s accuracy, and the owner of the maltreated thigh began to yell like a circus calliope.
    His right hand, meanwhile, had not been idle. It jammed up over a chest to rip aside a collar and expose the throat beneath. Here, the inhumanly clever fingers squeezed hard, too.
    The third man was frenziedly beating away in the darkness with a blackjack. Some of the blows got home, but never squarely. Benson was moving his head too fast for that. He was dazed, but nowhere near unconsciousness.
    The man whose throat he grasped went limp. The man who was screeching with the intolerable agony of his leg was fighting, not to disable Benson, but just to get away. His main ambition in life just then was to say “Uncle.”
    He managed to tear loose. And The Avenger’s left fist shot up at a pale blur. The blur was the face of the third man, who had been jabbing viciously at him with the blackjack.
    Benson’s fist caught the blur squarely, with the force of a piston. The man coughed and half fell off Benson’s chest.
    The Avenger got to his feet. It was all over but the running. The two left conscious realized that pretty enthusiastically. They raced for the rear door and leaped out.
    Benson got there almost as fast as they did. But the door did not move to his tug. Cannily, the men had rigged an outer fastening, before entering here, so that they could stop just such a pursuit as this.
    The Avenger’s shoulder muscles bulged to pull the door back inward, off its hinges if necessary. Then he relaxed. The sound of a car in rapid motion came to his ears. Too late to do anything about the two.
    He turned back to the third man, still out from the pressure against the great nerves of the neck. Benson calmly switched on the light. And then, with better illumination and time to look around, he saw that there were two bodies in the back room. One was that of his attacker, stirring a little now and moaning.
    The other body lay near a divan, and did not stir at all. It was a dead man!
    Benson, pale eyes like ice in a polar dawn, stepped to the dead man first. He noted that the body was in pajamas. It was that of a small fellow with a bald spot rimmed with gray hair. Spot and hair were a mess where a club had broken the whole dome of the skull.
    It was Quinn, proprietor of the place. Sometimes, it appeared, the veterinarian slept here in his downtown office on the divan. Tonight had been one of the times, which was unfortunate because tonight these killers had sneaked in after something.
    The Avenger set about discovering what it was the three had been looking for. The room was in a mess from a thorough search. So he decided that if what the three had wanted had been in there, they’d already found it.
    He stepped to the man