The Avenger 11 - River of Ice by Kenneth Robeson Read Free Book Online Page B

yelled and what The Avenger’s swift eyes had caught even before Mac’s. Something like a mountain falling on them!
    The car had approached the building that was being demolished. It had been rolling past the boarded-off sidewalk, with the planks throwing back the rhythmic swishing of the tires. And then the building wall had started to fall on them. At the same instant they heard a rumbling boom.
    The remaining wall of the old building was nearly six stories high. It was leaning out and over the car as if it would never stop tilting. And Benson was driving the sedan right at it! Instead of trying to speed ahead of destruction, he had swung the wheel around so that the car dove straight for the base of the falling masonry and mortar. It would have been impossible to get ahead of the fall by going forward; but any other man on earth would have automatically tried it, too frightened to think otherwise.
    Not Benson. Instead, the sedan was rocketing at the base of the leaning wall. It jounced over curbing, sent planks in all directions and jammed half through the opening that had formerly been the entrance of the place. Mac and Smitty didn’t know whether they were yelling or not. They rather thought they were. But if they had been, no one would have heard them.
    Six stories of brick wall falling outward from its base! The roar of that collapse drowned all sound for blocks. The top began tumbling down over the front of the building on the other side of the street. The wall disintegrated, seeming almost as liquid as an ocean wave. Bricks and great stone blocks tossed up high fell again. The street at that section was a choked welter of debris with several parked cars buried somewhere beneath many feet of brick and rock.
    “Whoosh!” sighed Mac, in the sedan. “Ye can consider me faintin’ like a young girl. ’Tis a miracle we’re alive.” And yet not such a miracle. The Avenger had shot the car into the one spot where it had the chance of escape: half through the base of the wall itself. The structure had leaned out and down away from them, instead of falling on them. The top of the sedan was dented where assorted fragments of brick and cement had collapsed through the top of the entrance frame, but that was all.
    However, it was close enough, even for these men whose lives were made up of close calls. They got out of the sedan, with Smitty using his enormous strength to jam open a door that was bent less badly than the rest. “Go on to the address Miss Waller gave,” Benson said quietly to Mac. “Smitty and I will return to Bleek Street. I’d like to ask the girl a few questions.”
    “And she’d better answer them pretty straight too,” said Smitty hotly. “It’s a pretty odd coincidence that we were sent along a street where a building wall was ready to collapse just as we came along.”
    But there were no questions to be asked. Lini was not at Bleek Street! Benson called Nellie Gray down from the top floor after he had gone to her room on the second and found it empty. “Slipped away!” said Nellie ruefully. “It’s all my fault, chief. But, naturally, I wasn’t looking for her to do a thing like that. Why would she come here begging for help and then steal away again after we’d promised it?”
    MacMurdie got back from the address given by Lini. “No room’s rented there under her name or the name of anybody else lookin’ like her,” he said sourly. “She’s a schemin’ little skurlie. She came here only to lead us into a death trap. The trap failed and now she’s cleared out.” But The Avenger shook his white head, his pale eyes searching as if through far mists for the whole of a truth of which, as yet, he could only suspect a small part.

CHAPTER VII

The Alibi
    Next morning at about ten o’clock, Benson left the Greenwich Precinct Station with his white face as expressionless as always, but with his pallid, deadly eyes glittering as they did when he was pitted against large-scale