The Avenger 12 - The Flame Breathers by Kenneth Robeson Read Free Book Online Page A

the rear end. His glance at the blackened motor block was very brief.
    He was looking for traces of the car’s gasoline tank. And he wasn’t finding any. Yet there should have been traces. The metal shell of a tank shouldn’t disappear in even the hottest fire.
    The three crouched quickly in the darkness. The voice of the man in front had stopped, and steps sounded. They saw him leave a tiny cubicle boarded off as an office. He came toward the rear of the place.
    The three shifted a little as he came closer, trying to keep the test car’s chassis between them and him. He didn’t seem to suspect anything. He walked slowly, openly, toward the back, across the garage from them. Then he turned and seemed about to retrace his steps to the office.
    There was a click and the garage was suddenly flooded with light! It struck the surprised three from every angle at once.
    Smitty suddenly exclaimed aloud. He had turned, and had seen something.
    “Oh-oh,” he said. “There’s that girl again.”
    While they had watched the man drift aimlessly in their direction, another person had stolen silently toward them on the near side of the garage. They had been neatly flanked. And this other person, evidently the one to whom the man in front had been talking a moment ago, was the girl with the ink-black hair and the jet-black eyes who had gummed their play on the salt flat.
    She stood facing them, in the glare of light, with the enormous gun in her steady small hand.
    “Don’t move,” she warned. Then she raised her voice. “All right, Eddy, get the others.”
    The man near the front reached into the first car at hand. He leaned on the horn button. Two short blasts and a long one resounded echoingly in the garage—and it also could be heard for some distance outside.
    Benson’s hands commenced to stray innocently toward his collar. If a finger had touched a certain spot there, the garage would have been filled, in about four seconds, with an inky pall of smokelike gas that would have blinded the man and the girl. Most men would have allowed the move to be completed; you can’t hide a gun in a shirt collar.
    The girl, however, was smarter than most men. Back on the salt flat, she must have seen that the collapse of the gunmen was preceded by an inconspicuous move of Benson’s hands.
    “Keep your hands absolutely still,” she warned. “No, don’t even raise them over your head. Keep them absolutely as they are.”
    Benson stayed as still as stone, eyes like chips of white steel. Mac and Smitty raged impotently beside him. And men began to pile in the front door of the garage.
    There were about ten men. They came so quickly in answer to the horn signal as to suggest that their headquarters were in one of the buildings flanking the garage.
    They glared at Mac and Smitty and Benson and began running purposefully toward them. Mac recognized half a dozen of the men they had gassed on the salt flat. The gunmen were pretty sore about that, it appeared.
    However, this time the men did not attempt to shoot. With blackjacks and clubbed guns in their hands they prepared to surround the three and knock their heads out from between their ears.
    The reason for the desire to avoid shooting was plain enough. This wasn’t deserted country; this was a city. And the noise of gunshots wouldn’t be easy to explain.
    There is one thing about a large gang of men. They look imposing; but in such a number, there is always one chump who messes the works. It was so in this case.
    A big fellow with a split ear was in the lead, snarling more ferociously than any of the others, eager to get in the first crack with the butt of his automatic.
    He got there first, all right; half a dozen steps in the lead; And he swung at the first head to present itself—the sandy-thatched skull of MacMurdie.
    At the same time, without realizing it, the man got between Mac and the girl with the gun.
    It was the opening awaited.
    With a snarl that made the gangster’s