The Avenger 13 - Murder on Wheels by Kenneth Robeson Read Free Book Online

Benson had seen, all right. He twirled the wheel of his ponderous machine as if it had been a tiddly-wink in his steely hands. But no turn could avoid that charge!
    The strange-looking car had picked up an incredible speed in the eighty yards or so it had traveled. It must have been going fifty when it crashed The Avenger’s car.
    There was a wham that split the night, and Benson’s tanklike machine rocked far over, tipped back and screamed to a stop, hopelessly disabled. Any other car on earth that had hit the specially built machine hard enough to knock it out of the running would have been a smashed ruin, itself. But not this teardrop thing. It backed easily, still without motor sound, and stood with only a couple of small dents in its snout.
    Three men got out of it, their faces unidentifiable in the dark, their bodies just black shapes. They yanked open the left door of The Avenger’s car. The right one would have needed a blowtorch and crowbar. One of the men drew a gun!
    “No shots!” snapped another. “Club ’em. That’ll make it look like it was done in the accident.”
    So they dragged out a slim but compact form. That was The Avenger, eyes closed, breathing heavily. Then they got a gangling, bony body out—and that was Mac.
    With the two limp bodies in the open, on the road, where they could swing at them freely, they raised their guns to break bone and cartilage!
    They had reason for being so sure that both men were as senseless as they seemed to be. Any others would have been, after that broadside smash. But they didn’t know that one of many devices in that special car of The Avenger was a clampdown arm that snapped across the thighs of all the passengers at the press of a button. This padded bar held bodies straight and firm against impending accident. And Benson had snapped it when the car from the lane leaped at them, and he had unsnapped it again when the accident was over.
    But the gunmen didn’t know this. All they knew was that the hands of the fellow with the snow-white hair suddenly shot out, grabbed the legs of the fellow who was bending over him to club him and pulled.
    The man choked out a curse and fell. He fell, by intent of the white-haired man, against the fellow who was going to club MacMurdie. And then both of them sprawled in a tangle that would have been funny in less deadly circumstances.
    “Get the skurlies!” roared Mac, leaping up and boring toward the third man. This one had leveled his gun hastily. He pulled the trigger and to hell with the noise!
    The slug got Mac in the abdomen, and the gunman half turned to help his pals, assuming, of course, that a slug in the stomach would stop any man. Permanently. But under Mac’s clothes was that celluglass protection that had saved the lives of all the band so many times. Mac kept right on coming.
    His fist caught the fellow right under the ear; and he turned a pin wheel in thin air that was almost beautiful to behold. Mac whirled to help The Avenger; but, as he might have known ahead of time, there was no need for that.
    The two men had risen from their sprawled heap and charged. Benson had clipped one on the jaw as neatly as if delivering an anaesthetic in a hospital before Mac turned. He got the second just as Mac waded in.
    “Get to that car!” Benson snapped to Mac. “Quick! Before—”
    But the time had already passed for that. Someone had remained in the mystery car, at the wheel. And now it leaped back like a frightened lobster, stopped on a dime, and leaped forward up the road. Mac had never seen such a pickup, and he stopped his instinctive but senseless chase on foot after about four steps.
    “Too bad,” said Benson, when Mac came back. “I wanted to look at that machine, very much.” The pale, awesome eyes were coldly disappointed but the paralyzed face, of course, could show no emotion; it was glacier-rigid. “Anyway, we have these three men to question.”
    “How about Smitty?” said Mac anxiously. “He