The Avenger 18 - Death in Slow Motion by Kenneth Robeson Read Free Book Online Page A

man.
    The address was that of a run-down rooming house on West Ninth Street. The man lay in his room, second floor rear, with a doctor in attendance. He gasped for each breath; his color was dreadful. It didn’t need Dick Benson’s superlative knowledge and skill as a physician to know that death was close.
    The doctor in attendance looked up as Dick opened the door, recognized the personage known for treatises and experiments throughout the medical world. They stepped into the hall.
    “What do you make of it?” asked Dick Benson, after greetings had been exchanged.
    The doctor chewed his lip.
    “I don’t know, Mr. Benson. I simply don’t know. I would swear it was a particularly swift and deadly form of pernicious anaemia. But anaemia does not strike like this, all in a minute. The man is dying, right now!”
    “Delirious?” asked The Avenger.
    “No. Clear-headed as a well man. But he speaks, and moves, with curious slowness. His motor nerves seem to have been slowed up in their reactions to a fifth of normal.”
    The Avenger went into the room. The dying man looked up with dumb appeal in his eyes. And Benson’s agate, pale eyes contained for an instant their rare look of impersonal but genuine kindliness.
    “Can you talk a little?” he asked, quietly, voice like a tonic in its calm strength.
    The man gritted his teeth and nodded.
    “You saw the man from the truck, near the time clock, I understand,” said Benson. “Will you describe him?”
    The Avenger got the best description yet.
    The man seemed about twenty-five or six, but he may have been older. At least his eyes looked older, dark, narrowed, secretive, with a scar or something in the right eyebrow that parted it in the middle. Thin-lipped, average height and weight, smiling as if he always smiled no matter what the circumstances.
    “I’m going to take a blood sample,” said Benson to the doctor. “Then I think we’d better take this man to the hospital. We may do something.” Though he knew there was nothing really to be done.
    The doctor went downstairs to the hall phone and put in a call to the hospital. And the man with the icy, pale eyes proceeded to draw a little blood, pale blood from the dying man’s veins, into a small bottle.
    He was just securing the stopper when the doctor came back in.
    “An ambulance will be here in a few minutes,” the doctor said.
    The few minutes passed, and far off there was the wail of a siren. The doctor didn’t hear. Only Benson, with his miraculous sense of hearing developed in a hundred wilderness and arctic places where he had wrested a large fortune before he entered the crime field, caught the distant, sighing sound.
    “The ambulance,” he nodded. But then he stopped and listened again.
    There had been a faint sound of bells mixed with the siren noise.
    At the same moment his nostrils, keen as an animal’s, caught the scent of smoke—that deadliest of all smoke—with a smell of wood and varnish and rags mixed in. Then there was a sudden commotion from downstairs, and a frantic pounding of feet as the few in the house began stampeding for the sidewalk.
    “For heaven’s sake—” gasped the doctor.
    And from downstairs drifted the dread cry: “Fire!”
    The Avenger was already at the door.
    At that moment the stairs were clear enough so that he could have leaped through flame and smoke to safety. But his quick eyes saw at once that another thirty seconds would make the staircase an impossible path. He could get away; but the doctor and the sick man couldn’t!
    He turned back into the room. And even as the door shut against the searing heat and choking smoke, the stairway became an inferno down which no man could go.
    And the stairs were the only descent possible from that floor.

CHAPTER VII

Truckful of Trouble
    To find one light truck, among New York’s thousands of light trucks, after that truck has left a place nearly an hour ago and mingled with the teeming traffic in heaven knows what