The Avenger 20 - The Green Killer by Kenneth Robeson Read Free Book Online

now.
    Nellie put her hand on top of the lumber pile for a fast start at them.
    Then she jerked her hand away before contacting something there that was as hideous as a bad dream.
    There was a spider on the pile of lumber. But what a spider! It was as large as a small saucer, covered with loathsome black hair, and with red streaks on its underside.
    For a second she didn’t get the connection. Then she did. Another person might never have caught the real meaning of the presence of this spider here, but Nellie had a brain as quick as a steel trap under her silky blonde tresses.
    A spider, bigger, more vicious-looking than any in this part of the world! Nellie remembered two tiny punctures, close together, on the creamy shoulder of the vacant-eyed girl at Bleek Street. She remembered the way the two punctures seemed to slant in toward each other.
    She looked around the shed.
    At the far end were two little monkeylike shapes, hardly to be made out in the shadows. Over them, on a rafter, was a third such shape.
    She kept on looking. She spotted four more in the nearer rafters, and then—she jumped a foot—one lying like a snake on a beam almost directly over her head.
    The two men she’d been so concerned with a moment ago were at the boat, now. They stepped into the cargo opening. But that was death at a little distance.
    This other was death right at hand and immediate.
    The little dark men, so skilled at concealment that in their native jungle a white man could go for days with dozens of them all around him and never see one, could perform almost impossible feats in civilization’s surroundings, too. They had slid in the opening, one by one, like shadows, without even Nellie’s hearing or seeing.
    One of them had silently dropped that spider to take care of her. And it almost had!
    The little monkey man above her had a bamboo tube to his lips. He’d seen her avoid the spider and was going to fix that up with a second form of silent death.
    A poisoned dart!
    Nellie made the leap over the lumber pile that she had intended to make a few minutes before. She lit on her small feet, and she lit running. Behind her there was a little tap as the dart hit wood beyond where she’d just been.
    She ran straight toward the boat, zigzagging as she did so. Half a dozen deadly darts came within inches of her. Two she saw as they zinged beyond her, the rest she didn’t. She got to the boat, which was out of accurate dart range.
    Behind her, in the shed, the little dark men swarmed to action. Like hopping apes, they came after her. Which was precisely what she had hoped for.
    Already it had begun to look as though the Indians lurking so unaccustomedly around New York were the enemies of that other band of killers that had attacked Heber. So Nellie’s plan was simple: Set one gang against the other.
    Of course, she and Smitty were apt to find themselves in the center, which wouldn’t be healthy. But it was the best plan she could cook up on the spur of the moment.

    She swung into the ancient hull.
    Smitty had done his back dive, and the two men had followed him in beyond the bulkhead. So, for the moment, Nellie had this space to herself.
    Then the little monkey men swarmed in murderously. And silently. That silence was grisly. If only they’d made a noise, yelled or something. But they were as soundless as shadows and as purposeful as machines. They poured toward her.
    A while ago Nellie had tried not to be discovered by the two white men. Now she wanted very badly to be discovered.
    “Hey!” she yelled, as the little men swarmed in.
    Beyond the bulkhead door, there was a smothered expletive. Then the big fellow with the glasses jumped back through the doorway, looking utterly amazed and completely savage. He jerked the gun toward Nellie, because hers was the first figure he saw.
    He held the shot, while Nellie ducked frantically to the deck plates. Because by then he had seen the little men, too.
    One girl. A lot of men. And now the