The Avenger 22 - The Black Death by Kenneth Robeson Read Free Book Online

a leather chair and a desk. Along the other side was a teak-wood slab, forming a kind of deluxe workbench. On this was a handful of blackish badly wilted stuff that might or might not be the remains of the black orchid. They couldn’t quite see from the doorway.
    Nellie shrugged a little and followed the girl over to the teakwood slab. Dan Miller and Smitty went, too.
    “You see,” Alicia Hannon said apologetically, “I wanted this flower because—”
    Smitty had seen her move in a hurry at the drugstore when she flashed to that metal rear door and through. She moved the same way now—only, it seemed, even faster.
    With the last word seeming to float in the air after her like the wake of a fast boat, she darted to this door. But she did not leap out of the room nor did she slam the door shut as she had at the store.
    She pressed a button next to the door. It looked like an ordinary electric-light switch.
    Almost as fast as Alicia, Nellie Gray moved. But it was not quite fast enough. There was a six-foot gap between Nellie and Alicia when the latter jabbed at that button.
    There was a jarring thud as a heavy metal screen fell between the two girls. The thing came so close to Nellie that it almost cut her small nose off, and she banged into it so hard that she bounced back and nearly fell. She started to charge at it again, with Miller and Smitty now beside her.
    “Don’t!” warned Alicia. Her tone was not at all pleasant, now. Indeed, at something in it, the three stopped as though barricaded by it quite as much as by the screen.
    “That screen is electrically charged, now,” said Alicia. “If you touch it again,” she said to Nellie, “you’ll do more than bounce back. If your heart is in excellent condition, the voltage might not kill you. But you would find it very uncomfortable.”
    “Why, you—” gasped the little blonde.
    Alicia Hannon went out, not bothering to shut the door.
    The three looked angrily at the screen.
    It was of very heavy mesh. It divided the room lengthways, with the three cooped up in a long, narrow cell on the workbench side, and with the chair and desk and the doorway on the other side. The screen was not too heavy for muscles like Smitty’s to twist and wrench into an opening. But there was that electrical charge—
    Smitty’s huge forefinger poked experimentally toward the screen, as you might poke an unbelieving finger toward a gleaming surface labeled “Fresh Paint.” You know, just to be sure.
    Alicia Hannon appeared in the doorway again. She had on a crazy little wisp of a hat and was calmly drawing on her gloves. She was all ready to leave.
    “Believe me,” she said, with not much interest, to the big fellow, “you won’t like it if you touch that screen. The walls inside the screened-in half, the half of the room you are in, are of metal. They’re electrified, too. Your best move will be no move at all. Just sit on the floor there.”
    “You’re going to be pretty sorry about this,” said tiny Nellie in a grim tone.
    “Look here,” Dan Miller said. “Why do you do a thing like this to me? You know me, Alicia. I’m your friend.”
    “You seem to be on the side of people who are not my friends, now,” snapped Alicia. “Goodbye. I won’t see any of you again, I hope.”
    “Wait a minute,” Smitty yelped. “How long are we to be held here?”
    Alicia looked at a competent watch on her slim white wrist.
    “A clockwork mechanism will shut off the current at midnight, tonight.”
    “That’s nearly seven hours!” Smitty said. “You cant—”
    Alicia Hannon was no longer in the doorway. She had calmly left them.
    Smitty poked with that big forefinger at the screen again. Then he went into a kind of shaky dance, wrenched his finger away and howled.
    There was enough current in the mesh to knock an ordinary man cold!

CHAPTER VI

The Black Pig
    There was just one consolation in this humiliating situation for Smitty. Nellie had kidded the life out of him for