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

being fooled by the good-looking daughter of the well-known inventor.
    Now, Nellie had been fooled, too, right down to the ground.
    “It’s amazing how a man can be fooled by a pretty face,” he said guilelessly. “That is, men are fooled. Other girls, of course, are too smart for that.”
    “Shut up!” said Nellie waspishly. She whirled to Dan Miller. “You didn’t do so well, did you? You said you were an old friend; that she might talk to you when she wouldn’t talk to strangers. She didn’t seem to treat you much as a friend.”
    “I’ve never seen her act like this before,” said Miller apologetically. “She has always been sweet and gentle—”
    “Hummmmph!” snorted Nellie. “Come on, Smitty. Get us out of here.”
    “Just like that, huh?” growled Smitty.
    “What’s a little wire?” Nellie goaded him. “Come on, crash it. If you hit it hard enough—”
    “No thanks!”
    Nellie turned from him and went to the bench. She did not experiment by touching the wall. Looked at closely, you could see that it was of metal, all right, with dull paint hiding that fact from all but a searching glance.
    “I remember about this, now,” said Miller suddenly. “The old man, Hannon, had this room fixed just after I left his employ. Twice, he was threatened by foreign agents after some of his inventions. Then he fixed this trap for anyone else who might break in and try to steal his secrets. I guess that’s why he had such a heavy current run to it—he didn’t care whether he killed a spy or not.”
    “Couldn’t you have remembered this just a little sooner?” said Nellie over her shoulder. She was too sore to be very good company at the moment.
    She picked up the blackish shreds on the bench. Then her tone changed.
    “It’s that black orchid, all right. But, Smitty, did Mac tear it up as much as this in his experiments?”
    The giant looked. “No, I don’t think so. Looks as if Alicia Hannon got mad at it or something and chopped it up in a vegetable grinder.”
    It certainly did. The wilted, already-decaying flower was in bits. One more puzzle.
    The giant turned from it and bent to the floor. He flipped back a rug. The floor showed sleek and polished under the thick Oriental, and Smitty grunted.
    “Good. Hardwood strips. I was afraid the floor might be parquet, or even some composition like smooth cement.”
    “So it’s in strips,” said Miller, who wasn’t very good company either, with a seven-hour wait ahead of him. “So what?”
    Smitty didn’t answer. From an inner pocket, he took a very handy tool he always carried. It was like a very small pinchbar; but the hooked end was pointed instead of flat, and the straight end had a chisel edge that was sharper than most knives.
    Smitty jammed the chisel edge into the hairline crack between two of the narrow hardwood strips and pried. A good deal of splintering followed the action.
    After half a dozen tries, he removed a strip from wall to screen, about nine feet long.
    “Oh,” said Nellie.
    Smitty rammed the end of the strip at the screen, near the wall in which the doorway was set. Sparks licked around the thin strip and it smoldered and fumed, but he got it through a widened hole before it burned through. The end of it touched the electric button next to the doorway, then pressed.
    The tiny blue sparks stopped playing around the short-circuiting wood, and the screen began rising up into the ceiling again, taking the wood with it and snapping it off as the metal frame disappeared into the ceiling slot.
    “So we’ll be here till midnight,” said Smitty. “That’s what she—”
    “Let’s cut the self-praise,” snapped Nellie, “and get along out to Hannon’s country place.”
    “You think Alicia will be there?” said Miller.
    “Maybe,” Nellie retorted. “But whether she is or not, that’s where The Avenger will be, unless we get out there too late to catch him. He said he was going there, before we left Bleek