The Avenger 5 - The Frosted Death by Kenneth Robeson Read Free Book Online Page A

skull, bringing a gasp to his lips.
    Benson’s hand dipped into his pocket and came out with something like a small handful of glass marbles. He dropped one on the floor at his knees, and threw the rest with a scattering motion.
    There was a succession of tinkling sounds as they broke. And the light in the laboratory began to fade out.
    The men fighting the two broke their silence, then. One of them cried out in the surprise of seeing an electric cluster of lights slowly dimming, for no discernible reason. A couple of the others swore in a guttural foreign language.
    The lights kept on dimming.
    With a movement that was really no more than a blur in quickly gathering gloom, The Avenger retrieved Ike, the throwing-knife that had pierced the wrist of the first gunman.
    No words needed to be exchanged between Benson and Smitty. The two always worked in perfect unison. Smitty knew all about what had happened: The Avenger had broken half a dozen of the “darkness” pellets he always carried with him. The pellets released a black pall so impenetrable that even electric lights were quickly blotted out by them.
    These were blotted out now, less than thirty seconds after the release of the ink-black liquid within; liquid which had such an affinity for oxygen that it volatilized instantly and spread as an odorless, tasteless black gas.
    The air was as black as the water is around a squid after it has discharged its concealed ink. In the blackness, Smitty and Benson got to the window. Benson went up the silk cable to the roof; while Smitty, helped by darkness, held the groping enemy at bay. Then Smitty kicked over the workbench under the window with such force that it knocked his attackers down like ninepins, and joined his chief on the roof.
    They drew up the silk cable. But they did not go. One of The Avenger’s most often-used tactics was to apparently flee—but actually stay near and return to the scene. He did so now.
    They heard the laboratory door slam. The men who had so unexpectedly overwhelmed them were getting away, fast, carrying their wounded with them. Then Benson silently slid down to the laboratory again.
    A little of the black pall was settling. It did not last long. It was light enough for him to see what he wanted to. And that was a thing he’d been pretty sure he’d see.
    The mold-covered pig was gone!
    The men had come in here to look around and make sure that no incriminating trace had been left in the laboratory by the person who had killed Targill last night. They might not have found the pig in the incinerator chute. But they had gotten it, now, through Benson’s having lifted it out to the lab floor.
    It was logical that further examination of the laboratory would not reveal the secret of the frosted death. Benson swung out of the window and back up the cable to join Smitty on the roof.

CHAPTER VIII

Silent Partner—Silenced
    The residential section called Clapham, out on Long Island, is for the very rich. The estates are larger, the grounds of each better kept, and the servants more profuse, than in any other spot.
    One of the biggest of these estates belonged to a man named August Taylor.
    August Taylor, sixty-seven, a semi-invalid and a most irritable and unpleasant man, was remarkable for three things. One was that he possessed nearly twelve million dollars. Another was that no woman had managed to grab him as a husband; so he was a bachelor with his moneybags. The third was that he had four million dollars sunk in the Sangaman-Veshnir Drug Corp., which in a way made him a silent partner; and he also had himself insured for another three million with the corporation as beneficiary.
    August Taylor did not often show up at the Sangaman-Veshnir Building. He let his millions represent him there. For the most part, he rarely stirred from his Clapham estate. And that was natural enough. The estate was a beautiful place in which to spend all one’s time.
    At the moment, however, on the morning after the