The Avenger 9 - Tuned for Murder by Kenneth Robeson Read Free Book Online

another person or for an answer to a message.
    It was the latter the old man was waiting for. He had turned over to the gate guard an urgent letter. The letter had been taken to Mr. Jenner. Now the old man waited for a reply to it.
    Near the straight, heavy wire of the fence, a mongrel dog happened to be prowling. The dog yawned, scratched at a flea, started to trot past the station wagon.
    A bone, in the last stages of decomposition, attracted the dog, and he started toward it. Then he stopped.
    He began to howl! It was a strange sound. It was the way a dog often bays at the moon, or in answer to shrill music.
    Or it was like the dread sound a dog makes when there is death in the air.
    The dog howled and scratched frantically at its ears. And the unseeing gaze of the old man at the wheel of the station wagon suddenly became really unseeing—and blank! It was as if the soul in him had abruptly died, leaving only the husk of him sitting there.
    Down the street rolled a van. It was one of these things that travel coast to coast and look as big as a boxcar. A ten-wheeler. Garfield City, being on a big State highway, attracted a lot of vans like that; and they rolled past the Garfield plant because that was on the edge of the four-lane concrete strip.
    The van rumbled forward at about twenty miles an hour over the local speed limit, which was thirty. And the old man in the station wagon stepped dreamily on the starter. The motor came to life. The man shoved into gear.
    After that, no two versions agreed.
    The gate guard said that the man simply rolled the station wagon right in front of the van, like a little boy darting from behind a parked car into the path of another speeding one.
    But that wasn’t credible, of course; so other versions, sounding more natural, were considered and the guard’s view ignored. The emergency brake of the station wagon had come off, rolling the car in front of the van before the van driver could stop. The old man had shoved into second instead of reverse, when he meant to back around and swing into the gate. He had—
    Oh, there were a lot of plausible-sounding theories. But they didn’t change the fact that the station-wagon driver had deliberately started his car and, open-eyed, driven it into the path of the grinding, roaring van.

    Inside the Garfield plant, at the moment, something else was happening that might be looked on as equally odd, considering the man who was doing it and the implications of the act.
    Jenner wasn’t reading the letter the old man had brought. He wasn’t in his office to read it. He was in the company stockroom.
    He had walked in the doorway with a sober greeting to the stock clerk, and gone to the racks containing jigs and dies—master tools for stamping or drilling precision parts in quantity.
    The stock clerk hung around till a call from a foreman for a drill rod drew him to the front. Then Jenner acted fast.
    Looking around to be sure he was unobserved, the president of the company dipped into the pigeonhole containing a male and female die for one of the punch presses. They were small dies. He put them into his hip pockets where they wouldn’t sag enough to be noticeable. But first he took identical parts from the hip pockets and slid these new ones into the rack to replace the older, worn ones.
    He turned around before the clerk had come back. No one in the vast plant could dream of the transfer. The finished hole punched in beryllium alloy by that press could be inspected as much as you pleased and found correct—because the precision gauge used for the measuring was not quite right either. Jenner had changed the gauges over a month ago.
    The company president smiled pleasantly at the stock clerk, complimented him on the neatness and system with which he kept his stock, and left.
    He went up to his office and was handed the letter delivered by the station-wagon driver.
    The letter was from Jesse Cranlowe, and it asked what in the name of thunder had