The Avenger 13 - Murder on Wheels Read Free

expression that you’d rather talk only to Mr. Benson,” he said. “That’s all right with me. Here we are.”
    They passed through the revolving door, and he put a hand under her elbow and steered her to a four-passenger coupé. She vaguely saw two men in the narrow rear seat, and then felt herself getting in as the “associate” of Mr. Benson opened the right-hand door.
    He climbed behind the wheel and the car started. It started down the street—away from the airport! At first, Doris thought the man merely meant to turn around a block instead of making a U turn on crowded Woodward Avenue. But he kept on going.
    “Say—” she began.
    Then she stopped, cold all over. Because he was grinning a little, and it was not pleasant at all. She turned and really looked at the two behind, then, and saw what a little fool she had been.
    They were two of the three who had been in that sedan on the other side of the State early that morning!
    “Hi, toots,” said one. The other said nothing; he just flexed his hand a very little on the butt of the automatic he held across his knees.
    Doris swallowed hard. She knew, now, what had happened. The man who had approached her in the lobby had been near enough to the switchboard to hear calls, or else had bribed the operator. Then he had acted to keep her from ever talking—to Benson or anybody else!
    She had been a fool and it looked as if she were going to pay for it with her life!
    “How did you get wise to the fact that something was going to happen on the dunes road this morning?” the man at the wheel asked, the vein in his forehead writhing as if it had life of its own.
    Doris said nothing.
    “Yeah, and just what are you wise to?” snapped one of the men in the back seat.
    Doris made the same answer; in other words, no answer at all.
    “O. K.,” grinned the man at the wheel. “Don’t talk if you don’t feel like it. It doesn’t make any real difference if we find out what you know. We just want to be sure nobody else does.”
    The car was going as fast as the man could wheel it and not get unwelcome attentions from the police. It neared the vast expanse of the Marr automobile plant, one of the motor city’s biggest.
    The car they were in was not a very expensive one, but it was a deluxe model of its make. There were two windshield wipers, two sunshades, two rear-view mirrors.
    In the rear-view mirrow provided for the passenger on the front seat, Doris noticed that a car was coming after them pretty closely. It was a coupé. She couldn’t see who was in it and didn’t care very much who it was. It was the proximity of the coupé, itself, that interested her.
    Doris had her feet straight out in front of her, under the dash. With her right foot she began tapping gently and rapidly against the side of the car.
    It sounded amazingly like something the matter with a wheel. Something serious.
    “Hey! What’s that?” said one of the two in the rear.
    “Must be a wheel bearing,” scowled the man at the wheel. “Aw, let it go. We’ve got no time for—”
    Doris was tapping her foot more loudly and was slowing the rhythm of it just a little as the man instinctively slowed speed.
    “We can’t go along sounding like a snare drum,” he snarled. “Of all the rotten—”
    He was going quite a little slower, now, and Doris’s left hand shot out.
    The gearshift was on the steering column. She grabbed it with her palm braced hard against it, and with all her strength she shoved!
    The bedlam made by shoving a car into reverse while it’s going ahead about twenty miles an hour is something that must be heard to be believed. Maybe a tooth or two went, probably not, the way they make cars, now. But everything locked from the fan at the front to the wheels in the rear.
    The men raved curses and tried to recover their balance. The coupé behind honked loudly, and then plowed into their rear. A crowd started gathering at once; a couple of cops began running from far places.