The Avenger 20 - The Green Killer
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Authors: Kenneth Robeson
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By Kenneth Robeson
#1: J
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#2: T
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#3: T
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#5: T
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#7: S
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#10: T
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#11: R
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#12: T
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#13: M
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#14: T
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WARNER PAPERBACK LIBRARY
WARNER PAPERBACK LIBRARY EDITION
F
IRST
P
RINTING
: J
ANUARY
, 1974
C
OPYRIGHT
© 1942
BY
S
TREET
& S
MITH
P
UBLICATIONS
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NC
.
C
OPYRIGHT
R
ENEWED
1969
BY
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ONDÉ
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EST
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UBLICATIONS
, I
NC
.
A
LL
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IGHTS
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UBLICATIONS
. I
NC
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OVER
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LLUSTRATION
BY
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APERBACK
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ISBN: 0-446-75-394-7
Printed in the United States of America
CHAPTER XII: Reception Committee
CHAPTER XIV: Search for Treasure
THE
GREEN KILLER
The Apeman
The man looked like a monkey.
He looked so much like a monkey that the first thing you thought on beholding him was that you weren’t seeing a man at all, but a large ape dressed in man’s clothes.
He was of average size—that is, for a human being—and he had a fair spread of shoulders. But as he walked, with a sidewise hitch as an orangutan walks, his knuckles almost touched the sidewalk. This was because his knees were bent in a gnarled way, as though they could never be straightened again.
His face was flattened, with a pug nose that had wide nostrils—apelike nostrils. He had a felt hat jammed far down on his forehead, but under the brim you could see coarse red hair. His forehead was about an inch and a half high.
In addition to this oddity of appearance, the man had another highly noticeable characteristic.
He looked very, very ill.
The small part of his simian face that could be seen under the hat brim was sheet-white. His lips kept quivering, and his hands trembled, hanging low below his knees.
A very sick man who looked so much like an ape that if he’d visited the zoo, the monkeys would probably have started chattering to him from their cages! Surely, you’d never see another like him in New York.
But anyone thinking that would have been proved wrong in about two minutes. For there was another like the man, and this other was trailing the man. One ape after another. And with the second ape acting in a sinister, deadly manner.
The first man was shambling along a side street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues where there weren’t many people. When he did approach anyone, he kept as far away as possible, trying to hide his bizarre appearance.
The second man seemed to have a magical ability to disappear altogether when people approached. Like some wild thing direct from a wilderness and carrying stalking methods of the jungle into the heart of a modern city, this man blended with shadow and other covering till he was almost invisible.
It was about ten o’clock at night, so there were plenty of shadows. Ahead, Sixth Avenue showed more brightly, but this side street was dimly illuminated.
The first man stumbled on his crooked, unsteady legs and almost fell. The second increased his pace with grim eagerness, and there was a glint of steel in his right hand. As he moved faster, for just an instant he flitted across a lighted patch and could be seen.
He was much smaller than his quarry. And, though the first man was white, this one wasn’t. He was a native of some tropical region, shambling, dark-skinned, savage-looking. There wasn’t a trace of humanity in his wild features.
But there was more mystery in the night than that represented by just these two men who looked like monkeys.
The first man, ducking and keeping to the building shadows as a group of people passed him, slunk by a dark, open areaway. The group of people passed just at the mouth of the dark den, which was perhaps why he wasn’t molested.
But there was no one near when the apelike trailer reached the opening of the areaway. So he reached it—but never passed it. In fact, he never did anything else in this life.
With a whisper like that of a snake, something uncoiled from the darkness. The thing that uncoiled looked like a snake, too, till it wrapped around the startled dark man. Then it could be seen to be a rawhide cord with a weight at both ends.
Like a thing alive, the primitive but effective weapon tightened around the man, holding him helpless. Long arms reached from blackness, fastened on the little fellow, and jerked him in. There was a stifled shriek that wasn’t loud enough to be heard more than a few feet. Then, silence. Ghastly silence!
The first man went on. In his weakened, desperate gait could be seen no signs that he’d ever been aware that he’d been tracked or that the tracker was now eliminated. He just went on, crazily, unsteadily, knuckles brushing sidewalk, toward more brightly lighted Sixth Avenue.
In the darkness of the areaway, words sounded.
“Got it?”
“Yeah! I feel like one of these here vampires or something.”
“The hell with what you feel like. Time for the next.”
“Sixth Avenue down toward the Village, ain’t it?”
“Yeah! We’ll get him there. Come on.”
The drugstore on Sixth Avenue and Waverly looked like an ordinary drugstore when you first walked in. But the back room was out of the ordinary.
This back room was huge. It was divided down the middle into two laboratories. One was filled with electrical-and radio-experimental apparatus. This belonged to Smitty, of the fabulous little band of crime fighters called Justice, Inc. The other half was for chemical work, and it belonged to Fergus MacMurdie, who was proprietor of the store.
MacMurdie stood behind the soda fountain at the moment. Mac was tall, with huge hands and feet and coarse, reddish skin. His hair was sand-colored, and his eyebrows looked like ropes of sand with little bitter blue eyes under them.
On the other side of the counter were Smitty and Josh.
Algernon Heathcote Smith was a six-foot-nine, near three-hundred-pound giant. His good-natured moonface and china-blue eyes made him look stupid. But he was far indeed from being stupid.