Read The Avenger 20 - The Green Killer for Free Online

that stuff!”
    The giant doubled up with laughter. “Trying to make me jealous,” he gasped. “As if I cared where you went with Cole.”
    “Oh, don’t you care?” said Nellie with ominous innocence. “Then, if that’s the case, I’ll really go places with Cole and have fun and—”
    “Aw, now, Nellie,” protested the giant, with all mirth draining from voice and face. “I was only kidding.”
    “I’ll only be kidding, too. But it’s going to be a lot of fun with Cole. He’s so good-looking.”
    Smitty was still protesting in anguish when they reached the East River on the Manhattan side.

    They went to the newsstand at the foot of Fortieth Street.
    Justice, Inc., had a large band of helpers, which had proven invaluable. This band consisted of the newsboys of New York.
    They all knew The Avenger. They all swore by him and lived to imitate him. They were the sharpest-eyed lads in the world, and they knew things and noticed things that even the police didn’t. It’s a small happening that can take place around a newsboy’s stand without his getting hep to it.
    Of this boy, Nellie asked, “Do you know of any abandoned hulk of a boat around here docked at a yard also unused?”
    The boy didn’t. Nor did the next one north. But with the third, the giant and the tiny blonde drew fire.
    Their informant, a kid of fifteen or so with black eyes like gimlets, nodded at once.
    “East River Wrecking Co.,” he said. “It handled junk. Went out of business last year. The yard’s never been sold or rented. There’s an old scow there, resting on the bottom.”

    Smitty and Nellie went to the yard, and they stopped their clowning around at once.
    The very look of the place was sinister.
    Junkyards tend to be big, and this was no exception. It was at least a quarter of a block in extent, along the crowded river. Only the river, right at this point, wasn’t so crowded.
    Between sidewalk and yard was what at first seemed to be a high board fence. Then Smitty and Nellie saw that it was not a fence; it was the back of a low shed. Smitty looked around, saw that no one was near them, then ripped a board off.
    That sounds simple, but you should have seen the board. It was a two-inch slab, twenty inches across, nailed solidly to sound beams. An ordinary man could hardly have shaken it. Smitty put two vast fingers through a knothole, heaved, and then regarded a splintered board at his feet.
    “You’ll be using telegraph poles for toothpicks if you keep on,” Nellie said.
    She stepped through the opening. Smitty laboriously, at the expense of some skin, squeezed through after her.
    The yard was empty, save for a litter of paper and broken glass. To the south was the four-story, sagging building that had been used as an office and also for further junk storage, perhaps for the more valuable metals such as zinc and tin and copper. To the north was a big building having nothing to do with the yard. It was windowless on that side.
    The river end of the yard was open. There was a tumbledown dock, and next to this was a rusted hulk of a boat that was too large to be a seagoing tug, too small to be a tramp freighter, but looked a bit like each. A mongrel of a boat, which had probably been towed here and beached, to be cut up for scrap, but had not been taken down before the yard went out of business.
    All around, there was no window through which one could spy. It was a perfect set-up for shady business.
    The shed into which Nellie and Smitty had stepped was open in front, with a clear view from it to the boat, so the two kept in a corner where a pile of used lumber offered a shield.
    “If anyone’s on that old tub,” said Smitty, “they’re probably keeping a lookout.”
    “Yes. How are we going to get to it without being seen?”
    “We,” said Smitty, “are not going to get to it. I am. You are to stay here, ready to run like blazes if somebody comes, or to radio word to Bleek Street if I fail to come back in a few