The Avenger 18 - Death in Slow Motion
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Authors: Kenneth Robeson
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By Kenneth Robeson
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#14: T
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#16: T
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#17: N
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RINTING
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OVEMBER
, 1973
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ENEWED
1969
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IGHTS
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OVER
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ISBN: 0-446-74-392-5
Printed in the United States of America
CHAPTER III: Deaf-and-Dumb Murder!
CHAPTER VII: Truckful of Trouble
CHAPTER XIII: The Gathering Web
DEATH IN
SLOW MOTION
The Shivering Mail
In the teeming beehive that is New York City, an old man shivered and looked ill.
Few people paid any attention, naturally. Down and out, a ragged bum, he was the kind of old man who would never draw a second glance from anyone.
If a skyscraper had fallen or an earthquake had opened a ten-foot crack down Broadway’s entire length, everybody along the Atlantic seacoast would have dropped whatever he was doing to hear about it and observe it. Yet, a falling building or an earthquake would not have had the importance of this old bum’s feebleness, could some prophet or seventh son of a seventh son have been around to discern that fact.
However, no such mythical person was nearby at the time; so he remained just a weakly moving old tramp beneath the notice of the passers-by.
He was on Waverly Place near Avenue of the Americas at the time and heading west.
He was about the most unsavory-looking character you’d wish to see. Of any age over sixty, he had straggly gray whiskers that looked like the moth-eaten fringe of an old rug. His watery brown eyes seemed to have a film of mist over them. He was fairly tall, but so stooped with age that he seemed a small man.
He was dirty, and his clothes obviously hadn’t been off his feeble old frame for days, perhaps weeks. His shoes flapped a little as he shuffled along, because the soles were loose. And from the flapping fronts, you could now and then see a toe which had gone through its sock.
Altogether, not a spectacle to command interest, even though the old man might be in distress.
That he was in distress was apparent from his gait.
He shuffled a few steps and then leaned against a building wall for a moment, panting, with his hand to his ragged chest. He went on and almost sagged to his knees. He recovered, and tottered along again, west toward the Hudson River.
The old tramp was carrying a bundle as disreputable looking as himself.
A tattered newspaper was the wrapping of the bundle. From one end trailed the jagged ends of a few broken slats. Some bits of string trailed out, too. The old fellow had obviously been out gleaning in ash cans and the city streets, getting odds and ends that he might sell for a few pennies, and bits of wood for fuel with which to cook.
As he neared Avenue of the Americas, he seemed to become more and more ill. His spells of leaning against something for support were longer. His shivering grew more intense. His face, or what you could see of it behind the straggly whiskers and the dirt, had a gray-green look. About the shade of a lima bean.
Coming down Avenue of the Americas was a Negro.
He was tall, as thin as part of a split-rail fence, with feet like barges and with a sleepy-looking dull-witted face. He walked in the same manner as he talked. There was a lazy inclination to use just as little energy as possible for the result desired.
Josh Newton had graduated with high honors from Tuskegee Institute. He could, and did, talk with the crisp and precise diction of a college professor when he was among friends, and his brain and body were as fast as chain lightning when there was need for it.
But all this could be inferred in one simple phrase: he was a valued aide of Richard Henry Benson, known to an increasingly uneasy underworld as The Avenger.
Josh reached the corner of Waverly and Avenue of the Americas just about the same time as the old man. They were across Waverly Place from each other; but even across the street Josh’s quick eye caught the old boy’s distress.
He crossed in a hurry and went up to the aged tramp.
“Anything wrong with you-all?” he drawled. Josh, with strangers, scrupulously lived up to his lazy, no-account appearance.
“No,” said the old man. “I’m all right.”
His voice asked no favors. In fact, it was a harsh and repellent voice.
“Looks to me lak you’s in trouble,” drawled Josh. “Ah got a few nickels if some food’d help.”
“I don’t need food,” snarled the old man. “Get away from me, will you?”
Josh stood back and viewed the trembling, tottering, ragged old ruin. And as he stepped back, the old man sank to his knees, floundered frantically to get up and could not make it.
Josh put an arm under the ragged shoulders.
“Get away from me, I tell you!” cried the old bum. “I’m all right—”
And saying this, he fell flat on his dirty, whiskery old face and lay in the dust of the sidewalk. He glared up at Josh, not unconscious, but unable to move a muscle.
So Josh picked him up and carried him to MacMurdie’s drugstore, which was a bare dozen steps from there and to which he had been going in the first place.
