"coffinfortheavenger" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tepperman Emile C)

and sent chunks of plaster, brick and glass flying in all directions. The car crashed into
the lobby, its front tires blowing out with cracking explosions like pistol shots. The hood
became a mass of bent and twisted metal. Debris came piling down upon the car as one of the
rafters in the lobby ceiling gave way. For a moment the whole building shook as if it might
come tumbling down.

Then the tremor ceased, the plaster stopped falling, and the wrecked car came to rest,
half in and half out of the lobby.

For the space of a couple of minutes neither the clerk nor the people in the restaurant
moved. They were stunned by the sudden catastrophe.

But Dick Benson released his hold upon Nellie Gray and leaped to the side of the car.

Nellie shouted, "Look out, Dick, it may explode!"

He disregarded the warning and sprang to the door of the Rolls, wrenching at the handle.
But the door would not open.

The figure of George Crawford sat erect and unmoving behind the wheel. The wheel was
jammed into his chest, and the top of the car was crushed down upon his skull. He was dead,
of course, but his body was still sitting upright.

Nellie Gray came up alongside of Benson and uttered a low gasp of horror.

"Dick! He's...he's wearing, a strait jacket!"

Benson nodded grimly.

Crawford's torso was incased in a white strait jacket, with the arms lashed across his
chest so that he had been powerless to move as the heavy car hurtled down the hill, carrying
him to destruction.

"It must have taken a fiendish imagination to conceive a thing like this!" Benson said.
He pointed to two heavy wires, running from the steering wheel down to eye screws in the
floor board. That was what had kept the car straight and true on its coarse. Crawford's
body was also lashed to the seat so that he had remained erect all through the wild ride.
Incased in the strait jacket, he had been helpless to do a single thing to save himself.

"Who could have done it?" Nellie demanded.

Benson was already reaching in through the shattered window. Pinned to Crawford's
strait jacket there was a white card, perhaps five inches long and three inches wide.

"This may answer your question, Nellie." he said. He removed the card and held it so
that she could read it. The message was written in indelible ink in a bold and striking
longhand:


To the Avenger: