"Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 290 - Death has Grey Eyes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Maxwell)

clattered into the gutter. Dick made a fast lunge of his own to intercept the
action, but he wasn't half across the sidewalk before Cranston's flinging foot
stopped him with a well-paced trip.
It wasn't that Cranston wouldn't have welcomed Dick's intervention. He
was
only thinking of Dick's welfare.
Straight across the street was a darkened alley and Dick was coming into
dead-aim from that passage. A rifle spoke from the darkness with Dick as its
target, but it spoke too late. The sniper wasn't counting on the headlong
pitch
that Dick took from Cranston's foot. Sizzling half a yard above Dick's
descending head, the bullet flattened against the brick wall beside the
doorway.
The whine of a passing bullet wasn't a novelty to Dick Whitlock. Hitting
the curb, he kept flat and rolled away from the lighted patch. From the
sidewalk, Cranston punched shots at the alley opposite and forced the sniper
back for the next bark of the rifle was muffled. Dick heard a bullet crackle
the sidewalk and ricochet against the wall; then, like echoes, came the quick
scurry of feet.
Dick was still on the roll. Coming against the bumper of a parked car, he
shifted past the fender and came up by the running board. Looking for the
bouncing men, he saw that they were gone. More amazing was the fact that
Cranston had vanished too. In fact from the evidence at hand, Dick could have
classed it all as more of his dream life, until he heard shouts and police
whistles as proof that things had really happened.
A car came scudding up the street and Dick's natural impulse was to get
back to the doorway, since everyone except the vanished Mr. Cranston seemed
leagued against him. But now Dick had another ally, one who appeared as
suddenly as Cranston had melted, a figure that in that moment of stress
awakened a peephole in Dick's cavalcade of blotted memories.
Out of blackness came blackness, alive. A cloaked figure embellished with
a slouch hat, took Dick with one sweeping arm, flung him around and across the
curb, as though intending to carry him over to that alley where death still
lingered, for all that Dick knew. Punching the blackness and finding air
instead, Dick was relieved when his trip became abbreviated. The scudding car
stopped with a shriek of brakes and proved to be a taxicab with a door that
flew open as if a button had pressed it.
In a sense, the cab intercepted Dick, for his cloaked friend whirled him
right into it and closed the door with the same motion. Then, mounting the
step, the being in black aimed an automatic as formidable as Cranston's
through
one open window and out the other, and barraged shots at the death alley as
the
cab lurched past.
There was no response from the rifle. Evidently the sniper had fled
under
the probe of Cranston's shots and was therefore well away when the black-clad
marksman took over. From the window Dick heard a laugh, then saw the blackness
clear like a disseminating mist. Passing street lights told him that he was
alone, except for the cab driver, who was successfully leaving the sound of