"Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 077 - The Merchants of Disaster" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

a sight such as they had never seen before directly ahead of them.

A faint cry came from Joe. It was a strangled sort of cry, apparently for help. It shut off in mid-beat as if
strong fingers had been applied to his neck.

His companions turned and ran. It was some minutes before their courage returned enough for them to
come back and investigate.

When they did, everything was calm and peaceful. Even Joe looked calm and peaceful. There were no
marks of violence of any kind on his body. But he was very dead.

The body was picked up later that same night. The deputy coroner who examined it did his job hurriedly.
The death of one human derelict more or less meant nothing to him.

He did note on the record that Joe Goopy’s death was not homicide. Then he wrote "acute alcoholism"
as the real cause, and let it go at that.

Being young and with a fair amount of curiosity, he wondered just what had killed the aged tramp, but he
wasn’t curious enough to perform an autopsy. Had Joe’s companions told their story there might have
been an investigation. As it was, the death was left a mystery.



LES QUINAN was confronted with a mystery also—a minor mystery, he believed at first. And to begin
with, he paid but little attention.

In fact, he had noticed the queer light signals for several days before his interest was aroused. Even then
he was only mildly intrigued.

That is, until he discovered he was the only one who saw the signals at all!

At that, he had no inkling of what he was about to discover or his actions might have been different. In
which case the course of many lives would have been altered. A great number of those lives probably
would have been saved.

Les Quinan didn’t know about the death of Joe Goopy, of course. But if he had he wouldn’t have
connected that death with the queer light flashes.

The flashes, in themselves, seemed insignificant enough. Actually, they appeared only as long streaks of
sunlight.

But sunlight does not originate in the fifth floor of a Washington office building. And besides, Les Quinan
could not see sunlight anyhow. He was snow-blind.

Big, dark-colored glasses covered his eyes. He paced his office restlessly, unable to read, cursing the
impulse that had taken him on a skiing trip and his own lack of caution which had resulted in the
snow-blindness.

Les Quinan was a patent attorney, and a good one. But he needed his eyes to read law books and to
draw up legal documents.