"Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 122 - The King of Terror" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

“Hello, Francis,” he said. He slid onto a stool beside the other. “Really, Francis, you look a holy horror in
that red hat and with that idiotic armband.”

Francis sugared his coffee. “Percy,” he said, “I have argued psychology with you before, so I will not do
so now. I will just ask you one question: Do you think you could tell a peacock from a chicken if they
both had no feathers?”

Percy sneered. “Give me a glass of milk,” he told the waiter, “with just a touch of chocolate in it.” His
sneer was polite. Everything he did was polite. He had a floorwalker's manner without ever having been a
floorwalker.

“It is a bitter day,” Francis said. “I thoroughly detest a climate like this.”

“Yes, it is very unpleasant,” Percy agreed.

The waiter went to the other end of the counter.

Francis said, “The new guns are in a car I rented, at the end of this block.”

“Have you tested them, Francis?”

“Oh, naturally. They are very good weapons. Better, even, I think, than the Thompson submachine gun.
They are of the same caliber as the Thompson, but I believe their reliability is greater since the mechanism
is simpler. It follows that it would be, don't you think?”

“True,” Percy said. He consulted his wrist watch. He showed Francis the time. “I believe we should be
going, don't you?” he asked.

“By all means,” Francis agreed.



THEY shot Doc Savage to pieces in the long narrow lobby hall of a midtown skyscraper.

The building was one of the tallest in the city, in the world in fact, and the decorative motif of its lobby
was subdued modernistic. The main lobby was a great vaulted room where chandeliers hung and where
dozens, actually dozens, of elevators operated for the benefit of the tenants.

But Doc Savage's private elevator was apart from the others. Once it had been in the same bank with the
other elevators, but lately it had been changed, being now placed at the end of a small corridor that was a
narrow thumb off the main lobby.

Percy and Francis took up a position at the mouth of this small blind hall, and there they waited.

“I do hope our calculations are sufficiently accurate that this will not be embarrassing,” Francis remarked.

“Yes, indeed,” Percy agreed. “It would be such a bother.”

They stood there, two fine, kind, polite, suave-looking gentlemen who wouldn't be thought to have an
idea more violent than what kind of a present to take the baby at home this evening, or, maybe, when