"Shadow - 360215 - Back Pages - Grace Culver - Hit The Baby" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brown Roswell)

The cry trembled from outside, in through the foul air of the supply room like
a scream from hell.
"Help!"
Big Tim's feet were pounding the hard floor of the sound stage before his
red-headed assistant shook off the freezing terror of that shout enough to dive
into action.
Hard on her chief's heels, she raced across the big barn in the direction where
daylight showed beyond the huge sliding doors. She was abreast of him when
they reached the relative brilliance of the open lot.
That eerie yell had come from somewhere near Stage 1, at the end of the row.
Noonan and Grace plowed toward it, trained instinct guiding them through the
weedy lawn that once had been a carefully kept-up picture plant.
The late light slanted from behind the last stage, throwing a blotchy purple
shadow toward the oncoming detectives. And huddled at the rim of the
unobstructed radiance lay what they were racing toward.
A crumpled shape-a man scarcely more than a boy-sprawled limply among
the weeds. His face, turned skyward, was distorted with terror, jaw rigid, eyes
bulging. Like a giant grinning mouth, a gash clear across his throat was spewing
blood in a terrible, swift tide. From the brutal wound, where it had been sunk
almost to its hilt, a queer, primitive dagger protruded.
As Grace went down on her knees at the boy's side, she could hear their racing
followers thrash to a horror-choked standstill in the undergrowth at her back.
Moe Eisman's breathless whimper panted words of recognition.
"Oh! Bill Daley, it is! Is-is it that he-"
"Dead," the girl from Noonan's pronounced quietly. She had seen death strike
often enough before in her private detective career. But there was something so
wantonly savage in the attack on this good-looking kid, that it left her silent.
"Daley? Who's Daley?" Tim rapped. "My camera punk. Assistant camera man,
that means," one of the shirt-sleeved workers spoke up. "I'm Ziegler, the camera
chief. I sent Bill over here to look over the stock, maybe half an hour ago."
"Stock?" Tim cut in. "What stock?" "All the photographic stuff Dictator didn't
ship west when they shut down here is stored on Stage 1. Maybe some things we
could fix up, instead of buying new. Bill is-was-good at that kind of tinkering."
Looking up from the dead boy's side, Grace saw her employer's grizzled brows
draw together. He queried:
"The kid was alone?"
"Sure. We got only a small crew. All the rest were on Stage 5, working with
me, when you blew that supply room door."
Tim bent slowly, squinting down at the knife plunged into its ghastly crimson
sheath. He had made no move to enter Stage 1; seemingly because the two local
police in the crowd had jurisdiction and had gotten on the Job already.
But Grace realized, from intimate knowledge of the older man's methods, that
he had taken in the whole layout and figured search to be a waste of time.
"Funny kind of a knife. Looks like one of those native machetes from-from
some place like Haiti."
He straightened decisively.
"There's a print of that voodoo movie you made somewheres around the
studio, Eisman?"
The paste-colored face of the terrified executive twitched in stuttering
acknowledgment.