"Shadow - Back Pages - 370515 - The Kid Faces Death" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brown Roswell)

"At the clinic," Slug answered. "At her living quarters, the home of her
mother; I even had some of the uniformed boys scout around to the homes of her
friends. I tell you we worked fast, looked in all the logical places, and she's gone!"
Mike Ryan chewed on his short cigar for a moment, then he shrugged. "I
thought I had a lead on a guy in the florist shop, but maybe not. This Parker girl
must be guilty."
Slug snapped: "Must be? She is!"
But Danny Garrett was looking at the bundle under the skinny detective's arm.
"Slug," he asked, "what's that ?"
Slug O'Donnel answered the- question, though he addressed Ryan as he did
it. "The screwiest thing you ever heard of" he said. "I found it underneath a
hidden plank in Shirly Parker's apartment when I was tapping around to find
something hollow. Guess what it is."
"I'm not paid to guess," grunted Ryan.
"It's the manuscript of a book! Look, here's the title."
Danny saw it as it was held up:
Treatise: Of An American Medical Man By Paul Hudson
"Imagine Hudson, a stationery-store guy, writing a book about medicine," said
Slug as he and Ryan climbed into the police car.
Danny Garrett watched them drive off, then he headed down the street as fast
as he could walk. He could imagine Paul Hudson writing a book like that, and he
could imagine a reason for it. It was the book Shirly had taken with her from the
scene of the crime.
He remembered Doctor Stanley Sims asking Paul about the book, and how
Paul had answered with reserve, as though it were too personal a subject to
discuss.
Danny went into a telephone booth and looked Sims up in a directory. A few
minutes later he was at Sims's door, ringing the bell.
It was a brownstone house near Gramercy Park. It was pitch-dark now,
except for the street lamps which glimmered a few feet away.
Danny waited impatiently for an answer; then he rang again. Still no answer.
He went down the steps to the sidewalk to think. There was a curious burning
inside of him, as though he were being foolish to leave.
At last he crept around the side of the house. It was abundant with ivy vines.
Seeing a light that shone from one of the side windows, Danny climbed the small
picket fence and peeked in.
He saw Doctor Sims, in shirt sleeves, his face covered with sweat, cross the
room. There was something about the intensity of his expression that chilled
Danny. The tall, thin surgeon disappeared from sight.
Still, Danny had not seen enough to warrant calling for the detectives; the
clues he was following were, as yet, too vague. He leaped to the vines, clung to
them, and crawled to the high sill of the window.
Ryan had always warned him about doing anything against the law, but this
time Danny felt that Shirly Parker was in grave danger, and that if he didn't do
something about it now it would soon be too late for anybody to do anything.
His desperate hope that he was right and that he might find the girl a prisoner
here gave him courage and would, he thought, excuse him even in the eyes of
Mike Ryan.
Carefully Danny lifted the window. Silently it slid upward. He squeezed his
small body through and jumped to the carpeted floor of the room. There was no