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

sound.
Danny saw Sims coming back, and he ducked down behind a chair. In a
moment the tall doctor was gone again.
Danny rose again and moved forward. He was breathing hard now, and sweat
had begun to crease his young face; his blue eyes were feverishly alert. Presently
he found himself in a dimly lighted hall.
The faint odors of medicines and a dustless cleanliness that made the air dry
and parched, came to his nostrils. It was as though he were in a house that had
been closed fifty years ago from the outside world; a house that had not changed
with the times, but remained stiff and cold and old-fashioned, so that to walk
through its rooms was like walking in forbidden territory.
He was in the middle of the hall when he heard a short scream. It had come
from a woman in a room just ahead!
Danny turned and fled to the living room, and then he stopped. The scream
sounded again. He looked about desperately for a phone. There was none.
He began thinking. Even if he did phone, the police, or his detective friends,
might arrive too late. There was no one in the whole house who could help the
person who was screaming but himself. Yet he was a lad, and to risk himself
against the fury of a murdererЧ
Sweating what seemed like blood now, he turned and doggedly went back
into the hall. He looked again for a telephone and saw none. He moved stealthily
toward the room from which the screams had come.
He heard voices: "You and Paul tricked me! I want to know where it is!"
"If you knew you would kill me," Shirly Parker gasped. "You would kill
meЧ"
"No," came the doctor's thick voice, "I will kill you if you don't tell me! Kill
you here and now! It is only that manuscript that I want!"
Her voice was filled with terror. "Don't come near me again with that knife!
That's your murder knife! Don't come near me!"
"Will you tell?"
"No!"
Danny heard her scream again. He turned the knob of the door. It opened
easily. He saw the doctor's thin back, thee shirt that was sweat-ridden; he saw the
terrified, black-haired nurse half lying in a chair. Danny gasped.
The doctor had her in a strait-jacket. Danny knew that he had to work quickly.
He moved to a chair, picked it up. He lifted it over his head. It was heavy, and
that was not easy to do. He rushed toward the doctor.
Sims heard him and spun around. Danny had one fleeting look at the horrible,
dilated eyes, the lock of gray hair that hung over the surgeon's glistening
forehead, the surgical knife that was in his handЧ
Then the chair crashed. It caught Sims squarely on top of the head. The
doctor's legs went out from under him like pieces of string.
As he struggled on the floor in an effort to regain his feet, Danny's eyes
centered on the bottoms of the doctor's shoes. Then the eyes widened as a thought
raced through the shoe-shine boy's brain.
Sims was nearly on his feet again. Danny grabbed at a vase, crashed it over
the doctor's head.
The surgeon groaned and fell back. Danny could see the phone now; it was in
one corner of this, an old-fashioned operating room that probably dated to the
doctor's early days of home practice. Heart smashing within him, the shoe-shine