"onebullet" - читать интересную книгу автора (Daniels Norman A)

Pickering nodded and left hurriedly. Gallagher glanced around; then he began crawling up the
stairs on his hands and knees, examining each banister post. Halfway up, he emitted a grunt of
satisfaction. There was a piece of thin, strong silken cord tied to one post. He untied it and
slipped it into his pocket.

A radio car howled up and Gallagher put them in charge. He turned over his service pistol to one
gaping patrolman.

"That finished Higgins," he explained. "It's evidence."

Gallagher had one solitary card in the hole, Carew, the sniveling little pickpocket who had stopped
him ten minutes before he had captured Higgins. Carew had given the tip-off and therefore Carew must
have been in on the deal. Carew holed up in a cheap little hotel. Gallagher took a cab to the hotel.
He selected the fire escape as his best means of entering without an alarm being sent through the
place.

He reached the window of Carew's room, but the curtain was drawn. The room was dark and only
silence greeted him. He tried the window and found that it wasn't locked. He slipped through it,
moving the curtain aside as he did so. It was pitch dark in the room, but he could hear cautious
breathing, as though someone lurked in one of the farther corners, ready to deal death. He reached
out blindly and his hand seized the back of a sturdy wooden chair.

He raised it up, holding it as a shield and proceeded across the room. Something brushed against
one of the chair legs. Gallagher turned swiftly, raised his weapon and slashed down with it. He
heard a:grunt of pain and then the room was suddenly illuminated for an instant by the flash of
a gun.

Gallagher drove the chair straight at the spot from which the flame had lanced out. It struck the
gunman and Gallagher bored in as fast as he could, driving the man back until he was against the
wall. Someone else moved behind him. Gallagher raised the chair and brought it down with all his
strength. He felt the legs shatter under the impact and someone dropped heavily to the floor.

Then a husky arm wound around his throat. He had put one intruder out of the way, but in doing so,
he had opened up a way for attack by the other man. Gallagher tried to squirm out of that embrace
and all the while his reeling mind steadied around one fact. Why didn't this man gun him out ? It
would have been a simple thing to do. Even the first shot had missed him by yards, as though it
had been deliberately aimed away from him.

He reached up with both hands. His fingers dug into powerfully built shoulders. He heaved with all
his strength and felt his attacker being lifted off his feet. Then a numbing blow crashed against
the side of his head. Gallagher's fingers grew weak. The blow was repeated, with even more vicious-
ness this time. Gallagher dropped to his knees and raised both arms to cover his skull against
another savage blow. His senses were reeling badly. He managed to clamber back to his feet.

There was someone near the door. Courageously, Gallagher started forward. A man's form came out of
the darkness in a leaping attack. Gallagher went down under the impact but he wrapped his arms around
the man, forced him over on his back and drove home a short jab to the chin.

Oddly enough that chin seemed to possess no resistance at all. A wave of horror swept over Gallagher.