"Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 140 - Racket Town" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Maxwell)

Its wheels had straightened; it hurtled across the avenue at an angle and
bashed its big bulk against a box car on a siding.
The sedan stopped. The lights of the grade crossing were no longer
bobbing
with red when Cardona and Walton reached the demolished truck, for the train
was
past. Crushed in the truck's wreckage was the driver. The smash had killed
him.
Cardona's professional eye saw more. Joe pointed to the dead man's
shoulder.
"Somebody clipped him," declared Cardona. "That's why he couldn't handle
the brakes or straighten the wheel!"
Joe's guess was wrong. That bullet had averted tragedy, instead of
causing
it. The truck driver had faked his play with the hand brake. The shot from the
dark had halted his last deeds. Hands that were still yanking to the right
were
numbed. A pressing foot had been literally pulled from the truck's accelerator
pedal.
The mysterious rescuer was gone. He and his coupe had disappeared, unseen
by Cardona and the men whose lives he had saved. He had accomplished his
vanish
by swinging his car to the right, extinguishing the lights, as he parked
beneath
the darkening coverage of overhanging trees. Dusk was fully settled. The coupe
was lost in gloom.
Keen eyes watched from the coupe while Cardona and Walton hustled back to
the sedan. They drove to a service station around the next corner, in order to
report the accident. When the sedan had made the turn, there was a glimmer
from
the lights of the coupe.
Housed in darkness, the black-clad driver started his car forward. As he
drove beneath the hush of the tree-lined avenue, his unseen lips provided a
strange, solemn laugh, that whispered mirthlessly through the thickened dusk.
That tone was the laugh of The Shadow!


CHAPTER II

CRIME'S VERDICT

THE SHADOW'S deeds did not pass unseen; nor was his laugh unheard. Soon
after the coupe had left, a taxicab pulled from a driveway deep beside an old
house and headed for the center of Parkland. The cab stopped in front of a
three-story structure called the Knightson Building.
That building represented the first of the real-estate enterprises that
had made Warren Knightson a rich man. When Knightson had gone broke, the
building had been taken over by receivers. A barber shop occupied the
ground-floor office that had once been Knightson's headquarters.
The passenger alighted from the cab. He was a dapper-looking man,