"Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 260 - The Money Master" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Maxwell)

Bert's beer glass hit the bar and smashed. His eyes were livid, wild, as he cried:

"The Shadow!"

TIMED to Bert's introduction, the silhouette show became a living drama. A cloaked shape had taken
over. The big guns whipped upward past the slouch hat that topped the hawkish profile. Other picture
shapes swung frantically, the outlines of guns appearing in hands that enlarged as their owners receded.

Strident was the laugh that burst from the windows of the second-floor office. It was The Shadow, right
enough. Thanks to his shorter route, he'd overtaken Shep's raiders.

In the office itself, the scene showed in three dimensions. Tough-looking men with caps on their eyes
were stopping short between a flickering projector and the window shades where it cast its progression
of phantom forms. In their very midst, they saw a shadowy shape materialized into actual substance.

Wheeling in from the darkness beside the projector's beam, The Shadow might well have arrived from
the path of light itself. Never had his advent been more uncanny, nor could it have created greater
surprise. The snarls with which hoodlums were ridiculing the hoax, turned to terrified gasps.

The Shadow's laugh drowned other sounds. The hard swings of his heavy guns sent thugs reeling from his
path. His shape was a kaleidoscopic whirl against the window shade, showing on the screen like an
animated representation of a hurricane. For The Shadow foresaw that he had little time to lose.

These prowlers, snooping unwarily in the projector light, could not be the person that The Shadow
wanted. Somewhere behind the glow, in a room where The Shadow caught the dim flicker of a flashlight,
was the murderer who had brought his followers here.

Not a small-fry killer like Wip Jandle, who had merely done a trapped rat's trick when he slew Elvor
Brune, but a dangerous murderer who geared his acts to major crime. One who would answer to the
specifications of Shep Ficklin, marked by The Shadow as the man who had ordered the slaughter of
Gregg Emmart.

The rest could wait while The Shadow was reaching Shep. Having settled scores with the leader, the
cloaked fighter would find a roundup of the lesser lights easy. The game was to make Shep show his
hand; so this The Shadow did by another stroke of bold but rapid strategy.

Leaving a wake of half-dazed crooks behind him, The Shadow launched straight for the projector. His
blotting shape grew into mammoth proportions on the double screen as represented by the window
shades, giving the effect of a huge bat spreading its mighty wings and dividing itself. Then the light was
entirely blotted by The Shadow's enveloping shape.

Curious how the sweep of The Shadow's cloak folds over the projector allowed trivial gleams to display
themselves. One glow came from a swinging flashlight in the back room, proof that someone there was
swinging about to aim.

Someone who must certainly be Shep FicklinтАФ

Even that thought was interrupted by the rapid rip of a gun. Furiously, Shep was boring bullets from a .38
into what he supposed was blackness. At least it was blackness when Shep aimed, but it was light again
when the stony-faced big-shot fired. The same glow as beforeтАФthe beam of a projector casting