"Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 281 - Town of Hate" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Maxwell)

Only a slight jog was needed to pitch Zeke over the embankment brink, but in the blackness, the killer
waited before delivering that final touch. In fact, all was so silent that the body of Zeke Stoyer seemed
alone and forgotten.

Why had the murderer provided this strange sequel to his crime?

What could he be awaiting amid the soft whine of the wind that accompanied the patter of the drenching
rain?

The answer came cutting through the singular mist that accompanies a thunder storm only when it drives
itself into a pocket of rising land.

That answer was the smooth throb of an automobile motor. It purred above the muffled obbligato of the
Kawagha River as it tumbled through its deep and rocky gulch!

III.
MARGO LANE shrieked and the brakes sang a tune that was a perfect mimic of her cry.
Only Lamont Cranston could have saved them from the thing ahead--so Margo thought; but she was
prejudiced in Lamont's favor. What Cranston did wasn't really very remarkable; he was saving his best
trick for a later demonstration.

What actually impressed Margo was the thing that could have happened if Lamont hadn't come through.

Their trim coupe was following the side road which was registered as 6-E on the road map. The "E"
apparently stood for "endless." Amid a rain that Margo was mistaking for the Kawagha River, the road
suddenly ended--with nothing but an inadequate chunk of fence between the car and nowhere. The fence
was marked 6-E and in this case the "E" stood for "end."

The brakes weren't enough to halt a calamity that would have finished in the gorge. Unquestionably the
fence meant that the road turned, but which way did it go? If Margo had been at the wheel, she'd have
been thinking it over during the eighty-foot trip down into the gorge. Cranston didn't pause to ponder. He
swung the wheel and answered the riddle.

The road went the way the car did, to the left.

Lightning ripped the rain and mist asunder, a split-second later. There was the road! And with it, the
bridge that meant an immediate junction with the highway leading down to Lamira. The bridge was an old
one and Margo expected to hear it rattle, but she didn't. Any clatter from those old timbers was
completely drowned by the horrific blast of thunder that picked up where the lightning flash left off.

Margo caught her breath at the far end of the bridge. She grabbed Lamont's arm as he wheeled the car
to the left. She'd been studying the road map so constantly that a basic idea remained wedged in her
brain.

"Turn right!" shouted Margo, amid the dying thunder. "That's the way to Lamira!"

"We're stopping at the Old Bridge Tavern," returned Cranston, quietly, just as the thunderclap finished.
"No need to ride out the storm. We'll let it do the job itself."

Its fog-lights cleaving the mist, the car made the swerve. Spotting the embankment, Cranston hugged the