"Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 320 - Reign of Terror" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Maxwell)

tents and vanish. I don't know."

"Where do I come in?" Hawkeye asked.
"There's a new booking agent who's just become big. I don't know much about him. I'd like to know
more. His name is Bill Martin."

"I'll dig around and see what I can excavate. So long."

In a room, on the top of a high office building, a room whose windows were always blacked out, a silent
sanctuary, sat a figure of the night.

A lamp on a desk cast a circle of light. In the patch of light a hand that seemed disembodied was at
work. It scribbled on and on. Just at the edge of the light was the phone which had just been set in its
cradle.

The Shadow continued to write. Forming under his hand was a pattern. An ugly pattern of which he had
only recently become aware. His agents, sending in reports, had sensed a new force at work in the
underworld. But they had only been bits and pieces of the overall plan. The Shadow was adding and
subtracting at the moment, trying to force the jigsaw puzzle together.

Not a sound reached that stygian room. It was as separated from the busy world around it as though it
had been set on a lonely planet. Only one man knew the number of the phone that rested at The
Shadow's elbow. That man was Burbank. Even The Shadow's most trusted agents, like Hawkeye, had
to dial Burbank's phone answering service. Burbank rerouted the call to this phone.

That way The Shadow was not disturbed unless the circumstances warranted it. And Burbank weighed
the calls very carefully before he put them through.

'Barrels and Larry, guns for hire,' The Shadow wrote. 'Good capable gunmen both. Trustworthy for most
uses. One a hophead, though that meant that no real information would have been given to him.'

The Shadow sighed. It was still a pity that they both had died. Some shred of information might have
escaped them. This way...

Writing again, The Shadow penned, 'To date we have a list of twenty men all of whom check in with
Corbaccio. If we can find out who Corbaccio relays to...'

He laid the pencil down. There was not quite enough to go on... yet. He stood up. His low menacing
laugh, foreboding and warning, filled the dark, shrouded room.

He would know and soon, for The Shadow had ways of getting information...

CHAPTER V
THE kitchen, clean, sparkling white, modern, would have delighted the heart of any housewife.
Everything was laid out with an eye to efficiency. The stove, within hands' reach of the cutting board, the
electric refrigerator on the other side so that barely a shift of the body brought one to it. It was a perfect
kitchen except for the size of it. It seemed to have been laid out for a giant.

The giant came into it rubbing his hands. He called out, "Hey Buster, prepare your stomach for a treat.
This is going to be Eggs Benedict a la Ed Corre."