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

They were smart, making it in weekly installments. He might have trouble in raising ten thousand in a
lump. He might have had to sell some stocks and that would have left a record. This way... Only then he
remembered that he had to be in the operating room at nine the next morning.

He got to his feet and turned off the light. The office was empty now. He went out the door. It closed
behind him. Darkness filled the room. Black shadows that made weird patterns on the light grey rug.

There was a whisper of sound at the partly open window. So faint as to be but the veriest echo of an
echo, a sinister laugh came into being and then was gone. If there had been ears to hear they would have
wondered where the sound could have come from and what could have made it. But as it was the sound
died away as though unborn.

Now the office was really empty.

CHAPTER II
SHE was unusual in that she was almost as pretty off stage as on. Generally the kind of face that looks
exquisite from the audience is a little coarse at close range. But she was the exception to the rule. She sat
down in front of her make-up mirror and in that crowded little dressing room she was like a lambent
flame.

Outside her door the hubbub of a nightclub went on. The orchestra finished the chord that had brought
her off. She smiled as she heard the last bit of applause die away. The audience had been receptive that
night. They had liked every song she had sung, every special intonation that was her identification mark.

Looking at herself in the mirror she was glad she was alive, glad she was a performer, glad she was
getting the recognition she had always wanted. She took a deep breath. It had been a long, tough climb,
but now, at moments like these, she regretted nothing.

Savoring the moment to the utmost, she was deaf to the little sound of her door opening. She didn't even
realize that there were two men in her room till she saw their reflection in the mirror.

Pulling a wrapper up about her, she said angrily, "You might have knocked!"

One of the men said, "Why?" in a flat voice that denied the question it asked.

For a long moment there was complete silence in the crowded little room. The outside noises seemed to
die away. Fear came slowly to the girl. She had been around. She knew the score. But this didn't add up.
The men looked at her coldly. They didn't look at her the way she was used to being eyed by men.

One of them who was medium sized opened his clenched hand. After all the melodrama of the silence,
the content of his hand was an anti-climax. In the center of his palm was a little bottle.

She looked at it. Through the glass she could see an oily fluid. It shimmered slowly in the light from the
unshaded bulb over her make-up mirror.

The man held the bottle gingerly at his finger tips. He removed the glass stopper from the top of the
bottle. Then his slits of eyes flicked around the room. He saw, thrown on a settee, a rag doll.

He walked to it and slowly tilted the bottle over the doll's idiotically smiling face. Drops of the liquid
poured down. The girl watched, hypnotized by what was happening.