The Crimes of The Scarlet Ace: The Complete Stories of Major Lacy & Amusement, Inc. by Theodore A. Tinsley

Author:Theodore A. Tinsley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Action and Adventure
Publisher: Altus Press
Published: 2012-10-29T07:00:00+00:00

Mr. Whiskers

I

JOHN TATTERSALL LACY was rather a tall man, but he had to rise stiffly on his toes and leap upward in order to catch hold of the stone sill of the window. He hung there coolly for a moment, confident that he was secure from observation. The paved alley was a narrow cul-de-sac between the private dwelling house and the blank white-washed wall of the towering apartment structure. No one had seen the grim-faced major enter the alley. No one had observed him make certain of possible retreat by propping the iron gate ajar with an empty ashcan.

He hung at arm’s length, his head below the level of the window, staring upward at the dusty glass. He had not been mistaken. There was a small X, marked with soap, on the inside of the lower right-hand pane.

He chinned cautiously until he could peer into the room. It was empty. With a deft muscular twist the major got one knee planted, braced his body against the casing and lifted the sash with a slow, even pressure. He grinned. The window slid up smoothly without a squeak or a jerk, almost as if the wood had been recently greased.

Lacy’s grin was not a pleasant or a humorous one. There was a steady flame of savage rage burning in his heart. Somewhere inside those shabby walls of weathered brick was Pat Harrigan—a helpless captive in the hands of cold-gutted killers. The soaped cross, hastily scrawled on the pane like a mute plea, proved it. Pat’s wavering voice had come over the telephone wire in a swift, sibilant whisper—a whisper that had ended in a faint crash of sound and the click of a replaced receiver.

Pat had gasped out an address and a name. The name of a dead man! A ghost, into whose fleeing body Lacy had emptied his automatic—and Lacy never missed. A spectre that had risen green from the grave, and without the slightest warning had already struck disastrously at the field forces of the Emergency Council for Crime Control.

In a certain private hospital on West End Avenue lay Ed Corning. Ed was Lacy’s friend and one of his most efficient staff officers. He had been wheeled into an operating room that very morning as an emergency appendicitis case, and was fighting grimly for his life with three gunshot wounds in his back—and the same dead man’s name on his delirious lips.

And now Harrigan was kidnapped, vanished. The call from the missing Pat had come through a private wire to the penthouse headquarters of Amusement, Inc., scarcely a half hour after Lacy had left the bedside of the babbling Corning.

The major had answered that phone call alone. He had curtly refused Charlie Weaver’s plea to accompany him. The strain of the lone wolf in Lacy vibrated to the challenge. Something elemental and primeval stirred in his blood. He went alone, with a crumpled address in his pocket, a deadly automatic slung beneath his left armpit, and the grim challenge of a dead man whispering in his brain.

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