Murder Makes a Ghost by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Ghost
Publisher: The Ghost Super-Detective Magazine
Published: 1940-07-10T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

Death Penalty

You’re very funny,” Lefty said. ‘“Seventy-five grand. That’s a joke.”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong,” the man in the wire mask said. “I’m not joking. That’s my price. Seventy-five grand for your life—that’s really not so high, unless you’re awfully damn modest about your worth.”

It took Lefty McKay just a little time to grasp the fact that Wire-Mask was absolutely serious. And then the color started to creep into his face. I saw his hand make two false starts up toward his shoulder holster.

“Why, you dirty damned robber! I won’t pay it. I haven’t got it. If I did have it, I still wouldn’t pay it.”

“You’ve got it, all right,” Wire-Mask said. “Right in that bag. I could take all of it if I wasn’t a square-shooter.”

The man in the wire mask coolly touched a button on his inter-office communication telephone. I heard Dr. Stockbridge answer.

“Prepare to give Lefty McKay anew face, Doc,” the man in the wire mask ordered. “We’ll move him with the bandages on his face and in the ambulance. We can even get him a police escort out of town if he wants it.”

“I said nothing doing,” Lefty said. “Not for any seventy-five grand.”

“If you don’t act nice, we can move you in a hearse instead of the ambulance,” the master criminal said. He came around his desk and took Lefty’s bag out of Lefty’s hand. There wasn’t anything McKay could do about it because the fat man who had driven Joe and me to the garage had a gun in Lefty’s back.

Wire-Mask sat down, coolly opened the bag, counted out greenbacks which he transferred from the bag into a brief case,

“That’s my cut, Lefty,” he said. “And we’ll have you out on the Coast with a new face and twenty-five grand in your pocket in about forty-eight hours.”

Lefty’s body trembled with violent rage.

“You can’t do this to me,” he said hoarsely. “Take most of my dough like that. Damn it, I’ll get you for this!”

“You’re wrong,” the man in the wire mask said. “I have done it to you, and you won’t get me for anything.”

And then Dr. Stockbridge came in with two gunmen, and Lefty was taken out of the room.

The criminal chief went to a long steel cabinet which he opened. From it he took a canvas bag and a submachine gun. He tossed the canvas bag to the floor at Joe Harper’s feet. The contents of the bag gave out a metallic clatter. The man in the wire mask nursed the machine gun in the crook of his arm.

“I’ve had the misfortune to lose the combination to my safe, Indian. Since you’re the best safe man in the city, you open it for me.”

Joe Harper gulped. He knew as well as I did that his last attempt to impersonate Indian’s voice had been a washout. Furthermore, although Joe had lived by many different professions, he had never cracked a safe.

Joe looked at the man in the wire mask and shook his head.

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