THE SPIDER-City of Doom Read Online Free PDF Page A

tightness of Wentworth's face.
    "What is it, Dick?" he asked quickly.
    "Ram Singh!" Wentworth snapped out. "That shooting scrape on Jerome Avenue!"
    Kirkpatrick stared, frowning, thumbed through a file of reports on his desk, paused to study one. "Unidentified man, apparently a Negro, shot in a telephone-booth and carried off by assailants," he summarized swiftly.
    Wentworth cursed harshly, dropped into a chair and sat stiffly on six inches of the seat. His fists were clenched on his knees.
    "They got Ram Singh," he said dully. The two men, Wentworth and Kirkpatrick, were much alike in a general way as they sat there facing each other—two men who had been violent enemies and now were friends. Both were dark and had lean, hard jaws. Kirkpatrick had a saturnine countenance, harsh lines chiseled about a firm-lipped mouth that was emphasized by a straight pointed mustache. His gray eyes peered out straightly from under broad, level brows and his black hair lay flat against his head. There was a calmness about the man as he rested his elbows on the desk and rubbed his palms together with a dry whisper of sound. "Tell me about it," he urged, his voice incisive, accents clipped.
    Wentworth nodded. "You know what the Spider did in Middleton tonight?" he queried, and when Kirkpatrick nodded, Wentworth explained that he had set Ram Singh to searching for Devil Hackerson since one of the men killed by the Spider in Middleton was a Hackerson hood.
    There was a slight ironic twist of Kirkpatrick's lips as he listened that had nothing to do with the seriousness of the situation. His mockery was because both of them spoke of the Spider as though he were a third person.
    Kirkpatrick had battled the Spider for many months, though secretly he admired and respected this swift avenger who struck down the criminals that the law-hedged police could not reach. Finally he had confronted Wentworth, told him flatly that he knew he was the Spider, but that he lacked proof. Until such time as positive evidence fell into his hands, he said, he would assist Wentworth and the Spider in every legal way. But if that evidence came into his possession, he would prosecute to the full extent of his powers. It was an armed truce. Never again had either of them referred to Wentworth's possible connection with the Spider. But it often amused Kirkpatrick, and the mockery touched Wentworth's face, too.
    His gray-blue eyes met Kirkpatrick's directly as he talked, explaining about the activities in Middleton, how they confirmed his own suspicion that there was a tie-up between the death of the chemist, Jim Collins, and the robbery of the bank. But there was mockery in Wentworth's tip-tilted eyebrows though there was grave seriousness in the set, determined mouth and chin, the thin-bridged intelligent nose, the calm broad forehead. His black hair crisped across his brow, swept down to hide a thin scar upon his right temple, relic of an old knife fight. There was a throbbing in that wound now, but that was the only symptom in his vital, keen face that the alarm over Ram Singh gnawed at his heart.
    "You see the seriousness of what threatens," Wentworth said swiftly. "If these criminals use their steel-eater widely, there won't be a bank in the country safe from their attack. Just before Ram Singh was—" Wentworth paused and swallowed hard; the muscles bulged along his jaw line, "before he was shot, he shouted something about the Sky Building. I don't know whether he meant a robbery was being staged there or whether he meant Hackerson had a headquarters there. But if you are willing, I'd like to go there with you and see what we can discover."
     
    Kirkpatrick nodded gravely, but it was nearly two hours later—two hours in which they had thrown every resource of the police into the search for Ram Singh—that Kirkpatrick stepped to a wardrobe in a corner and shrugged into a dark-blue belted topcoat. He set a derby straight across his brows and together he and Wentworth