Inch by inch, he drew himself forward till he was sitting on the top step of the stair. He peered down into the lighted rooms below. Ah! There he was! The Strangler stood beyond the big chandelier in the front room, the “Kid” could see him plainly through an open door. His face was smiling, the crooked smile of a shark.
Resting his automatic across his bent knees, the “Kid” took steady aim at the man who had done for him.
“A little higher than the pockets!” he told himself, repeating the old gunman’s formula for a killing shot.
Next moment the pistol roared; and the man standing down there in the light jerked up his hands and staggered backward. Greedily, the “Kid’s” fast glazing eyes drank in every detail of the Strangler’s agony. He knew what that look meant—
Billy the Strangler began to pivot on his heels, staring with blind eyes into space.
“Where is he?” he cried. “Damn your soul and body—you—”
He pitched forward to his face. And the “Kid,” leaning peacefully back, felt himself snatched up into a great red cloud that has descended out of the roof upon him.
In an upper room in the house of Ah Wing, the Chinaman sat at an instrument that resembled a telephone switchboard. There were on its surface eight little globes, each with a plug socket beneath.
Ah Wing had an operator’s head-piece in position, and he seemed to be listening attentively to something that came to him over the wires.