In this excerpt from Raymond Chandler's Red Wind, I suspect you may have been misled by what looks like a hyphen, but I think is actually an ineptly formatted dash.

I have used curly brackets below to group together what I consider to be the components of the sense units of the sentence in question:

{His eyes moved} {in short stabs} — {sick eyes}.

Chandler's dash introduces a parenthetical description of the man's eyes. It could be rephrased thus:

He moved his sick eyes in short stabs.

In this excerpt from Raymond Chandler's Red Wind, I suspect you may have been misled by what looks like a hyphen, but I think is actually an ineptly formatted dash.

I have used curly brackets below to group together what I consider to be the components of the sense units of the sentence in question:

{His eyes moved} {in short stabs} — {sick eyes}.

Chandler's dash introduces a parenthetical description of the man's eyes. It could be rephrased thus:

He moved his sick eyes in short stabs

or

His sick eyes moved in short stabs.