The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction
- Автор: Якубовски Максим, Беллем Роберт
- Год: 2014
- Язык: английский
- Год: Constable & Robinson
- ISBN: 9781472111807
- Жанр: Крутые детективы
Электронная книга - «The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction». Краткое содержание книги:
“He has good reason to, I’d say,” Slabbe mused. “Murders going on around him, on his account, and him not having much, if anything to do with them, but still needing to keep his lip buttoned.”
Carlin leveled a finger longer and bonier than his nose at Slabbe. “Just let’s hear you explain this.”
The phone rang.
Slabbe grinned. “You’ll get it on a platter.” He answered the phone. Abe Morse’s husky voice said: “Benjie? I put this chauffeur into a cabin up here at Lilac Lake. I’m down the road at a gas station. He’s alone and he put a pot of coffee on the stove, so I took a chance on phoning.”
“Slide back there, but don’t let him get his mitts on you, kid. He didn’t go there just to drink coffee. We’ll be up. How do we make the right cabin?”
“Turn left at the breast of the dam, left again a hundred yards on. It’s a big log place, all by itself. My jalopy’ll be off in a little grove of pine trees.”
Slabbe hung up. “OK Leftenant,” he told Carlin. They drove to Lilac Lake, left at the breast of the dam, left again a hundred yards on. There wasn’t much moon, no stars. The air off the black-looking water was chill. Slabbe’s breath made frosty clouds when he said, “There’s the pine grove,” and swung ponderously to peer.
Carlin eased the departmental sedan off the road. The tires made whispering sounds on pine needles, a winter old. They found Abe Morse’s car, but not Abe. They prowled ahead on foot, found the cabin, a solid two-story structure in the log cabin tradition, but with nothing phony about the logs. The place was a fort.
“The caddy’s gone,” Slabbe frowned. “Cripes, I hope Hurst didn’t clip Abe.”
“I hope you get your hope,” Carlin grunted. “No lights inside now. No coffee, I can smell. When these trees get full of leaves, I’ll bet it’s black as hell in here.”
Slabbe squeezed the lieutenant’s arm for silence – and got it, complete silence, with only the intangible, non-noise sound of a large body of water nearby.
“Take a chance on a light for a second, Pat,” Slabb suggested. “The road’s dirt. Ought to be tire marks.”
“Yeah,” Carlin said a second later. “Car came in, didn’t go out.”
“He made coffee and drove on past the cabin, huh?” Slabbe said. “Suppose I slip down on foot and you go back for the sedan?”
It wasn’t necessary. A shadow darker than the rest glided up to them. Abe Morse’s husky voice said: “He’s about a quarter of a mile down the road. He’s looking for something in a gully off to the right. I got the distributor cap off the Caddy. Was that right?”
“It wasn’t wrong.” Slabbe chuckled.
“Looking for something in a gully?” Carlin scowled. “What the hell for?”
“A body, is my guess,” Slabbe said. He went ahead, faster now. Carlin cursed and stumbled. “Give me a good concrete city street,” he complained. “What’s that?”
“Tree toads in the woods,” Abe Morse husked. “An owl over there in that chestnut tree. See it?”
“The tree or the owl?” Carlin said sarcastically. “I wouldn’t know one from the other.”
Alan Hurst’s flashlight was suddenly a giant white firefly below them to the right. He was in a gully fifty feet deep, fifty yards across, that ran beside the road. Slabbe squatted and pulled Carlin down beside him so that their silhouettes did not stand out.
“It’s not so steep going down from here, but look at the other side,” he said. “It’s a face of rock. He’ll have to come back up this way or cut left or right down there and plough a hundred yards before he can break clear. How about one of you guys at each end? I’ll go down right here.”
Abe Morse slipped away without question. Carlin spat and burped, but finally loped off. Slabbe went down, crab-style, feet first on his heels, palms and beam. The chauffeur’s flash was swinging methodically, covering every square foot of the undergrowth as he worked through the gully. He found what he was looking for just as Slabbe came up behind him.
Hurst was breathing fast, but stopped and gave a little grunt of triumph as his flash centered on his find: a man’s body. The man was on his back. His clothing showed that he’d been out in the weather for days. Slabbe recognized his features: Jake George.
Hurst hesitated no longer. He caught the man’s arm, started to lift him as easily as a sack of feathers. He stopped, frowned, let the arm go again. He picked up a basketball-sized rock, poised it over the dead man’s pasty face.
Slabbe said: “Don’t do it, son.”
It was a mistake. Slabbe was shambling forward, but he shouldn’t have spoken. Or he should at least have clipped Hurst first.
The chauffeur swung easily, smoothly, catlike, and shot-putted his rock at the first thing he saw moving, which was Slabbe. Man, beast or devil smacking into Slabbe once he was under way would have come off second best, but not rock. It took him on the left shoulder and let him know about it. It stopped him, swung him with more, though less localized push, than a .45 Colt slug. He spun so that his back was toward Hurst when the chauffeur cut his flash and leaped away.
Slabbe closed his teeth against the pain, lurched around and shambled after Hurst. The chauffeur’s longer legs made it an uneven contest. He was twenty yards ahead of Slabbe and gaining.
Slabbe opened his mouth to shout to Carlin and Abe Morse, but decided against it. If Hurst knew there were reinforcements handy, he might go to earth in the undergrowth. As it was, he was certainly trying for the Caddy – which was now without a distributor cap.
Slabbe tried for the car, too. Since he had just come down, while Hurst had been here for a while, he was a bit better oriented. When he started clawing up the slope to the road, he was sure he was lined up with the Caddy, while Hurst, off to the right, would have to run back this way once he made the road.
Slabbe’s left hand and arm were numb. His right hand tore on the rocks he clutched at, felt warm and sticky. The slope was just a blur, he could have closed his eyes and made just as good time. He heard the scrambling sliding sound made by rocks and dislodged earth by both himself and his quarry. His lungs were bellows sucking air through his open mouth, drying his lips and tongue and throat till he wanted to gag. He rolled over the hump and was on the road again. Hurst’s footfalls were approaching, thumping on the dirt. Slabbe peered for the dark shape of the Caddy. He saw double – but it was no illusion. There were two cars there. Headlights slashing suddenly into the night proved it. A tinkling voice proved it. In Fudge Burke’s place the voice had sounded clearly as tiny bells in a fine Swiss watch. Out here, with sky and trees to background it, it was a carillon.
“Here, Alan!” it cried. “In here! Quickly!”
7. Fire to the Finish
Hurst could have made it – but didn’t. It wasn’t his lungs or his legs that gave out. It was his heart. One second he was running freely in a long, loping stride. The next he lurched. The next after, he crumpled.
Slabbe was down on one knee. He shifted his gun from its line on where Hurst had been to the tires of the car with the blazing headlights. But that wasn’t necessary either. Miss Yates was not leaving, she was hurrying to Alan Hurst. Slabbe saw her kneel beside him. Her bonnet had fallen off and her white hair was silvery in the wash of the automobile headlights. There was no need for Slabbe to hurry.
When he had dusted himself off, righted his hat and swabbed blood from his right hand, he went over. Miss Yates was rising. She trembled a little.
“Dead?” Slabbe asked.
She nodded, turned. Slabbe took her arm. “I think there’s coffee in the cabin. Who owns the place?”