The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories
- Автор: Adams Cleve F., Babcock Dwight V.
- Год: 2010
- Язык: английский
- Год: A Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
- ISBN: 978-0-307-45543-7
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories». Краткое содержание книги:
Black Mask was the apotheosis of noir. It was the magazine where the first hardboiled detective story, which was written by Carroll John Daly appeared. It was the slum in which such American literary titans like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler got their start, and it was the home of stories with titles like “Murder Is Bad Luck,” “Ten Carets of Lead,” and “Drop Dead Twice.” Collected here is best of the best, the hardest of the hardboiled, and the darkest of the dark of America’s finest crime fiction. This masterpiece collection represents a high watermark of America’s underbelly. Crime writing gets no better than this.
Hansard waved a hand. “Once in a while. But not tonight. Which is Lily’s room?”
She put both hands flat on the marble, levered herself erect. “You ain’t gonna get rough, or anything like that, are you?”
“Not unless I have to.” Mike’s smile was still agreeable but his eyes were frosty. “Which room?”
“Front, right.” The stout woman pointed. “Want a key?”
“I don’t want to kick the door down.” He held out his hand. From somewhere in the folds of her dress she produced a flat key. “Just sit right down there again. Act natural. Don’t bother to tip off anybody. Just go right on as if I wasn’t around. Probably in a few minutes I won’t be.”
“I always play ball, Officer. It’s the safest way.”
He went toward the front of the house, used the key. He kicked the door open, stood to one side. The room was pitch-dark, the shades were drawn in the windows looking down onto the street, although through them Mike could see the dull claret glare of the MEATING PLACE sign at regular intervals. There was an odor of musky perfume.
He held his gun in his right hand, felt around for the light switch with his left. An unseen hand gripped his left wrist, jerked him off balance!
Mike wrenched himself free, but not before a two-foot length of lead pipe had smashed down across the back of his neck, half stunning him. He crashed forward, to his knees. A foot stamped savagely on his gun-hand, crunching the knuckles. The shoe, which had come within the detective’s blurred vision, booted the revolver out of his grasp.
The door slammed behind him; light flooded the room from rose-shaded bulbs in the ceiling. Hansard gazed up, groggily. Two men stood over him. One was short and squat. His arms were so long his hands hung almost to his knees. His face was long and narrow. There was a scar twisting down the right corner of his mouth. The left sleeve of his coat had a jagged tear in it. The fabric was soaked with something that looked like port wine.
The other man was tall and slender, with a boy’s pink cheeks and flax-colored hair that waved as if it had been marcelled. He wore a suit of pearl-gray gabardine, a wine-red shirt and an apple-green tie. Neither of the two faces above him had been among the photographs Ed Schmidt had taken from the Bureau of Identification, Hansard decided.
The tall youth spoke languidly. “Don’t waste time giving him the toe, Gorilla. Use the pipe.”
The squat man grunted, swung clumsily with the chunk of lead. Mike did his best to roll away from the blow, but took it on the shoulder. His left arm felt as if it were paralyzed.
“He’s one of them he-guys, Babe,” spat the Gorilla. “Got guts.”
“Never mind his guts, George. I want his brains smeared on the carpet. And make it snappy. He might have a partner hanging around somewhere.”
Mike wished to God he’d had sense enough to lug Ed Schmidt along. Maybe he could summon help, if that fat dame in the hall wasn’t in on the play. He tried to cry out, but the smash on the back of his neck had done something to his vocal cords. He could only whisper.
The Gorilla could still talk all right, though. “Can’t I have a little fun with him, Babe? It ain’t every day—”
“Kill him! Kill him now,” insisted Babe in an ugly high-pitched squeak. “Cave his skull in. Knock his teeth out afterwards, for souvenirs, if you want to. I don’t give a damn. But finish him off, first.”
Gorilla George measured his distance, swung down his arm.
Mike twisted, rolled, stumbled to his feet.
Babe was leveling a gun at him, five feet away. The detective could see the bright blue eyes sighting along the barrel.
There was no time to make a decision. Babe would put a shot through his heart in another split second. And if the slug missed, the Gorilla would be on him and next time that lethal pipe would smash home.
Mike acted almost without thinking. As Babe’s finger tightened on the trigger and the Gorilla’s grunt of rage came close behind him, Hansard leaped.
Through the window...
He took shade, curtain and sash with him. The glass crash was loud enough to smother the crack of Babe’s gun. Mike didn’t feel the impact of a bullet. But at that particular instant he didn’t think it mattered much. One way or another, he was probably checking out. Unless his estimate of distance had been exactly right!
He could hear the warning yells of pedestrians below as he burst out over the sill. It wouldn’t do any good to brace himself, but he couldn’t help it. Something came up, slammed into him with terrific force. He grunted with the shock, but it wasn’t the sidewalk, and it hadn’t knocked him goofy.
He’d guessed right, then. The narrow, flat surface beneath him, that had stopped his fall, was the top of the MEATING PLACE sign. It was directly under Lily’s window.
Women screamed from below. Mike twisted around to look down. There was a vicious stab of agony at his right side. That must be a cracked rib. The pain made him dizzy. He put out a hand to steady himself, knocked aside a length of hot tubing, saw the sign beneath him flicker and dim.
He gritted his teeth, got his knees under him, crawled backward till his heels touched the building.
A traffic cop sprinted across Seventy-second Street, shouting: “Don’t move! Stay right where you are... Keep your head now. I’ll get you!”
Hansard stood up, teetered precariously on the foot-wide top of the sign. He knew the traffic man, hollered: “Never mind me, Allison. Watch below there. Don’t let anybody in or out.”
“Got you, Mike.” The policeman bellowed gruff commands at the gathering crowd.
Mike rested his elbows on the sill above him, muscled himself up. He hadn’t taken all of the windowpane with him. He had to kick some of it out before he could climb back into Lily’s room.
The light was still on, his gun still on the floor, over in the corner where Gorilla George had kicked it. He picked it up.
The fat woman stood in the doorway, dry washing her hands and whining: “I thought you said there wasn’t gonna be any roughhouse?”
Mike ignored it. “Where’d those two punks go?”
“Those men who ran out into the hall just now?”
Mike’s lips tightened. “Don’t stall. Where are they?”
She pointed to the stairs. “They went down. I didn’t know you were after them. I couldn’t have stopped them, anyway.”
“I’ll say you couldn’t. You know ’em!”
“Never saw either of them before tonight, in my life. Honest to God.”
“All right,” he growled. “If you see either of them again, and don’t report it to the precinct, you’ll take a good long vacation at the city’s expense.” He went up to third and top floor, made sure there was no trap to the roof.
Allison yelled up to him: “Mike! Janitor down here says a couple of mugs beat it out back into Seventy-first, through the basement, a minute ago. One was a kind of ape-man with a scar on his face. The other one just a real sweet thing. They the ones?”
“That’s the pair.” Mike came down, described Gorilla George and the Babe in lurid detail. “Phone that dope in to the dispatcher. Tell every man on duty to pick up either one of those lugs on sight.”
“They got guns, Mike?”
“They sure have. And they like to use ’em on a man’s back. They’d have used one on me, right away, except they didn’t want to attract too much attention here in a crowded district. The Babe shot at me, as it was.”
“You look like you been in another fracas, somewhere, Mike. Get chewed up a little?”
Mike put his hand up to his cheek. The cotton and collodion bandage was still there. “Rather be chewed up than boarded up, Allison. I still got my luck. Never mind filing an accident report. But after you finish with that alarm, you might phone Homicide and tell ’em what happened up here. Those punks must have a hangout in town somewhere. They know their way around too well to be strangers. So maybe some stoolie can help us out.”