The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps
- Автор: Anderson Lars, Barr Randolph
- Год: 2007
- Язык: английский
- Год: Vintage Books
- ISBN: 978-0-307-28048-0
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps». Краткое содержание книги:
Weighing in at over a thousand pages, containing over forty-seven stories and two novels, this book is big baby, bigger and more powerful than a freight train — a bullet couldn’t pass through it. Here are the best stories and every major writer who ever appeared in celebrated Pulps like Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and more. These are the classic tales that created the genre and gave birth to hard-hitting detectives who smoke criminals like packs of cigarettes; sultry dames whose looks are as lethal as a dagger to the chest; and gin-soaked hideouts where conversations are just preludes to murder. This is crime fiction at its gritty best.
He opened the booth-flap, took a tight tug on his hat-brim, and poised himself for a sudden dash across the marble floor.
He waited until the latticed gate was stretched all the way across, ready to be latched onto the opposite side of the gateway. Then he flashed from the booth and streaked over toward it. “Hold it!” he barked, and the guard widened it again just enough for him to squeeze through sidewise.
He showed him his ticket on the inside, after it was already made fast. He looked watchfully out and around through it, in the minute or two this took, and there was no sign of anyone starting up from any hidden position around the waiting rooms or any place near-by and starting after him.
He wasn’t here; he’d lost him, given him the slip.
“Better make it fast, mister,” the guard suggested.
He didn’t have to tell him that; the train didn’t exist that could get away from him now, even if he had to run halfway through the tunnel after it.
He went tearing down the ramp, wig-wagging a line of returning redcaps out of his way.
He got on only by virtue of a conductor’s outstretched arm, a door left aslant to receive him, and a last-minute flourish of tricky footwork. He got on, and that was all that mattered.
“That’s it,” he heaved gratifiedly. “Now close it up and throw the key away! There’s nobody else, after me.”
“They’d have to be homing pigeons riding a tail-wind, if there was,” the conductor admitted.
He’d taken a compartment, to make sure of remaining unseen during the trip. It was two cars up, and after he’d reached it and checked it with the conductor, he locked himself in and pulled down the shade to the bottom, even though they were still in the tunnel under the city.
Then he sank back on the upholstered seat with a long sigh. Finally! A complete break at last. “He’ll never catch up with me again now as long as I live,” he murmured bitterly. “I’ll see to that.”
Time and trackage ticked off.
They stopped for a minute at the uptown station. There was very little hazard attached to that, he felt. If he’d guessed his intentions at all, he would have been right at his heels down at the main station, he wouldn’t take the risk of boarding the train later up here. There wouldn’t be time enough to investigate thoroughly, and he might get on the wrong train and be carried all the way to the Mid-West without his quarry.
Still, there was nothing like being sure, so after they were well under way again, he rang for the conductor, opened the door a half-inch, and asked him through it: “I’m expecting to meet somebody. Did anyone get on just now, uptown?”
“Just a lady and a little boy, that who—?”
“No,” said Blake, smiling serenely, “that wasn’t who.” And he locked the door again. All set now.
Sure, he’d come out there after him maybe, but all he, Blake, needed was this momentary head-start; he’d never be able to close in on him again, he’d keep it between them from now on, stay always a step ahead.
They stopped again at Harmon to change to a coal-powered engine. That didn’t bother him, that wasn’t a passenger-stop.
There was a knock on the compartment-door, opposite West Point, and dread came back again for a moment. He leaped over and put his ear to it, and when it came again, called out tensely, making a shell of his two hands to alter his voice: “Who is it?”
A stewardess’ voice came back, “Care for a pillow, sir?”
He opened it narrowly, let her hand it in to him more to get rid of her than because he wanted one. Then he locked up again, relaxed.
He wasn’t disturbed any more after that. At Albany they turned west. Somewhere in Pennsylvania, or maybe it was already Ohio, he rang for a tray and had it put down outside the locked door. Then he took it in himself and locked up again. When he was through he put it down outside again, and locked up once more. That was so he wouldn’t have to go out to the buffet-car. But these were just fancy trimmings, little extra added precautions, that he himself knew to be no longer necessary. The train was obviously sterile of danger. It had been from the moment of departure.
Toward midnight, way out in Indiana, he had to let the porter in to make up the two seats into a bed for him. He couldn’t do that for himself.
“I guess you the las’ one up on the whole train,” the man said cheerfully.
“They all turned in?”
“Hours ago. Ain’t nobody stirring no mo’, from front to back.”
That decided him. He figured he may as well step outside for a minute and stretch his legs, while the man was busy in there. There wasn’t room enough in it for two of them at once. He made his way back through sleeping aisles of green berth-hangings. Even the observation-car was empty and unlighted now, with just one small dim lamp standing guard in the corner.
The whole living cargo of humanity was fast asleep.
He opened the door and went out on the observation platform to get a breath of air. He stretched himself there by the rail and drank it in. “Gee,” he thought, “it feels good to be free!” It was the first real taste of freedom he’d had since he’d walked out of Head—
A voice in one of the gloom-obscured basket-shaped chairs off-side to him said mildly, “That you, Blake? Been wondering when you’d show up. How can you stand it, cooped up for hours in that stuffy two-by-four?” And a cigar-butt that was all that could be seen of the speaker glowed red with comfortable tranquillity.
Blake had to hang onto the rail as he swirled, to keep from going over. “When did you get on?” he groaned against the wind.
“I was the first one on,” Rogers’ voice said from the dark. “I got myself admitted before the gates were even opened, while they were still making the train up.” He chuckled appreciatively. “I thought sure you were going to miss it.”
He knew what this was that was coming next. It had been bound to come sooner or later, and this was about the time for it now. Any number of things were there to tell him; minor variations in the pattern of the adversary’s behavior. Not for nothing had he been a detective for years. He knew human nature. He was already familiar with his adversary’s pattern of behavior. The danger-signals studding it tonight were, to his practised eye, as plainly to be read as lighted buoys flashing out above dark, treacherous waters.
Blake hadn’t sought one of his usual tinselled, boisterous resorts tonight. He’d found his way instead to a dingy out-of-the-way rat-hole over on the South Side, where the very atmosphere had a furtive cast to it. The detective could scent “trap” a mile away as he pushed inside after him. Blake was sitting alone, not expansively lording it over a cluster of girls as was his wont. He even discouraged the one or two that attempted to attach themselves to him. And finally, the very way in which he drank told the detective there was something coming up. He wasn’t drinking to get happy, or to forget. He was drinking to get nerve. The detective could read what was on his mind by the very hoists of his arm; they were too jerky and unevenly spaced, they vibrated with nervous tension.
He himself sat there across the room, fooling around with a beer, not taking any chances on letting it past his gums, in case it had been drugged. He had a gun on him, but that was only because he always carried one; he had absolutely no intention of using it, not even in self-defense. Because what was coming up now was a test, and it had to be met, to keep the dominance of the situation on his side. If he flinched from it, the dominance of the situation shifted over to Blake’s side. And mastery didn’t lie in any use of a gun, either, because that was a mastery that lasted only as long as your finger rested on the trigger. What he was after was a long-term mastery.