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.
Blake was primed now. The liquor had done all it could for him; embalmed his nerves like novocaine. Rogers saw him get up slowly from the table. He braced himself at it a moment, then started on his way out. The very way he walked, the stiff-legged, interlocking gait, showed that this was the come-on, that if he followed him now, there was death at the end of it.
And he knew by the silence that hung over the place, the sudden lull that descended, in which no one moved, no one spoke, yet no one looked at either of the two principals, that everyone there was in on it to a greater or a lesser extent.
He kept himself relaxed. That was important, that was half the battle; otherwise it wouldn’t work. He let him get as far as the door, and then he slowly got to his feet in turn. In his technique there was no attempt to dissimulate, to give the impression he was not following Blake, patterning his movements on the other’s. He threw down money for his beer and he put out his cigar with painstaking thoroughness.
The door had closed behind the other. Now he moved toward it in turn. No one in the place was looking at him, and yet he knew that in the becalmed silence everyone was listening to his slow, measured tread across the floor. From bus-boy to tawdry hostess, from waiter to dubious patron, no one stirred. The place was bewitched with the approach of murder. And they were all on Donny Blake’s side.
The man at the piano sat with his fingers resting lightly on the keyboard, careful not to bear down yet, ready for the signal to begin the death-music. The man at the percussion-instrument held his drumstick poised, the trumpeter had his lips to the mouth-piece of his instrument, waiting like the Angel Gabriel. It was going to happen right outside somewhere, close by.
He came out, and Blake had remained in sight, to continue the come-on. As soon as he saw Rogers, and above all was sure Rogers had marked him, he drifted down an alley there at that end of the building that led back to the garage. That was where it was going to happen. And then into a sack, and into one of the cars, and into Lake Mich.
Rogers turned without a moment’s hesitation and went down that way and turned the corner.
Blake had lit the garage up, to show him the way. They’d gotten rid of the attendant for him. He went deeper inside, but he remained visible down the lane of cars. He stopped there, near the back wall, and turned to face him, and stood and waited.
Rogers came on down the alley, toward the garage-entrance. If he was going to get him from a distance, then Rogers knew he would probably have to die. But if he let him come in close—
He made no move, so he wasn’t going to try to get him from a distance. Probably afraid of missing him.
The time-limit that must have been arranged expired as he crossed the threshold into the garage. There was suddenly a blare of the three-piece band, from within the main building, so loud it seemed to split the seams of the place. That was the cover-up.
Rogers pulled the corrugated tin slide-door across after him, closing the two of them up. “That how you want it, Blake?” he said. Then he came away from the entrance, still deeper into the garage, to where Blake was standing waiting for him.
Blake had the gun out by now. Above it was a face that could only have been worn by a man who has been hounded unendurably for weeks on end. It was past hatred. It was maniacal.
Rogers came on until he was three or four yards from him. Then he stopped, empty-handed. “Well?” he said. He rested one hand on the fender of a car pointed toward him.
A flux of uncertainty wavered over Blake, was gone again.
All Rogers said, after that, was one thing more: “Go ahead, you fool. This is as good a way as any other, as far as we’re concerned. As long as it hands you over to us, I’m willing. This is just what we’ve been looking for all along, what’s the difference if it’s me or somebody else?”
“You won’t know about it,” Blake said hoarsely. “They’ll never find you.”
“They don’t have to. All they’ve got to do is find you without me.” He heeled his palms toward him. “Well, what’re you waiting for, I’m empty-handed.”
The flux of uncertainty came back again, it rinsed all the starch out of him, softened him all up. It bent the gun down uselessly floorward in his very grasp. He backed and filled helplessly. “So you’re a plant — so they want me to do this to you — I mighta known you was too open about it—”
For a moment or two he was in awful shape. He backed his hand to his forehead and stood there bandy-legged against the wall, his mind fuming like a seydlitz-powder.
He’d found out long ago he couldn’t escape from his tormentor. And now he was finding out he couldn’t even kill his tormentor. He had to live with him.
Rogers rested his elbow in his other hand and stroked the lower part of his face, contemplating him thoughtfully. He’d met the test and licked it. Dominance still rested with him.
The door swung back, and one of the gorillas from the club came in. “How about it, Donny, is it over? Want me to give you a hand—”
Rogers turned and glanced at him with detached curiosity.
The newcomer took in the situation at a glance. “What’re ya, afraid?” he shrilled. “All right, I’ll do it for you!” He drew a gun of his own.
Blake gave a whinny of unadulterated terror, as though he himself were the target. He jumped between them, protecting Rogers with his own body. “Don’t you jerk! They want me to pull something like that, they’re waiting for it, that’s how they’re trying to get me! It didn’t dawn on me until just now, in the nick of time! Don’t you see how he’s not afraid at all? Don’t you notice how he keeps his hands empty?” He closed in on the other, started to push him bodily back out of the garage, as though it were his own life he was protecting. It was, in a way. “Get out of here, get out of here! If you plug him it’s me you kill, not him!”
The gun went off abortively into the garage-roof, deflected by Blake’s grip on his wrist. Blake forced him back over the threshold, stood there blocking his way. The gorilla had a moment or two of uncertainty of his own. Blake’s panic was catching. And he wasn’t used to missing on the first shot, because he was used to shooting down his victims without warning.
“I’ve drawn on him now, they can get me for that myself!” he muttered. “I’m gonna get out of here—!” He suddenly turned and went scurrying up the alley whence he’d come.
The two men were left alone there together, the hunter and the hunted. Blake was breathing hard, all unmanned by two close shaves within a minute and a half. Rogers was as calm as though nothing had happened. He stood there without moving.
“Let him go,” he said stonily. “I don’t want him, I just want you.”
Rogers sat there on the edge of his bed, in the dark, in his room. He was in trousers, undershirt, and with his shoes off. He was sitting the night through like that, keeping the death-watch. This was the same night as the spiked show-down in the garage, or what there was left of it. It was still dark, but it wouldn’t be much longer.
He’d left his room door open two inches, and he was sitting in a line with it, patiently watching and waiting. The pattern of human behavior, immutable, told him what to be on the look-out for next.
The door-opening let a slender bar of yellow in from the hall. First it lay flat across the floor, then it climbed up the bed he was on, then it slanted off across his upper arm, just like a chevron. He felt he was entitled to a chevron by now.
He sat there, looking patiently out through the door-slit, waiting. For the inevitable next step, the step that was bound to come. He’d been sitting there like that watching ever since he’d first come in. He was willing to sit up all night, he was so sure it was coming.