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’d seen the bellboy go in the first time, with the first pint and the cracked ice, stay a minute or two, come out again tossing up a quarter.
Now suddenly here he was back again, with a second pint and more cracked ice. The green of his uniform showed in the door-slit. He stood there with his back to Rogers and knocked lightly on the door across the way.
Two pints, about, would do it. Rogers didn’t move, though.
The door opened and the boy went in. He came out again in a moment, closed it after him.
Then Rogers did move. He left the bed in his stocking feet, widened his own door, went “Psst!” and the boy turned and came over to him.
“How much did he give you this time?”
The boy’s eyes shone. “The whole change that was left! He cleaned himself out!”
Rogers nodded, as if in confirmation of something or other to himself. “How drunk is he?”
“He’s having a hard time getting there, but he’s getting there.”
Rogers nodded again, for his own private benefit. “Lemme have your passkey,” he said.
The boy hesitated.
“It’s all right, I have the house-dick’s authorization. You can check on it with him, if you want. Only, hand it over, I’m going to need it, and there won’t be much time.”
The boy tendered it to him, then showed an inclination to hang around and watch.
“You don’t need to wait, I’ll take care of everything.”
He didn’t go back into his own room again. He stayed there outside that other door, just as he was, in undershirt and stocking feet, in a position of half-crouched intentness, passkey ready at hand.
The transom was imperfectly closed, and he could hear him moving around in there, occasionally striking against some piece of furniture. He could hear it every time the bottle told off against the rim of the glass. Almost he was able to detect the constantly-ascending angle at which it was tilted, as its contents became less.
Pretty soon now. And in between, footsteps faltering back and forth, weaving aimlessly around, like those of someone trying to find his way out of a trap.
Suddenly the bottle hit the carpet with a discarded thud. No more in it.
Any minute now.
A rambling, disconnected phrase or two became audible, as the tempo of the trapped footsteps accelerated, this way and that, and all around, in blundering search of a way out. “I’ll fool him! I’ll show him! There’s one place he can’t — come after me—”
There was the sound of a window going up.
Now!
Rogers plunged the passkey in, swept the door aside, and dove across the room.
He had both feet up on the windowsill already, ready to go out and over and down. All the way down to the bottom. The only thing still keeping him there was he had to lower his head and shoulders first, to get them clear of the upper pane. That gave Rogers time enough to get across to him.
His arms scissored open for him, closed again, like a pair of pliers. He caught him around the waist, pulled him back, and the two of them fell to the floor together in a mingled heap.
He extricated himself and regained his feet before the other had. He went over, closed and securely latched-down the window, drew the shade. Then he went back to where the other still lay soddenly inert, stood over him.
“Get up!” he ordered roughly.
Blake had his downward-turned face buried in the crook of one arm. Rogers gave him a nudge with his foot that was just short of a kick.
Blake drew himself slowly together, crawled back to his feet by ascending stages, using the seat of a chair, then the top of a table next to it, until finally he was erect.
They faced one another.
“You won’t let me live, and you won’t even let me die!” Blake’s voice rose almost to a full-pitched scream. “Then whaddya after? Whad-dya want?”
“Nothing.” Rogers’ low-keyed response was almost inaudible coming after the other’s strident hysteria. “I told you that many times, didn’t I? Is there any harm in going around where you go, being around where you are? There’s plenty of room for two, isn’t there?” He pushed him back on the bed, and Blake lay there sprawled full-length, without attempting to rise again. Rogers took a towel and drenched it in cold water, then wound it around itself into a rope. He laced it across his face a couple of times, with a heavy, sluggish swing of the arm, trailing a fine curtain of spray through the air after it. Then he flung it down.
When he spoke again his voice had slowed still further, to a sluggard drawl. “Take it easy. What’s there to get all steamed-up about? Here, look this over.”
He reached into his rear trouser-pocket, took out a billfold, extracted a worn letter and spread it open, holding it reversed for the other to see. It was old, he’d been carrying it around with him for months. It was an acknowledgment, on a Police Department letterhead, of his resignation. He held it a long time, to let it sink in. Then he finally put it away again.
Blake quit snivelling after awhile, and was carried off on the tide of alcohol in him into oblivion.
Rogers made no move to leave the room. He gave the latched window a glance. Then he scuffed over a chair and sat down beside the bed. He lit a cigarette, and just sat there watching him. Like a male nurse on duty at the bedside of a patient.
He wanted him alive and he wanted him in his right mind.
Hatred cannot remain at white heat indefinitely. Neither can fear. The human system would not be able to support them at that pitch, without burning itself out. But nature is great at providing safety-valves. What happens next is one of two things: either the conditions creating that hatred or fear are removed, thus doing away with them automatically. Or else custom, familiarity, creeps in, by unnoticeable degrees, tempering them, blurring them. Pretty soon the hatred is just a dull red glow. Then it is gone entirely. The subject has become used to the object that once aroused hatred or fear; it can’t do so any more. You can lock a man up in a room even with such a thing as a king cobra, and, always provided he isn’t struck dead in the meantime, at the end of a week he would probably he moving about unhampered, with just the elementary precaution of watching where he puts his feet.
Only the lower-voltage, slower-burning elements, like perseverance, patience, dedication to a cause, can be maintained unchanged for months and years.
One night, at the same Chicago hotel, there was a knock at the door of Rogers’ room around six o’clock. He opened it and Blake was standing there. He was in trousers, suspenders, and collarless shirt, and smelling strongly of shaving tonic. His own door, across the way, stood open behind him.
“Hey,” he said, “you got a collar-button to spare, in here with you? I lost the only one I had just now. I got a dinner-date with a scorchy blonde and I don’t want to keep her waiting. By the time I send down for one—”
“Yeah,” Rogers said matter-of-factly, “I’ve got one.”
He brought it back, dropped it in Blake’s cupped hand.
“Much obliged.”
They stood looking at one another a minute. A tentative grin flickered around the edges of Blake’s mouth. Rogers answered it in kind.
That was all. Blake turned away. Rogers closed his door. With its closing his grin sliced off as at the cut of a knife.
A knock at the door. A collar-button. A trifle? A turning-point? The beginning of acceptance, of habit. The beginning of the end.
“This guy’s a dick,” Blake confided jovially to the redhead on his left. “Or at least he used to be at one time. I never told you that, did I?” He said it loud enough for Rogers to hear it, and at the same time dropped an eyelid at him over her shoulder, to show him there was no offense intended, it was all in fun.