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.
“A dick?” she squealed with mock alarm. “Then what’s he doing around you? Aren’t you scared?”
Blake threw back his head and laughed with hearty enjoyment at the quaintness of such a notion. “I used to be in the beginning. I’d have a hard time working up a scare about him now, I’m so used to him. I’d probably catch cold without him being around me these days.”
Rogers swivelled his hand deprecatingly at the girl. “Don’t let him kid you. I resigned long ago. He’s talking about two years back, ancient history.”
“What made you resign?” the other girl, the brunette, began. Then she checked herself. Blake must have stepped warningly on her toe under the table. “Let it lie,” he cautioned in an undertone, this time not meant for Rogers to hear. “He don’t like to talk about it. Probably—” And he made the secretive gesture that has always stood for graft; swinging his thumb in and out over his palm. “Good guy, though,” he concluded. Rogers was looking off the other way. He smiled to himself at something out on the dance-floor just then. Or maybe it wasn’t out on the dance-floor.
“Let’s break it up,” Blake suggested, as one co-host to another. “This place is going stale.”
The waiter came up with the check, and Blake cased his own billfold, down low at his side. “I’m short again,” he admitted ruefully.
“Let’s have it, I’ll pay it for you,” Rogers, who had once been a detective, said to the man he considered a murderer. “We can straighten it out between us some other time.”
Rogers, paring a corn with a razor-blade, looked up as the familiar knock came on his door. “That you, Donny?” he called out.
“Yeah. You doing anything, Rodge?”
They were Donny and Rodge to each other now.
“No, come on in,” Rogers answered, giving the razor-blade a final deft fillip that did the trick.
The door opened and Blake leaned in at an angle, from the waist up. “Fellow I used to know, guy named Bill Harkness, just dropped in to the room. Haven’t seen him in years. We been chewing the rag and now we’re fresh out of gab. Thought maybe you’d like to come on over and join us in a little three-handed game, what d’ya say?”
“Only for half-an-hour or so,” Rogers answered, shuffling on the sock he had discarded. “I’m turning in early tonight.”
Blake withdrew, leaving the door ajar to speed Rogers on his way in to them. He left his own that way too, opposite it.
Rogers put out his light and got ready to go over to them. Then he stopped there on the threshold, half in, half out, yawned undecidedly, like someone else once had, one night a long time ago, on his way out to get a midnight edition of the paper.
He didn’t have to be right at his elbow every night, did he? He could let it ride for one night, couldn’t he, out of so many hundreds of them? He’d be right across the hall from them, he could leave his door slightly ajar — He was tired, and that bed looked awfully good. He was a human being, not a machine. He had his moments of letdown, and this was one of them. Nothing was ever going to happen. All he’d managed to accomplish was play the parole-officer to Blake, keep him straight. And that wasn’t what he’d been after.
He was about to change his mind, go back inside again.
But they’d seen him from where they were, and Blake waved him on. “Coming, Rodge? What’re you standing there thinking about?”
That swung the balance. He closed his own door, crossed over, and went in there with them.
They were sitting there at the table waiting for him to join them. This Harkness struck him as being engaged in some shady line of business. But then that was an easy guess, anyone on Blake’s acquaintance-list was bound to be from the other side of the fence anyway.
“Pleased to meet you.”
“Likewise.”
He shook hands with him without demur. That was a thing he’d learned to do since he’d been around Blake, shake hands with all manner of crooks.
Blake, to put them at their ease together, trotted out that same worn theme he was so fond of harping on. “Harkness don’t wanna believe you used to be a dick. Tell him yourself.” He told it to everyone he knew, at every opportunity. He seemed to take a perverse pride in it, as though it reflected a sort of distinction on him. A detective had once been after him, and he’d tamed him into harmlessness.
“Don’t you ever get tired of that?” was all Rogers grunted, disgustedly. He took up his cards, shot a covert glance at Blake’s friend. “No folding money, only nickels and dimes.”
Blake took it in good part. “Ain’t that some guy for you?”
The game wore on desultorily. The night wore on desultorily along with it. Just three people at a table, killing time.
Harkness seemed to have a fidgety habit of continually worrying at the cuff of his coat-sleeve.
“I thought they quit hiding them up there years ago,” Blake finally remarked with a grin. “We’re not playing for stakes, anyway.”
“No, you don’t get it, there’s a busted button on my sleeve, and it keeps hooking onto everything every time I reach my arm out.”
Only half of it was left, adhering to the thread, sharp-pointed and annoying as only such trivial things are apt to be. He tried to wrench it off bodily and it defeated him because there wasn’t enough of it left to get a good grip on. All he succeeded in doing was lacerating the edges of his fingers. He swore softly and licked at them.
“Why don’t you take the blame coat off altogether? You don’t need it,” Blake suggested, without evincing any real interest.
Harkness did, and draped it over the back of his chair.
The game wore on again. The night wore on. Rogers’ original half-hour was gone long ago. It had quadrupled itself by now. Finally the game wore out, seemed to quit of its own momentum.
They sat there, half-comatose, around the table a moment or two longer. Rogers’ head was actually beginning to nod. Harkness was the first one to speak. “Look at it, one o’clock. Guess I’ll shove off.” He stood up and got back into his coat. Then he felt at the mangled thatch the game had left in its wake. “Got a comb I can borry before I go.”
Blake, mechanically continuing to shuffle cards without dealing them any more, said: “In that top drawer over there,” without looking around. “And wipe it off after you use it, I’m particular.”
The drawer slid out. There was a moment of silence, then they heard Harkness remark, “Old Faithful.”
Rogers opened his heavy-lidded eyes and Blake turned his head. He’d found Blake’s gun in the drawer, had taken it out and was looking it over. “Ain’t you afraid of him knowing you’ve got this?” he grinned at Blake.
“Aw, he’s known I’ve had it for years. He knows I’m licensed for it, too.” Then he added sharply, “Quit monkeying around with it, put it back where it belongs.”
“Okay, okay,” Harkness consented urbanely. He laid it down on the bureau-scarf, reached for the comb instead.
Blake turned back again to his repetitious card-shuffling. Rogers, who was facing that way, suddenly split his eyes back to full-size at something he saw. The blurred sleepiness left his voice. “Hey, that busted button of yours is tangled in the fringe of the scarf, I can see it from here, and the gun’s right on the edge. Move it over, you’re going to—”
The warning had precisely a reverse effect. It brought on what he’d been trying to avoid instead of averting it. Harkness jerked up his forearm, to look and see for himself; anyone’s instinctive reflex in the same situation. The scarf gave a hitch along its entire length, and the gun slid off into space.