The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction
- Автор: Якубовски Максим, Беллем Роберт
- Год: 2014
- Язык: английский
- Год: Constable & Robinson
- ISBN: 9781472111807
- Жанр: Крутые детективы
Электронная книга - «The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction». Краткое содержание книги:
I blasted both barrels of the shotgun; they blew the quiet night apart and echoed across the frozen lake and rattled the world.
Harry looked at me, stunned.
“What the fuck . . .?”
“Now unroll Louis and toss him in,” I said, standing near the gaping hole in the ice. “I’m afraid that plastic might float.”
Horrified, the big man did as he was told. Louis slipped down the hole in the ice and into watery nothingness like a turd down the crapper.
“Slick,” I said, admiringly.
“Oh Jesus,” he said. “Now you,” I said.
“What?”
I had the nine millimeter out again.
“Jump in,” I said. “Water’s fine.”
“Fuck you!”
I went over quickly and pushed the big son of a bitch in. He was flailing, splashing icy water up on me, as I put six bullets in his head, which came apart in pieces, like a rotten melon.
And then he was gone.
Nothing left but the hole in the ice, the water within it making some frothy reddish waves that would die down soon enough.
I gathered the weapons and the plastic and, folding the plastic sheet as I walked, went back to the cabin.
This was reckless, I knew. I shouldn’t be killing people who lived on the same goddamn lake I did. But it was winter, and the bodies wouldn’t turn up for a long time, if ever, and the Outfit had used this part of the world to dump its corpses since Capone was just a mean street kid. Very little chance any of this would come back at me.
Nonetheless, I had taken a risk or two. I ought to get something out of it, other than killing a sleepless night.
I got the girl’s clothes and went in and gave them to her. A heavy-metal T-shirt and designer jeans and Reeboks.
“Did you kill those men?” she said, breathlessly, her eyes dark and glittering. She had her clothes in her lap.
“That’s not important. Get dressed.”
“You’re wonderful. You’re goddamn fucking wonderful.”
“I know,” I said. “Everybody says the same thing. Get dressed.”
She got dressed. I watched her. She was a beautiful piece of ass, no question. The way she was looking at me made it clear she was grateful.
“What can I do for you?” she said, hands on her hips.
“Nothing,” I said. “You’re on the rag.”
That made her laugh. “Other ports in a storm.”
“Maybe later,” I said, and smiled. She looked like AIDs-bait to me. I could be reckless, but not that reckless.
I put her in my car. I hadn’t decided yet whether or not to dump the brown rental Ford. Probably would. I could worry about that later. Right now, I needed to get her to a motel.
She slept in the car. I envied her, and nudged her awake when we reached the motel just inside the Illinois state line.
I’d already checked in. I ushered her in to the shabby little room, its floor space all but taken up by two twin beds, and she sat on the bed and yawned.
“What now?” she said. “You want your reward?”
“Actually, yes,” I said, sitting next to her. “What’s your father’s number?”
“Hey, there’s time for that later . . .”
“First things first,” I said, and she wrote the number out on the pad by the phone.
I heard the ring, and a male voice said, “Hello?”
I gave her the receiver. “Make sure it’s your father, and tell him you’re all right.”
“Daddy?” she said. She smiled, then she made a face. “I’m fine, I’m fine . . . the man you sent . . . what?”
She covered the receiver, eyes confused again. “He says he didn’t send anybody.”
I took the phone. “Good evening, sir. I have your daughter. As you can hear, she’s just fine. Get together one-hundred-thousand dollars in unmarked, nonsequential tens, twenties and fifties, and wait for the next call.”
I hung up.
She looked at me with wide eyes and wide-open mouth.
“I’m not going to kill you,” I said. “I’m just turning a buck.”
“You bastard!”
I put the duct tape over her mouth, taped her wrists behind her and taped her ankles too, and went over and curled up on the other bed, nine millimeter in my waistband.
And slept like a baby.
CITIZEN’S ARREST
Charles Willeford
It was fairly late in the afternoon when I stopped at Gwynn’s Department Store on my way home to look at some new fishing tackle. Gwynn’s is the best store in the entire city; there are three full floors of everything imaginable. So I always took my time shopping at Gwynn’s; a man who’s interested in the outdoors can spend several hours in there just looking around.
My back was to the man at the counter – the thief, I should say – because I was looking at the shotguns in the rack behind the locked glass doors. He must have seen me, of course, but he didn’t know, I suppose, that I could see his reflection in the glass doors as he stood at the next counter. There was no clerk in the immediate vicinity; there were just the two of us in this part of the store on the ground floor. Casually, as I watched him in the polished glass, he snatched the heavy lighter off the counter and slipped it into the deep right-hand pocket of his green gabardine raincoat.
I was pretty well shocked by this action. As a kid, I had pilfered a few things from ten-cent stores – pencils and nickel key-rings, and once a twenty-five-cent “diamond” ring – but this was the first time in my life I had ever seen anybody deliberately steal something. And it was an expensive table lighter: $75 not counting tax. Only a minute or two before I had examined the lighter myself, thinking how masculine it would look on the desk in my office or on the coffee table in a bachelor’s apartment. Of course, as a married man, I couldn’t afford to pay that much money just for a cigarette lighter, but it was a beautiful piece of work, a “conversation piece”, as they say in the magazine ads. It was a chromium-plated knight in armor about six inches tall. When you flipped up the visor on the helmet a butane flame flared inside the empty head, and there was your light. There had been a display of these lighters in shining armor on the gift counter, and now, as the big man sauntered toward the elevators, there was one less.
If I’d had time to think things over I am inclined to believe now that I would have ignored the theft. As I’ve always said, it was none of my business, and nobody wants to get involved in a situation that is bound to be unpleasant, but at that particular moment a young clerk appeared out of nowhere and asked me if I needed any help. I shook my head, and pointed my chin in the general direction of the elevators.
“Do you see that man over there in the green raincoat? I just saw him take one of those knight table lighters off the counter and put it into his pocket.”
“Do you mean he stole it?” he asked, in a kind of stage whisper.
“No.” I shook my head again. “I didn’t say that. All I said was that he put the lighter into his pocket and then walked over to the elevators.”
The big man entered the elevator, together with a teenaged boy who badly needed a haircut, and the operator clanged the door closed.
The clerk, who couldn’t have been more than twenty-two or three, cleared his throat. “I’m afraid, sir, that this sort of thing is a little out of my province. Would you mind talking to our floor manager, Mr Levine?”
I shrugged in reply, but there was a sinking sensation in my stomach all the same. By mentioning the theft I had committed myself, and now I knew that I had to go through with it no matter how unpleasant it turned out to be.
The clerk soon returned with Mr Levine, a squat bald man in his early forties. He wore a plastic name tag and a red carnation on the left lapel of his black silk suitcoat.