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.
“The Doctor’s as right as they make them.” The Colonel nodded. “We’ve discussed you together, Mr. Williams. Now — well — I wonder about those nerves. I’m sure the Doctor would like to—. Rather — in a professional way, it would be interesting to study your reactions to sudden — sudden danger.”
And Doctor Elrod had quickly and perhaps nervously stepped forward and clutched at my wrist. I could see the watch in his hand.
I jerked myself free and stepped back a bit. I didn’t like it. I spoke my piece.
“The Doctor,” I said sarcastically, “can experiment with rabbits and guinea pigs. I’m not playing either tonight. Science, Colonel, can not play a part in a man’s... well... a man’s guts. The Doctor wasn’t there tonight to hold my hand or feel my pulse.” And suddenly, “If you must have a demonstration—” I snatched up the bottle of liquor, poured the small glass full to the very brim, and sticking it on the back of my outstretched hand, held it so. Never a drop of the “perfect stuff” fell to the floor to eat a hole in the rug.
“You can laugh that off,” I told him, “if you’re bent on some low scientific relief.”
And he did. I liked the look in the Colonel’s eyes then. Maybe not admiration exactly — rather, call it good sportsmanship. But he only nodded, winked once at the Doctor, knocked off his drink, and taking me by the arm walked to the outer door.
“You will guard the patient well, Doc,” he threw over his shoulder. “Your medical skill is not half as important as the secrecy of the man’s whereabouts. I—” and turning suddenly to me, “Good God! Williams — I never thought to tell you — to ask you. We might have been followed.”
“We were not followed,” I told him flat. “You can kiss the book on that.”
“Ah — yes, yes.” And as we went down the steps and climbed into the car, “I was upset, Williams. Very much upset. You could not have acted differently, of course. Indeed, if you had, I—”
“Would have been as stiff as a mackerel.” I finished for him. There was no use to let him minimize the part I had played.
“Yes — exactly.” He was thoughtful now. “I have a family back in Washington; a responsibility which makes me think that perhaps—” and straightening as he climbed in behind the wheel and I shoved in along side of him, “But I’ll see the thing through to the end — and I apologize for my rudeness. My—. There!” He stretched out a hand and gripped mine. “You saved my life tonight, and there are no two ways about that.”
“Okay—” I told him. “Forget it. Let the dead rest. You paid for it. It was part of the job.” Funny. When you get credit you don’t want it, and when you don’t get it you’re sore as a boil.
We drove for several blocks without a word. Then:
“I think I’ll drive you home with me. I have a job that it’s almost suicide to give a man.”
I smiled at him, and chirped:
“The suicide clause has run out on all my insurance policies. Besides which, I’m considered a bad risk, anyway, now. So—”
“Williams,” he said very slowly, “in some respects you are a very remarkable man.”
Well — he wasn’t the first one who had given me that line. But somehow I liked it. He didn’t strike me as a guy who went in much for the old oil.
Chapter VI
A Thousand Dollar Message
His house proved the regulation brown stone front — just a copy of the private hospital affair, a shade closer to the center of things in the city.
He let us in with a key, carefully closed the heavy front door and pushed me quickly before him up the stairs to the floor above.
“I have taken this house for my stay in the city,” he said, as we climbed to the first landing. “Just a man and his wife to look after me. An elderly, not over bright couple, who are long since in bed.”
A pause as we passed along a narrow hall, and he stood with his hand upon a door knob — a key turning the lock with his other hand.
“I think I shall take you quite a bit into my confidence, Williams. Yes — quite a bit. But come in.”
He threw open the door and we entered a comfortable living room facing on the street.
“You’ll excuse me just a moment.” He walked to a door in the rear of that room, inserted a key in the lock and went on talking before unlocking it. “Make yourself quite comfortable there. I have a—. Well — a man is waiting for me behind this door. One who might grow alarmed — greatly alarmed — if he heard us talking here. I must ease his mind.”
He spun the key, pushed the door open just far enough to admit his body, and slid himself through the narrow aperture, disappeared and—.
The door opened wide this time, and the Colonel was back in the living room again looking quickly around. He opened a closet, the key of which was in the lock; then without a word ducked quickly back into the bedroom again. For it was a bedroom. I could see the bed plainly now — an open window, too, across the room from it.
“What’s the matter?” I spoke close to the door, my gun half drawn. Even the most particular movie director would have been satisfied with the perplexed, excited emotion his face was registering.
“Nothing... nothing. It’s just my nerves, I guess.” The Colonel blocked my way for a moment, then with a jerk to his shoulders stood aside and pointed into the bedroom. “He’s gone,” he said. “I’ve searched the room. There’s—. And he used the lamp cord — the wiring — to lower himself to the alley.” He pointed excitedly to the length of wire that was twisted around the bed post and hung over the window-sill.
“Yes.” I saw that. The house was old — there was only one electric floor plug and that was across the room, so there was a generous length of wire needed to reach the lamp. The wire was made of heavy rubber. I leaned out the window and pulled it in. Offhand, I’d say that it reached within — well — ten feet of the ground. Not much of a drop for a man of average height. But my flash, cutting a ray of light into the blackness below, disclosed the fact that whoever had left that room was certainly not lying on the flagging below. I ran the light along the alley a bit, and found it as empty as a country constable’s helmet.
“It’s your show.” I turned to the Colonel. “It wasn’t much of a place to lock a guy up in anyway, unless he was hog tied — which—”
“There was no man a prisoner in this room.” He had a way of pushing his chin forward and his neck back when he hit his dignity. “That is, an involuntary prisoner.” He amended his last statement slightly. “Poor — poor, unfortunate creature.”
“I don’t want to stick my nose into your affairs,” I said, “But I don’t go in for riddles either. Wise me up or drop the subject. I don’t care which.”
“The man in this room,” the Colonel broke in, “was the man who brought me the information about Giovoni — the old man in the hospital. It was worth his life if certain parties discovered it.”
“Oh. A squealer — a rat. A—”
“No.” The Colonel shook his head. “Not in that sense, for I paid him nothing. I would trust you with his name, but that would be breaking a confidence. I promised him secrecy. He came here of his own accord, a withered, sickly, drug addict. He had no money, no friends, and he would not tell me who sent him. At one time he was useful to a certain — a certain trio of criminals. And then the drug. Once a relief from the nightmare of his life; now, to still the craving of his body — and the fear of his mind. He had been useful before; now he feared that he was to be killed. Not because he had ever betrayed these murderers, but because he knew something. Something that he was afraid they might read in his eyes, or that he might let slip in a drug-crazed moment. Yes, he feared death — murder.”