The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories
- Автор: Adams Cleve F., Babcock Dwight V.
- Год: 2010
- Язык: английский
- Год: A Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
- ISBN: 978-0-307-45543-7
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories». Краткое содержание книги:
Black Mask was the apotheosis of noir. It was the magazine where the first hardboiled detective story, which was written by Carroll John Daly appeared. It was the slum in which such American literary titans like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler got their start, and it was the home of stories with titles like “Murder Is Bad Luck,” “Ten Carets of Lead,” and “Drop Dead Twice.” Collected here is best of the best, the hardest of the hardboiled, and the darkest of the dark of America’s finest crime fiction. This masterpiece collection represents a high watermark of America’s underbelly. Crime writing gets no better than this.
The girl looked up at her, startled. “ ’Lo,” she answered involuntarily, without smiling.
The Eel bent forward, giving Tex a sharp glance of mistrust, but when he saw her grinning at him vacantly he turned back to the girl and continued his low-toned conversation.
Tex edged a little nearer, endeavoring to hear his whispered words. He stopped short and Tex felt instinctively that he was regarding her with suspicion in the bar mirror. She hooked her arm in the girl’s in a sudden burst of alcoholic familiarity and felt the girl grow rigid — with fear? Tex wondered. “Have thish one on me, dearie,” said Tex.
The girl relaxed and smiled wanly. “Oh — thank you.” She pushed her empty glass across the bar.
“M’boyfren’ll buy fur the crowd — won’ yuh, honey?” Tex swayed toward the inebriated obesity from Kansas City, but he was slumped over the bar, oblivious to the percentage girls’ ever consuming thirst.
Tex shrugged. “Nev’ mind, dearie, Ah’s good sport. Ah’ll buy — mahshelf.” She opened her stringy bead bag a crack and peered blearily into its shabby depths.
“Aw, lay off, will yuh?” The Eel scowled darkly at her, flipped a coin to the bartender, grasped the girl by the arm, and pushed her through the crowd of black-bottom maniacs on the dance floor to the door.
Through the medium of the bar mirror Tex watched them vanish into the one main street, a street that was already growing dusk, a street that, after dark, was deserted, stealthy, dangerous — for those visitors who are foolish enough to loiter.
Tex loitered, loitered until the music stopped abruptly with harsh discordance; until the last stream of sightseers stampeded for the Border; until the gambling halls and open-fronted cantinas closed with mock modesty and a final sly wink of lights; until night shrouded the wicked little town with brooding silence and skulking shadows.
With a cold shiver of apprehension Tex lurched past Cæsar’s Bar and Paul’s. She felt as if eyes watched from yawning black doorways, darkened windows — eyes that were hostile, suspicious, sinister.
She hugged her beaded bag under her left arm, her right hand clasped over it, and felt the reassuring hardness of the small, snub-nosed pistol, with its Maxim silencer, as it snuggled securely within the torn lining.
She turned into the dimly lighted entrance of the San Francisco Cantina and stumbled up the cheaply carpeted stairs to her room. She closed the door with a bang and hiccoughed as she switched on the light. From under lowered lids she made a hasty survey of the small, bare room, then flung herself full-length on the bed, her purse held tightly across her breast.
One hour crawled by on furtive, dragging feet. Two. And still Tex lay on her springless wooden bed, feigning drunken slumber.
A slight breeze riffled in through the window stirring the sagging lace curtain to shake some of its dust in Tex’s nose. She suppressed a sneeze and turned it into a snore with a choked sort of snort on the end of it.
A little longer she listened to the swishing of the curtain as it flapped wearily in and out of the window. Then she thought she heard another sound. A shuffling sound, soft, guarded, muffled.
Slowly she sat up, swinging her feet quietly over the edge of the bed and eased them to the carpetless floor. Silently she crept across the room to the door and paused, tensing, listening, her bead bag clutched in her right hand.
At first there was nothing — just silence — then a faint hissing sound. Tex leaned nearer to the crack and a few whispered words drifted in to her.
“But, Señor Jefe, she ees wan of my percentage girls. Mucho good wan, too. You make wan beeg mistake. She ees not what you t’ink.” The voice was Pancho’s — Pancho of the Blue Fox.
“Well, I ain’t takin’ no chances. She talks like that Texan female dick... Anyway — we’ll leave him for her.”
In her startled surprise Tex lost the rest of the sentence. She gripped the bead bag more tightly. Damn that Texas drawl of hers! For a second she wished she had heeded her chief’s warning and brought Bobbie with her. Then she laughed softly, a shaky little laugh. She’d been in tight corners before since she’d entered the secret service four years ago, and through her quick wit and clear reasoning she had always managed to extricate herself — with honors — and part of the trapped underworld. That was why the chief had chosen her to unravel the skein of mystery that tangled around the strange death of Melville Hewett, a wealthy San Francisco merchant, and the disappearance of his son, Arthur. The Eel had been seen coming out of Hewett’s home the night before the murder.
Tex was suddenly aware of a curious absence of sound. She waited a moment, holding her breath, her left hand on the door-knob. Then with a swift, cat-like movement, she pulled the door toward her. It opened abruptly, as if someone were pushing against it. She flashed her hand inside her bag, her fingers closing around the pistol, but suddenly recoiled with a stifled cry as a man’s body plunged inward and fell forward on his face.
There was something peculiar about his swollen, twisted limbs. Something that vaguely reminded Tex of another man. Who was it? Then in a flash she knew. Melville Hewett had looked that same way.
With a revulsion of feeling toward touching anything lifeless, that she had never been able to overcome, she turned the man on his back.
Staring up at her with glassy eyes, with the contorted features of one who has died in agony, was Bobbie; Bobbie, who was the youngest member of the department and whom the chief had evidently sent to protect her.
Tex straightened, her eyes clouded with unexpected tears, and her heart felt sick. Bobbie was such a youngster. So straight and clean. Damn them! Her hot Texan blood began to boil. She’d get them for this!
She leaned over him again, examining him more closely, pondering. There were no marks of violence. No blood. Then the glint of a green circlet on his left wrist caught her eye. The bracelet was of jade, carved, Chinese. Attached to it by a slender gold chain was a small folded paper. Tex stiffened, for instinctively she knew it was a message for her. She spread the paper out and read the illiterate, scribbled words — Ull git yuse next if u dont lay off. At the end, instead of the signature, was a green seal. Tex scrutinized it intently, her eyes narrowing as she turned the paper around. The seal evolved into a bracelet as she examined it. A bracelet with the head of a snake and the tail of a fish. She smiled, a grim twisting of her painted lips. The Eel was an egomaniac. He couldn’t resist the temptation of becoming his own press agent.
A low, husky sound issued from the slim, round throat of Tex; a cry of comprehension, relentless rage, warning.
Through the crooked back streets of Old Town, Tex slid cautiously, like some stalking shadow, through streets that seemed to be winding, dirt-smeared menaces leading into oblivion.
She was following her hunch. A hunch that beckoned her to Pancho’s crumbling adobe that crouched, like some hunted animal in the treacherous sands of the desert, one mile south of Tia Juana.
From time to time she glanced nervously over her shoulder. Silence trailed back of her — heavy, oppressive. And before her? Nameless peril. A little demon of fear clutched at her heart, squeezing it until she could hardly breathe. A peculiar tingling sensation ran along her arms and twitched the ends of her fingers. She knew the symptoms. She had had the same feeling when she was about to take off for the five-foot hurdles back in Texas. A breathless sort of feeling. A feeling that a hunter must have just before the kill.
Pancho’s adobe loomed unexpectedly before her, a darker shadow in the surrounding gloom. It was long, low and narrow. A wide chimney of rotting stones in the back; two thick, weather-scarred doors of solid wood in front; a narrow, deep-set window near the slanting mud roof at either end. No sound came from the adobe and no light penetrated the thick wooden openings.