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 reared after her, stumbled over the rug but caught her in time, flung her backward away from the door. The key came out of the keyhole, dropped to the floor, he kicked it sideways out of her reach. “No, you don’t!” he panted.
Something was holding her rigid, though his hands were no longer on her. He followed the direction of her dilated eyes, down toward the floor. His loosened heel had come off just now. She was staring, not at that, but at the lustrous string of pearls that spilled out of it like a tiny snake, their diamond catch twinkling like an eye.
Again she pounced, and again he forestalled her, whipped them up out of her reach. But as he did so, they straightened out and she got a better look at them than she would have had they stayed coiled in a mass. “It is number twenty-nine, from the store!” she gasped. “The one I showed you! Oh, mon Dieu, when they find out, they will blame me! They will send me to St. Lazare—”
He had never yet killed anyone, didn’t intend to even now. But death was already in the room with the two of them. She could have still saved herself, probably, by using her head, subsiding, pretending to fall in with his plans for the time being. That way she might have gotten out of there alive. But it would have been superhuman; no one in her position would have had the self-control to do it. She was only a very frightened French girl after all. They were both at a white-heat of fear and self-preservation; she lost her head completely, did the one thing that was calculated to doom her. She flung herself for the last time at the door, panic-stricken, with a hoarse cry for help. And he, equally panic-stricken, and more concerned about silencing her before she roused the house than even about keeping her in the room with him, took the shortest way of muffling her voice. The inaccurate way, the deadly way. He flung the long loop of pearls over her head from behind like a lasso, foreshortened them into a choking noose, dragged her stumbling backward. They were strung on fine platinum wire, almost unbreakable. She turned and turned, three times over, like a dislodged tenpin, whipping the thing inextricably around her throat, came up against him, coughing, clawing at herself, eyes rolling. Too late he let go, there wasn’t any slack left, the pearls were like gleaming white nail heads driven into her flesh.
He clawed now, too, trying to free her as he saw her face begin to mottle. There wasn’t room for a finger hold; to pluck at one loop only tightened the other two under it. Suddenly she dropped vertically, like a plummet, between his fumbling hands, twitched spasmodically for an instant at his feet, then lay there still, face black now, eyes horrible protuberances. Dead. Strangled by a thing of beauty, a thing meant to give pleasure.
2
Babe Sherman was a realist, also known as a heel. He saw from where he was that she was gone, without even bending over her. No face could turn that color and ever be alive again. No eyes could swell in their sockets like that and ever see again. He didn’t even bend down over her, to feel for her heart; didn’t say a word, didn’t make a sound. The thought in his mind was: “Now I’ve done it. Added murder to all the rest. It was about the only thing missing!”
His first move was to the door. He stood there listening. Their scuffle hadn’t taken long; these old Paris dumps had thick stone walls. Her last cry at the door, before he’d corralled her, had been a hoarse, low-pitched one, not a shrill, woman’s scream. There wasn’t a sound outside. Then he went to the window, peered through the mangy curtains, first from one side, then the other. He was low enough — third story — and the light had been on, but the shutters were all tightly closed on the third floor of the building across the way, every last one of them. He carefully fitted his own together; in France they come inside the vertical windows.
He went back to her, and he walked all around her. This time the thought was, appropriately enough: “How is it I’ve never done it before now? Lucky, I guess.” He wasn’t as cool as he looked, by any means, but he wasn’t as frightened as a decent man would have been, either; there’d been too many things in his life before this, the edge had been taken off long ago. He had no conscience.
He stopped over her for the first time, but only to fumble some more with the necklace. He saw that it would have to stay; opening the catch was no good, only a wire clipper could have severed it, and he had none. He spoke aloud for the first time since he’d been “alone” in the room. “Y’ wanted ’em back,” he said gruffly, “well, y’ got ’em!” A defense mechanism, to show himself how unfrightened he was. And then, supreme irony, her given name came back to him at last, for the first time since she’d put in an appearance, “Manon,” he added grudgingly. The final insult!
He straightened up, flew at the door like an arrow almost before the second knocking had begun, to make sure that it was still locked. This time it was the porter, sealing him up in there, trapping him! “M’sieu, the baggages.”
“Wait! One little minute! Go downstairs again, then come back—”
But he wouldn’t go away. “M’sieu hasn’t much time. The boat train leaves in fifteen minutes. They didn’t tell me until just now. It takes nearly that long to the sta—”
“Go back, go back I tell you!”
“Then m’sieu not want to make his train—”
But he had to, it meant the guillotine if he stayed here even another twenty-four hours! He couldn’t keep her in the damned place with him forever; he couldn’t smuggle her out, he couldn’t even blow and leave her behind! In ten minutes after he was gone they’d find her in the room, and a wire could get to Cherbourg four and a half hours before his train!
He broke for just a minute. He groaned, went around in circles in there, like a trapped beast. Then he snapped right out of it again. The answer was so obvious! His only safety lay in taking her with him, dead or not! The concierge had been asleep, hadn’t seen her come in. Let her employer or her landlord turn her name over to the Missing Persons Bureau — or whatever they called it here — a week or ten days from now. She’d be at the bottom of the deep Atlantic long before that. The phony pearls in the showcase would give them their explanation. And she had no close relatives here in Paris. She’d already told him that. The trunk, of course, had been staring him in the face the whole time.
He put his ear to the keyhole, could hear the guy breathing there on the other side of the door, waiting! He went at the trunk, pitched out all the things he’d been stuffing in it when she interrupted him. Like all wardrobes, one side was entirely open, for suits to be hung in; the other was a network of small compartments and drawers, for shoes, shirts, etc. It wasn’t a particularly well-made trunk; he’d bought it secondhand. He cleared the drawers out, ripped the thin lath partitions out of the way bodily. The hell with the noise, it was no crime partly to destroy your own trunk. Both sides were open now, four-square; just the metal shell remained.
He dragged her over, sat her up in the middle of it, folded her legs up against her out of the way, and pushed the two upright halves closed over her. She vanished, there was no resistance, no impediment, plenty of room. Too much, maybe. He opened it again, packed all his shirts and suits tightly around her, and the splintered partitions and the flattened-out drawers. There wasn’t a thing left out, not a thing left behind, not a nail even. Strangest of biers, for a little fool that hadn’t known her man well enough!