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.
“Bring me my meal in here, I can’t make the dining saloon.”
Fowler shrugged on his coat and went out, not looking quite so pleased with himself as he had a minute ago. Sherman knew, just the same, that his own actions had only cinched the suspicions lurking in the other’s mind about the trunk. The first round had been the detective’s after all.
That thought, and having to eat with his dinner tray parked on top the trunk — there was no other place for it — squelched the little appetite he’d had to begin with. He couldn’t swallow, had to beat it around the other side and stick his head out the window, breathing in fresh air, to get rid of the mental images that had begun popping into his dome.
“Going soft, am I?” he gritted. After a while he pulled his head in again. There were a few minor things he could do right now, while the dick was in the dining room, even if the main job had to wait for tonight. Tonight Fowler would be right in here on top of him, it would have to be done with lightning-like rapidity. He’d better get started now, paving the way.
5
He closed the window and fastened it, so the shade wouldn’t blow in on him. He set the untouched tray of food down outside the door, then locked it. The boat was a pre-war model reconditioned, one of the indications of this was the footwide grilled vent that pierced the three inside partitions just below the ceiling line — a continuous slitted band that encircled the place except on the deck side. It was the best they could do in 1914 to get a little circulation into the air. He couldn’t do anything about that, but it was well over anyone’s head.
He got out his keys and turned the trunk so that it opened away from the door. He squatted down, took a deep breath, touched the key to the lock, swung back the bolts, and parted the trunk. He didn’t look up, picked up a handkerchief, unfolded it, and spread it over her face. He got out a couple of the shirts that had been farthest away, protected by other things, and his comb, and then he took a file that was in there and went to work on the pearls.
It was hard even to force any two of them far enough apart to get at the platinum wire underneath without damaging them in the filing, but he managed to force a split in their ranks right alongside the clasp, which stood out a little because of its setting. The wire itself was no great obstacle, it was just getting the file in at it. In five minutes the place he had tackled wore out under the friction, and it shattered to invisibility. Three pearls dropped off before he could catch them and rolled some place on the floor. He let them go for a minute, poised the file to change hands with it and unwind the gnarled necklace — and heard Fowler saying quietly: “What’s the idea of the lock-out? Do I get in, or what?”
His face was peering in and down at Sherman through that damnable slotted ventilator, high up but on a line with the middle of the door, smiling — but not a smile of friendliness or good omen.
Sherman died a little then inside himself, as he would never die again, not even if a day came when he would be kneeling under the high knife at Vincennes or sitting in the electric chair at Ossining. Something inside him curled up, but because there was no blade or voltage to follow the shock, he went ahead breathing and thinking.
His eyes traveled downward from Fowler’s outlined face to the top of the trunk in a straight line. Her handkerchief-masked-head was well below it on his side, her legs stayed flat up against her as he’d first folded them, from long confinement and now rigor. He thought: “He doesn’t see her from where he is. He can’t or he wouldn’t be smiling like that!”
But the opening ran all around, on the side of him and in back of him. He must be up on a stool out there; all he’d have to do would be jump down, shift it farther around to where he could see, and spring up on it again. If he did that in time, he could do it much quicker than Babe could get the trunk closed. “He hasn’t thought of it yet!” Babe told himself frantically. “Oh, Joseph and Mary, keep it from occurring to him! If I can hold him up there just a split minute, keep talking to him, not give him time to think of it—”
His eyes bored into Fowler’s trying to hold him by that slight ocular magnetism any two people looking at each other have. He said very slowly: “I’ll tell you why I locked the door like that; just a minute before you showed up—”
Whang! The two halves of the trunk came together between his outstretched arms. The rest of it was just reflex action, snapping the bolts home, twisting the key in the lock. He went down lower on his haunches and panted like a fish out of water.
He went over to the door and opened it, still weak on his pins. Fowler got down off the folding stool he’d dragged up. If he was disappointed, he didn’t show it.
“I didn’t hear you knock,” Sherman said. There was no use throwing himself at him right now, absolutely none, it would be a fatal mistake. “I’ll get him tonight — late,” he said to himself.
Fowler answered insolently. “Why knock, when you know ahead of time the door’s going to be locked? You never get to see things that way.”
“More of that mind-reading stuff.” Sherman tried to keep the thing as matter-of-fact as possible between them, for his own sake, not let it get out of bounds and go haywire before he was ready. “I don’t mind telling you you’re getting on my nerves, buddy.”
He spotted one of the pearls, picked it up before Fowler saw what it was, put it in his pocket. “First you gum up a good shirt on me. Then you pull a Peeping Tom act—” He kept walking aimlessly around, eyes to the floor. He saw the second one and pocketed that, too, with a swift snake of the arm. His voice rose to a querulous protest. “What are you, some kind of a stool pigeon? Am I marked lousy, or what?” Trying to make it sound like no more than the natural beef of an unjustly persecuted person.
Fowler said from his side of the trunk: “Couple little things like that shouldn’t get on your nerves—” pause — “unless you’ve got something else on them already.”
Sherman didn’t answer that one, there didn’t seem to be a satisfactory one for it. He couldn’t locate the third pearl either — if there had been one. He wasn’t sure any more whether two or three had rolled off her neck.
He flung himself down on his bunk, lay there on his back sending up rings of cigarette smoke at the ceiling. Fowler, hidden on his side of the trunk, belched once or twice, moved around a little, finally began rattling the pages of a magazine. The ship steamed westward, out into the open Atlantic. They both lay there, waiting, waiting...
The human noises around them grew less after an hour or so; suddenly the deck lights outside the window went out without warning. It was midnight. A minute later, Sherman heard the door open and close, and Fowler had gone out of the cabin. He sat up and looked across the trunk. He’d left his coat and vest and tie on his berth — gone to the washroom. He listened, heard his footsteps die away down the oilcloth-covered passageway outside. That was exactly what Babe Sherman was waiting for.
He swung his legs down and made a beeline across the cabin, didn’t bother locking the door this time, it was quiet enough now to hear him coming back anyway. He went through that coat and vest with a series of deft scoops, one to a pocket, that showed how good he must have once been at the dip racket. The badge was almost the first thing he hit, settling his doubts on that score once and for all — if he’d still had any left. New York badge, city dick. Sherman had no gun with him, didn’t work that way as a rule. He thought, “He almost certainly has. If I could only locate it before he comes back—” He didn’t intend to use it in any case — too much noise — but unless he got his hands on it ahead of time, it was going to be very risky business!