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.
“Did you ring, sir?”
Sherman put his head on the steward’s arm appealingly. “I feel rotten,” he said in a low voice. “Get me some black coffee, will you? Too many brandies all afternoon and evening.” He looked the part, from what he’d just gone through — if nothing else.
“Yes, sir, right away,” the steward said briskly. And then instead of turning back, he took a step to get around Sherman and continue on down the passageway, toward where the body was!
“What’re you going that way for?” Sherman managed to say, gray now.
“The main pantry’s closed, sir, at this hour. We have a little one for sandwiches and things in back of the smoking room, I’ll heat you some up there—”
“Here I go!” was all Sherman had time to think. The whole boat went spinning around him dizzily for a minute, but his reflexes kept working for him. Without even knowing what he was doing, he got abreast of the steward — on the side where she was — and accompanied him back, partly turned toward him. The steward was a shorter man, only Sherman’s outthrust shoulder kept him from seeing what lay sprawled there as the inset opened out to one side of them. He pulled the same stunt he had on Fowler when he was getting the trunk closed under his nose, kept jabbering away with his eyes glued on the steward’s, holding them steady on his own face.
The steward stepped past, and the opening closed behind him again. Sherman dropped back, but still guarding it with his body. His jaws were yammering automatically: “—never could stand the coffee in Paris, like drinking mud. All right, you know where to find me—”
The steward went on and disappeared at the upper end. Sherman, in the inset, crumpled to his hands and knees for a minute, like an animal, stomach heaving in and out. This last tension had been too much for him, coming on top of everything else. “All to keep from dying twenty years too soon!” he thought miserably, fighting his wretchedness.
He got himself in shape again in a hurry, had to, and a minute later was groping up the corridor in the opposite direction, lopsidedly, borne down by her dimensions if not her weight on one side, his other arm out to steady himself against the wall.
There was no one out at the stairlanding now that the steward was out of the way, and only a single overhead light was burning. He decided to chuck the stairs and do it right from this A-deck. One deck higher or lower couldn’t make any difference if he went far enough back to the stern. And there might be other stewards on night duty on the other deck levels.
He put her down for a minute on a wicker settee out there, unhooked the double doors to the deck, and looked out. Deserted and pitch dark. A minute later she was out there with him, and the end of his long, harrowing purgatory was in sight. Babe couldn’t keep his hands from trembling.
He didn’t go right to the rail with her. There was still the necklace, for one thing, and then the nearer the stern the better to make a clean-cut job of it. You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face beyond the rail, but the deck wall on the other side of him showed up faintly white in the gloom, broken by black squares that were the cabin windows.
Near the end of the superstructure there was a sharp indentation, an angle where it jutted farther out, and in this were stacked sheaves of deck chairs, folded up flat and held in place by a rope. There were, however, three that had been left unfolded side by side, perhaps made use of by some late strollers and that the deck steward had missed putting away, and one of them even had a steamer rug left bunched across it.
He let her down on one of them and bent over her to finish freeing the necklace. The handkerchief had remained in place all this time, for some reason. But it was one of his own and huge, touched her shoulders. He had to discard it to be able to see what he was doing. Loosened, the breeze promptly snatched it down the deck and it vanished. His hands reached for the loose end of the necklace, where he had already filed it through close to the clasp — and then stayed that way, poised, fingers pointing inward in a gesture that was like a symbol of avarice defeated.
The platinum strand was there, but invisible now in the dark, naked of pearls! Not two or three but the whole top row had dropped off, one by one, somehow, somewhere along the way! The motion of carrying her, of picking her up and setting her down so repeatedly, must have loosened them one at a time, jogged them off through that break in the wire he himself had caused. And since it obviously hadn’t happened while she was still in the trunk, what it amounted to was: he had left a trail of pearls behind him, every step of the way he had come with her from the cabin out here — like that game kids play with chalk marks called Hare-and-hounds — but with death for its quarry. An overwhelming sense of futility and disaster assailed him.
They wouldn’t stay in one place, they’d roll around, but they were there behind him just the same, pointing the way. It was only the top row that had been stripped clean, the other two had been tourniqueted in too tight for any to fall off...
He had no more than made the discovery, with his fingertips and not his eyes, than a figure loomed toward him out of the deck gloom, slowly, very slowly, and Fowler’s voice drawled suavely:
“I’ll take the rest of ’em now, that go with the ones I been pickin’ up on the way.”
Sherman automatically gave the blanket beside him a fillip that partly covered her, then stood up and went out toward him, knees already crouched for the spring that was to come. The gloom made Fowler seem taller than he was. Sherman could sense the gun he was holding leveled at him by the rigid foreshortening of his one arm. The thing was, was it still empty or had he reloaded it since?
7
He started circling, with Fowler for an axis, trying to maneuver him closer to the rail. That brought the chair more clearly into Fowler’s line of vision, but the position of his head never changed, slowly turned in line with Sherman. Suddenly it dawned on Sherman that the dick didn’t know the whole story even yet; hadn’t tumbled yet to what was on that chair! Must have taken it for just a bunched-up steamer rug in the dark. Sure! Otherwise he’d be hollering blue murder by this time, but all he’d spoken about was the pearls. Hadn’t seen Sherman carry her out after all, then; thought he was just on the trail of a jewel smuggler.
“But in a minute more he’ll see her; he’s bound to!” he told himself. “Dark or not, his eyes’ll be deflected over that way. And that’s when—”
While his feet kept carrying him slowly side-wise across the deck, from the chair toward the rail, he muttered: “You will? Who says so?”
Fowler palmed his badge at him with his left hand. “This says so. Now come on, why make it tough for yourself? I’ve got you dead to rights and you know it! They’re so hot they’re smoking. Fork ’em over and don’t keep me waiting out here all night, or I’ll—”
Sherman came up against the rail. Had he reloaded that persuader or hadn’t he? “I can only be wrong once about it,” he figured grimly. He jerked his head at the chair. “The tin always wins. Help yourself!” His knees buckled a notch lower.
He saw the pupils of Fowler’s eyes follow the direction his head had taken, start back again, then stop dead — completely off him. “Oh, so you are working with a shill after all! What’s she showing her teeth, grinning so about? D’ye think I’m a kid—?”
He never finished it. Sherman’s stunning blow — the one he’d promised him in the train — his whole body following it, landed in an arc up from where he’d been standing. His fist caught Fowler on the side of the neck, nearly paralyzing his nerve centers for a minute, and the impact of Sherman’s body coming right after it sent him down to the deck with Sherman on top of him. The gun clicked four times into the pit of Sherman’s stomach before they’d even landed, and the impact with which the back of the dick’s head hit the deck told why it didn’t click the two remaining times. He was stunned for a minute, lay there unresisting. Less than a minute — much less — but far too long!