The Second Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 20 More Classic Mystery Stories
- Автор: Пауэлл Тэлмидж
- Год: 2015
- Язык: английский
- Год: Wildside Press
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Second Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 20 More Classic Mystery Stories». Краткое содержание книги:
“Dust to salve the itch in our feet,” the poet supplied.
“That’s right, pops,” Willis nodded. “We yearn to roam. You got a car and dough.”
“Sorry,” I said, suddenly very sober, “but I don’t think...”
“Man,” Willis said, “you just think about Camilla.” His heavy face had changed, hardened. He lifted his right hand almost to tabletop level. I saw the glint of dusky light on six inches of gleaming switchblade. I sat very still. This was the decision the pair had made when I’d strolled in and they’d pegged me for an easy mark.
“Let’s go, pops,” Willis said.
“All right,” I swallowed drily. “I won’t resist. You won’t have to hurt me.
“That’s good, pops. We don’t want to hurt you. We’re not stupid. Just the dough and the car, that’s all.”
We rose from the table and walked out of the Dantean room and onto a parking lot, Willis close behind me with the tip of the knife against my back.
“It’s the sporty little car right over there,” I said. “Please... careful with the knife.” I eased the wallet from my pocket, stripped it of cash, several hundred dollars, and handed the money to Willis.
His big hand closed over the bread. “Thanks, pops. And look, you ought to be more careful, wandering into places like the Moons of Jupiter.”
“Seeking adventure, you found it,” the poet surmised.
I handed the car keys to Willis. “That’s it. You have got it. You’ve stripped me clean.”
“So long, pops.”
I saw the flash of his big fist. Conditioned as I was, even after Camilla, I could have handled him — both of them, Cleef posing no problem in a rough-and-tumble.
I took the punch on the chin, rolling with it just enough to keep from being knocked blotto. My knees crumpled. I fell on the darkly shadowed asphalt, stunned but not unconscious.
I heard Willis say: “That’ll hold him while we split the scene.”
I heard the poet intone: “Hail the open road!”
I heard the rush of their feet, the starting of the car, the sigh of engine as the car took them from the parking lot.
I got up and dusted myself off in time to see the taillights vanish around a distant street corner.
Good-bye Camilla’s car... Bought with my money, but she’d done the shopping, chosen the model. Not even a fingerprint to connect the car to me; I’d wiped them away before entering the Moons of Jupiter.
I strolled to the street in order to find a taxicab several blocks from the scene.
Good-bye, Camilla...
I still had the smallest catch in my throat. I hadn’t really meant to kill her when I struck her in that final moment of insane rage.
Farewell, Camilla... It was hard to cover my tracks and get rid of you, the evidence. I wonder when they will find you in the trunk of the car? California? New Orleans? At some service station in Alabama when the attendant moves from gas pump to the rear of the car and catches the first whiff of the ripening smell?
As for you, easy marks, you know not from where I came, or where I go, or even my name.
So enjoy the ride...
Gator Bait
Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, March 1971.
Crouched on the prow of the drifting water sled under a brazen Louisiana sky, Chat felt the old dread pouring through him in sickening waves. It was an icy prickling in his clammy, sun-leathered skin. It blurred his vision so that Fornier’s Bayou seemed to swirl about him, the canebrakes, the hummocks of greasy green palmetto and saw grass, the towering fingers of heat-blasted gray cypress with their festoons of Spanish moss.
A thin, stringy-muscled, undersized thirteen, Chat clutched the scabrous, weathered gunwales and wallowed his tongue inside his mouth, wishing he could spit out the dry, cottony feeling.
He shivered, listening to the watery whisper as Lefevre, his stepfather, stood in the stern, poling the craft. They had inched into the bayou under power fifteen minutes ago. Lefevre had cut the throttle, kicking the air propeller to a stop in its wire-mesh cage. The slow, careful search for an alligator den had begun.
Within five minutes, Chat had spotted the wet hump, the protrusion of tangled twigs that meant ’gator. As if in supplication, a nearly naked young figure clad in tattered jeans and dingy sneakers, he’d crouched with his lips forming a silent plea for Lefevre to miss the ’gator sign. More than anything, he’d wanted to go home today empty-handed, without a wetting.
The sled lurched from a hard jab of the pole. Chat slipped a glance over his shoulder. A big, strapping, Cajun figure in the stern, bending his dark, hairy weight against the pole, Lefevre split his tangle of black, wiry beard with a snag-toothed grin.
“We got us a skin, boy! Get ready. That ’gator is going to shed his hide!”
Lefevre’s words seemed to hang in the muggy, primeval stillness.
Chat closed his eyes, the dread in him sharpening until it felt like fishhooks in his stomach.
“Boy,” Lefevre rumbled, “what’s the matter with you? Get a move on! We got to wake that old ’gator up and get him mad enough to come roaring out of his den.”
“I don’t feel so good, Pa.”
“Belly hurting again?”
“Yeah, Pa.”
“Now, boy,” Lefevre growled, “you just cut that sissy stuff out. Hear me? Ain’t you ashamed? What’s the matter with you, anyhow? Ain’t you normal? Toutain’s boy, and those twins of De Vaux, they take to ’gator baiting like it was candy. You going to be the only yellow-belly boy in the swamp?”
Chat clutched his stomach. “I can’t help it, Pa.”
Lefevre cleared his throat, making it a heavy sound of disgust and disparagement “Boy, you lived on your ma’s apron strings too long, just you and a woman. It’s time you quit acting like a girl. Why, when I was your age, I couldn’t wait to go ’gator baiting. I used to beg my pa. I used to prod them out for the pure hell fun of it. You need to change your attitude, boy. It’s the greatest excitement in the world. Running a fox or treeing a coon don’t hold a candle to it!”
“Yes, Pa.” Somehow Chat managed to rise. His knees were weak with an inner trembling, but they supported him. Sparks of panic misted behind his eyes as he saw how close the sled had moved in.
“That’s better,” Lefevre said. He steadied the peeled-sapling pole with his left hand, bent down and pitched the coil of slender hemp rope that had lain at his feet Chat caught the line instinctively. He felt his hands forming the noose, slipping it about his shoulders, securing it under his armpits. Then he was powerless to move further. “Pa, I swear I can’t—”
“Enough!” Lefevre’s voice was a cruel, muted roar, thick with contempt for cowardice. “I’ve heard all the mealy-mouthing I’m going to! Now you get the hell in the water and roust that ’gator out or I’ll whale the tar out of you.”
Shivering, Chat slipped into the water. It was about shoulder deep, a turgid swath hampering his movements. He slipped the long wooden rod from its homemade wire brackets on the port side of the sled. He forced himself to move, taking slow steps on the soft bottom while Lefevre played out the hemp line and steadied the sled, elbow crooked about the pole.
The first rancid mustiness of the alligator’s den came to Chat, choking his thin nostrils. Hesitantly, he lifted the hard wooden rod and poked in the direction of the den.
“In closer, boy!” Lefevre snarled. “You ain’t playing pat-a-cake!”
The merciless sun seemed to hide as Chat edged forward. Holding the long rod with both hands just below water level, he snaked the tip into the barely visible mouth of the den. His heart was a motionless lump of ice as the rod searched and probed. He felt it strike scaly hide. Then a piece of it snapped as saw-toothed jaws clicked.