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.
Sherman got up off him, pulled him up after him, bent him like a jackknife over the rail, then caught at his legs with a vicious dip. The gun, which was still in the dick’s hand, fell overboard as he opened it to claw at the empty night. His legs cleared the rail at Sherman’s heave like those of a pole vaulter topping a bar, but his faculties had cleared just in time for his finish. His left hand closed despairingly around a slim, vertical deck-support as the rest of his body went over. The wrench nearly pulled it out of its socket, turned him completely around in mid-air so that he was facing Sherman’s way for a brief instant. His face was a piteous blur against the night that would have wrung tears from the Evil One himself.
But a human being was sending him to his death, and they can be more remorseless than the very devils of hell. “I don’t want to die!” the blurred face shrieked out. The flat of Sherman’s foot, shooting out between the lower deck-rails like a battering-ram, obliterated it for a minute. The gripping hand flew off the upright support into nothingness. When Sherman’s foot came back through the rails again, the face was gone. The badge was all that was left lying there on the deck.
The last thing Sherman did was pick that up and shie it out after him. “Take that with you, Cop, you’ll need it for your next pinch!”
Carrying out his original purpose, after what had just happened, was almost like an anticlimax; he was hardly aware of doing so at all, just a roundtrip to the rail and back. He leaned up against the deck wall for a minute, panting with exertion. The partly denuded necklace, freed at last from its human ballast, in the palm of his hand. “You’ve cost me plenty!” he muttered to it. He dumped it into his pocket.
Suddenly the deck lights had flashed on all around him, as if lightning had struck the ship. He cringed and turned this way and that. They were standing out there, bunched by the exit through which he himself had come a little while ago, stewards and ship’s officers, all staring ominously down toward him. He knew enough not to try to turn and slink away; he was in full sight of them, and a second group had showed up behind him, meanwhile, at the lower end of the deck, cutting him off in that direction. That last scream Fowler ripped out from the other side of the rail, probably; the wind must have carried it like an amplifier all over the ship at once.
“But they didn’t see me do it!” he kept repeating to himself vengefully, as they came down the deck toward him from both directions, treading warily, spread out fanwise to block his escape. “They didn’t see me do it! They gave it the lights out here just a minute too late!”
The chief officer had a gun out in his hand, and a look on his face to match it. They meant business. One by one the cabin windows facing the deck lighted up; the whole ship was rousing. This wasn’t just another hurdle any more; this was a dead end — the last stop, and he knew it.
Suddenly he came to a decision. The net was closing in on him and in a minute more his freedom of action would be gone forever. He didn’t waste it, but used it while he still had it to cut himself free from the first crime even while the second was tangling around him tighter every instant.
He found the rail with the backs of his elbows, leaned there negligently, waiting for them. Right as they came up, his elbows slipped off the rail again, his hands found his trouser pockets in a gesture that looked simply like cocky bravado. Then he withdrew them again, gave one a slight unnoticeable backhand-flip through the rails. The motion, screened by his body, remained unobserved; their eyes were on his face. The necklace had gone back to Manon, the job had blown up — but it couldn’t be helped, he had his own skin to think of now.
The chief officer’s eyes were as hard as the metal that pointed out of his fist at Sherman’s middle. “What’d you do with that man Fowler?” he clipped.
Sherman grinned savagely back around his ear. “What’d I do with him? I left him pounding his ear in 42-A. We’re not Siamese twins. Is there a regulation against coming out here to stretch my legs—?”
The night steward cut in with: “I didn’t like how he acted when he ordered the cawfee a while ago, sir. That’s why I reported to you. When I took it in to him they were both gone, and the insides of this man’s trunk were all busted up and lying around, like they had a fierce fight—”
A woman leaning out of one of the cabin windows shrilled almost hysterically: “Officer! Officer! I heard somebody fall to the deck right outside my window here, the sound woke me up, and then somebody screamed: ‘I don’t want to die!’ And when I jumped up to look out—” Her voice broke uncontrollably for a minute.
The officer was listening intently, but without turning his head away from Sherman or deflecting the gun.
“—he was kicking at a face through the rails! I saw it go down—! I... I fainted away for a minute, after that!” She vanished from the window, someone’s arm around her, sobbing loudly in a state of collapse.
The net was closing around him, tighter, every minute. “We all heard the scream,” the officer said grimly, “but that tells us what it meant—”
The bulky captain showed up, one of his shirttails hanging out under his hurriedly donned uniform-jacket. He conferred briefly with the chief officer, who retreated a pace or two without taking his gun off Sherman. The latter stood there, at bay against the rail, a husky deckhand gripping him by each shoulder now.
The gun was lowered, only to be replaced by a pair of hand-cuffs. The captain stepped forward. “I arrest you for murder! Hold out your hands! Mr. Moulton, put those on him!”
The deckhands jerked his forearms out into position, his cuffs shot back. The red welt across his knuckles where he’d bruised them against Fowler’s jawbone revealed itself to every eye there.
He flinched as the cold steel locked around him. “I didn’t do it — he fell overboard!” he tried to say. “It’s her word against mine—!” But the net was too tight around him, there was no room left to struggle, even verbally.
The captain’s voice was like a roll of drums ushering in an execution — the first of the hundreds, the thousands of questions that were going to torment him like gadflies, drive him out of his mind, until the execution that was even now rushing toward him remorselessly from the far side of the ocean would seem like a relief in comparison. “What was your motive in doing away with this man, sending him to his death?”
He didn’t answer. The malevolent gods of his warped destiny did it for him, sending another of the stewards hurrying up from the deck below, the answer in both his outstretched hands, a thin flat badge, a gnarled string of pearls, half-gone.
“I found this and this, sir, on the B-deck just now! I thought I heard a scream out there a while back and I went out to look. Just as I turned to come in again this, this shield landed at my feet, came sailing in from nowhere on the wind like a boomerang. I put on the lights thinking someone had had an accident down on that deck, and a little while afterward I caught sight of this necklace down at the very end. The wind had whipped it around one of the deck-supports like a paper streamer—”