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:
The lagoon opened before his gritty-eyed gaze, a long stretch of water with a surface like black glass, hemmed by palmetto, wild cabbage palms, high grass, and a few gnarled pines.
Lefevre cut the engine and the sled slipped forward silently as he began poling.
Crouched in the prow, Chat thought desperately: Maybe we’ll miss the den this time. Maybe the big bull won’t be in it, but he knew he was wrong. From the way Lefevre was tracking the water sled, Chat knew that his stepfather had located the den yesterday, when he’d cut the ’gator’s sign, and he knew the bull would be here. He was emptily certain of it.
“All right, boy, over the side.” Lefevre kept his voice down, but it quivered with eagerness.
Chat stood up, facing the man slowly. Lefevre had picked up the line, was tossing it to him.
Chat caught the thin rope. “Pa, are you sure this is the way it’s got to be?”
Lefevre’s mustache and beard shifted with the angry twisting of his mouth. “Don’t start that again, boy! Fair warning, for the last time!”
“All right, Pa.” Chat wriggled the lasso under his armpits, picked up his long prodding pole, and slipped into the water. It was deeper than he’d thought, claiming him to his chin. Pole upraised like a long, thin spear, he worked his way forward, buoyancy pulling the mucky bottom away from him at each step.
The den was straight ahead, just a few yards now. He could see the mouth of the huge nest just under the surface.
He stopped moving, settled his sneakered feet firmly on the bottom. Glancing behind, he saw Lefevre, solid and spread-legged, playing out the line until it dipped into the water.
“Come on, boy!” Lefevre bit out “Get moving. Take up the slack. You’re just about there.”
“I can’t, Pa.” Chat spoke with head lifted, keeping his chin clear.
Lefevre worked the line in his hands. “Boy,” he said in a low, deadly tone, “if you ain’t moving before I can count to three...”
“You big overgrown fool,” Chat said with a heat he’d never before displayed. “There’s snags in here. You blind? Can’t you see them sticking up here and yonder?”
“Snags in every swamp,” Lefevre said. “You just get your foot loose and be quick about it.”
Chat ducked, then reappeared with water spilling from his head. He twisted his face once more in Lefevre’s direction. “Can’t make it. You want your ’gator, you come in and free my ankle.”
Lefevre measured the distance to the den with a glance. He hesitated. He cursed the delay. He threw the line down savagely. Then he slipped over the side and labored with slogging steps toward Chat, his eyes despising the boy for his awkwardness. He came to rest beside Chat. Again his small, black eyes flicked in the direction of the den.
“Just free my foot,” Chat said, water lapping to his lips, “and then get back and take hold of the line. Please, Pa. Please hurry!”
With a final glower at Chat, Lefevre lowered his bulk beneath the surface. Chat saw his sinking shadow, felt the touch of Lefevre’s hands on his leg.
Then, with a release of his hard, stringy muscles. Chat fired himself off the bottom. He stepped on Lefevre, bearing him down, the surprise of the action addling the man for a moment. The long prod in Chat’s hands shot into the den. It lashed the water. He felt it strike the lurking ’gator — once, twice, three times — with all the strength Chat could put behind it.
Lefevre spluttered up to the surface in the same instant the maddened bull charged from his lair with a bellow that jarred trees at the far end of the lagoon.
“Now, big man,” Chat screamed, “let’s see who’s the best man in the swamp...” He gurgled the final word, surface diving with the agility of a young otter.
Lefevre stared into the enormity of cotton-lined jaws. He endured a fear-paralysis for one second before he broke and thrashed toward the water sled. He was one second too late.
Early the following Monday morning. Chat walked into Rickel’s Crossing. His jeans and red flannel shirt were washed clean. His freckled, snub-nosed face was scrubbed. His sun-bleached thatch was combed.
The village hunkered in its usual air of desertion, a couple of muddy pickup trucks parked on the narrow, dusty road that petered out here on the swamp’s edge.
Chat spotted Mr. Fargo sitting in a cane-bottomed chair on the porch of his weathered general store. Mr. Fargo was dozing in the heat, a big, fat, bald-headed fellow whose short-sleeved shirt looked like an extra skin pasted on with sweat.
Chat halted at the porch rail, where whittlers had carved initials, notches, and little primitive resemblances to human faces.
Chat cleared his throat and Mr. Fargo opened his big, bulbous, blue eyes. “Well, hello there, Chat.”
“How are you, Mr. Fargo?” Chat said politely, looking up from his stance in the dust.
“I’m just fine, boy, but I hear you been in a terrible experience. By the time you run and fetched the Toutains, wasn’t much of your step-daddy left to bury.”
“No, sir.” Chat cleared his throat. “But we give him a right fitten funeral. Now I reckon to go to Houston, Texas, and see my Aunt Mavis.”
“That’s a far piece, boy. You got any money for bus fare, grub, and such like?”
“I figure I can make it.” With plenty to spare, Chat added to himself, feeling the three hundred dollars of poacher’s money pinned beneath his shirt. Lefevre had kept his treasure trove in a fruit jar buried beneath the old willow tree.
“If you can’t hitch a ride, boy,” Mr. Fargo said, “you got a ten-mile walk down our back road to the highway where you can flag a bus. And it’s a mighty hot day for walking.”
“Not to me,” Chat said. “I figure it’s a real fine day for walking. Good-bye, Mr. Fargo.”
“Good-bye, boy, and luck to you.”
Chat nodded, turned, and set off down the road. He began whistling as he rounded the first bend in the road, and it was the note of a bird set free.
The Commune
Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, January 1971.
The intruder couldn’t have picked a safer place to invade than the rambling, age-musty Victorian house where little old lady Lominac lived alone.
The widow was less than a hundred pounds of dainty bones and wrinkles — incredible wrinkles, like skeins of cobwebs delicately traced in layers, one upon another. Yet even if the widow Lominac’s wrinkles had wrinkles, the effect was not unpleasant. Sweetly formed little bones lurked beneath the wrinkles, and gentle blue eyes peered out.
Physically, she was no match for any intruder stronger than a sturdy six-year-old. Even if she’d had a weapon, it was impossible to think of her firing it at another human being. One might just as easily have imagined Whistler’s mother, mini-skirted in a psychedelic joint, plunging a heroin hypo into her arm.
The widow’s house was, by today’s standards, a gingerbread monstrosity of cupolas, turrets, gables, leaves, tall chimneys, and blank windows. It glowered gothically from a slight rise that overlooked the weedy acres of what had once been a landscaped estate on the edge of town.
Like its owner, the place had an aura of loneliness, as if bewildered at finding itself in an era of split-levels, jet planes, and polluted air. The house lurked with memories of croquet games on sunny lawns, genteel courtships on the porch swing, summer parties lighted by paper lanterns.
Mrs. Lominac’s young husband had gone forth in World War I, never to return to the house. A generation later, her only child, a son born just three months after his father had gone overseas to France, had marched away down the same front walk. It had been the first leg of a journey that ended when a Japanese machine gun cut him in two on a South Pacific island.