The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories
- Автор: Adams Cleve F., Babcock Dwight V.
- Год: 2010
- Язык: английский
- Год: A Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
- ISBN: 978-0-307-45543-7
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories». Краткое содержание книги:
Black Mask was the apotheosis of noir. It was the magazine where the first hardboiled detective story, which was written by Carroll John Daly appeared. It was the slum in which such American literary titans like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler got their start, and it was the home of stories with titles like “Murder Is Bad Luck,” “Ten Carets of Lead,” and “Drop Dead Twice.” Collected here is best of the best, the hardest of the hardboiled, and the darkest of the dark of America’s finest crime fiction. This masterpiece collection represents a high watermark of America’s underbelly. Crime writing gets no better than this.
“Be nice, copper.”
Canavan was in no humor to be nice. With a sound like a maddened bull he pivoted and swung a devastating left at the nearest face. The face merely slid to one side and the momentum of the blow, missing, carried Canavan into a pair of outspread arms. “Sock him,” the owner of the arms said. The second guy socked. Canavan had already been knocked cold once tonight. This second attack was just too much. Blackness as absolute as the bottom of a coal mine engulfed him.
Chapter Four
The Letter
He awoke with a sense of unreality, as does one who has been under an opiate for a long, long time. Blurred objects swam before his eyes, as though seen through layers and layers of gauze, or the opalescent depths of a gray-green sea. Once he had had a tooth extracted, a molar whose roots were wrapped around the jawbone, and the exodontist had given him several successive shots of novocaine. Canavan had passed out, awakening later with almost these same sensations. There was no pain, only the vague discomfort of incipient nausea. Voices were blurred too, and then the sharply insistent fumes of ammonia bit at his nostrils and the fog cleared away.
The guy with the ammonia flask said: “Jeeze, he looks green!” He was a small chunky man with eyes almost as naive as Kleinschmidt’s. Canavan tried to hit him in the mouth but for some reason he couldn’t get his hands up. Later he found that this was because they were tied to the chair he was sitting in.
Beyond this first guy there was a second, also small, though not so chunky. He had sallow skin and a habit of sucking air into his lungs through the right-hand corner of his mouth. Canavan figured him for a reefer smoker, and this conclusion was borne out by the faintly sickening odor of burning weeds which saturated the atmosphere. It smelled like the inside of an incinerator after the gardener leaves.
The room belonged in a decrepit and abandoned farm house. The floor was of well-worn pine, the walls covered with stained and moldy wall-paper, with here and there a cleaner area where once had hung a picture. Aside from Canavan’s chair, a cumbersome Morris, there was only one article of furniture in the room. This was a chipped iron bed with a stained and lumpy mattress. On this unbeautiful couch lay Miss Hope Carewe, wearing only shoes and stockings and a slip. She was not there from choice apparently. There was adhesive on her mouth, and presumably there was more around her wrists and ankles, though Canavan couldn’t be sure of this. Her eyes looked at Canavan with horrified fascination.
In lieu of more authentic names Canavan dubbed his jailers Tubby and Reefer. Tubby smelled of the ammonia bottle. “Jeeze!”
Reefer’s eyes narrowed. “Cut the clowning! You gonna go back and find a phone or will I?”
Tubby licked his lips. “Let’s ask the punk a couple of questions first.” He looked at Canavan. “Where’s the letter?”
“What letter?”
Tubby made a V of his first two fingers and gouged Canavan’s eyes. Canavan essayed a kick, but here again he was thwarted. His legs were also bound to the Morris chair. All he could do was yell, and he did this quite effectively. Nobody seemed to mind. Obviously there was no possibility of a rescuer within earshot. Canavan ceased yelling. “Listen, lice, this is the first I’ve heard about any letter.”
Tubby winked at Reefer. “He says he don’t know about no letter.”
“I heard him,” Reefer said. “You don’t have to translate.” He now addressed Canavan directly for the first time. “Why don’t you make this easy on yourself, copper? You ought to know we can’t afford to let you circulate again, but a good clean slug in the right place is a lot nicer than some of the things we could think up.”
Canavan, strangely enough, was quite calm. He could blow his top over some little inconsequential thing, but in an emergency he took the breaks as they came. “I know what you guys can do to me. The thought turns my stomach.”
Tubby managed to look actually sympathetic. “Then why don’t you spill?”
“Because I can’t, you fool! Believe me, I’d give you all the letters in the Los Angeles post-office if I had them. I’m a cop, not a hero.”
“Sure,” Reefer said, “sure.” He stared meditatively at Miss Hope Carewe on the bed. “Funny, she says she don’t know about any letter either.”
“Maybe there isn’t any,” Canavan said brightly.
Tubby considered this. “Matter of fact, there might not be, at that.” He twirled the cylinder of his gun. “Only if there ain’t we’re all going to a hell of a lot of trouble for nothing.” He looked at Reefer. “We’d better get in touch with the boss.”
“Kolinski?” Canavan said.
Both Reefer and Tubby ignored him. Presently they held a whispered conversation and finally, after flipping a coin, Reefer went out. Somewhere there was the sound of a starting car.
Tubby sat on the edge of the bed beside Hope Carewe, nursing his gun and a cigarette. The utter silence was enough to set your teeth on edge.
After a while Canavan said: “Look, you didn’t mind my yelling. Certainly the girl can’t yell any longer. Why don’t you take that damn tape off her mouth and let her breathe comfortably?”
“Why not?” Tubby said. He reached over and worked a none-too-clean thumbnail under a corner of the adhesive. Then, with a sort of sadistic enjoyment, he ripped the strip free and watched the tears start from her golden-brown eyes. “How you like it, babe?”
“I’d like to carve you into seven hundred small pieces,” she said frankly. She tried to wipe her eyes on a bare shoulder, without much success because her hands were tied behind her. Giving up the attempt presently she regarded Canavan. “I seem to have caused you no end of trouble.”
“And that’s a fact,” he agreed. “For a gal whose father owns seventeen million dollars you do get in the damndest jams.”
Tubby became suddenly alert. “What’s this about seventeen million dollars?”
“Didn’t Kolinski tell you?” Canavan said.
Tubby looked positively sick. “Kolinski! That’s twice you’ve — You mean to tell me Big George is...?” He broke off to leer cunningly at Canavan. “Let’s hear some more about this seventeen million bucks, copper.”
Canavan, feigning a sincerity he did not feel, framed his next words carefully, like an artisan laying bricks. “It’s no skin off my nose, monkey, but I hate to see even a punk like you suckered into anything. How much are you and your side-kick getting paid for all this?”
Tubby’s pale eyes shifted. “A grand.”
“There you are!” Canavan said triumphantly. “The boss gives you a cock-and-bull story about looking for a letter. Because why? Because if he told you this was a snatch job involving millions you’d want more dough!” He snorted. “Here you are, risking the G-heat and worse, and all for a lousy thousand bucks.”
Tubby brooded on this for a moment. Then, muttering obscenities, he stood up. “Thanks, copper. Thanks too much.” He went out, banging the door behind him.
Hope looked at Canavan. “You didn’t believe a word of that.”
“No,” Canavan admitted.
He considered the possibility of escape, but there seemed little chance for it. His hands weren’t even tied together. They were bound at the wrists, each to one of the rear legs of the Morris chair, and his arms were practically numb from being bowed over the broad arms of the chair. “No, I didn’t believe it, but when in doubt it’s always a good idea to get the other team fighting among themselves.”