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.
“Easy, Kennedy!”
“Easy, hell! This is just a heart-to-heart talk, Mac. Forget your loyalty to the badge when I’m around. You’ve kept a stiff upper lip, and you’ll continue to. But just keep in the mind that here’s one bird who knows his tricks. I know — see? — I know that Judge Haggerty is the Duke’s silent partner in those three night-clubs he runs. Haggerty’s aiming for Supreme Court Justice, and he needs lots of jack for his campaign. And he’s not going to let a tough nut of a police captain get in his way.”
MacBride bit the reporter with a keen, hard eye. After a long moment he swung his feet down from the desk and pulled open a drawer.
“Have a drink, Kennedy.”
He drew out a bottle and a glass and set them down. Kennedy poured himself a stiff three fingers and downed it neat, rasped his throat.
“Good stuff, Mac,” he said.
“Have another.”
“Thanks.”
Kennedy measured off another three fingers and swallowed the contents at a gulp, stared meditatively at the empty glass, then set it down quietly.
“Now, Mac,” he said, looking up obliquely, while the ghost of a smile played around his lips. “I’ll tell you what I came here for.”
“Came to razz me, I thought.”
“No. That’s just my roundabout way of getting at things. One reason why I got kicked off the city desk.”
MacBride felt that something important was in the wind. Sometimes he liked Kennedy; other times, he felt like wringing the news-hound’s neck. Clever, this Kennedy, sharp as a steep trap.
“Well,” he said, leaning back, “shoot.”
“Just this, Mac. Maybe you’re going to run up against Duke again.”
“Go ahead.”
Kennedy’s smile was thin, almost mocking. “Duke’s bought that old brewery out off Farmingville Turnpike.”
MacBride’s chair creaked once, and then remained silent. His stare bored into the lazy, whimsical eyes of the reporter. A sardonic twist pulled down one corner of his mouth.
“What’s that wop up to?” he growled, deep in his throat.
“I’ve got a hunch, Mac. He’s getting crowded in the city. He’s going to make beer there — the real stuff, I mean. And gin. And—” he leaned forward — “he’s going to rub it in — on you.”
“He is, eh?” MacBride’s voice hardened. “He’ll take one step too many. He’s getting cocky now. I never saw a wop yet who didn’t overstep himself. Riding on my tail, eh? Well, we’ll see, Kennedy. Let him move out of turn and I’ll jump him. That wop can’t kick me in the slats and get away with it. The booze I don’t give a damn about. I wouldn’t have cared how many speakeasies he ran in the city. But when he ran stud games in the back rooms and reached out for soused suckers I got sore. That’s why I broke the Nick Nack Club. It was three in the morning, and among the bums in the back room were two guns from Chicago.”
Kennedy chuckled. “That was when Captain Stephen MacBride pulled one of the biggest bones in his career. What a beautiful swan song that was! Hot diggity!”
MacBride rose to his lean, rangy height and cracked fist into palm.
“Boy, but I’m aching to meet that dago! I hope to hell he does make a bum move!”
“He put you out in the sticks; out,” added Kennedy whimsically, “in the Old Man’s Home. And you’re sore, Mac. I can foresee some hot stuff on the frontier, and Grove Manor on the map.”
MacBride swung to face him, his feet spread wide. “Just that, Kennedy — just that. They shoved me out here to cool off and grow stale. But I’m not the guy to grow stale. Duke’s cracking wise. Maybe he thinks that the transfer has shut me up. Maybe he thinks he can ride me and get away with it. Let him — that’s all — just let him!”
There was a knock at the door, and then Sergeant Haley looked in, his beefy face flushed with excitement.
“Carlson’s on the wire, Cap’n. There’s been a smash-up out on Old Stone Road. Carlson was riding along in the patrol flivver when he saw a big touring car tangled up against a tree half in the bushes. There’s a dead man in the car but Carlson can’t get him out ’count of the wreckage.”
MacBride snorted. “Is Carlson so hard up for company that he has to call up about a wreck?”
“No, but he says he thinks there’s something fluky about it. He says there’s a woman’s footprints near the car, but he didn’t see no woman.”
“Maybe she walked home,” put in Kennedy. “Lot of that going on these days.”
“I’ll speak to him,” clipped MacBride, and sat down at his desk.
Sergeant Haley went out and switched over the call and it took MacBride only a minute to get the details. Then he hung up and, pouring himself a drink, corked the bottle and dropped it back into the drawer.
“The ride will do me good,” he remarked as he slapped on his cap.
“Me, too,” added Kennedy.
MacBride looked at him. “You’re out of your territory, aren’t you?”
“What the hell!”
On the way out MacBride told the sergeant, “When Kelly and Kerr drift in — God knows where they are now — tell ’em to hang around. Call up the nearest garage and tell ’em to send a wreckage crew out to Old Stone Road, about a mile north of Pine Tree Park. Buzz the morgue and tell ’em to send the bus to the same place. Tell ’em tonight, not sometime next week. When Lieutenant Miller gets fed up on monkeying with his radio, ask him to kindly take care of things till I get back. When you work out your present game of solitaire, I’d appreciate your getting those delinquent reports as near up to date as you’re able. I won’t be long.”
Outside, he stopped on the curb to light a fresh cigar. Then he followed Kennedy into the police car, and said, “Shoot, Donnegan,” to the man at the wheel.
2
Out of the hub of town, the car struck Old Stone Road and followed it past neat, new bungalows and later, past fields and intermittent groves of piney woods. Once through Pine Tree Park, the road became darker, lined by heavier woods, with not even an occasional house to relieve the gloom.
Donnegan, at the wheel, pointed to a pair of headlights far up the road, and when they drew nearer, MacBride saw a small two-seater flivver parked on the side and a policeman in uniform spreading his arms to stop them. Kennedy hopped out and MacBride followed him.
“There it is,” said Carlson, and pointed to a tangled heap of wreckage against a tree alongside the highway. MacBride strode over, and Carlson followed, snapped on a flashlight and played its white beam over the ruined car.
“Three thousand bucks shot to hell,” observed Kennedy. “And still insurance companies make money.” He sniffed. “Who’s the stiff?”
“Don’t know,” muttered MacBride and made a gesture which indicated that the man was so deeply buried beneath the wreck that they could not get him. He turned to Carlson. “You said something about footprints.”
“Yeah, Cap. See?” He swung his flash down to the soft earth around the car. “Sure, a woman’s.”
MacBride nodded, then said, “But she never got out of this car after it struck.”
The wreck offered mute evidence to that statement. Its radiator was caved in half the length of the long, streamlined hood, and the cowl and part of the hood were crushed up through the windshield frame. Beneath this, and wedged in by the left side of the car, lay the man who had been at the wheel, face downward, the steering-wheel broken and twisted around his chest.
“I been wonderin’ where the woman could have went,” ventured Carlson.
“Whoever she was, she must have walked away,” said MacBride. “Her footprints wouldn’t show on the macadam.” He added, after a moment, “At any rate, I’ll bet my hat she wasn’t in the car when it socked that tree.”