The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries
- Автор: Пауэлл Тэлмидж
- Год: 2020
- Язык: английский
- Год: Wildside Press LLC
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries». Краткое содержание книги:
He licked his lips and looked up and down the street. Children were playing; people were going in and out of stores; a big, dark woman was arguing in a screeching voice with a pushcart produce peddler.
Connors felt dwarfed by it all. The street reaching endlessly in either direction gave him the sensation that he was being stretched and pulled by the immensity of open space.
So much space.
The size of it built a hard knot in his throat. No order to this space. No gray walls to cut it off at its proper ending point.
He felt a strong urge to move, to flee the feeling that so much space imparted to him.
He dashed into the street.
Brakes squealed.
Horns honked.
A truck came tearing at him like a mountain on the move. The driver leaned out the window. “Ya damn fool, whyn’t ya watch where you’re going!”
Connors gulped and ran.
He reached the farther curb. He sat down and made an effort to get his breathing under control.
A pair of teenage boys, swaggering against the front of a building, watched Connors. They were a blond boy and a dark one. They looked at each other and grinned. The blond boy flipped his cigarette away.
Connors struggled to his feet. He moved toward the center of the sidewalk. A heavy man in work clothes bumped him, gave him a glare. Connors reeled to one side and collided with a slim, young, dark woman who carried a baby in her arms.
“S-Sorry,” he said. He stood in the middle of the sidewalk, people swirling about him. No plan, no pattern to their movements. No order.
His head was spinning.
He was carried forward relentlessly in the tide of humanity. He wanted to claw his way clear, but he was at the corner now; the light was changing and the tide carried him on.
He jostled his way to the safety of a building front. Two young men stepped to either side of him. A blond boy, a dark one. The blond boy was lighting a fresh cigarette.
“Hi, pop,” the dark boy said. He had a lean hard face; there was an animal look in his eyes. The early sun glistened on his duck-tailed hair.
Connors shrank away from them. There was something menacing in their eyes. Something cruel and hard and new that had come into the world since he’d seen it last.
“You the old con from across the street?” the blond boy asked.
Not so old, Connors tried to say. Forty-six. But his hair was gray and thin, his face pale, lined, twitching. Maybe he did look old to them.
“A real honest-to-john con,” the blond boy said. “Real tough.”
“He don’t look so tough to me, Jerry,” the dark boy said.
“How tough are you, pop?”
“I... I’m not so tough.”
“Hear that, Jerry? He ain’t so tough. What’d they can you for, pop? Taking candy from a baby?”
“No,” Connors said.
“Well, what? Come on, give with the details. We’re your pals, see? We wanna hear all about it.”
“Armed robbery,” Connors said in a whisper.
“Yeah? Filling station? Old lady in a grocery store maybe?”
“Armored truck,” Connors said.
“Hear that, Jerry? A real tough armored truck cracker.”
“What do you want with me?” Connors said.
“We just wanna see how tough you are, pop.”
“I told you. I’m not tough. Please let me go.”
“We ain’t stopping you, pop.”
Connors tried to move to one side. He bumped the blond boy.
“Don’t shove me, pop,” the boy said in a low tone. “Don’t shove me. I don’t like it, see? I guess I’m about as tough as any con.”
Connors’ throat worked as he looked at the young, hard animal eagerness of their faces. People eddied all about him, but he felt isolated, alone.
He fought the feeling of weakness in his knees. His eyes scurried in their sockets.
Then he broke and ran.
They followed him for a few steps.
“Let him go, Jerry. I guess we showed ’im. Tougher than any con.”
“Yeah, let’s see what’s doing down the block.”
Connors moved blindly through the immensity of space. He felt helpless against the disordered maelstrom about him. Like a man who has wandered naked from his house.
He reached the entrance of a restaurant. It was the place where Myrt worked.
He looked inside for some sign of her. Finally he saw her clearing a table. He stood with his face pressed against the broad front window, watching her until she went into the kitchen.
He turned away and began slow, unreal movements down the sidewalk.
He felt exhausted when he regained the apartment. He stumbled into the bedroom and fell across the bed. The strong feeling that something was wrong rose in him until it was overpowering.
He jerked around and sat up.
The door was open.
He sprang from the bed and slammed the door. Then he returned to the bed and lay down and pulled the covers over himself.
Myrt came in at two o’clock. She worked a split shift and had each afternoon off from two until five.
He heard her in the small living room. He rose slowly. The bed was wet with the imprint of his sweating body. He stood crouched near the bed, listening to her humming.
The bedroom door opened.
She stopped short, then smiled. “Hello, honey. Taking a nap?”
“I don’t want to talk,” Connors said.
He walked into the kitchenette. Why had she come? The bedroom had been almost dark and silent. Now, as he stood in the kitchenette, the roar of wild disordered sound from outside came crashing over him. His heart began to pound and his teeth chattered.
Myrt had followed him. She stood in the doorway. “You catching cold, honey?”
“Leave me alone,” he said.
“But, baby doll...”
“Leave me alone,” he said in a louder voice.
“Now, honey,” she said. She was coming toward him. Her great, heavy arms reached around him. He felt as if he were suffocating.
He shoved her with all his strength. He saw her twist and fall backward. The back of her head struck the edge of the sink. With her weight, the blow was hard and cruel. She fell down limp and Connors stood over her.
“Myrt?” he said.
There was gray matter and blood spilling out the back of her head.
She was dead.
He was sorry — for a moment.
Then he realized that they’d give him life for this. They’d take him back. Maybe he wouldn’t get the same cell that had protected him for twenty years. But a new one would do.
He went into the living room; he looked out the window. He had to look. At the teeming, seething jungle outside.
He looked.
And looking at it, his relief was so great that tears came to his eyes.
The Dame Across the River
Originally published in Manhunt, April 1958.
There was a house across the river. It meant nothing at first. Too many other things were real, thirty one-thousand dollar bills in each of the money belts Trantham and I wore day and night — and Ingram.
The money, and Ingram, and the river. Those were the real things when we first crossed the river. We had lost Ingram somewhere back yonder, we thought, in the endless days and miles of running. We couldn’t be sure. Ingram was a hard man, and a tenacious cop. Pathological in his tenaciousness. Nothing mattered to Ingram except winning.
Now the river was our shield and shelter. Even Ingram’s authority meant nothing here, unless he went through channels. And local and state governmental bodies in Mexico moved slowly. There were too many men in such bodies who carried a resentment of the large, powerful nation on their north border. It meant something to them to have the big northern neighbor asking for something. It gave them a chance to be important.