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.
Detective Cohen appeared, with a bad wrist — his left hand.
“Where you been, Ike?” asked MacBride.
“Looking around. Guy in a cigar store around the corner said he was looking out the window a few minutes before the fireworks. Saw a big blue sedan roll by slow. He noticed because it’s a oneway alley and classy machines don’t often go through it. Runs back of the station-house, you know — Delaney Street.”
“See here, boys.” MacBride’s voice was tense. “You all well heeled? Good. We’re going to take a ride up to 210 Jockey Street, and I smell trouble. There’s something here I don’t understand. We were caught napping. I’ll say I was — I’m the dumb-bell. There I thought I had the case all ready to bake, and we were blown up.”
He found Lieutenant Connolly and gave him brief orders. He gathered together six reserves and Moriarity and Cohen. They used the big touring car in which Hess and the other two gangsters had been brought to the precinct. Gunther drove, and as he was about to slide into gear, Kennedy came up on the run.
“Room there for me, Mac?”
MacBride groaned. Getting rid of Kennedy was like getting rid of a leech. But taking a look at Kennedy, seeing him all banged up but still ready to carry on, the captain experienced a change of heart.
“Hop in,” he clipped.
The big machine lurched ahead. Once in high gear the eight cylinders purred smoothly.
Two left turns and a right, and they were on a wide street that led north. In the distance the reflection of the white light district glowed in the sky. Ten men were in the car. There was no room for comfort.
The white light district grew nearer.
MacBride and his men ignored traffic lights. They struck Jockey Street. Jockey Street is like a cave. At one end it is lit by the glare of the theatrical district. As one penetrates it, it becomes darker, narrower, and the street lamps are pallid. Two and three-story houses rear into the gloom, lights showing here and there, but not in abundance. Most of the doors are blank-faced, foreboding. It is a thickly populated section, but pedestrians are rare. More than one man has been killed in lower Jockey Street. Patrolmen always travel it in pairs.
The machine stopped.
“Two ten’s on the next block,” said MacBride. “We’ll leave the car here. Gunther, you and Barnes go over one block south and come up in the rear. Hang around there in case anybody tries to get out. The rest of us will try the front.”
They all alighted. Gunther and Barnes, their sticks drawn, their pistols loose in their holsters, started off purposefully. MacBride, though he saw no one, had a vague feeling that eyes were watching him from darkened windows. People might have been curious in Jockey Street, like all humanity, but they differed materially in that they rarely came into the open to vent their curiosity.
As the men walked down the street, their footsteps re-echoed hollowly; a nightstick clicked against another. MacBride led the way, a jut to his jaw, his fingers curled up in his palms. Home, in peaceful Grove Manor, his wife was probably mending socks. Maybe his daughter was playing the piano; something about Spring from Mendelssohn or one of those Indian love lyrics. Well, he carried lots of insurance.
How about the men with him? Most of them married, too, with little kids. Moriarity, Cohen, Feltmann, Terchinsky, O’Toole, Pagliano. Gunther and Barnes in the back. Two hundred a month for the privilege of being a target for gunmen. They made far less — and paid double the life insurance premium — than many a man whose most important worry was a cold in the head or the temperature of his morning bath.
“This is it,” said MacBride.
Kennedy said, “Dump.”
“You stay out of it, Kennedy.”
“If you’ve got a pen-knife I’ll sit out here and play mumble-peg on the pavement.”
In front of the house, which was a two-story affair built of red brick, was a depression reached by four stone steps that led down to the basement windows. At a word from MacBride, the men hid in this depression. A single step led to the front and main entrance, where there was a vestibule with glass in the upper half.
Alone, MacBride approached this, tried the door, and finding it locked, pressed a bell button. Somewhere distant he heard the bell ring. He took off his cap of rank and held it under his left arm, partly to hide his identity. His teeth were set, his lips compressed. He rang again.
Presently he heard a latch click. It was on the inner door. There was a long moment before a face moved dimly in the gloom behind the vestibule window. MacBride made a motion to open the door. The face floated nearer, receded, remained motionless, then came nearer again. Then it disappeared abruptly. The inner door banged. He heard running feet.
“We crash it, boys!” he barked in a low voice.
His revolver came out. One blow shattered the glass in the vestibule. He reached in, snapped back the latch. His men swarmed about him. He leaped into the vestibule, tried the next door. It was locked, built entirely of wood.
“All together, boys,” he clipped.
En masse, they surged against the door. Again they surged. Wood creaked, groaned, then splintered. The door banged up under the impetus, and the law swept in. MacBride had a flashlight. It clicked into life, its beam leaped through the gloom. He turned.
“Holstein and Feltmann! Guard the front!”
“Yup, Cap!”
His flashlight swung up and down, back and forth, showed a stairway against one wall, leading to regions above. In the lower hall, he saw two closed doors.
“Bust these!”
He was the first to leap. The first door opened easily. The room was bare, unfurnished. He dived out and tried the next. It was unlocked. Empty. But it was meagerly furnished; a cot, a table, a rocking-chair, a gas stove.
“Lookout’s room,” he speculated. “Guy who came to the door.”
Sentences, words, were clipped.
The flashlight’s beam picked out the foot of the stairway.
“Up, boys!”
MacBride was off on the run. He led the way up the stairs.
Came two gun reports, muffled.
“Gunther and Barnes,” he said. “These guys are trying for a break.”
They were in the hall above. The first door they tried was locked. MacBride hurled his weight against it.
Bang!
A shot splintered the panel, passed the captain’s cheek. He sprang back.
Moriarity, leaning against the bannister, shot from the hip. He plastered four shots around the doorknob. Pagliano put three more there. Then they waited, silent, all guns drawn. They listened. Men were moving inside the room. There was an undertone of voices.
MacBride turned to Cohen “Ike, go downstairs and get the chair in that room.”
Cohen departed, returned carrying a heavy kitchen chair. MacBride took a chair, hefted it, then swung it over his head and dived with it toward the door. The chair splintered; so did the door. A couple of shots banged from the inside. MacBride felt a sting on his cheek. Blood trickled down his jaw.
Two policemen stood side by side and pumped bullets into the room. There was a hoarse scream, the rush of bodies, the pound of feet. Glass shattered.
Firing, MacBride and Moriarity hurtled into the room. Moriarity saw a dim figure going out through the window. He fired. The figure buckled and was gone.
“They’ve made the roof!” clipped MacBride.
He jumped to the window, out upon the fire-escape, up to the roof. He could see vague blurs skimming over the roof of the adjoining house. For a block these roofs were linked together, trimmed with chimneys, ventilating shafts, radio aerials.
Cohen went past MacBride in leaps and bounds, stopped suddenly, crouched and fired two shots. One knocked a man over. The other whanged through a skylight. Moriarity cut loose, missed fire.