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.
“Get in,” said the man beside him.
Tremaine cast a furtive over-the-shoulder glance back down the street; then he looked the other way. A man in a rust-brown suit and a derby stood on the far corner. When Jules looked at him he walked slowly away, the heavy, studied tread of a policeman. Jules swallowed audibly.
“Get in,” the man said again.
Jules removed his hand from the keyboard of his guitar and it swung around under his right arm. He held it with both hands and thrust it ahead of him and put his foot on the running-board. He looked about again with a panic-stricken face. The man in the rust-brown suit had disappeared. There was no one else in sight. Tremaine saw that the glass of the car door was thick and had a slightly yellowish tint. Bullet-proof glass. The man with the twisted shoulder jostled him and thrust something hard into his back.
Slowly Jules climbed in. The two men already in the car said nothing. The driver had a dead-white face in which were dry, feverish eyes. The man in the back was bony. Bunches of muscle knotted on his thin jaws. Jules sank down into the deep upholstery of the rear seat beside him and carefully placed his guitar between his knees. The man with the twisted shoulder got in and clicked the door shut. The car lunged forward. Still no one spoke. Jules watched the dingy buildings slide past as they jounced the length of the block, crossed Mulberry and swung right on Lafayette and picked up speed. Jules caught a flash of a street sign at a corner. It read E. 10 St.
When they sped past Twelfth Street, Jules spoke timidly: “I thought Joe’s was on Tenth Street.”
The man with the twisted shoulder snorted a laugh. He said: “It is.”
The car swung around Union Square, beating a red light, and jockeyed through Broadway traffic.
“What’s Joe’s last name?” Jules asked.
The man’s button eyes looked at him with no expression. “It won’t do no harm to tell you. It’s Catrini.”
Jules screwed down in his seat. The car slewed to a stop on a red light, the brakes snubbing its nose down. The motor purred and a faint odor of exhaust gas crept into the tonneau.
“Couldn’t we have a little more air?” Jules asked.
The man on his right leaned forward and cranked the door window tight shut. The left corner of his mouth lifted slightly. He put his right hand in his coat pocket. When the car sprang forward again he took it out with a snub-nosed revolver in it.
“I’m afraid you can’t have any more air,” he said.
He rested the gun across his left forearm so that the muzzle gaped at Jules’ stomach, and he cringed away from it, raising his right hand so that the palm interposed between the revolver and his abdomen.
“Don’t,” he whispered. “It might go off!”
The man snorted another monosyllabic laugh. He said: “It might.”
Traffic streaked past the windows and more buildings, flossier and expensive now. They swung east, then north, then swept up the ramp of Queensborough Bridge. The air sweetened, freshened by the water of the East River. It was filtering in from a ventilator in the car’s roof.
Jules’ eyes kept swinging back to the gun that was held carelessly cocked, the man’s finger on the trigger. He pressed his body back in the deep softness of the cushion, shoving his feet against the floor. The snout still was leveled at his belly. He leaned forward, his hands clasped about the neck of his guitar. In this way he interposed his elbow between the gun and his body.
His left hand slid down the strings; his fingers inveigled themselves into the round sounding hole just below them. His lips trembled still. His sidelong glances at the gun were furtive and frightened but there was hardness at the back of his eyes. The car slid off the bridge, turned south, then east again. Jules saw that the continuous backward glide of buildings was interspersed now with trees. Traffic thinned. The car’s speed picked up. Tremaine hunched forward over the guitar, fondling it. He swayed forward a little as the car slackened speed, but he was tensely braced when it swung around a corner and began to jounce over a rough road with long, heaving dives.
“Please uncock that gun,” Jules quavered, glancing again at the black mouth of the snub-nosed revolver. “This bouncing might make it go off!”
The man with the twisted shoulder lounged back in the seat and said nothing. He allowed his eyes to slide about and looked at Jules out of their corners. Tremaine caught a flash of the chauffeur’s white face in the small rear vision mirror above the windshield. He was grinning. The man beside Jules laughed outright, the knots of muscles on his jaws rippling.
The car swerved again and shoved its long snout up a narrow lane among trees. In fifty feet it was completely out of sight of the main road. The machine stopped and slowly turned around. The car was long. It took a lot of maneuvering. Jules’ hands gripped the guitar until they ached. He could feel the bite of the strings across his fingers. When the car pointed back the way it had come, the driver, a sly grin on his white face, leaned back and opened the right rear door.
“What... what are you going to do?” Jules babbled. His legs were tense under him. He lifted the guitar slightly from the floor, his left hand sliding down to the sound opening. His lips trembled and his shoulders cringed.
The man with the twisted shoulder swung his head slowly about. The corner of his mouth lifted. He spoke gently, unpleasant laughter lurking in his voice. “We think we’ve got a flat tire. We want you to get out and look at it.”
The chauffeur laughed aloud. Jules looked at him. The feverish eyes were mocking. He looked into the bony, grinning face of the man at his left. Neither of these two had a gun but both were looking at the gun in the hands of the man with the twisted shoulder. Jules looked at it, too.
“I don’t think the tire’s flat,” he said, in a pleading tone. “I didn’t hear anything like a flat tire.”
The man leaned towards him slightly, his button eyes flat, and the gun pointed unwaveringly at his stomach.
“This is a good car,” he said. “You wouldn’t be able to hear anything like a flat tire.”
Jules looked wide-eyed at the gun and opened his mouth and closed it again. He gulped and said: “All right.”
He got to his feet, crouching with his head against the low roof. He did not turn his back to the man but kept his eyes on the gun and lifted the guitar so that he held it crossways in his hands, the big end to his left. His left hand slipped the cord loose from its button at the base, then slid to the sound opening again and the first finger inserted itself in a ring there which could not be seen.
“All right,” he said again
He struck down with the guitar. Its base bonged on the wrist of the hand that held the gun. It discharged and the bullet tugged at Jules’ left trouser leg. In the same instant he leaped from the car and his right hand seized the inner handle of the door and slammed it shut as he whirled behind it.
Shouts and hoarse curses burst out in the car, slightly muffled by its heavy doors and the thick glass. Jules was sprinting on his toes at a diagonal from the back of the car, sprinting with his head back and his chest out. As he ran he counted slowly to himself: “Three — four — fi—”
Wind struck him from behind and hurled him face down on the earth. A twig jabbed his cheek and a muffled ripping concussion burst in his ears. For nearly five minutes Jules lay as he had fallen, the earth cold against his face; then slowly he thrust himself up from the ground, gravel biting his palms, his shoulders humped, his head sagging. He heaved to his knees, then reeled to his feet, steadied himself with one hand on a tree. He breathed deeply a half dozen times, shaking his head sharply; and then he stood erect and moved heavily around towards the car.