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.
“There’s the yawl! My Lawd, he’s scuttled her!”
Off to port, and not more than a hundred yards away, they saw the upper third of a mast sticking out of the water at a sharp angle.
“Water wasn’t as deep as he thought it was,” Bridges remarked. “H-m. Where’s the nearest river? He wouldn’t plan to go far on the open gulf in a dugout.”
Chuck Dean smoothed out the chart with shaking fingers.
“Nearest river from here is the Carti, about half a mile farther to the east.
“That must be the one. Cut over to port, cox’n, and head along the shore. Well, boys, it won’t be long now.”
VIII
Heading east they came shortly to an area of muddy water which told them they were at the mouth of the Carti. They found a break in the dense jungle which lined the shore and headed into it. The river here was a good two hundred yards wide and the current barely noticeable.
“Heah’s where we’ll pick up on him,” Chuck Dean said tensely. “He can’t make time in that cayuco.”
Half an hour later they ran, without warning, onto their first sandbar.
“All out but the cox’n!” McMain cried.
The three men leaped into the knee-deep water and hauled the dory astern until she was clear.
“Reckon we better take to the dugout?” Chuck Dean asked.
“Not yet,” McMain returned. “Try it to port, cox’n. The channel seems to be that way.”
During the next half hour, while the river grew steadily more narrow and shallow, they went aground three times. McMain finally gave up.
“We can’t waste any more time with the dory. Cox’n, stay here till we come back.”
The boy’s jaw dropped. “How long might that be, sir?”
“It might be all winter,” McMain snapped. “But it will probably be less than twenty-four hours. You have emergency rations. Put out a light tonight as soon as it’s dark and keep your eye peeled for us.”
As they stowed a box of rations and the rifle in the dugout, McMain said briefly: “We have eight hours of daylight left. Once it’s dark, we can consider that he has slipped us for good.”
They wasted no more time in talk. They got into the narrow dugout, took up their paddles and bent their backs to the task ahead. Within five minutes they had settled into a smooth rhythmic pace that shot them swiftly up the swollen river.
Within a half mile after leaving the dory the three men were hauling their dugout over a short and rocky rapid. Above the rapid they found a quarter-mile stretch of river which ran deep and swift. It was all they could do to make headway against it.
And then Bridges, in the bow, raised his paddle and pointed to a sandbar in the middle of the river. They all saw the footprints there: the large prints of a man and the small prints of a woman. No one said anything.
But McMain hitched his .45 forward.
The three men toiled onward, doggedly, in silence, paddling the deep stretches, dragging the frail dugout through or around the rapids. They worked feverishly, rain and sweat streaming from their faces.
And then abruptly, unexpectedly, the chase was over. They rounded a bend, paddling in deep water. They saw Clark and Billie Dean standing beside their canoe at the foot of a rapid less than thirty feet away.
McMain’s hand leaped to his Colt. Bridges reached for the rifle. But Benson Clark waved his empty hands and called, with a laugh:
“Put your guns away, gentlemen. I know when I’m licked.”
McMain’s hand did not leave his automatic. He sensed there was something wrong with the picture. It wasn’t normal for a man in Clark’s position to give in without a struggle. The Federal man must have felt the same way about the situation, for he kept his rifle ready and did not again pick up his paddle.
Only Chuck Dean, with a stricken, hurt look in his eyes, kept paddling towards the other cayuco. Benson Clark said:
“I see you don’t believe me.” He turned to Billie Dean, who, in a torn yellow slicker a dozen sizes too large for her, stood knee-deep in the water. “Billie, take the gun out of my holster and toss it in the river.”
With a weary sigh, without looking at the approaching men, Billie pulled the revolver from the holster at Clark’s hip and tossed it in the rushing water.
“You’d never have got us,” Clark said cheerfully, “if I hadn’t stove this damned cayuco on a rock.”
They saw then that the dugout was half full of water and was afloat only by virtue of the buoyant wood of which it was made.
“Hold the boat steady, boys,” Bridges ordered crisply.
He stepped out into the water. Producing a pair of handcuffs, he slipped them over Clark’s wrists. He searched the prisoner with practiced hands. Then he jerked his head towards the dugout.
“In you go, Clark. Into the bow. You too, Miss Dean. Into the stern.”
Then he grinned at McMain, as much as to say, “Well, that’s that.”
But McMain’s hand remained on his gun. He felt no sense of triumph. For there was Billie Dean, haggard, bedraggled, ready to drop with weariness — her part in the drama still unexplained.
And he felt no sense of security. For there was Clark, tired but debonair, and smiling! Taking it all as a joke, though he knew he must go back to Colón and stand trial for murder.
It had been too easy. Much, much too easy.
IX
They started down the river in the storm, five of them in a dugout built for three. Benson Clark, handcuffed, sat in the bow; Bridges behind him; then Chuck Dean and Billie, with McMain in the stern. They paddled in silence.
Billie, finally, turned and looked up at McMain. Her dark hair was wild and matted. Her gray eyes were tired, lifeless, her cheeks sunken. She spoke so quietly that McMain alone caught the words.
“Aren’t you ever goin’ to smile at me again?”
Her voice was husky and provocative, but McMain kept his eyes straight ahead. He didn’t want to talk. He was too tired to talk. He felt empty and torn by strife.
“You haven’t even so much as looked at me since you caught us,” Billie pointed out. And then added querulously: “Cain’t you even speak to me?”
At that moment Clark, though he could not have heard the conversation in the stern of the long dugout, turned and said:
“Look here, you people! You might as well get this straight right now. Billie Dean is in the clear on this job.”
No one said anything. Clark wheeled further, glaring at Bridges.
“Steady, you damned fool!” the Federal man snapped. “Do you want to capsize us?”
Clark laughed hollowly. “I wouldn’t mind,” he retorted. “What’ve I got to lose?...Billie, tell them how you happen to be with me.”
“Go ahead, Miss Dean,” Bridges urged. “It’ll help kill time. Besides which, I am very much interested.”
“This gentleman is Mistah Bridges, Billie,” Chuck Dean explained. “He’s chief operative for the Department of Justice in Panama.”
Sighing, the girl leaned back against McMain’s knees.
“Clark told me at the dance last night that he was a Secret Service operative. He showed me credentials that certainly looked genuine and I had no reason for disbelievin’ him.”
“Didn’t it strike you as odd that a Secret Service man would tell you his business?” Bridges asked skeptically.
“Odd?” Her voice was contained, slightly belligerent. “After all, when a man asks a woman to marry him, doesn’t he usually tell her his occupation?”
“Sorry,” Bridges said, without sounding at all sorry. “Hadn’t realized he’d gone that far.”