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.
“He don’t,” admitted O’Reilly. “He belongs in a nice comfortable chair, wired for electricity.”
“All men are alike,” said Sarah. “They jump to conclusions. Just because Eddie left a dead man in his kitchen and just because Eddie’s fingerprints showed he’d been in jail... Listen, O’Reilly. Anybody could have shot that man. I could have shot him.”
“You!” O’Reilly laughed. “You couldn’t hit a clay pigeon in a shooting gallery, woman.”
“No, but men make better targets than clay pigeons — bigger targets, I mean. Now, O’Reilly, you can let me off at this next corner. I’ve got to...”
“I’m taking you right to your door, Sarah Watson. You’re tired, woman, hanging around with a bunch of cops all afternoon. It must have been a shock to you, too, woman, when you came on that dead body in Chariot’s kitchen.”
“It would have been a greater shock if the body hadn’t been dead. You slow up, O’Reilly. Stop at the next corner. Stop, I say! Let me off here. I’ve got to...”
The car swept past the corner with Sarah grabbing the door handle beside her. It swung into Sarah’s street, slid halfway down the block. O’Reilly shouted:
“Glory be! Look what’s out in front of your door, Sarah Watson. Look! Your car!”
“Stop!” Sarah shouted. “Don’t run into it. My car! What a coincidence! O’Reilly, I told you that Eddie Danville wasn’t all bad. Maybe he stole my car to make a getaway in, but he found my name and address in it, and left it here for me, before he went wherever he was going...”
O’Reilly put on the brakes. He turned slowly in his seat and stared hard at Sarah.
“Woman, I’m beginning to understand why you were so anxious to stop at that corner...”
Ben Todd poked his head out of the open rear window and twisted his neck to look up.
“Sarah,” he yelled, “somebody’s in your flat. There’s a light...”
“Of course there’s a light,” Sarah agreed. “There’s always a light. You know that, Ben Todd, you crazy squirt. You know I always turn a light on in the morning, so I won’t have to come home to a dark place. You know... O’Reilly, turn this car around!”
O’Reilly did not stir. His black brows were gathered, his eyes glaring at Sarah’s craggy countenance.
“Woman,” he began, but choked suddenly, as Sarah reached across him, put one foot on the starter, and kicked his shins viciously in an effort to put her other foot on the clutch.
“Woman,” O’Reilly repeated, giving her a dig with his elbow which sent her bouncing back to her own side. “I’m taking you to that corner, but if you was a man, I’d...”
The car whirled into a U-turn and sped back toward the corner.
“Thank you, Sergeant. I have to stop at the corner to buy milk. I’ve got a new cat in my flat.”
Sarah Watson sat on the edge of her bed. The bed was in a cubbyhole between the front room and the rear room of her railroad flat. The window of the cubbyhole looked out on a dark, narrow air-shaft. Both doors of the cubbyhole were closed.
On a straight chair, facing the bed, sat Char-lot, whose real name was Eddie Danville. He was still in trousers and undershirt and his face was whiter, if possible, than it had been when Sarah first saw it.
“Now, Eddie, we’re safe here for a few minutes,” Sarah began. “I’ve got a premonition there will be a big mick cop stamping through the premises soon. Let’s have them now, Eddie, the names I’ve been waiting all afternoon to hear.”
Eddie Danville looked around the room. He wet his lips and whispered:
“One of ’em was named Jake.”
“Jake what?”
“Jake. That’s all I know.”
“Jake! There are ten thousand Jakes. What was the other one’s name. Come now, Eddie. Hurry!”
“Tony. That’s all I know. Tony.”
“You’re a big help. Tony! Ten thousand Tonys! Wait a minute... that man with the scar who died in your kitchen... you ever see him before this time?”
“No.”
“His name was Chinny Downs. A killer, according to the cops. Now, Eddie. We know that Chinny Downs was mixed up with Jake and Tony somehow, because he came to your place to do their dirty work for them, and get you before the cops got you. If we could find out who else Chinny Downs was mixed up with... Drat it! There’s the bell! Remember what I told you, Eddie, about the fire escape...”
The bell in Sarah’s kitchen went on ringing. It rang furiously, first in frenzied spurts, then long, loud, and insistently. Presently, Sarah swished into the kitchen, silencing the bell by the simple method of jabbing a button in the kitchen wall. As she jabbed, her eyes roved over the kitchen. Suddenly, she ceased jabbing, dashed to the table, grabbed one of the two used coffee cups there, rinsed it and set it back in the cupboard. A moment later, she was at the door which opened from her parlor to the main hall.
“Sergeant,” she greeted the man puffing up the last flight, “why, I never expected to see you...”
Sergeant O’Reilly did not answer. He came on up the stairs, rounded the banister, pushed past Sarah, strode into the little parlor, strode into the cubbyhole bedroom, peered under the bed, jerked open a closet door, yanked at a yellow rubber raincoat and some dangling black garments, then strode back into the kitchen.
“What is this? A raid?” Sarah asked.
“You know what it is. Where is he?”
“Where’s who?”
“Chariot. Eddie Danville.”
“Heavens, O’Reilly! You don’t mean you think that jail bird... that... er... murderer... is here?”
“You know I think he’s here and you know why. Ten thousand dollars is why, Sarah Watson. You’d do anything for ten thousand.” His eyes shifted to the window. “What’s that outside that window? Glory be! She’s got him on the fire escape!”
O’Reilly dashed to the kitchen window, his gun ready. The shade flew up revealing a dark form on the fire escape.
“Don’t shoot, Sergeant,” the fellow pleaded. “It’s Ben Todd. I’m here for the same reason you are. I came back because I got a hunch the old gal was up to something...”
Ben Todd jumped down into the kitchen. Sarah Watson stepped between him and O’Reilly, her hands on her broad hips, her bristling brows tied in a knot.
“O’Reilly,” she said, hoarsely, “I might have expected this from you, but you, Ben Todd...” She whirled on the long-legged, red headed young man standing just inside the open window. “You, you young addlepate. Who do you think you’re working for, anyway? Me, or O’Reilly?”
“I’m working for you, Sarah.”
“Not any more, you ain’t.”
“I’m working for you, Sarah, and when I got a hunch that jail bird might be here with you... Well, I just had to come back to protect you, old girl.”
“Any time I need protection from any man, I’ll ask for it! Now, git! No, you stay, Ben Todd. You and me are going to have a talk. O’Reilly, you git! And next time you come here to go through my personal belongings and look under my bed, you bring a search warrant.”
The door banged on O’Reilly’s broad back. Before the echoes died away, Sarah was at her front window, peering down. A few moments later, she returned to the kitchen.
“Now,” she said to the young man sitting on the window sill, “we can talk, Ben Todd. We can talk about what’s going to become of you, poor soul, now that you’re out of a job.”
Ben Todd grinned. He twisted about on the window sill, reached out a long arm, and dragged into the kitchen a white-faced young man in undershirt and dark pants.
“Sarah,” Ben chuckled, “what do you think would have become of you, poor soul, if I hadn’t been out on that fire escape to create a little diversion for Sergeant O’Reilly?”