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.
A firm hand hauled him up. A hoarse voice said: “Stop resting, feller. I’ve got a car waiting.”
Together, they dashed around the dark bulk of the station, dived into the lone car waiting in the dreary street beyond. The taxi began to move. There was only one other car in sight, its tail light rapidly diminishing. Ben Todd said: “Sarah! That poor girl! How—?”
Sarah lifted her black gloved hands. She crooked the fingers suggestively. She said: “This is the way it happened, Bennie.”
“God!” breathed Ben Todd. “Strangled! Sarah, what in the name of hell are we going to do now?”
“We’re going to keep quiet if you know what’s good for you,” said Sarah, with a glance at the driver’s back. “This is no place to discuss—”
Sarah broke off and leaned toward the driver. She said:
“This flying field, young man. It is the only one hereabouts? You’re sure? Good! Now, listen, young feller, a lot depends on this. You sure there ain’t a single solitary private plane to rent at that field, for love nor money?”
The taxi driver kept his head over the wheel and nodded. They were making speed. The tail light of the single car ahead was growing larger.
Sarah said: “Then you’re damn sure, young man, that there ain’t a plane of any kind or description flying out of this place until the regular passenger plane comes through at four a.m. and takes off again?”
The driver nodded. He said, “You can stake your life on it.”
“Maybe I am,” said Sarah, quietly, and leaned back against the cushions.
Ben Todd spent the next ten flying minutes hunched in his corner, staring at Sarah Watson’s rugged profile, which looked white in the flash of occasional street lamps, dark and brooding in the intervals between.
The taxi swerved on to a dirt road, bumped to a stop in front of a fenced field. There was a gate in the fence, and beyond the fence, a square, boxlike structure.
Ben Todd reached for the door handle on his side of the car. Sarah gripped his arm. She said: “Wait!”
The man standing just inside the gate of the flying field moved on, passed into shadows, emerged again and walked through the door of the square building beyond the gate.
Sarah said: “All right, now,” thrust a crumpled bill into their driver’s hand and got out. They passed through the gate and halted, Sarah’s fingers digging into Ben Todd’s arm, in their ears, the diminishing sound of the car they had come in. Sarah Watson said: “We’ve got about fifteen minutes to wait, if the plane’s on time. Don’t spend any of ’em in the light, Ben Todd, and don’t go near that waiting room, until the last minute, and then get our tickets. If you can change your appearance any while you’re hanging around in the dark, do it. And give me your valise. I need the duds in it.”
“Sarah!” Ben Todd’s voice sounded as though rust had attacked his vocal chords. “Sarah, you’re not going to try to get into my clothes? They won’t fit you and you couldn’t get away with it anyway, old girl. Listen! I’d do anything to get you clear of this terrible thing, Sarah, but...”
“Idiot! Give me that bag. Remember, keep out of sight ’til the last minute. I’ll meet you just before the plane leaves the ground.”
Sarah Watson grabbed Ben Todd’s valise from his nerveless hand and strode away and was lost in the shadows at the far side of the field.
Ben Todd located the spot where the plane would settle down to discharge and admit passengers. Thereafter, he skulked in shadows, his forehead beaded with perspiration in spite of the cool wind of approaching dawn. Once or twice, he thought he saw the dark bulk of Sarah’s figure melt into the darker bulk of the shadowed side of the waiting room structure. Several times, he was sure he saw a flashlight darting there, close to the ground. Then, the distant drone of a big plane came to his ears and he lifted anxious eyes. The stars were fading out and gray was washing into the ceiling above him.
Like a monstrous, murmuring white bird, the plane rested in the white path of the runway. The trim stewardess stood at one side of the rear door, the collar-ad co-pilot at the other side, watch in hand. Faces peered out of the windows of the plane, waiting.
The co-pilot snapped his watch shut, grinned at the stewardess, put his foot on the first of the two little steps up to the plane’s door.
A woman ran out from behind the waiting room, carrying a man’s valise in one hand, a yellow cardboard suitcase in the other. An enveloping, bright yellow rain coat flapped as she ran. The bags smacked against her thighs as she came on.
She slowed. She lifted the hand with the valise in it and straightened the exotic creation of black velvet and nodding violets which had slid forward off her grey hair and was threatening to blind her. She came to a full stop, set the valise down, and adjusted the polka-dotted veil which hung from the hat, drawing it well down and over her prominent chin.
A long legged young man shot out from the waiting room door and joined her. She thrust the bags into his hands.
“Here,” she said. “You handle it. Tell ’em we know the suitcase weighs too much, but your valise don’t weigh anything, because it’s empty now. Tell ’em to divide the weight of the suitcase between us, because we’re travelling together. Don’t bollix it, feller. It’s important—”
Sarah Watson charged on, thrust a ticket under the co-pilot’s handsome nose and entered the plane. She went in with no more sound than the rattling of her stiff yellow raincoat, and she took a seat at the rear.
The seats were brown leather, four seats on each side of the aisle. A man and woman sat on one side, rather white and tense. In front of them, an elderly gentleman, evidently a person of means, read a book.
On the other side, Ben Todd sat in the last seat, with his back against a walled-off cubicle labelled “Stewardess.” In front of him, sat Sarah Watson. In the front seat on that side of the aisle, just behind the glass partition which separated the passengers from the pilots, a man sat. All that was visible of the man from the rear was a section of dark hair and a soft felt hat.
The plane soared. The squares of dark and light on the earth beneath grew smaller, then began to take form in the growing light. Here and there, sunlight glinted on a steeple.
Sarah Watson turned in her seat. Ben Todd leaned forward. Sarah said, through her veiclass="underline" “Well, we made it. But I can’t say I think much of your ideas of disguise. Any fool can turn up his coat collar and pull down his hat. Couldn’t you have rustled a false mustache or something, Bennie? Not that it matters now. We’re on and nobody can get off this thing until—”
“Sarah, listen! You can’t get away with it, old girl! The cops will be waiting for you at the next stop.”
“Waiting for me?” Sarah thrust her proboscis close to Ben’s. “Waiting for me? Ben Todd, do you mean to say you’ve been thinking that I... do you mean to say that you’ve been thinking that poor girl is dead because I—?”
Ben Todd stared into the eyes behind Sarah’s dotted veil. For a long time, neither of them moved, except to sway slightly with the swaying of the plane. Ben Todd said, slowly: “I’ve been a damn fool, old girl. But you’ve got to admit you acted like you had something damn unpleasant to run away from.”
“Not from,” said Sarah, hoarsely. “After! Look ahead, Bennie. Ain’t there something familiar about the back of that head?”
Ben Todd stared at the dark hair resting on the leather cushions of the seat up the aisle. He stared at the soft felt hat on top of the hair. Presently, Ben Todd said, very quietly:
“Wart face!”