The Deep
- Автор: Спиллейн Микки
- Год: 1961
- Язык: английский
- Год: E. P. Dutton & Company
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Deep». Краткое содержание книги:
Deep was back in town after a twenty-five year exile — to inherit an empire and avenge a death. He and Bennett had made the inheritance pact when they were kids — blood brothers in crime. They had known then that even New York was too small for them both to share, and so they had tossed a coin to determine who would stay and who would build his organization in another town. Deep had lost and gone.
But now Bennett has lost — been murdered in his own home — and Deep is ready to prove lie is strong enough to take over. Deep wants Bennett’s killer; the others want Bennett’s job. And all too many of them — including the beautiful Irish — want Deep dead.
The Deep is the mastermind in one of the most exciting stories Spillane has ever written — a breathtaking tale of violence in action.
They never quite reached us. They stopped when they heard the squad cars and being pros, knew the score. They scrambled for a way out, knew that the cops would have that end covered too.
We huddled there in the pale light that drifted out of the coal bin, heard the cops smash their way in and listened while the shooting started again. They were pros up there and were going as far as they could because there was nothing else to lose. On the top floor were three dead men and the wheel would turn on all of them because of it. All they could do now was take out their hate on society until they were dead or their bullets were gone and hope they died first because the death the law prescribed was, in reality, more horrible than dying with a cop’s bullet in your gut.
Helen said, “Deep...?”
“I didn’t lay a gun on anybody,” I said.
Her hand felt for my face, found it and pulled it down to hers. Her mouth was cold and I could feel her tremble under my hands.
“Please, Deep... I don’t understand.”
“Look...”
“Hugh Peddle came. He made me tell him what you had said.”
I squeezed her shoulder. “I know what he did.”
“He thought I knew.”
“He was wrong.”
A riot gun roared into the night, tearing things apart. Whistles shrilled and somebody shouted orders directly above us. More sirens were coming in now, surrounding the block. Like an air raid, I thought. Death a few feet away. You huddle together in a dungeon of a cellar and listened to death upstairs.
I said, “I called Roscoe. He should be watching this. It’ll make quite a story.”
“But... he hates you.”
“He hated everybody, kitten.”
She felt the change in my voice. “What do you mean?”
“Tell me, were you engaged to Bennett?”
Helen pushed back, stared at me, her eyes searching for my meaning. One side of her face was all swollen, but she was still beautiful. “No, Deep,” she said. “He asked me, but I told him no. You know what I was trying to do.”
“He didn’t know that, kid. He thought he had you. He was going to let all the boys in on the big secret that he was going to ask you to marry him.”
“But how could he...”
I interrupted. “He never grew up. Remember... he still thought like back in the old K.O. days. To him, if you stayed close, you were his.”
“He was mad! I never...”
“Did you tell Roscoe he asked you that?”
“Well, yes, I did, but...”
The firing grew more intense. A section of ceiling powdered and came down like snow around us.
Very slowly, almost dreamlike, Helen turned and looked up at me. Her eyes were large, dark. She caught my intimation but couldn’t believe it. “Not Roscoe,” she said.
“Your half brother.”
She put the seal on it herself. “No... he was my father’s stepson, thanks to an earlier marriage. He really wasn’t my brother at all.”
The last seal. It was done.
I said, “He was always in love with you.”
“Oh, no.” Her face buried itself against my chest and I knew I had to tell her then.
“It was Roscoe, kitten. It was bad enough he hated all of us, but long ago I had you and he knew it. He wanted you himself and because I had you it warped his whole life. He didn’t stay here for any reason other than to direct his hate at the things that took you away from him.
“Me, I was long gone. Psychos learn to redirect their hatred and you even helped. He could take almost anybody, but never me or Bennett. When Bennett proposed to you he flipped. He really flipped. It was like having me there again. It was the old days. He went all the way back to the crazy hatred of the old days.”
She still couldn’t understand. It was too big for her.
“He went nuts, sugar. Roscoe went absolutely nuts. All he could do was think of how he could kill Bennett and he reverted to those old days himself. He had no gun but knew where we used to keep them. He got down here and opened the arsenal and found a zip.
“You know, if the gun hadn’t been there he might have come back to normal. He might have realized what he was about to do, but there was still a couple of pieces and some ammo in the old spot behind the shelves and he pulled one out and loaded up.
“Bennett was killed at night. Early. Not a normal hour for a kill at all. It was before ten when most pros haven’t started out yet. Roscoe went up there, popped Bennett who was waiting for Dixie, ran for it and passed the alley where Bennett had run. See... he hadn’t killed Bennett. When he knew Bennett followed him he had been running toward his own sanctuary... Hymie’s deli, which was still open. The thought that anybody would connect them scared him and in that frenzy all psychos get, did the impossible... carried Bennett back to his apartment and dropped him.”
I nodded.
“That’s what happened. He was out of his mind. He was a full-fledged madman. He was something else, too. He was a catalyst. He did something terrible to the world he lived in. He ousted Bennett but reintroduced me. He started things happening, instituted forces he never thought existed, and in his madness, never gave a true thought to what he had done.”
Somebody opened up with a Thompson upstairs. There was another scream. They were firing from the full perimeter of the building now and the sound of guns and cars and voices was a cacophony of sound that made music perfectly suited to the city. It was a moment of moments.
“He was a madman at the first kill,” I said. “Not the second.”
“What?” Her voice sounded small.
“Roscoe killed Tally, Irish.”
“He... no!”
But she knew I was right. “He wasn’t mad the second time around. He knew what he was doing then. I scared him when I told him that Tally spat on his corpse. I scared hell out of him when he heard about Pedro bone-picking. All he thought was that they had seen him run by, or perhaps pack the body back. He got to Tally with the only weapon he had at hand — a bottle. He nearly killed me with the same thing.
“That’s what I overlooked. It was a simple kill to begin with. An amateur kill. Only the prize involved was so big I gave other people credit for smoking up the trail. It would have been worth the try.”
She said, “But Tally...”
“He wasn’t a madman then, kid. He was covering his tracks. I’ll give you odds that before long a small Mexican named Pedro will turn up dead someplace with his head squashed in or his throat cut. Roscoe knows the turf. He could run anybody down he wanted to. He’s as worldly-wise as I am and playing it just as cute and now his back is to the wall.”
From the darkness of the coal pit Roscoe said, “Not all that far, Deep.”
We couldn’t quite see him, but we could hear the madness in his voice. Out of the shadows his hand protruded and in it was a gun if you could call it that, and that you had to because it had already killed two people. Long ago Bennett had killed Spanish John with it and not too long ago Roscoe had killed Bennett with it and now there was another bullet left and it was going to be in me. I had to come first because when I was done it would be an easy job to handle Helen and not too hard to explain away the kill, especially when you were a madman and knew the ropes too.
He stayed right there, the gun leveled at my head with a strange, deadly precision that most amateurs don’t ever attain but a madman might.
There was death all around us now. Upstairs the hammering had slowed, become intermittent, then suddenly stopped. There were feet pounding up the stairs... voices shouting back and forth, counting the dead.
It had to come.
It came very close by too.
Somebody had found the door that led to the old cellar club.