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.
He wondered. Still, there had been innumerable baffling crimes solved by leads much more absurd than this. The air-mail job. Well, the idea was there to stay. He couldn’t get rid of it.
He slept on it all night. Or tried to. Writing people and artists know how that is. You can’t tear those things out of you. They weigh you down like an anvil. Sometimes you can’t breathe comfortably. You think of it for hours and then very suddenly it comes, clear and clean, like big handwriting. All you have to do then is sit down and copy it.
Frost was like that. In the morning, it took definite form. It wasn’t nebulous any longer. That air-mail job hadn’t been an accident. It was premeditated. Everybody thought it was just one of those things that have to be a part of any new field of endeavor when man pits his brain and brawn against nature. But Jerry was willing to bet his life it had been premeditated.
Once, down south, when they were having a lot of fun with Salazar and Madero, a grizzled veteran had said, “Kid, when you get a hunch — ride it!” Well, that wasn’t always so easy. The odds were big. No matter if you had a strong body, the odds were big. But Jerry Frost had a hunch. And he was going to ride it.
It all depended on one thing, and he went out to see about that. He wasn’t the least bit surprised when he discovered the spot where the train had been held up was but a few hundred yards from Withers Field, the municipal airport. He had expected it.
He telephoned the Secret Service chief and the Jamestown chief and made the same request of both. It was for them to forget they had seen him.
Irrespective of the theories of the investigators, and their verdicts, Jerry was convinced the mail plane had been tampered with. To do that required cold nerve and daring that not every criminal possessed. Find the man who conceived that idea and you had the brains behind the train robbery. And he was a man who would need and who would have a sound knowledge of airplanes.
That afternoon he reported to the hangar of the Mid-West Air Transport Company at Withers Field with a letter of introduction to Captain Eads. An hour before Captain Eads had been telephoned that one Thomas Femrite, a name Jerry adopted for obvious reasons, was to be given employment as a mechanic and test pilot.
He knew, of course, that there was little chance of any of the bandits being at the Field now. But that flying field once had been the center of their operations. That wasn’t much to work on, but it was something. It was considerably more than anybody else had decided.
“Captain Eads?” Jerry asked.
A man seated at the inside desk turned and looked. Before him in the door stood a man six feet tall and as brown as a nut. He had long arms, long legs and good eyes. He looked every inch a flyer. There is something about a new man who comes to a flying field that compels attention. You immediately size him up and wonder how much stuff he’s got, and whether he’s going to be a heel or a good fellow, and whether or not he can fly. Captain Eads decided this lad would do.
“Mr. Femrite, reporting for duty.”
“Come in, Mr. Femrite. An old army man?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I thought so. What outfit?”
“The Forty-seventh.”
Captain Eads lifted his eyebrows. “Oh, yeah? Pretty good gang of crate-busters. The downtown office telephoned me about you. How many hours have you had?”
“Oh, six or seven thousand.”
“Whoosh! That’s plenty. Well, you’ve come to the right place if you’re a seven-thousand-hour man. We need men who can assemble motors and who aren’t afraid to fly those same motors. Know what I mean?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right. Red!”
An oily individual who escaped being a dwarf by a few inches shoved his auburn head through the door.
“Take Mr. Femrite around and make him acquainted. He’s going to work for us.”
Getting acquainted with the Mid-West crew was the work of but a few moments. Red was short, Jerry learned, for Fred Walker, and apart from him the only other veteran was Slimmer King. There were a couple of youngsters but they didn’t count. They hadn’t passed the prop-spinning stage.
Going over big was simple with Red and Slimmer. Jerry spoke their language. The kids were aloof, but after he had stunted one of the rickety Travelairs one afternoon, they warmed up and immediately made him a model.
Nor had his maneuvers hurt his prestige with the old-timers. Jerry had all but knocked the knob off St. Peter’s gate. That particular day he went crazy. What he didn’t do with that old bus hadn’t been invented.
“Gee, you looked great!” Red beamed. “But I thought once or twice we oughta kissed you good-bye before you left the ground.”
“Stop kidding, Red. I bet you can do things with a crate I’ve never thought of.”
“Naw,” Red confessed. “I ain’t much of a stunter. I can get ’em up there and get ’em down and that lets me out. I wasn’t born to kick no rudder bar. My head belongs in a motor.”
After that, things came easier for Jerry. The ice had been broken. He came to know something of the other fellows on the Field. He was particularly attracted to the bunch in the No. 6 hangar. They were commercial men.
He sensed a sort of rivalry between the Mid-West fellows and the bunch in No. 6. There was no particular reason for it, but he did. Ostensibly, they just about had the commercial business at the field sewed up. The Mid-West wasn’t in competition with them, yet they growled and glared every time Jerry got close. He spoke to Red about it.
“They’re just a gang of five-dollar-a-lick boys,” Red said. “Don’t pay them any attention. They haul passengers, but personally, I wouldn’t let one of ’em push me in a wheelbarrow. I just don’t crave their company.”
“There’s no reason for them to be sore at me,” Jerry said.
“That’s their way. They’re sore at everybody. The farther away from those guys you stay the better off you’ll be.”
But he had no intention of staying away. He was curious. So the next day, under the pretext of borrowing a porcelain, he invaded their hangar. He went up to the fellow who had been pointed out as Casey.
Casey gave him the porcelain. He was stocky and careless in his personal appearance, even for an airplane mechanic. “Where you come from, feller?”
“Oh, all over,” said Jerry.
“I saw you yesterday doing some fancy flying. Looked like you’d wobbled a stick before.”
“Yep — I’ve wobbled ’em before.”
“You a new air-mail pilot?”
“Nope, just a mechanic.”
“Well, there ain’t many mechanics can fly like that.”
“Oh, I dunno.”
“A guy like you is wasting his time meddling with spark plugs and pushing a gasoline truck over a flying field. You’d ought to get in the big money. Commercial stuff.”
“Sounds pretty good.”
“It is good.” Casey was positive. “Any guy what can bust clouds like you can is wasting his time drawing two hundred bucks a month. Interested?”
“Maybe. Much obliged for the porcelain.”
That night Captain Jerry Frost reported to the Adjutant-General by telephone. He reported that he had become established and that the outlook was promising and that something possibly would happen soon.
The Adjutant-General, still annoyed, retorted that something would happen soon — to the entire force. “They’re still raising hell,” he said bluntly. “Let me send you some help.”
“Now, listen,” said Jerry firmly. “Any outside interference will gum the whole works. You sit tight and stop worrying. And don’t send anybody! Forget all about it.”
The Adjutant-General grumblingly agreed, and then told himself he was glad Frost was on the job. If anybody could do it, Jerry could.