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.
The K.O.’s.
Us.
Remember us? We were the big ones.
Time again, the one factor that enveloped us all. There was so much of it. He could shoot me and club her to death. No trouble. It would stick. He was smart. He could do it, explain it off and get a story out of it afterwards. I thought of all the ways he could do it and knew how easy it would be.
She said, “No matter. It’s over now, isn’t it?”
Back there in the darkness I knew he was ready. The gun was small, but the tube of it was something I could look into. I could even imagine the deadly little .22 nestling there ready to puncture my skull the way Bennett had designed it to, knew the chances of a misfire were as remote as missing your head with a hat. The little man was crazy cool and had already thought out the answers and I was his only obstacle left.
There were only seconds more and we all knew it and Helen squeezed my forearm not really knowing what to do, the pure love she felt wanting to throw herself in the line of fire, but holding back because I pushed her back and let Roscoe play it all the way out.
“You’re dead, Deep.”
His voice sounded strained when he said, “The end of the trolley ride, Deep.”
“Is it?”
“You’re like all the rest. You paid your nickel, you get the ride.”
“I guess you heard what I said.”
“I heard it all.”
“You’re nuts, Roscoe.”
“Let’s say I was. As you stated, now I’m protecting myself.”
“You’re still nuts.”
“No more.”
“Sure you are, small man. You forgot the big point.”
He paused, then. “Go on.”
“The trolley ride.”
“So.”
“It’s my nickel. I can get off wherever I please. Remember your simile of the trolley?”
And he did. Like the amateur he was he came screaming through the door with the same gun he had killed Bennett with only this time it was for me and while Helen was screaming with a partial realization of what was happening I drew and fired and shot Roscoe Tate through the right eye and his brains spattered all over the clubhouse walls.
He seemed terribly shrunken in death, a little guy who had nursed a big hatred for those for whom he’d held a big envy too long. It wasn’t the bullet that killed him. It was The Street. He had been killed a long time ago and never knew it.
Roscoe Tate had died when he tasted fear, and instead of spitting it out like the rest of us, forced himself to swallow it. He was killed when he let a revengeful satisfaction chain him to The Street and twist his guts until the explosion came.
Helen’s hands were pressed against her mouth, near hysteria making the cords in her neck stand out like wires, pressing her face out of shape until her face had an animal look. Blood squirted suddenly from her lips, staining her teeth a bright crimson.
But she wasn’t looking at the mess on the floor. She was looking at me.
There were more police whistles blowing upstairs. More voices and ominous sounds. Somebody threw the door open and a splash of light beamed down into our cavern, searching, yet reluctant to press the issue.
They knew where we were!
“You had to do it,” she said. “You had to do it!”
I frowned at her, looked at the gun in my hand and slammed it back into the holster.
“Helen...”
Eyes that hysteria had held wide too long suddenly washed themselves with tears and she dropped her hands to her sides in abject helplessness. Her lip was swollen from where she had bitten it and very softly a sob caught in her chest.
“You had to go and kill him, Deep. Why?”
“Helen...”
I could barely hear her voice. “Why didn’t you kill me, Deep? It would have been easier that way.” I tried to stop her, but she went on. “You killed him, but you should have killed me. In a way you really did anyway.”
“Please, Helen.”
She shook her head, the futility of the whole tragic moment caught in a single gesture. “What is there to say, Deep? I had to go and love you. I had to fall crazy in love with you. I should have known. All this senseless disregard for life and peace and happiness was part of me in the beginning too... but I got away from it. I hated it. I never wanted any part of it... I even tried to stop it. Then I came back because of you.”
She stopped me with a wave of her hand when I went to speak. “It’s no good, Deep. It’s over now. I would have waited for you forever if I had to. You were my man. You knew that, didn’t you?”
I nodded silently.
Her eyes were bright with tears and she touched my face. “I didn’t care what you did. I didn’t care what you were wherever you came from because you were mine and I was yours and when it was done we would be together, even if it was for a little while and we were very, very old.”
I said, “I didn’t come from so far away, Helen. Not in distance. Just in time.”
She listened, but didn’t truly hear. “But you spoiled it, Deep,” she told me. “You committed the one crime there’s no turning back on. You did the one thing you said you wouldn’t do. You threw all our love and our promises to the wind when you killed him.”
The tears spilled from her eyes, shining wetly against her cheeks. “If you could have been... just anybody...” she hesitated a second before she spoke... “it wouldn’t mean anything. It wouldn’t be so bad. But when you’re part of something like... all this...” she stopped, sobbed and pressed her hand to her mouth again.
You could hear them coming down the stairs now, being very careful.
“... then it’s over. There’s only death now. You committed the one crime there’s no turning back on. There’s no possible defense. You’re one of them, Deep, and when any one of them kills, the law kills back.
“And now the law is going to take you and when you die, I’ll die too. That’s what you did. In one second you threw away everything we ever had. You should have let him kill you. You did anyway. You should have let him.”
A voice called for a riot gun and there was a shuffling on the stairs. Others were standing by, ready to fire and step by step they started down.
I said, “Helen... I love you.”
She smiled, sadly, her eyes a little cloudy with tears that had a bitter sting. “I know,” she said, “and now it’s too late. There isn’t even any hope left and we had so much. So very much.”
Behind us they reached the bottom of the stairs.
Then I grinned, real big, and in a brief moment she knew that because years ago two kids had decided to split the world between them didn’t mean that both of them had to keep the pact and that somewhere along the line the worse one had found out that to hop off the trolley wasn’t the way to abandon hope. In that one brief second she knew the reasons and the answers for a lot of things.
They were there, guns out, all of them. Sergeant Hurd in front with the riot gun and the rest with service revolvers. There was only a second left now.
In that one scant second, that tiny particle of time, she had a glimpse of that flash of gold pinned to the wallet I held in my hand when they all came up behind us and lowered the guns and knew. She knew.
Sergeant Hurd said, in a tired command voice, “Nice going, Lieutenant.”