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.
The rumble increased to a roar, filled the air with a howl of sound, snuffed out the metallic clang of the clock’s second note. The screaming drone of wind through wires.
Eyes snapped upward.
Then it came.
Sweeping in low over the Municipal building hurtled a black shadow — a low wing, streamline racing monoplane. It banked sharply as though to give its pilot a view of the square below him, then disappeared behind the Woolworth building.
The watchers stood petrified.
Once more the black ship swung into their range of vision, lower this time, banked, and circled the cramped area like a hovering eagle.
No one moved.
Suddenly the pilot pulled his somber-hued bus into a steep zoom above the Municipal Building, fluttered up into a graceful reversement and hurled his crate across the plaza again directly at the grey Woolworth tower. Swooping down he pulled the screaming ship up into a sharp inside loop that almost scraped the walls and reached its apex directly above the huddled group on the steps.
As it hung there for an instant, upside down, a black shape dropped like a plummet from the auxiliary cockpit. The pilot brought his plane out of the loop and scudded out of sight toward the south.
The black object fell writhing. A flutter of black sprang from it, mushroomed out, breaking the swift descent with a jerk.
“A parachute!”
The cry broke like a single word from the lips of the stunned watchers, a moan of mingled surprise and relief.
The thud, thud of running feet as the nucleus of a crowd closed in.
Slowly, silently the ’chute floated down through the windless dusk, the figure suspended beneath it swinging back and forth in an ever-lessening arc.
The group on the steps scattered from beneath it.
A flash of sudden enlightenment burst upon the district attorney. His cry split the silence like the shrill of a siren.
“Burke!”
The kidnaper had kept his word.
A ragged cheer rose. It changed to a gasp of horror, an instant later, as the ’chute deposited its burden with a dull crash on the stone plaza and its black silken folds crumpled slowly over it.
There it lay in a huddled heap, unmoving.
The D.A. sprang toward it, followed closely by his men. Hands tore eagerly at the enveloping silk. A cordon of police appeared as if from nowhere to hold back the milling crowd.
Dizzy Malone stood unnoticed in the excitement, watching slit-eyed.
The black silk came away disclosing the still figure of a man crumpled on the pavement.
It was Burke, district attorney of the city of Chicago.
“He’s stunned by the fall!” Louden cried. “Broken bones, maybe! Call an ambulance!”
Mitchell bent over the huddled body, fingers probing deftly.
He straightened up again.
“No need,” he said, simply. “Burke is dead — hung.”
A spasm of rage swept him. He shook his fists at the sky overhead and cursed the vanishing plane and its pilot with blasting, withering oaths.
“Hung him, the carrion!” he shrilled. “Burke was alive when he dropped. His body’s still warm. The parachute was attached to a noose around his neck. When it opened it hung him — hung him by the neck until he was dead!”
He covered his face with his hands.
An examination of the corpse proved that he was right.
It was a clever job and timed to the second.
The shrouds of the ’chute had been fastened to a rope which ended in a noose. The noose circled the dead man’s neck, a knot like a hangman’s protruding from beneath one ear. His hands were wired together.
When the plane went into a loop and hung there bottom side up, the man had been catapulted downward from his seat. The ’chute opened automatically and snapped his neck with the dispatch of a hangman’s sprung trap.
An ambulance jangled up.
From Centre Street came the roar of a motorcycle. A police-runner elbowed his way to the district attorney.
“Flash from Van Cortlandt Park, Chief. At 7:55, a black plane swooped down over the parade ground and scooped up the basket with the ransom. Got into the air again before anyone could get near him.”
The D.A.’s big shoulders drooped.
“And then he got wise to how we’d tried to frame him,” the big man mumbled. “Poor Burke. My God! Oh, my God!”
His shoulders quivered spasmodically.
In the confusion, Dizzy Malone edged her way in until she stood beside him.
Her words dripped across his numbed mind — measured, stinging, calculated to cut with the bite of a steel-tipped lash.
“Yes, hung by the neck until he was dead — like he hung Baldy Ross on a frame-up!” The voice went on, its words searing themselves across the district attorney’s soul. “And remember, big boy, you sealed the death warrant that sent the Kid to the Big House to fry!”
Chapter II
The Moll Pays a Visit
Dizzy Malone nodded her way between the huddle of tables that shouldered each other for space around the El Dorado’s gleaming dance floor. With a crooked grin and a toss of her smoothly-waved blonde hair she dismissed half a dozen offers of parking space at as many tables.
She wanted to be alone — to think — and it was in the strident, blaring heart of a night club that her mind worked best. About her beat waves of flesh-tingling, erotic sounds — rising and falling rhythmically from brazen throats, from tense, stretched strings, from the quivering bellies of drums — the swirling, clamoring pulse of Broadway’s night life.
Dizzy loved it.
She chose a table in the corner and sat down facing the writhing mass of lights and color.
Against its bizarre background the scene in the district attorney’s office and the mad happenings in front of the City Hall that afternoon passed rapidly in review.
The job had all the ear-marks of the Ghost. She snarled the name hatefully into the drunken medley of sound. The Ghost must be back then, and broke.
Yes, it all fitted in perfectly. A quick recoup of the stake — part of it hers — that he’d thrown away on that flossie, Spanish Lil — and — revenge. A double-barreled goal that would eat into his twisted mind like acid.
It was like the Ghost to combine business with — revenge.
First this bird Burke who had convicted Baldy, and then—
A waiter with a broken nose and a livid scar that stretched from lip to ear bent over her solicitously, yet with an air of being in the know, of belonging.
“Scotch,” Dizzy said, automatically.
The waiter disappeared.
Dizzy’s shrewd mind pieced together the scattered bits of the puzzle. With Burke out of the way who would be next? Who, but—
The waiter again.
He placed the drink before her, bent close to her ear as he smoothed the rumpled tablecloth.
“I hear Spanish Lil is back.”
Dizzy stiffened.
“Where?”
The words seemed to slip out of the corner of her mouth. Her lips did not move.
“At Sugar Foot’s in Harlem, throwin’ coin around like a coked-up bootlegger.”
“Thanks.”
The grapevine! System of underworld news.
The waiter moved away.
Dizzy made a pretense of drinking, smiled woodenly at a shrill-voiced entertainer, and rose.
Where Spanish Lil was, there the Ghost would be.
Outside the El Dorado, Dizzy climbed into a low, nondescript hulk of a roadster. There was class about the roadster. Its dull, grey finish gleamed in the lamp light. Its nickle fittings were spotless.