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.
“Fade!” the D.A. snapped at the plainclothes men and they backed out, closing the door behind them.
Dizzy stood in the middle of the room, waiting, watching.
Mitchell looked up at her out of eyes deep-sunken and blood-shot. His face showed lines of worry and strain. Even his grizzled hair seemed a trifle greyer. It was a cinch that his nerves were keyed close to the breaking point.
What had happened to the big boy, Dizzy wondered. It would surely take more than that business in front of the City Hall to throw a veteran like himself so completely haywire.
His eyes bored into her and a flush slowly rose to his cheekbones.
“You damned little punk!” he roared, suddenly, springing to his feet.
“But, Chief—”
“Shut up!” he snarled at his assistant. “Let me handle this!”
Seizing the girl’s arm he twisted it savagely.
“Now come clean! What do you know about that Burke job?”
Dizzy looked him in the eye.
“I told you what I knew yesterday,” she said coldly. “I made you a proposition purely on a hunch. The offer still holds. Give me a plane, a fast one, with a machine-gun on it, and your say-so to go ahead, and maybe I can get the Ghost for you. And when I say ‘get’ I mean ‘get!’ That’s all.”
“It is, huh?”
The D.A. dragged her roughly to the desk.
“Well, what about this?”
He snatched a sheet of paper from its top and thrust it in front of her eyes.
It was in the same handwriting as the Burke ransom letter and on the same type of paper.
Dizzy read it hurriedly.
“You see what happens when you try to double-cross us, Mitchell! Don’t try to chisel again. Unless you announce through the papers that you will comply with our demand for $500,000 as we shall direct, you will be dead by midnight!”
“Well?”
The district attorney pointed to a newspaper scare head.
“Now what have you got to say?” he asked fiercely.
“My proposition is still open. And remember, big boy, you prosecuted the Ghost’s kid brother. You sent him up to fry in the chair.”
“Is that all?”
“Yes.”
The D.A. stood over the girl threateningly.
“Listen, baby, you know plenty and you’re going to spill it. Now are you ready to talk nice?”
Dizzy shrugged.
“You heard me the first time, big boy.”
Mitchell’s big hand shot out and clamped over her slim arm.
“You’re gonna come clean with what you know, see, baby!” he snarled. “Or else I’ll give you the works!”
“I’m no squealer!” Dizzy spit the words in his face.
The D.A. flung her savagely into a chair.
“All right, then, you little punk, I’ll just sweat it out of you!”
“Good Heavens, Chief! Can’t you see she’d had enough?” Tom Louden’s voice quivered. “Lay off her. She won’t talk.”
The D.A. turned his back on the crumpled heap that lay whimpering piteously in the chair.
“All right, Tom. Jug her then for safe keeping. She’s dangerous.”
“Oh, go easy, Chief! Don’t do that. I’ll be personally responsible for her. I don’t think she’s in the know anyway.”
Dizzy looked up gratefully at the young assistant D.A. out of a face that had become pinched and drawn. Racking sobs shook her, but she bit her lips to keep them back.
Mitchell gave tacit consent to his assistant’s plea by ignoring it.
“Well, guess I’ll call it a day,” he said gruffly, pulling out his watch. “Eleven-thirty. The buzzards have got half an hour yet to keep their promise, but they won’t get me!”
Mitchell turned abruptly on his heel and left the room.
When the door closed Louden crossed to the shuddering heap in the chair.
“I’m sorry, kid,” he said with real emotion. “Feeling better?”
Dizzy nodded and tried to smile.
“Good, kid. Now promise that you won’t take it on the lam and I’ll run you home in my car.”
“I won’t lam it — now!”
“Let’s go then, Dizzy,” Tom urged as he helped her gently to her feet. “We’ll just trail along behind the Chief to see that he gets home all right, then I’ll chance Hell’s Kitchen and drop you at your door.”
Dizzy gulped her thanks and clung to his arm for support as they hurried to the street.
What amounted to a riot squad had been called out to escort the D.A. to his home. It roared away from the big grey building while Dizzy and Tom climbed into his modest sedan. An armored motorcycle preceded and followed Mitchell’s limousine. On the seat beside him sat a pair of plainclothes men.
Mitchell had boasted that the buzzards who knocked off his colleague from Chicago wouldn’t get him, but he was taking no chances.
Tom Louden’s sedan stuck its nose into the drizzle of rain and scampered after the cavalcade as it streaked away northward.
Into Fifth Avenue they raced, sirens shrieking; past red lights and green alike, the smooth wet asphalt flowing behind them like a black ribbon.
Forty-second Street slid by and the rain-drenched statue of General Sherman dripping in its tiny park at Fifty-ninth.
A few blocks further on they turned right, bumped across the car tracks at Madison Avenue, past the great church on the corner of the Park. It was dark except for the illuminated dial of the clock on its steeple whose hands quivered on the edge of midnight.
Half way up the block the cavalcade stopped before the private residence of the D.A.
Louden pulled in behind the limousine. The coppers leaped to their stations, guns drawn. The D.A. stepped out, chuckling, and headed for his door, waving aside the proffered umbrella of the plainclothes men who walked beside him.
“The buzzards won’t get me,” he gloated. “Not tonight they won’t.”
He reached the door and stood on the mat, regardless of the pelting rain, drawing out his key.
The first stroke of midnight clanged hollowly from the church on the corner.
“I fooled ’em this time,” the D.A. laughed.
He thrust the wet key in the lock.
As it touched, a point of blue flame appeared, sputtered into a glow that ran hissing across his hand and up his arm. The D.A.’s body stiffened. Blue sparks cascaded from his feet. His bulky frame writhed in spasmodic jerks, thin spirals of smoke rising from his seared flesh. His features convulsed in agony.
Then, its work done, the burning wave of electricity flung the charred body of New York’s district attorney shuddering to the sidewalk.
When his bodyguard bent over him, Mitchell was dead.
In Tom Louden’s sedan Dizzy’s white lips framed scarcely audible words — “He fried — just like the Ghost’s kid brother!”
Chapter IV
Another Demand
Dizzy Malone threw off the purple coverlet of her bed and reached for the morning papers. There was one thing she wanted to find out — how the trick had been turned.
The papers exposed the ingenious device in detail. She lapped them up as she munched rolls and drank coffee prepared by her cleaning woman.
A man had called at the D.A.’s house with the forged identification card of an inspector for the Electric Light Company. He wished to inspect the meter. He was admitted without question by an unsuspecting servant.
The meter was out of order, he said. He would fix it. As well as the servant could remember he had mentioned something about the wiring of the doorbell fouling the house current.