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 bogus inspector set to work.
What he really did was to install a transformer which stepped-up the house current to a deadly degree. Ingenious wiring of the metal door frame and the steel door mat completed the trap, which was set by simply connecting a wire outside the door. An apparently innocent passerby could stoop over and make the connection. That done the victim stepped on the mat, inserted the key and completed the circuit that electrocuted him. The rain, of course, aided the design materially.
Dizzy shuddered at its utter hellishness.
It smacked lustily of the Ghost, but a Ghost goaded by homicidal mania, a Ghost stooping to the exhibitionism born of illusions of grandeur, a Ghost whose twisted mind was disintegrating in a final burst of fiendish bravado.
If it was the Ghost he had gone stark mad. And as such he was doubly dangerous.
But even Dizzy had no real evidence to pin the two killings on her former partner. From long experience with his methods she sensed, however, that he would have executed them in practically the same manner as the unknown. And then, too, there was the element of poetic justice in the two slayings that she had hunched in the very beginning.
She was two points up on the police any way you looked at it — she knew the Ghost was in New York and she knew his hideaway. And those two bits of information she intended to keep to herself, to be used to bring to a successful ending her vendetta of hate.
She would put the bee on the Ghost, and she would do it herself — that was her right — but she was smart enough to realize there must be a semblance of legality about it or it would be bars, and possibly the chair, for her.
The next move was up to the Ghost.
It came even as she wondered what it would be.
The faint buzz of the telephone.
Dizzy snatched for the French phone in its recess under the bed.
Tom Louden, acting district attorney for the city of New York, was on the wire. Mr. Louden’s compliments and would Miss Malone be so kind as to come to Headquarters immediately?
Miss Malone would.
She held the hook down for a few seconds, then called the garage around the corner for her car. Tumbling out of bed she made a hurried toilette and dashed down the stairs. The grey roadster was waiting at the curb, motor running.
Dizzy craved action and she got plenty of it from the crowds of early bargain-shoppers on the drive to the big grim building on Centre Street.
It was the third time in three days that she had crossed the threshold of the district attorney’s office, but this time she entered with a perky smile and a jaunty step, for she realized that she was master of the situation. It was her turn to dictate.
Tom Louden greeted her with a harassed smile.
“There’s hell to pay, Dizzy,” he said, running his hand wearily through his hair. “Look!”
She took the extended sheet of paper, recognizing with an ominous shiver the soiled foolscap of the two previous ransom letters.
“This just queers everything,” Tom Louden groaned. “Read it.”
Dizzy’s eyes swept back and forth across the paper.
“You see we mean business! The ante is raised to $1,000,000. Follow these instructions exactly. Wrap the dough (grand notes only) in a bundle and attach same to an automatically opening parachute. A pilot is to take a single-seater up from Roosevelt Flying Field with the dough and parachute today at 2 p.m. and head due east out over the ocean, flying 100 miles an hour at 5,000 feet. Plane is to be plainly marked with alternating black and white stripes. When pilot sees a yacht whose decks are similarly painted he is to descend, drop the parachute and return. Bets are off if any attempt is made to follow plane or discover yacht. No tricks this time! We see all, know all!
“If these directions are not followed to the letter within twenty-four hours we will bump off Jake Levine!”
A cry of horror burst from Dizzy’s lips at sight of the sinister name.
Jake Levine — Boss Fixer of gangland, human octopus in whose tentacles danced dip and judge alike, maker and breaker of politicians, super-fence, master blackmailer, banker for anything from petty larceny to murder if the return was not less than fifty per cent, chiseler and double-crosser feared from the lowest sink in the tenderloin to the highest holder of the public trust.
“You see what I’m up against on my first job, Dizzy,” Tom growled hopelessly. “Levine got a duplicate of this letter. He’s been down here already — he’s here yet. Says he’ll blow the lid off, knock the legs out from under the administration — and he will, too — if something isn’t done. The party leaders have been on my neck since daylight, and I’m half crazy.”
He looked up to the girl appealingly.
“What I heard of that dope of yours about the Ghost sounded pretty sensible and I’d like—”
The door of the office burst open and an undersized, rat-faced man burst into the room.
“What the hell you going to do about this, Louden?” he demanded, his voice high pitched with panic.
He was trembling violently. The sickly sallow pallor of fear showed through his natural swarthiness. His eyes, beady and set close together, jerked furtively about the room. The aggressive loudness of his clothes even had lost their swagger and he stood revealed as the yellow rat he was.
“You’ve gotta do something, I say!” he almost screamed. “Listen, you heel! When I got that letter I fixed it so there’ll be hell to pay for certain parties” — he emphasized the words slyly — “if anything happens to me, and they know it. Have they come through with the dough that bum wants?”
“Why... a... not yet, Mr. Levine,” Louden stalled. “You see—”
“The hell I see! That guy means business. Look who he’s bumped off already. He ain’t fooling, and if you don’t do something for me damn soon I’ll start talking and break every punk in this administration.”
His yellow teeth showed in a snarl.
“And don’t make a false play either, boy. Remember — if I go on the spot, I wreck the grafters just the same. Nobody ever made a heel outa Jake Levine. Now what kinda protection you givin’ me?”
“I can lock you up in a cell, Mr. Levine,” Louden suggested. “You would be safe there.”
“In a cell... a cell!” the man shrieked. “Listen to him! Maybe that bum’s got somebody planted to get me there — some lousy screw maybe. I don’t trust nobody.”
He paused a moment.
“I know where I’ll go!” he burst out again. “I’ll stick to one of those certain parties until he gets me out of this.”
Turning abruptly he flung himself through the door.
“Well, it won’t be long now before the axe falls,” Tom muttered.
“And it won’t be long before the time set by that letter is up, too,” Dizzy cut in from where she had flattened herself against the wall. “It’s almost noon now.”
The acting D.A.’s eyes lit up hopefully.
“Oh, yes. That dope of yours about the Ghost — what was it?”
Dizzy gave him the same story she had Mitchell. It was all good hunching, she knew, but not tangible enough evidence on which to make a pinch. She even told Louden that she had positively seen the Ghost the night before, but she carefully refrained from any mention of having trailed him. It was too late to nail him at his hideaway, and even if she had been a squealer.
“And my proposition remains practically the same,” she finished. “Let me fly that striped ransom plane from Roosevelt’s Field at two o’clock this afternoon. Be sure it’s a fast one and have a machine-gun mounted on it — and I’ll get the Ghost for you.”