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.
Suspicion flashed squint-eyed across Louden’s face.
“Say!” he demanded sharply. “How do I know you’re not in on this game too? You were his moll.”
Hot hate flushed Dizzy’s face which changed, gradually, to the amused expression she might have worn when watching the helpless squirming of a newborn puppy.
“Listen, stupid,” she laughed. “I don’t carry any dough. You weigh the ’chute with a flock of bricks. Everything’s like it should be except for that, and the machine-gun, and Dizzy Malone flying the ship.”
Louden considered.
“No, no, Dizzy,” he burst out petulantly. “It’s impossible. I can’t take upon myself the responsibility of sending you of all people. It’s a job for the police. Your proposition is absurd. I’ve a Boeing pursuit plane out at the field ready and waiting. It’s camouflaged to look like an old crate that’s about ready to fall to pieces, and it’s striped black and white. The parachute is waiting for its load of a million dollars.”
He laughed harshly.
“A million dollars! And I’m sitting here doing nothing. Why, look here! The thing to do is to lay a trap for the boat that’s to pick up all that money.”
“Don’t be dumb!” Dizzy snapped. “I know the way the Ghost’s mind works. He’s a racketeer and a flier. He don’t play with rowboats. I know him like a book and I’m the only one who can get him. Give me a chance!”
The peremptory jangling of the telephone cut in on the voice that had become low and pleading.
Louden picked up the receiver. His face went white as he listened.
“Yes, sir. Yes, sir... I’m doing the best I can... No, nothing definite yet... I’ll give you a ring... Yes.”
His hands trembled violently as he replaced the receiver.
“Come on, Tom.” Dizzy was at him again. “Take a chance. Stall those certain parties off. Tell them someone’s come through with the dough and you’ve sent it out. Call the field about the machine-gun. It’s the Ghost — I know it’s the Ghost and I’ll get him so he won’t bother anyone again. If I don’t get him I won’t come back,” she finished simply.
Louden’s eyes fixed themselves despairingly on hers and slowly a look almost of relief came into them.
He stood up and squared his shoulders with decision.
“I’ll do it!”
Dizzy was across the room. Her arms went around his neck and she pressed a red kiss full on his lips. Before he knew what had happened she was half way through the door. There she turned.
“Plenty gas in the Boeing and two motorcycle cops to shoot me through traffic,” she shouted with a wave of the hand.
Then she tore.
Louden stood there, stunned, his mouth open.
“Gas — cops—” he mumbled, nodding his head dumbly.
But when Dizzy reached her grey roadster, two red motorcycles were coughing impatiently beside it. Their drivers were looking with some disdain at the unpromising hulk, but before they had gone two blocks they were pleasantly disillusioned.
Then, sirens shrieking, they proceeded to do their stuff and, for the first time in her life, Dizzy looked at a copper with favor. The baby in front of her could ride, and he did so.
Through traffic they wailed their way, screamed across crowded Queensborough Bridge and on to Long Island.
There, Dizzy gunned the V-16, worrying the heels of the man in front. In the mirror she could see the man behind grin as he hung on doggedly.
Then all three went raving speed-mad.
It was with fifteen minutes still to spare that they whined through the entrance to Roosevelt Field.
The coppers flung wearily off their busses and kicked them into their rests. But they stood to attention and brought their fingers to their caps with real admiration when Dizzy stepped jauntily to the ground and hurried to where she saw a battered-looking crate, striped black and white, being warmed up on the line.
A field official stepped forward.
“The ship is ready,” he said, waving his hand.
“Gas?” Dizzy snapped.
“Full tanks.”
“Cruising radius?”
“A thousand miles.”
“Good!”
Dizzy stepped into the flying suit he held toward her and adjusted helmet and goggles.
She waved aside the parachute straps he started to buckle about her with a grim: “That won’t do me any good!”
It was to be a battle to the death.
Dizzy climbed aboard and the man explained the manipulation of the machine-gun that had been hastily geared to the motor and camouflaged and showed her where the auxiliary belts of ammunition were nested in the cockpit.
“This is a regulation army pursuit ship,” he said, “with complete equipment Very pistol and lights, earth inductor compass—”
“Okay, okay!”
The girl checked the details as he pointed them out and shot a glance at her wrist watch.
Two o’clock!
She revved the motor, thrilling to the smooth precision of its whining roar as the man snapped the buckles of the safety-belt.
“Money ’chute!” she cried.
The man brought it and stowed it away within easy reach.
“Bricks!” he shouted with a grin.
Dizzy nodded.
“Let’s go!”
The chocks were pulled from the wheels. She gave it the gun and the crate rolled into the runway, hurtled forward. A slight pull on the stick and it catapulted into the air.
Climbing in a tight spiral she watched the altimeter — a thousand feet, two, three, four, five. Then she leveled off and threw the ship into a series of intricate maneuvers. She had been taught by a master — the Ghost — and had proved a more than apt pupil. The Boeing responded to the slightest touch on rudder and stick. Never had she flown such a ship.
She leveled off again and, putting the blazing disc of the sun at her back, set her course by the compass dead into the east. Full gun she watched the speed indicator climb to its maximum, then throttled down to an easy hundred miles an hour. No need to figure drift — not a breath of air stirred.
Long Island slid out from under her and the Boeing nosed out over the Atlantic.
Dizzy dipped her left wing and scanned the smooth blue expanse of water. No yacht with striped deck met her eager gaze; in fact, there was no boat of any sort to be seen, no smudge of black smoke, even, on the horizon ahead. She wormed round in the cockpit as far as the safety-straps would permit and scanned the air.
Nothing.
The scorching sun beat blindingly into her eyes.
A sense of utter loneliness settled depressingly about her.
She shot the moon to warm her guns, quivering with a throb of power at their chattering death-talk.
An hour spun round on the dial of her watch.
The sea below her was a round blue waste circled by a shimmering heat haze.
Another hour—
She dispelled a growing uneasiness with a screaming burst of the guns.
The sun settled slowly behind her. The Boeing roared on into the east.
Another hour—
The ship, perceptibly lightened of its load of gas, floated easily in the air. She flew left-wing low, now, searching the water for a striped-deck yacht.
Still nothing. The sea was as barren as a deserted mill-pond. She searched the sky above and behind. Nothing but the red round of the sun, slowly sinking.
The vague restlessness of fear shuddered along her nerves that the staccato of the guns failed to dispel. The gas was almost half gone and still the bare, tenantless reach of water stretched below her.