Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 39, No. 6, June, 1994
- Автор: Bashover Albert, Crawford Dan
- Год: 1994
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines
- ISBN: ISSN: 0002-5224
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 39, No. 6, June, 1994». Краткое содержание книги:
“No, Ma.”
“You know what they DID to me in there?”
“Well—”
“Dumped my suitcase out on the floor, pawed through my underwear, searching.”
“Oh?”
“Then that... that torturess, she decided to search me!”
“Well, Ma—”
“I yelled. I hollered. I waited for you to bust down that door and storm in and rescue me, my Rambo. Only you never came. I was on my own. Told the witch I’d have her head and then her job, in that order. Told her I knew cops, half the damn city police — and the broad says — you know what she says? — she goes, ‘Yes. I’m sure you’ve had plenty of dealings with them.’ This snarky little grin on her face. I could of slapped her! I would of slapped her, only these other couple of ones had ahold of me, pinning me down, hurting me, an’ then the first one, the head torturess, starts hitting me—”
“Ma, she didn’t.”
“Beating on me. Took out her gun and pistol-whipped me—”
“Ma—”
“A feeding frenzy, all of ’em beating on me. Kicks. Kidney punches. Slaps. Then the snarky one, the torturess, she pulls this rubber glove thing halfway up her arm, got this sneer on her face would stop a bullet, and then — and then—”
Ma slumped against the headrest with her eyes rolling up white at the memory of it, coughing and pounding herself in the chest.
“I never been that humiliated in my entire life!”
Louie thinking it must have been something, all right — Ma humiliated. He couldn’t imagine it.
Ma snuck a glance at him. “You think I’m lying ’cause you don’t see no marks, but I’m black and blue under this dress, all the things they did to me while you just sat here. Cigarette burns. Electric shocks—”
“Come on, Ma.”
“I’ll never pay taxes again!”
“You don’t pay taxes now—”
“Because of women like her. That’s why I don’t pay!”
Ma was quiet a minute, catching her breath, then suddenly regaining control of herself, she glanced at him quickly.
“Listen. While I was inside that place getting tortured, did any of ’em come back out to the car and say anything?”
“No, Ma.”
“Poke around at all?”
“No. I think they forgot I was there.”
Ma sat back.
“Lucky for them,” she said. And snorted.
Dufault spotted the van while driving back from the flea market in his half-ton truck. He was in a bad mood already, having had a lousy day, nobody much interested in the colored glass insulators he had got with the copper bus bars from that jerk Zeke. What he thought might work, use the insulators as a come-on, the colored glass sparkling in the sun, then give his customers a glimpse of the stuff under the table and tell them it was layaways for somebody else. Thought they’d jump at that. Grab some other chump’s bargain? Do it!
Bargains which were actually the stuff he couldn’t set out in the open in case the cops came sniffing around.
He recognized the van by the scrape mark on the door where his jimmy bar had slipped on the night he’d acquired it, and at the sight he nearly stood the truck on end, stopping. Nearly hopped out and ran over to the van, and would have except for the fact there was a cop car parked not ten feet away, and a Dr. Hook towtruck right there, beginning to winch up the back of it.
Dufault was angry. He’d only grabbed the van last night, hadn’t even had a chance to search through it for anything flea-marketable. And now he was racking his brain over how the van could have got here, the other side of the river, miles from home.
Not the cops. If they’d found it at the shop, they’d have left it where it was and built a case around it. Staked the place out and waited for Dufault to show up. No reason to drag the evidence across town out here to Charleswood.
But if not the cops, who then? Kids? Some punks stole it, went for a joy ride, then discovered they couldn’t handle the smell, pulled the van over and ditched it here? It could have happened like that. Except the kids from his neighborhood, they’d have stripped it first, popped those mags off, all that Goodyear rubber, and rolled the wheels away for sure.
He took one last look at the cop standing at the van’s open window fanning the smell away, the truck driver rattling his chains; then Dufault reluctantly slipped the half-ton into gear and continued on home to the shop. Arriving there, he really got mad. Finding the big front door gaping wide, and the shop in the craziest mess he’d ever seen outside of a comic book.
Not tossed. You couldn’t say the place was tossed. Rearranged is what it was, but in a nasty sort of way. Tool cabinets turned back to front so you couldn’t get at them. Drawers yanked out and put back in the wrong order with the wrong things inside: one drawer was filled with powdered soap. Cabinet doors above the workbench nailed shut. And look at this. VCR’s and microwave ovens stacked up in the front window with a hand-lettered card propped in front of them saying:
He jerked the window curtain down fast.
And then Dufault saw the note on the bench, scrawled in the same grease pencil characters, composed on the back of an invoice.
Zeke Boyer.
Who else?
Dufault rolled the door down and went back out to his truck and hauled himself up into the driver’s seat feeling put upon and ornery and just plain mean.
The blurb about Ed came at the end of forty minutes of uninterrupted music the radio announcer kept interrupting to say how he wasn’t going to interrupt anything. The blurb telling how a Komodo dragon on loan from Indonesia had gone missing outside a veterinary clinic where it had been waiting to get an X-ray after it leaped off a table at the zoo onto a summer student, the student falling into the zoo’s X-ray machine and breaking his head, and the machine.
“Hear that?” George asked. “Doof robbed a zoo.”
“And the place really is a zoo, ain’t it.” Zeke, nursing a beer, was talking with his nose buried in Ma’s old Funk and Wag-nail’s, one each week at the supermarket twenty-five years ago. “You know, according to this, it says our pal Ed is pretty amazing.”
“He’s amazing, all right,” George said. “Any animal that won’t eat and still dumps all over the place.”
George stuck the aluminum snow shovel in the closet and washed his hands in the sink. What had happened was Zeke had found a way to get Ed moving. You just clapped your hands together, a sharp whack! and he crawled towards you. Easy. He’d clapped Ed up the basement stairs, grinning, to show George, and the first thing Ed did when he got to the top was mess the hall. Like making some sort of a comment.
“What’s even more amazing is how dumb some humans are,” George said, “bringing lizards inside a house. Even Dufault wasn’t that stupid.”
“What else we gonna do with him? We got to keep him somewhere, don’t we?” Thumping the book. “Like it says here. Ed’s coldblooded. He gets cold, he could go dormant on us. Another thing — listen! — Ed could grow to be three hundred pounds if you took and you fed him on wild pigs and deer.”
“Wild pigs and deer, huh? That’s what you’re bringing home next, wild pigs and deer. I draw the line there, bro. At pigs and deer.”
Zeke scowled.
“Fine. Don’t help. I’ll do everything myself. Feed the little guy, change his water, follow him around with the snow scoop. Only listen. Later, when those bucks come rolling in, don’t come sucking up to me like you’re some kind of a buddy, okay?”