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 sun was well up when they went on to the veranda. There should have been the click of machetes in the cane fields and the low, lazy laughter of the workers. But everything was still, and that stillness held an ominous meaning.
Wylie was frankly without hope — more so as the day wore on, and Vivian, although she had never admitted defeat, admitted to herself that she saw no way out of the impasse. Benedetti, she saw now, had made no mistake when he told her that escape was impossible.
The day wore on, and still Benedetti did not put in an appearance. Once Vivian asked one of the maids where he could be found and received in answer a queer jumble of Creole French that held no meaning. Later, they essayed a walk to the Sugar Central, whose smokestacks rose on the other side of the cane fields, but one of the ever-present natives stepped slowly in their path, his machete openly in evidence. From the corner of her eyes Vivian could see others, alert, ready, at the edge of the jungle. Their captors were taking no chances.
On the far side of the cleared space Vivian could see a break in the jungle where a path ended. From this path men kept coming and going, and this, she surmised, must lead to the place where they were scheduled to die that night.
It was after dinner when Benedetti made his appearance, and with him stalked tragedy.
Vivian and Wylie were on the broad veranda, walking up and down. Something — some sixth sense — warned Vivian of danger, even before she heard the quick, catlike tread behind her. She made an attempt to swing around an instant too late. Someone leapt on her. A strong arm was locked about her throat. A hand was clamped over her mouth. A knee dug into the small of her back. She wrenched, tore at the gripping hands, even as she saw other hands seizing Wylie; she was aware of Benedetti’s face, his features hard as stone. In the same second something dropped over her head and blotted the world into darkness.
How long she was held there motionless on the veranda she did not know. Then came a quick gabble of Creole in Benedetti’s voice and the smothering hand was removed.
She flashed a glance around. The place was deserted save for herself, Benedetti and one tall native who stood beside the veranda steps, the ever-present machete in evidence. Obviously a guard.
The man interpreted her look.
“Your companion is gone. You will never see him again,” he said, and his voice was indifferent. He might have been speaking of some trivial object that had disappeared. He turned back toward the dining room, where candlelight made a soft glow. Vivian followed. The house seemed curiously still, as if all life had departed from it save these two.
“Gone — you mean—” She could not finish the sentence.
Benedetti nodded and selected a cigarette from a box on a little side table; lit it at one of the candles.
“He will be the first sacrifice to Ogoun Badagri. When the great green snake god has finished with him they will come for you. You will be the climax of the ceremony,” he told her brutally.
“You mean that you — a white man — will actually permit these men to make a sacrifice of us?” she queried. She knew, before she said it, that any appeal to him would be useless, but her mind was going around frantically, seeking a method of warding off the death that was imminent.
“What is your life and that of your companion to me?” he asked. “Nothing — not so much as the ash from the cigarette — compared with the fact that your death means that I keep my plantation a year longer. I refused close to half a million dollars from the sugar trust for the island. Do you think, then, that I would permit a little thing like your life to rob me of it?”
Chapter V
Voodoo Death
Vivian did not answer. Her eyes roamed around the room, although already every article in it had been photographed indelibly on her retina. A fly had alighted on the border of the sticky fly paper that lay in the center of the mahogany table. It tugged and buzzed, but the sticky mess held it too firmly.
“You may comfort yourself with the thought,” Benedetti went on, “if the fact is any comfort, that you are not the first. There have been others. The little dancing girl from the Port-au-Prince cabaret, a Spanish girl from Santo Domingo...”
He was not boastful, purely meditative as he sat there and smoked and talked, telling Vivian of the victims whose lives had paid for his hold on his sugar plantation. Vivian’s eyes were fastened on the feebly fluttering fly on the sticky paper. They, too, were caught like flies in a trap, and unless she could do something immediately — she faced the fact calmly — it would be the end.
Abruptly she leaned forward. There was a stillness in her pose, a stillness in her opaque eyes. Her hands coiled like springs. She found it difficult to keep her detached poise as the scheme began to unfold and take shape in her brain.
She smiled thinly. The air was suddenly electrical, filled with the portent of danger. Benedetti caught the feel of it, and peered at her suspiciously for a moment. The Lady from Hell knew that it was a thousand to one that she would lose. But, if her scheme worked, she could save Wylie’s life and her own, and Benedetti might be made to pay for the thing he had attempted — pay as he had never dreamed that he would have to pay.
Reaching out one hand she moved the candle in front of her, so that its glow fell more on Benedetti’s face than her own. Her voice, as she spoke, was quiet, almost meditative. But her eyes told a different story.
“How much time have I to live?” she said.
The man glanced at his watch.
“Roughly, two hours,” he said. He might have been estimating the departure time of a steamer, his voice was so calm. “It might be a trifle more or less — the time of my workers is not accurate. When the drums stop they will come for you. And when they start again — well, you will be there then.”
She rose to her feet, leaning lightly on the table.
“If I am to die,” she said hysterically, “I will die beautiful.” Then she added as an explanation, “My makeup is in my room.”
But he was on his feet too, alert, wary. “You must not leave my presence,” he said. “I cannot permit it. The sacrifice must go to the arms of Ogoun Badagri alive, not a corpse.”
His dark eyes held no recognition of the fact that she was a very beautiful woman. Vivian sensed, and rightly, that to him she was merely a woman who might thwart his plans. But she caught the implication in his last sentence.
“I shall not take poison,” she said. “You may come with me — watch me, if you wish.”
She took a step or two and groped blindly at the table for support. Instinctively he stretched out a hand to steady her.
That was the moment for which she had planned, the instant for which she had been waiting. Benedetti made the fatal mistake that many men had made with the Lady from Hell as an opponent — of underestimating her as an adversary.
Like a striking snake her hand darted to the table, seized one of the heavy candlesticks. Before Benedetti could interfere, had even divined her purpose, the heavy metal fell across his forehead with stunning force. He crumpled to the floor without a murmur.
Leaving him where he had fallen, Vivian ran to the door and peered out. The gigantic black on guard at the veranda steps had heard nothing. He was still standing there, unaware of the drama being enacted within the dining room.
Swiftly she turned back and her slender fingers searched the drawers of the carved mahogany sideboard against the wall until she found what she sought — a heavy, sharp carving knife. She balanced it speculatively in her hand. It would do, she decided.