Collection of Stories
- Автор: Стерлинг Стюарт
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Collection of Stories». Краткое содержание книги:
The girl screeched again — “Sundy — stop it! — you crazy?” She fought to scramble in the doorway.
Koski clipped her on the chin with a short left. Her head snapped back as if her neck was a rubber band. She collapsed limply.
Somewhere at the stern, a door banged open under the drive of Mulcahey’s brogan. The man inside the houseboat cursed thickly. The gun coughed again.
Koski went in, fast.
A bull-necked man with enormous shoulders and a big bald head stood straddle-legged with his back to a table littered with bottles, glasses, broken cups, greenbacks. He wore sailors’ whites and a short-sleeved undershirt which showed the hard, knotty muscles of his hairy arms. His left hand held a short-bladed dirk, his right, a long-barreled revolver with smoke dribbling lazily from its uplifted muzzle.
He chopped the gun down, aiming at the door leading to the rear compartment, through which Mulcahey would have to come.
The door burst open. The sergeant plowed in, six feet of dripping, rubber-clad target.
Koski dived at the table. The gun spat a tongue of flame at the ceiling. Table, gunner and Koski crashed to the deck together in a shower of broken glass.
Mulcahey stepped in, clubbed his gun. The barrel caught the baldheaded man over the ear. He shook his head like a dog coming out of water, twisted, kicked upward from his half-reclining position. His saddle oxford caught the sergeant ten inches below the belt buckle.
Koski clamped an, arm under the bald man’s chin, wrestled his knee into the small of the undershirted back. The revolver described a small, flashing arc, hit Koski’s knee cap. A wave of agonizing pain washed over him. He levered pressure on the windpipe in the crook of his forearm, heard a snap as if the man’s neck had broken.
Sundstrom’s left hand scrabbled around on the floor, came up with the jagged neck of a broken rum bottle — jabbed it over the muscular shoulder, at Koski’s eyes.
Koski lunged sideways, smashed the bald head toward a leg of the overturned table. The bottom of the leg hit the crown of the hairless skull with a solid guk! The broken glass dropped out of Sundstrom’s fist.
Mulcahey clouted him once more across the temple.
“Takin’ one thing with another, Steve,” the sergeant rolled the unconscious man on his stomach, “I would say this mouse is very lucky indeed to get off with no more than a shiner. This is a very tough customer.” He snapped handcuffs on the wrists crossed behind Sundstrom’s back.
“Too tough to be just schwocked.” Koski’s eyes roved from the overturned table to the double berth, the built-in cupboards and wardrobe, the bookshelves stacked with oblong brown-paper parcels, the big floor-model radio and the desk beside it with typewriter and notebook. “What was he trying to hide, I wonder?”
The big Irishman retrieved one of the greenbacks from the table where it had remained, stuck with spilled rum. “Out in the back room there is a big hunk of something covered up with a sheet — and I do not think it is a barber chair.”
“A printing press?”
“Could you think of a better hideout for counterfeiters?”
“There are all kinds of counterfeiters, sarge.” Koski limped to the desk. “Go get that kid. I had to rock her to sleep to keep her from rushing in here and getting a slug.”
Mulcahey stuck Sundstrom’s gun in his raincoat pocket, clomped heavily out to the boat deck.
Koski went to the rear room. It was really two rooms — a small bathroom to starboard — a bigger room, which originally had been the sleeping quarters, to port.
The berths had been left in, used to store cases of paper stock. In the middle of the floor was a cloth-draped something mounted on a solid iron base.
He pulled off the dust cloth. It was a small motordriven press. In the corner, where there had once been a wardrobe, was a four cylinder gas-driven generator.
Koski looked at the form locked on the press bed. He picked up a sheet discarded and flung on the floor.
From the houseboat’s living-room came a moan:
“Sundy! Sundy! They’ve killed you!”
Koski went back. The girl leaned against the radio, weakly. Her eyes were haggard. Mulcahey held her right wrist.
The sergeant gestured impatiently: “He ain’t dead. But he ain’t goin’ to be much use as a husband for a while, Mrs. Sundstrom. They’ll let you see him once a month — on the other side of a screen.”
“He hasn’t done anything,” she whimpered, “you can’t—”
“No?” boomed Mulcahey. “We caught you with your—” he changed it, in midstream, “—with the goods on you.”
“Turn your damper down, Irish,” Koski said. “It’s only a misdemeanor.”
“Counterfeiting?” His partner craned his neck forward.
Koski frowned. “Songs. Not bills, Irish. This wild man was printing boot-legged lyrics. Took down the words off the radio, set ’em up, printed ’em without bothering about getting copyright owners’ permission.” The Lieutenant held out the sheet he’d picked off the floor:
Authentic Words of the Most Popular Songs on Stage, Radio and Screen. A Hundred Hit Parades In One — Ten Cents.
“Illegal,” Koski said. “Not very criminal. Not enough to make Mrs. Sundstrom’s husband go berserk. Must have been something else.” He looked at the girl.
“No,” she cried defiantly. “We did print some of those song sheets. But we never sold any ourselves—”
“ ’Sright!” The man on the floor came to, mumbling. He made an effort to roll over. “She didn’t have anything to do with it, Hannah didn’. I killed him, myself.”
Koski turned the handcuffed man on his side. The polished scalp was smeary with blood but across the right temple was a livid welt of darker hue. The head of the Harbor Squad plainclothesmen bent to examine it. Tiny flakes of dark green ink, or paint, had been driven into Sundy’s skin.
“Who’d you knock off?” Koski looked down into the watery blue eyes.
The girl tried to get away from Mulcahey: “Shut your mouth, Sundy! Don’t talk!” She flailed ineffectually at the sergeant’s raincoat with a balled-up fist.
Koski went to the row of hooks fixed in the partition beside the door to the boat deck. A yellow sou’wester hung alongside a girl’s cobalt transparent rain cape — next them, an oyster white raincoat. It was long. It had a belted back. And it was damp.
Koski flung the raincoat over the man on the floor. It reached from his shoulders to his ankles. The belt came halfway between his waist and knees.
“Fits you like those dungarees fit her.” Koski fished in the raincoat’s pockets. They yielded a soggy pack of cigs and a folder of paper matches. The folder was metallic burgundy in color — on it in gilt lettering was Maxie.
“Now, who,” Koski made the inquiry as if he didn’t really expect an answer, “is Maxie?”
The man on the floor grunted unintelligibly.
“Maxie’s a guy who came over from another boat to have a drink,” Hannah said. “He forgot his coat when he went, that’s all. Don’t waste your time looking for Maxie!”
“Going to be hard to find?” Koski roamed around the cabin, poking at parcels on the shelves, dishes on the galley sink, the desk.
Letterhead sheets with song lyrics, — everything from Margie to I’m My Own Grampa. And one letter that read:
Dear Mr. Sundstrom: —
Our last shipment of 30 reams of #12 Cyndax Super, 25x38, exhausts the amount of credit which Mr. Maximilian Cavado arranged for you. Inasmuch as we have been unable to contact Mr. Cavado, we suggest you get in touch with him, in order that further shipments may be made on other than a COD basis.