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.
I didn’t know him at first. Perhaps for the opposite reason Waldo hadn’t seemed to know him. He’d had a hat on all the time over at the cocktail bar and he didn’t have one on now. His hair ended completely and exactly where his hat would start. Above that line was hard white sweatless skin almost as glaring as scar tissue. He wasn’t just twenty years older. He was a different man.
But I knew the gun he was holding, the .22 target automatic with the big front sight. And I knew his eyes. Bright, brittle, shallow eyes like the eyes of a lizard.
He was alone. He put the gun against my face very lightly and said between his teeth: “Yeah, me. Let’s go on in.”
I backed in just far enough and stopped. Just the way he would want me to, so he could shut the door without moving much. I knew from his eyes that he would want me to do just that.
I wasn’t scared. I was paralyzed.
When he had the door shut he backed me some more, slowly, until there was something against the back of my legs. His eyes looked into mine.
“That’s a card table,” he said. “Some goon here plays chess. You?”
I swallowed. “I don’t exactly play it. I just fool around.”
“That means two,” he said with a kind of hoarse softness, as if some cop had hit him across the windpipe with a blackjack once, in a third-degree session.
“It’s a problem,” I said. “Not a game. Look at the pieces.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Well, I’m alone,” I said, and my voice shook just enough.
“It don’t make any difference,” he said. “I’m washed up anyway. Some nose puts the bulls on me tomorrow, next week, what the hell? I just didn’t like your map, pal. And that smug-faced pansy in the bar coat that played left tackle for Fordham or something. To hell with guys like you guys.”
I didn’t speak or move. The big front sight raked my cheek lightly almost caressingly. The man smiled.
“It’s kind of good business too,” he said. “Just in case. An old con like me don’t make good prints, all I got against me is two witnesses. The hell with it.”
“What did Waldo do to you?” I tried to make it sound as if I wanted to know, instead of just not wanting to shake too hard.
“Stooled on a bank job in Michigan and got me four years. Got himself a nolle prosse. Four years in Michigan ain’t no summer cruise. They make you be good in them lifer states.”
“How’d you know he’d come in there?” I croaked.
“I didn’t. Oh yeah, I was lookin’ for him. I was wanting to see him all right. I got a flash of him on the street night before last but I lost him. Up to then I wasn’t lookin’ for him. Then I was. A cute guy, Waldo. How is he?”
“Dead,” I said.
“I’m still good,” he chuckled. “Drunk or sober. Well, that don’t make no doughnuts for me now. They make me downtown yet?”
I didn’t answer him quick enough. He jabbed the gun into my throat and I choked and almost grabbed for it by instinct.
“Naw,” he cautioned me softly. “Naw. You ain’t that dumb.”
I put my hands back, down at my sides, open, the palms towards him. He would want them that way. He hadn’t touched me, except with the gun. He didn’t seem to care whether I might have one too. He wouldn’t — if he just meant the one thing.
He didn’t seem to care very much about anything, coming back on that block. Perhaps the hot wind did something to him. It was booming against my shut windows like the surf under a pier.
“They got prints,” I said. “I don’t know how good.”
“They’ll be good enough — but not for teletype work. Take ’em airmail time to Washington and back to check ’em right. Tell me why I came here, pal.”
“You heard the kid and me talking in the bar. I told him my name, where I lived.”
“That’s how, pal. I said why.” He smiled at me. It was a lousy smile to be the last one you might see.
“Skip it,” I said. “The hangman won’t ask you to guess why he’s there.”
“Say, you’re tough at that. After you, I visit that kid. I tailed him home from Headquarters, but I figure you’re the guy to put the bee on first. I tail him home from the city hall, in the rent car Waldo had. From Headquarters, pal. Them funny dicks. You can sit in their laps and they don’t know you. Start runnin’ for a streetcar and they open up with machine guns and bump two pedestrians, a hacker asleep in his cab, and an old scrubwoman on the second floor workin’ a mop. And they miss the guy they’re after. Them funny lousy dicks.”
He twisted the gun muzzle in my neck. His eyes looked madder than before.
“I got time,” he said. “Waldo’s rent car don’t get a report right away. And they don’t make Waldo very soon. I know Waldo. Smart he was. A smooth boy, Waldo.”
“I’m going to vomit,” I said, “if you don’t take that gun out of my throat.”
He smiled and moved the gun down to my heart. “This about right? Say when.”
I must have spoken louder than I meant to. The door of the dressing-room by the wall bed showed a crack of darkness. Then an inch. Then four inches. I saw eyes, but didn’t look at them. I stared hard into the baldheaded man’s eyes. Very hard. I didn’t want him to take his eyes off mine.
“Scared?” he asked softly.
I leaned against his gun and began to shake. I thought he would enjoy seeing me shake. The girl came out through the door. She had her gun in her hand again. I was sorry as hell for her. She’d try to make the door — or scream. Either way it would be curtains — for both of us.
“Well, don’t take all night about it,” I bleated. My voice sounded far away, like a voice on a radio on the other side of a street.
“I like this, pal,” he smiled. “I’m like that.”
The girl floated in the air, somewhere behind him. Nothing was ever more soundless than the way she moved. It wouldn’t do any good though. He wouldn’t fool around with her at all. I had known him all my life but I had been looking into his eyes for only five minutes.
“Suppose I yell,” I said.
“Yeah, suppose you yell. Go ahead and yell,” he said with his killer’s smile.
She didn’t go near the door. She was right behind him.
“Well — here’s where I yell,” I said.
As if that was the cue, she jabbed the little gun hard into his short ribs, without a single sound.
He had to react. It was like a knee reflex. His mouth snapped open and both his arms jumped out from his sides and he arched his back just a little. The gun was pointing at my right eye.
I sank and kneed him with all my strength, in the groin.
His chin came down and I hit it. I hit it as if I was driving the last spike on the first transcontinental railroad. I can still feel it when I flex my knuckles.
His gun raked the side of my face but it didn’t go off. He was already limp. He writhed down gasping, his left side against the floor. I kicked his right shoulder — hard. The gun jumped away from him, skidded on the carpet, under a chair. I heard the chessmen tinkling on the floor behind me somewhere.
The girl stood over him, looking down. Then her wide dark horrified eyes came up and fastened on mine.
“That buys me,” I said. “Anything I have is yours — now and forever.”
She didn’t hear me. Her eyes were strained open so hard that the whites showed under the vivid blue iris. She backed quickly to the door with her little gun up, felt behind her for the knob and twisted it. She pulled the door open and slipped out.
The door shut.
She was bareheaded and without her bolero jacket.
She had only the gun, and the safety catch on that was still set so that she couldn’t fire it.
It was silent in the room then, in spite of the wind. Then I heard him gasping on the floor. His face had a greenish pallor. I moved behind him and pawed him for more guns, and didn’t find any. I got a pair of store cuffs out of my desk and pulled his arms in front of him and snapped them on his wrists. They would hold if he didn’t shake them too hard.