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.
“God, Cap, I just got a call from Scofield! There’s hell in Riddle Street. Uh — the front of Tony Maratelli’s house been blown off!”
“Ain’t that funny?” said Kennedy. “We were just talking about him.”
MacBride bounced out of his chair and reached for his hat and coat.
IV
There was a crowd in Riddle Street.
The night was dark, but the red glow of the burning house lit up part of the street. Fire engines were there, and hose lay like great black serpents in the lurid glow, and the black rubber coats and helmets of firemen gleamed as they shot water into the flames.
The water fell back into the street and froze and glazed the pavements. Behind the fire lines stood men pointing and talking; and there were women with shawls around their heads and with coats flung hastily over night-dresses. There were a few women with children in arms.
A sleek red touring car with a brass bell on the cowl drove up and the fire chief, white-haired beneath his gold-braided cap, got out and looked up at the flames and had a few words with a lieutenant.
Part of the house wall caved in with a muffled roar, and dust and smoke billowed, and some of the onlookers cried out. A couple of patrolmen kept walking up and down and pushing back those who tried to edge in beyond the lines.
MacBride arrived in a police flivver driven by Hogan. Kennedy was in the back seat with him. MacBride got out and shoved his hands into the pockets of his neat gray cheviot and looked around and then spotted Patrolman Scofield. Scofield came over and saluted and MacBride asked:
“Where’s Tony?”
“In that house across the street — number 55.”
“Anybody hurt?”
“Tony got a bash on the head, that’s all. His wife wasn’t hit, but she’s pretty hysterical.”
“Where were you when this place was blown?”
“Three blocks up River Road. I heard it and came on the run.”
“I’ll take a look at Tony.”
He went into number 55. The hall-door was open, and there were some people in the hall. The sitting-room was off to the right, and MacBride saw a white-coated ambulance doctor sitting on a chair and listlessly smoking a cigarette. Tony was sitting on another chair wrapped in a heavy bathrobe and staring into space. His wife was sitting on a cot, holding her baby in her arms and moaning and rocking from side to side. Several women were grouped around her, trying to comfort her, and one held a glass of water.
MacBride drifted into the room, looked everybody over with quick scrutiny, and then went over and stood before Tony. After a moment Tony became aware of his presence and looked up and tried to say something, but he could only shake his head in dumb horror. MacBride took one hand out of his pocket and laid it on Tony’s shoulder and pressed the shoulder with brief but sincere reassurance.
“Snap out of it, Tony.”
“Holy Mother... Holy Mother...”
“I know, I know. But snap out of it. You’re alive. Your wife and baby’re alive.”
“Like... like the end of the world...”
MacBride caught his toe in the rung of a chair and slewed it nearer. He sat down and took a puff on his cigar and then took the cigar from his mouth and braced the hand that held it on his knee.
“You’ve got to snap out of it, Tony...”
Tony winced. “Out of bed I was throwed... out of bed... like—” He groaned and put his hands to his head.
MacBride looked at the cigar in the hand on his knee and then looked up at Tony. “Were you asleep when it happened?”
“Yes... I was asleep. The wall fell in...”
“Did you get any warning before-hand? I mean, was there any threatening letter?”
“No... no.”
“Well, try to snap out of it, Tony. I’ll see you again.”
MacBride got up and put the cigar back in his mouth and his hands back in his pockets. He looked around the room, his windy blue eyes thoughtful. Then he went out into the hallway and so on out into the street. He stood at the top of the three stone steps and watched the firemen pouring water into the demolished house. The flames had died, but the water was still hissing on hot beams.
Kennedy came out of the crowd, his face in shadow but the red end of a cigarette marking out his mouth. From the bottom of the steps he said:
“Now why do you suppose they chucked a bomb at Tony’s house, Cap?”
“Who chucked a bomb?” said MacBride.
“Are we thinking about the same guys?”
MacBride went down the steps. “Yeah, I guess so. But I don’t know why.”
“Let’s go back to Headquarters and get a drink.”
“I’m hanging around a while,” said MacBride.
Half an hour later water stopped pouring into the ruins. The firemen began to draw in the hose. The front of the building had disappeared. You could look into the lower and upper stories and see the debris.
MacBride went over and had a few words with the chief. He borrowed a flashlight from one of the firemen and went up the blackened stone steps. He climbed over the broken door and swung his flash around. He stepped from one broken beam to another and finally reached the living-room. The floor was slushy with black ashes that had been soaked by the water. The smell was acrid. He looked at the chair wherein he had sat one night and talked with Tony. It was burnt and broken.
He proceeded over fallen plaster that was gummy beneath his feet and reached a stairway. He climbed this and came to the floor above. The white beam of his flash probed the tattered darkness. Overturned chairs, beds soaked with water and blackened with soot. Tony’s home in ruin... He sighed.
There were three bedrooms, and he went from one to another, and looked around and meditated over several things, and then he went down by the cluttered stairway and worked his way back to the street.
He returned the flashlight to the fireman and said, “Thanks.”
He stood on the curb, his chin on his chest and his hands in his pockets. Presently he was aware of Kennedy standing beside him.
“Where’ve you been, Cap?”
“Places,” said MacBride.
“What did you see?”
“Things.”
V
Tony Maratelli stood by the window of number 55 Riddle Street and looked across at the epitaph of his home.
It was not a pleasant sight, in the sharp clear light of a winter morning. He could see the broad bed wherein he and his wife were used to sleeping; the smaller bed in another room wherein his daughter had narrowly escaped death; the other room and the other bed that were Dominick’s...
Tony looked sad and haggard, and when a fat man looks haggard it is in a way pathetic. A couple of men were already at work removing the debris from the sidewalk, and a policeman walked back and forth, guarding what remained of Tony’s possessions.
Of course, mused Tony, he would have a nice house again, somewhere. He had plenty of money. But — that house was an old one, and he had lived there for fifteen years — first as tenant, then as owner. It had been one of the milestones of his success as a building contractor. Wherefore its ruin made him feel sad. He pulled his heavy bathrobe tighter about his short, adipose body and sniffed.
He saw MacBride come down the opposite side of the street, pause to have a talk with the patrolman on duty, then run his eyes over the ruined house. Tony’s eyes steadied. He licked his lips. MacBride was his friend, but...
The captain turned abruptly and crossed the street. Tony waited for the sound of the doorbell. It came. Mrs. Reckhow, who had been good enough to give him and his family shelter overnight, appeared from another room.