The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection
- Автор: Датлоу Эллен, Виндлинг Терри
- Год: 1992
- Язык: английский
- Год: St.Martin’s Press
- Жанр: Ужасы
Электронная книга - «The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection». Краткое содержание книги:
A pistol came down hard on my wrist and I dropped the razor.
Another pistol poked under my chin, prodding my gaze to the ceiling. Footsteps whispered across the carpet. I smelled expensive cologne.
“Well, well, this must be Richie.” A deep voice, with just the slightest hint of an Italian accent. “Gus has told me all about you.”
He was a thickset man with a fresh haircut and fashionably graying temples. He introduced himself as Jimmy Gemignani.
“So my friend Gus calls me,” Gemignani said. “ ‘Jimmy,’ he says, ‘we’ve got trouble out at Torito’s. A good friend of mine is over there, and he’s got the wrong idea. I’m afraid that someone might get hurt.’ ”
I started to rise from my seat, but Gemignani’s two toughs dropped big hands on my shoulders and stopped me. “Look,” I said. “I don’t know what you know, but if you go downstairs and take a look at Torito’s wife you’ll see that you’re roughing up the wrong guy.” I pointed at the old man, who was examining Torito’s swollen brow. “Get him away from Torito. Please.”
Torito’s father seemed amused by my concern. “Don’t listen to him. He doesn’t understand yet.”
Gemignani nodded. “Then make him understand. I don’t have a lot of time, and neither does Gus. He needs Torito for a press conference next week.” Gemignani’s lips curled in disgust. “And we can’t use Toro like this.”
The old man shook his head. “That wasn't the deal. I got a contract. It’s very specific. Besides, nobody’s paid me yet.”
"You’ll get your money,” Gemignani said shortly. “Now, make him understand. If this thing’s going to work, we’re going to need his full cooperation.”
Torito’s father put the straight razor in my right hand, and then he raised my left and placed it over my heart. I felt it beating . . .
. . . pounding a staccato speed-bag rhythm. I felt the sleeping black sky stretching forever, dry sandpaper breezes scudding this way and that like indecisive ghosts, heat waves radiating from the highway in the middle of the night. The old man in the desert picking up a piece of mesquite, me knocking at Torito’s door. The old man grinning. Me closing Torito’s wounds. The old man carving, flick flick flick.
I concentrated on the sound of the knife. In a few moments, my heartbeat was even, steady.
I looked at Torito’s ruined face. He tried to grin. “C’mon, Richie,” he said. “It’s the only way. You got to help me.” He stared at the TV, watched himself fall under Barkley’s fists. “I can’t go out like that.”
Gemignani’s toughs moved away. Gemignani himself handed me my snakeskin bag.
“I guess everybody wants it,” I said, as if I’d forgotten all about Rosie.
“He understands now.” The old man winked at me. “We got a deal, you and me. We’re in this together. That’s the way it’s got to be.”
“Okay,” Gemignani said. “Let’s do what needs to be done.”
A smirking bellboy opened the limo door and Gemignani handed him my bag and a ten-dollar bill. The bellboy scurried away, whistling, his polished black shoes silent on red carpet. He slapped the marble knee of a statue of Hercules and disappeared through a revolving door. For a moment I heard the jingling music of slot machines, but then the door’s rubber seals caught and I heard nothing.
Vegas. When it was quiet, it was nothing more than a piece of the desert.
Gemignani patted my knee. I could feel his wedding ring through my thin slacks. I wanted to shove his hand away, but I knew that would be a mistake.
“I never saw anything like that before,” he said, a tinge of admiration in his voice. “I never did.”
I got a cigarette out of my jacket pocket and planted it between my lips.
“We don’t have a reservation in your name,” Gemignani said. “Just tell the desk clerk that Jimmy G sent you. Torito’s press conference is gonna be on Wednesday at noon—that’ll give you three days to rest up. Check with the concierge on Wednesday morning and he’ll give you the details.”
Another pat, and then Gemignani’s hand slipped away. “You do good work, Richie. I’m glad you’re part of the team.”
I climbed out of the limo and closed the door too hard; the slam sounded like a hammer blow. My lips quivered and I almost lost my cigarette. I waited for a scream of pain, but it didn’t come.
I patted my pockets, searching for a match. Gemignani’s driver offered a lighter, but I was shaking so badly that I could barely catch the flame.
The driver flicked his fingers against my chest. “Don’t get to close. A man in your condition shouldn’t play with fire.”
I blew smoke in his face.
He looked hurt. “Just a piece of friendly advice,” he said, handing me a thick envelope. “Here’s some more: stay away from the roulette wheel, and never hit when the dealer is showing a six, no matter what you’ve got in your hand.”
I took the envelope and started up the red carpeted stairs. Hercules stared down at me, a hunk of dead marble.
I thought about wood, dead and seasoned, smelling of muscle and blood. Claw hammers and carving knives stolen from Penitente men, adrenaline chloride 1-1000 and Enswell irons and Vaseline. All the rotten pieces of Torito that the old man cut away and flushed down the toilet. All the surgical thread and bloodstained sandpaper and rusty nails. Rusty nailheads fading to cherry-red scars. Avitene and thrombin, whittled survey-stake ankles and knuckles made of ironwood. Slivers and shavings that writhed and died like worms on the green tiled floor, my cramping fingers fighting to grip a surgical needle slick with blood. I thought about wood that splits, and men with knives, and men who never see the punches coming.
And then I didn’t want to think anymore.
My heartbeat was strong and even—mesquite is a damn tough wood—and I knew how to keep it that way.
The desert whispered behind me, but inside the hotel there’d be noise. I ditched the cigarette. Opened the envelope. I had three days of nothing, money to burn, and a new ticker that could keep the pace.
The rest I’d learn to live with.
I wasn’t going to worry about the scars.
THE KIND MEN LIKE
Karl Edward Wagner
Karl Edward Wagner, a former psychiatrist, has been a full-time writer since 1975. He has written or edited more than thirty-five horror and science fiction books, including his collections In a Lonely Place and Why Not You and I? and the annual Year’s Best Horror Stories anthology published by DAW Books.
What is it about the pin-up? The fantasy woman has always played an important part in American pop culture, and probably always will. The Vargas girl, the Playboy bunny, and the Penthouse pet all provide something to generations of males. But there is a darker side to the pin-ups that can be seen in the bondage magazines and the kinkier leather magazines. In this story from the anthology Hotter Blood, Wagner uses the career of Betty Page, a ubiquitous girlie model in the fifties whose spirit permeates this story, as the foundation for a multilayered portrait of a protagonist both erotically alluring and ultimately terrifying.