Michael Collins - Act of Fear

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Michael Collins - Act of Fear» весь текст электронной книги совершенно бесплатно (целиком полную версию без сокращений). В некоторых случаях можно слушать аудио, скачать через торрент в формате fb2 и присутствует краткое содержание. Жанр: Криминальный детектив, на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале библиотеки ЛибКат.

Act of Fear: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

Предлагаем к чтению аннотацию, описание, краткое содержание или предисловие (зависит от того, что написал сам автор книги «Act of Fear»). Если вы не нашли необходимую информацию о книге — напишите в комментариях, мы постараемся отыскать её.

Act of Fear — читать онлайн бесплатно полную книгу (весь текст) целиком

Ниже представлен текст книги, разбитый по страницам. Система сохранения места последней прочитанной страницы, позволяет с удобством читать онлайн бесплатно книгу «Act of Fear», без необходимости каждый раз заново искать на чём Вы остановились. Поставьте закладку, и сможете в любой момент перейти на страницу, на которой закончили чтение.

Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

It’s not so important to win a fight, but it is important to not let the other man win. I wanted Swede to get the idea that I’d get up each time he knocked me down. The fight wouldn’t end. That’s the best way to make a man stop knocking you down — make him know that it won’t get him what he wants. And I wanted him to know that I knew who had jumped me. I’m supposed to be a detective, and it might worry him to think that I knew my work.

The building was not too bad, and not too good. The usual six-storey old-law tenement with the fire escape in front. There were worse on the block, and there were better. It had been worked on some, but it had not exactly been renovated. In the white-tiled vestibule I studied the doorbells and mailboxes. I got a kind of surprise. The Olsens lived on the top floor, which is the cheap floor in a six-storey walkup. But from the look of the mailboxes they had the whole floor. That made their place the best apartment in the building, or at least the biggest. In this building, unrenovated, there were four to six apartments on each floor. The Olsens had a whole floor. Olsen had his name on all four mailboxes of the top floor. It meant that there was money around somewhere. It made them look like pretty fair-sized fish in a small and shabby pond.

From what Petey Vitanza had told me I’d already figured that the Olsens, except Jo-Jo, were not exactly a hard-working family. If they were parasites on some gaudier fish, it looked like that other bigger fish was making pretty big waves. While I was pressing another bell on the first floor I remembered Swede’s shoes and his decent enough suit and the information from Packy Wilson that Olsen drank in the better places.

The door buzzed to let me in, and I whipped through the downstairs hall fast. I waited out of sight on the first landing until the irate woman I’d buzzed on the first floor finished muttering a few obscene remarks on the ancestry and occupations of what she supposed had been the kids of the neighbourhood. When her door finally closed I started up the stairs. Not as quietly as a cat, but quiet.

Whatever else he was, Swede Olsen was not worried enough or cautious enough to wonder how come his upstairs bell rang without the downstairs bell. You can usually count on that in New York, because I never saw a building where the downstairs bells always worked or where the downstairs door wasn’t either broken half the time or left open to air out the hallways.

Swede opened the door himself and right away. He was my man. The suit had been changed, but the shoes were there on the small feet. The white of the shoes was stained with a mixture of coffee grounds and soggy orange peels. He was a big man, the face was square, and the blond hair was four-fifths grey. His hands were big and fleshy. There was discoloration on the knuckles of his right hand that would be a bruise tomorrow. His complexion was pale from too much time in places with dim light and no air. He was surprised. Even shocked. Me he hadn’t expected.

‘Dan Fortune, remember?’ I said. ‘Coffee looks good on the shoes.’

His jowled face went a bright shade of magenta. He clenched his bruised fist. I opened my suit jacket and displayed the police special. He took a step in my direction. I dangled the gun. I didn’t point it, you understand, I waved it lightly around under his nose, which was six inches above mine. He was a slow thinker. The danger was that he would start swinging before he thought it out. A smarter type would maybe have guessed that the last thing I would do was use the gun. With Swede the risk was that he would figure he could hit me before I used the gun. But the danger passed. His small eyes blinked at the gun and he stepped back. My diaphragm relaxed. He let me walk into the apartment.

‘What the hell do you want, Fortune?’

‘Some talk,’ I said. ‘It was too dark where we met last. Besides, we were both too busy in the alley.’

The apartment was big and ugly, just like Swede Olsen himself. Walls had been knocked down to make one large apartment out of the four small ones, but all they had accomplished was to make a big box out of small boxes. The place was not lack-of-money ugly; it was plain rotten-taste ugly. The whole place shouted of money made too late to know how to spend it. The living-room had cost a lot to furnish, but it still looked like the cheap room it was. The decoration was the kind they used to ship out to Africa to cheat the natives out of their ivory and gold. The couch and two chairs were purple-red velvet with gargoyle wooden legs. All covered with plastic to protect the beauty.

‘You crazy?’ Swede said. ‘I never saw you before.’

He was a terrible liar. He had known me on sight.

‘Then you don’t mind telling me about Jo-Jo,’ I said.

It confused him. His fists began to clench again. I guess that every problem that ever faced Swede Olsen had been met with his only argument — clenched fists. This time even he seemed to sense that he was not reacting very consistently.

‘What about Jo-Jo,’ he said cautiously.

‘Where is he, Swede?’

It was too much for him. ‘I told you to lay off!’

‘I thought you never saw me before?’

He blinked like a moth in a sudden light. His confusion was complete. I had a good chance of getting something out of him. The woman who spoke behind me must have thought the same.

‘Get out of here, mister.’

She looked like one of those Okie women you see in the pictures of the Dust Bowl in the Depression standing beside a grey and battered flivver piled with the junk that was all she owned. Her face looked like a ploughed field that had baked as hard and dry as stone in the sun. Her hair had started out blonde, and her eyes were washed-out blue. The eyes were now glacier blue, and the hair was grey and hung like limp string. Her hands were cracked like a dried-out mud puddle. But her clothes had cost a fair bundle, and the hands were clean. Her black sheath dress even had some style and taste, except that on her it looked like the shroud of a scarecrow. On her the triple strand of real pearls looked like rope. The years had left her nothing to hang clothes on but a bag of old bones and a leather skin.

‘I’ll handle it, Magda,’ Swede said.

His voice would not have convinced even me. The woman ignored him. I knew who was the real muscle in this house. Magda Olsen. The wife. She looked like Swede’s mother, but she was his wife, the mother of Jo-Jo. Magda had not had a rosy youth. She looked at me as if I were a cockroach she knew too well.

‘Forget my boy, you hear?’ Magda Olsen said.

‘What’s his trouble, Magda? Maybe he needs help.’

‘Get lost.’

‘You don’t want him found?’

‘Who says he’s lost,’ the woman said.

‘I say he’s lost,’ I said. ‘What I can’t say is if it’s voluntary or with some persuasion.’

‘Beat it,’ Magda Olsen said. She had a one-track mind, and she was brighter and quicker than her man. She knew that I knew nothing. She was not about to tell me anything. I decided to shoot in the dark. One thing was sure: if they knew anything, they knew more than I did. The dark was all I had to shoot in. But I knew now that something was not right with Jo-Jo. I thought about the most probable reason for Jo-Jo to run — that he had seen who mugged Stettin. In which case, someone else would be after him.

‘The other guy looking for Jo-Jo will play a lot rougher,’ I said. ‘If I found him, I could help.’

It was at this exact moment that I knew I had a real case on my hands. I was not just wasting time on a boy’s bad hunch, and Jo-Jo Olsen was not sunning himself on a cosy beach. My wild shot hit home.

Swede looked like he’d been kicked in a tender place. Magda Olsen froze into stone. Swede sweated through the fresh suit jacket. Swede was worried wet. Magda was worried, too, but she was also determined. She was determined to follow the course of action they were on, whatever that was. And I had a strange feeling about Magda and Swede Olsen. Call it a sensation. Call it an opinion. They were worried, yes. But they were not worried about Jo-Jo. They were worried about themselves.

Читать дальше
Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Похожие книги на «Act of Fear»

Представляем Вашему вниманию похожие книги на «Act of Fear» списком для выбора. Мы отобрали схожую по названию и смыслу литературу в надежде предоставить читателям больше вариантов отыскать новые, интересные, ещё непрочитанные произведения.


Michael Collins - Night of the Toads
Michael Collins
Michael Collins - Silent Scream
Michael Collins
Michael Collins - Shadow of a Tiger
Michael Collins
Michael Collins - Walk a Black Wind
Michael Collins
Michael Collins - The brass rainbow
Michael Collins
Suzanne Collins - Cathing Fire
Suzanne Collins
Suzanne Collins - CATCHING FIRE
Suzanne Collins
libcat.ru: книга без обложки
Michael Crichton
Michael Grant - Messenger of Fear
Michael Grant
Wilkie Collins - Die Frau in Weiss
Wilkie Collins
Отзывы о книге «Act of Fear»

Обсуждение, отзывы о книге «Act of Fear» и просто собственные мнения читателей. Оставьте ваши комментарии, напишите, что Вы думаете о произведении, его смысле или главных героях. Укажите что конкретно понравилось, а что нет, и почему Вы так считаете.

x