Эд Макбейн - Learning to Kill - Stories

The .22 went off with a sharp pouff and he felt instant pain when the small bullet ripped into his shoulder. But he’d already squeezed the trigger of the .38 and Janet’s arm jerked as his larger bullet tore into flesh and bone. Her fingers opened, and the silenced gun fell to the floor. He kicked it out of her reach.

Footsteps were rushing up the stairs. Outside the door, the landlady shouted, “What is it, Mrs. Radner? What is it?”

“Call the police!” Davis yelled through the closed door. “Now!”

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” Janet said. “This will kill my father.”

“Your father still has Nick,” Davis said. “And his porcelain.” He paused and looked directly into Janet’s eyes. “That’s all he ever had.”

When you start writing parodies of private eye stories, it’s time to stop writing them. By the time this story was published, in January of 1955, I had written the last of the Matt Cordell stories and was ready to give up on the subgenre. Not only was I finding it increasingly more difficult to justify a private citizen investigating murders, but Cordell presented the added problem of an investigator who wasn’t even licensed! Manhunt published this story under the Hunt Collins byline. It was a kiss-off to private eyes in general and Matt Cordell in particular.

She was cleaning fish by the kitchen sink when I climbed through the window, my .45 in my hand. She wore a low-cut apron, shadowed near the frilly top. When she saw me, her eyes went wide, and her lips parted, moist and full. I walked to the sink, and I picked up the fish by the tail, and I batted her over the eye with it

“Darling,” she murmured.

I gave her another shot with the fish, this time right over her nose. She came into my arms, and there was ecstasy in her eyes, and her breath rushed against my throat. I shoved her away, and I swatted her full on the mouth. She shivered and came to me again. I held her close, and there was the odor of fish and seaweed about her. I inhaled deeply, savoring the taste. My father had been a sea captain.

“They’re outside,” I said, “all of them. And they’re all after me. The whole stinking, dirty, rotten, crawling, filthy, obscene, disgusting mess of them. Me. Dudley Sledge. They’ve all got guns in their maggoty fists, and murder in their grimy eyes.”

“They’re rats,” she said.

“And all because of you. They want me because I’m helping you.”

“There’s the money, too,” she reminded me.

“Money?” I asked. “You think money means anything to them? You think they came all the way from Washington Heights for a lousy ten million bucks? Don’t make me laugh.” I laughed.

“What are we going to do, Dudley?”

“Do? Do? I’m going to go out there and cut them down like the unholy rats they are. When I get done, there’ll be twenty-six less rats in the world, and the streets will be a cleaner place for our kids to play in.”

“Oh, Dudley,” she said.

“But first...”

The pulse in her throat began beating wildly. There was a hungry animal look in her eyes. She sucked in a deep breath and ran her hands over her hips, smoothing the apron. I went to her, and cupped her chin in the palm of my left hand.

“Baby,” I said.

Then I drew back my right fist and hit her on the mouth. She fell back against the sink, and I followed with a quick chop to the gut, and a fast uppercut to the jaw. She went down on the floor and she rolled around in the fish scales, and I thought of my sea captain father, and my mother who was a nice little lass from New England. And then I didn’t think of anything but the blonde in my arms, and the .45 in my fist, and the twenty-six men outside, and the four shares of Consolidated I’d bought that afternoon, and the bet I’d made on the fight with One-Lamp Louie, and the defective brake lining on my Olds, and the bottle of rye in the bottom drawer of my file cabinet back at Dudley Sledge, Investigations.

I enjoyed it.

She had come to me less than a week ago.

Giselle, my pretty redheaded secretary, had swiveled into the office and said, “Dud, there’s a woman to see you.”

“Another one?” I asked.

“She looks distraught.”

“Show her in.”

She had walked into the office then, and my whole life had changed. I took one look at the blonde hair piled high on her head. My eyes dropped to the clean sweep of her throat, to the figure filling out the green silk dress. When she lifted her green eyes to meet mine, I almost drowned in their fathomless depths. I gripped the desktop and asked, “Yes?”

“Mr. Sledge?”

“Yes.”

“My name is Melinda Jones,” she said.

“Yes, Miss Jones.”

“Oh, please call me Agnes.”

“Agnes?”

“Yes. All my friends call me Agnes. I... I was hoping we could be friends.”

“What’s your problem, Agnes?” I asked.

“My husband.”

“He’s giving you trouble?”

“Well, yes, in a way.”

“Stepping out on you?”

“Well, no.”

“What then?”

“Well, he’s dead.”

I sighed in relief. “Good,” I said. “What’s the problem?”

“He left me ten million dollars. Some of his friends think the money belongs to them. It’s not fair, really. Just because they were in on the bank job. Percy...”

“Percy?”

“My husband. Percy did kill the bank guards, and it was he who crashed through the roadblock, injuring twelve policemen. The money was rightfully his.”

“Of course,” I said. “No doubt about it. And these scum want it?”

“Yes. Oh, Mr. Sledge, I need help so desperately. Please say you’ll help me. Please, please. I beg you. I’ll do anything, anything.”

“Anything?”

Her eyes narrowed, and she wet her lips with a sharp, pink tongue. Her voice dropped to a husky whisper. “Anything,” she said.

I belted her over the left eye.

That was the beginning, and now they were all outside, all twenty-six of them, waiting to close in, waiting to drop down like the venomous vultures they were. But they hadn’t counted on the .45 in my fist, and they hadn’t counted on the slow anger that had been building up inside me, boiling over like a black brew, filling my mind, filling my body, poisoning my liver and my bile, quickening my heart, putting a throb in my appendix, tightening the pectoral muscles on my chest, girding my loins. They hadn’t counted on the kill lust that raged through my veins. They hadn’t counted on the hammer that kept pounding one word over and over again in my skull: kill, kill, kill.

They were all outside waiting, and I had to get them. We were inside, and they knew it, so I did the only thing any sensible person would have done under the circumstances.

I set fire to the house.

I piled rags and empty crates and furniture and fish in the basement and then I soaked them with gasoline. I touched a match, and the flames leaped up, lapping at the wooden crossbeams, eating away at the undersides of the first-floor boards.

Melinda was close to me. I cupped her chin in one hand, and then tapped her lightly with the 45, just bruising her. We listened to the flames crackling in the basement, and I whispered, “That fish smells good.” And then all hell broke loose, just the way I had planned it. They stormed the house, twenty-six strong. I threw open the front door and I stood there with the .45 in my mitt, and I shouted, “Come on, you rats. Come and get it!” Three men appeared on the walk and I fired low, and I fired fast. The first man took two in the stomach, and he bent over and died. The second man took two in the stomach, and he bent over and died, too. I hit the third man in the chest, and I swore as he died peacefully.