Great Noir Fiction

by Ed Gorman (ed)

  “I said get out or I’ll ram that shotgun down your throat.” He got out. Through the window I watched him rejoin his men. There were five, not a dozen as he’d claimed. Later I learned that three of them were off-duty Detroit cops and he’d hired the other two from a private security firm.

  I waited until the fire engines came and Ahearn was busy talking to the firefighters, then went out the window again and crossed to the next bungalow, set farther back where the light of the flames didn’t reach. I knocked twice and paused and knocked again. Boyd opened the door a crack.

  “I’m taking Suzie and her father back to Frechette’s motel for looks. Think you can lie low here until we come back in the morning for the rental car?”

  “What if they search the cabins?”

  “For what? You’re dead. By the time they find out that’s Leo in the car, if they ever do, you and Suzie will be in Canada. Customs won’t be looking for a dead bandit. Give everyone a year or so to forget what you look like and then you can come back. Not to Texas, though, and not under the name Virgil Boyd.”

  “Lucky the gas tank blew.”

  “I’ve never had enough luck to trust to it. That’s why I put a box of C-4 in Leo’s lap. Ma figured it was a small enough donation to keep her clear of a charge of felony murder.”

  “I thought you were some kind of corpse freak.” He still had the surprised look. “You could’ve been killed starting that car. Why’d you do it?”

  “The world’s not as complicated as it looks,” I said. “There’s always a good and a bad side. I saw Ahearn’s.”

  “You ever need anything,” he said.

  “If you do things right I won’t be able to find you when I do.” I shook his hand and returned to the other bungalow.

  A week later, after J. P. Ahearn’s narrow, jug-eared features had made the cover of People, I received an envelope from Houston containing a bonus check for a thousand dollars signed by Howard Frechette. He’d repaid the thirty-five hundred I’d given Ma before going home. That was the last I heard from any of them. I used the money to settle some old bills and had some work done on my car so I could continue to ply my trade along the Crooked Way.

  Exit

  Andrew Vachss

  Andrew Vachss is one of the most praised yet controversial writers of our time. In novels such as Blossom and Sacrifice, he offers a view of our society that not everybody wishes to acknowledge.

  First published in 1989.

  The black Corvette glided into a waiting spot behind the smog-gray windowless building. Gene turned off the ignition. Sat listening to the quiet. He took a rectangular leather case from the compartment behind the seats, climbed out, flicking the door closed behind him. He didn’t lock the car.

  Gene walked slowly through the rat-maze corridors. The door at the end was unmarked. A heavyset man in an army jacket watched him approach, eyes never leaving Gene’s hands.

  “I want to see Monroe.”

  “Sorry, kid. He’s backing a game now.”

  “I’m the one.”

  The heavyset man’s eyes shifted to Gene’s face. “He’s been waiting over an hour for you.”

  Gene walked past the guard into a long, narrow room. One green felt pool table under a string of hanging lights. Men on benches lining the walls. He could see the sign on the far wall: the large arrow–EXIT–was just beyond Monroe. They were all there: Irish, nervously stroking balls around the green felt surface, waiting. And Monroe. A grossly corpulent thing, parasite-surrounded. Boneless. Only his eyes betrayed life. They glittered greedily from deep within the fleshy rolls of his face. His eight-hundred-dollar black suit fluttered against his body like it didn’t want to touch his flesh. His thin hair was flat-black enameled patent-leather, plastered onto a low forehead with a veneer of sweat. His large head rested on the puddle of his neck. His hands were mounds of doughy pink flesh at the tips of his short arms. His smile was a scar and the fear-aura coming off him was jail-house-sharp.

  “You were almost too late, kid.”

  “I’m here now.”

  “I’ll let it go, Gene. You don’t get a cut this time.” The watchers grinned, taking their cue. “Three large when you win,” Monroe said.

  They, advanced to the low, clean table. Gene ran his hand gently over the tightly woven surface, feeling the calm come into him the way it always did. He opened his leather case, assembled his cue.

  Irish won the lag. Gene carefully roughened the tip of his cue, applied the blue chalk. Stepped to the table, holding the white cue ball in his left hand, bouncing it softly, waiting.

  “Don’t even think about losing.” Monroe’s voice, strangely thin.

  Gene broke perfectly, leaving nothing. Irish walked once around the table, seeing what wasn’t there. He played safe. The room was still.

  “Seven ball in the corner.”

  Gene broke with that shot and quickly ran off the remaining balls. He watched Monroe’s face gleaming wetly in the dimness as the balls were racked. He slammed the break-ball home, shattering the rack. And he sent the rest of the balls into pockets gaping their eagerness to serve him. The brightly colored balls were his: he nursed some along the rail, sliced others laser-thin, finessed combinations. Brought them home.

  Irish watched for a while. Then he sat down and looked at the floor. Lit a cigarette.

  The room darkened. Gene smiled and missed his next shot. Irish sprang to the table. He worked slowly and too carefully for a long time. When he was finished, he was twelve balls ahead with twenty-five to go. But it was Gene’s turn.

  And Gene smiled again, deep into Monroe’s face. Watched the man neatly place a cigarette into the precise center of his mouth, waving away a weasel-in-attendance who leaped to light it for him. And missed again . . . by a wider margin.

  Irish blasted the balls off the table, waited impatiently for the rack. He smelled the pressure and didn’t want to lose the wave. Irish broke correctly, ran the remaining balls and finished the game. EXIT was glowing in the background. As the last ball went down, he turned:

  “You owe me money, Monroe.”

  His voice trembled. One of Monroe’s men put money in his hand. The fat man spoke, soft and cold: “Would you like to play again”

  “No, I won’t play again. I must of been crazy. You would of gone through with it. Yes. You fat, dirty, evil sonofabitch . . .”

  One of the calmly waiting men hit him sharply under the heart. Others stepped forward to drag him from the room.

  “Let him keep the money,” Monroe told them

  Gene turned to gaze silently at the fat man. Almost home . . .

  “You going to kill me, Monroe?”

  “No, Gene. I don’t want to kill you.”

  “Then I’m leaving.”

  A man grabbed Gene from each side and walked him toward the fat man’s chair.

  “You won’t do anything like that. Ever again.”

  Monroe ground the hungry tip of his bright-red cigarette deep into the boy’s face, directly beneath the eye. Just before he lost consciousness, Gene remembered that Monroe didn’t smoke.

  He awoke in a grassy plain, facedown. He started to rise and the earth stuck to his torn face.

  His screams were triumph.

  Deathman

  Ed Gorman

  First published in 1991.

  The night before he killed a man, Hawes always followed the same ritual.

  He arrived in town late afternoon—in this case, a chill shadowy autumn afternoon—found the best hotel, checked in, took a hot bath in a big metal tub, put on a fresh suit so dark it hinted at the ministerial, buffed his black boots till they shone, and then went down to the lobby in search of the best steak in town.

  Because this was a town he’d worked many times before, he knew just which restaurant to choose—a place called Ma’s Gaslight Inn. Ma had died last year of a venereal disease (crazed as hell, her friends said, in her last weeks, talking to dead people and drawing crude pictures of her tombsto
ne again and again on the wall next to her death bed.)

  Dusk and chill rain sent townspeople scurrying for home, the clatter of wagons joining the clop of horses in retreat from the small, prosperous mountain town.

  Hawes strode the boardwalk alone, a short and burly man handsome except for his acne-pitted cheeks. Even in his early forties, his boyhood taint was obvious.

  Rain dripped in fat silver beads from the overhangs as he walked down the boardwalk toward the restaurant. He liked to look in the shop windows when they were closed this way, look at the female things—a lace shawl, a music box with a ballerina dancing atop, a ruby necklace so elegant it looked as if it had been plucked from the fat white neck of a duchess only moments ago.

  Without quite wanting them to, all these things reminded him of Sara. Three years they’d been married until she’d learned his secret, and then she’d been so repelled she invented a reason to visit her mother back in Ohio, and never again returned. He was sure she had remarried—he’d received divorce papers several years ago—and probably even had children by now. Children—and a house with a creek in back—had been her most devout wish.

  He quit looking in the shop windows. He now looked straight ahead. His boot heels were loud against the wet boards. The air smelled cold and clean enough to put life in the lungs of the dead.

  The player piano grew louder the closer the restaurant got; and then laughter and the clink of glasses.

  Standing there, outside it all, he felt a great loneliness, and now when he thought of Sara he was almost happy. Having even sad memories were better than no memories at all.

  He walked quickly to the restaurant door, pushed it open, and went inside.

  He needed to be with people tonight.

  He was halfway through his steak dinner (fat pats of butter dripping golden down the thick sides of the meat and potatoes sliced and fried in tasty grease) when the tall man in the gray suit came over.

  At this time the restaurant was full, low-hanging Rochester lamps casting small pools of light into the ocean of darkness. Tobacco smoke lay a haze over everything, seeming to muffle conversations. An old Negro stood next to the double doors of the kitchen, filling water glasses and handing them to the big hipped waitresses hurrying in and out the doors. The rest of the house was packed with the sort of people you saw in mining towns—wealthy miners and wealthy men who managed the mines for eastern bosses; and then just hard scrubbed-clean workingmen with their hard scrubbed-clean wives out celebrating a birthday or an anniversary at the place where the rich folks dine.

  “Excuse me.”

  Hawes looked up. “Yes?”

  “I was wondering if you remembered me.”

  Hawes looked him over. “I guess.”

  “Good. Then you mind if I sit down?”

  “You damn right I do. I’m eating.”

  “But last time you promised that—”

  Hawes dismissed the man with a wave of a pudgy hand. “Didn’t you hear me? I’m eating. And I don’t want to be interrupted.”

  “Then after you’re finished eating—?”

  Hawes shrugged. “We’ll see. Now get out of here and leave me alone.”

  The man was very young, little more than a kid, twenty-one, twenty-two at most, and now he seemed to wither under the assault of Hawes’s intentional and practiced rudeness.

  “I’ll make sure you’re done eating before I bother you again.” Hawes said nothing. His head was bent to the task of cutting himself another piece of succulent steak.

  The tall man went away.

  “It’s me again. Richard Sloane.”

  “So I see.”

  The tall man looked awkward. “You’re smoking a cigar.”

  “So I am.”

  “So I take it you’re finished eating?”

  Hawes almost had to laugh, the sonofabitch looked so young and nervous. They weren’t making them tough, the way they’d been in the frontier days. “I suppose I am.”

  “Then may I sit down?”

  Hawes pointed a finger at an empty chair. The young man sat down.

  “You know what I want?” He took out a pad and pencil the way any good journalist would.

  “Same thing you people always want.”

  “How it feels after you do it.”

  Hawes smiled. “You mean do I feel guilty? Do I have nightmares?”

  The young man looked uncomfortable with Hawes’s playful tone. “I guess that’s what I mean, yes.”

  Hawes stared at the young man.

  “You ever seen one, son?”

  He looked as if he was going to object to “son” but then changed his mind. “Two. One when I was a little boy with my uncle and one last year.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “I hated it. It scared me and the way people acted, it made me sick. They were—celebrating. It was like a party.”

  “Yes, some of them get that way sometimes.”

  Hawes had made a study of it all so he considered telling

  Sloane here about Tom Galvin, an Irishman of the sixteenth century who had personally hanged more that sixteen hundred men. Galvin believed in giving the crowd a show, especially with men accused of treason. These he not only hanged but oftentimes dismembered, throwing arms and legs to the crazed onlookers. Some reports had it that some of the crowds actually ate of the bloodied limbs tossed to them.

  “You ever hang two at once?”

  “The way they did in Nevada last year?” Hawes smirked and shook his head. “Not me, son. I’m not there to put on a show. I’m there to kill a man.” He took a drag on his cigar. “I don’t want to give my profession a bad name.”

  God knew that executioners, as a group, were unreliable. In seventeenth-century England, the executioner himself was put in a jail cell for eight days preceding the hanging—so officials would know he’d show up on time and sober.

  “Will you sleep well tonight?” Sloane asked.

  “Very well, hopefully.”

  “You won’t think about tomorrow?”

  “Not very seriously.”

  “How the man will look?”

  “No.”

  “Or how the trap will sound when it opens?”

  “No.”

  “Or how his eyes will bulge and his tongue will bloat?” Hawes shook his head. “I know what you want, son. You want a speech about the terrible burden of being an executioner.” He tapped his chest. “But I don’t have it in me.”

  “Then it isn’t a burden?”

  “No, son, it isn’t. It’s just what I do. The way some men milk cows and other men fix buggies—I hang people. It’s just that simple.”

  The young man looked disappointed. They always did when Hawes told them this. They wanted melodrama—they wanted regret and remorse and a tortured soul.

  Hawes decided to give him the story about the woman. It wasn’t the whole story, of course, but the part he always told was just what newspapermen were looking for.

  “There was a blonde woman once,” Hawes said.

  “Blonde?”

  “So blonde it almost hurt your eyes to look at her hair in the sunlight. It was spun gold.”

  “Spun gold; God.”

  “And it was my duty to hang her.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “The mayor of the town said I’d be hanging a woman, but I never dreamt she’d be so beautiful.”

  “Did you hang her anyway?”

  “I had to, son. It’s my job.”

  “Did she cry?”

  “She was strong. She didn’t cry and her legs didn’t give out when she was climbing the scaffold stairs. You know, I’ve seen big strapping men just collapse on those stairs and have to be carried all the way up. And some of them foul their pants. I can smell the stench when I’m pulling the white hood over their eyes.”

  “But she was strong?”

  “Very strong. She walked right over to the trapdoor and stood on top of it and folded her hands very primly in front of her. And th
en she just waited for me to come over there.”

  “What was she guilty of?”

  “She’d taken a lover that spring, and when her husband found out, he tried to kill her. But instead she killed him. The jury convicted her of first-degree murder.”

  “It doesn’t sound like first-degree to me.”

  “Me either, son. But I’m the hangman; I’m not the judge.”

  “And so you hanged her?”

  “I did.”

  “Didn’t you want to call it off?”

  “A part of me did.”

  “Did she scream when the door dropped away?”

  “She didn’t say anything.”

  “And her neck snapped right away?”

  “I made sure of that, son. I didn’t want her to dangle there and strangle the way they sometimes do. So I cinched the knot extra tight. She crossed over right away. You could hear her neck go.”

  “This was how many years ago?”

  “Ten.”

  “And obviously you still think about her.”

  It was clear now the angle the young journalist would be taking. Hangman kills beautiful woman; can’t get her out of his mind these long years later. His readers would love it.

  “Oh, yes, son, yes, I still think about her.”

  The excitement was plain on the man’s young face. This may just have been the best story he’d ever had.

  He flipped the cover of his pad closed. “I really appreciate this.”

  Hawes nodded.

  The young man got up, snatched his derby from the edge of the table, and walked to the rear where the press of people and smoke and clatter was overwhelming.

  Hawes took the time for another two drinks and half a Cuban cigar and then went out into the rain.

  The house was three blocks away, in the opposite direction of the gallows, for which Hawes was grateful. A superstitious man, he believed that looking at a gallows the night before would bring bad luck. The man would not die clean, the trap would not open, the rope would mysteriously snap—something. And so he didn’t glimpse the gallows until the morning of the execution.