The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction

by Maxim Jakubowski

  “She likes kids.”

  “I like kids too, but four’s too many at her age. She’s only twenty-seven.”

  “She wants eight.”

  “She’s crazy,” Deighan said. “What’s she want to bring all those kids into a world like this for?”

  There was an awkward moment. It was always awkward at first when he came back. Then Fran said, “You hungry?”

  “You know me. I can always eat.” Fact was, he was starved. He hadn’t eaten much up in Nevada, never did when he was away. And he hadn’t had anything today except an English muffin and some coffee for breakfast in Truckee.

  “Come into the kitchen,” Fran said. “I’ll fix you something.”

  They went inside. He got a beer out of the refrigerator; she waited and then took out some covered dishes, some vegetables. He wanted to say something to her, talk a little, but he couldn’t think of anything. His mind was blank at times like this. He carried his beer into the living room.

  The goddamn trophy case was the first thing he saw. He hated that trophy case; but Fran wouldn’t get rid of it, no matter what he said. For her it was like some kind of shrine to the dead past. All the mementoes of his years on the force – twenty-two years, from beat patrolman in North Beach all the way up to inspector on the narcotics squad. The certificate he’d won in marksmanship competition at the police academy, the two citations from the mayor for bravery, other crap like that. Bones, that’s all they were to him. Pieces of a rotting skeleton. What was the sense in keeping them around, reminding both of them of what he’d been, what he’d lost?

  His fault he’d lost it, sure. But it was their fault too, goddamn them. The laws, the lawyers, the judges, the system. No convictions on half of all the arrests he’d ever made – half! Turning the ones like Mannlicher and Brandt and D’Allesandro loose, putting them right back on the street, letting them make their deals and their hits, letting them screw up innocent lives. Sheila’s kids, his grandkids – lives like that. How could they blame him for being bitter? How could they blame him for taking too many drinks now and then?

  He sat down on the couch, drank some of his beer, lit a cigarette. Ah Christ, he thought, it’s not them. You know it wasn’t them. It was you, you dumb bastard. They warned you twice about drinking on duty. And you kept on doing it, you were hog-drunk the night you plowed the departmental sedan into that vanload of teenagers. What if one of those kids had died? You were lucky, by God. You got off easy.

  Sure, he thought. Sure. But he’d been a good cop, damn it, a cop inside and out; it was all he knew how to be. What was he supposed to do after they threw him off the force? Live on his half-pension? Get a job as a part-time security guard? Forty-four years old, no skills, no friends outside the department – what the hell was he supposed to do?

  He’d invented Bob Prince, that was what he’d done. He’d gone into business for himself.

  Fran didn’t understand. “You’ll get killed one of these days,” she’d said in the beginning. “It’s vigilante justice,” she’d said. “You think you’re Rambo, is that it?” she’d said. She just didn’t understand. To him it was the same job he’d always done, the only one he was any good at, only now he made up some of the rules. He was no Rambo, one man up against thousands, a mindless killing machine; he hated that kind of phony flag-waving crap. It wasn’t real. What he was doing, that was real. It meant something. But a hero? No. Hell, no. He was a sniper, that was all, picking off a weak or vulnerable enemy here and there, now and then. Snipers weren’t heroes, for Christ’s sake. Snipers were snipers, just like cops were cops.

  He finished his beer and his cigarette, got up, went into Fran’s sewing room. The five thousand he’d held out of the poker-game take was in his pocket – money he felt he was entitled to because his expenses ran high sometimes, and they had to eat, they had to live. He put the roll into her sewing cabinet, where he always put whatever money he made as Bob Prince. She’d spend it when she had to, parcel it out, but she’d never mention it to him or anyone else. She’d told Sheila once that he had a sales job, he got paid in cash a lot, that was why he was away from home for such long periods of time.

  When he walked back into the kitchen she was at the sink, peeling potatoes. He went over and touched her shoulder, kissed the top of her head. She didn’t look at him; stood there stiffly until he moved away from her. But she’d be all right in a day or two. She’d be fine until the next time Bob Prince made the right kind of connection.

  He wished it didn’t have to be this way. He wished he could roll back the clock three years, do things differently, take the gray out of her hair and the pain out of her eyes. But he couldn’t. It was just too late.

  You had to play the cards you were dealt, no matter how lousy they were. The only thing that made it tolerable was that sometimes, on certain hands, you could find ways to stack the damn deck.

  SO YOUNG, SO FAIR, SO DEAD

  John Lutz

  You can live your life through and try hard to be a decent sort, but trouble might still come to you. That’s the way it seems to have been with me. My trouble was never the direct result of what I did, but the product of others. Neighbours especially. My advice is, don’t ever get too friendly with your neighbors. I had to learn that the hard way.

  Adelaide and I finished moving into our new house on a Sunday. That Monday I managed to stay away from the office and helped her sort the contents of cardboard boxes and move furniture about. We were both very happy that day, for we’d worked and saved for a long time to be able to afford our own home built here in the beautiful rolling hills south of the smoke-palled city. Here the air was clear as crystal and the view was the best nature had to offer.

  And the house itself was what we’d always wanted. Though not large, it was well built with excellent materials and designed with a tasteful touch of miniature elegance. Adelaide and I took a walk around our green property before dark that evening and admired the way the wood-shingled house seemed to blend so well with the forest-like setting.

  Of course the best thing about the house and the property was that it was ours. I’d worked hard to build up my own mail order business, Smathers Enterprises, and Mr and Mrs Will Smathers were comparatively well heeled for a couple in their early thirties who’d started married life on practically nothing.

  Adelaide stopped strolling and gazed down the narrow blacktop road that fronted our property. I stood off and admired her delicate features and shining blonde hair, the weight of her lithe, graceful body resting on one slender leg. Adelaide, too, blended well with the natural surroundings. She was a natural beauty, the type makeup couldn’t improve.

  “I wonder about our neighbor,” she said.

  I moved next to her, slipping my arm about her waist. From where we stood we could see the nearest home through a break in the heavy green of the trees. A large brick home with a swimming pool behind it, it was the only house within a mile of us in either direction. I could just see the top of a small beach house near the pool. Within plain view near the attached two-car garage was a long, expensive blue convertible.

  “Whoever our neighbor is,” I said, “he has money.”

  “It certainly looks that way.”

  “On the other hand, he may be mortgaged up to his neck.”

  We stood for a moment longer looking down at the big house before going back inside. I say looking down because our home was situated high on one of the hills, and the blacktop road snaked sharply downward for the next two or three miles as it meandered like a still tributary to the Red Fox River.

  I suppose I had no business saying anything about how our neighbor might have his property mortgaged. We’d gone into debt heavily to buy our own home. But the business was going well, and promised to continue to do so, and there was no reason we shouldn’t be happy now and pay as we went along.

  And in a way owing on the house could be a good thing. Once we were in it I knew we’d never give it up unless we absolutely had to, and it m
ight serve as a spur to help make me work even harder.

  But all the house motivated me to do that day was leave the office early so I could get home to enjoy living there with Adelaide. As I drove up the winding driveway I wondered when I’d get over the feeling that this was someone else’s charming home I was approaching and not my own.

  Adelaide knew I was coming home early and had dinner in the oven. She fixed us each a drink while we were waiting and we sat in the disarranged living room.

  “I don’t know when we’ll ever get things the way we want them,” Adelaide said, glancing around at the mess.

  I grinned at her and took a sip of my Scotch and water, admiring her fresh good looks in the plain housedress she did so much for. “There’s plenty of time.”

  “I suppose so.” She sighed with contentment and settled back in her chair. “I saw our neighbor today,” she said.

  “Did he drop by to introduce himself?”

  “No, but you can see the house from our bedroom window upstairs. When I looked out this afternoon I noticed a man swimming in the pool. He had a guest, a girl in a purple bikini who stayed there most of the day, then drove away in a little sports car.”

  I had to laugh. If Adelaide had any faults at all, one of them would be that she was a trifle nosy. “Are you going to start a dossier on them?” I asked jokingly.

  “Not yet,” she said with a smile. “And it’s not ‘them’, it’s ‘him’. The man seems to live there alone.”

  “Big house for a single man,” I remarked, “though it sounds like he has his fun there.”

  A timer bell sounded in the kitchen and Adelaide put down her drink and stood. I walked behind her as she hurried into the kitchen to check on the dinner.

  “You keep an eye on him and keep me posted,” I said, rubbing the back of my hand playfully up the nape of her neck. She didn’t answer and I kept quiet. Experience had taught me to joke only so far about Adelaide’s feminine curiosity.

  Though without any prompting she had another tidbit of information for me the next evening when I returned home.

  “Our neighbor seems to be something of a swinger,” she said. “There was a girl in a red bikini there today.”

  “Same girl, different bikini,” I speculated.

  Adelaide shook her head. “The first one was a tall brunette. Today it was a short blonde.”

  I smiled and shrugged. “His sister?”

  “I doubt it,” Adelaide said, and drew a miniature bronze rooster from the carton.

  “I’m sure we’ll find out more about him,” I said. “He’ll probably turn up at our door one of these days soon to introduce himself. Could be he doesn’t even realize there’s anybody living here yet.” Silently I wondered if he’d plant a shade tree between us and his pool when he did find out. Then for the next few hours I was busy helping Adelaide finish the job of unpacking and thought about little else.

  But that night my own curiosity about our neighbor was aroused when I walked across the bedroom to close the drapes.

  As my hand reached for the pull cord my eye caught the flash of a revolving red light in the distance. I leaned forward and squinted into the darkness, and I saw that a police car was parked in our neighbor’s driveway beside his long blue convertible.

  As I watched, another car pulled up behind that one. In the reflection of its headlights I could see that it was a plain gray sedan. Two men got out of it and went into the house without knocking.

  A hand touched my shoulder and Adelaide was standing beside me.

  “Now who’s nosy?” she asked.

  I didn’t answer, and we stood there for a while and watched shadows cross the distant draped windows. Then the two men and a uniformed policeman came out of the house. They got into their respective cars, the red light on the patrol car was turned off, and both cars left together. A few minutes later the windows of the house went black and Adelaide and I were staring at nothing.

  “What do you think?” Adelaide asked as we turned away from the window.

  “It could have been a lot of things,” I said. “Maybe the police were called because somebody was sick. Maybe the two men in the plain car were doctors. Maybe our neighbor thought he saw a prowler. I guess if we really wanted to find out the thing to do would be to ask him.”

  The next evening I got in the car and drove down the road to do just that.

  “It’s because I’m a burglar,” our neighbor answered me amiably.

  I stood there and blinked, twice. I’d introduced myself when he’d answered the door, and he’d introduced himself as Jack Hogan and invited me inside and offered me a drink. After a few minutes’ exploratory conversation with the tanned and handsome man, I’d gotten around to asking him about the commotion at his house we’d witnessed last night, offering our help if anything was wrong.

  “The police were here to harass me,” Jack Hogan went on. “Lieutenant Faber and his friends. I humor the lieutenant because I understand he acts out of frustration.”

  “But if you’re innocent—” I said in a rather dumbfounded way.

  “But I’m not innocent,” Hogan said freely, his gray eyes as sincere as his voice. “Though if you tell anyone I said so I’ll deny it. Lieutenant Faber knows I’m guilty, but he can’t do anything about it because I’m too smart for him. That’s the fun of it.”

  I didn’t know if Hogan was joking or not. When I took a sip of my drink some of it spilled on my hand.

  “A burglary was committed a few nights ago,” Hogan said, offering me his neatly folded handkerchief to dry my fingers. “They know I did it but they don’t know how, or what I did with the loot. Oh, they come and search here every now and then, but we both know they won’t find anything. And if a young lady is prepared to testify that I spent the time of the robbery in her presence, where does it all leave poor Lieutenant Faber?”

  “Where I am, I suppose,” I said. “Confused.”

  “Well, no need to be confused. I say what’s the sense of getting away with something if nobody knows about it? Surely you can understand that. Then, too, there’s the profit. Burglary is a thriving business. How else could I afford all this, living alone in a ten-room house with a pool, nights on the town, flashy women, flashy cars? A wonderful life. I admit to you, I need all that.”

  “Then, in a way, it’s all a game,” I said slowly.

  “Of course it’s a game. Everybody plays his own game. I just admit mine because I’m good enough to get by with it even though it is illegal.”

  “But it’s wrong,” I said, trying to bat down his clearly stated logic.

  “Sure, it’s wrong,” Hogan said, “but so’s cheating on your income tax, overcharging the public if you’re a big corporation, leaving a penny for a paper when you don’t have a dime. To tell you the truth, I don’t worry about right or wrong.”

  “I guess you don’t.”

  “You see,” Hogan explained earnestly, “it’s the challenge. I like nice things; I indulge myself. When I see something of value I take it. I guess I have to take it.”

  “Kleptomania on a grand scale, huh?”

  “Hey, you might say that!” He raised his glass and grinned.

  I finished my drink and got up to leave. Hogan walked with me to the door. On the porch I noticed that the long blue convertible was gone, replaced by an even longer and more expensive tan convertible. Hogan saw me looking at the car.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s not stolen and it doesn’t belong to a girl I have hidden in the house. You didn’t interrupt anything and I can afford to trade cars any time I feel like it. Say,” he said, pointing at the long car, “how do you like it?”

  “Beautiful,” I said.

  “Sure, and it cost a hunk of cash. Well, drop by again, why don’t you? Bring the wife and we’ll take a dip in the pool.”

  I walked down the driveway to where my car was parked. I didn’t know what to think of our new neighbor. I was sure he wasn’t joking, and I must admit I reacted a
s a lot of people would react. There was a sense of resentment in me that the things I worked so hard for, this man simply went out and took. And yet I found that I couldn’t really dislike Jack Hogan. I waved to him as I started the engine and drove away.

  When I told Adelaide about the visit she didn’t believe me. I didn’t blame her.

  “You’d have to talk to him to understand how he thinks,” I told her. “You might describe him as an honest crook.”

  “An honest crook?”

  “Well, honest about being crooked, anyway.”

  That confused Adelaide almost as much as I was confused, so I had a snack, went over some work I’d brought home, then went to bed.

  Neither Adelaide or myself mentioned our neighbor for a while as we busied ourselves about our new home. Though I noticed that Adelaide kept a pair of binoculars in the bedroom now, and she often left the house to drive past the Hogan residence and look more closely at it, I suppose to check for bikini-clad guests and sports cars. Still, I don’t think she really completely believed what I’d told her about Jack Hogan until Lieutenant Faber called on us one Saturday afternoon.

  Adelaide and I were working in the garden she’d planted when the lieutenant drove up in his gray sedan. I stood leaning on my hoe and watched him approach. He was a harried-looking man who appeared to be in his mid-forties. His straight graying hair was combed to the side over his forehead and the breeze mussed it as his lined face broke into its emotionless, professional smile. Even before he introduced himself I knew who he was.

  “I hope we haven’t done anything wrong,” Adelaide said, returning the bland smile with one that shone.

  “Wrong? No,” Lieutenant Faber said. “Actually I’m a city detective and have no authority out here in the county anyway.”

  “And yet you drove out here to talk to us,” I said thoughtfully.

  “I don’t speak officially, Mr Smathers,” Faber said in his tired, hoarse voice. “Anything I say to you folks is off the record.” He got out a cigar and lit it expertly against the breeze. “How you getting along with your neighbor down the road?”