I ran. Not that it mattered, but I ran, out to the railing . . .and looked down. His body looked like a rag doll splayed on the rocks.
There was no question in my mind that he was dead, but slowly I wound my way down the steps . . . and was distracted by the room. The door stood wide open.
I don’t know what compelled me to look in, but I was drawn to it. It was a small room with a desk and a lot of shelves filled with books, mostly occult and black magic. There were carpentry tools on the wall, and all manner of needles and devices that might be used by a tailor. The air was filled with an odd odor I could not place, and on Machen’s desk, something that was definitely not tobacco smoldered away.
There was another room beyond the one in which I stood. The door to it was cracked open. I pushed it back and stepped inside. It was a little child’s room filled thick with toys and such: jack-in- the-boxes, dolls, kid books, and a toy piano. All were covered in dust.
On the bed lay a teddy bear. It was ripped open and the stuffing was pulled out. There was one long strand of hair hanging out of that gutted belly, just one, as if it were the last morsel of a greater whole. It was the color of honey from a fresh-robbed hive. I knew what the smell in the ashtray was now.
I took the hair and put a match to it, just in case.
Red Light
A Ms. Tree short story
Max Allan Collins
Max Allan Collins’ Stolen Away is one of this year’s major crime novels, and one almost guaranteed to bring him the wide public he’s long deserved. Collins works in a variety of forms, including short stories, of which he’s quickly becoming a master. This is one of the few “Ms. Tree” tales written in prose. Artist Terry Beatty and Collins do “Ms. Tree” in graphic-novel form for DC Comics.
First published in 1984.
I was stopped at a light, on my way home from working late at the office, when the guy climbed in on the rider’s side and pointed his gun at me.
It wasn’t much of a gun, but then he wasn’t much of a guy: He was chocolate-black and had Michael Jackson’s curls and approximate weight and a similar plastic beauty. Only I didn’t figure him for a rock star, or a Jehovah’s Witness, either.
“You oughta keep your doors locked, babe,” he said, flashing his caps. It was a dazzling smile, I had to give him that much; but it was a nervous smile. And there was blood spattered on his blue satin shirt and skinny white leather tie; also on one satin sleeve there was a tear, or rather a slash, just below the bicep, and a circle of red dampness grew around it. His white leather pants were spotless, however.
“Cut yourself shaving?” I asked.
His smile faded and only the nervousness remained. “You’re a pretty cool customer, babe, that much I got to hand you.”
“The meter’s running,” I said. “Where to?”
He was looking back over his shoulder. “Take a left when the light changes, then cut through the alley and double back to Wells.”
Red turned to green, and I did what he said.
He smiled smugly as he continued looking back over his shoulder. “Think we lost ’em. Just keep driving. You know where the Sky view Hotel is?”
“Out by the airport?”
“You got it.
“That where we’re going?”
“That’s where we’re goin’, babe.”
I got on the expressway; it was well after rush hour—lights blinked nervously in the night, though not as nervously as my passenger with the gun. For a skinny little man who obviously fancied himself cool, my main man here was a beat away from coming apart at the seams.
“How long have you been a pimp?” I asked him.
He shot me a narrow-eyed look that was at once angry and frightened. “Just drive, bitch,” he said.
“Hey, and here I thought I was your ‘babe.’ ”
He studied me; the gun in his hand—a nickel-plated .32 with a pearl-handle—studied me, too. “Ain’t I seen you someplace before?”
“That’s a pretty smooth line,” I said, smiling over at him. “Is that how you reel in the little girls from Michigan when you pick ’em up at the bus station?”
“Shut-up,” he said. There was almost a pout in his voice. He was beginning to think he’d climbed in the wrong car.
He was right.
“Anybody following us?” I asked.
He was looking behind him again. “Not that I can see. But step on it. Just don’t attract any sirens.”
I shrugged. “I go sixty-five along here all the time. Never been picked up yet.”
“Do it, then!” He almost spit the words.
“Nice teeth you got there. How much they cost you?”
He put the gun in my neck. Leaned into me. He smelled good. “You’re a nice-looking piece of work, but you got a smart-ass mouth. And I don’t like that in my ladies.”
“No offense. I’m just . . . nervous. It’s not every day a guy jumps in my car and holds a gun on me.”
“You ain’t nervous enough, far as I’m concerned.”
“We all show our nervousness in different ways, to different degrees. With me, it comes out in wisecracks. Now, you, you don’t seem nervous at all.”
That was a lie, of course, but it was also sort of a compliment. It isn’t true that you can’t bullshit a bullshitter, you know.
“But I wouldn’t blame you if you were nervous,” I said. “A situation like this, who wouldn’t be?”
He let air out. Pulled the gun away from my neck. Slid back over by his window.
“Well, I’m not,” he said, wincing as he flexed the bleeding arm. “Nervous.”
“It’s five minutes to the airport. Care if I smoke?”
“Light up. Die of cancer. See if I give a shit.”
I punched in the lighter; a few seconds later it popped out of the dash. I pulled it out and pressed it to the hand holding the gun. Skin sizzled, he screamed, shot himself in the leg, and I slammed on the brakes.
The windshield didn’t shatter, when his head slammed into it, but it made a lovely lace-like effect, as if the most artistic spider in the world had had a hand in it. And here my passenger had managed it all with a simple nod of the head.
I ended up my sliding skid along the roadside. Other cars glided by in the cool night, not noticing us, or not caring, as I hopped out and went around on the driver’s side and pulled him out onto the shoulder. There was blood in his pretty curls, but he wasn’t dead. I had my gloves on, so picking up the little gun he’d dropped in my car was no problem. I gave him a nudge or two with my foot and he rolled down the embankment into the ditch. Then I went back to the car, got my own gun out of my purse and went down to see how my main man was doing.
He was on his back, just beginning to rouse. He pushed up on one elbow, touched his bloody head, looked up groggily. “Who . . . who the fuck are you, anyway?” he managed.
I removed the clip from his automatic; emptied the bullets in one cupped hand, tossed them into the night. Put the clip back, tossed it in his lap. Then I bent over and, holding my gun on him, edged a money clip from out of his tight white pants. I peeled off a hundred, tossed the clip back at him.
“That’s for my windshield,” I said. “And my name’s Michael Tree.”
“Oh, shit . . . ”
“You might’ve seen my picture in the paper. Every now and then I kill somebody I don’t like.”
“I didn’t do anything to you . . .”
“Not enough to kill you over.” I turned away. “I’ll see you around.”
From behind me his voice was a razor cutting the night.
“You’re one cold bitch, ain’t you?”
I didn’t turn when I spoke. “That coming from a pimp I take as high praise indeed.”
I started up the embankment.
A red Cadillac came careening up, and three women jumped out, almost simultaneously: a redhead, a blonde, a brunette. All of them had spandex pants on and various skimpy, spanglely tops. All of them wore expressions so
intensely angry the makeup on their pretty faces was cracking.
The redhead had a knife in her hand and the blade was bloody.
“We saw him get in your car waving his gun,” she said breathlessly. “Figured he made you drive him.”
“You figured right,” I said.
The brunette said, “We thought we lost you, but then we figured he might head back to the Skyview so we got on the expressway and . . .”
The redhead cut in, nodded toward my car. “What happened?”
“That’s my line,” I said.
“He killed Candy,” the blonde said. She was maybe twenty and had a face harder than the gun in my hand.
“He said she was holding out on him,” the brunette said, her mouth a thin red line, her eyes full of water, “and he shot her!”
The redhead said, “And I took this out of my bag and cut him! Then he ran . . .”
“Can’t blame him,” I said.
“Where is he?” the redhead with the knife demanded.
I pointed down the embankment. “Down there. Waiting for you.”
And I drove off and left them to it.
Taking the
Night Train
Thomas F. Monteleone
Thomas Monteleone is writer, raconteur, editor, and (lately) publisher. But mostly, he’s a writer. He’s got this tight, paranoid city voice that makes him a direct descendant of Cornwell Woolrich. I think he’s got a major crime novel in him and I hope he soon makes the shift over from horror. In the meantime, he’s writing literally dozens of tales as dazzling as this one.
First published in 1981.
It was after 3:00 a.m. when Ralphie Loggins scuttled down the stairs, into the cold sterility of his special world.
Holding the railing carefully so that he would not slip, as the November night wind chased him, he entered the Times Square subway station. Ralphie always had to be watchful on steps because the elevated heel on his left shoe was constantly trying to trip him up. He fished a token from the pocket of his Navy pea jacket and dropped it into the turnstile, passing through and easing his way down the last set of stairs to the platform.
Ralphie walked with his special clump-click-slide to a supporting girder by the tracks and waited for the Broadway-Seventh Avenue local, noticing that he was not alone on the platform. There were few travelers on the subways in the middle of such winter nights, and he could feel the fear and paranoia hanging thickly in the air. Turning his head slowly to the left, Ralphie saw a short, gray man at the far end of the station. He wore a tattered, thin corduroy jacket insulated with crumpled sheets of the Daily News.
To Ralphie’s right, he heard footsteps approaching.
Just as he turned to look, he felt something sharp threatening to penetrate his coat and ultimately his kidneys. At the limits of his peripheral vision he was aware of someone tall and dark-skinned looming over him, the stranger’s breath heavy and warm on his neck.
“Okay, suckah!” came a harsh whisper, the words stinging Ralphie’s ear. “You move and you dead! Dig?”
Ralphie nodded, relaxing inwardly since he knew what would come next. When he did not move, the man pressed his knife blade a little more firmly into the fabric of the coat, held it there.
“Now, real easy like . . . get out your bread, and give it up . . . ”
Ralphie slipped his left hand into his back pocket, pulling out his wallet, and passed it back over his shoulder to the mugger. It was snatched away and rifled cleanly and quickly. The tip of the blade retreated, as did the tall, dark presence of the thief. His footsteps described his flight from the station, and Ralphie was alone again. He looked to the end of the platform where the gray old man still stood in a senile, shivering daze.
A growing sense of loss and anger swelled in Ralphie. He felt violated, defiled, hurt in some deeply psychic manner. The mugger had reinforced his views of life in the city and all the dead hours within it. A silence pervaded the station, punctuated by a special kind of sadness and futility. Stifling his anger and his pain, Ralphie smiled ironically—it was most fitting that he be robbed in the subway, he thought.
Time seemed to lose its way beneath the streets of Manhattan, flowing at a rate completely its own, and it seemed to Ralphie that there might be a reason for it. He felt that there was something essentially wrong about the subways. As though man had somehow violated the earth by cutting these filthy pathways through her, and that the earth had reacted violently to it. Ralphie believed this, because there was a feeling of evil, of fear, and of something lurking beneath the depths of the city that everyone felt in the subways. Ralphie knew that others had sensed it, felt it, as they descended into the cold, tomblike stations.
His thoughts were shattered by the approaching roar of the train. A gust of warmer air was pushed into the station as the local surged out of the tunnel, jerked to a halt, opened its doors. The old man shuffled into a distant car; Ralphie entered the one closest to him. As he sat on the smooth plastic seat, the doors sighed shut, and the train rattled off into the darkness, under the belly of the beast, the city. The only other passenger in Ralphie’s car, an old woman in a ragged coat, a pair of stuffed shopping bags by her high-topped shoes, looked at him with yellow eyes. Her face was a roadmap of wrinkles, her lips so chapped and cracked they looked orange and festering.
Ralphie kept watching the old woman, wondering the usual thoughts about members of her legion. Where did she live? What did she carry in those mysterious bags? Where did she come from? Why was she out riding the night trains? The rocking motion of the cars was semi-hypnotic, soothing, and Ralphie felt himself unwinding from the tension of the robbery. He allowed himself to smile, knowing that the mugger had gotten nothing of value—his left pants pocket still held his money clip and bills, whereas the wallet had contained only some pictures, business cards, and his library card. He had not been counting the local’s stops, but he had been riding the train for so many years that he had an instinctive feeling for when his station would be coming up. It was not until the train reached Christopher Street-Sheridan Square that Ralphie began staring through the dirty glass into the hurtling darkness. Houston Street would be next.
Then it happened.
The lights in the car flickered and the motion of the car slowed. The old shopping-bag lady seemed to be as still as a statue, and even the sound of the wheels clattering on the tracks seemed softer, slower. The warm air in the car became thicker, heavier, and Ralphie felt it was becoming difficult to breathe. He stood up, and it felt as if he were underwater, as though something were restraining him. Something was wrong. The train seemed to be slowing down, and he looked out the windows, past the reflection of the interior lights, to see something for the briefest of moments—a platform, a station with no sign, no passengers, only a single overhead bulb illuminating the cold beige tiles of its walls.
For a second, Ralphie imagined the train was trying to stop at the strange station, or that something was trying to stop the train. There was a confluence of forces at work, and time itself had seemed to slow, and stretch, while the train struggled past the place. Then it was gone, replaced by the darkness, and the train was gathering speed, regaining its place in the time flow.
The air thinned out, the old lady moved her head, gripped her bags more tightly, and Ralphie could move without interference.
The train was loud and full of energy once again. Ralphie felt a shudder pass through him. It was as though something back there had been reaching out, grasping for the train, and just barely failing. The image persisted and he could not stop thinking about it. He knew that the image of the stark, pale platform and the single naked bulb would prey upon him like a bad dream. He knew he had passed a place that no one ever saw, that no one even knew existed; yet he had seen it, felt its power . . .
The local lurched to a halt, its doors slamming open. Ralphie looked up and saw the Houston Street sign embedded in the wall tiles. Jumping from the car, he hobbled across the deserted platform, wedg
ed through the turnstile, and pulled himself up the steps. The cold darkness of the street embraced him as he reached the sidewalk, and he pulled his collar tightly about his neck. The street was littered with the remnants of people’s lives as he threaded his way past the overturned trash cans, discarded toys, heaps of eviction furniture, stripped cars, and empty wine bottles. This was the shabby reality of his neighborhood, the empty shell that surrounded his life. He walked to the next corner, turned left, and came to a cellarway beneath a shoe repair shop. Hobbling down the steps, he took out his key and unlocked the door to his one-room apartment. He flipped on the light switch and a single lamp illuminated the gray, tired room. Ralphie hated the place, but knew that he would never escape its prison-cell confines. Throwing his coat over a straight-backed chair, he walked to a small sink and medicine chest, which had been wedged into the corner of the room. His hands were trembling as he washed warm water over them, chasing the stinging cold from his bones. In the spotted mirror he saw an old face, etched with the lines of defeat and loneliness. Only thirty-one and looking ten years older, his sandy hair was getting gray on the edges, his blue eyes doing the same. He tried to smile ironically, but could not manage it. There was little joy left in him, and he knew it would be better to simply crawl beneath his quilt on the mildewed couch and sleep.
That night he dreamed of subway trains.
It was late in the afternoon before he awakened, feeling oddly unrefreshed. He could not forget the baleful image of the empty station, and he decided that he would have to investigate the place. When he took a train up to midtown, he asked the trainman about it. The IRT employee said he had never heard of that particular platform, but that there were countless places like that beneath the city: maintenance bays, abandoned stations, old tunnels that had been sealed off. Somebody must have left a light on, that’s why Ralphie had seen it at all. The trainman seemed unimpressed, but Ralphie had not told him how he had felt something reaching out from that place, trying to take hold of the train . . .
Great Noir Fiction Page 30