Long Live the Dead

by Hugh B. Cave

  The gun went off again. But this time she was writhing over it. Both her hands were clawing at it. When it exploded, Nick Vierick’s agonized eyes were looking into the muzzle of it, and the bullet ploughed his face like a torpedo churning through sea-water.

  He stiffened convulsively and the girl lost her balance, fell away from him. She rolled into the legs of a table, lay there and listened to Vierick’s horrible groans of torment, saw him twisting and curling like a snake under a heavy stone. It lasted but a moment, then he thrust his legs straight out and was still, but his groans continued.

  She staggered erect, the pain in her own body forgotten in her desperation. She knew all at once, with crystal clarity, that she had only a few minutes in which to do what had to be done. Al and Pete would be coming. “Hurry, hurry, hurry!” she whispered. But Nick Vierick wouldn’t stop groaning and the blood in his gaping mouth bubbled like a fountain with every outpouring of sound.

  She tore a coil of adhesive tape from Ed Corley’s ankles and slapped it over Vierick’s lips. It wasn’t enough. Blood and groans seeped from under it. She ripped tape from Ed Corley’s wrists and used that, too. Scrabbling about on hands and knees, she snatched up the burlap sack and knelt between Vierick’s legs and tugged the sack over his head, down over his shoulders, his hips.

  The sound of her own breathing frightened her. The redness of Vierick’s spilled blood, smeared on her hands and wrists, churned up a sickness inside her that vied with a physical pain steadily growing more acute. She jammed Vierick’s legs into the sack and pulled tight the rope that closed the sack’s mouth. Frantically, she tied knot after knot until the rope was hopelessly snarled. Then she fled into the bathroom.

  A towel cleaned up most of the blood. The puddle on the carpet, where Vierick’s face had been, she covered with a scatter-rug. Then she seized Ed Corley by his shoulders and dragged him into the bedroom, pushed and kicked him into a closet and slammed the door shut.

  When Al and Pete came in a moment later, she was finished. She sat in her favorite chair, languidly smoking a cigarette. The burlap sack lay against the legs of the living-room table.

  There were spots of blood on her housecoat, but her arms were draped to cover them, and over the greater blotch of blood beneath her shoulder she had drawn a red satin jacket for which the man in the sack had paid thirty-five dollars only two weeks ago.

  The shoulder throbbed like an impacted tooth. Pain poured through her, so that it was torture even to lift the cigarette to her lips. But she said in a casual voice: “Nick’s gone

  out front to his car. He’ll meet you in the alley.”

  “We got time for a drink, you suppose?” Al said hopefully.

  “No. Get that damned thing out of here. It gives me the creeps.”

  Al gave her a look, grinned. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said. Matter-of-factly, he and Pete lifted the sack from the floor and went out with it.

  Flo was on her feet almost before the door closed. Ghastly pale, she clung to the arm of her chair to steady herself. “Got to—hurry,” she whispered, the words brittle against her teeth.

  She stumbled into the bedroom. The pain was growing worse, but in spite of it she propped herself against the end of the bed and removed her housecoat. You couldn’t wear a bloody housecoat on the street and hope to get anywhere without being picked up.

  She wanted to look at herself in a mirror then. To look at the hole in her body made by the bullet. But she had strength left for only one thing more—a dress—something heavy, through which the blood would not soak too soon.

  Somehow she got the thing over her head, down over her heaving breast. Then she was out of the bedroom, weaving drunkenly through the living-room to the door.

  She got as far as the stairs and looked down them. They seemed steep as the drop of a Coney Island roller-coaster, and up from the depths in a gray, swirling cloud, shot through and through with streaks of lightning, came agony.

  She swayed there, took a step forward. Scream after scream ripped from her lips as she fell. Like an uprooted tree on a mountainside she crashed downward, and was still tumbling, still reddening the walls with her blood, long after her screams had stopped and the pain inside her had gone away—forever.

  Police sirens wailed as Ed Corley emerged from his wife’s apartment. He stood in the hall, listening, his swollen lips hooked in a scowl. He went to a window down the hall and looked out.

  A police car-stopped at the curb and uniformed men piled out of it. Another squealed to a halt behind it. There was a rush of uniformed shapes.

  Ed Corley backed away from the window, muttered something under his breath, and hurried to the rear of the hall, to the rear stairway. He walked stiffly, because the adhesive tape had numbed his legs. His wrists were numb, too, and sticky. His lips were torn.

  He descended the rear stairs slowly, hearing echoes of the pandemonium that dinned in another part of the house. He opened a door and it led to an alley. He went through the alley—which was empty—and kept on walking.

  He supposed he had done enough walking for tonight, even though the doctors had told him to walk as much as possible if ever his legs were to be strong again. By rights he should return to his hotel now and go to bed, but the thought left him cold and scowling.

  This was a strange, unfriendly city where strange things happened. He had liked it a while ago. Certain things about it had seemed familiar. But now he hated it, and wanted to be out of it.

  The frightening thought occurred to him that maybe, after all, he had made a mistake in running away from the sanatorium. Maybe the doctors had been right in telling him that a man without a memory, a man with no recollections of his past, would be no good in the world.

  He had wandered for weeks now in search of that past. Cities, open roads, odd jobs here and there, handouts … He had been away for ages and was mentally no better for it, physically so weary that he longed to lie down somewhere, anywhere, and sleep for days on end.

  “Maybe—maybe I ought to go back there and take things easy, like they told me to. Maybe if I do that, the old brain will get right again—in a while.”

  A policeman turned the corner ahead of him. Ed Corley hesitated, then made up his mind. Quickening his step, he closed the gap.

  “Officer, listen. I used to be a cop, too, they tell me, and I got to have help. Look, officer … I want to go home.”

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The Black Mask title, logo, mask device, and all illustrations in this book are the exclusive copyrights of Keith Alan Deutsch. Reproduction in any manner is forbidden without express, written permission from the owner.

  “Too Many Women” by Hugh B. Cave. Copyright © 1934 by Pro-Distributors Publishing Company, Inc. Copyright renewed © 1962 by Popular Publications, Inc. From Black Mask, Vol. 17, No. 3 (May 1934). Reprinted by permission of Keith Alan Deutsch, proprietor and conservator of the respective copyrights, and successor-in-interest to Popular Publications, Inc.

  “Dead Dog” by Hugh B. Cave. Copyright © 1937 by Pro-Distributors Publishing Company, Inc. Copyright renewed © 1965 by Popular Publications, Inc. From Black Mask, Vol. 20, No. 1 (March 1937). Reprinted by permission of Keith Alan Deutsch, proprietor and conservator of the respective copyrights, and successor-in-interest to Popular Publications, Inc.

  “Shadow” by Hugh B. Cave. Copyright © 1937 by Pro-Distributors Publishing Company, Inc. Copyright renewed © 1965 by Popular Publications, Inc. From Black Mask, Vol. 20, No. 2 (April 1937). Reprinted by permi
ssion of Keith Alan Deutsch, proprietor and conservator of the respective copyrights, and successor-in-interest to Popular Publications, Inc.

  “Curtain Call” by Hugh B. Cave. Copyright © 1938 by Pro-Distributors Publishing Company, Inc. Copyright renewed © 1966 by Popular Publications, Inc. From Black Mask, Vol. 21, No. 8 (November 1938). Reprinted by permission of Keith Alan Deutsch, proprietor and conservator of the respective copyrights, and successor-in-interest to Popular Publications, Inc.

  “Love Live The Dead” by Hugh B. Cave. Copyright © 1938 by Pro-Distributors Publishing Company, Inc. Copyright renewed © 1966 by Popular Publications, Inc. From Black Mask, Vol. 21, No. 9 (December 1938). Reprinted by permission of Keith Alan Deutsch, proprietor and conservator of the respective copyrights, and successor-in-interest to Popular Publications, Inc.

  “Smoke in Your Eyes” by Hugh B. Cave. Copyright © 1938 by Pro-Distributors Publishing Company, Inc. Copyright renewed © 1966 by Popular Publications, Inc. From Black Mask, Vol. 21, No. 9 (December 1938). Reprinted by permission of Keith Alan Deutsch, proprietor and conservator of the respective copyrights, and successor-in-interest to Popular Publications, Inc.

  “Lost—and Found” by Hugh B. Cave. Copyright © 1940 by Pro-Distributors Publishing Company, Inc. Copyright renewed © 1968 by Popular Publications, Inc. From Black Mask, Vol. 23, No. 7 (April 1940). Reprinted by permission of Keith Alan Deutsch, proprietor and conservator of the respective copyrights, and successor-in-interest to Popular Publications, Inc.

  “The Missing Mr. Lee” by Hugh B. Cave. Copyright © 1940 by Pro-Distributors Publishing Company, Inc. Copyright renewed © 1968 by Popular Publications, Inc. From Black Mask, Vol. 23, No. 7 (November 1940). Reprinted by permission of Keith Alan Deutsch, proprietor and conservator of the respective copyrights, and successor-in-interest to Popular Publications, Inc.

  “Front-Page Frame-Up” by Hugh B. Cave. Copyright © 1941 by Pro-Distributors Publishing Company, Inc. Copyright renewed © 1969 by Popular Publications, Inc. From Black Mask, Vol. 23, No. 10 (February 1941). Reprinted by permission of Keith Alan Deutsch, proprietor and conservator of the respective copyrights, and successor-in-interest to Popular Publications, Inc.

  “Stranger in Town” by Hugh B. Cave. Copyright © 1941 by Pro-Distributors Publishing Company, Inc. Copyright renewed © 1969 by Popular Publications, Inc. From Black Mask, Vol. 23, No. 12 (April 1941). Reprinted by permission of Keith Alan Deutsch, proprietor and conservator of the respective copyrights, and successor-in-interest to Popular Publications, Inc.

  Copyright © 2000 by Hugh B. Cave

  Introduction copyright © 2000 by Hugh B. Cave and Keith Alan Deutsch

  Cover design by Andrea Worthington

  ISBN 978-1-4804-6233-5

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