Hammett (Crime Masterworks) Read Free Page A

running board. A push with cautious boots, a twist, and he was out.
    On his usable elbow and his knees, he crawled a dozen yards to a lip of dune and sought shelter behind a tussock of coarse fringing sea grass. He bit through his lip to keep from crying out; the wet cold had begun worrying at his bullet-torn shoulder. His lips writhed back from his bloodied teeth. His hand took a fresh grip on the smeary pistol butt. He waited.

    Dan Laverty was out of his Reo and shielded behind an open door with the .38 in his hand. Nothing moved in the stark glare his headlights laid on the other car. There was no sound except the high whine of escaping steam. The visible, right-hand door was closed. Laverty moved out past his own car.
    Now he could smell gasoline from a ruptured tank. One shot fired . . .
    The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want
.
    The Psalm chanted through his mind, unsought but oddly comforting. He doubted if the man could have survived the crash. Why had he risked his life over a mere car theft?
    He placed each step deliberately, so no water-filled succulents would crunch underfoot. Through the window he could see that the far door was gone. Three or four more paces, and he could see something blanket-wrapped in back. Even as this registered, his eyes were finding the awkward turtle-trail scrabbled away from the car. Digging knees and elbows, which meant. . .
    He was spinning and dropping into his firing crouch, but Tokzek had already come up from behind the dune a dozen feet away with the big .44 revolver speaking at Laverty’s chest. Its voice was merely a series of clicks. The hammer was falling on empty chambers.
    With a groan of terror, Tokzek fled into darkness. He made two paces before Dan Laverty shot him in the spine. He went down in a sudden heap, writhing and screaming, as Laverty turned back toward the car and the hastily glimpsed bundle. He shone his flashlight in through the unbroken rear window. Flung up against the glass as if in entreaty was a delicately boned hand. He recoiled savagely.
    ‘Blessed Virgin, protect us,’ he breathed.
    The sprawled girl had been pitched from her blanket shroud by the crash. Even in the flashlight’s wavering rays her nude body was the delicate amber of old ivory. The ebony hair was in wild disarray, the Oriental features contorted with pain and fear. On the flesh were the mottled bruises of a systematic beating.
    The policeman went around the car to the other rear window. He could feel the black Irish rage rising, threatening to engulf him again like that other time. When his light again flooded the interior, bile choked his throat.
    Blood was streaked across the girl’s lower belly and on the insides of her thighs. The flesh there was roughened and empurpled.
    She could not have been over twelve years old.
    Dan Laverty turned from the car with his face terrible and his eyes feverish. He trudged back to Tokzek with a sleepwalker’s step.
    ‘Want me to ease your pain, laddie?’ he asked in his soft Irish tenor.
    Grunting with effort, he drove the toe of his boot up into Tokzek’s testicles. Tokzek screamed, bucked with the impact like a man gripped by a naked high-tension line. Again. Again. As if to successive jolts of electric current. Finally, shattered ends of bone severed his spinal column and ended it.
    Laverty’s eyes gradually unglazed. When he realized what he had done, he crossed himself and vomited a few yards from the corpse.

3
    W ith sudden impatience, Dashiell Hammett thrust aside the December, 1927, issue of
Black Mask
. He needed more complication, another scene showing the Op stirring things up in Poisonville, for the four published novelettes to work as a novel. And with the book version, titled
Red Harvest
, already scheduled for publication, he had to do any insert scenes damned quick.
    He began pacing the narrow cramped living room. How about a . . . no, that wouldn’t work. But . . .
    Yeah. Maybe a fight scene. Good. Set in a