The Gutter and the Grave
Read The Gutter and the Grave Online
Authors: Ed McBain
Contents
Raves For the Work of ED McBAIN!
“McBain is so good he ought to be arrested.”
—Publishers Weekly
“The best crime writer in the business.”
—Houston Post
“The author delivers the goods: wired action scenes, dialogue that breathes, characters with hearts and characters that eat those hearts, and glints of unforgiving humor…Ed McBain owns this turf.”
—New York Times Book Review
“You’ll be engrossed by McBain’s fast, lean prose.”
—Chicago Tribune
“McBain has a great approach, great attitude, terrific style, strong plots, excellent dialogue, sense of place, and sense of reality.”
—Elmore Leonard
“McBain is a top pro, at the top of his game.”
—Los Angeles Daily News
“A virtuoso.”
—London Guardian
“McBain…can stop you dead in your tracks with a line of dialogue.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“I never read Ed McBain without the awful thought that I still have a lot to learn. And when you think you’re catching up, he gets better.”
—Tony Hillerman
“Full of noir touches and snappy dialogue.”
—New York Newsday
“Ed McBain is a national treasure.”
—Mystery News
“Raw and realistic…The bad guys are very bad, and the good guys are better.”
—Detroit Free Press
“A story so sharp you could shave with it.”
—Orlando Sentinel
“McBain is the unquestioned king…Light-years ahead of anyone else in the field.”
—San Diego Union-Tribune
“As good as it gets…compulsively readable.”
—Seattle Times-Post Intelligencer
“Vintage stuff. The dialogue is sharp, the plotting accomplished, and the prose bears the McBain stamp—uncluttered, unpretentious, ironic.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“If you’re looking for a sure thing, pick this one up.”
—Syracuse Herald-American
“A major contemporary writer…His prose [approaches] a kind of colloquial poetry.”
—William DeAndrea, Encyclopedia Mysteriosa
“The McBain stamp: sharp dialogue and crisp plotting.”
—The Miami Herald
“A master storyteller.”
—Washington Times
“McBain keeps you reading and keeps you guessing… The book is a winner.”
—London Sunday Telegraph
She drained her glass and went into the kitchen. When she came back, the bottle was in her hand. She looked at me, and her eyes held mine, and she said in a cold level voice, “Do you believe there are some things a person must do, right or wrong?”
I shrugged.
“I don’t care what you believe,” she said. “There’s something I’ve got to do right now. I’ve got to get stinking blind drunk. Can you understand that?”
She’d picked the right person to ask. “I can understand it,” I said, “but the police might not when they get here.”
“The hell with the police,” she said. “I’m going to get so drunk I can’t stand. You can stay if you want to see it. If you’d rather not, then leave.”
She poured three inches of straight bourbon over the ice in her glass. “Here’s to murderers,” she said, “the goddamn world is full of them.” She knocked off the three inches and refilled the glass.
“Not too fast,” I said, “or you’ll get sick.”
“I want it fast and hard,” she said. “I want it to knock me down.” She drank the refill and poured again, gagging a little as the stuff went down. Then she kicked off her high-heeled pumps. Then she put down the bottle and pulled off the half-slip, and then she went to sit by the window in bra and panties, her feet propped up on the window sill.
She killed the third drink and then tossed her long blonde hair over her shoulder and shot me a backward glance and flashed the most evil smile since Eve grinned at Adam with the apple in her teeth.
“Come here, Cordell,” she said.
“What for?”
“Come here and kiss me…”
MONEY SHOT
by Christa Faust
ZERO COOL
by John Lange
SHOOTING STAR/SPIDERWEB
by Robert Bloch
THE MURDERER VINE
by Shepard Rifkin
SOMEBODY OWES ME MONEY
by Donald E. Westlake
NO HOUSE LIMIT
by Steve Fisher
BABY MOLL
by John Farris
THE MAX
by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr
THE FIRST QUARRY
by Max Allan Collins
GUN WORK
by David J. Schow
FIFTY-TO-ONE
by Charles Ardai
KILLING CASTRO
by Lawrence Block
THE DEAD MAN’S BROTHER
by Roger Zelazny
THE CUTIE
by Donald E. Westlake
HOUSE DICK
by E. Howard Hunt
CASINO MOON
by Peter Blauner
FAKE I.D.
by Jason Starr
PASSPORT TO PERIL
by Robert B. Parker
STOP THIS MAN!
by Peter Rabe
LOSERS LIVE LONGER
by Russell Atwood
HONEY IN HIS MOUTH
by Lester Dent
QUARRY IN THE MIDDLE
by Max Allan Collins
THE CORPSE WORE PASTIES
by Jonny Porkpie
A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK
(HCC-015)
First Hard Case Crime edition: December 2005
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London
SE1 0UP
in collaboration with Winterfall LLC
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should know that it is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
Copyright © 1958, by Hui Corp. Copyright renewed.
All rights reserved. Originally published as
I’m Cannon—For Hire
by Curt Cannon.
Cover painting copyright © 2005 by R.B. Farrell
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Print edition ISBN: 978-0-85768-367-0
E-book edition ISBN: 978-1-78329-447-3
Design direction by Max Phillips
www.maxphillips.net
The name “Hard Case Crime” and the Hard Case Crime logo are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime books are selected and edited by Charles Ardai.
Visit us on the web at
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The new ones, the old ones, they’re all now dedicated to the love of my life—my wife, Dragica.
The name is Cordell.
I’m a drunk. I think we’d better get that straight from the beginning. I drink because I want to drink. Sometimes I’m falling-down ossified, and sometimes I’m rosy-glow happy, and sometimes I’m cold sober—but not very often. I’m usually drunk, and I live where being drunk isn’t a sin, though it’s sometimes a crime when the police go on a purity drive. I live on New York’s Bowery.
There’s some talk that now with the Third Avenue El demolished, real estate values will soar and the city will clean out the Bowery and make it a respectable high-priced business district. All right. When they do, I’ll move elsewhere. There’s always an elsewhere for people who are running from something. I’m running from a ghost. The ghost is named Matt Cordell.
There’s a little park just outside Cooper Union. During the school term, the park is full of art and engineering students. The young girls come out in their paint-daubed smocks and puff on their cigarettes as if this is the last smoke before the firing squad takes over. It’s fun to watch the kids because they’re burning more than cigarettes—they’re burning life, they’re
burning it in big blazing holocausts and loving every minute of it. It’s great to be alive, I guess. I never go to that little park during the school term. I go there in the summer, though. The park is empty then. You can sit on one of the benches and look at the statue of Peter Cooper and feel protected and cloistered in the middle of a giant throbbing city. Once in a while, a cop will come along and tell you to move on. But most of the time, you can sit there and be alone in the center of a crowd.
I was there when Johnny Bridges found me. I wasn’t drunk. I was feeling like tying on a stiff one because New York City in the summertime is possibly the hottest place in the world. I can’t understand why tourists come here. It’s a wonderful place to live, but who’d want to visit it? I was sitting in the park thinking of cool civilized drinks like Tom Collinses and Planter’s Punches and then thinking about what
I’d
drink—an uncool, uncivilized pint of cheap booze. That was when Johnny Bridges walked up.
“Matt?” he said.
I didn’t recognize him at first. He’d put on some weight around the middle, and his features were a little thicker. It took me a few moments to place the broad shoulders and the brown eyes, the narrow thin lips and the sharply sweeping nose. Then the name came back from somewhere in my memory, Johnny Bridges, and I looked at him with new interest. He was about my age, I guessed, thirty-two or thirty-three. I hadn’t seen him in ten years.
“Matt Cordell?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“How’ve you been?” he said, smiling. “You remember me, don’t you? I’m…”
“Yeah,” I said. “What’s on your mind?”
“Okay if I sit down?” he asked.
“It’s a free country.”
He sat on the bench alongside me. He tried not to notice the shabby wrinkled suit I was wearing, or the soiled shirt, or the fact that I hadn’t shaved in a week. He tried not to notice my red-rimmed eyes, too, but he didn’t succeed in hiding his initial shock or the slow adjustment he was making to my appearance. I don’t know what he expected, but this wasn’t the Matt Cordell he’d known ten years ago. Nervously, he fished into his jacket pocket and extended a package of cigarettes to me.
“Smoke?” he said.
I took a cigarette and he lighted it for me, returning the package to his pocket after he’d taken one for himself. He was wearing a blue seersucker suit with a red tie. I figured he was working for a Madison Avenue advertising agency or a bank. He looked very neat and very clean-shaven and very
Esquire
magazine-ish. It probably made him itchy just sitting there beside me.
“How have you been, Matt?” he asked.
“Just dandy,” I said. “And you?”
“Fine. Oh, fine,” Johnny said.
“That’s good.”
“Yeah, that’s…” He let the sentence trail. We sat in
silence for a little while. I don’t believe in pushing a man. He’d come looking for me, and I’d have been delighted if he hadn’t found me. If he had anything on his mind, he’d get to it in his own time. If he had nothing to say, he could leave as soon as he finished his cigarette.
“I read about you,” Johnny said. “In the newspapers.”