American Pulp by Ed Gorman & Bill Pronzini & Martin H Greenberg

Author:Ed Gorman & Bill Pronzini & Martin H Greenberg [Gorman, Ed & Pronzini, Bill & Greenberg, Martin H]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0786704616
Publisher: Carroll & Graf Publishers
Published: 1996-12-31T21:00:00+00:00

James Reasoner

DOWN IN THE VALLEY

From Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, September 1979

Author of innumerable novels in innumerable categories, James Reasoner is best known—under his real name, anyway—as the author of Texas Wind, one of the great cult hardboiled novels of our time. Somebody really ought to bring it back into print, and very soon. One other thing: Reasoner is as good a short story writer as he is a novelist. Here is an example of what a master can do in just a few perfectly chosen words.

E. G.

Forty-three men huddled in the back of the truck, cold and afraid. There was no moon, and the canvas flaps on the side cut out what little starlight there was. It was pitch black inside, and none of the men knew where they were headed.

Ramon didn’t care. He was in the United States now, and that was all that mattered to him. Now he would never have to go back to the little village in the hills. He shifted his shoulders against the wall of the truck and closed his eyes.

There were whispered conversations all around him, as the nervous men tried to ease the tension. No one talked to Ramon, though. He had always been a quiet one, preferring to let his knife speak for him when it had to. That was why he was here now; his knife had one day been too eloquent and left a dead man on the floor of the cantina. Now he was on his way to a new life in a new country.

Up in the cab, the driver rubbed his neck and squinted down the path of the headlights. He was a big man named Flood who thought about neither the past nor the future, but only about the money he had coming when he got his load of wetbacks to San Antonio. Flood didn’t care about the legality of what he was doing. The men who had set up the pipeline paid well.

Farther down the road, two men sat drowsily in a parked car. It was a battered old Plymouth, and anyone passing by on the highway wouldn’t have given it a second look. The two men inside had been sitting there for four hours, waiting.

Ramon felt sleep easing into his head as the truck rolled along. He let it come in gladly. The last seventy-two hours had been busy.

In his dream, he woke up. He got out of bed and went to the door of his hut. Down at the end of the valley, the sun was creeping up over the hills. Ramon enjoyed watching the sunrise; he liked the pretty colors. But he did not like going to work in the fields, and that was the thing that the sunrise signaled.

“Ramon?” It was a sleepy murmur from the bed. He returned to it and stroked the glossy black hair spread out on the pillow. It was hard for him to make his hand be gentle.

“Go back to sleep, Elena,” he said quietly.

“. . .

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.