Suspense, Suspicion & Shockers (Vintage Pulp Stories by Charles Boeckman) by Boeckman Charles

Author:Boeckman, Charles [Boeckman, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Story 13

YBOR CITY

A dark alley, a quick knife-thrust—and a vengeful search for an unknown killer.

It happened in an alley in Tampa, Florida, in the squalid Ybor City district. One minute he was a man, smoking a cigarette, waiting for me in the humid summer night. The next, he was a corpse, falling over with a knife in his back.

I never saw his killers at all, except for two blobs of shadow in the stinking blackness of the alley. One of them was a woman. She collided with me, giving me the feel of her softness and the smell of her cheap perfume. Then she was gone.

Something had spun out of her hand when she plowed into me. I groped around for it. My hands came in contact with a woman's small purse. Quickly, without looking at it, I stuffed it in my coat pocket. Then I walked down into the black maw of the alley where the dead man lay.

Stuccoed walls, crumbling with age, formed canyons around me. Outlined against the starry summer sky was filigreed iron grill work around a balcony, and the leaves of a banana tree waving above a courtyard wall.

The corpse was heavy, like an inert sack of potatoes. I shoved and wedged it into a doorway, and then I walked back to the mouth of the alley, lighting a cigarette. I was standing there, casually smoking, when the patrolman came up with his flashlight.

"Evening, officer," I said.

He shoved the blinding light across my face. When he got it out of my eyes, I could see by the glow of a streetlight that he was young and freckle-faced, built like a Notre Dame tackle.

I inhaled a lungful of smoke, let it drift away. His light whipped down the alley, crawled over garbage cans, packing crates, bundles of paper, went over the spot where the dead man had sprawled, and then made a circuit of the fire escapes and balconies.

"Something the matter?" I asked.

"I don't know. I thought I heard something. Some kind of yell. What're you doing here?"

"Just walking around. I heard it, too. In the alley. A couple of cats fighting, I think. They make the damnedest sounds. Like a woman getting raped."

He relaxed a little. "Yeah." He shoved the flash into his belt, lit a cigarette. Then he took out a handkerchief and mopped his freckled forehead, pushing his cap back. "God, it's hot tonight."

"Not a breath stirring," I agreed.

"Yeah, I guess that's what it was. Cats, I mean. We got a couple of old alley Toms in my neighborhood. Keep me awake squalling and fussing every night."

"They can raise a lot of hell, all right."

He stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket. "You better not hang around here by yourself," he said in a friendly tone. "Lousy part of town. One of these cigar rollers might slug you."

I shrugged and moved away from the alley. I walked down the street and crossed over to a drug store. Like the rest of Ybor City, it was all Spanish.

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