Brett Halliday - Mike Shayne's Torrid Twelve

The buggy drew up sharp before the stoop of our house. I jumped out and ran through the door with Ripper close behind. We ran through to the parlor where mom and pa always sleep in the big old feather bed. I was crying then something awful and calling for mom.

She had me safe in her arms and pa sat up and lighted the oil lamp. His voice was mighty roiled. “What’s all this rumpus going on in dead of night?” Mom was holding onto me close and clucking soft like she used to do when I was ailing. After a little I told them I was coming home.

“You’ve got yourself a home, daughter,” pa said, speaking steady like he would to a fretted colt. “You be a married woman, married in the sight of God and man.”

“I can’t live with him longer, pa!”

Pa got out of bed with his striped cotton night shirt over his long drawers. Even in these garments he still was high in pride.

“What’s your husband done to you, daughter?” And when I could not tell he turned and went out to the buggy. It wasn’t long before he came back. “Has Jim ever laid hand to you, Jennifer?”

I shook my head. “But he talks so strange and he repeats—”

Pa was full of wrath. “Talks! It’s come to a pretty how-de-do when a man can’t talk! Shame to you, daughter. Now get on home with your man or I’ll give you a thrashing you won’t forget, even though you’re woman growed and married.”

Mom could only reach out her old worn hand and take mine.

Pa must have noted the trouble in my eyes for he gentled a mite. “If you were alone, we’d take you in. But this is between man and wife, daughter. And what God hath joined together, let no man put asunder! Now take your dog and get on back with your man.” Ripper followed me. I climbed in beside Jim, my shoulders sagged as though laden with a thousand sacks of grain.

“Giddy up, Nellie,” Jim sang out. As we reached the top of the hill, he said real slow, “Where would you go to, Jenny? Where would you go?”

I looked out into the clouded moonlight at Ripper running alongside. He was black and hoary as a wolf, his muscles all smooth and powerful.

After a while I said, “What you fixing to do to us, Jim?”

His voice was cold as winter’s wind. “What am I fixing to do? Now, that there’s a mighty interesting question.” His voice rose to shrill. “I’m going to break you proper, that’s what. I’m going to break you like a woman needs to be broke.”

He would break me, all right. That I knew for true. He’d have me old and cringing before the crops were in.

The sound of his laugh froze my bones. “Got Ripper figured too! I’m gonna get me a great big club for him and let you watch it.”

We were in the lane and I could see the fine log cabin with the moon shining down right pretty on it, and I thought it was sort of sad that I’d planted all those pretty moonflowers. Come June and they’d be blooming, all drowsy with their own sweet smell, and who now would see their blooming?

Jim was looking out at Ripper and I could feel the killing lust and hate mounting in him.

Only Ripper too had reason to hate. And Ripper was trained at killing wild beasts.

And God knows tonight I would not stay him…

I reckon death does come certain sure to the house round which moonflowers are planted. It would come tonight.

When the Rider Fork and Hoe Company moved its plant from Philadelphia to Brooklyn, it adopted the simple, expedient course of laying off most of its workers and rehiring new ones in Brooklyn. But it not only kept its key men, it moved them at company expense.

That’s how it happened the move didn’t separate Rick Henderson and his best friend, Junior Carr. The fathers of both boys were shop foremen for Rider.

Before the move, Rick got a lecture from his father on the subject of juvenile gangs. Big Sam Henderson had been reading the newspapers.

“We’ll be living in a nice section of Brooklyn,” Big Sam told his son. “Only a couple of blocks from Prospect Park. But Brooklyn ain’t like Philadelphia.”

“How’s that?” Rick asked.

“Here this gang stuff is only in the slums. Near as I can figure from the newspapers, Brooklyn’s got it all over. Even in the nice sections the police have plenty to worry about.”

Rick gave him a confident grin. “Don’t worry about me, Pop. I can take care of myself.”

He had reason for confidence. At sixteen Rick Henderson was five feet eleven and weighed one hundred and eighty pounds. He was first-string fullback on his high school football team and president of the boxing club. Though he wasn’t a brawler, he’d had his share of teen-age fights, and had yet to lose one.

Big Sam said, “I’m not worrying about you getting beat up. I’m worrying about you hooking up with one of these gangs.”

Rick looked at his father with amazement. The circle Rick moved in did its best to emulate what it thought was college-level behavior. He belonged to a national high school fraternity, unrecognized but tolerated by the school, and he and his fraternity brothers wouldn’t have dreamed of being seen in public with a girl who didn’t belong to one of the national high school sororities. In its own estimation Rick’s circle was a highly sophisticated group which tended to look with patronizing amusement at all other levels of teen-age society.

“One of those teen-age black leather jacket outfits?” Rick asked with raised eyebrows. “That’s for the movies, Pop. What would I be doing with a bunch of squares?”

“Well, you just mind what I say,” big Sam said gruffly. “There’s gonna be no juvenile delinquents in this family. I had to be sure you’d understand that.”

Beneath his gruffness there was relief. Big Sam had confidence in young Rick’s judgment. But with all the stuff in the papers about juvenile crime, a parent couldn’t be too careful.

Rick described his conference with his father to Junior Carr. They both had a good laugh over it.

“Boy, what parents can’t think of to worry about,” Junior said. “Guys like us getting tied up with one of those punk kid Apache-haircut outfits. Wonder if Iota Omega has a chapter at the school we’re going to?”

Junior Carr was as tall as Rick, but only weighed a hundred and thirty pounds. He was too light for athletics and too uncompetitive to go out for less strenuous school activities. His high school fraternity was the most important social activity in his life.

“No,” Rick said regretfully. “I looked it up. Had some fellows in other frats check their chapter lists, too. I don’t think they have any fraternities there.”

“Maybe we can start a chapter,” Junior said with an air of hope.

Rick’s family settled in a four-room flat on Sterling Place, a quiet street of uniform-looking apartment buildings and small neighborhood stores. It wasn’t Brooklyn’s finest residential section, but neither was it shabby. Aside from the fact that most people in the area lived in apartments instead of individual houses, it didn’t differ from the middle-class residential sections of any big city.

Junior Carr’s family rented a flat just around the corner from the Hendersons, on Underhill Avenue.

The move took place over a weekend. It was Sunday evening by the time both families were settled enough for the boys to have a chance to look over their new neighborhood. Immediately after dinner they met in front of Rick’s apartment building.

Instinctively they headed for Flatbush Avenue, the nearest main street. After wandering down to Grand Army Plaza without seeing anything more interesting than a subway entrance, they turned around to explore Flatbush in the opposite direction.