Brett Halliday - Mike Shayne's Torrid Twelve

“You see this maniac, Mr. Ferris, you call the constable,” the deputy sheriff said. “And don’t lose no time about it, either. That man chopped up two women before they put him away, and he’s chopped up two more people since. God knows where he’ll stop, unless’n we get him fast.”

“He killed them with a hatchet,” the constable said. “The ones he killed before they put him away, I mean. I don’t know why they didn’t just up and hang him, the way they should of done. Hell, putting a maniac like that in an asylum is just plain stupid!”

“That’s a fact,” the deputy sheriff said. “You won’t have any trouble recognizing him, Mr. Ferris. He’s a big, tall old boy, with a face would scare hell out of almost anybody. He’s got him a face like a shovel.”

“That’s right,” the constable said. “I seen his picture.”

“He’s almost all jaw, that old boy is,” the deputy sheriff said. “Little scrunched-up forehead and crazy eyes, and this great big jaw jutting out there, just like a goddamn shovel.”

“Yeah,” the constable said. “It hangs out there like a cowcatcher on a train.” He patted the stock of his shotgun. “I got this old lady loaded up just right for him, too. I got me bird shot in one barrel, and buckshot in the other. If I holler halt, and he don’t do it, that birdshot ought to slow him down mighty fast. And if the birdshot don’t, the buckshot sure’r’n hell will. It’ll slow him down permanent!”

“I got my gun loaded the same way,” Henry said. “I been laying for some chicken thieves.”

The constable nodded. “Just don’t go shooting him, without you give him a chance to surrender, though.” He turned slightly to wink at the deputy sheriff. “Ain’t that right, Bob?”

The deputy grinned. “Sure,” he said. “We got to give him his just rights, like they say in the book.”

Henry grinned back, knowingly. “I’ll give him everything that’s coming to him, don’t worry.”

The constable patted the stock of his shotgun again and turned toward the pickup truck. “Well, we got to be rolling, Henry. There’s a lot of folks down the line, haven’t got phones. We got to warn them.”

Henry was reluctant to give up his company so soon. He rarely had callers at all, much less for interesting reasons like this one. “I sure wish you could stay and pass the time of day,” he said hopefully.

“Some other time, Henry,” the constable said, climbing into the truck. He opened the door on the other side for the deputy and leaned back against the cushion. “Give my best to the missus,” he said. The deputy waved to Henry and started the motor.

Henry watched the truck circle around toward the rutted road that led up to the blacktop, and then he walked slowly toward the house and went inside.

Martha was sitting in her wheelchair near the front door. She was pouring herself another tablespoonful of the patent medicine the doctor had told her was completely worthless. She paused with the spoon halfway to her mouth and scowled at Henry accusingly.

“Where’ve you been all this time?” she demanded, in her thin, whining voice. “A body could die ten times over, for all you’d care.”

Henry said nothing. He watched Martha swallow the medicine and pour another spoonful. She was only twenty-seven, but she looked at least twenty years older than that. Since the stroke that had paralyzed her legs, she had seemed to wither away slowly, day by day, until Henry could scarcely remember exactly what she had looked like when he married her.

Martha had been no raving beauty even then, Henry often reflected, and only God knew how he had had enough stomach to marry her, even to get his hands on her farm. That was just the trouble — he’d never got his hands on it at all. Martha had let him work it for her, but she had kept it in her own name. He’d never own so much as a square inch of it, until she died. The best he had been able to do was hold out a little of the egg money.

Martha swallowed the second spoonful of the medicine, grimaced and screwed the cap back on the bottle very carefully.

“Folks are talking about your never going to church, Henry,” she whined. “And about your working so much in the barn on Sundays. It isn’t right.”

“That barn ain’t no affair of theirs,” Henry said. “And how am I supposed to go to church? I’d be gone three hours or more. Then you’d really holler, for sure.”

“Not about your going to church, I wouldn’t.”

“Then, why do you nag me so about being out to the barn?”

“That ain’t the same thing at all, Henry, and you know it.”

“It sure looks like the same thing to me, by God! It’s me not peeking in on you every five minutes that gets you riled up so much, not where I am.”

“That’s another thing,” Martha said. “What in the world do you do out in that barn, every blessed Sunday? It appears to me you spend more time out there on Sundays than you do all week put together.”

Henry stared at her, wondering whether he should tell her about the maniac being loose, just to change the subject. No — it would only set Martha off on a lot of damnfool questions, and he didn’t feel like talking to her any more than he had to. He didn’t even want to look at her.

He turned, left the house again and climbed back up in the hayloft. The visit by the constable and the deputy sheriff had almost made him forget about Colleen Kimberly, out there on the knoll beyond the orchard, but now he had an urgent need to look at her again. It would be painful, but it was something he had to do. He hoped she’d still be there — that sun was getting plumb brutal, especially if you were one of these real fair-skinned people, like Colleen.

She was still there, Henry found. She had shifted around on her canvas chair, so that she was facing the barn. The unconscious display of bare legs was more provocative than anything Henry could remember.

“Oh, Lord!” he said to himself in the stifling heat of the hayloft. “What makes me torment myself so?”

He lowered the spyglass a moment, to wipe the sweat from his face — and it was then that he saw the man in the orchard. The man was traveling at a fast lope, and, in his right hand, he carried a large meat-cleaver.

Henry stared at the cleaver, and then at the man’s huge, undershot jaw. “It’s that crazy shovel-face maniac,” he said aloud. “It’s him, surer’n all hell! He’s running through the orchard that way, so’s he can cut around the house and come in the front door.”

Henry came down the ladder fast, smiling broadly. There was no fear in him, no hesitancy. He knew exactly what he was going to do, and the thought pleased him.

You talk about your warm welcomes, he thought. I’ll give you one, mister. I’ll give, you one you ain’t never going to forget. ’Course, you won’t have long to remember it, but you sure’n hell ain’t going to forget it.

He ran to the shelf where he kept his shotgun, jerked the gun from its leather case, and crept to the barn door.

The man with the cleaver was at the far end of the orchard now, crouching down, watching the house from behind an apple tree. Even from this distance, and without the spyglass, Henry could see the crazed look in the big man’s eyes.

He’s a mean one, all right, he reflected. He should of been hung to begin with, like the constable said. Just look at him standing out there, thinking about how he’s going to chop somebody up with that cleaver…

The thought echoed and re-echoed in Henry’s mind. Suddenly he began to sweat even worse than he had in the hayloft. He put the thought into words. “Chop somebody up…” he whispered to himself.