Brett Halliday: Mike Shayne's Torrid Twelve

Well, why not?

Martha was there in the house, wasn’t she? And helpless in her wheelchair, wasn’t she? The maniac would kill her with that cleaver — that was sure. And all Martha could do was scream.

Suppose he waited till she screamed, Henry reasoned, and then ran into the house with his shotgun? He’d be too late to save her, wouldn’t he? She’d be dead, and he could blow the maniac’s head off. Then he would have the farm all to himself.

The farm — and Colleen Kimberly.

He could have the girl too, by God! Her pa would be glad to get her off his hands, if he could marry her to a widower with all the land Henry was going to have. It was all so clear, so easy, so sure. Nobody would think a thing about it. He could hear them now—“Old Henry is out in his barn, see, and he hears Martha scream out, and he grabs up his shotgun and comes running, but he’s too late — that maniac has already killed her.”

Henry knelt in the shadow, just inside the barn door, and waited for the lunatic to make his dash for the house. The man moved cautiously around the apple tree, then suddenly broke into a run. But not toward the house — he was racing off in the opposite direction, toward the elm grove just this side of the blacktop.

Henry sprang out of the barn and sprinted after him. No, you don’t! he thought. Oh, no you don’t! You can’t cut out on me now, mister. I can outrun you any day in the week.

He caught up with the man, in the elm grove. The lunatic slipped and fell, and scrabbled to his feet again — too late. Henry shoved the barrels of his shotgun into the crazed face and pulled one of the triggers.

The sight of the man’s face and head sickened Henry, but only for a moment. Almost before the man’s body struck the ground, Henry had whipped out of his shirt and wrapped it around the man’s head. Even so, he couldn’t prevent considerable blood from spilling on the ground. He swore. If the constable or that deputy sheriff should come nosing around out here, a little blood could be just as dangerous as a lot.

He worked rapidly and coolly, knowing the shotgun blast might bring a curious neighbor to investigate. He scooped dried grass and leaves over the place where the blood had spilled. Then he pushed the handle of the meat-cleaver into his belt, hoisted the dead man to his shoulder and picked up the shotgun. And, though he staggered a little under the man’s weight, he was able to move toward the house at something close to a run…

Martha’s eyes rounded, and her face blanched, and her hands clawed at the arms of her wheelchair. “Henry!” she gasped. “Henry, what—”

It was the last thing she ever said. Henry used the cleaver with all the practiced skill of a hundred butcherings. Then he pointed the shotgun at the wall and fired the second barrel.

He didn’t look at Martha, as he ripped the blood-soaked shirt from the dead man’s head and ran to the bedroom. By God, he thought, killing people was easy as hell, once you set your mind to it. He stuffed the bloody shirt into the bottom compartment of his fishing tackle box and pushed the box to the rear of the shelf in the closet. Then he took a clean shirt from the bureau and buttoned it up the front on his way back to the crank phone in the parlor.

This time he did look at Martha, and he smiled a little as he asked the operator in town to ring the constable for him. He was thinking about the way the sun had shimmered on Colleen Kimberly’s thighs. It was going to be hard to keep the happiness out of his voice when he talked to the constable, hard to sound the way the constable would expect him to sound.

“Constable Weber left word he’d be at the Shanley place a while,” the operator told him. “I’ll try to ring him there for you.”

“He got her, Jim!” Henry yelled, when the constable’s voice finally came on the wire. “That maniac! He’s done killed Martha with a cleaver!.. Yeah, I got him, but it was too late. I seen him out in the elm grove, up by the road, and I snuck up there and fired a barrel to scare him into surrendering, but he took off like a goddamn rabbit…

“No, I didn’t have the craw to kill him right then. I should have, God knows, but I just couldn’t do it. He got away from me. I come back to the house — and there’s poor Martha laying there, all chopped to hell and gone, and this crazy bastard coming at me with his cleaver. I just barely had time to get my gun up and pull the trigger…

“Yeah, that’s right. He circled around me out there, somehow, and come back to the house.”

Henry let his voice break. He sobbed for a moment, then went on raggedly. “If’n I’d been another minute sooner, I could have saved her. It was all my own fault, by God, Jim…

“Yes, it was too…

“Yeah, I’ll stay right here.” He hung up, shook a cigarette from his pack and strolled between the bodies toward the door.

It was so easy, he thought — so damned easy. He walked out on the porch and leaned back against a post, to wait for the constable. It wouldn’t be much of a wait, he knew — the Shanley place was less than half a dozen miles away.

He had just started to strike a match to his cigarette, when a flash of color in the elm grove caught his eye. He froze, staring at Colleen Kimberly, while the flame crawled up the match and burned his fingers.

How long had she been there? What might she have seen? He dropped the match, flicked the cigarette away and strode toward her. For a moment, he thought she meant to turn and run away, but then she stood still and leaned back against a tree trunk, to wait for him.

He stepped close and nodded to her. “What are you doing up here in the grove, Miss Colleen?” he asked.

She smoothed the blond hair back from her forehead and smiled up at him shyly. “I heard the gun,” she said.

“You just get here?” he asked.

She bobbed her head and pressed her back a little closer to the tree trunk. “I thought maybe you’d had an accident,” she said softly. “Like my Uncle Carl had that time he shot himself in the foot.”

Henry drew a deep breath. “You was worried about me? Is that what you mean, Colleen?”

She looked away from him and moistened her lips. “Yes. And I kept wondering why you never came back to the knoll. I waited and waited.”

Colleen was really a very small girl, Henry noticed, now that they stood face to face like this. Small and perfect and all woman — and almost his. It seemed the wrong time to be telling her about Martha, but it had to be done.

“Something pretty awful has happened here, Colleen,” he said. “Did you hear about the maniac that got loose from the asylum?”

She shook her head. “I’ve been out on the knoll all afternoon, and everybody else is visiting in town.”

“He was here,” Henry said. He paused. “He was here — and he killed Martha.”

Colleen sucked in her breath sharply. “He killed her?”

“Yeah,” Henry said. “With a meat-cleaver.”

She was staring at him. “He killed your wife?”

Henry nodded, and, for some reason, the look on the girl’s face made him feel a little uneasy.

“With a meat-cleaver?” she asked. “Some man killed your wife with a meat-cleaver?”

Henry bit at his lip. For the first time since he’d talked to Colleen on the knoll that day, he was beginning to understand what folks meant when they said she wasn’t quite bright. She was so pretty to look at that a man didn’t notice anything else at first.

But there was something wrong with her, he realized now. Her voice was clear and sure, but it was like a little girl’s — like a little girl reading words from a book she didn’t understand, saying the words properly without knowing what they meant.