Ричард Деминг - Manhunt. Volume 3, Number 1, January, 1955

“Leave him alone. I ain’t hurting him. I just don’t want him to hop away. You don’t want to lose him, do you?” He looked up slyly at Manny and then he winked at Joe. Slowly he began increasing the pressure of his foot, pushing the toad down. In a moment the toad was squashed flat on the wooden step.

“You dirty louse,” Joe said. He had to push Manny away while he covered the toad with dirt. Great tears were rolling down Manny’s bewildered face.

Joe gave Pete a look of disgust and then he grabbed Manny by his fat arms. “Manny, look. Forget about it. It’s just a toad. You can get another one. It’s...”

But he could see that it was useless to talk to him. He went back and sat down beside Pete again on the steps.

Manny squatted down on the ground. He was blinking away his tears, and he began poking his finger in the dust, trying to uncover the dead toad. They both watched him.

“Jesus Christ, you hate everything, don’t you?” Joe said.

“Well, what makes you think you’re so pure all of a sudden?”

“You didn’t have to kill the thing.”

“Oh, for Chrissake, Joe. Manny’s just a half-wit. He’s feeble minded. He don’t know anything and he don’t feel anything.” He looked at Manny again. “Ain’t that so, little orphan Annie? You haven’t got any brains, have you?”

Manny stood up and pouted at Pete. “My name’s Manny.”

“No it ain’t. It’s Annie. Little orphan Annie. You’re a girl.”

His eyes were brimming with tears. “I ain’t no girl,” he protested.

“No Annie, you’re wrong. You’re a girl. You’re a girl and you haven’t got a brain in your head. Is that right, Annie?”

“I’m not Annie.”

Pete pulled himself off the steps and walked over to the dim-witted giant. He stood directly in front of him and looked up into his face. He was about six inches shorter than Manny was.

“Annie, I just got an idea,” Pete said. “A beautiful idea. They tell me you’ve never done a useful thing in your life. Well, I’m going to give you a chance to do the first useful thing you ever did.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a jackknife. He held the knife in front of Manny’s face and pressed the button on the handle. A four-inch blade snapped out, brushing Manny’s nose.

“How old are you, Annie? Twenty? Twenty-five?”

“My name ain’t Annie.”

“Annie, they tell me that for all your life somebody has had to take care of you. They tell me you’re not good for anything. Somebody has to dress you, somebody has to feed you, somebody has to tell you what to do. You’re just like a baby, only you’re worse than a baby because a baby’s got brains.

“You’re no good for anybody, little orphan Annie. No good for yourself, no good for me, no good for Joe here, no good for anybody.”

Joe came over and tried to push Pete away. “For Chrissake, leave him alone, will you, Pete? What did he ever do to you?”

He shrugged Joe off. “Annie, they tell me you’ll do anything anybody tells you.” He put the knife into Manny’s hand, closed Manny’s fingers around the handle, and brought his hand up so that the knife was a few inches from Manny’s throat.

He stared into Manny’s dull blue eyes. “Annie,” he ordered. “Cut your throat.”

“Pete, for Chrissake, what are you trying to do?”

“Well, Jesus, Joe. I’m only trying to give little orphan Annie here the chance to do the first useful thing he ever did. You’re not trying to stop me, are you?”

They stared at each other for a moment and then Joe shrugged his shoulders and walked back to the porch.

Pete laughed and pushed the blade closer to Manny’s throat. Then he stood with his hands on his hips, looking up into the frightened, stupid face. “Annie,” he commanded. “Do as I say. Cut your throat. Go on! Cut it!”

Manny’s lower lip was trembling and his mouth hung open as he stared down at Pete. He was beginning to drool out of the corner of his mouth, and the knife was shaking in his hand. Then he began to lower his hand slowly.

It made Pete laugh. “Now can you beat that,” he said. “They told me you’d do anything anybody ever told you.” He laughed again. “And they told me you never did a useful thing in your life, and they were right. You never did and you never will. Little orphan Annie. Big, fat, stupid, little girl...”

For just the barest fraction of a second there was the glint of sunlight on the blade of the knife. With one short, quick motion, and with his tremendous strength, Manny drove the knife into Pete’s belly.

It was an underhanded motion, and he ripped upward and sideways with the knife so that he made a long, curved cut. It made a hole in Pete’s shirt only slightly larger than the width of the knifeblade. The hole in Pete’s belly was nearly a foot long.

He did not speak again. He made only a strange gurgling sound deep in his throat. He covered the wound with both hands, and he stared down at the wound watching the blood flow like a river through his fingers.

He began sagging to the ground almost at once and his white shirt and pants were already red with blood. When he had sagged almost to the ground, he dropped suddenly into a sitting position, it was only a foot or so, but he dropped with enough force so that his intestines spilled out into his shirt, and he sat holding his insides and staring at his hands. He was like a man stealing sausage.

In a moment he fell forward and over to one side a little and he was dead.

The whole thing took not more than ten seconds.

Manny turned and began to walk away. The road was bare. For a second Joe watched Manny walking away.

Then he thought to himself, “Now where in hell is that truck?”

Cynthia Finch’s death didn’t bother anybody. It was the way she’d died — by a weapon that couldn’t possibly exist.

You could love Cynthia Finch, or you could hate her, and there were people who did both with equal enthusiasm. I myself had vacillated between both ends of the emotional spectrum, sometimes wanting to strangle her and sometimes wanting to hug her.

I did not much feel like hugging her that Wednesday morning. Nor did my preference for murder run toward the gentler form of strangulation. She sat behind her desk in the offices of Bradley and Brooks, and there was that infuriating smile on her face, and I pictured her head on the end of a long pike, and I would have joyously carried that pike through Hell.

“You see, Jon,” she said, smiling, her lips tinted a very pale orange, her midnight black hair fluffed around her neck, circling her face like an oval black frame, “it’s just not good.”

I snorted, but made no other comment. I’d been writing the Rocketeers show for a good long time now. I’d been writing it when Alec Norris was producer, and I’d been writing it before him, when fat Felix Nechler held the production reins. I was used to producers coming and going, and I was used to interference and advice from the office boy up. And even if Cynthia Finch was the fair-haired girl of television at the moment, and even if I’d appreciated her calm efficiency after the blundering, bumbling job Norris did, I still did not have to wax enthusiastic when she pulled one of my scripts apart.

“You’re thinking I’m all wet, I know,” she said, still smiling. “You mustn’t misunderstand me when I say this isn’t good.” She tapped the script with one tapering, delicate hand. “I don’t mean it’s not good by past standards. I simply mean it doesn’t stack up to what we’re trying to do now.”