Robert Alter - 101 Mystery Stories

When there was a vacant stool she edged in, piled her books on the counter, made her voice higher, her eyes wider, and ordered what she had heard one of the other kids order — “A special milkshake.”

She selected a straw out of the metal container near her, peeled the paper off it, and waited. Maybree was down at the other end of the counter, and a boy with a pimply face made her milkshake and put it in front of her. It was “special.” It contained two kinds of ice cream, a handful of malt, and an egg.

Bonny dipped her straw into it and sucked up the sweet, heavy mixture. She kept her eye on Maybree. He began to move up toward her. She pinched her straw so that it was useless, selected a fresh one, and stripped the paper off it. With a deft, practiced gesture, she slipped the little dart, point first, into the end of it.

She lifted it to her lips.

Maybree strolled down near her and stood still, his hand braced on the inside edge of the counter.

It was thus that he glanced at the very good-looking high school girl with the sea-colored eyes. He heard an odd sound, saw those sea-colored eyes glaze, and he gasped as she went over backward, her pretty head striking the asphalt tile of the floor with a heavy thud, her dark red hair spilling out of the bandanna when the knot loosened. She was dead even as she hit the floor.

That’s why I get a bang out of the mayor claiming to have cleaned up this town. Hell, he couldn’t have cleaned it up if Johnny Howard had been running things. When the mayor started his cleanup, Johnny Howard was gone, and weak sisters were trying to climb into the vacated saddle.

Yeah, Johnny Howard disappeared that same day that Bonny died. They # didn’t locate him for five days. They found him in that furnished room that still held Bonny’s usual clothes. The landlady had been hearing a funny noise. They found Johnny Howard on his hands and knees, going around and around the room, butting his head into the wall now and then. He told them he was looking for Bonny. They’ve got him out in the state sanitarium now, giving him shock treatments, but they say it’ll never work with him.

That’s right. Bonny made a mistake. Just one mistake. You see, she didn’t realize that by taking that huge slug of bourbon and then drinking half of that sticky milkshake she’d signed her own death warrant. They found the little dart embedded in the inside of her lower lip.

You can’t mix bourbon and milkshake without getting a terrible case of hiccups.

Bill Pronzini is one of America’s finest mystery/suspense writers, as well as one of its leading critics. He has published more than 30 novels and 280 stories. His fiction has been translated into 17 languages and he has edited or coedited some 40 anthologies, including, with Martin H. Greenberg, Baker’s Dozen: 13 Short Mystery Novels; A Treasury of World War II Stories; and A Treasury of Civil War Stories. A longtime resident of San Francisco, he possesses one of the world’s larger collections of pulp magazines.

Martin H. Greenberg, who has been called “The king of the anthologists,” now has some 125 of them to his credit. In addition to the books he has edited with Bill Pronzini, Greenberg has been a joint editor on A Treasury of American Horror Stories and 101 Science Fiction Stories. Greenberg is Professor of Regional Analysis and Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, where he teaches a course in American foreign and defense policy.