He did not have to listen. The first stroke of the big tower clock set the air to vibrating, and it was the sound of a knell tolling, tolling for him.
"It'll be over soon." Pretty Boy's voice was almost gentle. "On the sixth stroke they'll throw the switch and three thousand volts will crash into your body and burn your nerves and short circuit your brain. Listen, there's the fourth stroke — and the fifth — "
Burke Morgan seemed to hear a whole chorus of voices whispering the count together. Four — five — six -
He tried to shut them out, shut out the clanging clock, shut out everything. But he could not shut out the venomous hiss of electric current surging into the chair. He could not ignore the great shower of sparks that flamed around his head, his hands, his feet, the smell of burning…
Burke Morgan leaped up wildly. He gave a single scream, and it seemed to him a hundred throats echoed it. Then silence, darkness, nothingness.
Pop Dillon settled back into his old rocker. There would be photographers and reporters there early and he wanted to be on hand for them. There would be columns in the newspapers tomorrow about The Chamber of Horrors. Oh, it would be a fine summer. Now the police had finally gone, taking with them the bodies of Burke Morgan and poor Officer Hendryx, two for the morgue who would eventually be immortalized in wax in the Chamber of Horrors.
"Pop." It was Pretty Boy Thomas' voice — yes, it was. "That was clever, Pop. Even to me it sounded like my own voice."
"And mine did to me." That would be Alice Johnson speaking in her shy, soft voice.
"Well, after all, I was a pretty good caster," Pop answered modestly, but pleased by the praise. "I was one for all of ten years, in a carny show. You know what a caster is? A ventriloquist. Yeah. Carny people use that short name."
"You handled him well." It was Jack the Ripper this time. The voices were no louder than the rustling of mice in the woodwork, or the fluttering of curtains at the windows. To anyone but Pop, they would have seemed just that. "I was wondering if you were going to try that shower of sparks effect you worked out to give the crowds a thrill, taking them by surprise when you put your foot on a button beside the platform."
"Yes," Pop answered. "I thought it would startle him long enough for me to run to the door and call for help."
"Of course you didn't know it was his heart that had put him in the prison hospital," Dr. Crippen, the poisoner, said with professional detachment. "But the combination of a craving for drugs, tremendous tension, shock and a bad heart killed him. Right there in your electric chair."
"He got what was coming to him," Dillinger growled. "You should let me have real bullets in my gun and I'd a saved you the trouble."
"This way was better," Billy the Kid said. "We'll have a great summer. The crowds will be flocking in."
"They'll be flocking in to see me, not you old dusty, moth-eaten has-beens!" a new voice sneered, and a sudden, shocked silence filled the big room.
Pop Dillon's eyes opened wide in surprise, and looked at the figure of Burke Morgan, which he had brought up and seated in the electric chair for the benefit of the photographers.
"Is that any way to talk, Morgan?" Pop asked severely. "Hardly dead yet and boasting already?"
"It's true and you know it," Burke Morgan said. "They'll mob the place to see the electric chair I died in, right at midnight", just when my sentence said I was to die."
Pop was about to answer when Jack the Ripper spoke up.
"Let him talk all he wants," Jack said. "Just don't answer him and he'll get tired of being left out. There's no point in being concerned over who draws the crowds, because what's good for one of us is good for all of us. Why, think what would happen if Pop ever had to go out of business. We'd be sold, melted down — killed."
There was a little murmur all over the room, a stirring, a rustle of anxiety, like the creak of old woodwork settling.
"Oh, I'm good for a long time yet," Pop told them all. "But I want you to be on your best behavior this summer and put on the finest show we ever had."
"We will… We will… We certainly will…" the whispers assured Pop. He closed his eyes with satisfaction. They were a good troupe to work with. It was going to be a fine summer.
As he drifted off to sleep, he could hear the rustle of tiny voices rise and fall in the darkness. All of them were now busily discussing the evening's events.
Even Jesse James.
A Gun With a Heart
by WILLIAM LOGAN
I have found killers to be men who love their work. At the close of a day, as they wend their way homeward, they do indeed have a feeling of great accomplishment. Unlike the white collar man in his gray flannel suit, they see a whole job through to the end — the end of someone or other.
"I don't want to come back without him," George said. His wife sat down at the white kitchen table, a sock and darning egg in her hand. She put the egg in the sock and looked up. "Why don't you want to?" she said. "What difference would it make?"
"A difference to me, first of all," George said. "And, second, I'm known as a dependable man. I've got to stay dependable. It's a matter of reputation."
"Terry's not going to get rid of you because you come back without this one man," his wife said. "You can leave, and spend a couple of days looking — really looking. You know where he won't be, if you see what I mean. You can make it all look good, George. And then you can come back — and what's the harm?"
"I don't like it, that's the harm," George said. "I never did anything like that."
"You never had an assignment like this before, either," his wife said.
George went to the refrigerator and opened it. He studied the contents for a second, brought out an orange and began to peel it carefully, sitting at the other side of the white table. "That's not the question," he said. "The thing is, am I dependable or am I not dependable?"
"George — "
"I don't like it any better than you do. But Terry knew what he was doing when he asked me to take this one on. He must have figured I knew him better than anybody else, and so I was the man to look for him. He would figure like that."
George put a section of orange in his mouth. His wife watched him. "How can you sit there and eat, and talk about it?" she said. "You're so calm. It's like nothing at all to you."
"Don't say that," George told her, swallowing the section of orange. "We were close. We were very close at one time, like brothers. I can feel that. But what else can I do?"
"You can do what I told you," his wife said. "Put on a good act of looking. Didn't you ever not find somebody before?"
George nodded. He put another section of orange in his mouth, chewed and swallowed it. "Just once," he said. "It turned out later the man was dead, died of natural causes."
"No matter how it turned out," his wife said. "Did Terry want to get rid of you then?"
"Well, he wasn't happy about it," George said.
"You're still here," his wife said. She placed the sock and the darning egg on the table. "You're still around."
"Yeah," George said. "Sure. I'd better get going. I got a long drive."
"You think about what I said," his wife said. "You think about it, I mean really."
"Sure," George said.
He got up, swallowing the last of the orange. He put on his shoulder holster and shrugged a jacket over it. "Maybe I better take a raincoat," he said. "It might rain out there. You never can tell."
His wife sat without answering him. George went to the hall closet, picked out his raincoat and folded it neatly over his arm. "I'll see you when I see you," he said.