And that Sally... He’d have to start splitting down the middle with her, he knew. Maybe she was even worth it. One thing was sure, she’d learned how to terrify young girls better than anyone else he could have teamed up with. He’d seen her work on just one girl, but it had been enough to convince him. Sally had wrapped her arm around a fourteen-year-old girl’s throat in such a way that the girl was helpless. Then, with a hand towel soaked with water, she had beaten the girl across the stomach until she was almost dead. When the girl had recovered slightly, she had been only too willing to tell Sally every man she’d picked up during the last six months.
That particular list of names, Streeter recalled, had been worth a little over ten thousand in shake-down money.
He came to a drug store and braked the cruiser at the curb.
In the phone booth, he dialed Sally’s number, humming tunelessly to himself. He felt much better now, with Johnny Cabe’s three hundred dollars in his pocket.
When Sally answered, he said, “Streeter. Anything doing?”
“I got one in here now,” Sally said. “A real tough baby. I picked her up at Andy’s trying to promote a drunk at the bar.”
“She talking?” he asked.
“Not a damn word. I got her back in the Quiet room.”
“What’s her name?”
“Don’t know. All she had in her bag was a lipstick and a few bucks.” She paused. “Like I said, she’s tough. She won’t even give us the time of day.”
“Listen,” Streeter said. “Things are slow tonight. See if you can get her talking. Maybe I can collect a bill here and there.”
“That’s an idea.”
“You haven’t lost your technique, have you?”
“No.”
“All right. So turn it on. Give her that towel across the belly. That ought to make her talkative.”
For the first time he could remember, he heard Sally laugh.
“You know,” she said, “I’m just in the mood for something like that. Maybe I will.”
“Sure,” Streeter said. “The sooner you get me some names, the sooner I get us some dough.”
“Don’t forget, Carl — it’s fifty per cent now.”
“Sure.”
He hung up and went back out to the cruiser.
After another slow hour of routine checks, he decided to see how Sally was making out with the tough pick-up. He stopped at a diner and called her.
“God,” she said, as soon as he had identified himself, “we’re really in it now, Carl.” Her voice was ragged, and there was panic in it.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I went too far. I was doing what you said, and—”
“For God’s sake, Sally! What’s happened.”
“I... I think I broke her neck...”
“You think! Don’t you know?”
There was a pause. “Yes. I broke her neck, Carl. I didn’t mean to, but she was fighting, and all at once I heard something snap and...”
The thin film of perspiration along his back and shoulders was suddenly like a sheathe of ice.
“When, Sally? When did it happen?”
“J-just now. Just a minute ago.”
“You sure she’s dead?”
“Dead or dying. There was a pulse a few seconds ago, but—”
“But her neck! You’re positive it’s broken? That it just isn’t dislocated, or something?”
“It’s broken. This is it, Carl. For both of us. God...”
“Listen, damn it!” he said. “Was she wearing stockings? Long ones?”
“Yes. What—”
“Take one of them off her and hang her up with it.”
She seemed to have trouble breathing. “But I... I can’t do that. I—”
“You’ve got to! Do you hear? It’s the only way out. Tie one end of the stocking around her neck. Then put a chair beneath that steam pipe that runs across the ceiling. Haul her up on the chair with you and tie the other end around the pipe. Leave her hanging and kick the chair away, just like she’d done it herself.”
He waited, breathing heavily.
“All right,” Sally said. “I’ll try.”
“You’d better. And hurry. Get her up there and then leave the room for a few minutes. When you go back to see your prisoner, she’s hanged herself. See? They’ll give you hell for leaving her alone with stockings on, but that’s all they can do. She panicked and hanged herself; that’s all.”
“But, Carl, I—”
“No buts! Get busy!”
He opened up the siren and kept it open all the way back to the Eighteenth. He ran up the station steps, through the corridors. He was breathing quickly. When he arrived at the second floor he was soaked with perspiration.
He forced himself to walk leisurely through the large room that housed the detective headquarters, back toward the short corridor that led to the Quiet room. The Quiet room was a small, soundproof detention cell where they sometimes put the screamers and howlers until they calmed down enough for questioning. It had been designed to provide some degree of quiet for the men out in the headquarters room, and not as a torture chamber.
But it had served Streeter and Sally Creighton well and often.
Streeter paused at the door to the corridor and drew a paper cup of water from the cooler. Where in hell was Sally? he wondered. She should be out here by now, killing time before she went back to discover that her prisoner had hanged herself.
He glanced about him. There were only two other detectives in the room, and both were busy with paper work. A man in a T-shirt and blue jeans sat dozing in a chair, one wrist handcuffed to a chair arm.
Then he heard footsteps behind him, and Sally’s voice said, “Thank God you’re here.”
He turned to look at her. Her face was gray and her forehead was sheened with sweat.
“Where’ve you been?” he asked.
“To the john. I don’t know... something about this made me sick in the stomach.”
“Yeah. Well, let’s go down there and get it over with.”
He led the way down the corridor to the Quiet room and threw the heavy bolt. The goddamned little chippie, he thought. So she’d thought she was tough... Well, she’d asked for it, hadn’t she? She’d asked for it, and she’d damn well got it.
He jerked the door open and looked up at the girl hanging from the steam pipe. Her body was moving, very slowly, a few inches to the right and then back again.
He stared at her while the floor seemed to tilt beneath his feet and something raw and sickening filled his stomach.
He took a faltering step forward, and then another, his eyes straining and misted. It was difficult for him to see clearly. Absently, he brushed at his eyes with his sleeve. The hanging figure before him sprang into sudden, terrifying focus.
The girl’s body was as slim and graceful looking in death as it had been a few hours ago when he had watched her clearing away the dinner dishes. But not the face, not the horribly swollen face.
“Jeannie,” he whispered. “Jeannie, Jeannie...”
The Coyote
by David Chandler
I was sick, to my stomach. There was my father, the gun in his hand, saying, “Take it! Take it!”
Mama told me to see Beaver but when I got to the toolshed I saw that someone had already tethered him, maybe the hired man from Ventura Father had sent away that morning after hardly a day with us. I went straight back to the house. I could hear them still talking in Father’s room. A lot of it I couldn’t understand but what they were saying about me I could figure out all right, and I stood by the door listening to them.