Jake Smith shot him a quick, puzzled glance.
Tom shrugged and lit a cigarette jerkily. “I just don’t like wife beaters, that’s all,” he muttered.
“Okay,” Jake shrugged. “So you don’t like wife beaters. Personally I don’t give a damn.” He concentrated on driving.
Tom Rivas watched the streets unfold before their headlights. He didn’t bother to explain his words. It was a matter of pride. You didn’t go telling everybody how you watched your old lady get her brains beaten out one night by a crazy-drunk father. But Tom could remember plain enough, though he’d been only seven at the time. He could remember her whimpering cry and the huge brute of a man, his father, slamming his fist into her face over and over. And then the piece of stove wood coming down on her head, popping it open like an overripe canteloupe.
Yeah, he could remember.
They got down to the narrow streets and the buildings that were a constant gray from the iron works smog.
They stopped the car and walked across a wet street to a bar. It was raining a fine mist that night.
The name of the bar was Harry’s Place. Harry, himself, was at the beer tap, carefully filling a glass with keg beer. He had a little plastic paddle in his right hand, skimming off the excess foam. He was an artist at this job.
Jake walked up to the bar. “You got some apartments in this building?”
Harry looked up at the two policemen. The other men in the dim place looked up too. Their faces all had the same look, a sullen animosity which was half fear. The people down here in Hunkytown had little use for the law, which was seldom on their side whether they were right or not.
Slowly, Harry laid the paddle down. He caught up a corner of the soiled apron that was tied around his fat middle and wiped his hands. “Nah,” he said. “We ain’t got no apartments here. Why?”
“This two-ten Prescott? We got a call to check a disturbance here. Something about a man beating his wife.”
Harry’s jagged teeth stumps revealed themselves in a leer. “Oh, sure.” Down the bar, there was a man with his cap pulled down over his eyes, a mug of beer in his hand. He laughed shortly.
“Well?” Jake asked, his temper beginning to shorten. Tom Rivas stood right behind him.
“Yeah,” the saloon keeper said, “I guess there was a disturbance here, you might say. They went home, though. He took her home.”
“The guy that was beating his wife?”
“Yeah. He come here and got her. She was screeching around like she didn’t want to go, so he slapped her up a little and took her home. It’s just across the street.” He took a dirty, broken thumb nail out of the beer suds and jabbed it at a frame house across the way.
The man in the cap chuckled again. “Ain’t nothin’ to get excited about, copper. Just Mack Szykora havin’ a row with his missus. Happens all the time. Every week he knocks her around a little. Don’t mean no harm.”
Tom Rivas’ fists bunched and he got a little white around the mouth, feeling the urge to knock the man in the cap down for his callousness.
The bartender said, “Don’t know who called you, copper. It wasn’t nothin’.”
Jake stood there a minute longer, then he went outside. “Let’s go,” he muttered. He opened the car door.
But Tom Rivas remained on the sidewalk. He gazed across the street at the cheap frame house with the shades drawn. While he stood there, he heard a faint cry.
“Hey,” Jake called after him, “where you goin’?”
Tom didn’t answer. He went right up to the house, walking through the weeds and rubble in the front yard. He could hear it quite plainly now. A man’s deep, rumbled curses. The smack of a hand against bare flesh. Then her gasp. “No, Mack. Please... for God’s sake. Don’t—”
Tom leaped up on the porch and went for the door. His lips were drawn back and a hot, red haze came down over his eyes.
The door was not locked. The knob spun in his hand. He jerked it open and charged into the place, stumbling over furniture in the dark hallway. Over to the left, a slit of light was showing under the bedroom door. Tom headed that way and wrenched the door open.
The man and the woman in the room froze with surprise when he burst in. For a split second the scene was transfixed. Nobody moved. The young policeman glanced at the girl who was huddled against a wall.
She was a pretty, young thing, not over twenty. Almost all her clothes had been ripped off. Her thick black hair had piled loosely around her naked shoulders and her puffed, tear-stained face. Her long, slim legs were coated with sheer nylon. She had lost one shoe. Her flesh was very white and smooth except where big Mack Szykora’s fingers had left ugly, purple bruises.
Like most of the girls in Hunkytown. she was a bit on the pale, thin side. But her huge black eyes and dark hair contrasted beautifully with her white skin.
Tom couldn’t get his eyes off her. He was a bachelor and not exactly dumb about women, but this one had an indefinable something that hit him like a strong electrical charge on a wet day. It was the first time he’d ever wanted a woman at first sight.
Her husband was a giant. Like all the iron workers in Hunkytown, he was well over six feet tall and carried at least two hundred and thirty pounds of solid beef. Heat from molten metal and blast furnaces had tinged his battered features a permanent dull brick red. Now he stood in the center of the room, blinking dazedly at Rivas.
The girl recovered first. She moved away from the wall to the bed where she snatched up a sheet to cover her nakedness. Her husband’s brain moved slower. “Whata hell’re you doin’ here, copper?” he grunted, shaking his head.
With an effort, Rivas stopped looking at the girl. “Come on,” he said. “You’re going with me.”
The ceiling light, a naked fifty-watt bulb on the end of a drop cord, hung directly over the big man’s head, shining on a bald spot and casting the jagged lines of his face in harsh shadows.
His big paws began flexing. A low rumble, like a freight going down a grade, issued from his throat. “Why, you rotten copper,” he whispered. Then he came at Rivas with his giant arms outstretched, a gorilla reaching to crush every bone in the policeman’s chest with one hug.
The raw hate washed up into Rivas’ mouth with a sour, rotten taste out of his stomach. He was glad Szykora wanted to argue about it. He took a blackjack out of his pocket and waited until the husky iron worker’s arms came around him and the man’s coarse face was pushed up to his with a gush of sour beer stench. Then, Rivas brought the blackjack down across Szykora’s face. He could have simplified all this by drawing his pistol and frightening Szykora into submission. But he preferred to do it this way. He preferred to swing the blackjack again and again, whipping the big ape down to his knees, whipping his face into a bloody froth, while everything dissolved into a red haze. The frightened girl merged with his memory of his old lady the night she was killed and he took out on Szykora the hatred that had lived with him for twenty years.
Rivas was making animal sounds in his throat as his arm came down again and again and the sweat soaked through his uniform and stood out in big, sticky drops on his face. He would probably have beaten Szykora to death on the spot if Jake Smith hadn’t come in and dragged him off the man.
The next day they brought Szykora into court. There wasn’t much they could do to him. The girl was there, but when she was brought before the court, she refused to testify against her husband. Nobody in Szykora’s neighborhood would file a complaint. They were all afraid of the big man. Finally, Szykora was given a couple of days for drunken behavior and resisting arrest.