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?”
The Death-Ray Gun
by Evan Hunter
Cynthia Finch’s death didn’t bother anybody. It was the way she’d died — by a weapon that couldn’t possibly exist.
1.
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.”
“And just what is it you’re trying to do now, Cynthia?” I asked.
“I’m trying to push Rocketeers up into the respectable bracket.”
“My writing has been called a lot of things,” I said coldly, “but it’s never been called unrespectable.”
“Your writing is fine,” Cynthia said.
“But...”
“Yes, but.”
“But it isn’t respectable.” I grinned sourly, picked up the script, and then stood up. “You’ll excuse me, Cynthia. I’m going out to get very unrespectably drunk. Then I’m moving over to the Captain Jet show. They want science-fiction, and that’s what I’ve been writing for the past five years.”
“You’re behaving like an adolescent,” Cynthia said.
“Am I? Then it’s the influence of Rocketeers. Look, Cynthia, let’s get this straight. I don’t mind submitting story ideas, and I don’t mind submitting outlines, and I don’t even mind submitting step by step treatments. I’ve listened to you and Perry and Mark, and I’ve even taken occasional tips from some of the cameramen. But when you suddenly decide the product I’ve been turning out all along isn’t good enough for a lousy juvenile show, it’s time to hop into my own little rocket ship and go where I’ll be appreciated. It’s as simple as all that.”
“And you still don’t understand,” she said sadly.
“I understand one thing, Cynthia, and that is the side upon which my daily bread is buttered.”
“Sit down,” she said suddenly, “sit down, Jon.”
“There’s no sense prolonging...”
“Oh, for God’s sake, sit down!”
I sat down reluctantly, sullenly handing her the script when she reached over the desk for it.
“Shall we discuss this like intelligent adults?” she asked. I didn’t answer. “All right, here’s what’s wrong. In the first place, the science is all wet. I know you’ve been writing just this kind of science for a long time now — but we can’t have it that way anymore. It has to be accurate, and it has to be based upon known facts.”
“Cynthia...”
“You’ve got, for example, Cadet Holmes sucking in great gobs of oxygen on Mars. Now hell, Jon, spectroscopic tests of Mars have never revealed oxygen in the atmosphere of that planet. That means any oxygen there would be in a quantity less...”
“... than one-thousandth of that in the Earth’s atmosphere. Cynthia, you’re not telling me anything new.”
“Then why is Cadet Holmes breathing oxygen?”
“He’s breathing oxygen in this week’s sequence, too. Why the sudden complaint?”
“I’ve had that changed,” Cynthia said. “But why do you continue counter to scientific knowledge?”
“Why are there Martians, Cynthia? Do you object to the goddamned Martians?”
“Well, no. Extra-terrestrial beings are good for the show. They...”
“Well, go ask your high-priced science expert if Martians are likely to be found on Mars. Look. Martians come into the sequence two weeks from now. They breathe, and that’s impossible. So I have Holmes breathing in the current sequence, and he has to continue breathing.”
“I told you I’ve already changed that.”
“Then why the hell bring it up?”
“Because there are more important things wrong with the script. For example, you’ve got this Martian disease that shows all the symptoms of food poisoning. For God’s sake, Jon, International Foods is our sponsor.”
“Shove our sponsor,” I said.
“All right, do that, if you’re not interested in getting paid for what you write. But don’t forget the mothers who watch the show, too. And don’t forget that the biggest problem they have with their kids is feeding.”
“Do you know the limerick starting, ‘A woman who triplets begat’?”
“No. So you throw in food poisoning, a delightful excuse for every kid who doesn’t feel like eating Poppsies.”
“Poppsies, shmoppsies. Are you running a TV show or a luncheonette?”
“Here’s another thing,” Cynthia said. “You’ve got The Marauder’s mind captured by the Martians, and they force him to do dastardly things. The kids don’t know his mind is captured until the end of the sequence. All they see is their good old friend Marauder behaving like a bastard. So all these months we strive to build a father image, and you come along and wreck the whole thing in a week.”
“Why don’t you get Sigmund Freud to write your show?” I said. “He knows all about father images. Me, I’m just an underpaid writer.”
“Jon...”
“Jon me not, Cynthia.” I stood up, took the script from her desk, and stuffed it into my briefcase. “We sang a duet, doll, but the show closed.”