Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 29, No. 4, September 1971

She deserved to die. But the anger in him was dead. So was something else. The hunger for her, the raw gut-aching hunger, stronger than pride, stronger than disgust. Dead! As he looked at her, the mocking lips curled back in an ugly smile, he felt like vomiting. And now he knew exactly what he had to do.

The hypo was undamaged. Using a handkerchief to avoid fingerprints, Stockwell released about half its contents and injected the rest into Gloria’s thigh. That should keep her out for a while. He put the hypo back into the case and tucked it into his pocket.

Then he carried his wife over to where he’d fired the shots. Carefully he wiped his prints off the .22 and put it in her limp right hand. With his hand over hers, he forced her to squeeze off another round. The slug slapped into the opposite wall where some of the others had struck.

Brad Stockwell assumed nobody had heard the shots, or paid any attention to them, or the police would be all over the place by now.

Nonetheless, he scanned the rows of cabanas before he left. Most were dark. And he could detect no movement on the beach. As a final precaution, he smudged the door handle with his hand. It was the only other thing he could remember touching.

Gloria couldn’t have planned it better, Brad Stockwell thought, his eyes fixed on the flowing white ribbon of cement. No one had seen him come or leave. Gloria would take the fall for Stanley Teal all by herself. A lovers’ quarrel, that’s how it would look. Manslaughter at worst, better than she deserved. A good lawyer might even convince a jury it was self-defense.

Brad Stockwell couldn’t care less. He had other things to think about now. Liquidating the business, starting over again some place else. Africa, South America, maybe even India. He’d heard they needed engineers in India.

When the lights of San Francisco glittered at him in the distance, he was whistling, whistling like a kid. He hadn’t done that for a very long time.

I Know a Way by Bill Pronzini

Hope, hate — all these things he had lost. But he still clung to one primeval urge — Murder!

* * *

Summerville Sheriff Mike Cameron finished locking the door after the last of the eleven drunks he and his deputy, Jack Hannigan, had arrested at The Gandydancer, a small roadhouse on the outskirts of town.

It was a lucky thing, he told himself wearily, turning deaf ears to the muttered protestations and demands from within the cell, that none of the eleven had suffered anything worse than a bloody nose. If they had, he and Hannigan would have had to make a special run to Kennerton, five miles distant, because that was where the closest hospital was located. As it was, they had had to make three trips to transport all of the eleven drunks between The Gandydancer and the jail.

As he followed the corridor back to the jail office, Cameron supposed it would have been easier to have forgotten the entire incident and sent the lot of them home. But damn it, he didn’t like public brawling and it served them right if they had to cool their heels in a cell overnight. When old Judge Lee fined them each fifty dollars on Monday, maybe they’d think twice about getting into a ruckus again.

In the long run, that would make Cameron’s job a hell of a lot simpler — and a hell of a lot happier, he thought ruefully.

He opened the block door and stepped into the office, closing the door quietly behind him. Hannigan was sitting at his desk with his feet propped on an opened drawer, massaging the back of his neck. Across the single room, Crazy Henry, the handyman, sat reading a comic book at one of the utility tables.

Cameron went to his desk, catty-corner to Hannigan’s, and sat down heavily. He was a big, solid man with a deeply tanned, deeply lined face and piercing gray eyes.

He said, “Well, another jolly Saturday night.”

“Yeah,” Hannigan said. Thin and dark and normally good-humored, he had laugh wrinkles under his blue eyes and at the corners of a generous mouth. But he wasn’t laughing now, or even smiling; he looked all in.

“You know, Mike,” he said, “I get damned tired of this job sometimes. Seems the only thing it entails is pulling in weekend drunks or breaking up barroom brawls — or both, like tonight.”

“Uh-huh,” Cameron agreed laconically.

“Summerville is such a damned quiet town. Nothing ever happens here. We get maybe two felonies a year, if you want to call some kids stealing a car to go joyriding, or a transient breaking into Havemeyer’s Grocery to raid the liquor felonies. The rest of the time, it’s drunks. Damned lousy drunks, anyway.”

“Well,” Cameron said reasonably, “there’s quite a few cops who would like to change places with us.”