This Doc Harrington has got hold of some curare. It is a South American poison and they use it in this country in small doses to make convulsions ease up when they give people shock therapy. It paralyzes muscles. Jam a little bit in the bloodstream and it will paralyze the heart action. Poof! Like that. Quick as a bullet.
The bodyguards that are protecting Walt Maybree during business hours are on the lookout for hard characters who look like they might rub Maybree out in a direct way. Johnny Howard figures they will not be on the lookout for high school gals.
For the next two days he had Bonny practicing with a soda straw and these little wooden darts he has fixed up. They just fit in a soda straw. A needle on one end and paper things on the other to make them fly right.
Walt Maybree works behind his own soda fountain.
The idea is that Bonny goes in there as a high school girl and she has the little dart with the curare on the end in her hand. She sits at the fountain and tucks the dart in the end of the soda straw, puts it up to her lips, and puffs, sticking the little dart into the back of Maybree’s hand, or, better yet, his throat.
When he keels over, she goes out with the crowd.
Probably Bonny laughed and kidded a lot when she was up in the suite practicing on the cork target with the little darts. Probably Johnny Howard kidded back, but neither of them must have thought it was very funny. To Johnny Howard it was okay to rub out the competition with hot lead, but sending your gal out to kill somebody with a blowgun is something else indeed.
Anyway, the pressure on Johnny was getting worse every day, and his boys were mumbling and it was only a question of time until somebody turned hero and blasted Johnny.
On the day that was set, Bonny went in her black dress and her high heels and her dark red hair piled high on her head and unlocked the door to the room she had rented near the high school. The little dart with the sticky stuff on the needle end was wrapped in tissue paper and was in a little box in her purse. She had a suitcase with her.
The black dress fitted snugly on Bonny’s curves. She took off the dress and the nylons and the high-heeled shoes and put on scuffed, flat moccasins and shortish tweed skirt and a sloppy sweater. She let that wonderful dark red hair fall around her shoulders, and she tied a scarf thing around her shining head.
She had schoolbooks with her. She took them out of the suitcase, held them in her arm, and looked in the chipped mirror over the oak bureau. Carefully she smiled. Bonny the high school lass. But with too much makeup. She swabbed all the makeup off and put back just a little. It looked better.
Her knees were shaking and her lips felt numb. Her heart was fluttering. No woman can go out to commit murder without something taking place inside her.
One little thing had to be added. She took the big purse she was leaving behind, took out the half-pint flask that Johnny Howard had given her two years before, and tilted it up to her lips. The raw liquor burned like fire, but it steadied her down. That was what she wanted.
It had all been timed just right. She left the room, carrying the books, and walked to the high school. She went in the door, and, when she got halfway down the hall, the noon whistle went off and the doors opened and the hall filled with kids.
Bonny felt funny until she saw that she wasn’t being noticed. She went right through the building and out the other door and became part of the crew that stormed the gates of Walt Maybree’s Drugstore.
Between the thumb and first finger of her right hand she tightly held the little messenger of death.
The liquor was warm in her stomach, and she made an effort not to breathe in anybody’s face. She was a little late to get a seat at the counter, and so waited, quietly and patiently, and while she waited she thought of Johnny Howard. It was only by thinking of Johnny that she could go through with the whole thing.
When there was a vacant stool she edged in, piled her books on the counter, made her voice higher, her eyes wider, and ordered what she had heard one of the other kids order — “A special milkshake.”
She selected a straw out of the metal container near her, peeled the paper off it, and waited. Maybree was down at the other end of the counter, and a boy with a pimply face made her milkshake and put it in front of her. It was “special.” It contained two kinds of ice cream, a handful of malt, and an egg.
Bonny dipped her straw into it and sucked up the sweet, heavy mixture. She kept her eye on Maybree. He began to move up toward her. She pinched her straw so that it was useless, selected a fresh one, and stripped the paper off it. With a deft, practiced gesture, she slipped the little dart, point first, into the end of it.
She lifted it to her lips.
Maybree strolled down near her and stood still, his hand braced on the inside edge of the counter.
It was thus that he glanced at the very good-looking high school girl with the sea-colored eyes. He heard an odd sound, saw those sea-colored eyes glaze, and he gasped as she went over backward, her pretty head striking the asphalt tile of the floor with a heavy thud, her dark red hair spilling out of the bandanna when the knot loosened. She was dead even as she hit the floor.
That’s why I get a bang out of the mayor claiming to have cleaned up this town. Hell, he couldn’t have cleaned it up if Johnny Howard had been running things. When the mayor started his cleanup, Johnny Howard was gone, and weak sisters were trying to climb into the vacated saddle.
Yeah, Johnny Howard disappeared that same day that Bonny died. They # didn’t locate him for five days. They found him in that furnished room that still held Bonny’s usual clothes. The landlady had been hearing a funny noise. They found Johnny Howard on his hands and knees, going around and around the room, butting his head into the wall now and then. He told them he was looking for Bonny. They’ve got him out in the state sanitarium now, giving him shock treatments, but they say it’ll never work with him.
That’s right. Bonny made a mistake. Just one mistake. You see, she didn’t realize that by taking that huge slug of bourbon and then drinking half of that sticky milkshake she’d signed her own death warrant. They found the little dart embedded in the inside of her lower lip.
You can’t mix bourbon and milkshake without getting a terrible case of hiccups.
About the Editors
Bill Pronzini is one of America’s finest mystery/suspense writers, as well as one of its leading critics. He has published more than 30 novels and 280 stories. His fiction has been translated into 17 languages and he has edited or coedited some 40 anthologies, including, with Martin H. Greenberg, Baker’s Dozen: 13 Short Mystery Novels; A Treasury of World War II Stories; and A Treasury of Civil War Stories. A longtime resident of San Francisco, he possesses one of the world’s larger collections of pulp magazines.
Martin H. Greenberg, who has been called “The king of the anthologists,” now has some 125 of them to his credit. In addition to the books he has edited with Bill Pronzini, Greenberg has been a joint editor on A Treasury of American Horror Stories and 101 Science Fiction Stories. Greenberg is Professor of Regional Analysis and Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, where he teaches a course in American foreign and defense policy.