“Oh, yeah!”
He seized Ike by the back of the neck, jerked, and slammed him against the fender. Then something smashed against his face. It was the woman, beating him with her handbag. “Go away! Git away from here!”
Ike faced him, lips writhing, eyes glaring a slaty gray against the deep red of the burns he had received that morning. But his voice was low, even if it broke with the intensity of his emotion. “Get out of my way, you! You got nothing to do with this.”
He lunged at Ike with his fist — missed. Ike struck with the knife. He fended with his left arm, felt the steel cut in. With his other hand he struck, and Ike staggered back. There was a pile of shovels beside him, almost tripping him up. He grabbed one, swung, smashed it down on Ike’s head. Ike went down. He stood there, waiting for Ike to get up, with that terrible vitality he had shown this morning. Ike didn’t move. In the car the girl was sobbing.
The police, the ambulance, the dust, the lights, the doctor working on his arm, all swam before his eyes in a blur. Somewhere far off, an excited voice was yelling: “But I got to use your telephone, I got to, I tell you! Guy saves a man’s life this morning, kills him tonight! It’s a hell of a story!” He tried to comprehend the point of this; couldn’t.
The foreman appeared, summoned the third shift to him in loud tones, began to read names. He heard his own name called, but didn’t answer. He was being pushed into the ambulance, handcuffed to one of the policemen.
Brett Halliday
(1904–1977)
Brett Halliday (Davis Dresser) was the creator of Michael Shayne, a red-haired Miami private detective who was enormously popular in the 1940s and 1950s. Shayne appeared in fifty novels written by Halliday, beginning with Dividend on Death (1939), and, after 1965, in another eighteen written by various ghostwriters under the Halliday byline. He also appeared in a series of seven B films starring Lloyd Nolan, among them Sleepers West (1941, based on Frederick Nebel’s Sleepers East [1933]) and Time to Kill (1942, based on Raymond Chandler’s High Window [1942]); in five additional B pictures in the late 1940s starring Hugh Beaumont; on the radio from 1944 to 1952 featuring Jeff Chandler, among others; and on television in 1960 and 1961 with Richard Denning. He also lent his name to Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine (1956–1985), one of the longest running crime-fiction periodicals. As critic Art Scott has noted, “Shayne is a tough, direct character, not tricked out with gimmicks, not given to guilt complexes or excessive philosophizing... Mike Shayne is the Generic Private Eye.”
Halliday began his writing career with neither Shayne nor crime fiction, but with soft-core sex and Western novels for the lending-library market. Between 1934 and 1942, he published sixteen of the former and ten of the latter under both his own name and various pseudonyms. His first detective novels, Mum’s the Word for Murder (1938) and The Kissed Corpse (1939), were published under the name Asa Baker and featured former Texas Ranger ferry Burke. Even after the success of Shayne, Dresser wrote one mystery under the name Andrew Wayne, two mysteries under the name Hal Debrett (in collaboration with Kathleen Rollins), and three hard-boiled paperback originals under the name Matthew Blood (in collaboration with Byerson Johnson).
In addition to his prolific output of novels, Halliday found time for an occasional shorter work. “Human Interest Stuff,” a nonseries story, is perhaps the strongest of them. Originally published in the pulp magazine Adventure in September 1938, this rough-and-tumble yarn has an offbeat narrative approach, a Mexican railroad-construction-camp setting, and a tight little twist in its tail.
B. P.
Human Interest Stuff
(1938)
You want a human interest story for your paper on the execution tomorrow? A guy is slated for a one-way trip to hell in the electric chair, and all you see in it is a front page story!
That’s your business, of course. I never blame a man for doing his job. I’ve kept my mouth shut up to now for Sam’s sake, but he won’t mind after the juice is turned on in that little gray room.
You’re right. There is a whale of a story that hasn’t been told. I guess it’s what you’d call human interest stuff, all right.
I’m the only person that can give you the real low-down. Me, and one other. But it’s a cinch the other fellow isn’t going to talk for publication.
All right, if you promise to hold it until after they throw the switch tomorrow morning. I wouldn’t want Sam to be sore at me for spilling it.
Yeah. There’s a gap of five weeks unaccounted for from the time Bully Bronson’s murderer crossed the Rio Grande going south until he came back to fry in the hot seat.
A lot of living can be packed into five weeks. A hell of a lot, Mister.
It’s funny the way things worked to bring Sam and me together. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but things don’t — south of the Border.
I drifted into the railroad construction camp that morning, needing a job bad and not caring what kind of a job it was.
The American engineer, Hobbs, was down with tropical dysentery and was all set for a trip back to a hospital in the States. He had a young assistant he’d planned to leave in charge of the work, but the youngster was new to Mexico and just the night before I hit camp he had gone on a tear and drunk enough tequila to make the mistake of insulting a Mexican girl.
The girl’s father drained the cactus juice from his belly and left him in bad shape to take charge of a construction job.
With his fever at 105, Hobbs was in a tight spot when I happened along. They were filling the last gap in a railroad line that was to connect St. Louis with the west coast of Mexico and with the Orient by ship, and the rainy season was due in about six weeks.
That meant the fill and culverts had to be in place within six weeks — or else. The last gap was across that valley south of Terlingua, where plenty of water runs down from the mountains during the rainy season.
And there was more to it, really, than just beating the rainy season. The history of the St. Louis, Mexico & Asiatic Railroad goes back a lot of years to a group of men in St. Louis who dreamed of a direct route from their city to the Orient.
They backed their dream with money and started building the S. L. M. & A. from both ends toward the middle. Something happened — they ran out of money, I guess — and got the American end to within a hundred miles of the Border, and the Mexican end about two hundred miles south of the Border.
For forty years, the line was in a receivership and that three hundred mile gap was the difference between a dream and reality.
Just last year, they got money from somewhere and started filling that gap.
Now, it was narrowed to four miles, and you can’t blame Hobbs for jumping at any chance to get the grade finished before the rainy season came along and held them up another six months.
Yeah, that’s just what he did. He asked me a couple of questions to see if I knew my stuff, then put me in charge.
They took him north in a Ford ambulance at noon, and his assistant died at four o’clock — the Mexican knife having drained more from his belly than just the over-dose of tequila.