I remembered how he’d almost killed one of the guys in the gang who’d wrapped a rat as a birthday present gag. How he’d taken special pains to live near the top of all buildings, so the chance of getting rodents would be smaller. The time he’d jellied into a heap, until three of the boys had killed a rat that ran across his path.
“Rats, Harry,” I repeated, savoring the word.
“W-why? Why do you ask? Yeah, I suppose I still don’t like ’em. So what?” He didn’t know whether to answer or not He was squinting at me, licking his lips, really nervous.
“Do you have your wife clean real good, so the rats don’t get into the cupboards, Harry? Do you call in the exterminators every year at the store, whether you need them or not? I’ll bet you smack your kid if he laughs at a Mickey Mouse cartoon. Is that right, Harry, do you?” I’d spoken softly, but steadily.
“Why do you wanta know? Why?” The sweat glistened like bubbles on his face.
“I just thought I’d inquire, Harry. You see, this entire place is filled with them. See them?”
Some men fear death, some fear closed places, some water. Chuckling Harry Kroenfeld feared rats. With an almost pathological fear. I wasn’t going to just kill Harry—please credit me with more ingenuity than that—I was going to kill him!
“Rats, Harry! Large, black, crawling rats, with thin, wiry whiskers and little, pointed snouts, sniffing. They’re all over the place, Harry! See them? See them, Harry?”
I had been talking quietly, but his head began snapping back and forth on his neck, as though he were on scent, as though he wanted away from there desperately. He probably did.
“No! There aren’t any…I don’t see any…Lew, look, you got to—uh—let me go home now! Helen’s waiting for me, Lew!” He was getting frantic, his voice was rising. But that didn’t matter. The old Steel Pier warehouse is way down away from everything. No one would hear.
“Certainly I’ll let you go, Harry. After the rats have eaten away your pants cuffs, and started on the bones in your fat legs. Do you have bones in there, Harry? They’ll find them! How long do you think it will take them to eat through all that fat, Harry?”
“Lew!” he screamed, straining at his bonds. The chair clattered toward me, but I motioned him off with the gun. I could tell it hadn’t completely sunk in yet. He still didn’t believe I’d do it Chuckling Harry has been known to be wrong.
“I wouldn’t worry too much, Harry, because it’ll take them at least three hours to finish you. They’re pretty messy eaters.”
I smiled in a friendly way, then I shot him.
The .45 erupted, Harry screamed once at the pain, then spun around—still tied to the chair—and fell onto his back. There was a neat, round hole in his pant leg, and it was becoming stained dark very quickly. Blood was streaming out of his left leg. “It could have been a bit higher,” I mused, “I’d always thought there was more blood higher up the leg. Oh well…”
I walked over and looked down at Harry. He’d fainted. Or perhaps it was just a state of shock. Either way, he was lying there, eyes shut, mouth half-open, tic in his cheek jumping. I shoved the gun into my pocket, bent down.
I lifted Harry and the chair. It was quite a job; a big man, and in that half-conscious shock state he was dead weight. Well, not exactly dead, but soon—soon.
I tipped the chair up, set it back on its legs, and brushed off my hands. That warehouse was filthy. They really should have taken better care of it.
I held the gun steady on Chuckling Harry while I fished the knife out of my pocket. I had to open the blade with my teeth.
Harry’s head was tipped back on his shoulders, the tongue protruding from his gummy lips just a bit. He was still in shock. I laid the automatic down, taking the fabric of his pant leg in my hand. I carefully slit it up past the thigh, letting the fabric fall away from the leg. The bullet had gone through the bone, just below the kneecap. It was a messy wound—I was willing to bet it would hurt Harry plenty when he woke up.
I brushed off my hands again, and my knees. The place was deep in garbage-leavings from winos who had camped in there. That was good.
Just as I was going back to my packing crate, Harry began moaning; then he came to. His eyes snapped open and whipped back and forth around the warehouse. I knew all he could see were the dark corners; the shimmering, hanging cobwebs; the .45 and me.
“You’ve waited eighteen years for this, haven’t you, Greenberg?” His eyes were glazed, but a sort of sanity seemed to come over him for a moment.
“For what, Harry? For the rats to eat your intestines out? That’s very true; I have. It’ll be fun. I’m not a vengeful man, as you know, but Sheila just wouldn’t rest easily if I didn’t make some sort of gesture in her behalf—”
He winced and moaned as the pain from his leg hit him. Harry licked his lips, turned his head from side to side. I’ve got to admit—he suffered. Then I took his mind off the leg; I said, “Rats, Harry? What do you think happens when they smell all that rich Kroenfeld blood?”
Harry began straining his eyes into the gloom, trying to see the rats. “They’re back there,” I reassured him, pointing to a hollow scraping behind some crates. He drew back against the chair, struggling with the ropes that bound him.
“They’re tight, Harry: You and I tied them, and we were old buddies, weren’t we, Harry? Harry? Are you listening? Hear them scrabbling on the floor?”
I could tell he heard them. His face was a white balloon dotted with sick sweat. I knew he could hear them, because I could hear them. I felt for the plastic sack in my pocket.
The noise from the darkness was beginning to mount. Tight, tiny squeals came from all around us. Occasionally a gray shadow leaped from one patch of black to another. They’d smelled the blood.
“They want you, Harry! Remember the days when we’d come down here to the waterfront, for collections, and you’d stay in the car till we brought you the take? You didn’t like them, did you, Harry?”
I knew he was picturing the wharf rodents, fresh from the tramp steamers, tumbling over one another as they ripped apart a dead fish. Their clicking, vicious teeth leaving nothing of a bleeding gutter-mutt. The stench of them rooting in the grain bins and garbage piles.
He watched, fascinated, as I drew the plastic sack from my side pocket. I looked up, and caught him staring at me. “You know what this is, Harry?” His eyes were dull, lifeless. The leg wound was pumping shiny rivulets of blood into his sock and shoe.
I ripped the tape from the mouth of the bag, getting up. I drew out a wet, dripping piece of bread. It was brown and soggy. The smell overpowered me for a moment. I almost gagged. “Bread, Harry. Just bread. Dipped in chicken blood. My butcher was really surprised when I asked him to make some of this up. You should have seen his face!”
I moved around the warehouse, dropping the blood-soaked pieces of bread in dim corners, kicking the stuff into the darkness. One piece slid out of sight beneath a pile of broken timbers and an instant later I could hear them tearing at it.
“Lew! My God, Lew!” I turned around, where I stood in the darkness, looked at Harry in the center of the yellow circle. Suddenly he leaned forward, sweating like the pig he resembled.
“Lew, I’ve—I’ve saved some money from the old days! I—I can give you ten thousand if you’ll let me go! I’ll f-forget this whole thing, Lew! I’m an honest shopkeeper now! Please, Lew, forgive me!”
I’d never seen a man struggle so, sweat so, bite his lips so often. He had become a parody of himself. He did the same things over and over again. It was really something to watch.
I walked over to him. Looked down into the horror that stared from his eyes.
“Money, Harry? No, money doesn’t mean anything to me now. I have a great deal of it. A fine home, a wife, two children—everything I missed when I was a kid, Harry. But I’ve got something more—something you don’t have. I have a big hate, Harry. One that I’ve been nursing for eighteen years. One that I—oh! What’s that? There’s a r
at, over there, behind that stack of bricks, isn’t there, Harry?”
He was staring up at me, terror swimming freely in his eyes. So I went on. “A big hate, Harry. I overheard a conversation a long time ago; you were talking to one of the boys, telling him how Sheila had bled more than you thought one woman had any right to bleed. I heard you say she was still kicking when they dumped her. Right off the loading dock of this warehouse, wasn’t it, Harry? Eighteen years ago, wasn’t it, Harry?”
His eyes rolled up and for a second I thought he was going to have a seizure, robbing me of the climax. I brought my fist back and cracked him across the mouth. His head snapped around and his eyes slid back down. They were small, small, compared to the white that surrounded them.
“Getting weak, Harry?”
He was so pale, it was amazing he was still conscious after the shot. I’d counted on fear keeping him awake. This was the big moment I’d waited eighteen years to enjoy.
“Wait till they come after you, Harry. Just wait. Rats, Harry, rats! Think of all that warm, bristly fur; think of all the fleas and death they’re carrying. First they’ll go for that bleeding leg, Harry; they’ll get a whiff of all that gore and come running! Then the ripping starts! And after a while the pain will be so big you won’t have to worry about the bullet in your leg. That’ll be nice, won’t it, Harry?”
I was going to continue, but the scream I’d seen building as I’d begun—broke.
He opened his cavernous mouth wide, saliva drooling, and screamed. Oh, my God! So loud I thought the dust would fly off everything and roar around the room!
He began kicking out, his feet still tied together, and making little mewling noises at the same time. His feet would get just a bit away from the chair, before the ropes stopped their movement. He seemed to be kicking at the rats, though they hadn’t ventured into the light yet.
But they would. Meals are too far apart on the wharves for them to pass up as juicy a feast as Chuckling Harry Kroenfeld.
He screamed again. This one was a loud, bubbling thing that started deep in his stomach and rattled up.
“Oh, stop, stop, Harry,” I begged him. “You don’t want to frighten them off, do you?”
He didn’t stop. In fact, he screamed louder. Now I could see the fingers of his bound hands clutching at the back of the chair. He was straining his quaking fat toward me, leaning forward as far as the ropes would allow. His legs writhed, his knees heaved, his body trembled.
He was looking past me in grotesque agony. I turned to see what he was staring at.
Then I saw the first one.
It was a little monster, with protruding teeth I knew were as sharp as a guillotine blade. Beady, hateful red eyes glared out of the darkness. The tentative piping of its voice reached toward us.
“They’re coming, Harry,” I said, risking a closer look into the dark. They were back there—straining toward the fat in the chair. All I had to do was remove that source of fear—the light—and they’d be on him.
I started walking toward the seamed metal door. “They’ve smelled and eaten all that bloody bread, and they’re hot now. They’re stirred up, Harry. They’re hot and hungry and they smell a good meal.”
“Lew! Please, dear God in heaven, don’t let him do this to me, don’t let him, don’t—”
It was interesting to listen to the changes in tone as his cries climbed higher and higher. I took the key from my pocket. He was bouncing on the chair, scraping and clattering in a very small circle. I moved out of the circle of light that held him; moved from its edges toward the door.
They were coming now—coming in full force. I could hear their claws scratching the stone floor. There must have been a thousand of them. More than I’d counted on. Harry could hear them.
I tried not to listen to his ravings from behind me, as I started to unlock the door. I turned once to look at him—for the last time.
“Lew!” he answered. “Lew! I didn’t mean to do it! I didn’t mean to hurt Sheila—I didn’t mean it, Lew, so help me God!”
I tried to believe him. Right then I wanted to believe him very much. I tried to think of her, as I stood there, just one year younger than me, and so pretty, so grownup, all the fellows in the block beat each other up just to get a date with her. I tried to think how Harry had seen her one night when I’d brought her to a party he’d thrown. I tried to think how nice it would have been if Harry had married Sheila, even though Harry was a bit fat and a bit older than her. It would have been nice, even at that.
I tried to think of her blonde hair, and her tiny pixie figure, and her high, giggly laugh, and the way Harry had said her mouth was open when they’d dumped her with the tire chains around her slim ankles. How she’d taken in water at the mouth and nose, and sunk, eighteen years ago, before they’d even gotten a chance to hear her call out for her brother Lew.
I’d been hearing that call for eighteen years.
I tried to think of those things, but Harry’s screams kept interrupting.
“Lew, Lew, help me, Lew, don’t let them at me!”
“Sorry, Harry,” I mumbled over my shoulder as I unlocked the door, “I can’t deprive them of their pleasure. We all get our kicks one way or another. You had yours eighteen years ago—the rats get theirs today.”
I took a final look at his dead-fish face before I clicked the lights off. He was on the verge of madness. The darkness fell in and was complete.
“Goodbye, Harry.”
I stepped over the sill, slammed and locked the door. I leaned up against it, found myself panting. My back was cold, perspiring. It hadn’t been easy. I’d had to steel myself for years to do this. It hadn’t been easy; in the instant before I’d shut the door, I’d seen them racing across the dirty floor, making for him.
I could hear his screams from inside the warehouse. They tore at me. The boys would have a real clean-up job when they came two days later.
I turned away and walked up the pier to my car. I could have stayed and watched through a window, I suppose. But I didn’t really want to. That warehouse was filthy.
And I hate rats.
“I’LL BET YOU A DEATH”
Greasy Ernie’s Diner was loaded with Strikers.
It was a week after the rumble, and everybody was dissatisfied. Just as the Strikers had been about to tangle with the Jolly Stompers, the cops had broken the war up.
Now they slouched in the booths, looking out through the big, metal-rimmed windows at the slicing rain pounding black and heavy into the street.
Checker Tobin sat and toyed with the remnants of his hamburger.
“It’s a rotten night,” he murmured.
“Rotten. Real rotten, couldn’t be worse rotten.” He was a thickset boy with deep blue eyes and heavy brows that met above a lumpy, ridged nose. He fingered a salt shaker, tapping it lightly on the micarta table top.
The rain sleeted against the windows, and the Strikers chewed their lips in general annoyance at everything.
Vode sat beside his steady girl Cherry, opposite Checker. “Ohwoo, what a bitch of a night. Nothin’s on nowhere. No dance, no chickie-run, like nothin’—no-where!” He sighed, pulled one leg onto the bench, hugged his knee.
Checker slid back in the booth, a faint smile flickering across his lips. “Man! I wish we’d gotten to them Stompers!” He shook his head in remembrance.
Vode’s girl, Cherry, yawned. “Yeah, but we didn’t. The cops got in there too quick. Slobs.”
She was a striking girl, with a lush body for her age. Her hair was a thick, flame-colored mass, pulled back into a pony-tail. She watched Checker carefully, an unnamed emotion in her dark eyes. Once, she licked her lips.
Checker was leaning back in the booth. His eyes seemed to be shut, though Cherry couldn’t be sure he wasn’t watching her through narrowed slits. “If I was out there—if I was pushin’ with them Stompers—I’d know what to do…”
Checker let the switchblade slide down his arm. As Vode and Cherry, across
the table, watched, the shank dropped out of Checker’s black-leather sleeve, into his hand.
Checker raised the knife, fingers turned up and curled around the weapon. He showed the switch to Vode. “See it?” he said, voice low and whispery.
Cherry leaned forward, licking her full lips; Vode nodded, the cowlicks bobbing. “Now!” snapped Checker, pressing the button with his thumb. “Now see it?”
The knife snicked and the blade arced up. Checker had it in front of his face, the flat edge toward him. A shaft of reflection on the metal showed one blue eye and heavy brow above it. “See it?” he asked again.
Vode glanced around nervously, nodded once more. He moved uncomfortably in the booth. “You better put that away, man,” he advised. “A cop walks in here, you’re dead!” He nodded his head at the knife.
Checker moved his hand slowly, in front of his face, letting his reflection shiver on the blade.
“Cops. Crap on them! If they hadn’t come around last Thursday, we’d of ripped the hides off them Stompers!” His voice had risen, and the Strikers in other booths were leaning toward him, turning around to stare, something in his voice drawing their attention.
“I was looking for that creep calls himself Johnny Slice, the one who’s prez of the Stompers,” Checker admitted, jiggling the switchblade in his hand. “If I’d gotten close to that punk, I’d of cut him wide. Wide!” His face had hardened, the jaw muscles straining.
One of the Strikers, a boy named Julie, leaned over the back of his booth, poked Checker with one finger. “Yeah, Daddy-O, I can picture it now: you standin’ there like Superman, with all them cops runnin’ over you, and you takin’ cuts at schnookle Johnny Slice. I can picture it right now!”
He started to laugh, slid back down into the next booth, and clutched his stomach.
Checker roared something unintelligible, startling the customers at the counter, and shoved out of his booth. In a moment he was in the next booth, his hand wrapped in the fabric of Julie’s shirt, the shank at the boy’s throat.
“You callin’ me liar, Julie?”