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

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.”

“Oh, I suppose,” Hannigan said. “But hell, Mike, haven’t you ever wished for something big to break? Something really big? Something to put Summerville on the map, get our names in the papers from coast to coast?”

“Like what?”

“Oh I don’t know,” Hannigan said. “Maybe a couple of escaped murderers holed up over at the Summerville Hotel, and we take ’em after a gun battle. Or the bank getting robbed. Something like that.”

“I guess I wouldn’t mind capturing some escaped murderers or some bank robbers,” Cameron said wryly, “but you can leave out the gun battle, thank you.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Sure, I know.” Cameron sighed softly. “But things like that aren’t going to happen. Nothing of national interest, or even state-wide interest, has happened in Summerville since the old man founded it in 1884. I don’t imagine things are going to change for us.”

“Well, I still wouldn’t mind being famous.”

“Neither would I,” Cameron said. “But we might as well face it, Jack. We’re just doomed to a life of anonymity, and that’s that.”

Both men were silent for a time, pondering. Crazy Henry said suddenly, “I know a way.”

They looked at him. He was sitting in his chair, smiling at them, his wide blue eyes shining. He had been listening with rapt attention to their conversation. He was a tall, lanky man with a great moss-like tangle of brown hair and long, powerfully-muscled arms. He wore a blue denim shirt and a pair of faded, worn dungarees.

It was his job to sweep up every now and then, and do general odd-job chores around the jail. He wasn’t officially on the city payroll, but Cameron gave him ten dollars a week for food and essentials. He sleep on a cot in the woodshed out back.

“I know a way,” he said again, his eyes flicking back and forth between Cameron and Hannigan.

“Well, that’s fine, Henry,” Cameron said gently.

“It’s a real good way, too,” Crazy Henry said.

“Sure it is.”

“You been nice to me, Mike. Real nice. I want to do something for you and Jack. Something for Summerville, too.”

“All right, Henry,” Cameron said. “Tell you what you can do. You can watch things here while Jack and me go over to Elsie’s for some coffee. You run and fetch us if the phone rings.”

“Okay, Mike.”

“I’ll bring you back some pie, how’s that?”

“Blueberry?”

“Sure.”

“That’s my favorite.”

“Mine, too.”

Crazy Henry grinned and nodded. Cameron and Hannigan got on their feet and put their hats on. “Another hour, and Bert comes in to relieve, thank God,” Cameron said, and they went out and shut the door behind them.

Crazy Henry stared at the door for a long moment. It’s not a bad thing, he thought, because it’ll be real good for Mike and Jack and Summerville. The television and the comic books say it’s a bad thing no matter what, but they’re wrong. It’ll put Summerville on the map, and that’s real good. It’ll make Mike and Jack famous, and that’s real good. Okay.

He nodded his head, his eyes shining brightly. He got to his feet and went out to the rear of the jail, to where the shed was located. He entered, and moments later came out again with the huge, double-edged woodsman’s axe he used sometimes to chop small logs into cordwood. He went back into the jail.

The ring of keys was on Cameron’s desk, where he’d put them, and Crazy Henry picked it up. He went to the block door and opened it.

“I know a way,” he said, with a secret smile.

And with the keys in his left hand and the big sharp woodsman’s axe in his right, Crazy Henry started down the corridor to the cell with the eleven drunks...