Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 138, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 821 & 822, September/October 2011

Waiting for Rusty by William Cole

As part of our 70th-anniversary celebration, we offer, tins month, a reprint from the original Black Mask magazine, with which EQMM has decades-old ties. “Waiting for Rusty” is one of the shortest stories ever published in Black Mask, but it remains, according to conservator Keith Alan Deutsch, the one that has generated the most reader letters. It was William Cole’s only Black Mask story, and was bought by Fanny Ellsworth, who took over editorship of the magazine from Joseph Shaw in 1936. Ellsworth favored emotional tales over hard-boiled narration and under her, writers such as Cornell Woolrich emerged at Black Mask.

One of these days I’m going to tell the sheriff. One of these days he’s going to blow his mouth off once too often and I’m going to take him out there and show him. I may get on the wrong side of him, but it’ll be worth it...

I’m just closing up my little roadside place for the night when they come in. Dotty and three guys. One of the men has a sawed-off shotgun and he stands by the window. Dotty and the others come up to the bar.

“Evenin’, Professor,” Dotty says, looking around. “You here alone?”

“Yeah,” I says, when I’m able to talk. “Yeah, but—”

“Good,” Dotty says. “Lock that back door and then start pourin’ rye.”

She’s wearing a blue slicker turned up at the neck and no hat. Her light hair is a little fluffed from the wind. She looks about the same as I remember she did when she went to the high school at Milbrook, only now you can’t look long at her eyes.

“Listen, miss,” I says, “listen, you don’t want to stay here. They’re surrounding the whole county. I just got it over the radio.”

“He’s right,” the man at the window says. “We gotta keep movin’, Dot. We gotta keep movin’ — and fast, or we’ll wake up in the morgue.”

“Get outside,” Dotty tells him, “and keep your eyes open or you’ll wake up there anyway.”

She goes over and turns on the radio. The other two men keep walking around. They’re all smoking cigarettes, one right after the other.

I know enough to do what I’m told.

There’s nothing on the radio but some dance music. The two men look at each other; then the shorter one goes over to Dotty.

“I know how you feel, Dot,” he says. “But they’re right on our tail. We gotta—”

“I told you boys once,” Dot says, “and I’m not tellin’ you again. We wait here for Rusty.”

“But supposin’ he don’t come?” the man says. He has a way of rubbing his wrist. “Supposin’... supposin’ he can’t make it? Supposin’—”

“Supposin’ you dry up,” Dotty says. “Rusty said he’ll be here and when Rusty says something...”

The music breaks off and she whirls to listen to the press-radio flash. It’s about the same as the last. The police have thrown a dragnet around the entire northern part of the state and are confident of capturing Rusty Nelson and his mob at any hour. Dotty don’t think much of this, but when she is called Rusty’s girl and Gun Moll No. 1, she smiles and takes a bow.

“After the bank holdup yesterday,” the announcer says, “Rusty and Dotty split up, one car going north, the other northwest. The state trooper who tried to stop Dotty at Preston this afternoon died on the way to the hospital.”

“Too bad,” Dotty says. “He had the nicest blue eyes.”

A car goes by on the highway outside and they all stand still for a second. Then the music comes back loud and the men jump to turn it down low. The taller one is swearing under his breath.

“Canada ain’t big enough,” he says sarcastic-like. “We gotta meet here.”

Dotty don’t say anything.

In no time at all, they finish the bottle of rye. I open another.

“Maybe he couldn’t get through,” the shorter man says. “Maybe he tried to but couldn’t.”

There’s another radio flash. The cops have traced Rusty to Gatesville.

This makes Dotty feel a lot better. She laughs. “He’s near Gatesville,” she says, “like we’re near Siberia.”

She gets feeling pretty good, thinking of Rusty. She don’t mind the music now, the way the men do. She asks me if it comes from the Pavilion and I tell her yes.

“I was there once,” she says. “I went there with Rusty. They were havin’ a dance and he took me.” The men aren’t interested and she tells it to me. “I had to wear an old dress because that’s all I had, but Rusty, he sees me and says, ‘Gee, kid, where’d you get the new dress?’ and we hop in his boiler and roll down there.”

She has stopped walking around now and her eyes are all different.

“They have the whole place fixed up... those colored lights on a string and the tables under the trees and two bands on the platform. As soon as one stops, the other one starts. And there’s a guy goes around in a white coat with those little sandwiches and you can take all you want.”

There’s the scream of a siren in the distance. The men take out guns.

“The girls all wear flowers,” Dotty says. “And I don’t have none. But Rusty says, ‘You just wait here,’ and soon he’s back with a big bunch of flowers, all colors and kinds. Only I can’t wear half of them, there’s too many. And then we dance and drink punch until the cops come. And then we have to lam out of there; they say Rusty bust in the glass in the town florist shop.”

The siren is much louder now. The man with the shotgun runs in.

“A patrol car just passed!” he says. “Come on, let’s blow!”

Dotty don’t seem to hear. “Get back out there,” she tells him.

The man’s face goes even whiter. He looks at Dotty and then at the others. “I say we move,” he says. “Rusty or no Rusty. We’ll be knocked off here sure.”

The other men try to stop him but can’t.

“And we don’t even know that he’ll show. He might’ve turned south, or kept west. All the time we’re waitin’ here he might even be—”

Dotty has put her back to the bar. She waves a gun at the man.

“Get away from that door,” she says. She leans back on her elbows. “Drop that rattle and get over there. We don’t want to have to step over you.”

It takes the man a minute to get it. Then his knees begin to give. He opens his mouth a few times but nothing comes out.

Then there’s that static on the radio and the announcer telling how Rusty was nabbed down in Talbot. Dotty stands there and listens, resting back on the bar.

“Not a single shot was fired,” the announcer says. “The gangster was completely surprised by the raid. Alone in the hideout with Nelson was a pretty, dark-haired, unidentified girl.”

Then there’s that static and the music again.

Nobody looks at Dotty for a while. Then the man with the shotgun bolts for the door. No sooner he’s opened it, he shuts it again. “There’s a guy comin’ up the road,” he says. “He’s got on a badge.”

For what seems a long time, Dotty don’t move. Then she reaches out and snaps off the radio. “Let him come,” she says. “You guys get out in the car.”

The men don’t argue. They go out the back.

Dotty walks slowly to the door. When she speaks, her voice isn’t flat anymore. “You know,” she tells me, “it was funny about those flowers. They just wouldn’t stay put. Every minute I’d fix them and the next minute they’d slip. One of the girls said the pin was too big.”

She steps out on the porch, and I drop flat in back of the bar.

“Hello, Copper,” I hear her say. The rest is all noise...

One of these days I’m going to show the sheriff. One of these days he’s going to tell once too often how he got Dotty and I’m going to take him out on the porch and show him...

Sure, she might have missed him, even Dotty might have missed him twice in a row. But she would never have put those two slugs in the ceiling. Not Dotty. Not unless she had reason to. Not unless she wanted to die.