Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Vol. 24, No. 4. Whole No. 131, October 1954

Payment in Full by Dion Henderson

It is only fair to warn you that Dion Henderson’s “Payment in Full” is an uncommon story indeed, written in an unusual style. But we earnestly suggest that you stick with it, and once the author’s individualistic style gets under your skin, you will feel its great power and impact. This is a tough ’tec about a tough guy, and in the genuinely realistic tradition of tough stories; indeed, it may be one of the toughest ’tecs about a tough character you have ever read — and without the slightest help from the kind of sex, sadism, or sensationalism that so many contemporary hardboiled tales suffer from. This is a story of violence, yes — but not violence for the sake of shock alone; the violence stems from credible circumstances and characters. Murder, you will discover, can be a matter of mathematics.

The author is a mysterious personage. Three times we tried to get in touch with him, and were unable to elicit a single response. We know nothing whatever of the man who calls himself Dion Henderson. Obviously, he prefers to remain in total obscurity, and surely that is his privilege. But after reading “Payment in Full,” we’d bet he has an interesting back: ground or interesting ideas...

While they were waiting for “the man called Numbers” to be brought up from Security, the reporter tried to find out more about him from the warden. It did not work out very well, mostly because of the two police officers from the city who were there with them. The warden was especially formal when police officers were present. His whole career was built on trouble, and since the law was at the bottom of it all he sometimes felt about the law the way a professional soldier feels about war.

Later, when the officers were in the administration office, the reporter tried again to learn something about the man called Numbers. “What do you expect of a man,” he asked the warden, “who has killed a cop and served seven years for it?”

The warden looked wry and said, “That is a pretty good question, but I have a better one: what do you expect of a man who did not kill a cop but has served seven years anyway?”

The reporter suddenly became very tense, but they were in the kitchen of the prison and before he could ask for the answer to such an important question, the chief cook came toward them wiping his hands on his apron. “Have a cup of coffee, Warden?” he asked, and a thick white mug of steaming coffee materialized out of nowhere. Once the chef had been an amateur cook and a professional magician; now his activities were reversed, but he still liked to do tricks for the warden. As a result, the reporter lost his biggest opportunity to find out something important about the man called Numbers, coming just close enough to understand that there was something important. The reporter was so vexed by the cook-magician that he did not realize until much later that the magician part was important too. As it was, a messenger reached them before the warden finished his coffee and they left the kitchen.

On the way down the corridor the warden said, “You mustn’t worry; maybe I don’t know the answer.”

A guard brought the man called Numbers into the visitors’ reception room. The reporter had not seen him for seven years. He did not look tough — at least, not until he looked at the police officers and recognized the one who was a sergeant. His face did not change much, but enough to see that he was tough all right.

The sergeant said, “Hello, cop-killer.”

The warden did not like that, but soon they would be “outside” where he couldn’t do anything about it, so he did not make an issue of it. He said to the man called Numbers, “I can’t help you any more once you’re through the gate.”

“You can’t help me anyway,” Numbers said. “It’s a matter of mathematics.”

The warden started to say something, then hesitated, and in the pause the sergeant said harshly, “All right, let’s go.” Something was pushing the sergeant hard and it showed in his harshness: his partner had been killed in a gunfight — the same gunfight that put the man called Numbers in prison for seven years. No cop would ever forgive Numbers: seven years were not enough to pay for a dead cop. They had only got Numbers for second degree and when he had become eligible for parole the week before, they had promptly filed a burglary detainer on him. Cops could forget the little things — the easy ones like burglary that you can hang on any big loser; but they would never forget the man called Numbers, because there is no degree of being a dead cop.

The warden did not go out with them. He wanted no more of this. A guard on the other side of the inner gate turned a big old-fashioned key, and they went through, stopped, and waited until he had locked the gate again and put the key away; then the guard took another key and opened the outer gate. They did not let you forget it was a prison.

They were now out of the administration building and going down the walk between the lawns that were very beautiful, both as lawns and as fields of fire for the riflemen in the towers on the Wall. At the main gate they waited again while the guard inside opened the first door, closed it, and locked it behind them. After that he opened the last door and the detective who drove for the sergeant went out to get the car. The guard locked the gate behind him.

All this while the reporter was trying to think of an answer to the question about the man called Numbers. A few answers occurred to him and he thought perhaps he was close to something when suddenly the sergeant took the manacles out of his pocket.

“Stick ’em out, cop-killer.”

Numbers said evenly, “You better lock them behind me. There’ll be only two of you with me.”

He said that, and the next instant there was a welt rising on his face from the handcuffs, and rising with the welt was the wild naked look you do not often see unless you watch men wanting to kill other men.

Recollection of his job moved up closer in the reporter’s mind and he said, “Now look, I have to write a story about this trip.”

“You don’t want to do that,” the sergeant said.

“The hell you say.” The reporter did not have to remind the sergeant that cops do not tell reporters what to write about.

“Every week—” and the sergeant’s voice was quite different now, “— every week I stop around and see Joe’s widow and one of the kids got polio and she was crying and what she said to me was ‘Why did Joe ever want to be a cop?’ ” Then after a moment the sergeant said, “She never asked me nothing like that before, not the whole seven years.”

He took Numbers’s right hand, put the cuff on it, and closed the other on his own left wrist. The reporter was filled with unexpected alarm; he did not know why, he could not even imagine why. He took a step forward but felt foolish about it, and anyway the squad car was pulling up in front. The other officer got out and the sergeant led the way, and all the while the reporter had the frantic feeling that he was about to remember everything he needed to answer the warden’s question and that for some reason it would be too late.

They were beside the car, a police special, a two-door with the engine running and the door at the curb open. The driver stood behind Numbers and the sergeant started climbing into the car ahead of him, awkwardly because of the handcuffs. It all happened like slow motion, but so shockingly fast and smooth that the reporter could not budge; yet his mind phrased this orderly sentence: This man called Numbers is left-handed, and he worked in the kitchen with a magician, and somehow these things have a bearing on the answer to the question of what to expect from the ex-con.

The cop behind Numbers had reached past him to hold the seat back and Numbers had reached forward under the cop’s coat with his left hand and slipped the gun out of the harness — and then shot the cop while the snub barrel was still pushed up against his armpit. It made hardly any noise, but when the cop’s body fell out of the car his coat was burning a little. The sergeant was hunched over, partly turned aside, with one arm stuck out beside him; his mouth came open but nothing came out because Numbers shot him once in the body and an instant later, as though there was something there he did not want to see any more, he shot the sergeant in the face. The reporter still stood there when the hand with the revolver came around and the front end of it, a .357, was as big as all the world.

“Drive,” Numbers said. “Now.”

The sound of his voice was what started time moving again. The reporter slid under the wheel and as the car started he saw that not even the guard behind the gate six feet away had moved. They had made it down the block and had turned away from the prison onto another street before a tower guard got into action. Numbers found the key to the manacles in the sergeant’s pocket and freed his wrist. After that he leaned forward holding the .357 in the split between the seats. The reporter thought that perhaps later he would be very angry with himself, but right now he did not feel any rage. He did not feel anything but the size of the revolver and the feel that was the feel of death behind him.

“You drive okay,” the man called Numbers said. “You ain’t got much of a percentage to work on but you’re doing okay. That is,” he said, “unless somebody crosses you up. Figures will always come out even — that’s the nice thing about figures — except when people mess them up. People are always messing them up on the Outside,” he added broodingly; “you got to help me keep track, otherwise they won’t come out even. Like now—” There was something he had to say and now he said it, “For seven years they owed me a cop. I paid for one cop before I got him, but now I got two of them.” He laughed a little and said, “Bargain day — two for the price of one.”

The reporter was getting ready to say something but meanwhile Numbers said, “They ought to add everything up before they frame a guy for killing a cop. A guy who could figure out anything at all to live for wouldn’t ever kill a cop.” Numbers paused, then he said, “Once you get past that, it’s not so hard.”

So the reporter did not say anything. He simply drove the car. It was a good car and could stand a lot of driving. There was no trouble for quite a while.

“Turn on the radio,” Numbers said. “Let’s see if we can get some music.” He had the tight deadly excitement in him that belongs to a man who has just come unscathed through combat for the first time, after all the months of waiting and preparation when you cannot quite believe how easily a man can die, nor how stubbornly.

The music on the radio was, of course, the voice of the metropolitan police dispatcher. Distance broke up the reception, so they could not hear what he was saying.

At the first town, nothing much happened except some girls in shorts outside the drug store on Main Street turned to look at the car, and a local policeman looked at it, looked away, and then as it passed, leaped out into the street and blew his whistle. No one could tell what he expected to happen after he blew it. It was just one of the things you do when something happens that is not supposed to happen, like a runaway killer going through your town when the girls are standing outside the drug store and it is the day before the firemen’s picnic maybe.

The only difference between that town and the next one was that in the next the police were waiting. The reporter turned into Main Street and up ahead were a couple of cars in the middle of the road and somewhere the telltale wink of a spotlight.

Numbers rubbed his free hand over his short haircut.

“Let’s tell ’em we’re coming.”

The reporter thought how you could not only get very bitter but very bored in seven years in prison.

“Let’s tell ’em loud,” and Numbers pushed up the special’s red spotlight, switched on the siren, and said, “Bet you a fin they get out of the way.”

They did.

It did not seem reasonable but it was another of the things you do because the habits of routine have their own kind of handcuffs on you when the routine is broken. The traffic officers heard the siren and saw the light, and they backed their cars out of the way in a real hurry, so the special could get through; and it went through all right. The reporter got a glimpse of their faces: astounded, foolish — whatever they felt as soon as they had a chance to realize what their reflexes had done.

“Cops,” Numbers said. “You always know what a cop is going to do. It’s a regular formula.”

“Then you know what they are going to do now,” the reporter said. “They are going to chase hell out of us.”

“That’s okay,” Numbers said. “I been alone in a cell for seven years, I don’t mind a little company, even cops. Just so they don’t get too close.” He leaned forward and the big ugly .357 jutted up a little. “And I got confidence in you that they won’t get too close, because then I’d have to screw up my bookkeeping. There ain’t any place in my books for a dead reporter.”

“I wouldn’t want you to upset your bookkeeping,” the reporter said grimly.

At the first crossroad they turned off the highway. Most of the cars after them now were traffic patrol cars built to catch almost anything on a straightaway. But on a winding back road the city special, with its souped-up acceleration, had a distinct advantage. The reporter tried to keep his mind on his driving because he had found it impossible to stop thinking altogether, and if he did not concentrate on the driving he would think about other things. So he thought about the road and was grateful when a squirrel started to cross ahead of them, decided not to, was undecided, and before it made up its mind it did not matter; either they hit it or they didn’t, he couldn’t tell. They passed a farm where a boy in overalls was driving a dozen cows up the lane because it was late afternoon now and time for milking. Just after they passed, the boy opened a gate and drove the cows onto the road because the barn was on the other side; and the man called Numbers laughed.

“There’s one for our side,” he said happily. “When those cops come over the hill and get mixed up with those cows, there’ll be steak scattered for miles around.”

The boy in overalls had waved and the reporter felt bad because he could not do anything about what was going to happen to the boy and his cows. Thinking about that was no good, so he thought about steak, which Numbers had just mentioned. The reporter was not hungry and when he forced himself to think about steak, he obstinately thought about the kind of steak he didn’t like; that reminded him of the way his wife fixed it and that brought him squarely to thinking about home and he didn’t want that, he didn’t want any of that. He did not even want to begin it, because that would lead to the men who would not go home any more; and the car already was thick with the sweetish smell of gunpowder and death that meant one man would not go home to a wife whom the reporter had never seen and to a boy whose picture the reporter had been shown at various stages over the years. Mostly he had been shown pictures of the sergeant’s boy during the time he played football in high school. After that they tapered off because the boy wanted to be a doctor and you don’t put anyone through medical school on a sergeant’s pay. The reporter did not know the other cop, but anyway he did not want to speculate about the home he would not be going back to either, nor his wife, nor his kid who might want to be a football player or a doctor or, worse yet, a cop. It was hard to see why anybody would want to be a cop, and why anybody would want to be a good cop was beyond comprehension. There was something preposterous about the whole thing, but just then the back road they were on came to a dead end on another broad straight highway.

The reporter let the special run and it went quickly to 85 miles an hour, but no faster because it was a car for city traffic. A long powerful state-police car began to crawl up bigger and bigger in the rear-view mirror, and finally pulled up alongside. It was there only an instant because the officer in it was alone, on the wrong side to shoot, and before he could pull far enough ahead to push them off the road, Numbers pushed his gun through the window and the trooper dropped back instantly, to follow them instead, almost bumper to bumper, where Numbers could not get a clear shot at him.

They were still a mile or so ahead of the other police cars when they went around one of the sweeping banked express-highway curves and a yellow sign flickered up on the right side, warning of a side road.

“There’s a turn,” Numbers said.

“We’re going too fast,” said the reporter.

“So turn anyway,” Numbers shouted. The side road was suddenly there, and a billboard that said Three Miles to Centerville. “I don’t feel like leading no parade into Centerville.”

Numbers lunged forward at the wheel and they turned in a shrieking rubber-burning gravel-spraying curve that did not quite come out at the same angle as the side road. They went through a guard rail in an explosion of splinters, across a ditch, and then through a fence and into standing corn where the ground was soft and clung to the tires so that it was like a carrier landing, slowing up too soon but not killing anyone.

The reporter put his head down on the wheel feeling very cold and stiff, and meanwhile the state-police car that had not tried to follow them on the turn made a tight precarious swing on the highway and came into the side road. They were behind the billboard and almost hidden in the corn, and the officer came running from his car, trying to get the sling of a machine gun over his head. When he got to the corn, a cock pheasant began cackling in alarm.

Numbers was out of the car and the officer was running awkwardly down the corn row toward them when Numbers suddenly squeezed off a shot with the .357. He missed and the officer stopped short, an expression on his face as though he had forgotten what he was hunting, and while he fumbled desperately for the bolt on the machine gun, Numbers fired again. This time he did not miss. At 30 feet the bullet struck the trooper in the chest as though he had been slugged with a maul, with everything in him breaking and while not exactly flying into pieces, still clearly not being fastened together any more.

The reporter got out of the car with a love for far cornfields in his face, but Numbers jabbed the big ugly revolver at him and they were running for the long powerful state-police car up on the side road. Numbers stopped only for a moment, then came on with the little black-leather ammunition case from the trooper’s belt.

Just as they pulled away in the new car, the first of the remaining pursuers roared past on the highway, not seeing the smashed fence in time. Numbers was putting the little semicircular clips of revolver cartridges in his pocket.

“My other cop friend didn’t have any spares,” he said, and when the reporter didn’t comment he added, “my cop friend in the back seat, I mean, the dead one. All my cop friends are dead cops.”

This was sheer bravado. The reporter did not turn his head but something in his expression must have been visible to Numbers who said in an entirely different tone, “You’re supposed to be keeping track, you know.”

“Yeah.” The reporter did not recognize his own voice, but he did not like the sound of it. “Yeah. It looks as though you’re two ahead.”

“That’s the hell of it,” said Numbers. “Everything would come out even if people wouldn’t screw it up. The figures alone are nice and clean. Say,” he said, “maybe we ain’t got everything figured in. Maybe they owed me one for the old lady, too. That’s one more.”

“Old lady,” the reporter said. “Who?”

“You ought to read your own newspaper,” Numbers said. “Last week, back there just ahead of the want ads. Sixth from the top, my missus, in Other Deaths.”

“Maybe it was the sergeant’s fault.” The reporter heard emotion in his own voice for the first time.

“Cut it out,” said Numbers. “You’re a reporter, you ain’t people. The cops, when they’re working at it, they ain’t people either, any more than I am when I’m working at being a killer. Only difference, a killer don’t have no eight hour day so he can quit being a killer after the whistle blows and go home and take off the shoes. Once he’s got the job as a killer he ain’t ever people any more.”

They took another side road to the left, this one narrower and more rutted and rocky, and Numbers said, “My missus got sick in the railroad station. It was raining and she waited all night. Nobody’s fault, when you get right down to it. Anyway,” he said, “she was married to some other guy by then.”

After a while the reporter figured something out for himself.

“That was the day you were supposed to get out?”

“Yeah,” said Numbers. “I guess nobody remembered to tell her a cop-killer never gets out.” Then after a moment he said, “It must have been tough on the new guy she married. She was a good kid. But it wasn’t as tough as it would’ve been if he knew why she was there.”

There was a pause and finally Numbers asked again, “Do you think maybe they owed me a cop for her?”

The reporter said, “If you had a slide rule, maybe you could figure it out.”

Numbers did not seem to hear; he was lost in some thought of his own.

Outside, the afternoon sunlight was gone from the slopes, and in the hollows it was getting dark. The radio in this car was adjusted so they could hear the state police, and about the time the first red light showed up through the trail of dust behind them, the voice on the radio announced coldly to all cars that units were approaching the fugitive from both ends of the road.

Numbers pointed up ahead with the revolver barrel.

“There’s a nice stone farmhouse up on that hill,” he said, “and there ain’t many trees in the way. Maybe we ought to see do they take in tourists.”

The reporter swerved into the long climbing lane, hoping no one would be at home — please, there should not be anyone! — because from here on it was going to be rough.

“Nobody home,” Numbers called out.

They got out of the car beside the old stone house as the first of the police cars pulled up at the bottom of the lane. There was no idle shooting now. The police were too far away for the short gun and they were no longer in any hurry. In a little while the first cars came in from the other end of the road.

“You got to give them credit,” Numbers said. “They really get things organized, once they get to it.”

Down the hill a man with a rifle sprawled in plain view and Numbers motioned to the reporter and dodged into the house. There was nothing much to do now but watch and wait.

They were throwing a cordon around the hill. It was hard to cover all of it because of the size and there were many open places. There was a cornfield on one side and a woods that marched up the hill from the back. Beyond the woods was the highway and you could hear traffic once in a while because no one had remembered to block it off yet — or no one had thought it necessary.

“It’ll be real dark in a few minutes,” said Numbers. “They haven’t got enough lights set up yet. All I have to do is get to the woods and then down to the road and I can go for another ride.”

“There may be a few cops in the way, even in the dark.”

Numbers was wiping the .357.

“I can talk to them, six at a time.”

“That sure makes everything come out even.” The reporter realized that he was talking wildly. “BangbangbangbangbangBANG! Mathematics with a .357, Q.E.D.”

Numbers didn’t shoot the reporter. He didn’t even seem angry.

“It don’t matter now.” He was laying out the cartridges again, the ones he had taken from the dead trooper. “There ain’t any way you can make it come out even once people mess it up.”

“I don’t know.” The reporter was listening in amazement to himself. “You got three. You claim they owed you one beforehand and one for your wife.”

“I wasn’t married to her,” Numbers said. “Not really. She married this other guy. I felt bad for a while. I felt real bad. When she died I didn’t really feel bad. A cop-killer don’t really feel nothing.”

The reporter said, “I thought you hadn’t killed a cop then.”

“I have now,” Numbers said. “I’ve killed three of them. That’s the thing; they forget cop-killers were people to begin with and some of it won’t brush off. They get so busy taking things away from you they forget that if they don’t leave you something, you haven’t got anything to give a damn about.”

Numbers said, “You really got to look out for a guy who don’t give a damn for anything.”

After he said that, he arranged the cartridges carefully and counted them. Down the hill in the dusk, a police captain with a bull horn blared, talking to the machine gunners. A searchlight came on, turned against the front of the house.

Numbers was looking at the cartridges with a wondering, almost admiring expression.

“That ought to show something,” he said presently. “That ought to show how you got to stand by the figures. Look at this, now, I just forgot about twenty-three lousy thousandths of an inch.”

“What?” the reporter said. “What?”

“Twenty-three thousandths,” Numbers said, his voice liking the statistics of ordnance. “That is mainly the difference by how much .38 special cartridges are too big for a .357 cylinder.

“There were six cartridges in the gun I got from the sergeant,” he said. “There’s one left. And all I got from the other cop are .38s.”

He laughed. The reporter didn’t feel like laughing. Down the hill the captain with the bull horn wanted to know if Numbers was going to surrender.

“Now I got to use this one,” Numbers said. “I got to answer that cop.” He went to the window and fired his last shot defiantly down the hill. Half a dozen guns responded but they didn’t come close.

Numbers came away from the window, still laughing.

“If you hadn’t made that crack,” Numbers said, “I’d of gone and messed up the figures myself.”

The reporter did not remember saying anything.

Numbers said, “These other guys didn’t mess them up after all. It’s just right, like I said.”

“What is?” the reporter asked.

“The whole account: I paid them seven years for one cop, and they owed me one for the old lady, and then I was one ahead of them.”

He laughed again and said, “So now it’s all gonna come out even.”

Then the man called Numbers opened the door and the blinding white of the searchlight poured in and he stepped out into it, the empty gun still in his hand, and him still laughing, and the reporter stayed on the floor holding on tightly to nothing at all — until the shooting stopped.