Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories

Although gifted and imaginative enough to be able to turn his typewriter to a variety of popular-fiction genres, Michael Kerr (Robert Hoskins) seems never to have fully utilized this talent. His identifiable output is not extensive. As Kerr, he wrote a good deal of science fiction during the mid-1970s, appearing in many of the leading magazines as well as writing a paperback original, The Gemini Run (1979). Under his real name, he edited the anthology series Infinity (1970–1973), whose five volumes regularly featured new material from the best science-fiction writers, including Robert Silverberg, Arthur C. Clarke, and Poul Anderson.

Kerr began his novel-writing career by penning modern Gothics. A Place on Dark Island (1971) was the first of seven titles to appear under the pseudonym Grace Corren. As Susan Jennifer, he wrote two Gothics, the first of which, The House of Counted Hatreds (1973), was reissued in 1980 under the Corren name. During the 1980s, he turned to the action-adventure field, contributing such titles as Argentine Deadline (1982) and The Fury Bombs (1983) to the Mack Bolan spinoff series, Phoenix Force, under the house name Gar Wilson. According to certain reference books, Kerr appears to have ceased writing altogether in the mid-1980s.

Under his real name, Kerr wrote only a handful of mystery shorts, all more or less hard-boiled in concept and execution. “The Saturday Night Deaths,” a fine, moody shocker, appeared in the July 1976 issue of Mystery Monthly; a second story, “Candy Man,” was published in the same issue as by Robert Hoskins.

J. A.

The Saturday Night Deaths (1976)

Dolan was the first: he died at 5:48 P.M.

Technically it wasn’t yet Saturday night, for just like the traffic council, counting usually starts at 6 P.M. And it was early for a family-triangle blowup. But Dolan was known as a morning drinker and an any-time skirt chaser, and when the police finally picked through the blood painted throughout all three rooms of the floosie’s apartment, it was fairly obvious that Mrs. Dolan had reached the point where she could take no more. They figured she took care of her husband first, ripping him open from groin to breastbone, then used the blonde for a pincushion. It’s amazing how much strength an aging woman can have: the Medical Examiner counted over one hundred stab wounds on the girl. But it looked as if Mrs. Dolan was neatest with herself — one slash on each wrist, letting her life run out and soak the cushions of the sex-stained sofa.

7:07 P.M.: Lettoli was next to die.

They found him in the alley behind one of his own cheap hotels, ordinarily a place Lettoli avoided like the plague. They found him with his wallet ripped open and the credit card section missing. The gun was a .32 and most probably a Special — good enough to do the job.

According to Mrs. Lettoli the thief didn’t get much besides the credit cards, for her husband did not believe in carrying cash — twenty bucks at the most, maybe only four or five, in case he decided to pick up a newspaper or if he ran out of cigars. Of course, in a way it was his own fault, wearing that three-hundred-dollar suit in an area where cops went only in pairs. Still, nobody — not his wife, his lawyer, even his boys — could figure out what brought him to that alley on that particular night. He didn’t make his own collections. Of the hotel staff, the only one to see him that Saturday was the janitor, who came out into the alley to dump garbage into the already overflowing cans, and thus discovered the body.

It wasn’t a bad night for murder in one sense — at least as far as the cops were concerned. The weather was cooperative, almost warm, the temperature just breaking through the fifty mark and the smell of spring in the air. There was no drowning rain to blur the vision of men bending over the chalked outline of Lettoli’s body, no water running in the streets or brown slush to slop over the side of one’s shoes. Of course, they still had to breathe in the stink of violent death, but that goes with the job.

7:55 P.M.: Huegens was number three, only forty-eight minutes after Lettoli.

His wife was screaming hysterically while the cop rode with her in the ambulance to the hospital. Although the intern tried to sedate her against the pain of the broken arm and ribs, the officer did manage to gather that some maniac had forced them off the road after first riding their tail so closely that Huegens had sped up in fear of being rammed. He was pushing eighty on the old parkway with its treacherous curves when the guy behind cut out on the worst curve on the whole damn road — cut too close. The red paint of the other car was deep in the scratch that went from Huegens’ rear fender halfway across his door. It was at that point that Huegens lost control of the Cadillac: the car went through the low stone fence and knocked over a dozen hundred-year-old gravestones before it came to a stop fifty feet inside the cemetery.

Death by violence is not something unknown in a city the size of this one — the average annual rate of murders since 1960 comes out to just over seventeen. That’s enough to justify maintaining a homicide division at detective central, although in slack periods some of the four men assigned there go on loan to divisions cut short by the economy-minded, tight-fisted city council.

August can be a bad month most years, particularly during a summer of drought. The city sizzles then, for days and sometimes for weeks under the relentless sun, the heat captured by the concrete streets and concrete buildings. Christmas can be bad for murder too, as can any other holiday season — when the pressures to achieve can seem the heaviest, and those who are failing — at least in their own eyes — can easily break. But the average rate for murder means that over the course of a year there will be no more than one death by violence every three weeks.

And so three times in one evening was definitely unusual. Not yet a record, but certainly bringing this day to the top of the list of deadly days.

9:50 P.M.: Pelk was number four. He tied the record.

He got it coming back from the candy store two blocks from his house with the early edition of the Sunday paper. He always took the dog out for a walk at that time of the evening, and his habits were well known in the neighborhood and among his friends and business acquaintances. All of the cops agreed that this death was deliberate. Why else would a car coming from no farther than the stop sign at the end of the block not have time to slow down, not be able to swerve to avoid him? But there had been no unusual traffic noises noted by the neighbors, and certainly no squeal of brakes just before the impact.

The retired captain showed up at the investigation of what was still officially being called the hit-and-run death of Pelk, arriving perhaps twenty minutes after the boys from downtown. Peter Lorgos was in charge, one of the up-and-coming bright young men of the department. When he saw the captain, he moved away from the cluster of reporters.

“Cap, what are you doing here?”

“I caught the squeal, Pete, thought maybe I could help out — direct traffic or something. You boys seem to be having a busy night.”

Lorgos was embarrassed. “I thought you had taken off for California.”

“I leave tomorrow. If I don’t change my mind. I haven’t seen my sister for seventeen years, another week or month won’t make that much difference.”

“Well, Cap, we have things pretty well in hand...”

The retired captain understood his feelings, knew before he came that he would be in the way. Besides, he hadn’t worked the street end of an investigation for almost twenty years, and even when he was chief of detectives — up until six weeks ago — he always had the feeling that Pete and a few of his contemporaries were only tolerating him, would rather not have to put up with him. Now that the captain was out of the way some of the other old-timers would be clearing out soon, and then Pete and the others would have their chance at running things.

Not that the retirement was the captain’s idea at all — it was the regulations: sixty-five and out. The pension was generous enough, and he had put some money aside the last twenty-five years. It was just that he wasn’t ready to quit.

A patrolman came up to Pete, one of the new kids out of the last class. For a minute the captain couldn’t think of his name. Then it came to him — Minetti.

“Sergeant, they’ve just located a vehicle, abandoned behind the high school about six blocks from here. The headlight is smashed, and it looks like it’s the car that hit Pelk. But it’s black — it’s definitely not the car involved in the Huegens crash.”

“Scenting conspiracy, Pete?” the captain asked.

He shrugged. “You never know, Cap. Wouldn’t you check out all angles when four of the city’s biggest hoods get it on the same night?”

“Pelk has been out of the rackets and clean for over twenty years,” the captain said mildly.

“Maybe someone has a long memory. He and Dolan started out together on the streets, and for a long time Huegens did his legal dirty work...”

His voice trailed off; he seemed to feel awkward to be lecturing the older man on the history of the power structure of the city. He was glad suddenly to have the opportunity to shout orders at a too pushy television cameraman. The captain stood there for another two or three minutes, watching from the sidelines, then finally walked back to his own car.

He heard the low murmur of the police radio — he should have turned it in the day he retired, but somehow he forgot. Maybe it was because the day before the sergeant in charge of the supply office had told him that for some strange reason he couldn’t find the paperwork charging the captain for the thing.

He sat in his car for perhaps another ten minutes, until the meat wagon came to claim Pelk. After that the television crew left, and then most of the gawkers as well. He watched Pete moving around for another couple of minutes, and then he started the car and pulled away from the curb, cutting around the barricades blocking off the scene of the accident.

Midnight: Chelton broke the record. He was number five.

They found him with a gun in his hand, the smell of scorched flesh coming from the hole under his chin where the bullet had entered. There was another hole the size of a fist in the top of his head and a half-kilo of uncut heroin under the front seat of his car.

It didn’t figure: Chelton wasn’t under pressure, apart from the usual surveillance by the federal, state, and city narcotics boys. Everyone knew that he was the number one man in the city drugstore, but he was too smart to be caught with so much as an aspirin in his machine-turned gold cigarette case — unless there was a doctor’s prescription folded around the tablet. There were plenty of others to take the risks, to do the holding. Chelton himself was on top of his world, respected among his fellow syndicate associates, living in a fantastic riverfront mansion, built during the Thirties by a famous movie queen for three hundred thousand dollars. Chelton enjoyed a happy family life; his kids were educated in the most exclusive private schools, where never was heard a discouraging word or intimation as to the source of Papa’s wealth and the nature of his business.

Why should Chelton stick a gun under his face and pull the trigger?

But the gun was in his hand.

And the only other prints on or in the car belonged to members of his family.

About then somebody in the department came up with the bright idea that since all of the deaths except Dolan’s were connected with cars, maybe there was something worth looking into. The genius blabbed to a television newsman, and he got to make his first public appearance on the one o’clock news roundup, just a few minutes after Sellinger walked off the balcony of his penthouse on the twenty-third floor.

12:53 A.M.: Sellinger was number six. He landed on the hood of a car pulling out of the building garage, almost adding the car’s four passengers to the death list. They would have been the first extraneous victims since the death of Dolan’s wife and girl friend.

By now there were a great many nervous people in town, almost everyone who was still awake. The ones with criminal connections were perhaps justified in their worries, but the police switchboard was besieged with distraught callers of the little-old-lady variety, who were certain that a mad killer was lurking in the hydrangea bushes below their bedroom. There was no way such calls could be checked out, for every available man had been called in to duty and the city was being saturated with patrols — but someone got the bright idea of bringing in some of the volunteers from the drug and suicide centers, and letting them talk to the nervous grandmas. They did a pretty good job of calming the old ladies.

After that the pace seemed to pick up:

1:21 A.M.: someone poured a glass of household lye solution down Bergen’s throat. It was possible the man was unconscious at the moment of assault, as there was no sign of struggle. But it made no difference, for he would have been just as dead if he had struggled.

2:02 A.M.: Wentworth’s north-side house went up in a shower of flames that reminded one late-pacing neighbor of a giant Roman candle. The cause was later determined to be an exploding gas line.

2:43 A.M.: someone entered Korman’s bedroom without waking his wife. He was strangled with one of her stockings, also without waking his wife. His body was not discovered until morning, at which time his servants also found the dead bodies of three guard dogs, struck down by poisoned tranquilizer darts.

At 3:50 the captain arrived home to find Pete Lorgos’ city sedan in his driveway. Pete was sitting in the porch swing that the captain had never gotten around to taking down, with Ellie no longer there to nag him about such matters. He knew there was a three-inch rip in the window screen behind Lorgos as well, although this new nylon screening didn’t rust like the old stuff did. The storm windows were still stacked in the garage behind the house.

“Pete,” the captain said, speaking to the spark of the other’s cigarette as he got out of his car. He walked up to the porch. “Come on in and I’ll fix coffee, if you can stand instant.”

“That’ll be fine, Cap.”

Lorgos said nothing as he followed him through the clutter of the living room, even when he saw the dust coating the tables and the pile of unwashed dishes in the kitchen sink. The captain found two mugs in the cupboard and set the teakettle on the gas range to boil, then pulled out a chair at the kitchen table.

“Sit down, Pete.”

Pete stared at him a minute before doing so.

“It doesn’t look as though you’ve done much packing, Cap.”

“Oh, I’m ready to go — what I’m taking will fit in three suitcases. No sense burdening yourself when you strike out for a whole new life, Pete.”

“That makes sense. Are you planning to come back for a visit?”

“There’s nothing to bring me back here now — I’m letting the real estate people handle everything, including the cleaning up. I won’t even have to come back to sign the papers.”

He glanced towards the living room, closed his eyes suddenly as he saw it the way it had been before Ellie died last summer. She was with him in that instant, her old rose fragrance strong in the air, her firm hand touching his shoulder to reassure him. He almost lifted his hand to hers, before he opened his eyes again.

“Nothing personal, Pete — but I don’t expect to miss you people a bit.”

The teakettle whistled, and he got up to spoon crystals into the mugs and pour in the water. He found milk in the refrigerator, brought it out, and found a spoon for the cracked sugar bowl on the table. Then he sat down again and stirred his coffee.

Pete sipped from his mug and stared at the captain over the lip. At last he set it down again and sighed, scratching his nose.

“I still don’t know how you did the Dolan job, Cap — the neighbors heard nothing, although the walls are paper thin. I’m almost ready to concede that you had nothing to do with that one, that it was just as it seemed.”

The captain’s face was carefully blank.

“The others all check out — you made it easy, although you must be tired now. Everybody knows what a hard-nose you are, Cap. For forty years this has been one of the crookedest cities in the country, but you won’t even pick a nickel off the sidewalk if there’s anybody to see you. Every other top cop to retire from the department walked away with enough to make him comfortable for life, but look at you — planning to drive to California to stay with your old-maid schoolteacher sister. How much money do you have, Cap?”

“More than most people think, thanks to Ellie. But every penny of it came honest, Pete — most of it because my wife was smart enough to scrimp out a few dollars and put them in mutual funds right from the beginning of our marriage. A few years ago she believed some psychic’s prediction that the market was headed for trouble and switched everything into government securities.”

“It must have been tough, Cap, watching the world fall into a sewer and not be able to do anything about it. A lot of old sins were expunged from the record tonight. I’m glad you’re leaving tomorrow.”

He got up then, leaving his cup half full. The captain followed him back through the house, stood on the porch as he opened the door to his car.

“If I could connect you to Dolan, Cap, I wouldn’t be walking away now. But I don’t really think you’d kill innocent bystanders. Send us a postcard from California — something to put up on the bulletin board.”

The captain stood on the porch watching the taillights of Lorgos’ car winking until they turned the corner, not wanting to go back into the house, to be reminded again of Ellie’s absence. Ellie had always been proud of him, even during the bad years when some of the mobsters had leaned hard — he still bore the scars of the beating that put him in the hospital for three months. It was rough for her then, with only him to worry about, but he was glad they never had kids. He hated to think what might have happened if there had been kids...

He went back in the house, stopped in the kitchen to pick up the mugs and place them in the sink with the other dishes. For a moment he was tempted to clean up, then decided no. He went upstairs to the bedroom, found the laundry bag stuffed with the clothes he had been wearing earlier in the evening. They were all the old things from the bottom drawer, threadbare pants and worn shirts that Ellie had stuck away to give to a charity that never came calling.

He stripped off the things he had on now, adding them to the bag, and went in the closet to find something more decent. Then he came back to the dresser and noticed the pile of mail that had been sitting there for days now. He flipped through the stack, saw that one of the letters was from the real estate company that had wanted to list the house. He dropped them all back unopened.

Then he picked up the silver-framed photo of Ellie as she had been when they first met, just after the war. She was smiling — it seemed to him now that she had always been smiling, no matter what her real feelings, trying to make it easier for him. He put the picture back down, went downstairs to check over the house.

The feeling of clutter, of mess, was pervasive. In the kitchen the captain leaned against the counter again, staring at the pile of dishes in the sink. Again he was tempted to start cleaning up, but instead he went into the living room, went to the little smoking stand that he had before he married Ellie. For the last three months the copper-lined compartment had been full, what with the heroin that he planted on Chelton to make sure the newsmen played up his drug connections, and the various guns he had used. They were gone now, of course, except for the one he left with Chelton, even the tranquilizing gun he had used on Dolan’s girl friend, on Chelton, and on all of them after that. The only things left in the cabinet were a few of his old pipes and a half a can of tobacco, stale now; he hadn’t touched them since Ellie’s death. In the back corner was the collection of lighters he had accumulated over the years.

Now he brought out a pipe and the tobacco, stuffed the bowl carefully, and picked up one of the lighters. It was dry, as were the next two, and then he spotted a butane job that had been given to him as a Christmas present by someone two or three years ago. As he flicked the wheel orange flame leaped up; the fuel had not leaked.

He sat down in his chair now, lighting his pipe and then reaching to turn off the lights, wanting to sit in the darkness for a time. He closed his eyes, thinking back over the evening, remembering now the excitement that had stabbed at his heart as he rode up on Huegens, forced him from the road. The captain had been so intent on checking out his plates that he had not realized his wife was in the car until the moment of impact. Afterwards he was relieved to learn she had survived. It had been a close thing for the captain, but he managed to bring the car back under control and leave the parkway at the next exit, as he had planned.

He flicked the wheel of the lighter again, watching the flame shoot up nearly four inches as he adjusted the little wheel. It was a pretty thing.

In a way he felt sorry for Dolan’s women, although he was not so unaware of their involvement in Dolan’s operation as Pete Lorgos was — neither of them could be called an innocent bystander, and there were those who thought his wife was the actual brains of the organization. The thought of killing them had been distasteful, had been what had taken the captain so many weeks to work up to this night. That’s why he made them the first to die, to have it done with.

The girl friend came first. She was the first human being he had ever killed — in all his thirty-eight years on the force he never once fired his gun at anything other than a target on the range. He must have lost control when he started driving the knife into her, for he could not remember hitting her so many more times after the first stroke.

By the time Dolan’s wife arrived the captain was composed, waiting for her behind the door; he got his hand over her mouth before she had a chance to spot the body. It had been a long time since he learned about pressure points, but they worked just like the book said they would. Once she was unconscious it was easier to use the knife and slash her wrists. And it was no trouble at all to take Dolan when he walked through the door a few minutes later. The knife was in his gut and ripping up before he even realized that something had happened to the women, before he could ask the captain why he had summoned him to this meeting.

The hardest part of all was getting the knife back into the woman’s fingers...

Suddenly he was trembling, cold sweat pouring from his face as he remembered them dying, remembered the way in which they had all died. It seemed easy at the time, but now the truth was catching up to him.

He shivered, forced his back stiff, bit down on his lip. He thought, “Why should I feel sorry for them?” For thirty-eight years he had been forced to watch Dolan and Lettoli and Huegens and the others, watch them ride over the bodies of the people of this city, unable to touch them, forced even to hold their car doors for them. Until Ellie died the captain had swallowed the hate he felt for himself because of them, accepted the dirt that they threw at him even as he turned down their money. He was Mr. Clean of the department, the one incorruptible cop — the one who turned his back and washed his hands of the affair, refusing to be involved.

Maybe, he thought, maybe he should have quit the job right at the beginning, even though he would never have met Ellie...

But he hung on, tried to do his best within the strictures placed on him by the men who really ran the city. He started the list early, though, even before he knew Ellie. It began with a dozen names, and over the years there had been many additions and deletions, until tonight only the nine men had remained.

Now they were all dead.

The captain’s pipe was out. He flicked the wheel once more, but he did not relight it. Instead, he got up and went into the kitchen, bent to blow out the pilot lights on the gas stove, then turned all the burners on full. Then he went back to the living room, sat down in his chair again, thinking of California...

But there was nothing for him there. He had lost touch with his sister years ago, except for the Christmas cards that Ellie sent with both of their names on them. His sister had sent him one from California this year, but he had not bothered to send one back.

Everything he wanted was in the past, everything he needed to do finished. He looked at the lighter in one hand, placed his pipe back in his mouth now, sucking on the cold bowl.

The smell of gas was very strong now.

He spun the wheel of the lighter, over and over, watching the dance of the beautiful flames...

With the demise of Manhunt in the late 1960s, the only consistent magazine market for short noir fiction over the next fifteen years was Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine. Founded by pulp maven Leo Margulies, and edited for twenty years by his wife, Cylvia Kleinman, and then by Sam Merwin, Jr., and Charles E. Fritch, MSMM often was a showcase for hard-boiled tales by established writers of the period. But the magazine also published new writers whose careers subsequently blossomed in the fields of suspense and horror fiction, including George Chesbro, Margaret Maron, Joe R. Lansdale, Gary Brandner, Robert J. Randisi, Richard Laymon, and James M. Reasoner.

Reasoner, a Texan, published his first story in MSMM in 1976, following up with some seventy-five others in the mystery-detective genre. His only crime novel, Texas Wind (1980), which features a Fort Worth private eye named Cody, is considered a minor paperback classic by those fortunate enough to have found a copy. Only a small number were published, and just a fraction of those were distributed to retail outlets. Under pseudonyms, Reasoner has also produced dozens of Western novels and historical sagas, alone and in collaboration with his wife, award-winning novelist L. J. Washburn.

“Graveyard Shift,” which was published in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine in November 1978 under the name M. R. James, is one of the first stories to address the ultramodern issues of the convenience store as a target for small-time armed robbers bent on a quick score, and the many kinds of violence that stem from such an establishment’s vulnerability. Like James Hannah’s “Junior Jackson’s Parable,” it is a trenchant parable for our time.

B. P.

Graveyard Shift (1978)

Graveyard shifts are all alike. I know too well the emotions that fill the long nights: boredom and fear. Boredom because nothing different ever happens, fear that sometime it might.

Convenience stores are all alike, too. Boxy little buildings filled with junk food and a few staples like bread and milk. The prices are too high, but where else can you buy things after midnight?

The little KwikStop store wasn’t the first one in which I had worked. I’ve been traveling the country, trying to see some of that I haven’t seen, now that I’m a widower and don’t have any reason to stay in one place. The convenience stores always need help, and I have experience. Getting a job is no problem.

Neither is the fact that I’m usually assigned the all-night shift. It gives me the days free to do anything I want.

You see the same type of customers, no matter where the store is. Before midnight, you get teenagers buying cokes and college kids buying beer and potato chips. A lot of young couples come in to buy milk and diapers. Sometimes you get a drunk who wants to buy beer after hours. Sometimes they get nasty when you refuse.

And sometimes you get one like the man who stepped in earlier tonight. That’s where the fear comes in.

He was thin and had a pinched, beard-stubbled face, with too-wide eyes that never stopped moving. His clothes were shabby and his hands were pushed deep in the pockets of his windbreaker. I knew the type right away.

I’ve been working in the little stores long enough that attempted robberies are nothing new to me. Most stores have a policy about robberies that emphasizes cooperation and observation. They tell the clerks to do whatever the robber says. It’s supposed to be safer that way.

But as I looked at this guy, I felt an ache in my belly and the palms of my hands began to sweat. This might be one of those times. The hammer of my pulse began to accelerate.

The man picked up a sack of Fritos and came toward the cash register. His other hand was still in his pocket.

The doors opened and two men and a young boy came in, heading for the soft drink case.

The man in the windbreaker looked hard at the newcomers and then dropped a quarter and a penny on the counter to pay for the Fritos. I rang up the sale and began to breathe again as he pushed through the doors on his way out.

It wasn’t long afterward that George and Eddie pulled up in their patrol car and came inside for coffee, like they do every night.

“Hello, fellas,” I said. “You should have been here a little earlier.”

George poured himself a cup of the always-ready coffee and asked, “What happened, Frank?”

“Maybe I’m being paranoid, but there was a guy in here I think was going to rob the place. Some customers came in and he changed his mind.”

“Did he pull a gun on you?”

“No, I didn’t see a gun. It was just a gut feeling. Like I said, maybe I’m paranoid.”

“Gut feelings are the best ones,” Eddie said. “What did he look like?”

“Thin, maybe one-forty or fifty, about five-nine, sandy hair, probably about thirty years old. He was wearing blue jeans and a brown wind-breaker.”

Eddie wrote it all down in his notebook while George asked, “Did you see what he was driving?”

“He walked in. He might’ve had a car parked out of the lights, but if he did, I didn’t see it.”

“Okay, we’ll keep an eye out for him. He probably won’t be back, though, at least not tonight.”

Business picked up not long after they left, and I was too busy to worry about the man who had been in earlier. I had quite a few customers in and out until three o’clock, when traffic tapered off. It would be slow now until a little after four, when the early morning workers would start coming in.

It was 3:37 when the man returned. I hadn’t even seen a car drive by outside for over ten minutes, and I knew he wouldn’t have to back out this time. I nodded to him and tried not to look scared as he stepped up to the counter.

“Pack of Camels,” he said shortly. I put the cigarets on the counter between us. “Too late to buy beer?”

“I’m afraid so,” I answered. I could feel sweat breaking out on me, dampening the red and white smock all the clerks wore. Midnight is the latest you can buy it except on Saturdays.

He rocked back on his heels, then forward. His teeth were yellowed and I could see old acne scars on his face. I knew I would never forget the way he looked as he sneered and said, “I guess that’ll do it then.”

I began to work the cash register. When it popped open, he said, “You come out from behind there. There’s a gun in my pocket.”

I knew it was silly, but I couldn’t help asking, “Is this a hold-up?”

“That’s right, jackass. Now you get out from behind that counter like I told you. Move!”

I swallowed the huge lump in my throat and began to do like he told me, moving down around the microwave oven and the popcorn machine. The machines shielded me from his view momentarily, and I don’t think he even saw my hand go behind my back, under the long smock, to the clip-on holster.

I stepped out, bringing the little pistol up and aiming it at the bridge of his nose. Surprise and fear leaped into his eyes.

The same emotions that must have been on my wife Becky’s face when she walked into a little store far away and surprised a man just like this one, a man who had gotten away clean, leaving my world bleeding to death on a dirty tile floor...

I pulled the trigger and shattered the expression on his face. He didn’t even have time to fire his own gun.

I put the gun on the counter and went to the pay phone to call the police. As I did, I thought about where I would go next. No one would be surprised when I quit this job, not after something like this.

That meant a new town, a new name, a new job. I wouldn’t have any trouble finding work.

Like I said, convenience stores are all alike. And I’ve got plenty of experience.

Truckers, that hardy breed of men (and in recent years, women) who push the big rigs across America’s highways, have been the subject of noir fiction and films for more than a half-century. A. I. Bezzerides’s 1938 novel of wildcat produce carriers in northern California, Long Haul (filmed in 1940 as They Drive by Night, starring Humphrey Bogart), was the first major work with a trucking theme. A second Bezzerides novel, Thieves’ Market (1949), explores the lives of postwar independent freighters and was a near bestseller. In recent years, the CB-radio craze and the enormously successful Burt Reynolds film Smokey and the Bandit (1977) inspired a plethora of big-rig novels; notable among these is Phillip Finch’s Haulin’ (1979).

Two of the best crime shorts about the lives of road jockeys are Robert Reeves’s Black Mask novelette, “Murder in High Gear” (1941), a rollicking action yarn featuring tough “highway detective” Bookie Barnes, and Margaret Maron’s dark fable “Deadhead Coming Down,” which first appeared in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine in April 1978.

Maron began writing short fiction in the late 1960s. More than a dozen of her stories appeared between 1968 and 1980 in a variety of digest periodicals, most prominently Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, nine of them under the byline Margaret E. Brown. Her first novel, One Coffee With (1981), began a critically acclaimed series featuring police lieutenant Sigrid Harald. A second series character, attorney Deborah Knott, made her debut in Bootlegger’s Daughter, a haunting tale of old and new crimes in the tobacco country of North Carolina, which received the Mystery Writers of America Edgar award for best novel of 1992.

B. P.

Deadhead Coming Down (1978)

Funny thing about this CB craze — all these years we trucking men’ve been going along doing our job, just making a living as best we could, and people in cars didn’t pay us much mind after everything got four-laned because they didn’t get caught behind us so much going uphill, so they quit cursing us for being on the roads we was paying taxes for too and sort of ignored us for a few years.

Then those big camper vans started messing around with CB, tuning in on us, and first thing you know even VWs are running up and down the cloverleafs cluttering up the air with garbage and all of a sudden there’s songs about us, calling us culture heroes and knights of the road.

Bull!

There’s not one damn thing romantic about driving an 18-wheeler. Next to standing on a assembly line and screwing Bolt A into Hole C like my no-account brother-in-law, driving a truck’s got to be the dullest way under God’s red sun to make a living. ’Specially if it’s just up and down the eastern seaboard like me.

Maybe it’s different driving cross-country, but I work for this Jerry outfit — Eastline Truckers — and brother, they’re just that. Contract trucking up and down the coastal states. Peaches from Georgia, grapefruit from northern Florida, yams and blueberries from the Carolinas — whatever’s in season, we haul it. I-95 to the Delaware Memorial Bridge, up the Jersey Turnpike, across the river and right over to Hunt’s Point.

Fruit basket going up, deadhead coming down and if you think that’s not boring, think again. Once you’re on I-95, it’s the same road from Florida to New Jersey. You could pick up a mile stretch in Georgia and stick it down somewhere in Maryland and nobody’d even notice the difference — same motels, same gas stations, same billboards.

There’s laws put out by those Keep America Pretty people to try and keep billboards off the interstates, but I’m of two minds about them. You can get awful tired of trees and fields and cows with nothing to break ’em up, but then again, reading the same sign over and over four or five times a week’s a real drag, too.

Even those Burma Shave signs they used to have when I was driving with Lucky. We’d laugh our heads off every time they put up new ones, but you can’t laugh at the same things more’n once or twice, so we’d make up our own poems. Raunchy ones and funnier’n hell some of ’em.

Those were the good old days. Right after the war. I was a hick kid just out of the tobacco fields and Lucky seemed older’n Moses, though I reckon he was only about 35. His real name was Henry Driver, but everybody naturally called him Lucky because he got away with things nobody else ever could. During the blackouts, he once drove a load of TNT across the Great Smokies with no headlights. All them twisty mountain roads and just a three-quarter moon. I’d like to see these bragging hotshots around today try that!

Back then it took a real man to truck ’cause them rigs would fight you. Just like horses, they were. They knew when you couldn’t handle them. Today — hell! Everything’s so automatic and hydraulic, even a 90-pound woman can do it.

Guess I shouldn’t knock it though. I’ll be able to keep driving these creampuffs till I’m 70. Not like Lucky. Hardly a dent and then his luck ran out on a stretch of 301 in Virginia. A blowout near a bridge and the wheel must’ve got away from him.

Ten years ago that was, and the company’d quit doubling us before that, but I still miss him. Things were never dull driving with Lucky. We was a lot alike. He used to tell me things he never told nobody else. Not just the things a man brags about when he’s drinking and slinging bull, but other stuff.

I remember once we were laying over in Philly, him going, me coming down, and he says, “Guess what I saw me today coming through Baltimore? A red-tailed hawk. Right smack in the middle of town!”

Can you feature a tough guy like him getting all excited about seeing a back-country bird in town? And telling another guy about it? Well, that’s the way it was with me and him.

I was thinking about Lucky last week coming down and wishing I had him to talk to again. Ninety-five was wall-to-wall vacation traffic. I thumbed my CB and it was full of ratchet jaws trying to sound like they knew what the hell they were saying. It was Good Buddy this and Smokey that and 10-4 on the side, so I cut right out again.

I’d just passed this Hot Shoppe sign when the road commenced to unwind in my head like a movie picture. I knew that next would come a Howard Johnson and a Holiday Inn and then a white barn and a meadow full of black cows and then a Texaco sign and every single mile all the way back home. I just couldn’t take it no more and pulled off at the next cloverleaf.

“For every mile of thruway, there’s ten miles on either side going the same way,” Lucky used to say and, like him, I’ve got this skinny map stuck up over my windshield across the whole width of the cab with I-95 snaking right down the middle. Whenever that old snake gets to crawling under my skin, I look for a side road heading south. There’s little Xs scattered all up and down my map to keep track of which roads I’d been on before. I hadn’t never been through this particular stretch, so I had my choice.

Twenty minutes off the interstate’s a whole different country. The road I finally picked was only two lanes, but wide enough so I wouldn’t crowd anybody, not that there was much traffic. I almost had the road to myself and I want to tell you it was as pretty as a postcard, with trees and bushes growing right to the ditches and patches of them orangy flowers mixed in.

It was late afternoon, the sun just going down and I was perking up and feeling good about this road. It was the kind Lucky used to look for. Everything perfect.

I was coasting down this little hill and around a curve and suddenly there was a old geezer walking right up the middle of my lane. I hit the brakes and left rubber, but by the time I got her stopped and ran back to where he was laying all crumpled up in orange flowers, I knew he was a sure goner, so I walked back to my rig, broke on Channel 9 and about ten minutes later, there was a black-and-white flashing its blue lights and a ambulance with red ones.

Everybody was awful nice about it. They could see how I’d braked and swerved across the line. “I tried to miss him,” I said. “But he went and jumped the same way.”

“It wasn’t your fault, so don’t you worry,” said the young cop when I’d followed him into the little town to fill out his report. “If I warned Mr. Jasper once, I told him a hundred times he was going to get himself killed out walking like that and him half-deaf.”

The old guy’s son-in-law was there by that time and he nodded. “I told Mavis he ought to be in a old folks’ home where they’d look after him, but he was dead set against it and she wouldn’t make him. Poor old Pop! Well, at least he didn’t suffer.”

The way he said it, I guessed he wasn’t going to suffer too much himself over the old man’s death.

I was free to go by 9 o’clock and as I was leaving, the cop happened to say, “How come you were this far off the interstate?”

I explained about how boring it got every now and then and he sort of laughed and said, “I reckon you won’t get bored again any time soon.”

“I reckon not,” I said, remembering how that old guy had scrambled, the way his eyes had bugged when he knew he couldn’t get out of the way.

Just west of 95, I stopped at a Exxon station and while they were filling me up, I reached up over the windshield and made another little X on my road-map. Seventeen Xs now. Two more and I’d tie Lucky.

I pulled out onto 95 right in front of a Datsun that had to sit on his brakes to keep from creaming himself. Even at night it was all still the same — same gas stations, same motels, same billboards.

I don’t know — maybe it’s different driving cross-country.