Juvenile Delinquent

by Richard Deming

  When this seemed to puzzle him even more, I explained, “I wasn’t tailing him. I just happened to be in the barbershop at the time.”

  In marked contrast to his previously hurried talk, Dave said almost slowly, “None of us knew Buddy was riding the stuff. But even so, why would he rat to the other club members? He was all for Stub’s idea the other day.”

  “Maybe he didn’t rat to the other club members,” I said. “Maybe he ratted to Buzz Thurmond, and Thurmond put him up to arousing the club against Stub.”

  After reflecting a moment, he said in the same slow voice, “Yeah. You can never tell what a junkie’s going to do. If Buddy’s hooked, he’d do anything Buzz told him for a couple of free shots.”

  I said, “If this kangaroo court finds Stub guilty, what are they likely to do to him?”

  The kid had calmed down considerably while we talked, but now he began to look worried again. “Nothing much, I guess. Maybe kick him out of the club.”

  “Any danger they’ll sentence him to any kind of physical punishment?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said in an uncertain voice. “They brought along the cat, of course, but that’s just to sort of scare guys. They never use it hard enough to really hurt a guy.”

  “The cat?”

  “Cat-o-nine-tails. Maybe they’ll give him a couple of lashes. But they only flick it hard enough to sting.” He added uneasily, “Only thing is, a lot of the guys seemed to be riding pretty high.”

  I thought this over. It seemed reasonable to assume that if Buzz Thurmond was behind the kangaroo court, he would have seen to it that the addicts in the group were all doped to the eyebrows. And if twenty of the members were addicts, as Stub had estimated, it wouldn’t be hard for things to get out of hand.

  “I think I’d better look in on this meeting,” I decided.

  “Stub said no,” the redhead insisted. “He wants you to get clear out of the neighborhood. He didn’t like the way some of the guys were talking about you.”

  “I don’t like it either,” I informed him. “I think I’ll do a little talking back.”

  I started to walk toward the brownstone entrance and Dave O’Brien followed hesitantly. He seemed undecided about whether he should go in with me or not. I made the decision for him.

  “You stay out here,” I said. “If you hear things really getting out of hand, better yell for the cops.”

  “There’s sixty guys down there,” he said doubtfully.

  “Sixty kids,” I corrected. “I think I can handle kids, even if they’re doped up.”

  I noticed as we passed the two front windows to the basement room that the green drapes were not only drawn, the windows were shut so that no sound could emerge. Dave O’Brien lingered in the doorway, still looking doubtful, when I went inside and moved down the hall toward the basement stairway.

  The moment I opened the wooden door at the top of the steps, a mixture of sound and tobacco-stale air rolled out. The sound was an ominous muttering which made the hair at the base of my neck bristle, because I had heard the same sound once before.

  I had heard it the night a mob tried to break down the city jail to get at an accused baby-killer.

  Pulling the door shut behind me, I went down the stairs rapidly.

  None of the Purple Pelicans saw me arrive, for they were all crowded to the far end of the room with their backs to me. Even if anyone had glanced my way, he probably wouldn’t have been able to make out that I wasn’t wearing a purple jacket, for the air was dense with tobacco smoke, and the two naked bulbs which hung from the ceiling to furnish the only illumination weren’t strong enough to cut through the haze into the corners of the big room.

  As I started to move forward slowly, from beyond the crowd there came a whistling sound followed by a dull splat and a groan. Momentarily all sound ceased then, but almost instantly the muttering resumed.

  What I had heard changed my slow movement to a gallop. Lowering my head, I charged through the mass of youngsters like a fullback hitting the line, scattering boys in all directions. I skidded to a halt in an open area at the far end of the room.

  Directly before me Stub Carlson was spread-eagled on the floor, a purple-jacketed boy holding each of his arms and legs. He was stripped to the waist and his back was a mass of bloody welts.

  Over Stub stood a muscular youth of about eighteen, also stripped to the waist and glistening with sweat. His back was to me and he was just raising a vicious-looking cat-o-nine-tails over his head.

  My right hand grasped the whip just as it reached the top of its upsweep, and my left gripped the boy’s shoulder. Swinging him around, I slashed the knotted leather thongs of the cat-o-nine-tails across his bare stomach and chest with such force, he let out a howl of pain and stumbled backward until he crashed into the rear wall.

  The four boys holding Stub’s arms and legs looked up in startlement just as I swung the lash for a second time. The two holding his legs barely had time to throw their arms in front of their faces before it landed. With their jackets protecting their arms, the blow couldn’t have hurt them much, but it must have stung considerably. They both screamed and rolled over and over on the floor to get out of my range.

  The two holding Stub’s arms didn’t wait for the third swing. Headfirst they dived away from me and scrambled to safety on hands and knees.

  No one in the audience had moved during my attack, being too stunned by its suddenness. Turning to face them, I got them to move by taking a step forward and swinging the cat in a vicious circle at head height. It would have ripped to pieces any face it caught, but though I was boiling with rage, I wasn’t berserk enough to want to mar any of the kids permanently. I only swung it close enough to the circle of faces to make the boys jerk back in terror. The ring widened appreciably.

  Then I threw the lash half the width of the room at the boy I’d taken it from. He let out another yell when the handle caught him in the stomach.

  Ignoring him, I let my eyes move around the circle of faces slowly, and the boys shifted uneasily under the contempt they could see in my expression. For the moment they were too taken aback by my sudden appearance to do anything but gape, but as I helped Stub Carlson to his feet, a voice broke the silence.

  “That’s the private cop Stub’s been ratting to,” it said loudly. “The guy who’s trying to break up the club.”

  I swung toward the voice and saw that it had come from Buddy Tip, the blond kid I had seen at Polito’s barbershop. The words brought an angry muttering from the rest of the group.

  The only way to keep a mob under control is to step on the first person who tries to arouse it and step on him hard. Swiftly I moved toward Buddy Tipp and brought my palm across his left cheek in a stinging slap.

  He stumbled backward, fell to one knee and looked up at me with a mixture of outrage and fear.

  “If anybody’s been ratting around here, it’s you,” I growled at him. “Tell the boys how you spilled Stub’s plans to Buzz Thurmond and he got you all hopped up so you’d sucker the club into making this damn-fool play.”

  He was hopped up too, I realized as I glared down at him. His pupils were so small they were all but invisible. Looking around the ring of faces again, I saw that most of those in the front row had equally contracted pupils.

  Stub had managed to come erect, but he was weaving on his feet and staring around him with glazed eyes. A shirt, jacket and snap-brim hat lay on the floor near where he had been spread-eagled. Stooping, I picked them up, set the hat on his head, draped the jacket over his lacerated shoulders and handed him the shirt to hold. When I took hold of his arm he let me start to steer him through the now silent crowd without resistance, as though he were a punch drunk fighter being led from the ring.

  A path silently opened before us, but we had gone no more than a few steps when a sharp click behind us made me release Stub’s arm and spin around. The youngster from whom I had taken the cat-o-nine-tails stood spraddle-legged not two paces away, a s
witch knife with a seven-inch blade thrust out before him.

  15

  DESPITE his youth the boy was an impressive-looking opponent. Naked to the waist and with his well-muscled body shining with sweat, he looked like a pirate getting ready to board ship. A half dozen livid welts had raised across his chest and stomach from the single lash I had given him. His face was white with rage, and as I examined him warily, I saw that his eye pupils were mere pin points.

  I also noticed for the first time that both forearms were dotted with needle punctures.

  There’s no point in trying to talk down a guy full of heroin, because the stuff makes him feel big enough to whip the whole world. I simply grinned at him derisively and motioned him forward.

  He didn’t need a second invitation. He moved in with the smoothness of an expert, the knife thrust forward at waist level and the blade pointing upward. As the light glittered on it I could see that it was honed to razor sharpness and tapered to a needle point.

  In the background the thin voice of Buddy Tipp said, “Cut his guts out, Larry!”

  The boy attempted to take this advice. But as the blade slashed up at my stomach, I crossed my forearm, the right on top of the left, and grabbed with both hands. My left hand clamped his wrist and my right about his forearm. I pushed downward with my left, pulled forward with my right and simultaneously pivoted to swing my hip into his.

  Before you could say, “Judo,” he was flat on his face on the floor and the knife was in my hand.

  Hefting the weapon casually, I looked around for Buddy Tipp. In the front row of the crowd ringing us I spotted the youngster who had tripped me up the day I first asked for Stub Carlson. In the background I caught a glimpse of two of the boys who had been present when Stub volunteered the services of his private squad, but they refused to meet my eyes and only drifted even farther back. Then I located Buddy Tipp standing behind a couple of other boys. His eyes glittered at me like a rabid cat’s.

  I weighed backing him into a corner by walking toward him with the knife, then decided the heroin he had in him would make his reaction too unpredictable. He might draw his own knife instead of backing, and I didn’t care to get involved in a knife battle with a sixteen-year-old kid. Instead I snapped the knife shut and dropped it in my pocket.

  An instant later I decided it would have been smarter to take a chance on backing him down.

  As I started to push the still dazed Stub on toward the stairs, Buddy screamed, “Don’t let that cop out of here! Kill ‘em both!”

  Up to that moment I’d had the rest of the mob pretty well cowed, none of them wanting to make the first move against me. But the blond youngster’s enraged scream acted as a trigger.

  Abruptly the crowd stopped opening a reluctant lane before us and we were suddenly walled in. A dozen clicks sounded as switch knives appeared.

  I told myself that probably a third of the crowd was full of heroin, and even though they were a bunch of kids, some as young as fourteen and none of them over eighteen, it was time for shock tactics if either Stub or I expected to get out of the place alive.

  Keeping my hold on Stub’s arm, I said with a weariness I was far from feeling, “You kids are beginning to bore the hell out of me.”

  Then I dipped my hand under my arm, flicked the safety off my P-38 and smashed a bullet into the light bulb immediately over our heads.

  Instinctively every kid around us recoiled. Somebody yelled unnecessarily, “He’s got a gun!”

  I took careful aim and shot out the other light twenty feet away.

  Pandemonium set in as the room plunged into pitch darkness. I reholstered my gun before some kid could bump into me in the dark and accidentally set it off again.

  All around us there were shouts, curses and the noise of people stumbling over each other. I made directly for the stairs, moving ahead of Stub and dragging him along behind me. Whenever we ran into anyone in the dark, I put my right hand under his chin, if I could find it, or against his chest if I couldn’t, and pushed, a maneuver which was invariably followed by the sound of several boys falling and thrashing around on the floor in an attempt to untangle themselves from each other.

  Once I stumbled over a kneeling boy myself and was prevented from going down only by my grip on Stub. Even then we both went through a sort of drunken dance in the dark before recovering our balance and moving on.

  We had made the foot of the stairs before anyone thought to flick on a lighter.

  At the first flash of light every boy in the room got the idea, however. Within seconds matches and lighter flames sprang to life all over the club room.

  I pushed Stub up the first two steps and said, “Move!”

  As he began to stagger upward somebody yelled, “They’re going up the stairs!”

  In the flickering light I could see the entire horde surge toward us.

  With Stub reeling ahead of me like a drunken man we didn’t make very rapid progress. By the time we reached the door at the top, match and lighter flames were halfway up to us.

  Reaching beyond Stub, I unlatched the door, put my hand in the middle of his back and shoved. He staggered forward into the upper hall, but I didn’t wait to see if he retained his feet. Turning my back on him, I gripped either side of the door jamb and raised my right knee to my chest.

  I was happy to discover that Buddy Tipp was the first boy to the top of the stairs. When I planted my aluminum foot in the center of his chest and shoved, his mouth popped open and he spread his arms wide in a sort of backward swan dive.

  The flickering lights on the stairway winked out as milling bodies rolled down the steps amid thumps and roars of anger and yells of pain.

  When I slammed the door shut, I found Stub dazedly resting on his hands and knees where he had fallen after my shove. Jerking him erect, I hustled him out to the street.

  Outside Dave O’Brien peered at us frightenedly.

  “What were those shots?” he asked.

  “Ask me later,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  I started to trot toward my car at the corner, dragging Stub Carlson along. Recognizing that something was wrong with Stub, the redheaded O’Brien grabbed his other arm. Between us we managed to work him up to a fair burst of speed.

  When we reached the car, I left Stub for Dave to manage and raced around to the driver’s side. While I was getting the engine started, Dave helped Stub into the front seat and slid in next to him.

  I was swinging the car into a U-turn before Purple Pelicans began to pour from the brownstone entrance.

  Since Stub’s home was only a block from the basement club room, I decided that wouldn’t be the safest place in the world to take him with sixty out-of-control youngsters after our hides. While I doubted that even with a third of them hopped up they’d go so far as trying to beat down his door, I saw no point in taking the chance. Anyway, in their present mood they’d almost certainly strip my car, and possibly wreck it completely, if they found it parked in front of Stub’s place.

  I drove right on past and headed for my own flat.

  When we had traveled a couple of blocks Stub groaned and inched his back away from the seat.

  “How do you feel?” I asked him.

  “All right,” he said in a voice so thick it was all but incoherent.

  Dave O’Brien asked, “What’s the matter with him?”

  “They used the cat,” I said tersely. “I think he’s in a state of shock.”

  I gave Dave a brief rundown of what had happened in the club room.

  “My God!” the redhead said in an awed voice. “Have the guys gone crazy?”

  “Just temporarily,” I said. “They’re full of H and they’ve been whipped up into a mob. By your pal, Buddy Tipp, I think. And I’d guess on Buzz Thurmond’s orders.”

  After a moment I added reflectively, “I think I’m going to enjoy meeting the Purple Pelicans’ friend and advisor.”

  When we reached my apartment house I parked in the no-parking
zone right in front. Supporting him between us, Dave and I managed to get Stub up the half flight of stairs to my flat without much difficulty. I led the boy into my bedroom, told him to lie down on the bed on his face, and then pulled the jacket away from his back.

  Dave O’Brien took one look and headed for the bathroom at a dead run.

  I covered Stub with a blanket, told him just to lie still, and went into the hall to phone Doc Mason.

  I don’t often require a doctor, being of fairly good general health, but when I do need one I call Dr. Tom Mason. I suppose you’d call him my family doctor. He only lives six blocks from my flat, and he said he’d be right over.

  Tom Mason was in his early forties, tall and skinny and with the faintly harassed look all doctors with too large a practice seem to develop. When he had examined Stub’s back, he looked at me questioningly.

  “He was beaten,” I said. “With a cat-o-nine-tails.”

  Before touching the lacerated back the doctor took the boy’s pulse, looked at his eyes and listened to his heart with a stethoscope.

  Then he said, “This youngster’s in mild shock. Go fix a hot toddy, and put a shot of liquor or brandy in it.”

  Obediently I went into the kitchen. Dave O’Brien, who by that time had emerged from the bathroom with an only faintly green complexion, followed along.

  As he watched me put the kettle on and get out a bottle and a couple of lemons, he asked, “You think he’s hurt bad, Mr. Moon?”

  “He won’t die, if that’s what you’re worried about, but he won’t be going to school for a few days. You know Stub’s folks, Dave?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ll send you home in a taxi when you leave here. I want you to go by their place and tell them he’s staying here tonight.”

  He laughed a trifle cynically, and when I looked at him he said, “They won’t care. Stub never bothers to tell his old man or his old lady when he stays out all night. His old lady’s always drunk and his old man just plain don’t care.”