Doris Speck
an excerpt

The Lady Loan Sharks were a vicious all girl gang that started wreaking havoc on piggy banks across New York’s lower west side back when their leader had dropped out of the fifth grade.
“No, I’m serious, kid. It’s gonna’ break my ever-lovin’ heart – you don’t get that malted. Look, you gotta’ let me loan you the dough. Naw, it ain’t nothin’, it ain’t nothin’.
“I can see how bad you want it, kid, and it’s eatin’ me up inside. It’s like I’m one of those mallow bars on the inside, see, all soft and gooey and whatnot. I just like to make people happy, I’m tellin’ ya’.
“Look, how ‘bout this? --it makes ya’ feel any better, you can pay me back with interest. Let’s make it...a LOT of interest. Oh, wheneva’ ya’ can, wheneva’ ya’ can - –let’s make it Friday. So we gotta’ deal? Okay! Put ‘er there!”
A week later, if little Patty didn’t fork over that fifteen cents plus interest...it was curtains for her Betsy Wetsy doll. PS23 was full of young victims learning painful but valuable lessons. Slinkies were stretched and mangled beyond recognition. Silly Putty was found in back alleys, flattened and riddled with tire tread. Pez dispensers were given a cement shoe and sent to sleep with the guppies. One horrible morning, a morning no one will ever forget, young Suzy Bingham woke up to find the severed head of her Kewpie doll under the sheets with her.
These were the actions of the notorious Lady Loan Sharks. These were the actions of sick, depraved minds. And buried beneath Randene’s ratted beehive was the sickest, most depraved mind of them all.
Under Randene’s aggressive leadership, the Ladies eventually graduated from their Schwinn Starlets to an assortment of older model Harley Davidsons. They branched out from terrorizing just the public school crowd to striking fear in the hearts of every adult who had the misfortune to cross their noisy, exhaust-filled path. The Lady Loan Sharks learned to spot the desperate, the down-trodden, the delightfully deficient...the Doris Specks.