The Mike Hammer Collection, Volume 2 (75 page)

They didn’t try to be quiet. Two of them were bragging that I’d be ready to spill my guts and the other one said I had better be. It was a quiet voice that wasn’t a bit new to me. It said, “Wait here and I’ll see.”

“You want us to come in, boss? He might need more softening.”

“I’ll call you if he does.”

“Okay, boss.”

Chairs rasped against the floor as the door opened. I could see the two of them there starting to open a bottle on the table, then the door closed and he was feeling for a light switch. He swore at the blackness, struck a match and held it out in front of him. There was no light, but a candle in a bottle was on the chair and he lit it. He put the bottle down beside me, drew up the chair and lit a cigarette.

The smoke tasted sweet in my nostrils. I licked my lips as I watched the butt glow a deep red and he grinned as he blew the cloud across my face.

I said, “Hello, Carl.” I made it good and snotty, but he didn’t lose the grin.

“The infamous Mike Hammer. I hope the boys did a good job. They can do a better one if I let them.”

“They did a good job.”

I rolled my head and took a good look at him. “So you’re ... the boss.”

The grin changed shape this time. One side of it dropped caustically. “Not quite ... yet.” The evil in his eyes danced in the candlelight. “Perhaps by tomorrow I will be. I’m only the boss locally ... now.”

“You louse,” I said. The words seemed to have an effort to them. My breathing was labored, coming through my teeth. I closed my eyes, stiffened and heard him laugh.

“You did a lot of legwork for us. I hear you blundered right on what we have been looking for.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You wanted to trade. Where is it?”

I let my eyes come open. “Let her go first.”

He gave me that twisted grin again. “I’m not trading for her. Funny enough, I don’t even know where she is. You see, she wasn’t part of my department.”

It took everything I could do to hold still. I could feel the nervous tremors creeping up my arms and I made fists of my hands to keep from shaking.

“It’s you I’m trading for. You can tell me or I can walk out of here and say something to the boys. You’ll want to talk then.”

“The hell with you.”

He leaned a little closer. “One of the boys is a knife man. He likes to do things with a knife. Maybe you can remember what he did to Berga Torn.” I could see the smile on his face get ugly. “That isn’t even a little bit what he’ll do to you.”

The side of his hand traced horrible gestures across my body, meaningful, cutting gestures with the nastiest implications imaginable in them. Then the gestures ended as the side of his palm sliced into my groin for emphasis and the yell that started in my throat choked off in a welter of pain and I mumbled something Carl seemed to want to hear and he bent forward saying, “What? What?”

And that repeated question was the last Carl Evello ever spoke again because he got too close and there were my hands around his throat squeezing so hard his flesh buried my fingers while his eyes were hard little marbles trying to roll out of their sockets. I squeezed and pushed him on his knees and there wasn’t even any sound at all. His fingernails bit into my wrists with an insane fury that lived only a few seconds, then relaxed as his head went back with his tongue swelling in the gaping opening that was his mouth. Things in his throat stretched and popped and when I let go there was only the slightest wheeze of air that trickled back into lungs that were almost at the bursting point.

I got him on the bed. I spread him out the way I had been and let him lie there. The joke was too good to pass up so Carl lived a minute longer than he should have. I tried to make my voice as close to his as I could and I called to the door, “He talked. Now put him away.”

Outside a chair scraped back. There was a single spoken word, silence, and the slow shuffle of footsteps coming toward the door. He didn’t even look at me. He walked up to the bed and I could hear the snick as the knife opened. The boy was good. He didn’t drive it in. He put it in position and pushed. Carl’s body ached, trembled and as I stepped away from the candle the boy saw the mistake and knew he had made his last one. I put everything I could find into the swing that caught the side of his neck and mashed his vertebrae into his spinal cord and he was dead before I eased him to the floor.

Cute. Getting cuter all the time.

I came out of the door with a yell I couldn’t keep inside me and dived at the guy at the table. His frenzied stare of hesitation cost him the second he needed to clear his rod and while he was still digging for it my fingers were ripping into his face and my body smashed him right out of the chair. The gun hit the floor and bounced across the room. My knees slammed into him, brought a scream bubbling out of his mouth that snapped off when my fist twisted his jaw out of shape. He didn’t try for the gun any more. He just reached for his face and tried to cover it but I didn’t let him have the pleasure out of not seeing what was happening. His eyes had to watch everything I did to him until they filmed over and blanked out when the back of his head cracked against the floor. The blood trickled out his nose and ears when I stood over him, a bright red that seemed to match the fire burning in my lungs. I pulled him inside to the other two, tangled his arms around the boy who still held the knife and left them that way.

Then I left. I got out on the street and let the rain wash me clean. I breathed the air until the fire went out, until some of the life I had left back inside crawled into my system again.

The guy sitting in the doorway ten feet away heard me laugh. His head jerked up out of the drunken stupor and he looked at me. Maybe he could see the way my face was and understand what was behind the laugh. The eyes bleary with cheap whisky lost their glassiness and he trembled a little bit, trying to draw back into his doorway. My laugh got louder and he couldn’t stand it, so he stood up and lurched away, looking back twice to make sure I was still there.

I knew where I was. Once you put in time on Second Avenue you never forget it. The store front I came out of was dirty and deserted. At one time it had been a lunch counter, but now all that was left was the grease stains and the FOR RENT sign in the window. The gin mill on the corner was just closing up, the last of the human rubble that inhabited the place drifting across the street until he dissolved into the mist.

I walked slow and easy, another one of the dozens you could see sprawled out away from the rain. Another joe looking for a place to park, another joe who couldn’t find one. I made the police call box on the second corner down, got it open and said hello when I heard the voice answer. I didn’t have to try hard to put a rasp into my voice, I said, “Cooper, you better get somebody down this way fast. Somebody screaming his head off in that empty dog wagon two blocks south.”

Two minutes were all they took. The siren whined through the rain and the squad car passed me with its tires spitting spray. They’d find a nice little mess, all right. The one guy left could talk his head off, but he was still going to cook in the hot squat up the river.

I pulled my wallet out and went through it. Everything was there except money. Even my change was gone. I needed a dime like I never needed one before and there wasn’t even a character around to bum one from. Down the street lights of a diner threw a yellow blob on the sidewalks. I walked toward it, stood outside the door a second looking at the two drunks and the guy with the trombone case perched on the stools.

There wasn’t any more I could lose so I walked in, called the counterman over and tossed my watch on the counter. “I need a dime. You can hold my watch.”

“For a dime? Mac, you nuts? Look, if you need some coffee say so.”

“I don’t need coffee. I want to make a phone call.”

His eyes went up and down me and his mouth rounded into a silent “oh.” “You been rolled, huh?” He fished in his pocket, tossed a dime on the counter and pushed my watch back to me. “Go ahead, mac, I know how it is.”

Pat wasn’t at home. My dime clinked back and I tried his office. I asked for Captain Chambers and he wasn’t there either. The cop on the board wanted to take a message and the captain would take care of it when he came in. I said, “Pal, this kind of message won’t wait. It’s something he’s been working on and if I can’t get word to him right away he’s going to hit the roof.”

The phone dimmed out as the operator spoke away from it. I could hear the hurried exchange of murmurs, then: “We’ll try to contact the captain by radio. Can you leave your phone number?”

I read it off the dial, told him I’d wait and hung up. The counterman was still watching me. There was a steaming hot cup of coffee by an empty stool with a half pack of butts lying alongside it. The guy grinned, nodded to the coffee and made himself a friend. Coffee was about all my stomach would hold, but it sat there inside me like a million bucks in my hand. It took the shakes out of my legs and the ache from my body.

I lit a smoke, relaxed and watched the window. The wind in the street whipped the rain against the plate glass until it rattled. The door opened, a damp blast momentarily freshening the air. Another musician with a fiddle case under his coat sat down tiredly and ordered coffee. Someplace off in the distance a siren moaned, and a minute later another crossed its fading echo. Two more came on top of it, not close, but distant voices racing to a sore spot in the great sprawling sick body of the city.

Corpuscles, I thought. That’s what they were like. White corpuscles getting to the site of the infection. They’d close in and wipe out the parasites and if they were too late they’d call for the carpenter corpuscles to come and rebuild broken tissue around the wound.

I was thinking about it when Pat walked in, tired lines around his eyes, his face set in a frozen expression. There was a twitch in the corner of his mouth he tried to wipe away with the back of his hand.

He came over and sat down. “Who kicked the crap out of you, Mike?”

“I look that bad?”

“You’re a mess.”

I could grin then. Tomorrow, the next day, the day after, maybe, I’d be too sore to move, but right then I could grin. “They reached me but they didn’t hold on to me, chum.”

His eyes got narrow and very, very bright. “There was a dirty little mess not too far from here. That wouldn’t be it, would it?”

“How good is it like it stands?”

Pat’s lips came apart over his teeth. “The one guy left is wanted for three different kills. This one finishes him.”

“The coroner say that?”

“Yeah, the coroner says that. I say that. We have two experts on the spot who say that too but the guy doesn’t say that. The guy doesn’t know what to say. He’s still half out and he says things about a girl named Berga Torn he worked over and when he knew what he did it woke him up and now he won’t say anything. He’s the scaredest clam you ever saw in your life.”

“So it stands?”

“Nobody’ll break it. Now what do you say about it?”

I took a big pull on the butt and stamped it out in the ash tray. “It’s a detail. Right now it doesn’t mean a damn one way or the other to you or me. Someday over a beer I’ll make it into a good story.”

“It better be good,” Pat said, “I have all hell breaking loose around my ears. Evello’s sister came to us with a list of phone calls yesterday and we tracked down the names into the damnedest places you ever saw. We have some of the wheels in the Mafia dangling by their you-know- whats and they’re scramming for cover. They’re going nuts down in Florida and on the Coast the police have pulled in people big enough to make your hair stand on end. Some of ‘em are talking and the thing’s opening wider.”

He passed his hand over his eyes and drew it away slowly. “Damn it, we’re up as far as Washington itself. It makes me sick.”

The shake was back in my legs again. “Talk names, Pat.”

“Names you don’t know and some you do. We have the connections down pat but the ones up top are sitting tight. The Miami police pulled a quick raid on a local big shot and turned up a filing case of information that gives us a line into half the narcotics outlets in the States. Right now the Federal boys have assigned extra men to pick up the stuff and they’re coming home loaded.”

“How about Billy Mist?” I asked him.

“Nothing doing. Not a word on him so far. He can’t be located, anyway.”

“Leo Harmody?”

“You got another case? He’s howling police persecution and threatening to take things up with Congress. He can yell because there’s nothing we can slap him with.”

“And Al Affia’s dead,” I said.

Pat’s head turned toward me, his eyes a sleepy gray. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

“It couldn‘t’ve happened to a better guy.”

“He was chopped up good. Somebody had a little fun.”

I looked at him, lit another smoke and flipped the match in the ash tray where it turned into a charred arc. “How far did you get with him?”

“Not a thing. There wasn’t a recognizable print on that bottle.”

“What’s the word on it, Pat?”

His eyes got sleepier. “His waterfront racket is going sky-high. There’s been two killings down there already. The king is dead, but somebody is ready to take his place.”

The rain had the sound of a rolling snare drum. It was working up in tempo, backed by the duller, more resonant peals of thunder that cracked the sky open. The three drunks stared at the window miserably, hugging their cups as an anchor to keep from drifting out into the night. The fiddle player shrugged, paid his bill and tucked the case back under his coat and left. At least he was lucky enough to grab an empty cab going by.

I said, “Do you have the picture yet, Pat?”

“Yeah, I have a picture,” he said. “It’s the biggest one I ever saw.”

“You’re lost, kid.”

The sleepiness left his eyes. His fingers turned the ash tray around slowly, then he gave me that wry grin of his. “Play it out, Mike.”

I shrugged. “Everything’s coming your way. Now you’re having fun. What started it?”

“Okay, so it began with Berga.”