The Mike Hammer Collection, Volume 2 (80 page)

But Billy still leered.

Billy Mist, who knew where Velda was. Billy Mist who was going to talk before he died. Billy Mist who was going to give me the pleasure of killing him slowly.

It was thinking of Velda that smoothed it. My hands stopped shaking and my mind started thinking again. I looked around the mess I had made of the place, avoiding the eyes on the floor.

Billy had been packing. He had been five minutes away from being killed and he was taking a quick-acting powder. The one suitcase had a week’s supply of clothes in it but he could afford to buy more when he got there because the rest of the space was taken up by packets of new bills.

I was picking the stuff apart when I heard them at the door. They weren’t cops. Not these boys. They wanted in because I was there and nothing was stopping them.

How long ago was it that I asked Berga how stupid could she get?

Now I was the one. Sammy had told me. They were waiting for me. Now in squad cars on the corner of my block. Not for the Ford because by now they’d have figured the switch. So I go busting loose with the pack on my back and now I was up the tree.

Shoulders slammed into the door and a vertical crack showed in it. I walked to the overturned chair, picked up Billy’s rod and kicked the safety off. They were a little stupid too. They knew I was traveling clean but forgot Billy would be loaded. I pumped five fast ones through the wood belly-high and the screams outside made a deafening cacophony that brought more screams from others in the building.

The curses and screams didn’t stop the others. The door cracked again, started to buckle and I turned and ran into the bathroom. There was a barrel bolt on the door made for decency purposes only and wouldn’t hold anything longer than a minute or two. I slid it in place, took my time about opening the bathroom window and sighting along the ledge outside.

I got my feet on the sill, started to go through when my arm swept the bottles from the shelf. Dozens of bottles. A sick man’s paradise and Billy had been a very sick man after all. There was one left my arm didn’t touch and I picked it up. I stared at it, swore lightly and dropped it in my pocket.

The door inside let loose. There was more letting loose too. Shots and shrieks that didn’t belong there and I crawled through the window before I could find out why. I felt along the ledge with my toes, leaning forward at an angle with my hands resting on the building on the other side of the airway. I made the end where the building joined, found handholds on the other sills and went up.

For a change I was glad of the rain. It covered the noises I made, washed clean places for my fingers and toes and when I reached the roof bathed me in its coolness. I lay there on the graveled top breathing the fire out of my lungs, barely conscious of the fury going on in the streets. When I could make it I got across the building, got on the fire escape and crawled down.

Somebody in a dark window was screaming her lungs out telling the world where I was. Shouts answered her from someplace else and two shots whined off into the night. They never found me. I hit the yard and got out of there. Sirens were converging on the place and a hundred yards off the rapid belch of a tommy gun spit a skinful of sudden destruction into the airway.

I laughed my fool head off while I stood there on the sidewalk and felt good about it. In a way it paid to be stupid as long as you overdid it. I was too stupid to figure the boys planted around my apartment would follow me and too stupid to remember there were the Washington boys who would run behind them. It must have made a pretty picture when they joined forces. It was something that had to come. The Mafia wasn’t a gang, it was a government. And governments have armies and armies fight.

The trouble was that while the war raged the leader got away and had time to cover his tracks. I pulled the bottle out of my pocket, looked at it and threw it away.

Not this leader. He wasn’t going anywhere except a hole in the ground.

CHAPTER
13

The office was dark. Water leaked through the hole I had made in the glass and the pieces winked back at me. Nobody at the desk. No beautiful smile, challenging eyes. I knew where to look and pulled the file out. I held a match to it and the pieces clicked in place. I put the card back and went through the rooms.

Off the inner office a door led to stairs that ran up, thickly carpeted stairs that didn’t betray the passage of a person. There was another door at the top and an apartment off it. I kicked my shoes off, laid the change in my pocket on the floor and walked away from the one that showed the light.

There was only one room that was locked, but those kinds of locks never gave me any trouble at all. I stepped inside, eased the door shut and flicked my lighter.

She was laced into an easy chair with a straitjacket, her legs tied down. A strip of adhesive tape was across her mouth and around it were red marks where other tapes had been ripped off to feed her or hear what she had to say. There was a sallowness about her face, a fearful, shrunken look, but the eyes were alive. They couldn’t see me behind the lighter, but they cursed me just the same.

I said, “Hello, Velda,” and the cursing stopped. The eyes didn’t believe until I moved the lighter and the tears wiped out her vision. I took the ropes off, unlaced the jacket and lifted her up easily. The hurt sounds she wanted to make but couldn’t came out in the convulsions of her body. She pressed against me, the tears wetting my face. I squeezed her, ran my hands across her back while I whispered things to her and told her not to be afraid any more. I found her mouth and tasted her, deeply, loving the way she held me and the things she said without really saying anything.

When I could I said, “You all right?”

“I was going to die tonight.”

“Somebody’ll take your place.”

“Now?”

“You won’t be here to see it.” I found the key in my pocket and pressed it in her hand. I gave her my wallet to go with it and pulled her to the door. “Take a cab and find yourself a cop. Find Pat if you can. There’s an address on that key. Go hold what’s in the locker it opens. Can you do that much?”

“Can’t I ...”

“I said get a cop. The bastards know everything there is to know. We can’t lose any time at all ... and most of all I can’t lose you at all. Tomorrow we’ll talk.”

“Tomorrow, Mike.”

“It’s crazy this way. Everything’s crazy. I find you and I’m sending you off again. Damn it, move before I don’t let you go.”

“Tomorrow, Mike,” she said and reached for me again. She wasn’t tired now, she was brand-new again. She was a woman I was never going to let go again ever. She didn’t know it yet, but tomorrow there would be more than talk. I wanted her since I had first seen her. Tomorrow I’d get her. The way she wanted it. Tomorrow she was going to belong to me all the way.

“Say it, Mike.”

“I love you, kitten. I love you more than I’ve ever thought I could love anything.”

“I love you too, Mike.” I could feel her grin. “Tomorrow.”

I nodded and opened the door. I waited until she had gone down the steps and this time walked the other way. To where the light showed.

I pushed it open, leaned against the jamb and when the gray-haired man writing at the table across the room spun around I said, “Doctor Soberin, I presume.”

It caught him so far off base I had time to get halfway across to him before he dipped his hand in the drawer and I had his wrist before he could get the thing leveled. I let him keep the gun in his hand so I could bend it back and hear his fingers break and when he tried to yell I bottled the sound up by smashing my elbow into his mouth. The shattered teeth tore my arm and his mouth became a great hole welling blood. His fingers were broken stubs sticking at odd angles. I shoved him away from me, slashed the butt end of the rod across the side of his head and watched him drop into his chair.

“I got me a wheel,” I said. “The boy at the top.”

Dr. Soberin opened his mouth to speak and I shook my head.

“You’re dead, mister. Starting from now you’re dead. It took me a long time. It didn’t really have to.” I let out a dry laugh at myself. “I’m getting too old for the game. I’m not as fast as I used to be. One time I would have had it made as soon as I rolled it around a little bit.

“The gimmick, doc, there’s always that damned gimmick. The kind you can’t kick out of sight. This time the gimmick was on the bottom of that card your secretary made out on Berga Torn. She asked who sent her and she said William Mist. She signed the card, too. You pulled a cutie on that one. You couldn’t afford to let a respectable dame know your business, and you knew she wouldn’t put her name on a switch. You knew there might be an investigation and didn’t want any suspicious erasures on the card so you simply dug up a name that you could type over Mist to make the letters fit. Wieton comes out pretty well. Unless you looked hard you’d never pick it up.”

He had gone a deathly pale. His hand was up to his mouth trying to stop the blood. It was sickening him and he retched. All that came up was more blood. The hand with the broken fingers looked unreal on the end of his arm. Unreal and painful.

“You took a lot of trouble to get the information Berga had under her hat. A lot of clever thinking went into that deal at the sanitarium. You had it rigged pretty nicely, even to a spot where she could be worked over without anybody getting wise. Sorry I spoiled your plans. You shouldn’t have wrecked my heap.”

Something childish crept into his face. “You ... got ... another one.”

“I’ll keep it too. I didn’t go for the booby trap, doc. That was kid stuff.”

If his face screwed up any tighter he was going to cry. He sat there moaning softly, the complete certainty of it all making him rock in his chair.

I said, “This time I do it your way. I was the only one you were ever afraid of because I was like the men you give orders to. I’m not going to talk to you. Later I’ll go over the details. Later I’ll give my explanations and excuses to the police. Later I’ll get raked over the coals for what I’m going to do now, but what the hell, doc. Like I said, I’m getting old in the game. I don’t care any more.”

He was quiet in his chair. The quiet that terror brings and for once he was knowing the hand of terror himself.

I said, “Doc ...” and he looked at me. No, not me, the gun. The big hole in the end of the gun.

And while he was looking I let him see what came out of the gun.

Doctor Soberin only had one eye left.

I stepped across the body and picked up the phone. I called headquarters and tried to get Pat. He was still out. I had the call transferred to another department and the man I wanted said hello. I asked him for the identification on a dead blonde and he told me to wait.

A minute later he picked up the phone. “Think I got it. Death by drowning. Age, about ...”

“Skip the details. Just the name.”

“Sure, Lily Carver. Prints just came in from Washington. She had ‘em taken while she worked at a war plant.”

I said thanks, held the button down on the phone, let it go and when I heard the dial tone started working on my home number.

She said, “Don’t bother, Mike. I’m right here.”

And she was.

Beautiful Lily with hair as white as snow. Her mouth a scarlet curve that smiled. Differently, now, but still smiling. Her body a tight bundle of lush curves that swelled and moved under a light white terrycloth robe. Lovely Lily who brought the sharpness of an alcohol bath in with her so that it wet her robe until there was nothing there, no hill or valley, no shadow that didn’t come out.

Gorgeous Lily with my .45 in her hand from where she had found it on the dresser.

“You forgot about me, Mike.”

“I almost did, didn’t I.”

There was cold hate coming into her eyes now. Hate that grew as she looked again at the one eye in the body beside the table. “You shouldn’t have done that, Mike.”

“No?”

“He was the only one who knew about me.” The smile left her mouth. “I loved him. He knew about me and didn’t care. I loved him, you crumb you!” The words hissed out of her teeth.

I looked at her the way I did when she first held a gun on me. “Sure. You loved him so much you killed Lily Carver and took her place. You loved him so much you made sure there were no slips in his plan. You loved him so much you set Berga Torn up for the kill and damn near made sure Velda died. You loved him so much you never saw that all he loved was power and money and you were only something he could use.

“You fitted right into the racket. You were lucky once and smart the rest of the time. You reached Al after Velda left but you had time to catch up with her. By the way, did you ever find out why Al died? He was giving friend Billy Mist the needle. Billy knew what had happened when you called him down to tell him his girl friend wasn’t what she was cracked up to be. With Billy that didn’t go and he carved up his playmate. Nice people to have around.”

“Shut up.”

“Shut up hell. You stuck with me all the way. You ducked out because you thought the boys had me once, then came back when you found out I propped them up against a DEAD END sign. You passed the word right under my nose and had Billy packing to blow town. What a deal that was. I even showed you how to get out of my apartment without a tail picking you up. That’s why you’re here now. So what was supposed to happen? You go back to your real identity? Nuts. You’re part of it and you’ll die with it. You played me for a sucker up and down Broadway but it’s over. This isn’t the first time you’ve pointed a rod at me, sugar. The last time was a game, but I didn’t know it. I’m still going to take it away from you. What kind of a guy do you think I am anyway?”

Her face changed as if I had slapped her. For an instant the strangeness was back again. “You’re a deadly man, Mike.”

Then I saw it in her face and she was faster than I was. The rod belched flame and the slug tore into my side and spun me around. There was a crazy spinning sensation, a feeling of tumbling end over end through space, an urge to vomit, but no strength left to vomit with.