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| I, The Jury: " The cops aren't exactly dumb, you know. We can get our own answers." " Not like I can. That's why you buzzed me so fast. You can figure things out as quickly as I can, but you haven't got the ways and means of doing the dirty work. That's where I come in. You'll be right behind me every inch of the way, but when the pinch comes I'll get shoved aside and you slap the cuffs on. That is, if you can shove me aside. I don't think you can." " Okay, Mike, call it your own way. I want you in all right. But I want the killer, too. Don't forget that. I'll be trying to beat you to him. We have scientific facility at our disposal and a lot of men to do the leg work. We're not short in brains, either," he reminded me. " Don't worry, I don't underrate the cops. But cops can't break a guy's arm to make him talk, and they can't shove his teeth in with the muzzle of a .45 to remind him that you aren't fooling. I do my own leg work, and there are a lot of guys who will tell me what I want to know because they know what I'll do to them if they don't. My staff is strictly ex officio, but very practical." My Gun is Quick: I was remembering what Red said, about guys like me never having to pay and I wondered how true it was. " Mike... did you love Nancy?" " Naw, she was a friend. I saw her once and spoke to her a few minutes and we got to be buddies. It was one of those things. Then some son of a bitch killed her." " I'm sorry, Mike. I wish you could like me like that. Do you think you could?" She turned again, and this time she was closer. Her head nestled against my shoulder and she moved my hand up her body until I knew there was no marvel of engineering connected to the bra because there was no bra. And the studded belt she wore was the keystone to the whole ensemble, and when it was unsnapped the whole affair came apart in a whisper of black satin that folded back against the sand until all of her reflected the moonlight from above until I eclipsed the pale brilliance, and there was no sound except that of the waves and our breathing. Then soon even the waves were gone, and there was only the warmth of white skin and little muscles that played under my hand and the fragrance that was her mouth. The redhead had been right. Vengeance is Mine: I palmed that short nosed .32 and laid it across his cheek with a crack that split the flesh open. He rocked back into his chair with his mouth hanging, drooling blood and saliva over his chin. I sat there smiling, but nothing was funny. I said, "Rainey, you've forgotten something. You've forgotten that I'm not a guy that takes any crap. Not from anybody. You've forgotten I've been in business because I stayed alive longer than some guys who didn't want me that way. You've forgotten that I've had some punks tougher than you'll ever be on the end of a gun and I pulled the trigger just to watch their expressions change." He was scared, but he tried to bluff it out anyway. He said, "Why don'tcha try it now, Hammer? Maybe it's different when ya don't have a license to use a rod. Go ahead, why don'tcha try it?" He started to laugh at me when I pulled the trigger of the .32 and shot him in the thigh. He said, "My God!" under his breath and grabbed his leg. I raised the muzzle of the gun until he was looking right into the little round hole that was his ticket to hell. "Dare me some more, Rainey." One Lonely Night: I used to be able to look at myself and grin without giving a damn about how ugly it made me look. Now I was looking at myself the same way those people did back there. I was looking at a big guy with an ugly reputation, a guy who had no earthly reason for existing in a decent, normal society. That's what the judge had said. I was sweating and cold at the same time. Maybe it did happen to me over there. Maybe I did have a taste for death. Maybe I liked it too much to taste anything else. Maybe I was twisted and rotted inside. Maybe I would be washed down the sewer with the rest of all the rottenness sometime. What was stopping it from happening now? Why was I me with some kind of lucky charm around my neck that kept me going when I was better off dead? That's why I parked the car and started walking in the rain. I didn't want to look in that damn mirror any more. So I walked and smoked and climbed to the hump in the bridge where the boats in the river made faces and spoke to me until I had to bury my face in my hands until everything straightened itself out again. I was a killer. I was a murderer, legalized. I had no reason for living. The Big Kill: I was thinking too damn much to be careful. When I stabbed my key in the lock and turned it there was a momentary catch in the tumblers before it went all the way around and I swore out loud as I rammed the door with my shoulder and hit the floor.Something swished through the air over my head and I caught an arm and pulled a squirming, fighting bundle of muscle down on top of me. If I could have reached my rod I would have blown his guts out. His breath was in my face and I brought my knee up, but he jerked out of the way bringing his hand down again and my shoulder went numb after a split second of blinding pain. He tried again with one hand going for my throat, but I got one foot loose and kicked out and up and felt my toe smash onto his groin. The cramp of the pain doubled him over on top of me, his breath sucking in like a leaky tire. Then I got cocky. I thought I had him. I went to get up and he moved. Just once.That thing in his hand smashed against the side of my head and I started to crumple up piece by piece until there wasn't anything left except the sense to see and hear enough to know that he had crawled out of the room and was falling down the stairs outside. Then I thought about the lock on my door and how I had a guy fix it so that I could tell if it had been jimmied open so I wouldn't step into any blind alleys without a gun in my hand, but because of a dame who lay naked and smiling on a bed I wouldn't share, I had forgotten all about it. And that was all. Kiss Me Deadly: "That night I saw someone following me home." Her face had a curious strained look about it. " It's been that way every night since. I don't know if they've found me here yet or not." " Cops?" " Not cops." She said it very simply, very calmly, but couldn't quite hide the terror that tried to scream the answer out. She begged me to say something, but I let her squeeze it out herself. " The police came again, but Berga wouldn't tell them anything." The tongue moistened the lips again. The scarlet was starting to wash away and I could see the natural tones of of wet flesh. " The other men came... they were different from the police. Federal men, I think. They took her away. Before she came back...Those men came." She put something into the last three words that wasn't in the others, some breathless, nameless fear. Her hands were tight balls with the nails biting into the palms. A glassiness had passed over her eyes while she thought about it, then vanished as if afraid it had been seen. " They said I'd die if I talked to anyone." Her hand moved up and covered her mouth. " I'm tired of being scared, " she said. Her head drooped forward, nodding gently to the soft sobs that seemed to stick in her chest. What's the answer? How do you tell them they won't die when they know you're lying about it because they're marked already? The Girl Hunters: The guy made a wry face and shook his head. "You'll...never do it" My tongue ran over my lips without moistening them. "Do what?" "Get her in time." "Who?" "The woman." His eyes closed and for a moment his face relaxed. "The woman Velda." I sat there as if I were paralyzed; for a second totally immobilized, a suddenly frozen mind and body that had solidified into one great silent scream at the mention of a name I had long ago consigned to a grave somewhere. Then the terrible cold was drenched with an even more terrible wash of heat and I sat there with my hands bunched into fists to keep them from shaking. Velda. He was watching me carefully, the glaze in his eyes momentarily gone.He saw what had happened to me when he said the name and there was a peculiar expression of approval in his face. Finally I said, "You knew her?" He barely nodded. " I know her." And again that feeling happened to me, worse this time because I knew he wasn't lying and that she was alive some place. Alive! The Snake: Marv Kania had finally found me. His eyes had death in them, his and mine. His belly was bloated and I could smell the stench of a festering wound, the sickening odor of old blood impregnated into cloth. There was a wildness in his face and his mouth was a tight slash that showed all his teeth. Marv Kania was young, but right there he was as old as death itself. " I was waiting for you, mister." Slowly, I got up. I was going to have to pull against a drawn gun and there wasn't a chance I could make it. He was dying, but the gun in his hand was there with the deft skill of a professional and it never wavered an inch. He let the muzzle drift down from my head until it pointed at my stomach. "Right where I got it, and there's no coming back after that. Everything inside goes. You'll live a little while and you'll hurt like I hurt. You try to move away from it and I put one more in your head." I was thinking fast, wondering how fast I could move away from the shot. He knew what I was going to do and he grinned through the pain he felt. Just to let me know it was no good he made two quick wrist motions to show he still had it and I had it, then he thumbed the hammer back. The Twisted Thing: I worked up a husky mouthful of saliva and spat it as close to his feet as I could. The fat cop spun on his heel and let his lips fold back over his teeth in a sneer. " You gettin' snotty, Hammer?" I stayed slouched in my seat. " Any way you call it, Dilwick," I said insolently. " Just sitting here thinking." Big stuff gave me a dirty grimace. " Thinking...you?" "Yeah. Thinking what you'd look like the next day if you tried that stuff on me." The two cops dragging the little guy out stopped dead still. The other one washing the bloodstains from the seat quit swishing the brush over the wicker and held his breath. Nobody ever spoke that way to Dilwick. Nobody from the biggest politician in the state to the hardest apple that ever stepped out of a pen. Nobody ever did because Dilwick would cut them up into fine pieces with his bare hands and enjoy it. That was Dilwick, the dirtiest, roughest cop who ever walked a beat or swung a nightstick over a skull. Crude, he was. Crude, hard and dirty and afraid of nothing. He'd sooner draw blood from a face than eat and everybody knew it. That's why nobody ever spoke to him that way. That is, nobody except me. Because I'm the same way myself. The Body Lovers: He stood with his back angled to the wall. To an indifferent observer he was simply in idle conversation, but it wasn't like that at all. This was an instinctive gesture of survival, being in constant readiness for an attack. His head didn't turn and his eyes didn't seem to move, but I knew he saw us. I could feel the hackles on the back of my neck stiffening and I knew he felt the same way. Dog was meeting dog. Nobody knew it but the dogs and they weren't telling. He was bigger than I thought. The suggestion of power I had seen in his photographs was for real. When he moved it was with the ponderous grace of some jungle animal, dangerously deceptive, because he could move a lot faster if he had to. When we were ten feet away he pretended to see us for the first time and a wave of charm washed the cautious expression from his face and he stepped out to greet Dulcie with outstretched hand. But it wasn't her he was seeing. It was me he was watching. I was one of his own kind. I couldn't be faked out and wasn't leashed by the proprieties of society. I could lash out and kill as fast as he could and of all the people in the room, I was the potential threat. I knew what he felt because I felt the same way myself. Survival... Zero: The two young men turned and they didn't smile because they were Woody Ballinger's two boys, Carl and Sammy, and for one brief instant, there was something in their faces that didn't belong in that atmosphere of joviality and the little move they instinctively made that shielded them behind the others in back of them was involuntary enough to stretch a tight-lipped grin across my face that told them I could know. Could. From away back out of the years I got that feeling across my shoulders and up my spine that said things were starting to smell right and if you kept pushing the walls would go down and you could charge in and take them all apart until there was nothing left but the dirt they were made of. The Killing Man: I turned the knob, pushed it open and just stood there a second because something was wrong, sure as hell wrong, and the total silence was as loud as a wild scream. I had the .45 in my hand, crouched and edged to one side, listening, waiting, watching. Velda wasn't at her desk. Her pocketbook sat there and a paper cup of coffee had spilled over and stained the sheaf of papers before dripping to the floor. And I didn't have to move far before I saw her body crumpled up against the wall, half her face a mass of clotted blood that seeped from under her hair. The door to my office was partially open and there was somebody still in there, sitting at my desk, part of his arm clearly visible. I couldn't play it smart. I had to explode and rammed through the door in a blind fury ready... Black Alley: "It isn't going to be easy getting through this engagement, kitten, but let's keep it cool until we do." "I hope you're saying that because you're still weak." I gave her another grin, flipped out Patterson's .45 and pressed it into her palm. "Sure I am, doll, sure I am," I said. She looked at the slug, smiled and dropped it in her cleavage where it fell into her bra. I suppose. By the time I got home I knew it was a lie. The day had washed me out and even pushing the button in the elevator was hard work. The pain in my belly was coming back, sharp jabs of it with each beat of my pulse. When I got inside I started the bathwater going, then got undressed so there would be no waiting period before I got covered by the soothing warmth of the suds. I should of listened to Morgan. My body wasn't fifteen years old anymore. It was injured and hurting bad and all I could do was sweat it out until nature fused with medication and I could reach a normal peak again. Twice, I had to run more hot water into the tub and an hour later the relief started. I sat there for another ten minutes, then eased out and sat under the infrared light in the ceiling until I was dried off. Even thinking about what could have happened at Le Cirque gave me the jumps. Either of those guys could have cleaned my plow if they had gotten past my reputation. Luckily, all they could see was that .45 slug. If I had a bullet, then I had a gun. If I had a gun, then I sure would have used it if those clowns had made a move. That was real positive thinking for them. For me it was stupid. I looked at my face in the mirror over the sink. It was pretty haggard looking. I said, "No more, Mikey boy. Quit being a wise guy." |
