I, The Jury:
I SHOOK THE RAIN FROM MY HAT and walked into the room. Nobody said a word. They stepped back politely and I could feel their eyes on me. Pat Chambers was standing by the door to the bedroom trying to steady Myrna. The girl's body was racking with dry sobs. I walked over and put my arms around her.
"Take it easy, kid," I told her. "Come on over here and lie down." I led her to a studio couch that was against the far wall and sat her down. She was in pretty bad shape. One of the uniformed cops put a pillow down for her and she stretched out.
Pat motioned me over to him and pointed to the bedroom. "In there, Mike," he said.
In there. The words hit me hard. In there was my best friend lying on the floor dead. The body. Now I could call it that. Yesterday it was Jack Williams, the guy that shared the same mud bed with me through two years of warfare in the stinking slime of the jungle. Jack, the guy who said he'd give his right arm for a friend and did when he stopped a bastard of a Jap from slitting me in two. He caught the bayonet in the biceps and they amputated his arm.
Pat didn't say a word. He let me uncover the body and feel the cold face. For the first time in my life I felt like crying. "Where did he get it, Pat?"
"In the stomach. Better not look at it. The killer carved the nose off a forty-five and gave it to him low."
I threw back the sheet anyway and a curse caught in my throat. Jack was in shorts, his one hand still clutching his belly in agony. The bullet went in clean, but where it came out left a hole big enough to cram a fist into.
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My Gun is Quick:
WHEN YOU sit at home comfortably folded up in a chair beside a fire, have you ever thought what goes on outside there? Probably not. You pick up a book and read about things and stuff, getting a vicarious kick from people and events that never happened. You're doing it now, getting ready to fill in a normal life with the details of someone else's experiences. Fun, isn't it? You read about life on the outside thinking about how maybe you'd like it to happen to you, or at least how you'd like to watch it. Even the old Romans did it, spiced their life with action when they sat in the Coliseum and watched wild animals rip a bunch of humans apart, reveling in the sight of blood and terror. They screamed for joy and slapped each other on the back when murderous claws tore into the live flesh of slaves and cheered when the kill was made. Oh, it's great to watch, all right. Life through a keyhole. But day after day goes by and nothing like that ever happens to you so you think that it's all in books and not in reality at all and that's that. Still good reading, though. Tomorrow night you'll find another book, forgetting what was in the last and live some more in your imagination. But remember this: there are things happening out there. They go on every day and night making Roman holidays look like school picnics. They go on right under your very nose and you never know about them. Oh yes, you can find them all right. All you have to do is look for them. But I wouldn't if I were you because you won't like what you'll find. Then again, I'm not you and looking for those things is my job. They aren't nice things to see because they show people up for what they are. There isn't a coliseum any more, but the city is a bigger bowl, and it seats more people. The razor-sharp claws aren't those of wild animals but man's can be just as sharp and twice as vicious. You have to be quick, and you have to be able, or you become one of the devoured, and if you can kill first, no matter how and no matter who, you can live and return to the comfortable chair and the comfortable fire. But you have to be quick. And able. Or you'll be dead.
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Vengeance is Mine:
THE GUY WAS DEAD AS HELL. He lay on the floor in his pajamas with his brains scattered all over the rug and my gun was in his hand. I kept rubbing my face to wipe out the fuzz that clouded my mind but the cops wouldn't let me. One would pull my hand away and shout a question at me that made my head ache even worse and another would slap me with a wet rag until I felt like I had been split wide open.
I said, "Goddamn it, stop!"
Then one of them laughed and shoved me back on the bed.
I couldn't think. I couldn't remember. I was wound up like a spring and ready to bust. All I could see was the dead guy in the middle of the room and my gun. My gun! Somebody grabbed at my arm and hauled me upright and the questions started again. That was as much as I could take. I gave a hell of a kick and a fat face in a fedora pulled back out of focus and started to groan, all doubled up. Maybe I laughed, I don't know. Something made a course, cackling sound.
Somebody said, "I'll fix the bastard for that!" but before he could the door opened and the feet coming in stopped all the chatter except the groan and I knew Pat was there.
My mouth opened and my voice said, "Good old Pat, always to the rescue."
He didn't sound friendly. "Of all the damn fool times to be drunk. Did anyone touch this man!" Nobody answered. The fat face in the fedora was slumped in a chair and groaned again.
"He kicked me. The son of a bitch kicked me ...right here."
Another voice said, "That's right, Captain. Marshall was questioning him and he kicked him."
Pat grunted an answer and bent over me. "All right Mike, get up. Come on, get up." His hand wrapped around my wrist and levered me into a right angle on the edge of the bed.
"Cripes, I feel lousy," I said.
I'm afraid you're going to feel a lot worse." He took the wet rag and handed it to me. "Wipe your face off. You look like hell."
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One Lonely Night:
NOBODY ever walked across the bridge, not on a night like this. The rain was misty enough to be almost fog-like, a cold gray curtain that separated me from the pale ovals of white that were faces locked behind the steamed-up windows of the cars that hissed by. Even the brilliance that was Manhatten by night was reduced to a few sleepy, yellow lights off in the distance.
Some place over there I had left my car and started walking, burying my head in the collar of my raincoat, with the night pulled in around me like a blanket. I walked and I smoked and I flipped the spent butts ahead of me and watched them arch to the pavement and fizzle out with one last wink. If there was life behind the windows of the buildings on either side of me, I didn't notice it. The street was mine, all mine. They gave it to me gladly and wondered why I wanted it so nice and all alone.
There were others like me, sharing the dark and the solitude, but they were huddled in the recessions of the doorways not wanting to share the wet and the cold. I could feel their eyes follow me briefly before they turned inward to their thoughts again.
So I followed the hard concrete footpaths of the city through the towering canyons of the buildings and never noticed when the sheer cliffs of brick and masonry diminished and disappeared altogether, and the footpath led into a ramp then on to the spidery steel skeleton that was the bridge linking two states.
I climbed to the hump in the middle and stood there leaning on the handrail with a butt in my fingers, watching the red and green lights of the boats in the river below. They winked at me and called in low, throaty notes before disappearing into the night.
Like eyes and faces. And voices.
I buried my face in my hands until everything straightened itself out again, wondering what the judge would say if he could see me now. Maybe he'd laugh because I was supposed to be so damn tough, and here I was with hands that wouldn't stand still and an empty feeling inside my chest.
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The Big Kill:
IT WAS ONE OF THOSE NIGHTS when the sky came down and wrapped itself around the world. The rain clawed at the windows of the bar like an angry cat and tried to sneak in every time some drunk lurched in the door. The place reeked of stale beer and soggy men with enough cheap perfume thrown in to make you sick.
Two drunks with a nickel between them were arguing over what to play on the juke box until a tomato in a dress that was too tight a year ago pushed the key that started off something noisy and hot. One of the drunks wanted to dance and she gave him a shove. So he danced with the other drunk.
She saw me sitting there with my stool tipped back against the cigarette machine and change of a fin on the bar, decided I could afford a wet evening for two and walked over with her hips waving hello.
"You're new around here, ain't ya?"
"Nah. I've been here since six o'clock."
"Buy me a drink?" She crowded in next to me, seeing how much of herself she could plaster against my legs.
"No." It caught her by surprise and she quit rubbing.
"Don't gentlemen usually buy ladies a drink?" she said. She tried to lower her eyelids seductively but one came down farther than the other and made her look stupid.
"I'm not a gentleman, kid."
""I ain't a lady either so buy me a drink."
So I bought her a drink. A jerk in a discarded army overcoat down at the end of the bar was getting the eye from the bartender because he was nursing the last drop in his glass, hating to go outside in the rain, so I bought him a drink too.
The bartender took my change with a frown. "Them bums'll bleed you to death, feller."
"I don't have any blood left," I told him. The dame grinned and rubbed herself against my knees some more.
"I bet you got plenty of everything for me."
"Yeah, but what I got you ain't getting because you probably got more than me."
"What?"
"Forget it."
She looked at my face a second, then edged away. "You ain't very sociable, mister."
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Kiss Me Deadly:
"ALL I SAW was the dame standing there in the glare of the headlights waving her arms like a huge puppet and the curse I spit out filled the car and my own ears. I wrenched the wheel over, felt the rear end start to slide, brought it out with a splash of power and almost ran up the side of a cliff as the car fishtailed. The brakes bit in, gouging a furrow in the shoulder, then jumped to the pavement and held.
Somehow I had managed a sweeping curve around the babe. For a few seconds she had been living on stolen time because instead of getting out of the way she had tried to stay in the beam of the headlights. I sat there and let myself shake. The butt that had fallen out of my mouth had burned a hole in the leg of my pants and I flipped it out the window. The stink of burned rubber and brake lining hung in the air like smoke and I was thinking of every damn thing I ever wanted to say to a hairbrained woman so I could have it ready when I got my hands on her.
That was as far as I got. She was there in the car beside me, the door slammed shut and she said, "Thanks, mister."
Easy, feller, easy. She's a fruitcake. Don't plow her. Not yet. Hold your breath a minute, let it out easy, then maybe bend her over the fender and paddle her tail until she gets some sense in her head. Then boot her the hell out and make her walk the rest of the way home.
I fumbled out another cigarette, but she reached it before I did. For the first time I noticed her hands shaking as hard as mine were. I lit hers, got one out for me and lit that one too. "How stupid can you get?" I said.
She bit the words off. "Pretty stupid."
Behind me the lights of another car were reaching around a curve. Her eyes flicked back momentarily, fear pulling their corners tight. "You going to sit here all night, mister?"
"I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm thinking of throwing you over that cliff over there."
The headlights shone in the car through the rear window, bathed the roadway in light then swept on past. In the second that I had a good look at her she was rigid, her face frozen expressionlessly. When only the red dot of the taillight showed in front of us she let out her breath and leaned back against the seat.
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The Girl Hunters:
They found me in the gutter. The night was the only thing I had left and not much of it at that. I heard the car stop, the doors open and shut and two voices talking. A pair of arms jerked me to my feet and held me there.
"Drunk," the cop said.
The other one turned me around into the light. "He don't smell bad. That cut on his head didn't come from a fall either."
"Mugged?"
"Maybe."
I didn't give a damn which way they called it. They were both wrong anyhow. Two hours ago I was drunk. Not now. Two hours ago I was a roaring lion. Then the bottle sailed across the room. No lion left now.
Now was a time when I wasn't anything. Nothing was left inside except the feeling a ship must have when it's torpedoed, sinks and hits bottom.
A hand twisted into my chin and lifted my face up. "Ah, the guy's a bum. Somebody messed him up a little bit."
"You'll never make sergeant, son. That's a hundred-buck suit and it fits too good to be anything but his own. The dirt is fresh, not worn on."
"Okay, Daddy, let's check his wallet, see who he is and run him in."
The cop with the deep voice chuckled, patted me down and came up with my wallet. "Empty," he said.
Hell, there had been two bills in it when I started out. It must have been a pretty good night. Two hundred bucks' worth of night.
I heard the cop whistle between his teeth. "We got ourselves a real fish."
"Society boy? He don't look so good for a society boy. Not with his face. He's been splashed."
"Uh-uh. Michael Hammer, it says here on the card. He's a private jingle who gets around."
"So he gets tossed in the can and he won't get around so much."
The arm under mine hoisted me a little straighter and steered me toward the car. My feet moved; lumps on the end of a string that swung like pendulums.
"You're only joking," the cop said. "There are certain people who wouldn't like you to make such noises with your mouth."
"Like who?"
"Captain Chambers."
It was the other cop's turn to whistle.
"I told you this jingle was a fish," my pal said. "Go buzz the station. Ask what we should do with him. And use a phone--we don't want this on the air."
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The Snake:
You walk down the street at night. It's raining out. The only sound is that of your own feet. There are city sounds too, but these you don't hear because at the end of the street is the woman you've been waiting for for seven long years and each muffled tread of your footsteps takes you closer and closer and the sound of them marks off seconds and days and months of waiting.
Then, suddenly, you're there, outside a dark-faced building, a brownstone anachronism that stares back dully with the defiant expression of the moronic and you have an impending sense of being challenged.
What would it be like, I thought. Was she still beautiful? Had seven years of hell changed her as it had me? And what did you say to a woman you loved and thought was killed because you pulled a a stupid play? How do you go from seven years ago to now?
Only a little while ago a lot of other feet were pointing this way, searching for this one house on this one street, but now mine were the only ones left to find it because the rest belonged to dead men or those about to die.
The woman inside was important now. Perhaps the most important in the world. What she knew would help destroy an enemy when she told it. My hands in my pockets balled into hard knots to keep from shaking and for a moment the throbbing ache of the welts and cuts that laced my skin stopped.
And I took my first step.
There were five more, then the V code on the doorbell marked Case, the automatic clicking of the lock and I was in the vestibule of the building under a dim yellow light from a single overhead bulb and down the shadowed hallway to the rear was the big door. Behind it lay seven years ago. I tapped out a Y on the panel and waited, then tapped a slow R and the bolt slid back and th knob turned and there she stood with the gun still ready if something had gone wrong.
Even in that pale light I could see that she was more beautiful than ever, the black shadow of her hair framing a face I had seen every night in the misery of sleep for so long. Those deep brown eyes still had that hungry look when they watched mine and the lush fullness of her mouth glistened with a damp warmth of invitation.
Then, as though there had never been those seven years, I said, "Hello, Velda."
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The Twisted Thing:
The little guy's face was a bloody mess. Between the puffballs of blue-black flesh that used to be eyelids, the dull gleam of shock-deadened pupils watched Dilwick uncomprehendingly. His lips were swollen things of lacerated skin, with slow trickles of blood making crooked paths from the corners of his mouth through the stubble of a beard to his chin, dripping onto a stained shirt.
Dilwick stood just outside the glare of the lamp, dangling like the Sword of Damocles over the guy's head. He was sweating too. His shirt clung to the meaty expanse of his huge neck. He pushed his beefy hand further into the leather glove and swung. The solid smack of his open hand on the little guy's jaw was nasty. His chair went over backward and his head cracked against the concrete floor of the room like a ripe melon. Dilwick put his hands on his hips and glared down at the caricature that once was human.
"Take him out and clean 'im up. Then get 'im back here." Two other cops came out of the darkness and righted the chair. One yanked the guy to his feet and dragged him to the door.
Lord, how I hated their guts. Grown men, they were supposed to be. Four of them in there taking turns pounding a confession from a guy who had nothing to say. And I had to watch it.
It was supposed to be a warning to me. Be careful, it said, when you try to withhold information from Dilwick you're looking for a broken skull. Take a look at this guy for example, then spill what you know and stick around so I, the Great Dilwick, can get at you when I want you.
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.
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The Body Lovers:
I heard the screams through the thin mist of night and kicked the car to a stop at the curb. It wasn't that screams were new to the city, but they were out of place in this part of New York that was being gutted to make room for a new skyline. There was nothing but almost totally disemboweled buildings and piles of rubble for three blocks, every scrap of value long since carted away and only the junk wanted by nobody left remaining.
And there was a quality to the screams that was out of place too. There was total hysteria that only complete terror can induce and it was made by a child.
I grabbed the flashlight from the glove compartment and climbed out, picked a path through the mounds of refuse and ran into the shadows, getting closer to frenzied shrieks, not knowing what to expect. Anything could have happened there. A kid playing in those decayed and ruptured ruins could be trapped without having to do more than nudge a board or jar an already weakened wall. Aside from the occasional street lamps, there wasn't a light for blocks, and even the traffic detoured the section that handled the heavy equipment of the demolition crews.
But there wasn't any accident. He was just sitting there, a kid about eight in baggy jeans and a sweater, holding two hands clawlike against his face while his body wracked with his screaming. I reached him, shook him to get his attention, but in didn't do any good. I had seen the signs before. The kid was hysterical and in a state of shock, his entire body rigid with fear, his eyes like two great white marbles rolling in his head.
Then I saw what he was screaming about.
They had dropped the body behind a pile of cement blocks from a partly shattered wall, pulling a broken section of sheetrock over to hide it from casual view. But there's nothing casual about a little kid who liked to play in junk and found himself stumbling over the mutilated body of what had been a redheaded woman. At one time she would have been beautiful, but death had erased all that.
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Survival... Zero:
They had left him for dead in the middle of a pool of blood in his own bedroom, his belly slit open like gaping barn doors, the hilt of the knife wedged against his sternum. But the only trouble was that he had stayed alive somehow, his life pumping out, managing to knock the telephone off the little table and dial me. Now he was looking up at me with seconds left and all he could do was force out the words, "Mike ...there was no reason."
I didn't try to fake him out. He knew what was happening. I said, "Who, Lippy?"
His lips fought to frame the sentence. "Nobody I ...not the kind ...No reason, Mike. No reason."
And then Lippy Sullivan died painfully but quickly.
I went out in the hallway of the shabby brownstone rooming house and walked up to the front apartment that had SUPER scrawled across the top panels in faded white paint and gave it a rap with the toe of my shoe. Inside, somebody swore hoarsely and a chair scraped across bare wood. Two locks and a bolt rasped in their sockets and the door cracked open on a safety chain.
The fat-faced guy with the beery breath squinted up at me in the light from behind him, then his eyes narrowed, not liking what he saw. "Yeah?"
"You got a phone, buddy?"
"What if I do?"
"You can let me use it."
"Drop dead." He started to close the door, but I already had my foot in the crack.
I said, "Open up."
For a second his jowls seemed to sag, then he got his beer courage up again. "You a cop? Let's see your badge."
"I'll show you more than a badge in a minute."
This time he didn't try smart-mouthing me. I let him close the door, slide the chain off, then pushed in past him. The room was a home-grown garbage collection, but I found the phone behind a pile of empty six-pack cartons, dialed my number and a solid Brooklyn voice said, "Homicide South, Sergeant Woods."
"Captain Chambers in? This is Mike Hammer."
Behind me a beer can popped open and the fat guy slid onto a chair.
When the phone was picked up I said, "Hi, Pat. I got a stiff for you."
Softly, Pat muttered, "Damn, Mike ..."
"Hell," I told him, "I didn't do it."
"Okay, give me the details."
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The Killing Man:
Some days hang over Manhatten like a huge pair of unseen pincers, slowly squeezing the city until you can hardly breathe. A low growl of thunder echoed up the cavern of Fith Avenue and I looked up to where the sky started at the seventy-first floor of the Empire State Building. I could smell the rain. It was the kind that hung above the orderly piles of concrete until it was soaked with dust and debris and when it came down it wasn't rain at all but the sweat of the city.
When I reached my corner I crossed against the light and ducked into the ground-level arcade of my office building. It wasn't often that I bothered coming in at all on Saturday, but the client couldn't make it any other time except noon today, and from what Velda had told me, he was representing some pretty big interests.
Two others were waiting for the elevator, one an architect in the penthouse suite and the other a delivery boy from the deli down the street. Both of them looked bored and edgy. The day had gotten to them ,too. When the elevator arrived, we got in, I punched my button and rode it up to the eighth floor.
On an ordinary day the corridor would have been filled with the early lunch crowd, but now the emptiness gave the place an eerie feeling, as though I were a trespasser and hidden eyes were watching me. Except that I was the only one there and the single sign of life was the light behind my office door.
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.
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Black Alley:
The phone rang.
It was a thing that had been sitting here, black and quiet like a holstered gun, unlisted, unknown to anybody, used only for local outgoing calls, and when it was triggered it had the soft, muted sound of a silenced automatic. The first ring was a warning sound. The second time would be death calling.
Eight months ago I had come to Florida to die. The two bullets that I had caught in the firefight under the West Side Drive had churned into bodily areas that weren't made to be violated like that and the blood that had spilled out of me was just too much, so the others, the walking wounded and the repairable, were taken care of first by the few medics that who got to the battleground early. The dead and the dying were pushed aside or isolated in the section of no return.
The temperature was six below zero and it kept me dying on the spot because the blood coagulated and clotted in ugly smears of cloth and skin and the pain hadn't started yet, so when the little fat guy who saw my eyes open and still bright pulled me away from the carnage he was almost in the shock I was going into. Nobody would listen to him. He was a drunk. I was nearly dead.
Sometimes the body responds to a stimulus that can't be explained. He got me upright. I walked woodenly, dyingly. I was sat in an old car. The fat man rolled down the windows. The blood stayed frozen. My hands were numb and I couldn't feel my feet. Idly, I wondered what frostbite was like. Breathing was a thing that was happening, but at a pace that said it could slow, then stop at any time. A dull, squeezing sensation of pain was beginning to gnaw on my insides and I knew that eventually, and very soon, it would grow into a terrible, devastating animal with an awful hunger and I would be eaten alive by it.
I wanted to scream but nothing would come out. |
