Lady, go die (mike hammer) Read online

  Lady, go die

  ( Mike Hammer )

  Mickey Spillane

  Max Allan Collins

  Mickey Spillane, Max Allan Collins

  Lady,go die

  CHAPTER ONE

  They were kicking the hell out of the little guy.

  Halfway down the alley between two wooden storefront buildings, shadows in the moonlight did an evil dance, three goons circling around a whimpering pile of bones down on the gravel. The big guys seemed to be trying for field goals, their squirming prey pulled in on himself like a barefoot fetus in a ragged t-shirt and frayed dungarees. Blood soaked through the white cotton like irregular polka dots, and moans accelerated into ragged screams whenever a hard-toed shoe put one between the goal posts.

  “Mike,” Velda whispered, grasping my arm.

  Two of the baggy-suit bastards had hats jammed on their skulls, the other one, the biggest, was bare-headed with a butch cut so close to the scalp he might have been bald.

  I said a nasty word, took a last drag on the cig and sent it spinning into the deserted street. I slipped out of my sportcoat and handed it to my raven-haired companion, who was frowning at me, though those big beautiful brown eyes stayed wide. I held up a hand to her like a crossing guard, and she just nodded.

  “Where is the dame?” the bare-headed brute demanded. “We played games long enough, Poochie! You must’ve seen something!”

  Like the man said, it was none of my business. I was on a weekend getaway with my lovely secretary, trying to ease the pressure of big city life. Just before ten p.m. we’d arrived in Sidon, eighty miles out on Long Island, a little recreational hamlet in Suffolk County. We left my heap in the hotel lot and were having a nice cool evening stroll along the boardwalk, checking out the two-block business section of a little burg that had already gone to bed.

  “You wanna die tonight, Poochie?” the big guy was saying. He had three inches on my six feet, and forty pounds on my one-ninety, and there was fat on him, but muscle, too.

  And the hell of it was, I knew the son of a bitch.

  “You can die right here, Poochie! We’ll drop your sorry butt in a hole in the woods somewhere, no one the wiser.”

  I let the moonlight frame me in the mouth of the alley as I said, “You haven’t changed much, Dekkert. Little fatter.”

  His bully boy associates froze; one in mid-kick almost lost his balance. That was worth a grin.

  “Who is that?” Dekkert asked, turning toward me with that stubbly bullet head like a badly superimposed photo over his bulky body. He’d been handsome once, a real lady killer, before his nose became a nebulous thing that had been broken past resemblance to any standard breathing apparatus.

  Once by me.

  “I heard you were back in the cop business,” I said. “I just didn’t know Sidon was the lucky winner. You won the sweepstakes yourself when Pat Chambers didn’t get your fat ass tossed in the pokey, for all the graft you took.”

  “…Hammer?”

  I was within a few feet of them now-him and his two cronies, a skinny one whose kicks couldn’t have hurt much and a broad-shouldered one with the stupid features of a high school star athlete too dumb to land a college scholarship.

  Dekkert moved away from his victim, who was curled up crying. He faced me, close enough that I could smell the onions. “What are you doing in Sidon, Hammer?”

  “Just a little getaway.”

  “Come back in a couple of weeks, after the season starts. Show you a good time.”

  “Like you’re showing that poor little bastard?”

  He thumped my chest with a thick finger.

  “This is police business, Hammer. Official interrogation in a missing persons case. Why don’t you roll on down the road? Wilcox is a more year-round kind of place than Sidon.”

  He gave me a gentle shove.

  “So long, Hammer.”

  I laughed. “Police business, huh? Usually interrogations take place at police headquarters. Or is this alley the new Sidon HQ?”

  This shove wasn’t so gentle.

  “So long, Hammer.”

  The right I sent into his pan would have broken that nose if there had been enough cartilage left to matter. But the blow still managed to send ribbons of scarlet streaming from his nostrils and down his surprised expression. My left doubled him over, and then my right and left clasped in prayer to smash him on the back of his fat neck, sending him onto the alley floor in a sprawling belly flop.

  I was on his back, rubbing his face in the gravel, when his two clowns tried to haul me up and off. An elbow in the athlete’s balls took the fight right out of him, and a sideways kick into the skinny one sent him careening to hit the alley wall like I tossed a load of kindling there. Skinny boy slid down and sat and thought about his lot in life.

  I chuckled to myself, wiping my hands off on the back of Dekkert’s suitcoat. The little beaten-up figure down the alley was silent, like a child in its crib sleeping sound. The alley dead-ended in a wooden fence, so he wasn’t going anywhere.

  Still on his belly, Dekkert was the one doing the whimpering and moaning now, and so were his boys. I took the guns off all three of them, since my rod was in my suitcase, and rained slugs onto the gravel out of three Police Special revolvers before I tossed each of them with one-two-three clunks on the gravel, their cylinders hanging out, near their fallen owners.

  The skinny one found his voice. “We’re… we’re cops…”

  “Nah. You jokers aren’t cops. You’re hick rake-off artists.”

  The guy I’d kicked in the nuts was sitting up, hunkered, hands in his lap like he was taking inventory. He spoke with the quaver of a spanked kid.

  “You… you better leave town right now, Mister.”

  “Go to hell. I know my legal rights. Three shifty-looking characters were beating up some helpless joe, and I put a stop to it.”

  Dekkert had rolled over, but otherwise was not making a move. Bits of gravel were imbedded in his face and his forehead was scratched like a cat got at it. His nose had stopped bleeding but the lower half of his puss was a smear of red mingled with the yellow of puke on his lips.

  Just like the last time he screwed with me.

  “If you want me,” I said, tossing them a friendly wave, “I’ll be at the Sidon Arms.”

  I went over to the small, battered prone figure they had called Poochie. I helped him to his feet, gently, and he whimpered some more, but his round-ish face-a child’s not quite formed face-looked up at me, eyes bright with both tears and relief, and made a smile out of puffy, blood-caked lips.

  “Thanks, mister. Who… who are you?”

  “Why, I’m the Lone Ranger, kid. And wait till you get a load of Tonto.”

  Pulling the trigger had been easy. Living with it had been hard. Crazy rage got replaced with a joyless emptiness. No emotion, no feeling. I felt as dead as the one I’d shot.

  I had evened the score for a friend but the cost had been high-a woman I loved was dead, and the bullet that sent the killer to hell had along the way punched a gaping hole in my soul. I tried to fill it with booze, or at least cauterize the damn thing, spending most of my evenings at Joe Mast’s joint, trying not to fall off a bar stool and usually failing. But it hadn’t worked. Nothing worked.

  My best friend in the world, Pat Chambers, was a cop. We had been on the NYPD together, till my hot head got me assigned to a desk where I soon traded in my badge for a private license and a shingle that said, “Hammer Investigating Agency.”

  I couldn’t stay a cop. All those rules and regulations drove me bugs. I had a more direct method for dealing with the bastards that preyed upon society-I just killed their
damn asses. Killed them in a way that was nice and legal. Self-defense, it’s called, and it catches in the craw of your typical self-righteous judge, but none of them and nobody else could do a damn thing about it. They couldn’t even take my license away. Because I knew just how to play it.

  Just the same, Pat and I stayed friends, maybe because his scientific approach meshed well with my instinctive style-he was fingerprints and test tubes where I was motives and people. I could do things he couldn’t, and he had resources I didn’t. Usually private eyes and police are like oil and water, but what began as a convenient way for two different kinds of cops to feed each other information turned into a real and lasting friendship.

  So when he showed up on the stool next to me, training his gray-blue eyes on me like benign gun barrels, I said, “What’s a nice guy like you doing in a joint like this?”

  “Velda is getting worried.”

  Velda was my secretary, and my right arm. She had been with me since I set up shop and I hadn’t made a pass at her yet. But there was something special between us that wasn’t just boss and employee.

  “Tell her to lay off the mother-hen routine,” I said. I poured some whiskey in a glass and then down my throat.

  “You need to let it go, Mike. It’s ancient history.”

  “Not even a year, Pat.”

  “Would you change it? Would you go back and not pull that trigger?”

  “No.”

  “Then it’s time to move on.”

  I knew he was right. But I’d fallen into a goddamn self-pitying rut. Work five days a week, drink five nights a week. And on weekends, drink the whole damn time. Being numb was good. You didn’t think so much. But if I kept this up, I’d have a liver that even the medics couldn’t recognize as a human organ.

  Still, I said, “Blow, Pat. I’m a big boy. I can take care of myself.”

  “No,” Velda said, “you can’t.”

  I hadn’t even seen the big, beautiful dark-haired doll settle her lovely fanny onto the other stool beside me. I must have been far gone.

  “And we’re not about to let you crawl in that bottle,” she said, “and drown yourself.”

  I gave them a ragged laugh. Hell’s bells-they had me surrounded. I pushed the glass and the whiskey away.

  “Okay,” I said. “Officially on the wagon. Now. What do you suggest?”

  “First,” Pat said, “you go home and sleep till you’re sober.”

  “Second,” Velda said, “we go off somewhere and rest. Someplace where there are no women and no bad guys.”

  “That sounds dull as hell.”

  Pat said, “It’ll be good for you. You and Velda take the weekend for some R and R. Someplace out on Long Island, maybe.”

  Velda said, “What was that little town you and your folks used to go out to? Before the war?”

  “Sidon,” I said. I’d been there a couple times after the war, too. But not for a year or two. “It’ll be dead out there. The season doesn’t start for a couple of weeks.”

  “Right,” Velda said. “The weather’s beautiful just now, nice and sunny and warm but not hot. The beach, the ocean, it’ll be like a dream.”

  “Instead of this nightmare,” Pat said, slapping at my glass, “that you been wrapping yourself up in.”

  I turned to Velda. “You’re going along?”

  “Sure,” she said easily. “Why not? I got a new two-piece bathing suit I want to try out.”

  “One of those bikini deals?” I said, getting interested.

  She nodded.

  “Hey, I’m game, baby, but I’ll be recuperating, you know? From drink and debauchery and a general state of depression? You’ll need to stay right at my bedside.”

  “Separate rooms, Mike,” she said crisply, but she was smiling. “I’ll play nursemaid and babysitter, only I require my own separate quarters.”

  “Might as well take you along instead,” I said to Pat, “for all the fun I’ll have.”

  He raised an eyebrow and shrugged.

  Velda frowned. “No offense, Pat, but you’re staying home. I’m not equipped to handle all the trouble you two could get into.”

  She looked equipped enough to handle anything from where I sat.

  “Now,” she was saying, climbing off her stool, “can you stand up, or do we have to escort you?”

  I made it onto my own two feet. I may have leaned on them a little. A little more on Velda. She was softer and smelled a lot better.

  The little guy could walk, but just barely. Velda had found some old sandals near the mouth of the alley that were apparently Poochie’s, lost in the struggle. Anyway, they fit him. He wasn’t saying anything, but he could stumble along with me on one side and Velda on the other, each holding onto an arm.

  We trooped him through the lobby of the Sidon Arms, the only one of the little town’s four lodging options open year-round. The building was wooden and old but clean. The lobby was large enough to accommodate a summer crowd but nothing fancy, strictly pre-war, though I wasn’t sure what war. I guessed this hotel stayed open all year largely because of the bar off the lobby, where a high-perched TV was showing wrestling and half a dozen locals were nursing beers, watching whoever was battling Gorgeous George this week pretend to lose.

  The cadaverous bald desk clerk in mortician’s black reacted with popping eyes and a, “Merciful heavens!” Could hardly blame him-Poochie was a tattered, blood-spattered, black-and-blue wreck.

  We had not checked in yet but had a reservation. When I announced our names, the clerk pretended Poochie wasn’t between us hanging on like a very loose tooth to precarious gums. Everything was handled efficiently. We signed the book, and were told our rooms were adjacent but without an adjoining door. Everything aboveboard for a single man and woman traveling together.

  Finally the clerk said, “What about your, uh, friend?”

  “Recognize him?” I asked.

  “Yes. That is, uh, Poochie. He’s Sidon’s resident beachcomber. He has a shack on the water, just outside town.”

  Poochie showed no signs of any of this registering. He wasn’t unconscious, though, and had a goofy, puffy smile going. It widened whenever he looked up at Velda.

  “He got hurt,” I said, which was all the explanation I was in the mood to give out.

  “Oh, dear. Did he?”

  Cripes, didn’t this jerk have eyes?

  “Is Doc Moody still in town?” I asked. Moody had been a drinking buddy of my old man’s, on our visits to Sidon. And I’d tossed a few back with the doc on my last solo sojourn.

  “Why, yes he is. Should I call him?”

  “There’s an idea.” I dug out a five and tossed it to him, the way you would a fish to a seal. “Give the doc my name-he’ll remember it-and when he gets here, send him up to my room.”

  Right now I was praying the good doc would be sober enough to see straight.

  “Yes, Mr. Hammer,” the clerk said, and reached out a skinny, bony hand for the telephone.

  The Sidon Arms had three floors and no elevator. We walked Poochie slowly up the wide lobby stairs and for the first time since we’d made the trek from the alley, the little guy moaned.

  Velda said, “It’ll be all right, Poochie. It’ll be fine.”

  My room was 2-A and Velda’s was 2-B. The rooms were identical-dresser, wardrobe, a couple chairs, double bed, nightstand, no closet, no bath. That was at the end of the hall. Velda went down there to fill a pitcher with warm water and I set Poochie in the more comfortable of the chairs. It was upholstered and had some padding. While she cleaned him up, I went back down to the lobby. The clerk told me Doc Moody was on his way, and I made my way out to the parking lot behind the hotel and got our luggage and brought it up.

  Poochie seemed to be coming into focus as I hauled our bags in.

  “I think I better give Poochie my bed,” I said, standing next to her as she bent dabbing a washcloth gently onto our guest’s battered face. She was in a white blouse and a blue pleated skir
t and was the kind of nurse you dreamed to get.

  “You can sleep with me in my room, if you like.” She flashed me the sweetest smile.

  “No kidding?”

  “No kidding. You know me, Mike-I don’t stand on ceremony. And speaking of ceremonies, there’s a justice of the peace in this burg, isn’t there? Wonder if he makes house calls like your doctor friend?”

  “You’re no fun at all,” I told her. I leaned in and got our charge’s attention. “What was that about, Poochie?”

  He smiled. It was like Dopey smiling at Snow White.

  “What did Dekkert want with you, Poochie? Why did those creeps give you the Third Degree and then some?”

  He shook his head just a little. “Yellow-haired lady.”

  “What yellow-haired lady?”

  “They say she’s gone. I live down the beach.”

  “Down the beach from the yellow-haired lady?”

  A little nod, then a wince at the pain it caused.

  I asked, “Who is she?”

  “Not nice. Not very nice.”

  “They think you saw something, because you live near where she lives?”

  Another little nod. Another wince.

  Velda said, “Better lay off with the twenty questions, Mike.”

  I stood, put my hands on my hips.

  “Some gal with yellow hair is missing, and Dekkert wants to know where she went. Judging by the beating he gave Poochie here, Dekkert wants to know bad.”

  Velda frowned. “Apart from any official police interest, you think?”

  “Not necessarily. Typical of these towns to perform their rubber-hose symphonies well away from the station house and out of uniform. That alley makes perfect sense. This town rolls up its sidewalks at sundown, this time of year, with no tourists around.”

  “Almost no tourists,” Velda said.

  There was a knock.

  “There’s the doc now,” Velda said.

  “Is it?” I asked softly.

  I went to the bed where I had tossed my suitcase. I opened it, and slipped the. 45 Colt automatic out of its sling where it slept like a baby on my clean underwear. But babies can wake up screaming…