The Last Cop Out Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  One Down, ManyMore to Come

  Helen Scanlon lay naked on the bed, in total languor. Never, never before had it been like this. The wetness was still there, the satisfied glow in her body that centered directly in the full brunette triangle that was the apex of all her immediate being. Her breasts quivered with delight and a dreamy exhaustion seemed to flow from her fingers.

  Gill Burke looked down at her and smiled. She was the first step up the ladder of the Organization and the most pleasurable. The rest of the way would be messier. The bodies to come wouldn’t be live and warm and loving—theywould be vicious and bloody and ultimately dead ...

  Here’s Mickey Spillane at his most torrid and terrific blockbusting best! Get set for a going-over you’ll never forget! “There’s a kind of power about Spillane that no other writer can imitate.... He’s the master!”

  —The New York Times

  Copyright © 1973 by Mickey Spillane

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

  reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,

  electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any

  information storage and retrieval system now known or to be

  invented, without permission in writing from the publisher,

  except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages

  in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine,

  newspaper or broadcast. For information address

  E. P. Dutton, Inc., 2 Park Avenue,

  New York, New York 10016.

  SIGNET TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND FOREIGN - COUNTRIES

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN CHICAGO, U.S.A.

  SIGNET, SIGNET CLASSIC, MENTOR, PLUME, MERIDIAN AND NAL BOOKS are published by New American Library, 1633 Broadway, New York, New York 10019

  FIRST SIGNET PRINTING, OCTOBER, 1973

  eISBN : 978-1-101-17461-6

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For the critics, reviewers and unbelievers, I suggest a slow perusal of your newspaper files ....and special attention to a certain police file coded 3D-SSR-02

  To the Big Man . . . thanks.

  M.

  1

  He reached the newsstand at exactly three minutes to eleven, picked up the early edition of tomorrow’s paper, a copy of TV Guide, then waited another minute scanning the headlines in the light of the booth before crossing to the other side of the street. The dachshund on the end of the leash clambered over the curb, looked back quizzically, then turned right on command and led the way east on the deserted sidewalk.

  It was precisely one minute to eleven. He was totally punctual because the other one was fetishly punctual too and when the dark sedan passed the man and the dog, slipping into the open parking space in front of the old brownstone, it was as if watches had been synchronized hours earlier for this one brief meeting of their hands at the ultimate moment of destiny.

  The driver of the car cut the engine, switched off the lights and put the gear lever into park. He locked the right side doors, the left rear one and was feeling for the window handle beside him when he automatically looked up at the pedestrian walking his dog home, the innocuous one he had seen seconds before buying his paper and dismissed because people in New York still walked dogs, bought papers and went home, which an enemy would never do, and almost smiled back when the stranger smiled at him.

  Then he felt the ice in his stomach and a horrible dryness in his throat because he knew the face and recognized the curiously strange smile and knew that forty-six years of life was about to come to an end on a dismal little street on the West Side where he had no place being at all. There would be no more luxury penthouse in one of Manhattan’s towers, no more chubby wife nagging at him in broken English, no more backtalk from too-wise teenage kids, no more relishing his life or death power in the far-flung organization. And all because of a stupid blond cunt in a cold water flat who knew how to assuage his sex problems and bring him to that white glow he thought had disappeared forever.

  He saw the newspaper in the hand come up and tried to snatch his own gun from his pocket but he was much too late. Victor Petrocinni achieved one final orgasm when a heavy caliber bullet tapped a hole in his forehead and blew his brains all over the front of the car.

  The dachshund barely glanced back at the silenced whup of the discharge.

  Neither the man nor the dog had broken their leisurely stride in their walk to the end of the street.

  A month ago twenty-one of them had sat around the long table in the conference room of Boyer-Reston, Inc. This time only seventeen conservatively dressed men of various ages occupied the dark oaken captain chairs. Legal-sized pads and pencils were in front of each, coffee was available from an ornate urn against the wall, but the cups were empty and the pads were blank.

  At the head of the table Mark Shelby, whose original name had been Marcus Aurilieus Fabius Shelvan, silently fingered the gold Phi Beta Kappa key that ornamented his watch chain and let his eyes touch each one of the persons lining the table before him, remembering twenty years back when he had first sat at a meeting like this one.

  They had been old country faces then, with accented voices, and the garlicky smell still hung over them from the dinner that Peppy had served. Empty wine bottles had doubled as ash trays and he alone did the note keeping because he alone had the skill to transpose two languages into a coherent English to be referred to later. Only a few weeks before he had made his bones, a double kill of Herm and Sal Perigino, the attempted killers of Papa Fats... a little late in life to be put to the test, but then, he had been preselected to obtain the university education to benefit the organization and the murder assignment was more a formality, more a fraternal initiation than anything else.

  That other table had been a handmade plank affair in the back room of Peppy’s tavern and he had sat at it many times, working his way ever closer to the head. Now it was he who occupied the big chair and commanded the attention of the various corporate heads who fronted for the new, modern organization, the other society whose fortunes were made from the ills and vices of the Manhattan sector of New York City.

  Shelby’s voice and choice of words had a classic courtroom aura but there was no doubting the steel behind each syllable. Since the Perignino affair he had ordered the elimination of some thirty-odd persons whose actions he had found intolerable to organizational activities, personally attending to four of them as a constant reminder that he was still totally capable and as determinedly ruthless as any of his predecessors and worthy of the title he legally enjoyed as well as the sub rosa one employed behind his back. They called him Primus Gladatori, the First Gladiator, not because of his true given name, but for the way he dispatched his opponents—quickly and with pleasure.

  “Last night,” Mark Shelby said, “Vic Petrocinni was killed.” He shuffled the papers in front of him, found the one he wanted and held it down with a forefinger. “For six weeks, on Mondays and Fridays, he went to the same address at the same time for the same purpose. His excuses were all different and he thought he had everybody fooled but he walked right into an ambush because there was some
body he didn’t fool at all. That makes four of our people in one month.” He paused and looked up, his face as frigid as his eyes. “The question now is... why?”

  Leon Bray ran the computer section that serviced the organization’s long list of activities. At fifty, he looked a decade older, his face seamed from years of intense detail work, eyes owlishly large behind thick-lensed glasses. He tapped the table top with his pencil and waited for the soft murmuring to cease.

  “None of our people showed any unbalanced books,” he said. “I’ve triple-checked everything and the accounts were right, down to the last penny. Joe Morse and Baggert had upped their figures over twenty percent from last year and both Rose and Vic were doing great with their new territories. No complaints anywhere.”

  Shelby digested the information and nodded, then looked to his right. “Kevin?”

  Arthur “Slick” Kevin rolled his unlit cigar in his fingers and looked back at the chairman. He was nervous, and he didn’t like to be nervous, but what was happening had all the earmarks of something just beginning and promising to get bigger and bigger. His eyes narrowed and he shook his head.

  “I checked with all the other offices and nobody’s trying to move in or take over. Chicago and St. Louis want to lend us some of their men who might be able to spot any new faces around in case it’s a push by some of those wise punks from Miami or Philly, or even K.C. They ran into some trouble like that last year, but cleared it up in a hurry. I told them we’d wait awhile to see how things developed.”

  “How about Al Harris? He’s been out of Atlanta a year now.”

  Kevin waved the suggestion off. “That was all big talk and his day is past. Al’s got that place in Baja California and hasn’t left it since he got there. The Mex authorities keep an eye on him all the time and let him blow his loot in that little town where he lives and the old boy seems happy about it. On top of everything, he’s got T.B. So even if Big Al Harris has the contacts and the loot to finance a return he’s got too much sense to try it.”

  “You sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “How about you, Remy?” Shelby asked.

  All the little guy did was shrug, but that single gesture implied an intense investigation utilizing some two hundred trained men whose reports were analyzed down to the last detail. Finally he said, “Vic and Baggert both handled narcotics, but their territories didn’t overlap. Morse had the books and Rose was handling the shylocking. Nothing connects at all. None of them even had the same friends. I cross-checked them in every possible direction and couldn’t come up with a single connection except that Rose’s and Vic’s kids went to the same elementary school together.”

  Almost a minute passed before Shelby let his eyes come up from the papers again. He studied each face in turn, then seemed to take them all in at once. At that moment he looked more like one of those stern faces of past jurists whose portraits in oils hang in the courtroom than the chairman of the underworld’s most affluent board of directors. “No one,” he told them softly, “kills four of our head people without having a reason.”

  At the far end of the table the one they called Little Richard because of his huge bulk said, “We can’t be sure there’s just one.” Richard Case was the organization’s liaison man to the political spiderweb of the city. Ostensibly, he headed a mammoth real estate concern, was public-spirited and politically active, but like everything else, it was only a front, a cover for his true business.

  “Go on, Richard.”

  Three hundred pounds shifted in the chair, making it squeak under his weight. “No two guns were alike. Vic and Morse got it with thirty-eights, Baggart with a forty-five and Rose with a nine-millimeter job. The only thing the same was that each was a one-shot deal expertly placed.”

  “We have hit men like that,” Shelby reminded him.

  “No,” Case disagreed. “They would have made sure and placed a couple more in there. Besides, our guys wouldn’t have picked the time and places like that. These were all top ambush jobs and it looks like they were done with silenced rods. So far the cops can’t find anybody who heard a damn thing and whoever pulled off the hits must be either an expert at disguise or different guys altogether. The pattern’s the same, all right, but what witnesses were around can’t remember seeing anybody on one kill who matches up with anybody on another. If it is one guy he’s a damn top pro and there’s got to be heavy money behind him. That kind of talent costs.”

  Case scraped his chair back, his face still thoughtful. “But one thing with a pro like that... he’ll know we’re alerted now and he won’t feel like exposing himself any further. He’ll take his money and go cool off somewhere and let them shop for another gun somewhere else. He sure as hell is good and although he knows the territory he can’t be local and my bet is that right now he’s long gone from here.”

  “Let’s suppose it’s more than one guy,” Shelby offered.

  “In that case it’ll be all the easier to find out what the hell is going on. Somebody’s going to make a bad move or a wrong one and we’ll know where it’s coming from. All we need to know is why and we can take it from there.”

  “It’s a raid,” Kevin stated flatly.

  Across the table Leon Bray squinted at him through the thick glasses. “I’m not so sure. None of the properties have been touched. There hasn’t been a squeal any place. There’s still a chance that this can be a personal vendetta.”

  “Vendettas went out with the old regime,” Kevin told him.

  “Perhaps,” Bray agreed, “but with girls and greed, they can always be reinstituted.”

  Remy looked a little annoyed at both of them and slammed the table top with his palm. “I’ve already told you that there wasn’t any connection between them. That was the first angle we looked into and there’s absolutely no match at all. The only thing they had in common was this group right here and I don’t think I have to go any further than that.”

  “Relax, Remy,” Shelby said. His mind had been sorting out the information and the possibilities and when he was satisfied he sat back and reached for a cigar. Everybody else except the three who didn’t smoke did the same. “There’s only one conclusion,” he said. “It’s a raid, all right.”

  “So what do we do?” Slick Kevin asked him.

  “Simple,” Shelby answered. “We wait. They eliminated our people to shake up our control. Now they try to move into the loose areas and try to take hold. All we do is wait and see who is stupid enough to match their manpower against ours. Meanwhile, we restructure our table of organization and the operations will continue as usual. I don’t think our opponent will be trying any further hits.”

  But Mark Shelby was wrong. That night a hollow-tipped .22 went into the left earhole of Dennis Ravenal and the sub-chieftain of East Side prostitution died on silken sheets in a high rise apartment building whose door he thought was absolutely pick-proof.

  Nobody heard a shot. Nobody saw an intruder.

  At the offices of Manhattan’s Homicide Assault Squad Captain William Long sipped from a paper coffee cup and grinned at the commissioner. “Why break up a nice war like that?” he asked.

  “Because it looks like the police department is pretty damned inept,” the commissioner glared.

  “Oh, we’re ept, all right,” the captain told him. “It’s just that you can be more useful being useless sometimes. So far there aren’t any innocent bystanders.”

  “That won’t last long. The other side hasn’t turned on their hoses yet.”

  “Seems to me they don’t know where to look,” Long said.

  “I suppose you have a few ideas?”

  Long nodded, still smiling. It was nice to get under the commissioner’s skin. In two weeks he was retiring out and he couldn’t think of a better situation to mark the end of his career. “A few,” he admitted. “Nothing concrete, but after twenty-five years you sort of get an instinct for these sort of things.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d care to exp
lain them,” the commissioner said caustically.

  Long finished his coffee, crumpled the cup and tossed it into the waste basket. “There’s only two possibilities, business or personal. Frankly, I can’t picture anybody dumb enough to go after the organization’s top men from a personal sense of vengeance. Ergo... it has to be business. Somebody wants in and they have to move somebody else out first. They have to be tremendously big since this is a move—not against a part—but against the entire network of the syndicate. They wouldn’t dare allow a chunk like that being bitten off without jeopardizing their entire situation. This new force moving in is playing the old cute game of removing the top men to rattle the rest enough to let them get a toehold in the game or an attempt to soften the operation so they can leech in themselves.”

  “That’s a pretty dangerous play.”

  “Nevertheless,” Long told him, “it’s been tried before and it’s worked before. Sometimes the big guys see the value of assimilating the new ones instead of fighting them. They’re absorbed, making their overall power even greater. There’s always new blood coming along.”

  “And that, captain, makes it even worse. For a while there we’ve been able to push them back and with another year or two might even break them wide open, but if they start working from strength again everything we’ve done will be shot to hell.”

  “Not if this war keeps on the way it’s going.”

  “You know better than that.”

  “Yeah. It’s just too good to last. They’re five down and I think the lesson is about over. By now they ought to be ready to expose their hand and call their shots.”

  But Captain William Long was wrong too. At two-fifteen the next afternoon a taxicab was stolen from in front of a diner on Eighth Avenue. At two forty-eight the same cab was spotted, seemingly abandoned on a Greenwich Village side street, by a driver from the same fleet company. In the back seat Anthony Broderick, the former dockworker who was the enforcer for the organization’s shylocking racket, was slumped in the corner, a bullet from a .357 Magnum in his heart.