Lady, Go Die! Read online

  Lady, Go Die!

  Mike Hammer [17]

  Spillane, Mickey

  Random House Inc Clients (2012)

  Tags: Max Alan Collins, Mike Hammer

  Max Alan Collinsttt Mike Hammerttt

  * * *

  * * *

  When Hammer and Velda go on vacation to a Long Island beach town, Hammer becomes embroiled in the mystery of a missing well-known New York party girl who lives nearby. When the woman turns up naked - and dead - astride the statue of a horse in the town square, Hammer feels compelled to investigate.

  Mickey Spillane's lost 1940s Mike Hammer novel, written between I, the Jury and My Gun Is Quickand never before published! Completed by Spillane's friend and literary executor Max Allan Collins,Lady, Go Die is finally making its way into print almost 70 years after its inception!

  LADY,

  GO

  DIE!

  A MIKE HAMMER NOVEL

  MICKEY SPILLANE

  and

  MAX ALLAN COLLINS

  TITAN BOOKS

  Lady, Go Die!: A Mike Hammer Novel

  Print-edition ISBN: 9780857684653

  E-book edition ISBN: 9780857686244

  Published by

  Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark St, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: May 2012

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work.

  Copyright © 2012 Mickey Spillane Publishing, LLC

  Visit our website: www.titanbooks.com

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  Printed and bound in the United States.

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  LADY, GO DIE!

  A MIKE HAMMER NOVEL

  FOR OTTO PENZLER

  who came through for Mickey

  Contents

  Co-Author’s Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  CO-AUTHOR’S NOTE

  A week before his death, Mickey Spillane told his wife Jane, “When I’m gone, there’s going to be a treasure hunt around here. Take everything you find and give it to Max—he’ll know what to do.” I can imagine no greater honor.

  Half a dozen substantial Mike Hammer novel manuscripts were found among a wealth of unpublished material. Lady, Go Die! constituted perhaps the most exciting find. Initially, I thought the brittle, yellow single-spaced pages were an earlier draft of The Twisted Thing (published 1966, but written much earlier), because of the shared small-town setting and a few character names. As I read the manuscript, I realized this was something quite special—the unfinished second Mike Hammer novel.

  The famous first Hammer, I, the Jury, written in 1945 but published in 1947, was presented as a post-war adventure. I have honored that continuity here, although the partial manuscript I worked from (circa 1945 itself) originally contained references to World War Two as ongoing. Why Mickey set Lady, Go Die! aside, we can never know. But in my biased opinion, it was a yarn well worth finishing.

  M.A.C.

  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 s
aid 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.