Kill Me, Darling Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Mike Hammer

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  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

  A Tip of the Porkpie

  About the Authors

  Also Available from Titan Books

  MORE MIKE HAMMER FROM TITAN BOOKS

  Lady, Go Die!

  Complex 90

  King of the Weeds

  Kill Me, Darling: A Mike Hammer Novel

  Print edition ISBN: 9781783291380

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781783291410

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark St, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: March 2015

  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 © 2015 Mickey Spillane Publishing, LLC

  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.

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  In memory of

  HAROLD COOKE

  who rode the moonshine roads with Mickey

  CO-AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Shortly before his death, Mike Hammer’s creator Mickey Spillane paid me an incredible honor. He asked me to complete the Hammer novel that was currently in progress—The Goliath Bone—and then instructed his wife Jane to gather all of the other unfinished, unpublished material and give it to me: “Max will know what to do.” He described what would follow as a “treasure hunt,” as these manuscripts spanned his entire career from the late ’40s until his passing in 2006.

  The manuscripts were substantial—usually 100 pages or more, with plot and character notes and sometimes roughed-out final chapters. Most of the books had been announced by Mickey’s publisher at various times from the 1950s through the ’90s. As a Spillane/Hammer fan since my early teens, I am delighted to finally see these long-promised books lined up on a shelf next to the thirteen Hammer novels published by Mickey in his lifetime.

  In addition to the substantial novel manuscripts mentioned above, a number of shorter Mike Hammer manuscripts were uncovered in the treasure hunt conducted by Jane Spillane, my wife Barb and me, ranging over three offices in Mickey’s South Carolina home. Some of these were fragments of a few pages, primarily the openings of never-written novels or stories; these I have been gradually turning into short stories with an eventual collection in mind. Others were more substantial if less so than the six novel manuscripts. Although they vary in particulars, these shorter but still significant unfinished manuscripts are essentially the opening chapters of novels, sometimes with character and plot notes (and, in one case, a draft of the ending).

  I am setting out to complete at least three of these significant Hammer novels-in-progress, and Kill Me, Darling is the first. The novel is of particular interest because it is an early, variant version of Hammer’s 1962 “comeback” novel, The Girl Hunters, in which Mike discovers that Velda—missing and thought dead for seven years—has been behind the Iron Curtain on dangerous CIA business. (The posthumous Complex 90 is a sequel to that novel.)

  Mickey’s manuscript of Kill Me, Darling begins with the opening pages of The Girl Hunters, in which a drunken Hammer is dragged by cops (“They found me in the gutter”) to the home of Captain Pat Chambers. At that point, the manuscript goes in an entirely different direction, as you will see. Internal evidence indicates Kill Me, Darling was begun as a follow-up to Kiss Me, Deadly, likely around 1953 or ’54, the time frame I’ve used for the narrative.

  Rather than reuse the first few pages of The Girl Hunters, I have based the opening of Kill Me, Darling on another Spillane fragment from the same era that covered similar territory.

  Many readers have asked me if I will ever write my own Mike Hammer novel. The answer is that there is no need: Mickey left behind so much wonderful unpublished material that I am privileged to continue our collaboration.

  M.A.C.

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was quiet and dark and half-past three in the morning. The winos and the dipsos were happy things all nestled together in their doorways, and on the streets an occasional taxi would cruise by, slowing down for subway exits and still-open gin mills.

  What noise was left over from the night before had been dampened by the belly rumblings of thunder over the river and a wet heat had crowded in above the city like a hand dipped in slime.

  Sometimes a sudden momentary brilliance would light the sky, and down on earth below all the trouble would stand out in quick stark relief, long enough to be seen, not long enough to be perceived, much less remembered.

  And when I reached the end of the block, near the river, all the trouble left in the world seemed to belong to me alone. I was walking slow but not steady—too much booze for that. But at least I looked like myself again, trenchcoat collars up and hat brim down. Both garments clean over a rumpled, soiled, torn suit that was the uniform of the barfly I’d become.

  I hadn’t even heard about the mugging turned murder till a week after it happened. I hadn’t been much for following the papers since Velda walked out, and the kind of slop chutes I frequented couldn’t afford TVs up over the counter. So it took another drunk to say, “Didn’t you used to know that cop?”

  “What cop? I know lots of damn cops.”

  “Manley? Wade Manley?”

  “What about him?”

  “Somebody killed him last week.”

  The sand was still there on the sidewalk, spread out in a wide circle. Sand scuffed and dirty now, paraded through by kids and bypassed by their elders. Sand that still had its abrasive quality but also the discoloration of old rust.

  Only it wasn’t rust. It was blood. Or anyway it had been. Now it was just a substance decomposed to its chemical make-up. Not so long ago it had been bright red and completely alive and the one who had carried it in his veins and had it pumping through his heart had been as big and as prominent as the stain he had left by way of remembrance.

  They called Wade Manley the Big Man, and it was no exaggeration. Six three, broad-shouldered, he’d come up via the streets as a kid and later as a beat cop and when Pat Chambers and I were at the academy together, the Big Man had sought us out. You saw a heavy-set, bucket-head
ed guy and thought what a fat slob, but you were wrong, because despite the belly there was power in those arms and that bull neck. Those tree-trunk legs could run after you much faster than you’d ever imagine and then kick the ever-loving crap out of you, with the kind of force that only a big man could muster.

  He’d come around to give a lecture on the perils and rewards of working vice, and his eyes had fixed on Pat and me in the audience.

  “After you fellas put in a few years on the street,” he’d said later, in a gruff friendly way, “come see me. You got the kind of faces I can use.”

  We asked him what he meant.

  “Well, you, kid,” he’d said to Chambers, “have the kind of fresh-faced look that works out great on undercover assignments. You look like somebody who just fell off the turnip truck, and that’s perfect for working vice.”

  This had made me laugh, but the laugh caught when the Big Man looked at me and said, “And you, Hammer—you’re just the kind of mean-looking roughneck who can go undercover with any evil bunch of sons of bitches, and fit right in.”

  And that had made Pat laugh.

  This afternoon, at my office, where I hadn’t been in a while, the papers had piled up. I’d quickly picked out the one with Wade Manley’s picture on the front page, and a story that focused on the tough waterfront area where even a big, experienced off-duty police officer could fall prey to “malefactors.” Fancy word for the kind of rats that emerged from alleyways with greedy glowing eyes and bared feral teeth, only with switchblades to do the tearing.

  Eight deep punctures to his body, any one of which would have been fatal. Overkill, some might call it. Others might say thorough.

  When the front-page photo was taken, the Big Man hadn’t had any departmental recognition yet and the hat riding his skull looked fresh and new, almost G.I. in its crispness. He looked young and much lighter but then the picture was a dozen years old. He looked decent because he was and always had been, despite the soul-eating nature of working Vice.

  And most of all he looked like a hard man to break because he was that too… and died proving it.

  This I knew because the Big Man was not the sort who would just hand over his wallet to punks with knives or zip guns. They would have to take it from him. And they apparently had. And he was dead now. Stupid? Proud? Maybe. But I’d have done the same damn thing.

  Only… what had he been doing down here, alone? Was this really just a mugging gone horribly wrong? Manley hadn’t been on the streets himself in many years. He was strictly supervisory. Was he meeting someone?

  Then, like the man said, the rains came. Came down straight and hard as if from a giant showerhead and then I was looking at the big wide irregular discolored splotch of sand on the sidewalk as the rust color got red again and for a second the whole splotch seemed alive, glowing, bubbling, throbbing.

  But maybe it was my imagination, because after all I was crying a little bit—drunks cry easy, you know—and there was nothing in the whole goddamn world that seemed to be right or in focus any more.

  Not since Velda walked out.

  I got out the brown-bagged bottle of whiskey from my trenchcoat pocket and I swigged some down before screwing the cap on and slipping it back in where its weight was a soothing presence clunking against my thigh.

  She had been more than just my secretary. She was the other P.I. in Michael Hammer Investigations. Nobody was better at undercover work. But nobody was better at dressing up a drab outer office, either, behind a reception desk. Though she had no secretarial training when she arrived, her high school typing classes had proved enough, and she soon came up with a personal shorthand. Still, there were plenty who thought I’d hired her strictly for her looks.

  …tall, lithe, with wide shoulders and full high breasts and a small waist that flared into generous hips, all curves and valleys and toned musculature with beautiful Hedy Lamarr-like features dominated by dark almond-shaped eyes, framed by shoulder-brushing pageboy hair so black it reflected like new patent leather…

  But it was strictly business between us. Or it had been until I fell for her. And till she fell for me. Anyway, I thought she fell for me…

  Only now Velda was gone, in her way, like the Big Man was gone, in his… except in a sense, in a crazy damn sense, she was right here with me, they both were, as I stared into machine-gunning rain washing away the red froth in the sand that was all that was left of Wade Manley.

  Wade Manley, the head vice cop who had put me onto Velda. The Big Man who had come to me and said the Sterling girl was a burned-out case of an undercover vice cop who needed a job, needed a break, needed a friend.

  I just need somebody to step up, Mike. Somebody like you.

  And I’d stepped up.

  I got the bottle out again and used it. Left it in my hand this time.

  Because except for that bottle, I was all alone now.

  No big beautiful black-haired partner of a doll to back me up and keep me sane. To hold in my arms when she was hurting and for her to do the same for me and to stand at my side unafraid, throwing .22 slugs at some bastard trying to kill us both. She’d done that more than once.

  But she shouldn’t have let me cross the employer-employee line into loving her, first teasing me, then tempting me, though I’d never even been to bed with her. I never loved a woman more, but I’d never had her, not in that way, that crucial, all-important way. I was saving that for when the promise that went with the ring I gave her last year finally got kept.

  And she was saving all of that lushness, from the ripeness of her scarlet-rouged mouth to the high thrust of her breasts to the flatness of her muscular belly to those endless legs, legs that would wrap around me one day, saving herself for me, just for me, all for me.

  Then one day she was gone.

  And now, four fuzzy months later, there was no Big Man, either, was there? No big slob of a cop to go drinking with once a month, back when drinking was a pastime and not a full-time job. No big slob of an honest cop who thought stopping drug pushers outside schools was more important than providing security for some political bigwig. No more fat slob of a cop who wouldn’t give in to the slimeballs running the numbers or the bookies bleeding the town, and no more sloppy S.O.B. of a cop who couldn’t be scared off by murder, the threat or the deed. No… there was no cop like that at all anywhere in this City of Dreams.

  City of Nightmares.

  Wade Manley was very damn dead now, but even after the drumming rain had come and gone, his stain would remain on the sidewalk for all those to see who didn’t like his breed of cop… a faded splash for all the lowlife punks to laugh at… and all the big boys way up in the penthouses to sneer at as an example of what happened when a dumb damn cop wouldn’t play the game.

  The cop in question was dead all right, and buried, his funeral just something else in the paper that I’d missed… but his faded smear on cement would be there for some time for all the cop haters to gloat over. No big man after all, they’d say—just another damn cop. Another damn dead cop. A fatso whose pay had been a measly $6200 a year, and so what if he’s dead? Good riddance to a guy out to kill fun for other guys.

  So in the cellars they smiled, and in the penthouses they grinned, while behind the doors that separated tenants from owners, they didn’t merely smile… they laughed their foul heads off.

  And here I was out on the street… a sloppy damn drunk, crying a little maybe, but not so gone with grief or sodden with sauce that I couldn’t contemplate doing something about it.

  As I stood there, under my coat in a leather spring-action sling was an Army Colt .45 automatic and I was taking a fat chance of blowing a hole in my hip because there was a round in the chamber and the hammer was back. Not such a good idea, some would say, under the best of circumstances. But with a snootful? What was I thinking? Was I an idiot?

  Or maybe not really such a fat chance as that, and maybe it was a good idea, because from where I stood, everybody but me was an idiot no
w.

  Grinning, I took another snort.

  They were all out there on the other side of the rain laughing or waiting for some fool to try to do something about the Big Man’s death, and maybe they knew I was the Big Man’s pal, and what that could mean for them, only maybe they heard that Mike Hammer was a drunk now and I was on my way to being an even bigger slob than the dead cop was, and if they got me first, the joke would be on me, their laughter justified, because I’d just be an item buried behind the funnies, the notorious trigger-happy P.I. whose luck finally ran out on him. Just another dead lush now.

  Well, let them think that.

  Like I said, they were all idiots.

  Idiots who hated me or anyway hated who I used to be. Idiots who had killed the wrong cop this time.

  I drank some more whiskey from the bottle in the paper bag. It felt warm going down and burned in the furnace of my belly.

  “That was their mistake,” I said to nobody, rain sluicing off the front of my hat. The sidewalk was a little wobbly. “The mistake that makes them idiots—this time they killed the wrong damn cop.”

  Because I didn’t believe for a second that this was a mugging gone murderous. I didn’t buy for an instant that the Big Man had just been out walking in this foul corner of the city. What, for the air? For that lovely river bouquet? No, Wade Manley was down here meeting somebody. Something was supposed to happen, and he was supposed to be part of it.

  Only something else happened, and his death was it.

  Whoever did this had entered a very exclusive club for a rarefied brand of son of a bitch—a worldwide select society of sick pricks. Because this killer was a very special kind of killer now, wasn’t he? He was a cop killer and that marked him.

  For weeks to come, every copper on the NYPD would be after this special killer. They would turn over every dirty rock in the city and shake out every rat’s nest and turn this part of town inside out and upside down. They’d give it a damn good go.

  But the trouble was, if Manley’s brothers in blue didn’t find that marked man within those first weeks, other crimes would demand attention. And witnesses and even some cops could always be bought off. Time and money could erase that mark.