The Big Bang Read online

  The Big Bang

  Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins

  * * *

  AN OTTO PENZLER BOOK

  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT

  BOSTON NEW YORK

  2010

  * * *

  Copyright © 2010 by Mickey Spillane Publishing LLC

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,

  write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,

  215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Spillane, Mickey, date.

  The big bang / Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins.

  p. cm.

  "An Otto Penzler book."

  ISBN 978-0-15-101448-4

  1. Hammer, Mike (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Private

  investigators—Fiction. I. Collins, Max Allan. II. Title.

  PS3537.P652B54 2010

  813'.54—dc22 2009030063

  Hat illustration © Corbis

  Book design by Brian Moore

  Printed in the United States of America

  DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  * * *

  For Jim Traylor,

  who saw the pages

  * * *

  COAUTHOR'S NOTE

  This story takes place in the mid-1960s, when Mickey Spillane began it. With a deadline looming, he put The Big Bang aside, and substituted another Mike Hammer novel, The Twisted Thing, which he'd completed, and shelved, decades before.

  In 1982, on a visit to Mickey's South Carolina home, I was handed by my host two substantial Mike Hammer manuscripts. I was flabbergasted—there hadn't been a Hammer published since 1970! I read late into the night, which was always my practice with Spillane novels, and the next morning at breakfast offered up enthusiastic reviews.

  "Maybe we can do something with 'em someday," he said casually. On a later visit, in 1989, he sent the partial manuscripts home with me "for safekeeping."

  Mickey's words proved prophetic: a few weeks later, Hurricane Hugo destroyed his home, and The Big Bang would likely have been lost.

  We had spoken about the novel in detail, including the ending, which Mickey said was one of his favorites. My hope is that readers will greet this tale as enthusiastically as I did back in 1982, when Mickey Spillane handed me a stack of manuscript pages for bedtime reading.

  M.A.C.

  Chapter One

  THEY CUT THE KID off at the corner, driving his motorbike into the curb and spilling him across the sidewalk into the brick wall of an apartment building. Two of them came out of the back seat of the old sedan that had skidded to a stop, their shoulder-length hair flying, bell-bottoms flopping—one in a leather vest and no shirt had a short, tape-wrapped billy and the other in a tie-dye T-shirt sported a double length of bicycle chain ready to whip into the head of the groggy short-haired kid in striped top and jeans on the sidewalk.

  What they didn't figure on was me being in the doorway and when I stepped out and smashed the tie-dye slob with the chain, his face seemed to explode into a bloody mess, and he backflipped to the pavement and slid under the car he'd just left.

  The other one stopped the swing of the billy halfway down and tried to turn on me instead, and all I could think of was who the hell these chintzy little shits thought they were with their scruffy beards and spindly needle-pocked limbs, taking on an old tiger. I broke billy boy's arm between the wrist and elbow, took half his teeth out, snapped his jaw loose from its hinges, and sent the bastard's balls on a trip way up inside him with one beautiful place kick, landing him halfway out in the gutter.

  That was when the blond-Afro-haired kid driving the heap suddenly unfroze and jammed his foot down on the gas. The car screeched forward over the one under the wheels, making a wild cracking that went squishy at the high point of its bump, and the vehicle lurched on, leaving the crumpled figure in tie-dye to die like a fish on a deck, flopping twice before becoming another statistic.

  Leave it to New York, I thought.

  One lousy day back in the city and the fun was starting all over again. One day away from the sun and pure white sand and back to scarlet-splashed concrete and an early fall already turning cold and a fat woman standing in a puddle of spilled groceries screaming her lungs out at the mess she'd walked onto.

  A half block away, the would-be getaway car didn't make the squeeze between a double-parked truck and an oncoming bus and accordioned into a tangle of shrieking man and metal. For only two deep breaths a stunned, hushed silence held sway while the whole city seemed to pause in shock. Then the sounds of terror ended, and all returned to noise and normal.

  This was the city, after all.

  This was New York.

  The lanky, narrow-faced, sharp-eyed character sitting across from me in Captain Pat Chambers' desk chair wore a lightweight blue suit and darker blue tie and might have been a young exec on Wall Street. He was instead an assistant district attorney named Vance Traynor, who had a cocky, smart-assy manner that meant we'd tangle sooner or later.

  I'd gone down to Florida to recover from a knife blade that had opened my side like somebody wanted to slip in there and hide. I felt okay but not in the mood to tangle, not even with this petty bureaucrat.

  The windows were black with night. I'd been cooling my heels at Central Headquarters for hours. Pat had humored me by sharing the files on the three assailants—the dead driver was one Timothy Haver, 25, the tie-dye-kid-turned-speed-bump was Herman Felton, 26, and the billy-club boy was Norman Brix, 24.

  "Thought you might like to know who you killed," Pat had said, which wasn't fair—two had gotten themselves killed, and as far as I knew, the other one was still breathing.

  Anyway, I'd given two statements already, and now I was getting my official moment with one of the big boys. Swell.

  Pat was standing just behind the seated D.A.'s man, leaning against some file cabinets wearing a hooded expression that said he would rather be anywhere else. A mousy bespectacled stenog was taking everything down.

  "I suppose sooner or later," Traynor said, in a radio announcer's voice that would serve him well in the political arena, "I had to meet up with the great Mike Hammer."

  That didn't deserve a response so I didn't give him one. I'd already laid the facts out for him. Now he was just fucking with me.

  "I am supposed to believe that this was a mere coincidence," Traynor said, eyes slitted to cuts, "that a man with your background, your ... abilities... happened to be there. To save the day."

  "Mighty Mouse was out of town," I said.

  "So were you, till this morning. You get in slightly before noon, and without even stopping by your office, you go directly to pick something up from a client. That's your story."

  "No."

  "It isn't?"

  "It's not a story. I was doing business by phone while I was away. I was just following up back in Manhattan."

  The eyes fluttered wide, then slitted narrow again. "One of the two corpses had needle tracks, Mr. Hammer. So does the hospitalized assailant."

  "Junkies robbing somebody—who'da thunk it?"

  He was shaking his head. "Any way you spin it, Mr. Hammer, that puts drugs on the table. And weren't you in Florida because you got knifed when Junior Evello's boys took you on outside Dewey Wong's on East Fifty-eighth?"

  "That's a rumor. That's nothing that got on any police blotter."

  Pat was staring at his file cabinets, like he was wishing he could crawl in one of the drawers.

  "No," Traynor admitted. "But for a rumor, it has a certain weight, considering that two of Evello's top boys have not been seen since that
night."

  "Maybe they went on vacation, too."

  "The permanent kind, right, Mr. Hammer? Let's leave it a rumor. Let's call it hypothetical—why would two of Evello's boys jump you outside a Chinese restaurant?"

  I thought about trying a fortune-cookie gag, but instead said simply, "Junior thinks I was responsible for his late uncle's death, a lot of years ago."

  "Were you?"

  "Does it matter?"

  He was too young to deserve a weight-of-the-world sigh like the one he expelled. "The Evello Family still controls narcotics in this town. And you have a long history with them—didn't you once upon a time cost them a major load of heroin?"

  I shifted in the hard chair. "If you want to talk old times, buddy, send the stenog home and we'll have a beer somewhere. But if you want something on the record, I have no knowledge that this afternoon's incident has anything at all to do with the Evello mob or narcotics or anything except a couple of junkies needing fix money, taking down a guy who might have some cash on him."

  He sucked in air. Then he let it out, saying, "You just happened to be on the scene."

  "It's what we call in the business a coincidence."

  "Do you believe in coincidences, Mr. Hammer?"

  "Sometimes."

  His smile was thin but nasty. "Young Billy Blue was just lucky you were there."

  That was the kid on the motorbike I'd helped out.

  "He was lucky," I said. "The punks weren't."

  Traynor tasted his tongue. He didn't seem to like the flavor. "You happen to be there, and two guys get pulverized, and another is so badly beaten, he's in critical condition at Bellevue. At least you didn't shoot anybody."

  "It's early yet."

  Traynor grunted in obvious disgust. "Judging by your attitude, I would say the things I've heard about you from my associates are true."

  "Probably."

  "Your luck can't last forever, Mr. Hammer."

  "No. But I've outlasted five D.A.'s since I set up shop. And I don't bother even keeping track of the assistants."

  He rose, shoving Pat's chair back till its wheels collided with the wall. "I'm taking you at your word, Mr. Hammer, only because Captain Chambers vouches for you. But I'm going on record—if you get involved with this thing, your operating license and your gun permit will only be the first things to go. Clear?"

  "It begins and ends here," I said.

  "Good. Good."

  Pat waited until the young assistant district attorney had taken his leave, then reclaimed his chair and nodded to dismiss the stenographer. She went out, and he flipped the tops off a pair of plastic coffee cups and handed me one.

  He said, "You make new friends every day, don't you, Mike?"

  "Pretty much."

  He shook his head. "After all these years, and you're still a pisser."

  Captains of Homicide Division can lay off-key intonations onto the most abrupt sentences. I couldn't quite figure his mood, so took a taste of the coffee and shrugged. "Don't sweat it, Pat. There were witnesses to everything."

  He turned around and gave me a long, direct stare. "Buddy ... I've asked you before. Two armed guys and a getaway driver, and you're the one standing? Where do you buy your luck?"

  "Maybe theirs just ran out."

  His expression was glazed. "You were the primary cause of two kids getting killed. Doesn't that even get to you—a little?"

  I felt my face go hard and flat. "Kids, hell. They were punks—middle-twenties punks with a sweet list of arrests and convictions."

  "You could have stopped it and held them there," he said, eyebrow arching. "You had a gun, didn't you?"

  "Yeah, my .45, which means I could have shot them, too. I wasn't trying to kill anybody. I was just trying to stop a kid from getting hurt. Not pulling my rod, shit, I thought I was doing them a favor." I took another pull of the coffee. "Maybe I did at that."

  "Nothing bothers you, does it?"

  I shrugged a shoulder. "Not much anymore. Take a look around this town—it's that great big handbasket you heard so much about, headed to hell."

  He grunted a laugh. "After all the bad guys you shot, you'd think it would be paradise."

  I scowled at my supposed best pal. "Jesus, I just don't know what you're so bugged about. Those pricks could have killed that kid, if I hadn't stepped in."

  Pat made a wry face. "I'm not talking about what happened today. I'm talking about you, Mike. There was a time when things used to bother you. Now..." He shook his head glumly. "...there's no reaction at all. It's like nothing happened. What are you, dead inside?"

  I frowned. Shrugged. "Okay, so it bothers me. Satisfied?"

  His analytical mind bit right through my words. "Oh, you're bothered, all right. Just not about the two young men squashed to tomato sauce, or the other you put in the hospital needing an exploratory operation so the docs can find his nuts again."

  I folded my arms. Stuck my chin out. "That's right, chum. I am bothered, but I'm bothered about the kid on the motorbike. He was a working stiff, holding down an after-school job, right?" Pat had filled me in before the assistant D.A. took over. "No arrest record, all character references good, yet there he was, about to be ripped off by lowlifes who want the rest of the world to subsidize their drug habit."

  He held his hands up in surrender. "It's a crazy damn world, Mike. No argument. We live in one, they live in another."

  "Or am I wrong? Was that kid Billy Blue just another user or dealer or ... Come on, Pat, spell it out. You talked to the kid, I didn't."

  Pat shrugged again. "Like you said, he was on a job. A messenger boy."

  "What kind?"

  Now the Homicide detective had to think for a moment. Was I just curious? Or was I curious because I was going to wade into this mess? Like I wasn't already hip deep.

  Finally Pat said, "Special delivery of a certain antibiotic to a midtown doctor." He caught the way I was looking at him and gave me a negative sign. "No narcotics. We checked it out. Nothing in the package but capsules to be taken orally."

  "Does Billy know why they attacked him?"

  "No. But he has a guess."

  "Reasonable one?"

  Pat sipped his coffee and put his cup down. "The young man had just been paid two weeks' salary—a hundred and sixty bucks in cash."

  "And that's enough for any freak to take a crack at. We have an autopsy report on the punks, or is it too early?"

  Again he waited a few seconds, then gave me a tired grimace and said, "The one you left alive, and the driver of the car, were shooting H. The other had two dozen pills in his pocket."

  "Not Bufferin, I'd guess."

  "No. Speed."

  I frowned, sat forward. "How'd the creeps know the kid had that kind of dough on him?"

  "All three assailants reside, or resided, within three blocks of Dorchester Medical College. Everybody at Dorchester gets paid the same day twice a month, usually right after lunch. Apparently it's common knowledge. The Blue kid must've looked like an easy target."

  "What about the one in the hospital? What does he have to say for himself?"

  Pat's twisted smile had no humor in it at all. "He won't be saying anything for a long while, Mike. You made damn sure of that. They had to wire his jaws shut, he's in shock and going through withdrawal. The prognosis is that he'll probably live, but the doc I spoke to wouldn't bet on it. He's skinny, malnourished, and has hepatitis."

  "We'll ask Jerry Lewis to do a telethon."

  Pat didn't laugh at that. No sense of humor tonight. He said, "The damage you did won't kill him, but he's liable to check out during withdrawal. See, kiddo ... your luck is still holding."

  I felt my upper lip curl all on its own. "Screw his withdrawal. I couldn't care less what happens to that kind of human garbage. Those fucking drugheads are all the same, scumbags, all of 'em, and the gutter's too good for them. Hell, if I'd known what I do now, when this went down, I'd have knocked his ass under the car, too."

  Pat's e
xpression had turned grim. "Mike..."

  "What?"

  "It's a sour world. Don't make it worse."

  I put both shoulders into a shrug. "Sure."

  "These kids aren't born drug addicts. They're not 'scumbags' when they take their first breath. They have families, mothers and fathers who love them...."

  "Not enough."

  "Christ, you're self-righteous today. Listen to you!"

  "I'm not saying anybody started out bad. And the predators who get these kids hooked, they're the ones whose throats I'd really like to get my hands around. But you've seen the horror pictures, right, Pat? Once a vampire sticks his fangs in an innocent, that innocent turns into the next vampire, looking for a victim."

  "You really think it's that simple, don't you?"

  "I didn't say it was simple. I didn't say it wasn't tragic. But I see a vampire, buddy, I'm putting a forty-five-caliber stake through his goddamn heart."

  His eyes were like quarters. "And I'm supposed to believe you're not getting involved in this?"

  "I am involved! But ... I made my contribution to society for today. I took two, maybe three junkie thieves off the streets, and that's enough. For today, anyway."

  He was looking at me like I was the one out of a horror show. "Then lay off, Van Helsing. You got no counts against you right now. In fact, you come up smelling of roses for performing a public service. Even that old sedan was hot. The parents of those 'scumbags' aren't preferring any charges. Hell, they're glad to get their darlings out of their hair."

  "What happened to the mothers and fathers who loved them you were crowing about?"

  Suddenly Pat looked very tired. "Mike—as a friend. I'm asking you—lay off."

  I gave him the innocent face. "Lay off from what?"

  "From what you're thinking of, damnit! You have your back up about something and I can smell it all the way across the room."

  "I wish you'd tell me what it is, then."

  His eyes narrowed, his expression grew grave. "Think about it a little bit. Maybe it will come to you."

  "Sure. I'll do that." I reached for my hat and eased out of the chair, stretched, yawned. Little man had a busy day. "Think our budding assistant D.A. got everything he wants?"