The Killing Man mh-12

  The Killing Man

  ( Mike Hammer - 12 )

  Mickey Spillane

  "I rammed my elbow back and felt teeth go under it and the back of my head mashed the guy's nose who was holding me." Mike Hammer is back, and after almost 20 years, he's as psychotically hard-boiled as ever. Here, there's a dead man in Hammer's office chair. He has been horribly tortured; a note on the desk reads "You die for killing me," signed "Penta." Hammer's longtime secretary and sometime love interest, Velda, has been knocked unconscious and Hammer (no mellower despite the years), goes a-hunting. Gorgeous assistant DA Candace Amory warns Hammer off the case; he changes her mind. Penta turns up on government files as an assassin for hire, a billion dollars in drug money is missing and renegade CIA agents and mobsters are looking for Penta, while gunning for Hammer. Spillane's ( Kiss Me, Deadly ) dirty rain, mean streets, leggy broads, etc. have made him one of the all time best-selling authors--but many things, including present-day New York city, have changed since the '50s and Spillane has, for the most part, failed to notice. Readers will catch the bad guy 50 pages before Hammer does. $100,000 ad/promo.

  Mickey Spillane

  The Killing Man

  1

  Some days hang over Manhattan like a huge pair of unseen pincers, slowly squeezing the city until you can hardly breathe. A low growl of thunder echoed up the cavern of Fifth Avenue and I looked up to where the sky started at the seventy-first floor of the Empire State Building. I could smell the rain. It was the kind that hung above the orderly piles of concrete until it was soaked with dust and debris and when it came down it wasn't rain at all, but the sweat of the city.

  When I reached my corner I crossed against the light and ducked into the ground-level arcade of my office building. It wasn't often that I bothered coming in at all on Saturday, but the client couldn't make it any other time except noon today, and from what Velda had told me, he was representing some pretty big interests.

  Two others were waiting for the elevator, one an architect in the penthouse suite and the other a delivery boy from the deli down the street. Both of them looked bored and edgy. The day had gotten to them, too. When the elevator arrived, we got in, I punched my button and rode it up to the eighth floor.

  On an ordinary day the corridor would have been filled with the early lunch crowd, but now the emptiness gave the place an eerie feeling, as though I were a trespasser and hidden eyes were watching me. Except that I was the only one there and the single sign of life was the light behind my office door.

  I turned the knob, pushed it open and just stood there a second because something was wrong, sure as hell wrong, and the total silence was as loud as a wild scream. I had the .45 in my hand, crouched and edged to one side, listening, waiting, watching.

  Velda wasn't at her desk. Her pocketbook sat there and a paper cup of coffee had spilled over and stained the sheaf of papers before dripping to the floor. And I didn't have to move far before I saw her body crumpled up against the wall, half her face a mass of clotted blood that seeped from under her hair.

  The door to my office was partially open and there was somebody still in there, sitting at my desk, part of his arm clearly visible. I couldn't play it smart. I had to explode and rammed through the door in a blind fury ready to blow somebody into a death full of bloody, flying parts . . . then stopped, my breath caught in my throat, because it had already been done.

  The guy sitting there had been taped to my chair, his body immobilized. The wide splash of adhesive tape across his mouth had immobilized his voice too, but all the horror that had happened was still there in his glazed, dead eyes that stared at hands whose fingertips had been amputated at the first knuckle and lay in neat order on the desktop. A dozen knife slashes had cut open the skin of his face and chest and his clothes were a sodden mass of congealed blood.

  But the thing that killed him was the note spike I had kept my expense receipts on. Somebody had slipped them all off the six-inch steel nail, positioned it squarely in the middle of the guy's forehead and pounded it home with the bronze paperweight that held my folders down. And the killer left a note, but I didn't stop to read it.

  Velda's pulse was weak, but it was there, and when I lifted her hair there was a huge hematoma above her ear, the skin split wide from the vicious swelling of it. Her breathing was shallow and her vital signs weren't good at all. I grabbed her coat off the rack, draped it around her, stood up and forced the rage to leave me, then found the number in my phone book and dialed it.

  The nurse said, "Dr. Reedey's office."

  "Meg, this is Mike Hammer," I told her. "Burke in?"

  "Yes, but-"

  "Listen, call an ambulance and get a stretcher up here right away and get Burke to come up now. Velda has been hurt badly."

  "An accident?"

  "No. She was attacked. Somebody tried to smash her skull."

  While she dialed she said, "Don't move her. I'll send the doctor right up. Keep her warm and . . ." I hung up in midsentence.

  Pat Chambers wasn't at home, but his message service said he could be reached at his office. The sergeant at the switchboard answered, took my name, put me through and when Pat said, "Captain Chambers," I told him to get to my office with a body bag. I wasn't about to waste time with explanations while Velda could be dying right beside me.

  I was helpless, unable to do anything except kneel there, hold her hand and speak to her. Her skin was clammy and her pulse was getting weaker. The frustration I felt was the kind you get in a dream when you can't run fast enough to get away from some terror that is chasing you. And now I had to stay here and watch Velda slip away from life while some bastard was out there getting farther and farther away all the time.

  There were hands around my shoulders that yanked me back away from her and Burke said, "Come on, Mike, let me get to her."

  I almost swung on him before I realized who he was and when he saw my face he said, "You all right?"

  After a moment I said, "I'm all right," and moved back out of the way.

  Burke Reedey was a doctor who had come out of the slaughter of Vietnam with all the expertise needed to handle an emergency like this. He and his nurse moved swiftly and the helpless feeling I'd had before abated and I moved the desk to give him room, trying not to listen to their comments. There was something in their tone of voice that had a desperate edge to it. Almost on cue the ambulance attendants arrived, visibly glad to see a doctor there ahead of them, and carefully they got Velda onto the stretcher and out of the office, Burke going with them.

  All that time Meg had very carefully steered me to one side, obscuring my vision purposely, realizing what was going through my mind, and when they had left she handed me a glass of water and offered me a capsule from a plastic container.

  I shook my head. "Thanks, but I don't need anything."

  She put the cap back on the container. "What happened, Mike?"

  "I don't know yet." I pointed to the door of my office. "Go look in there,"

  A worried look touched her eyes and she walked to the door and opened it. I didn't think old-time nurses could gasp like that. Her hand went to her mouth and I saw her head shake in horror. "Mike . . . you didn't mention . . ."

  "He's dead. Velda wasn't. The cops will take care of that one."

  She backed away from the door, turned and looked at me. "That's the first . . . deliberate murder . . . I've ever seen." Slowly, very slowly, her eyes widened.

  I shook my head. "No, I didn't do it. Whoever hit Velda did that too."

  The relief in her expression was plain. "Do you know why?"

  "Not yet."

  "You have called the police, haven't you?"

  "Right after I spoke to you." I nodded toward the
door. "Why don't you go back to the office. I'll take care of things here."

  "The doctor thought I should look after you."

  "I'm okay. If I weren't I'd tell you. The cops will want to speak to both you and Burke later but there's no use of you getting all tied up with them now."

  "You're sure?"

  I nodded. "Just stay with Velda, will you?"

  "As soon as the doctor calls I'll check in with you."

  When she left I walked over to the miniature bar by the window and picked up a glass. Hell, this was no time to take a drink. I put the glass back and went into my office.

  The dead guy was still looking at his mutilated hands, seemingly ignoring the spike driven into his skull until the ornamental base of it indented his skin. The glaze over his eyes seemed thicker.

  For the first time I looked at the note on my desk, the large capital letters printed almost triumphantly across a sheet of my letterhead under the logo. It read, YOU DIE FOR KILLING ME. Beneath it, in deliberately fine handwriting, was the signature, Penta.

  I heard the front door open and Pat shouted my name. I called back, "In here, Pat."

  Pat was a cop who had seen it all. This one was just another on his list. But the kill wasn't what disturbed him. It was where it happened. He turned to the uniform at the door. "Anybody outside?"

  "Only our people. They're shortstopping everybody at the elevators."

  "Good. Keep everybody out for five minutes," he told a cop who stood in the doorway. "Our guys too."

  "Got it," the cop said and turned away.

  "Let's talk," Pat said.

  It didn't take long. "I was to meet a prospective client named Bruce Lewison at noon in my office. Velda went ahead to open up and get some other work out of the way. I walked in a few minutes before twelve and found her on the floor and the guy dead."

  "And you touched nothing?"

  "Not in here, Pat. I wasn't about to wait for you to show before I got a doctor for Velda."

  Pat looked at me with that same old look.

  I could feel a twist in my grin. There was nothing funny about it. "Oh, I'll get to the bastard, Pat. Sooner or later."

  "Cut that shit, will you?"

  "Sure."

  "You know this guy?"

  I shook my head. "He's new to me."

  "Somebody thought he was killing you, pal."

  "We don't look alike at all."

  "He was in your chair."

  "Yeah, that he was."

  He was looking at the note and said, "Who did you kill, Mike?"

  I said, "Come on Pat. Don't play games."

  "This note mean anything to you?"

  "No. I don't know why, but somebody sure was serious about it."

  "Okay," he said. His eyes looked tired. "Let's get our guys in here."

  While the photographer shot the corpse from all angles and did closeups on the mutilation, Pat and I went into Velda's office where the plainclothes officers dusted for prints and vacuumed the area for any incidental evidence. Pat had already jotted down what I had told him. Now he said, "Give me the entire itinerary of your day, Mike. Start from when you got up this morning and I'll check everything out while it's fresh."

  "Look . . . when Velda comes around . . ." I saw the look on Pat's face and nodded. My stomach was all knotted up and all I wanted was to breathe some fresh, cold air.

  "I got up at seven. I showered, dressed and went down to the deli for some rolls, picked up the paper, went back to the apartment, ate, read the news and took off for the gym."

  "Which one?"

  "Bing's Gym. You know where it is. I got there at nine thirty, put in a little better than an hour in the exercise room, showered and checked out at eleven thirty. Bing can verify that himself. It was a twenty-minute walk to the office and on the way I saw two people I knew. One was Bill Sheen, the beat cop, the other was Manuel Florio who owns the Pompeii Bar on Sixth Avenue. We walked together for a block, then split. I got to the office a few minutes before twelve and walked into . . . this." I waved my hand at the room. "Burke Reedey will give you his medical report on Velda and the ME will be able to pinpoint a time of death pretty well, so don't get me mixed up in suspect status."

  Pat finished writing, tore a leaf out of the pad and closed the book. He called one of the detectives over and handed him the slip, telling him to check out all the details of my story. "Let's just keep straight with the system, buddy. Face it, you're not one of its favorite people."

  The assistant medical examiner was a tubby little guy with light blue eyes that bristled with curiosity. Every detail was a major item and when he was finished with the physical aspect of the examination, he stepped back, walked around the body slowly, seeming to do a psychological analysis of the crime. Pat didn't try to interrupt him. This was the ME's moment and whatever he could garner from his inspection now would be valuable because the body would never be seen in this position again. Twice he went back to do a close scrutiny of the desk spike in the dead man's forehead, then made a satisfied grimace and snapped his bag shut.

  Pat asked, "What do you think?"

  "About the time?"

  "Yes, for one thing."

  The ME looked at his watch. "I would say that he was killed between ten and eleven o'clock. Certainly not after eleven. I will be more specific after the post-mortem. Has he been identified?"

  "Not yet," Pat said.

  "An interesting death. Those facial and chest cuts seem to have been made with an extremely sharp, short-bladed instrument."

  "Penknife?" I asked him.

  "Yes, possibly. Some people carry things like that."

  "Any medical reasons for the slashings?"

  "Want me to speculate?"

  "Certainly," Pat said.

  "Those were made to terrorize the victim. It's amazing what the sight of a blade opening up his own body can do to a person's psyche. Those wounds are too deep to be superficial, yet not deep enough to be fatal."

  "And that brings us to the hands."

  "A very unusual disfiguration." His bright blue eyes looked at both of us, then settled on Pat. "Have you ever seen this before?" Pat shook his head. "Someplace I recall hearing of this happening. I'll do a little research on it when I get back to the office. Frankly, I think it's a signature stratagem."

  "A what?"

  "Something a killer leaves to remember him by."

  I said, "That's a pretty complicated way of writing your name."

  "Agreed," the ME nodded, "but you'll never forget it. But the one he was impressing it on was the victim himself. Look, let me show you how he did this." He took the dead man's arm, stiff with rigor mortis, forcing the hand with the forefinger out and the other knuckles bent down, against the desk. Where the finger ended you could see the cut of the blade in the wood. "Imagine having to watch as each finger was cut off at the knuckle and not even being able to scream for relief? The pain must have been incredible, but even then, it could not have been as bad as the final act of hammering that spike into his head."

  "What are you saving for last, Doctor?"

  The ME gave Pat a sage little smile. "You're wondering how a grown man would let himself be totally immobilized like that?"

  "Right on," Pat told him.

  Swinging the swivel chair around so the back of the corpse's head faced us, the ME lifted up the shaggy hair and fingered a small lump over the ear. "A tap with the usual blunt instrument, hard enough to render the victim unconscious for ten minutes or so,"

  My mouth went dry and something felt like it was crawling up my back. The one he had laid on Velda wasn't to knock her out. That one was a killing blow, one swung with deliberate, murderous intent. I looked at the phone again. Meg still hadn't called.

  Pat bent over and examined the body carefully. His arm brushed the dead man's coat and pushed it open. Sticking up out of the shirt pocket was a Con Edison bill folded in half. When Pat straightened it out he looked at the name and said, "Anthony Cica." He held it out for
me to look at. "You know him, Mike?"

  "Never saw him before." His address was on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

  "You're lucky you had a stand-in."

  "Too bad Velda didn't have one." The tightness ran up me again and I began to breathe hard without knowing it.

  Pat was shaking my arm. "Come off it, Mike."

  I wiped the back of my hand across my mouth and nodded.

  The ME was pointing toward the note. "And that's his ego trip, wouldn't you say? The dead man can't read, so who will? And who is Penta?"

  "You're leaving all the fun stuff for us, Doc."

  "Keep me informed. I'm very interested. You'll get my report tomorrow." As he went to pass me he stopped and gave me those blue eyes again. "Do I know you, sir?"

  "Mike Hammer," I told him.

  "I've heard mention of you."

  "This is my office," I said.

  "Yes." He looked around, curiously critical. "Who is your decorator?"

  "That's his sense of humor," Pat said when the ME left. Then he went over and called in two of his people to go over the corpse itself.

  I went to the phone and called Meg. The answering service said she would be back at six. I called the hospital directly, but there was no report on Velda's condition so far. Nobody would speculate.

  It was another hour before the specialists finished and the body was carted out in its rubberized shroud. Pat was on the phone and when he hung up he turned to me and said tiredly, "The papers just got wind of it. They still on your side?"

  "Hell, most of the old guys are buddies, but some of those young ones are weirdos."

  "Wait till they read that note."

  "Yeah, great."

  "You still haven't told me who you killed, Mike." This time there was a quiet seriousness in his tone. It was a question direct and simple.

  I turned and faced him, meeting his eyes square on. "Anybody I ever took down you know about. The last one was Julius Marco, the son of a bitch who was about to kill that kid when I nailed him, and that was four years ago."

  "How many have you shot since?"

  "A few. None died."