The Last Stand Read online

  She got up and went somewhere, came back with a damp cloth and wiped my face gently with it.

  “Where have you been,” I asked, “these last few days?”

  “I used that apartment the floor up from yours. I only came back here to check on Doris, and pack the rest of my things. I was hoping to talk you into leaving Gantsville and ending all this.”

  “No need,” a female voice said to our left. “The end is almost here.”

  Doris was in the doorway, a .45 in her grasp, dwarfing the small white hand holding it. She still wore the same red frock, red as blood, red as Satan. Her dark eyes in the lovely face were wild.

  Ginger gasped. “Doris! What…”

  “Shut up! You love this fool so damn much, you can die with him.”

  The .38 was in my hand but out of sight, down between my thigh and Ginger’s.

  “You’re the killer,” I said, matter of fact. “No out-of-town trigger man—you killed Mayes.”

  The smile was as triumphant as it was crazed. “Of course I killed him. I loved him and I killed him, killed the bastard, who could love so many women but not me. Mr. High and Mighty, who couldn’t be bought, but could be had, by any pretty bitch.”

  Ginger, quietly bitter, said, “He never had me.”

  “Maybe not. I don’t know that I believe you, Sis. And I don’t know that I care. Mayes and that hussy he got pregnant, they’re both dead now. Just like you two will be in a moment.”

  She stepped into the room, and came over to stand before us, just a few feet away, the .45’s barrel staring at us with its cold black eye.

  “I liked you,” Doris said to me. “I thought you might like me. I gave you a chance earlier today, but you weren’t interested. Like Mayes wasn’t interested. I found him in that hotel room with another damn woman. She got away, but I blew his stinking head off…just like I’m going to blow the heads off the two of you.”

  Maybe three feet away now. Could I lift my gun-in-hand and fire before she did? Doris took one step closer, aimed the gun at me, and her finger gently tightened around the trigger.

  The roar shook the room.

  But the .45 hadn’t made it. A shotgun had. Doris was still standing there, but the top of her was nothing human. A blast from the open door took her head off and splattered it against the far wall, where dripping blood and chunks of bone and gobs of gore and one lonely eyeball stuck there like the work of some cut-rate Picasso. Then a body getting no signals from an obliterated brain toppled on its back with a rattling thud, and the headless body lay limply on the floor.

  The man in the doorway for once wasn’t standing so straight, nor did he look distinguished at all. Yet he was still the loyal servant, who would have done almost anything for Doris. Who could say exactly what he’d done, in those long nights with the master away?

  But there was one thing he couldn’t do for her, and couldn’t let her do, either.

  Not to her sister. Not to Ginger.

  Marsh slowly came to the headless form, its ragged neck spilling red like a kicked-over paint can, and, on his knees, covered his face and wept. When his hands lowered, his face wet with tears, he reached for the .45 in the woman’s limp fingers and I got there first. He looked up at me pitifully, wanting so much to die, but I shook my head as I stuffed the gun into my waistband.

  There had been enough death for one night.

  Ginger was in shock, no tears yet, and I walked her out of that room of death and into the living room, and sat her down.

  “It’s over,” I told her. “We’re together now, and we have a lifetime ahead of us to make new memories and put this one behind us.”

  She swallowed and nodded and put her crying face in my chest and her arms tight around me. I knew I should probably leave her to go call the cops.

  But what was the hurry?

  There was already one here.

  The LAST

  STAND

  by Mickey Spillane

  The day of the dying happens too fast. The sun comes up and it shines in your face and tells you it is time to arise and die the hard death that has been written for you and there is no way you can escape the momentous finale that circumstances have laid on you…

  CHAPTER 1

  He sat there on a rock that was too damn jagged to sit on to start with and wondered what he was doing out in the middle of a desert that was someplace in the United States where nobody would ever look to find him and, so far, not even a vulture was eyeing him for supper.

  He knew where he was. He could stick a pin in the map to show him exactly where he had landed and that was great. He knew where he was. Trouble was, nobody else knew. He wasn’t lost. He was right on course. He had made a great landing, never touching a wingtip to the ground or throwing a pebble into the ailerons or elevators, not doing one single thing to hurt the old relic he was flying except to swerve hard to avoid an outcropping that stuck up out of the arid soil like a dirty middle finger and there he sat, completely whole, entirely unscathed, with an absolutely workable airplane…if he could find whatever part had temporarily ceased to function…and put it right again.

  But then, he wasn’t much of a mechanic. Oh, hell of a pilot. Six thousand hours in the air, combat time in the wild blue a generation ago, a fistful of bucks to buy and restore an old BT 13A that dated back not to his own time in Vietnam but to his father’s era, the plane the flyers in WWII nicknamed the Vultee Vibrator…and stupid enough to get involved in an old timers’ cross-country junket when he could have parked his tail on his boat and gone fishing off the Carolina coast.

  A nice day, he thought. He had had a good breakfast with the guys, real SOS the way they used to make it, bread toasted on one side in the ovens, curled a little and plastered with creamed hamburger. The young jet pilot tried to insist it was creamed chipped beef, but hell, he was only in Desert Storm, and they’d barely had a chance to eat lunch before the coalition blew Saddam out of the grass. Creamed chipped beef my ass. It was creamed hamburger.

  Thirst was no problem. Three beers were jammed into the map case of the old BT over there and three more beside him behind the rock. As a matter of fact, right now he even had to pee and he did. The air was so dry it evaporated without even staining the soil.

  He thought about where he might be able to get help. Not from his cell phone, which got no signal out here.

  Indians, he said to himself. There’s got to be Indians out here in this wilderness. And hell, they weren’t hunting the Seventh Cavalry anymore. A lot of them were college graduates, old veterans like himself and guys out to make a living like anybody else. He remembered one from his cadet class, a big, sleek Native American who went into F-4 Phantom IIs and that was the last he had heard of him. His name was T.P. Summers. Naturally, that got changed to Indian Summers, after the old song.

  The rock got too sharp for his behind and Joe Gillian got up and walked to his airplane. He went around it, looking at the skid marks he’d left in the sand, avoiding up-thrust pinnacles of stone and two windswept mounds of sand that could have made him ground loop. Old 819 sat there as though she was tethered in her parking space back at the home field, both gas tanks three quarters filled, battery at full charge, two sandwiches in a plastic bag under the seat and emergency gear stowed in the proper place.

  The only trouble was, the damn engine had suddenly quit. No warning, no metallic coughing. Just quit. Sudden silence. He had called in his situation and position, but there was no answer. The radio was a little out of date too. But maybe, just maybe, somebody had heard his call.

  Overhead, the sun turned up the temperature and the dryness of his lips said he’d better either put on some ChapStick or have a beer. He looked around the rocky, sandy, mountainous desert, saw a patch of green and a plant that had a couple of white flowers looking for a bee’s kiss, figured that water had to be someplace below and opted for a beer. Those Miller Lites were still cold for now, snuggled in their wetsuit blankets, and no sense letting them get warm.
/>   Joe climbed up on the wing, tugged a beer out of its wrappings and grunted approvingly. Lady Lite was still plenty cold. He popped the top with a quick pull and was about to take that first beautiful swig.

  A voice said, “You happen to have another one of those, buddy?”

  He turned slowly. There was a man over by the rocks, sitting where Joe had been just a minute before.

  “You an Indian?” Joe said. He stepped down off the wing.

  “Betcha tail I’m one. Don’t I look like one?”

  “Not like they have on TV.”

  “Hell, those guys only show up at the ceremonies. Didn’t you ever read Tony Hillerman’s yarns about the red men?”

  “Sure.”

  “So how about that beer?”

  Joe nodded. “Come on down.”

  The Indian hadn’t been sitting on a rock at all. He was in a squat with his knees up around his neck and when he scrambled down the side of the hill Joe saw a guy as tall as he was.

  “You’re a big mother,” he said.

  “I had a white lady for a grandmother. Big job, she was.”

  He held out his hand and Joe took it. “Sequoia Pete,” he said.

  “That your real name?”

  “Nope. My real name has a lot of vowels in it and has something to do with a running rabbit.”

  Joe introduced himself and asked, “Don’t you speak Indian?”

  “Yeah, but you wouldn’t know it. I can handle Spanish, do some Portuguese, but hell, you can’t make a buck with that talk. Where’s that beer?”

  Joe made another quick trip on the wing and tossed a Lite down to Sequoia Pete. “Still cold,” he said.

  “Tastes great, less filling, right?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Pete hoisted the can and didn’t put it down until he had finished it, then squashed the empty, glanced around and shook his head. “Now I got to tote this damn can around until I find a garbage bucket.”

  “What’s the matter with right here?” Joe asked him, indicating the primitive landscape.

  “Come on, pal, you’re talking about my back yard. You toss junk in yours?”

  “No, but…”

  “You’ve already parked your old beat-up airplane—you plan to let it sit until it’s a heap of trash like those slobs back east?”

  “Maybe I should call triple A and get a tow truck.” He looked at Sequoia Pete very seriously. “How’d you get here, Pete?”

  “I rode part of the way. Walked the rest. Why?”

  “From where?”

  Pete pointed toward a row of mountains to the west. “Over there.”

  “Where’s your gear?”

  “I got it on,” Pete said. “I travel light.”

  “What are you doing out here?”

  “Working.”

  “At what?”

  “Right now I’m looking for fossils.”

  “Find any?”

  “Only that old airplane.”

  Joe swirled the rest of the beer around in his can then hoisted it and finished what was left. He wiped his mouth. “You’re lost too, aren’t you?”

  “Nope. My horse is lost. I’m right here with you.”

  “Actually, I’m not lost either,” Joe stated flatly. “I can show you on the map right where we are.”

  “Great,” Pete told him. He lifted his arm and held out a forefinger toward the flowering granite peaks to his right. “And I can tell you that right over there, almost on top of us but maybe fifty miles away, are the Superstitions.”

  “The what?”

  “The Superstition Mountains, flyboy. They’re on your map too.”

  Joe frowned and nodded. “I read something about them once…”

  “The ‘lost mine’ and all that jazz?”

  “It wasn’t a mine.”

  “Nope, that’s just what they called it. It was a cave where the Aztecs or somebody stashed this huge pile of gold to keep it out of the hands of the Spanish devils who were hard on their trail.”

  “Good story.”

  “They got prospectors up there still looking for it. Some big brains, too. All kinds of metal detectors.”

  “Wonder why they couldn’t find it with all that technology.”

  Sequoia Pete looked at the mountain ridge, the tops starting to fall into deep shadow. There was something plaintive about his bland expression. “The earth hid all that stuff, Joe. There are quakes in those hills too, not like they have in L.A. or San Fran, but strange subtle ones like a giant chewing up from below. Nobody’s there to see it or hear it and if there are, they don’t talk about it.”

  “Just as well,” Joe said. “Can’t you see some old weather-beaten prospector finding gold worth billions, all smelted, carved into statues and jewelry and all that good stuff? Man, it would throw his lifestyle right out of joint. He’d have to throw away his shovel, shoot his mule and go buy a Mercedes.”

  “Not me,” Pete said. “Indians don’t prospect. They’re out here looking for fossils. They get big college educations so they can come back and wear deerskin moccasins again.” He let out a little laugh and looked at Joe’s feet, then down at his own. “But not this chief, paleface. These boots came right out of the Cabela’s catalog and cost me a hundred thirty bucks.”

  “They stiff?”

  “Hell no. They make love to my toes. Now, can I ask you a question, flyboy?”

  “Be my guest.”

  “You going to just stand there or you want to look for help?”

  Joe thought a moment, lifting his head to slow scan the sky. Lining the south at about thirty thousand feet were a half dozen contrails with two more crossing them like a giant ‘T’ in the west. “Maybe we could wave to them.” He pointed.

  “Sure. Do that.”

  So Joe waved. He did it twice.

  “Look,” Pete said, “that’s not getting us anywhere. You got a radio on that plane?”

  “Yup. It works great around an airport or when you’re flying formation with a buddy, but from down here to over there, forget about it. That BT isn’t modern equipment.”

  “Then why’re you flying it?”

  “We have a club, Pete, one of those old-timers’ clubs who do stupid old-timers things like flying cross-country for the fun of it. We dress up in ancient gear and have a ball at county fairs.”

  “This is no county fair, buddy.”

  “Damn, and here I was wondering where they were having the chili cookoff.”

  “So how did you get over here in the red man’s back yard?”

  “A weather front developed right on my course line. I plotted out an alternate route figuring to go around the thunderheads, and another turned up again and you know where?”

  “Right in front of you?”

  “On the ball, Chief. So I dodged that. Then I ducked another. Once I found a hole and went under it and almost hit a rock that was some kind of a mountain peak and did some more dodging and ducking and suddenly I was in the bright blue again over John Wayne country. And before I could start to figure out which way was which, that nice big, fat engine of mine suddenly stopped. No warning. Just cold stopped. I was at eight thousand feet, went into emergency procedures, and all I could hear was the wind in my ears.”

  “And here you are.”

  “I saw a sign on a hangar once,” Joe said. “It said Flying is the second greatest thrill in the world. The first is landing.”

  “Is that true?”

  “Absolutely, Chief. Incidentally, you are a chief, aren’t you?”

  “Of course. All Indians are chiefs. Ask any tourist.”

  “Okay, Chief, how do we get out of here?”

  “We could go find my horse.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he knows the way home, flyboy.”

  “Pete, if your horse knew the way home he’s long gone. You’re as lost as I am. I’ll bet you were stumbling around till you saw me land and hoped you’d get a free ride back to your wigwam.”

 
“Man, I live in a hogan. That’s like a house. Sun-baked bricks. Sod roof two feet thick.”

  “Warm?”

  “Like toast. No electricity. Old-style generator, but it’s busted.”

  “You live fancy.”

  “Huh. You should see my neighbors.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Nearest is about twelve miles down the trail. Too close for comfort.”

  “Nice place, I assume?”

  “Dirt floors, shutters for windows.”

  “Well,” Joe told him, “being poor can be rough.”

  “Poor? That guy owns a dozen oil wells in the next state. He’s got money coming out his ears. I think he even owns a bank.”

  “So why does he stay here?”

  “What…and go into the big city miseries?” Pete said. “He might be rich, but he isn’t dumb.”

  “Well, let’s see how smart we are, Chief. How do we find your horse?”

  “Beats me. He took off at a full run. Never stopped.”

  “We got to start someplace.”

  Pete looked at him seriously. “You like walking?”

  “Not too far.”

  “You got on good shoes,” Pete told him.

  “So how far do we have to go?”

  “We’re not going to meet anybody this side of the Superstitions. At least over there we have a chance of running into somebody still scratching for gold, or those tourists who come in to paint pictures of the sun going down behind the mountains. You want to leave a note on your bird in case somebody comes looking?”

  Joe thought a moment, walked over to the old Vultee Vibrator, took a pad out of his back pocket, scribbled a note on it and stuck it in a trim tab hinge. When he came back he looked at Pete’s face and said, “Told ’em I’d be back in an hour.”

  “Nobody would believe that.”

  “I also said the plane was booby-trapped with six sticks of dynamite.”

  “That they’d believe,” Pete said.

  Four hours later the Superstitions were still there, not looking a bit closer than when they’d started walking, and the mild breeze had already covered up their footsteps in the sand except for the last hundred yards. The beer was warm now, but still wet. They split the sandwiches Joe had taken from the plane.