Dead Street Page 15

  And on the floor was another man in black, masked face down but with a broken bottle of Canadian Club stuck in his back like a handle should anyone want to pick him up. He was shuddering a little, but that didn’t last long.

  “I figured it was you who turned off the lights,” I told her. “But how the hell did you get to those bottles? I put them on the floor, and—”

  “And I heard you do it. Heard where you put them. Jack, I feel... numb. I should feel excited or terrible or... glad to be alive, or ashamed to have... killed that man — I did kill him, didn’t I?”

  I was leaning over him now, checking. “Thoroughly. And you may feel bad about it, when you’re through being in shock, but you shouldn’t. There are three others downstairs just as dead. They were here for you, and me, and those floppy discs.”

  I went over and slipped my arm around her. “Listen, baby, we’re going to hole up here — more may be on the way. In the meantime, I’ll get Kinder on the phone, and—”

  She squeezed my arm. Whispered, “Jack — someone’s in the hall.”

  Damn! I should have commandeered the dead intruder’s Glock, or gone over to the concealed gun closet. And I would have got around to that, but we had company again before I could.

  Only the man in the doorway was one of the good guys — Joe Pender. He was in a tan uniform like the one Kinder and the guard at the front gate wore. No cap, though — his red hair, white at the temples, was standing up, like the wind had turned it from hair into flames.

  “My God, are you two all right?” He had a Glock in hand too, sans silencer, nose down.

  I nodded.

  “I’ve already called Kinder.... How many?”

  “Four intruders. All dead, or probably so. I haven’t checked the other three bodies but you don’t recover from what they suffered. Those ice cream trucks still out there?”

  “Yes — one here on Kenneth, another back over on Lawrence. Checked them both before I came in, and they’re empty. The drivers must have been part of the house invasion crew.”

  That was when I saw what I’d been waiting for: Pender’s eyes glancing over at the manila folder on the antique desk.

  “Listen, why don’t you get Bettie over next door,” Pender said, “and I’ll hold the fort down here, till Kinder and backup show. This is a crime scene now.”

  Bettie sensed something. She had her arm around my waist, and was plastering herself to my side. Her breath was coming slow and hard.

  I said, “Joe, mind if I ask you something, before Bettie and I go next door?”

  “Sure. But we should—”

  “Hurry? Why? Are these stiffs going someplace beside a morgue?”

  “No. But I just thought—”

  “Here’s my question, Joe. You wouldn’t happen to be the guy who helped Darris out, and swept this place for bugs, would you? Like you’re the guy who suggested I move Bettie next door, so any intruders would be confused about where to go?”

  Pender pretended not to see what I was getting at. Didn’t do much of a job of it, saying, “Yeah, I swept this place, and as of this morning, it was clean. Land lines, too.”

  “Here’s the thing, Joe. Until those floppies were found, Bettie wasn’t a real threat. She’s someone who’s been watched for years. It hasn’t even really been a secret where she’s been hiding out. You’re even one of the ones who’ve watched her.”

  “You’re talking crazy, Jack.”

  I shook my head. “No. What I haven’t figured out is how deep you’re in it. How far back you go. You don’t pull off a major heist like that atomic caper without some inside help in law enforcement, and you were active back then. Hell, we knew each other — you may be the one who told the bastards who snatched Bettie that I’d be at the station house that evening.”

  “Jack... you’re wrong, Jack.”

  “You were also already starting your side business, of renovating buildings, right? So you may have been the guy who tipped the mob boys off that the urban legend about Big Zappo’s big old safe was for real — and that Bucky Mohler owned the building, or at least co-owned it.”

  His lips were peeled back over his teeth. “I don’t even follow this. What kind of medication are you on, Jack?”

  “Nothing. I’m in fine shape. The only health scare I’ve had lately is a Glock in the hand of a bent cop — a cop whose electronic surveillance only this evening, not long ago at all, overheard the discovery of those missing floppy discs. You heard it, Joe — heard that last big shoe drop.”

  And now he stopped denying it. He didn’t admit anything, but his expression changed. Hardened. Still, the eyes had a sadness. I’ll give him that much — some humanity was still in there.

  And, of course, the Glock swung up and aimed itself at me. And Bettie. We were standing so close, we were one damn target.

  “One other question, Joe, the eternal one — why? You have a nice life down here, and it doesn’t even cost you that much. This village is a sweetheart deal for ex-cops. You got a wife who loves you, you got kids, and grandkids, too, right? Why risk it all, why shame yourself and your career, for what? Money?”

  Pender sighed. Then he shrugged. “Not that easy, Jack. I’ve done business with those guys for a long, long time. And I had tastes and habits, when I was younger, that needed underwriting. Gambling. Coke. Pretty young things like your Bettie — that you can understand, surely?”

  “I understand, Joe. I understand greed and drugs and sex — hell, those are three biggies in our game, right? The big motives? But let me ask you this — how are you going to explain this to Darris, and he’ll be here soon — how are you going to explain killing Bettie and me?”

  He shrugged and smiled. A sad little smile, but a smile.

  “Because I didn’t do it. One of those assholes downstairs did — see, this is one of their Glocks.”

  And he extended his arm, pointing the weapon right at me. And Bettie.

  He never saw it coming, never sensed the animal leap, the swift, sleek, graceful beast, who saved his snarling for after sinking those sharp teeth tearing into white flesh.

  “Back, Tacos!” I said, and the dog, with blood on its face and head — some his own, some Pender’s — looked at me with chagrin. Had he been a bad doggie?

  “Good boy,” I said. “Bettie, take him downstairs. And call Kinder right now — I don’t think Joe really did, though with the noise, Darris probably is already on his way.”

  I went over to where Pender lay in a sprawl, his legs and arms going in directions that had no point, and his eyes were huge and his mouth was bubbling blood and so was his neck, from the jagged open gash, the red streaming.

  “Shoo... shoo...” he was saying.

  He might have been calling me “Shooter,” but I didn’t think so.

  A trembling finger pointed to the Glock he’d dropped.

  When he spoke, it took effort, and you had to give it to him for that, anyway. Of course it was more gurgling than anything else, but I understood.

  “Shoo... shoot me,” he said.

  “Why? You’ll be dead in a couple of minutes, Joe. Bleeding out from a wound like that, shouldn’t take... oh. I get it. You want me to shoot you with the Glock, and blame it on one of these bastards?”

  He managed to nod, the eyes even wider, wilder. With that gash in his neck, you’d think his damn head would’ve rolled off.

  “That way,” I said, “your family won’t have to suffer. You won’t die in disgrace. You went out a good guy, a hero who tried to save Bettie and me.”

  One more nod and something like hope flickered in the wide eyes.

  I stood. “I see where you’re coming from, Joe. Trouble is, what about all the real good guys, the cops who gave their lives to the Job, and who didn’t have mob pals and mistresses and gambling habits and a coke jones? Would be kind of a slap in the face of guys like that. Of guys like me, frankly. It’s not that I don’t want to shoot you, Joe, but...”

  Hell.

  He w
asn’t listening anymore.

  So Bettie and I shared the big rocker on my front porch and we watched — or I watched, and she heard — as Captain Darris Kinder and various other real good guys did their cop thing. And a quiet street in a retirement village was suddenly littered with death, as body bags emerged from the house, black cocoons no butterflies would ever exit.

  Kinder had finally been contacted by the federal boys. They informed him that a major operation was going down at Garrison Properties. Warrants had been issued, based on info provided by NYPD sources (including a certain retired captain) and a dozen arrests would be made in the early morning hours. Later, we learned these included several high-ranking “retired” Mafiosi, and I was told, off the record, that the long missing “materiel” had at long last been recovered, too.

  I pressed, and was told the atomic cube was intercepted when it was being off-loaded from a lead-lined ice cream truck onto a small cruiser at the Garrison Properties dock.

  But that was later. Right now Darris Kinder was dealing with a crime scene and all I had to do was cuddle with a beautiful brunette in my lap on a rocker on the front porch.

  She fell asleep for a while, after all that excitement. We weren’t going to bed, because we had to run Tacos over to the vet as soon as they opened, though right now the greyhound was sleeping peacefully at our feet, tail thumping in a dream as he chased a rabbit, metal or otherwise.

  The vehicles had just rolled away when she woke up, snuggled against me even closer, and asked, “Jack — is that the sun coming up?”

  “Yes. You want me to describe it?”

  “No. I can see it. Not well, but I can see it — colors, shapes. I’m alive, Jack. I’m coming alive.”

  Soon, so was the street, a boy on a bike hitting porches with papers, retirees in robes collecting them, lights coming on in houses, the sound of radio and TV and even the laughter of children, or anyway grandchildren.

  The Street back in the big city might be dead, but this one wasn’t. All those years without Bettie, I’d been as dead as that ancient patch of pavement. They say retirees go to Florida to die.

  But I felt like I was finally starting to live.

  Following Mickey Spillane Down DEAD STREET

  Preparing this novel for publication was a bittersweet task, a thrill, an honor, an obligation, a privilege. My only regret is that the task needing doing.

  Back around 1961, I was a thirteen-year-old in Iowa who fell in love with Mickey Spillane’s fiction, and was inspired by his work (and that of such peers of his as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain) to pursue crime and mystery writing.

  As a teenager, I was surprised to learn that the writer I admired so much had been controversial, that in fact he’d been vilified and attacked. When I read about Hammett, Chandler and Cain, I encountered glowing praise for the most part; when I read about Spillane, I heard ridiculous nonsense about pornographic sado-masochism, fascist tendencies and the fostering of juvenile delinquency.

  Over the years I became a champion of Mickey’s, and I remain so. During the ’50s, ’60s and into the mid-’70s, Spillane was the world’s bestselling author (not mystery writer — author, a term he disliked, incidentally) and having to defend a writer so popular seemed absurd to me then, and still does now. Part of my pro-Spillane effort included writing (with James L. Traylor) the first critical study of Spillane’s work, One Lonely Knight: Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (1984), an Edgar Award nominee, and later making a documentary, Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane (1999), available on DVD in the anthology of my short films, Shades of Noir (part of the boxed set, Black Box).

  As a reasonably successful mystery writer identified with championing Spillane, I was asked in 1981 by the organizers of the mystery fan convention, Bouchercon, to serve as their liaison with Mickey, who was one of their honored guests. I was also asked to appear with Mickey on a two-man panel and do the first in-depth public interview of Spillane specifically for mystery fans. Mickey finally coming in close contact with appreciative genre buffs was gratifying to all concerned.

  That was when our friendship began, and it lasted until his death in July 2006, and beyond. During those years we worked together on a number of projects, including our comic book series Mike Danger and a number of anthologies, some focusing on Mickey’s uncollected short fiction, others gathering stories by others in the noir tradition Mickey represented. And Mickey did me the favor of appearing as an actor in two of my independent feature films, Mommy and Mommy’s Day (these are also available on DVD).

  Additionally, I was privileged to share numerous conversations with Mickey, both at his home in Murrell’s Inlet, South Carolina, and over the phone, about writing. With the exception of Dave Garrity and comic book crony Joe Gill, Mickey had few writer friends. His public persona of the blue-collar writer, self-deprecatingly comparing his work to chewing gum for the masses, meant Mickey allowed few other writers inside the world of craft and art where he spent so much of his life.

  No one ever lived who loved storytelling more than Mickey Spillane; no one loved words and vivid turns of phrase more passionately.

  Over the last ten or so years of his life, before cancer took him quickly (until his last two months, he was uncommonly healthy for a man in his late eighties), Mickey approached his work in a fashion quite apart from the process of his younger days.

  The Spillane of Kiss Me, Deadly (1952) wrote quickly, in a fever heat. He claimed to have written some of his novels in intense, brutal sessions of as short a span as three days. I, the Jury (1947) may have been done in nine days (although sometimes Mickey admitted to nineteen). This was his habit throughout the ’50s and well into the 1970s. He typed with two fingers on cheap yellow paper, single-spaced to “make it look more like a book.”

  Ideas flowed through Mickey’s mind in a manner consistent with his boundless energy, and — during the periods when he didn’t publish much (from 1952 to 1961, for example) — he would often noodle with first chapters and story ideas. Sometimes he would come back to these, other times not. In his last ten years, his habit was to work in three offices in his home (one was actually outside his house, a small shack on stilts). Often he would have a book going in each.

  The last Spillane novel published during his lifetime, the adventure yarn Something’s Down There (2003), was one of these — he had begun it in the late seventies or early eighties, and didn’t finish it till a month or so before he submitted it. During his last five years he had four novels going — two Mike Hammers (The Goliath Bone and King of the Weeds), an adventure novel (The Last Stand) and a crime novel (Dead Street).

  Mickey completed The Last Stand, and had done extensive work on the other three, moving back and forth between them as his muse dictated. A major frustration of his last two months was that he wanted to finish Goliath Bone in particular, as he had promised himself and fans “the last Mike Hammer” in which Hammer and his loyal secretary, Velda, would finally marry.

  These last four novels show Mickey — who definitely had a sense of both his mortality as a man and his immortality as a writer — returning to the three genres he loved: private eye, adventure, and crime. For the latter, he in particular liked to write about tough cops, as witness The Deep (1961), Killer Mine (1968) and The Last Cop Out (1973).

  Initially, Hard Case Crime editor Charles Ardai and I were going to publish The Last Stand first, as it was the final work Mickey completed. The book is a very entertaining rumination on friendship and is thematically about as typically Spillane as anything he ever wrote; but the adventure-tale nature of the story itself is more on a par with Something’s Down There than the mystery/crime novels with which Mickey was so strongly identified.

  So while The Last Stand will no doubt see print before long, Charles and I — with Jane Spillane’s blessing — decided to start here, with Mickey’s final cop/crime novel. As this novel is a rare look at the later years of a traditional hardboiled anti-hero, and opens with (and periodica
lly returns to) poetic musings on life, death and re-birth in and out of the big city, Dead Street seems the perfect novel to remind readers why Mickey Spillane was the 20th century’s bestselling, most famous writer of “tough guy” fiction.

  Mickey and I spoke many times about Dead Street. On several of my visits to his home over the last ten years, this was the book he was working on. It began as a much different animal, although with common elements — originally, he intended to write about four ex-cops and their wives in a Florida retirement community oriented to police and firemen (based on a real such village), and crimes they solved in the area. As Dead Street evolved into his more typical loner cop story, Mickey often said he thought it would make a good movie for older actors, and hoped Charles Bronson might play the lead and that Lee Meredith, Mickey’s co-star in the incredibly long-running Miller Lite commericials, might play the blind girl, Bettie.

  Friendship was key in Mickey’s work and, of course, his life. Jack Stang, the hero of this novel, takes the name of the real-life upstate New York cop who was one of Mickey’s best friends, and who Mickey had hoped would one day play Mike Hammer in the movies. Mickey even shot a short try-out film for Stang as Hammer in the ’50s, and Stang appears with Mickey in the John Wayne produced film, Ring of Fear (1954), available on DVD. The irony is that Mickey blew Stang off the screen in that film, and set the stage for playing Hammer himself in The Girl Hunters (1963).

  Toward the end of his life, Mickey realized he would not be able to finish these last few novels, and he indicated to me that after he was gone, these and other unfinished projects would be turned over for me to complete. I later learned that he’d said to his wife Jane, “Give all this stuff to Max — he will know what to do with it.”

  No greater honor could have been paid to me by my friend, with the possible exception of the day he consented to be my son Nathan’s godfather.