Kill Me, Darling Page 19

  “Why should I buy this garbage?”

  “How about this, Nolly? You and Meyers tried to have me killed a couple of times tonight. Didn’t go so well. Mandy’s two bodyguards are shark shit by now, and when they suddenly disappeared, Bonetti and his pals noticed. Or anyway, they did when I pointed it out.”

  His voice sounded anything but cool as he sputtered, “I’ll talk to them. That’s no problem. You stop right there!”

  “Here’s the funny part—they already knew you were getting that racket going. Know how I know? A couple of days ago, with your late partner Meyers playing along, they hired me to kill you.”

  Silence but for some boat sounds from the bay.

  Then: “Try it, Hammer. Try it and see what happens to your bathing beauty.”

  “I don’t have to, Nolly. That’s the beauty part. Bonetti and the boys, they’ll do it for me.”

  “Go to hell, Hammer!”

  “Later, thanks. But right now your best play is to put the gun down, hand over the girl, and let me walk out of here. You can pack a bag and see if you can beat the bullets out of town. It’s a good offer, Nolly. Better than what I’d like to give you.”

  A nervous laugh punctuated his words: “I put this gun down, you’ll kill me.”

  “No. Listen to me carefully. I care more about her life than your death. Is that something you can understand, Nolly?”

  Velda was looking at me with lovely eyes peering from ugly swollen settings. She had said barely a damn word throughout any of this, letting me play it out. But there was love in that puffy, battered, beautiful face. I could see it. I could feel it. And only she could know what I was giving up not killing this scum.

  Something flickered in his face. A hint of humanity. Had he loved someone once? But then it was gone, and he said, “No, no, you’ll kill me. You’re a lying son of a bitch, and you’ll kill me. And after what I did to your broad here, you’ll do it nice and slow. I know about you, Hammer. I heard about you.”

  Very quietly I said, “Then you should have known better than to go after my girl.”

  His smile was a curdled version of the charming one now. “But that was what made it so sweet—so rich! Mike Hammer’s girl throws him over for Nolly Quinn. And you know what, Hammer? Now I’m throwing her over…”

  And he did.

  He shoved Velda off the diving board and she cried out, “Mike!” her eyes wide with terror as she tumbled off and dropped down, falling like a lovely stone into the deep end and sending up a geyser.

  Nolly hopped off the board and was running on the other side of the pool, shooting at me, little .22 cracks cracking the night. But I didn’t bother firing back, pitching the revolver and diving in.

  The water was as warm as a soothing bath but there was nothing soothing about the underwater sight of Velda knifing helplessly down, hair streaming like seaweed, the bubbles from her mouth going up.

  It took only a few strokes to get to her and slip my arm around her waist and swim with her at my side, her body making a mermaid motion despite her bound wrists and ankles. She instinctively knew what I was doing, that I wouldn’t go up to the side of the pool there in the deep end. Instead we swam underwater until we were in a shallower depth where she could get to her feet, ankles bound or not, and then we both came up gasping for air and the first thing we heard was a gunshot.

  The water was to her shoulders and just above my waist as I yanked the .45 from under my shoulder, the water making it a slow-motion affair, but knowing it would still fire just fine.

  Only I didn’t shoot.

  We’d expected to see Nolly waiting to pick us off from down toward this end of the pool, near the house, figuring that shot we’d heard had been him firing at us.

  But what we saw was Captain Barney Pell in rumpled suit and hat with half a cigar in his face and a Police Special in his fist, having stepped out onto the patio where he faced Nolly Quinn, who seemed pinned in midair like a butterfly in a collection. Staring in shock at Pell, Quinn still had the .22 in his hand but the arm attached to it was doing nothing but hanging limp.

  Then Quinn collapsed in a whimpering gut-shot pile.

  “Guess that’s what they call the nick of time,” Pell said with a grin, the cigar moving side to side.

  I helped Velda make it to the end of the pool and lifted her by the waist and sat her down where she could perch there with her legs in the water. No time to untie her just yet. Her expression was confused. Mine wasn’t.

  I sat next to her, as soaking wet as she was, the .45 casually in hand. “Velda, meet Captain Barney Pell of the Miami P.D. But don’t say it’s a pleasure. Because he’s the guy who fingered you tonight.”

  Pell took a couple of steps closer to us, his friendly freckled mug blossoming into a big smile. “Well, that’s crazy talk, Mike! What kind of bull are you—”

  “No kind of bull, Barney. I should have known sooner, but you putting one in Nolly’s belly makes it all come clear. You’re the guy who put this whole thing in motion. You told Pat Chambers about Velda going to Florida with Nolly Quinn, knowing he’d tell me and I’d come down here and almost certainly kill the bastard for you.”

  He seemed genuinely amused, chuckling as he said, “Come on, Mike, you’re not making sense.”

  But his gun was still in hand. Not quite aimed my way, but in his hand.

  I said, “Nolly Quinn was a partner in crime who you wanted to get rid of. You didn’t need him anymore. You could be Mandy Meyers’ dope conduit all by yourself. Like the good old days when cops were corrupt in Miami and nobody cared. Your old buddy Wade Manley sure came to the wrong person to help him get Nolly Quinn, didn’t he, Barney? He told you all about Velda, too, and you sat on that one till just today. Parceling out information to this one and that, like chum off the back of a boat.”

  The feigned amusement was gone now. He was shaking his head, seeming more frustrated than anything else. “This is crazy, Mike. What do I have to do with some New York cop? So I knew Manley from a convention or two, like your pal Pat. You need to settle down, brother. You need to get a grip.”

  I swung the .45 up at him. “I have a grip. You were the average-looking guy in a suit and a tie and a hat meeting with Wade Manley in Dirty Dick’s down on the waterfront. You’re exactly the guy who could set up a meeting with Manley down there and just walk right up and plug him.”

  “In New York? You’re out of your damn mind, man. I work a Miami beat, you know that!”

  I gave him the nasty grin. “But you were in New York last month, Barney. For the police convention. Telling Pat about Velda turning up in Miami. Passing out cigars at the Waldorf.”

  Pell had nothing to say to that.

  “You’ve been keeping tabs on me, Barney, with my help. I even told you I was staying at the Sea Breeze, info that you passed along to Quinn and Meyers when you thought I was getting too close to making you as his silent partner. That got two innocents killed. That’s on your tab.”

  A groan came from the fallen Nolly, who was trying to pull himself up, leaning on the .22 in his hand to do so, and Pell swung toward him and fired another shot into him, his chest this time. Quinn had been in no shape to use that gun, so self-defense it wasn’t.

  If these gunshots hadn’t already woken the neighbors, the shrill scream that ripped everything apart surely would.

  Erin Valen stood there framed in the glass doors onto the patio, her pretty little face a study in shock and rage. The redhead in the green sundress had seen Pell shoot Nolly that second, gratuitous time, and now she came running at the big cop, with no weapon but raised flailing fists.

  Pell swung his .38 toward her but my .45 blew the night apart and lifted the top of his skull off before he could fire, a chunk of bloody bone sailing then hitting the flagstone and cracking into pieces. The crooked cop went down all at once, like a collapsing wall, hitting on his side, gun tumbling, cigar too, landing with his head near enough to the pool for some of what had been in it to leak out a
nd plop down into the water. I hoped his new kid’s mother married better next time. Any stepfather would be a step up.

  Nolly Quinn was in even worse shape now, not a chance in hell he’d make it, though right now he was still breathing—hard and raspy and ragged, the kind of sounds a wounded beast makes when it’s crawled under a bush to die.

  She ran over to her crumpled lover, held him close, weeping until the mascara and the rest of the cosmetics came apart in streaks of sorrow as he kept grabbing jagged breaths that only wracked him further, convulsions shaking them both, hers of grief, his of pain, the motion shifting the perfect mass of red hair, and I knew Nolly Quinn’s secret at last.

  I’d been half-right about Nolly. Earlier tonight at the Five O’Clock Club, farm girl Miranda Storsky, alias stripper Randi Storm, had tried to fill in the rest with her last breaths, no need any longer to guard a secret worth money when redemption was all that was left. She’d seemed to be bidding me “…bye… bye…” but I never was worth a damn at spelling.

  Nolly was an AC/DC boy, only half gay, swinging both ways like his gate out front. But half would have been enough to get him completely killed by his hypocritical Mafia cronies, and Nolly needed the beauties he surrounded himself with to maintain his ladies’ man bona fides. Only the lovelies who discovered his secret and perhaps tried to blackmail him over it, well, they had to die, didn’t they? Like Kimberly Carter and Dotty Flynn and who knew how many others.

  As the two doomed lovers sat awkwardly enfolded on the flagstone, Velda and I emerged from the pool drenched and dripping, my arm around her waist. Then she reached her face up and kissed me on the mouth with heat that almost dried us off, begging silent forgiveness that wasn’t necessary at all. I lifted her into my arms to carry her like a bride across the threshold into where I could unbind and clothe her.

  The delicate little beauty who transcended the rest was lifting her so very handsome dying lover’s hand with the gun still in it, pressing its tip against her heart, entwining her own slender fingers with his on the trigger.

  “Take me with you, darling… kill me… kill me.”

  You could look past the askew red wig now and see the tortured face under the mask of make-up, catch the telltale clue in a graceful throat previously hidden by ribbon or high collar, look past the delicate frame of the waifish beauty and discern the houseboy who did everything for Nolly Quinn.

  The sharp report was loud but not loud enough to wake Nolly, and his true love was gone too, before the poolside reverberations could even diminish.

  What was it Nolly called his houseboy? Ron?

  Maybe Erin was Aaron.

  Like I said, I never could spell worth a damn.

  A TIP OF THE PORKPIE

  Part of my approach to completing Mickey Spillane’s unfinished novels is to keep them in the period during which he began them, and to place them within the continuity of the thirteen Mike Hammer novels published during his lifetime.

  That puts me in the odd position of working with a partial manuscript that was contemporary when written but has now become a period piece, making the end result something approaching an historical novel.

  In Kill Me, Darling, Mike Hammer goes to the Miami and Miami Beach of 1954. To help me recreate that setting in that era, I turned to a number of books, primarily Gangsters of Miami (2010) by Ron Chepesiuk and Miami Babylon (2009) by Gerald Posner. My thanks to the authors.

  I also consulted various vintage pamphlets, maps and fliers, notably Complete Guide to Florida (1956) by Andrew Hepburn and Highlights of Greater Miami (1950 and 1957 editions) by J. Calvin Mills. Also helpful were vintage issues of Cabaret magazine.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  MICKEY SPILLANE and MAX ALLAN COLLINS collaborated on numerous projects, including twelve anthologies, three films, and the Mike Danger comic book series.

  SPILLANE was the bestselling American mystery writer of the twentieth century. He introduced Mike Hammer in I, the Jury (1947), which sold in the millions, as did the six tough mysteries that soon followed. The controversial P.I. has been the subject of a radio show, comic strip, and several television series (starring Darren McGavin in the 1950s and Stacy Keach in the 1980s and ’90s). Numerous gritty movies have been made from Spillane novels, notably director Robert Aldrich’s seminal film noir, Kiss Me Deadly (1955), and The Girl Hunters (1963), in which the writer played his famous hero.

  COLLINS has earned an unprecedented twenty-one Private Eye Writers of America “Shamus” nominations, winning for True Detective (1983) and Stolen Away (1993) in his Nathan Heller series, which includes the recent Ask Not. His graphic novel Road to Perdition is the basis of the Academy Award-winning film. As a filmmaker in the Midwest, he has had half a dozen feature screenplays produced, including The Last Lullaby (2008), based on his innovative Quarry series. His documentary Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane (1999) appears on the Criterion Collection edition of the film Kiss Me Deadly. As “Barbara Allan,” he and his wife Barbara write the “Trash ‘n’ Treasures” mystery series (recently Antiques Swap).

  Both Spillane (who died in 2006) and Collins received the Private Eye Writers life achievement award, The Eye.

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

  LADY, GO DIE!

  MICKEY SPILLANE & MAX ALLAN COLLINS

  Hammer and Velda go on vacation to a small beach town on Long Island after wrapping up the Williams case (I, the Jury). Walking romantically along the boardwalk, they witness a brutal beating at the hands of some vicious local cops—Hammer wades in to defend the victim.

  When a woman turns up naked—and dead—astride the statue of a horse in the small-town city park, how she wound up this unlikely Lady Godiva is just one of the mysteries Hammer feels compelled to solve…

  “Collins knows the pistol-packing PI inside and out, and Hammer’s vigilante rage (and gruff way with the ladies) reads authentically.” Booklist

  “A fun read that rings true to the way the character was originally written by Spillane.” Crimespree Magazine

  TITANBOOKS.COM

  COMPLEX 90

  MICKEY SPILLANE & MAX ALLAN COLLINS

  Hammer accompanies a conservative politician to Moscow on a fact-finding mission. While there, he is arrested by the KGB on a bogus charge, and imprisoned; but he quickly escapes, creating an international incident by getting into a firefight with Russian agents.

  On his stateside return, the government is none too happy with Mr. Hammer. Russia is insisting upon his return to stand charges, and various government agencies are following him. A question dogs our hero: why him? Why does Russia want him back, and why (as evidence increasingly indicates) was he singled out to accompany the senator to Russia in the first place?

  “It may be Spillane’s hero throwing the punches in these stories, but make no mistake—it’s the writer who knocks you out.” BarnesandNobleReview.com

  “[Collins’s] prose never lets up for a second… a slam-bang climax that had us needing a drink when it was over.” Pulp Fiction Reviews

  “Spillane is a master in his own genre… Complex 90 is a hell of a book.” Bullet Reviews 5/5

  “Spillane at his best.” CrimeTime

  TITANBOOKS.COM

  KING OF THE WEEDS

  MICKEY SPILLANE & MAX ALLAN COLLINS

  As his old friend Captain Pat Chambers of Homicide approaches retirement, Hammer finds himself up against a clever serial killer targeting only cops. A killer Chambers had put away many years ago is suddenly freed on new, apparently indisputable evidence, and Hammer wonders if, somehow, this seemingly placid, very odd old man might be engineering cop killings that all seem to be either accidental or by natural causes.

  At the same time Hammer and Velda are dealing with the fallout—some of it mob, some of it federal government—over the $89 billion dollar cache the detective is (rightly) suspected of finding not long ago…

  “Collins’ witty, hardboiled prose would make Raymond Chandler proud.” Entertainment Weekly

>   “Another terrific Mike Hammer caper that moves non-stop like a flying cheetah across the reader’s field of imagination.” Pulp Fiction Reviews

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