The Consummata Read online

  “I told you I was deep cover,” Kim whispered.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “You could walk away,” Kim said, “and let us handle Halaquez in our own way.”

  “What,” I said, “and put this bastard back on the Company chessboard, to play more double-agent games? I intend to deliver him to the people he betrayed!”

  Her gloved fists were on her latex-clad hips. “We have interrogators who make Consummata-type torture look like the playtime it is. We have truth-inducing drugs and deprivation techniques and psychological manipulation that can—”

  “The only thing in this fucking skull worth knowing,” I said, and slapped Halaquez alongside the head, “is the name of the traitor in the Little Havana ranks. And they will get that out of him, and deal with it, just fine. Trust me, my love.”

  There we stood in the bare little room, with the ball-gagged, handcuffed, very helpless Halaquez a mute witness to our little marital squabble, a husband with his knife and gun, a wife in her black bondage gown.

  But she didn’t argue any further.

  “He’s yours,” Kim said. “Let them have him.”

  I had Halaquez’s arm by one hand, but I took her arm by the other and grinned. “You look pretty damn good in black, doll.”

  And she grinned back at me, her mouth full and moist and red. “Do you like it? Then why don’t you kiss me?”

  I did. Hard and sweet and tender and rough, mashing my lips into hers with a fierceness that was anything but role play.

  “Help me haul his ass out of here,” I said.

  “All right,” she said, and pulled on the Consummata mask and again became the blonde dominatrix who ran things around here.

  I tagged along as she dragged the whimpering Halaquez out into the corridor and down the wide stairway, and not a single security guy gave us even a second glance. We paused on the landing.

  “I’ve got a boat waiting at the dock,” I said.

  Her eyes narrowed in the mask holes. “You understand I have to stay behind....”

  “You need to do what you need to do,” I said ambiguously, and she towed our quaking prisoner down the rest of the way.

  Before long, we had moved through the downstairs and back through the kitchen, and outside where the night had grown a little chilly, wind riffling the palms.

  Now we had the handcuffed, ankles-chained Halaquez between us, me with one arm, her with the other, dragging him along like the bag of garbage he was. He was trying to scream behind the ball-gag, but only a muffled grunting emerged, like something unpleasant on the tube with the volume way down.

  As we moved along the row of gently swaying palms, he finally stopped his screaming, ceased any protest, his body slumping with despair, almost as if he were asleep or dead, and we had to tow him along. It slowed us, but not much.

  When got to the dock, Saladar was still seated up in the flybridge. He stood, his eyes wide and gleaming, his smile the same. Ever so slightly, he rocked with the motion of the moored craft.

  “You have done it, Señor Morgan!”

  “We’ve done it, Luis.” We were almost close enough to the boat to step on board now, with Halaquez between us, like parents hauling a reluctant trick-or-treater to the next house. Kim stepped to one side to remove her mask, while I held our captive loosely by one arm.

  “Luis, this is Kim, my wife,” I said. “She’s a government agent. Turns out this whole S & M set-up was an enormous sting.”

  Looking up at Saladar in the flybridge, Kim said, “You should know, sir, that you have the option of leaving this prisoner in my charge, for interrogation and maybe prosecution.”

  Halaquez straightened suddenly and his eyes were wide with something that was not fear, and I would have sworn he was trying to smile around that ball-gag. And was he laughing?

  Could he be laughing...and why?

  Saladar drew the .38 from his gunfighter’s holster and shot Halaquez in the head, the report a whip crack that echoed off the water. The near-naked man in the black latex shorts went down in a pile on the dock leaving only a bloody mist behind.

  Kim blurted, “What in the hell—”

  I said nothing, my eyes meeting Saladar’s. He lowered the gun but did not holster it.

  “I am sorry, my friend,” he said, bowing his head. He fumbled for words: “I am afraid...the emotion, it...seeing this traitor...forgive me....”

  “I can’t, Luis,” I said.

  His chin came up, his eyes implored me. “Señor....”

  “You’re the real traitor, aren’t you, Luis? I suspected as much. I even thought you might try to kill Jaimie here on the voyage home, which would have confirmed it. But you didn’t want to take that risk. You figured I might read the relief in his face when he saw you, the man he reported to...the man who has looted, manipulated, sold out, and betrayed his fellow Cubans in Little Havana, for how many years?”

  The gun came up, though its snout pointed down at us from his perch. His sneering smile suited his devil’s beard.

  “I careened into Little Havana,” I said, “and Pedro and the others embraced me as a possible savior. You played along, but betrayed me from the start. The very start. You were part of that small group, that first night, who knew of my masquerade, and knew I’d be at the Amherst Hotel.”

  He may have been a Commie, but his manner was imperial. “There is no need for this, Señor Morgan. You waste your words and your final moments. I am a soldier. I fight for a cause. You are a mercenary, the worst kind of capitalist.”

  If I distracted him enough, I might get to the .45. My suit coat hung open, after all. Then there was the knife sheathed on my left forearm.

  Which could I get to faster?

  “I wonder,” I said. “Were you chasing Dick Best’s nonexistent new invention for your cause? Or did you only see the wealth it promised?”

  But I would never know the answer, because a second whip crack cut through the night and interrupted our conversation, a shot cutting through Saladar’s shoulder in a blurt of blood, shoving him off balance, his .38 tumbling from his hand and plunking into the water like a stone.

  Gaita stepped from the shadows and onto the dock, a striking, strange, barefoot vision in a metal-studded black bikini. She too had a .38, not a long-barreled one like Saladar had dropped in the bay, but a little police special that did the job just as well.

  “Ladron!” she spat, and shot him in the chest.

  Saladar teetered on the flybridge.

  “Asesino!”

  And shot him the stomach.

  He lurched.

  “Traidor!”

  And shot him in the head.

  Finally he tumbled.

  Tumbled from the flybridge to the rear deck, and landed hard but surely didn’t feel it, a limp rag of a human hitting with a thud that made the boat rock slightly, a death with none of the dignity he’d worn in life as part of his disguise.

  Gaita came over to me and I held her. She was crying, but it seemed more anger than anything else. She started telling me how she’d seen Kim leave the ballroom with me, and how she had gone downstairs to wait to see if we would lead Halaquez out. The little avenger had been one of the girls hired by Kim to work tonight’s affair. Bunny had been unaware, and...

  I stopped her before she went into too much detail, saying, “All I care about is that you’re here, and that you shot that bastard.”

  Then I told her to go, and to take the gun with her, advising that she dispose of it.

  “Tell Pedro everything!” I called.

  “Si, Señor Morgan!”

  She disappeared into the night.

  Taking his wrists while I took his feet, Kim helped me swing Jaimie Halaquez’s mostly naked corpse up and onto the rear deck of the Black Beauty, where he landed with a noisy thump next to the equally dead Saladar. We hadn’t bothered discussing the obvious—that I would dump the bodies in the ocean.

  The whip cracks had sent no one running down the backyard to see wha
t the commotion was. Perhaps nobody heard anything over the blaring strip-club jazz. And the neighbors on either side were a world away.

  “Come with me,” I said to my wife. “I have this boat—it’s mine now.”

  “You bought it?”

  “Luis there sort of bequeathed it to me. And I have enough of a stake for us to get a good start on finding which of Sir Henry’s hiding places holds the money-truck treasure.”

  We were on the dock, the wood spongy under our feet, standing down a ways from the bloody mess Halaquez had made. Nearby, on the rear deck of the craft, two corpses were sunning themselves in the dim moonlight. I had some blood spatter on me from Jaimie dying so nearby, and she had some on her black latex gown. Not as romantic a setting as I might have liked. Unusual, though....

  “I have to stay,” Kim told me, though the violet eyes revealed she hated saying it. “It’s better if I clear you from the inside.... Someone’s coming.”

  A single figure was running down the backyard toward us—not at a breakneck speed, just jogging, and alone. One of the security guys?

  “I can handle whoever this is,” I said.

  “So can I. You have time to get on the boat and out of here....”

  “Wait...it’s Crowley.”

  “Morgan, go!”

  “No. No, he and I have a truce. Didn’t he tell you?”

  “No! He didn’t.”

  She and I hadn’t talked since the fed and I had made our pact.

  Then Crowley—in a dark suit that was similar to those of his agents up at the mansion, only better tailored—was on the dock with us. The breeze had picked up and was flapping his unbuttoned suit coat and ruffling his wispy amber hair. He glanced almost casually in the boat and saw the bodies there. Only a minor flinch registered on those bland features.

  “So those were gunshots,” he said to himself. Then to me, without a greeting, explained, “Guy on the door thought he heard gunfire down here. You do this?”

  “No,” I said. “A little Cuban girl who was working for you tonight. That’s your incentive to keep the lid on.”

  “Oh,” he sighed, rolling his eyes, “I plan to.... Are you all right, Miss Stacy?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “If you’ll excuse me....” He moved away from us, down the dock, and used a walkie-talkie. He told somebody—presumably the man on the door—that there was no problem on the dock, but he would check out the grounds personally. No need for backup.

  Then he came back and said to me, “You planning on dumping these dead fish?”

  “I am. You have a better idea?”

  “No. But I’m coming with you.”

  Kim pushed forward. “Walter, let’s just walk away. Let Morgan deal with this. Don’t you two have a truce?”

  Crowley said, “A truce until the end of the mission.”

  “Actually,” I said, “you promised me twenty-fours after I delivered Halaquez. Well, there he is.”

  “Morgan, I already had Halaquez, and you stole him out of my custody. Now he’s dead and worthless as an intelligence resource. You violated our agreement. It’s null and void. Now...here’s what we’re going to do.”

  And his small hand brought out the big nine millimeter from under his arm with admirable speed. I really hadn’t anticipated it.

  “Just a precaution,” he said. “I can’t send you out on that boat to dump those casualties without riding along. Miss Stacy, you come, too. Morgan, I promise you I will do everything I can to help clear you. But there’ll be no getting away from me this time—and with Art Keefer gone, there’s no one to come bail you out like after Nuevo Cadiz.”

  We got on the boat.

  Up on the flybridge, I played captain and Kim sat next to me, and Crowley sat on the teakwood deck supervising the dead, hanging onto the rail with one hand and keeping the nine millimeter ready in the other. Not menacing about it or threatening, though he had asked me for my .45, which I’d handed over—it was in his waistband.

  When the lights of Miami had disappeared behind us, and the ocean was an endless black ripple around us, touched with the barest shimmer of ivory from that slice of moon, I stopped the engines, and looked down at Crowley.

  “Is this all right?”

  “This will do,” he said. “Come down, both of you, and give me a hand.”

  We did.

  He held the gun on us as my wife in her black latex gown helped me take the corpses by their arms and legs and fling them into the drink. One at a time. The bodies floated, though as soon as the air in their lungs got replaced by water, they’d sink like stones; but right now they floated. And almost immediately I saw something chilling in the moonlight.

  I pointed, and they both looked.

  Nobody had to say it.

  Fins.

  Black fins cutting a white foamy path in the moonlighttouched blackness of the ocean.

  For the first time, alarm registered in Crowley’s voice. “Let’s get the hell out of here.” He motioned with the gun. “Back up there, you two.”

  In the flybridge in our side-by-side seats, I started the engines up, and under their throbbing, Kim whispered: “He’s the one, Morg. He’s my suspect. And something he said....”

  I whispered back, “I know.”

  I glanced back. Crowley was looking toward where the bodies had been floating, and sharks were now circling.

  I called out: “Hey, Walter! Let me ask you something.”

  He turned toward us and frowned. “No small talk! Just get us back to that dock.”

  “Okay, let me ask Kim, then.” I spoke to her but my eyes remained locked with his, and my voice loud. “Did you report in to Walter about Art Keefer’s death? Is there any reason for him to know Art’s name at all?”

  “No,” she said.

  And I threw the knife.

  It sank into his shoulder and, as part of his reaction, the gun in his hand went off, but luckily not at me or even at the teakwood deck, just off into the night, echoing, bouncing, fading.

  I leapt from the flybridge onto him, knocking him back against the rail, then yanked my .45 from his waistband and shoved it in his belly.

  “Drop the piece, Walter. Let Davy Jones have it.”

  He did, and it barely made a splash.

  Kim cut the engines. From her seat in the flybridge, she turned a grave, pitiless expression on him, looking more like the Consummata right now than my tender bride.

  “That money-truck heist was a CIA black op,” I said right into his terrified face, “and I was your patsy! You killed my friends, you’ve stolen years of my life!”

  “You can’t prove it!”

  “I don’t have to. I’m going out and I’ll recover that missing forty mil, and turn it in, and all my sins will be forgiven. But it’s something I have to do alone...well, almost alone. I’ll have my wife with me.”

  That bland mug of his finally had some genuine expression, eyes wide, nostrils flared, upper lip curled back in trembling desperation. “You take me back, you can have your twenty-four hours! You can have forty-eight!”

  “No, I’m going in another direction, Walter. And this?” I yanked my knife from his shoulder and blood plumed and burbled as he screamed.

  “This is where you get off,” I said, and shoved him over the back rail.

  His screaming turned into a burbling thing and the white foam in the Black Beauty’s wake was red-tinged as he splashed and yelled and made a huge fuss. As I said, the moon wasn’t providing much light.

  But I could see the fins coming.

  And so could he.

  We lay anchor off a far key and didn’t bother with swabbing the back deck of the blood of betrayers. That could wait. Right now we were celebrating our marriage with a couple of cold beers in the galley.

  Sitting across from me, still in black latex, a wedding gown of sorts, she said, “What now?”

  “Now we find that money. And when we find it, we can decide whether to clear my name or just spend the damn
stuff.”

  “I can see how you’d figure you’ve earned it by now.”

  “That’s right.”

  She nodded, once. “Okay. We’ll go treasure hunting. We’ll follow your namesake Sir Henry’s footsteps around the Caribbean. But there’s something else we need to do first.”

  “Yeah?”

  And the Consummata rose, took off her long gloves before freeing herself from the black latex gown, letting it pool and clump on the teakwood floor, then propping first one foot, then the other, on the little galley table where I sat, as she unlaced and removed the high-heel boots, stripping off the black lingerie, nose-cone brassiere, silk panties, sheer stockings, garter belt, exposing full breasts, narrow waist, flared hips, long muscular legs, attributes that required no kinky accoutrements, all that lovely pale flesh interrupted only by the dark delta that, as she settled herself on the mattress of the forward berth, parted between creamy thighs to reveal the pink portal where life begins.

  Those almond-shaped violet eyes taunted me.

  “Don’t you think,” she asked, “it’s about time we consummate this damn marriage?”

  “Nag, nag, nag,” I said.

  More Great Suspense

  From the Authors of

  THE CONSUMMATA!

  DEAD STREET

  by MICKEY SPILLANE

  PREPARED FOR PUBLICATION BY

  MAX ALLAN COLLINS

  For 20 years, former NYPD cop Jack Stang has lived with the memory of his girlfriend’s death in an attempted abduction. But what if she didn’t actually die? What if she somehow survived, but lost her sight, her memory, and everything else she had...except her enemies?

  Now Jack has a second chance to save the only woman he ever loved—or to lose her for good.

  Read on for an excerpt

  from DEAD STREET—

  available now at your

  favorite bookstore...

  It was quiet today. Overcast with a snap in the air. October was almost here and a fresh season of trouble was gearing up. Sergeant Davy Ross was standing beside an unmarked police vehicle, talking to a tall, thin guy in his fifties wearing black-frame glasses who had a white trench coat draped over his arm. In his hand was an inexpensive cardboard folder people keep receipts in and when Davy turned his head, glanced my way and said something, I knew they were talking about me.