A Long Time Dead Page 20
Hanging there, like crucified martyrs, were the dried, neatly stitched together skins of at least a dozen humans.
The women outnumbered the men by half. Hangers slipped under the loose shoulders held them in neat array, eyeless masklike faces hanging backward like hoods. Even the feet were still attached, like grotesque Dr. Denton’s.
Only the hands were gone.
I stepped back. My tongue was thick in my mouth. My heart was starting to pound, and a burger I’d wolfed at that diner was trying to make a break for it. I have seen a lot of things in my long and storied career, but I had never seen the like of this, and I am here to tell you that Mrs. Hammer’s little boy Michael was scared shitless.
I got the hell out of there.
Out of the room, out of the house, moving in a tight circle as I went, ready for him from wherever he might spring, some grotesque middle-aged version of that jug-eared, cow-eyed boy. I had my .45 in hand and if the man of the castle, or whatever the hell he was, came at me, I was ready to blast him to Kingdom Come.
But he didn’t, and I was outside, gulping in cool air, and darkness had fallen. Hadn’t it, though.
Still no sign of a vehicle. Gripping the .45, I returned to the barn. If Melodie and Jason were being held anywhere on this property, that seemed the most likely place. I didn’t want to deal with that padlock on the barn’s big front doors—if the owner showed up, he could spot that too easily. But there was a smaller set of double doors in back, also with a padlock, and the butt of the .45 knocked that off, hasp and all.
I went in. Hay lofts loomed on either side, and a row of empty animal stalls were along the left, with various farm implements, big and small, arranged under the loft overhang at right, on work benches, on pegboard. The floor was poured cement, much newer than the weathered gray outer structure. The cement sloped to several drains. Some pools of oil indicated vehicles might on occasion get stored here, but the most striking sight was the small thresher machine—if that’s what it was—that sat in the middle of the space. About the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, it was a patched-together thing, some of it bare metal, some parts bright red, others green, salvaged or scavenged from other farm equipment.
Oddly, it immediately recalled that pile of mismatched and chewed-up human parts that had started me on this search—it was pieces of this machine and that one welded together. To this city boy, it seemed a thresher, but the top section was flat with conveyor rollers and seemed to feed a boxy metallic maw, while on the other side of the thing, below, was another squared-off spout where whatever you fed in came out. A big black metal tray was under there … and I knew.
It was a skinning machine.
You laid your victim on top, mercifully dead (one would hope), and that seemed likely because there were no straps. The body would pass on the mini-conveyer through the metallic innards whose blades separated flesh from muscle and bone and organ. The design was as clever as it was fiendish, because the blades wouldn’t cut and churn until well within the metal maw, making blood spatter little or nil. I could even see the handles where you lifted the upper part, like a photocopier, to remove the “garment” just created. The residue, in no particular shape or form, would plop into the tray for disposal.
Normally the warped genius who had devised this beauty might have gotten rid of that refuse in any number of ways. Maybe there were pigs somewhere around here he could feed it to. Maybe this human mulch enriched his soil, who knew?
But I’d been right—he’d moved from grave-robbing to waylaying motorists, only he’d made a bad choice stopping Victor King. My hunch was King indeed had been stepping out on his beautiful young wife, because I didn’t figure the inventor of this machine would have stopped him if a lovely young woman hadn’t been along for the ride.
Then, in recent days, it became necessary for Baby Boy to leave Victor King’s hand next to the latest chewed-up corpse, to stop the hunt for the producer.
Only the hands were gone.
He cut off the hands and saved them. Why? Perhaps the hands didn’t make a good trip through his gizmo. Too many fingers and working parts. Or maybe he just liked to have full range of expression for his artistic fingers when he was doing his dance. Maybe he was even smart enough to save the hands for the very purpose he’d put King’s to—allowing a victim to turn up dead, if a disappearance was making too much heat.
I called Pat on the cell. Quickly I told him where I was, that I’d wandered into a psycho’s playground, and said to inform the locals and get out here himself.
“Any sign of the newscaster?” he asked.
“No,” I said, and then I heard it.
The muffled sound of someone trying to talk through a restraint.
“Just get out here,” I said, and clicked off.
I’d been so transfixed by the skinner that I hadn’t searched the place, and in the two stalls nearest those front double doors, I found them—the kid Jason, naked, his mouth duct-taped, his hands duct-taped behind him, his ankles, too. Unconscious.
Melodie was awake in her stall, her eyes huge and luminous in the glowing face, streaked with dirt and tears. She’d been given the duct-tape treatment, too, and like her cameraman, lay sprawled on the cement floor, which was dusted with hay. She, too, was naked, her skin pale and lovely despite the obscene display.
Bending over her, I removed the tape and soon she was in my arms, hysterical, crying, gasping, half-screaming, “Mr. Hammer! Mr. Hammer! Thank God.”
“Easy, baby. Is that kid okay?”
“That crazy farmer gave Jason some kind of drug—something in a big hypo, like you’d give a horse. I don’t know if he’s alive or not.”
I checked in the stall next door. The kid had a pulse. On the slow side maybe, but a pulse.
She was at my side, naked and shivering but also demanding. “Get me out of here! You have got to get us out of here.”
I slipped an arm around her, her flesh cool and smooth to the touch. “The cops are on the way.”
“Can’t you drive us?”
“My car’s too far. We’re better off waiting.”
Her eyes and nostrils flared. “You can’t be serious!”
“Your van’s out there, but God knows where the keys are. I’d have to carry that cameraman of yours like a baby, and if our host drove up while we were trying to get to the highway, or to my car … no. You just go back in your stall.”
“What?”
“Go back in your stall, and put that duct tape loosely over your mouth. Play possum.”
“I will not!”
My hand gripped her shoulder tight. “You will. Put your hands behind your back and pretend nothing’s changed since you last saw him. With luck, the cops’ll be here before he shows. If not, I don’t want him coming in and thinking anything’s wrong.”
She got it. “Before you jump him, you mean.”
“Something like that.”
Reluctantly, she did as I told her. When she was properly in place, I leaned down and gave her a kiss on the forehead, told her everything would be all right. Like Daddy.
Then I went to the stall adjacent to Jason, where I figured to position myself, and had yet another shock.
A pile of hands in a big stainless steel tray were in there. Like they were ready to be put out on a salad bar. Some were shrunken and mummified. Others looked fresher.
I took the next stall down.
And waited. Waited for the cop sirens. Waited as what was left of dusk darkened to night through those wire-and-glass windows.
When he came in, he was wearing somebody.
Some beautiful woman, most likely, but Melodie’s crazy farmer wasn’t beautiful. He was hideous. He was inside the skin, with its long flowing hair and empty drooping breast sacks, his hands popping out of the sleeves of dried stitched flesh, and the cow eyes were huge and wild in the empty facial
sockets.
What happened to that little boy who grew up in that house? What were his daddy issues? What were his mommy issues?
Something to do with killing and skinning and stuffing dead creatures, something else to do with artistic leanings and maybe the wrong feelings toward a mommy who had him sit on her lap.
Somebody, other than God, had made this monster.
But I would leave it to my betters to feel sorry for him. Me, I had no intention of letting him plead insanity and wind up in a minimum security hospital where they could untangle his wires and release him, or maybe before that, he’d just go over the fence some night.
Unless those cops showed very damn soon, I was going to kill the bastard. And I was just moving out of the stall when he rushed over to a bench where he touched a finger to a button on a vintage cassette player and a very distorted, scratchy version of “Hall of the Mountain King” began to play.
Behind him the double doors were open and moonlight crept in and smothered him in ivory, and he began to dance. Dancing in someone else’s skin. Dancing in the moonlight.
And you know what? He wasn’t half bad.
I stepped out and showed him the .45.
He froze in mid-balletic stance. “Who … who are you?”
I didn’t have a chance to say anything, because Melodie made a break for it. She had seen those open doors and he was positioned in front of her, where she didn’t think he could see her, and she just went for it.
But he did see her, and grabbed her from behind, flung her around by the wrist, making a human shield of her, all that glowing living flesh blocking that creped, stitched Frankenstein suit with a madman in it. And as I closed in, he moved defiantly my way and kicked out with a foot and turned on that thresher and it chugged and grunted and groaned and whined.
Was it hungry?
“I’ll stick her in it!” he yelled.
He had to yell, because his contraption was loud, blotting out the cassette player, and it seemed to shake the old barn’s walls, and to its churning rhythm, we moved in our own dance until he was over under the loft overhang and snatched a sharp sickle off the wall. Then its blade was at her throat like he was the grim reaper and I was just some damn human being who couldn’t do a goddamn thing about it.
And I couldn’t.
Not unless I could get a clear shot at his head, shutting off his motor reflexes. Then Melodie would be fine, and he’d fall to the cement as limp as his skin suit. But he was on the small side, and she was a tall drink of water, and I could not find a decent damn trajectory.
Meanwhile, that goddamn machine chugged and grunted and whined, wanting to be useful, wanting to be fed.
I raised my left hand in surrender, knelt and set the .45 on the cement. Then I stood and raised the other hand. He peeked up over her shoulder and smiled. Putting my gun down and my hands up had been enough to satisfy him.
He shoved her to one side and ran through the double doors. I had the .45 in hand in seconds and put one in his ass that sent him sprawling to the gravel. The .45’s roar was a percussive grace note in the terrible chugging song of the skinning machine. I ran out there, throwing a long shadow in the moonlight and pulled back the human hood to expose his jug-eared head and grabbed a handful of thick, greasy hair and dragged him back into the barn.
Melodie had Jason on his feet. The naked kid was coming around, and she had removed the duct tape from his mouth, wrists and ankles.
“Go wait over by the house,” I said, working it up over the industrial chug of the machine. “I’ll be there in a while.”
She nodded and drunk-walked him away.
But as she went, she looked over her shoulder at me. Very small, her voice called out: “My father always liked you! How you did things!”
Sirens finally. Distant. Probably just enough time.
Because I knew what the girl meant.
I dragged him by the hair and he made a snail trail of red on the cement. Then I stripped the human garment off him and rested it as respectfully as I could a distance away. He was crawling toward the double doors, and was almost there when I stepped in front of him and shut us in, the only light provided by the moon coming in those wired windows.
He was screaming and kicking, a big hairless baby but for his head of hair and pubic curls, and he howled when I slammed him on his back on top of his invention, hard enough to daze him, his feet at the maw. The machine was still chugging, the conveyor belt going, blades whirring, and he was immediately traveling into his own dark imagination. His screams lasted until he was in up to his knees, and I’d been right, there was no blood blowback at all, just a spattery sound you could barely make out over the mechanical music.
He was just about to pass out when I got it in.
I grinned at him.
“More than one way to skin a cat,” I said.
MICKEY SPILLANE (1918–2006) was an American crime writer. Many of his novels featured the detective Mike Hammer. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Spillane sold his first story to a pulp magazine by the time he graduated from high school. He served as a fighter pilot in the army air corps in World War II, and published his first novel, I, the Jury, in 1947. With over two hundred twenty-five million copies of his books sold internationally, Spillane ranks as one of the world’s most popular mystery writers.
MAX ALLAN COLLINS (b. 1948) is an award-winning writer of mysteries, comics, thrillers, screenplays, and historical fiction. His graphic novel Road to Perdition was the basis for the 2002 Academy Award–winning film of the same name. Collins cofounded the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers and studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He collaborated with Mickey Spillane on several projects and is completing a number of the Mike Hammer novels that Spillane left unfinished. Collins lives in Iowa with his wife, author Barbara Collins.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.”
Copyright © 2016 by Mickey Spillane Publications, LLC
“The Big Switch” first appeared in The Strand, 2008.
“A Long Time Dead” first appeared in The Strand, 2010.
“So Long, Chief” first appeared in The Strand, 2013.
“Fallout” first appeared in The Strand, 2015.
“Dangerous Cast” first appeared in The Strand, 2016.
“Grave Matter” first appeared in Crimes by Moonlight, ed. Charlaine Harris, 2010.
“It’s in the Book” first appeared in Mysterious Bookshop Bibliomysteries, 2014.
“Skin” first appeared in Dutton Guilt-Edged Mystery, 2012.
Cover art by Andy Ross
978-1-5040-3608-5
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