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Lisa rushed in and began screaming.

  He looked past me at her.

  He said in a very small voice, “Help. Help me. Darling... help...”

  She rushed to him, knelt to him as if at an altar. Her hand reached for the hypo jutting from his neck, but hesitated. “What can I do, Harmon? What can I do?”

  “Ah, let him heal himself,” I said.

  I had slipped off the table and was about to pull my trousers back on, out of a sense of decorum if nothing else, when she whirled to her feet and where she got the little gun from, I have no idea. It was just a little revolver, a .22, a purse gun, and it was no real problem. Not unless she shot me in the head, like in the right eye for instance. Where she was pointing it.

  There wasn’t much space between us—all three of us were on the same side of the baroque table, her and me and the doc. All I’d have to do was jump her to put an end to this.

  But she had caught me with my pants down. Literally down around my ankles, and I would trip over myself if I made a move.

  “That’s right, Mike. Look down that barrel. Look into that little round hole filled with the darkness that will swallow you up.” Her voice was shaking but her hand was steady. “Look what you’ve done!”

  She herself didn’t look, but I did as asked: Dr. Harmon Giles was sitting there with a needle in his neck and his eyes as wide as they were unseeing, spittle and vomit decorating his slack open mouth, his complexion already as pale as the white base of the antique operating table.

  “A man like you!” Her eyes were wild. “Uncouth, unschooled, a mental midget with his brains in his fists! For the world to lose a man like... like Harmon... a man of such brilliance, to a neanderthal like you. This was a man, a great man, who only wanted to better the world. I can’t allow it, Mike. I can’t allow a creature like you to exist. Your existence, Mike, in the absence of Harmon’s presence, is an insult. An insult to science. To peace. To the betterment of—”

  A whip crack stopped her mid-sentence.

  Only it wasn’t the crack of a whip, not really, rather the sound of a .32 Browning as a spray of the brains Lisa Contreaux was so proud of flew out the hole in the side of her head to splatter on the wall like so much more waste matter in this pesthole husk of a hospital.

  “She talked too much,” Velda said, at the door, the nose of her .32 curling smoke. In a black raincoat, her hair matted down and damp, my beautiful partner had never looked better.

  “I was beginning to get worried,” I said.

  “You think that character...” She gestured with the gun to the slumped, dead Giles. “...could shake my tail? Get your pants on. I knew you couldn’t keep ’em on around that little bitch.”

  We stepped into the lab side by side and I said, “What about the other two?”

  “I dealt with that tall skull-faced character at the gate. I didn’t kill him, since we need a live specimen. He’s bleeding from the shoulder, and ruining the inside of the trunk of that heap of yours. Can’t be helped.”

  “What about the Dragon?”

  “Is that who he is? I just saw a big guy in a raincoat milling around the lobby through a rain-smeared window. I came in the back way, up the rear stairs.”

  “Well,” I said, my shoulders tightening, “if Gorlin heard that shot, he’s on his way up here now...”

  She was handing me my spare .45, which she’d carried in a raincoat pocket. “He may not have heard it. We’re a bunch of floors up from him. Let’s go back down the rear stairs.”

  “I want him. This time I want him.”

  She put a hand on my shoulder and showed me a patient face. “Let me take you down the back stairs, and then you can come around and—”

  That was when the Dragon burst into the lab.

  Comrade Gorlin had his Makarov out, and he raised it at me, his thick-mustached lip curling back to expose those massive yellow teeth in a snarl, his brow furrowed but his eyes wide, but before either he or I could fire, Velda was blasting with the Browning, screaming at him and just blasting away, and she unloaded the thing at him, tearing holes in him and his tan raincoat, catching him in the shoulder and arm of the hand holding the Makarov, the weapon dropping from useless fingers, another slug nicking him in the left leg, before he stumbled back through those doors and out.

  Velda had hurt him, no question, but her firing had been atypically erratic, and I looked over at her and she was panting like she’d run a marathon, her eyes and nostrils flared, her mouth open in a silent scream, the cords in her neck taut, standing out in bas relief.

  “What?” I said.

  “That’s him? That’s your Dragon?”

  “Yeah! Of course.”

  She gripped my sleeve. “Your Dragon, Mike... he’s my torturer. That’s him! That’s the K.G.B. torturer who—”

  But she never finished—I was already in pursuit. I could hear him on the stairs, as he tried to run but his shot-up arm and especially the nicked leg were slowing him, staggering him. I took those stairs three at a time, risking the refuse and clutter that could have tripped me up, just racing down with no regard to the risk, and on the third-floor landing I caught up with him, only I didn’t shoot him, I tossed the .45 aside and I threw myself at him and on him and brought him down hard. He was wounded, all right, but a wounded beast is the most dangerous kind, and with his good hand he punched and flailed, and both knees worked at my midsection and groin. We rolled in the filth, the paint peelings, the brick dust, the rat dung, and it covered us in an awful gray, as his one big fist hammered at me but my two big fists smashed into him and smashed into him and smashed into him, and whenever a blow caught his wounded shoulder, he howled in rage and pain, until finally he grew sluggish and his hand fell limp. When I crawled off him, breathing hard, wiping blood off my face with a dirty paw, he lay on his back on the filthy floor, breathing hard too, but irregularly, hurt inside, things broken, tissue damaged, organs bleeding, though he was not dying, not yet. He was not even unconscious.

  I felt her nearness before I saw her.

  Velda was standing on the stairs where she had watched much of it, the Browning still in her grasp.

  “Give me a hand with him,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Just do it.”

  We hauled him up the stairs, much as he had hauled me earlier. He helped a little, figuring I was getting him somewhere out of this grime. As a prisoner of war, he expected ethical and humane treatment. But this was a cold war and my response would be in kind.

  Then we were walking him through the lab and into the little room where the dead doctor and nurse waited. I wouldn’t be needing their assistance.

  I slammed him up onto the operating table like a great big fish I’d landed onto a boat deck. I could hear him breathing, moaning, whimpering. A dragon whimpering. Wasn’t that goddamn undignified.

  “Honey,” I said, and I held my hand near her face, but didn’t touch her, not with all that bloody muck on me. “You go find a phone. Call Rickerby. And then call Pat. But there’s no hurry.”

  She looked at me confused. “No hurry?”

  “No.” I went over to the counter where Giles had been preparing my surgery and found the scalpel.

  “This is going to take a while,” I said.

  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; 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 nineteen 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 Target Lancer. His graphic novel Road to Perdition is the basis of the Academy Award-winning film. 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. As “Barbara Allan,” he and his wife Barbara write the “Trash ’n’ Treasures” mystery series (recently Antiques Chop).

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

  NOW AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

  LADY, GO DIE!

  MICKEY SPILLANE & MAX ALLAN COLLINS

  The Lost Mike Hammer Thriller

  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 broadwalk, 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...

  TITANBOOKS.COM

  COMING IN 2014 FROM TITAN BOOKS

  KING OF THE WEEDS

  MICKEY SPILLANE & MAX ALLAN COLLINS

  The Penultimate Mike Hammer Novel

  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...

  TITANBOOKS.COM

  AVAILABLE FROM HARD CASE CRIME

  MICKEY SPILLANE & MAX ALLAN COLLINS

  The Consummata

  MAX ALLAN COLLINS

  The Last Quarry

  The First Quarry

  Quarry in the Middle

  Quarry’s Ex

  Two for the Money

  Deadly Beloved

  Seduction of the Innocent

  TITANBOOKS.COM

  AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

  THE MATT HELM SERIES

  DONALD HAMILTON

  The long-awaited return of the United States’ toughest special agent.

  Death of a Citizen

  The Wrecking Crew

  The Removers

  The Silencers (June 2013)

  Murderers’ Row (August 2013)

  The Ambushers (October 2013)

  The Shadowers (December 2013)

  The Ravagers (February 2014)

  PRAISE FOR DONALD HAMILTON

  “Donald Hamilton has brought to the spy novel the authentic hard realism of Dashiell Hammett; and his stories are as compelling, and probably as close to the sordid truth of espionage, as any now being told.”

  Anthony Boucher, The New York Times

  “This series by Donald Hamilton is the top-ranking American secret agent fare, with its intelligent protagonist and an author who consistently writes in high style. Good writing, slick plotting and stimulating characters, all tartly flavored with wit.”

  Book Week

  “Matt Helm is as credible a man of violence as has ever figured in the fiction of intrigue.”

  The New York Sunday Times

  “Fast, tightly written, brutal, and very good...”

  Milwaukee Journal

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  AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

  HELEN MACINNES

  A series of slick espionage thrillers from the New York Times bestselling “Queen of Spy Writers.”

  Pray for a Brave Heart

  Above Suspicion

  Assignment in Brittany

  North From Rome

  Decision at Delphi

  The Venetian Affair

  The Salzburg Connection

  Message from Málaga

  While We Still Live

  The Double Image

  Neither Five Nor Three

  Horizon

  Snare of the Hunter

  Agent in Place (June 2013)

  PRAISE FOR HELEN MACINNES

  “The queen of spy writers.” Sunday Express

  “Definitely in the top class.” Daily Mail

  “The hallmarks of a Maclnnes novel of suspense are as individual and as clearly stamped as a Hitchcock thriller.” The New York Times

  “She can hang her cloak and dagger right up there with Eric Ambler and Graham Greene.” Newsweek

  “More class than most adventure writers accumulate in a lifetime.” Chicago Daily News

  “A sophisticated thriller. The story builds up to an exciting climax.” Times Literary Supplement

  “An atmosphere that is ready to explode with tension... a wonderfully readable book.” The New Yorker

  TITANBOOKS.COM

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Contents

  Co-Author's Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  About the Authors

  Also Available from Titan Books