Mike Hammer--King of the Weeds Page 22
“But why does it matter, Rudy? You’re facing charges that will put you away for the rest of your life. What are a few little money woes at a time like this?”
The sneer formed again in that rip of a mouth, but it curled into a terrible smile. “I’m not worried. So a few old faggots came out of the woodwork to identify me. So a drug-addled gangbanger is making crazy accusations to get himself a plea bargain. Crimes from forty years ago? Tough to prove, Hammer. Conspiracy with Henry Brogan? He’s dead, you fucking dope. And if maybe I do go back to Sing Sing for another stay? I’ll be King Shit all over again. That place is probably chaos by now, without me around to run things.”
“Wouldn’t count on it, Rudy. A reporter pal of mine is doing the kind of investigative digging that snags Pulitzers. When this is over, you may be sharing a cell with old Warden Vlad the Impaler himself.”
That made him momentarily blanch, but he forced a smile and said, “You’re as naive as you are imbecilic, Hammer. Warden Ladd has friends in all the right high places. Politics trumps reform efforts every time.”
“Maybe. My guess is, because of your history at Sing Sing? They’ll send you somewhere else. We got dozens of slams in this state. Maybe you’ll get Adirondack Correctional—that would be a sweet irony.”
That thin upper lip curled back and the light blue eyes were hooded in disdain. “I doubt you know the meaning of the word ‘irony.’”
“Don’t count on it. Anyway, Rudy—you don’t really want to get off on those charges, not now. Without the billions, and minus that settlement with the city… wouldn’t you want to get back into the prison system?”
His chin went up and pride came into his tone. “If that’s what it comes to… Wherever they might send me, I’d soon be in charge.”
I grinned, shook my head. “The ol’ King of the Weeds himself. Only now the King of the Weeds has the nicotine jim jams, ’cause he can’t lay hands on a single damn weed. See, that’s irony, Rudy.”
His face seemed to freeze. “Cheap irony, maybe… Are we about over?”
“Just one more thing I’m curious about.”
“Which is?”
My grin was long gone. “The cop fatalities, Rudy. Were any of them really accidents? Or did you arrange them all?”
Now the rip in his face turned up at both corners and amusement brightened up his expression. “What do you think, Hammer?”
“I think in a long and bloody and, as somebody said, storied career… I have never met up with anybody more evil than Rudolph Olaf. I think you were responsible for every one of those deaths, in part because you hate cops and what better prey could a serial killer want?”
He seemed genuinely offended by that. “Serial killer? Why, I’ve never killed anyone, Hammer.”
“Not yourself. You just move the chess pieces. Everybody else is a pawn to you.”
His eyebrows went up. “Not at all. There are rooks, bishops, knights…”
“Kings. Queens. Oh, I know that much about the game. You never killed any of those gay men, either—you had Brogan do them for you. What were the gay victims about, Rudy? Killing yourself by proxy? Is there some kind of twisted conscience in there somewhere that had you punish yourself through others? Or were the victims just the fish who happened to be in the Bowery waters you were swimming in at the time?” I batted the air. “What the hell’s the difference? Who cares why? What matters is you did it. You arranged the Bowery slayings. Just like you arranged those cops to die… in part to cloud the eventual kill that was the one kill you really wanted to see go down—Captain Pat Chambers. The cop who caught you.”
A smile flashed showing teeth almost as gray as his complexion. Gray like Danny Dixon’s, the AIDS victim who’d been one of the King’s Sing Sing subjects.
“Hammer, we’re back to irony. Your friend was shot, all right, and by one of my charges… but he was not the intended target.”
“Oh, I know that. I was the target. You hadn’t got around to Pat yet… but you would have. You would have. He was the cop of all those cops who you most wanted to kill—the rest were for fun. Pat would be for revenge. He made the arrest that sent you away. But that night outside Pete’s, I was your target… of course, I’d been your target before, hadn’t I? You sicced that Corsican hitman on me.”
He seemed amused. “And why would I do that? Simply because you were there when Chambers arrested me?”
I shook my head. “I was Pat’s friend and potentially trouble. You planned to murder Pat, which meant I would come looking for the killer. You didn’t need that grief, did you, Rudy? That was why the Corsican was set in motion.”
Now he did not look so amused.
I went on: “So that night outside Pete’s Chophouse, when Pat took the hit, I was the target again. You wanted me out of the game. Why? Because an evil son of a bitch like you knows when another evil son of a bitch is on to him.”
He was projecting boredom, or anyway trying to. He seemed calmer now, as if the conversation with me had distracted him enough to momentarily forget about his nicotine pangs, and perhaps it had. His hands were on his hips and his chin was up and the washed-out blue eyes gazed at me patronizingly.
“We are done here,” Olaf said. Then he raised an eyebrow. “But I’ll expect that carton of cigarettes.”
I shook my head. “Not going to happen.”
He chuckled, sighed. “Hammer, Hammer… you’re such an anthropoid. Such a Neanderthal throwback to simpler, more terrible times.”
“I may be simple, but I promise you… I understand irony.”
He pointed a bony finger, like a cruel parent banishing a ruined daughter. “Leave. Go. Get the fuck out. We have nothing more to discuss, and besides… I prefer my own company.”
“Sure thing, Rudy. It’s been real.”
I gave him a nod, started off, and then after a few steps stopped short. Eyes on the floor, I knelt with a laugh. “Well hell, Rudy! It’s your lucky day.”
He leaned his gray face out between the bars as far as he could.
I stood and pointed down to the crumpled, almost empty pack of cigarettes on the floor near the toe of my shoe. One smoke stuck itself out barely, and a book of matches was tucked in the mostly crushed cellophane. “Will you just look what one of the guards must’ve dropped.”
“Give it to me, Hammer.”
“Why don’t you work for it?”
I watched him get on his hands and knees and stretch his hand desperately out, his long skeleton’s arm reaching, reaching, reaching, until his fingers found the crumpled pack and he pulled it back into the cell with him. He sat on the floor with the thing in his hands, like a prospector panning for gold who had just come up with one hell of a nugget.
“I’m happy for you, Rudy,” I said. “But it’s a little undignified, isn’t it?”
“Go to hell, Hammer! Go to hell…”
I was back out on the street within two minutes, where Velda was waiting. We were planning to catch a bite in nearby Chinatown. After that, we would drive over to Bellevue and see how Pat was doing.
“Well?” she asked, as we started across to where the Ford was parked. “You boys have a good talk?”
I snugged up the collar of my freshly dry-cleaned trenchcoat. “Ol’ Rudy copped to everything. And, baby, let me tell you—we’ve never been up against a nastier son of a bitch than the King of the Weeds.”
We paused for traffic. She smiled at me wickedly. “Maybe. But Olaf’s not the King of the Weeds, Mike.”
“Oh? Then who is?”
“You are.”
“Oh, so now I’m a weed?”
“What’s wrong with that? A weed grows anyplace it wants to. It’s tenacious as hell and stronger than everything around it. When everything else dies, it stays alive and keeps breathing. Almost impossible to kill, too.”
“There I disagree. You can kill a weed. Even a king weed.”
Across the street now, I stopped and turned to look over and up at the sixth-floor wind
ow where I could see the gray face gazing down on me, sneering in contempt and condescension. He blew out a cloud of smoke and held up a middle finger.
“Checkmate, asshole,” I muttered.
Velda said, “What?”
Even at this distance, through the bars and mesh, I could see those washed-out eyes go suddenly dead, and then Rudy Olaf was gone from the window, slipping down out of sight. Bud Langston’s trick cigarette had done its work.
End game.
Hugging my arm, Velda was giving me a questioning look.
I shrugged. “I told him that shit would kill him.”
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 Ask Not. 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 Con).
Both Spillane (who died in 2006) and Collins received the Private Eye Writers life achievement award, the Eye.
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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
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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
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