Mickey Spillane - [Mike Hammer 13] (2 page)

One quick blink.
Yes, I know that. Maybe I still will be.

Almost apologetically, he said, “Everything I could do, I did.”

This time I didn’t blink at all.
I was waiting.

“I was drunk and I had the shakes.” He watched me closely, but I didn’t respond.
No blinks.
“It was like something dropped you right into my lap. I was being given another chance. What I did was totally unethical, completely unwise. When I should have taken you to a hospital to receive proper care, I took the responsibility upon myself like a complete fool, and by some happy circumstance, you survived all the indignities of a medical idiot and stayed alive in spite of what he did.”

That stupid blinking was beginning to bother me. It hurt, but I breathed in a little deeper and said in a strange voice, “Would I have lived otherwise?”

His lips pursed and his eyes grew oddly serious. “No,” he said. Then added, “You almost went down the black alley. Nobody comes back from there.”

And black had a meaning. It wasn’t death. Black didn’t represent death no matter what they told you. Grey represented death. Black was the color of ignorance.

So I stood there and looked down the black alley and didn’t step into it. I just melted back into a bubbly froth of anesthesia make-believe and awoke to a blurry fat man’s face.

I said, “Am I . . . dying?” My voice was cobwebby, shaky.

Finally, he told me, “That’s up to you now.” I saw a small smile touch his mouth and he added, “Just don’t do it. If you die, you kill me, too. Lousy choice for both of us.”

He saw the question in my eyes.

“Why? Man, if you kick it over in my home-made laboratory here I’m right down the drain. A month ago I wouldn’t have given a hoot. Hell, I would have welcomed the
big out
. Then you go and show up all blown to pieces and I take the challenge and make it real again, suddenly turning into a doctor who pulled off some kind of a modern miracle . . . and if you go, I’m right behind you.”

I had to force the words out. “Now you’re . . . sober?”

“Permanently.”

I was trying to verbalize another thought, but he held up his hand and shook his head at the same time. “No more talking.” He reached over to the table beside the bed and picked up a hypodermic needle. He shook some alcohol on a cotton swab, dabbed my arm and gave me a jab. “Just some sleep, no black alley this time.”

 

Somehow my mind had kept a count and I knew four more days had passed. In a way I had been fed with the life-sustaining solutions that pass through tubes into your veins and nourish the body, and the same body had been moved and massaged so that no muscular deterioration would set in and wet cloths had kept the skin clean.

Then I woke up and there was no fuzziness at all. The soft light of dawn made everything a dull cream color and I was able to breathe without it hurting at all. The door opened and the little fat man was there again. He didn’t seem so fat now. There was a drawn look to his face that was an improvement.

I think I grinned at him.

“You feel better?” he asked me.

I made the
okay
sign with my fingers and blinked
yes
.

“Cut out the blinking, friend. I think you can try speaking to me. What do you want to know?”

“How much do I owe you?” I said. My voice was there, but deep and raspy.

He dropped his head and let out a grunt. His eyes lifted to mine. “Joking?”

“Sure.”

“Otherwise I’d have to tell you that I owed you,” he said. After a moment he added, “I still might. If you want to take me to court you’d own my hide.”

“Knock it off,” I let out softly. “I’m alive.”

“I think that was your doing, not mine.”

“Don’t give me that.”

“I have to. Right now you’re on the upswing. There’s no way you’re going to come out of this like you had a broken leg or the mumps or something. You are in a very trepidatious situation.” He squinted and ran his hand across his face. “Damn, what a bedside manner I have. I shouldn’t even be talking to you like this.”

“Hey . . .”

“You like the rough news?”

I nodded.

“There’s nothing I can do for you anymore. If you want to keep functioning you are going to have to get rest so damn complete it will drive you crazy.” He stopped, wiped his mouth, then continued. “And I
mean
rest. Doing nothing. Taking it easy. Getting up, napping, going to bed early, just like some little preschool kid. That’s the only way your insides are ever going to come together and start working again.”

“For how long?”

He let a few seconds pass, then said, “You’ll know.”

“Will I ever be the same?”

“You’ll know that too when the time comes.”

He kept looking at me, not wanting to put his thoughts into words. I got tired of waiting and asked, “What’s missing, doc?”

“You just sounded like Bugs Bunny.”

“Cut the comedy.”

“Sure.” He licked his lips and a darkness came into his eyes. “I just found out who you are.”

I waited.

“A private investigator.” I didn’t have to blink on that one. He knew. “Mike Hammer.”

“Right. Is that bad?”

“No. Just trouble.”

“Why?”

“You are supposed to be dead.” He read the expression on my face and said, “Witnesses saw you shot. You were right near the pilings on the wharf. They said you were trying to get up and assumed you did and fell into the river.”

He was trying to get his composure so I kept quiet. When he could speak again he said, “It was a full moon, the tide was going out fast and anything or anybody in the river at the time would have been swept out to sea. There was a search off the docks and at the mouth of the Hudson but nothing was recovered.”

“Naturally,” I told him.

“Don’t get smart, Mr. Hammer.”

“Sorry.”

“Until now I didn’t know the attention you’d get from the press. They don’t know whether to treat your demise as a loss or a gain to society.”

“What do you think?”

He picked up my arm and felt my pulse again, a medical pause for thought. When a full minute had passed he let my hand drop and said, “As a doctor, I’m only concerned about your getting better.”

“That’s not what you’re thinking.”

“You really a killer, Mike?” he asked suddenly and bluntly.

“Not the kind you have in mind.”

“What kind are there?”

“Legal,” I said. “Illegal.”

“Explain.”

“Kill your enemy on the street, the chair. The rope.

The lethal injection. Kill your enemy in war, the medal, the honor, the reward.”

“Which were you, Mike?”

I grinned at him. I let him see my teeth in the grin because I had been there and he hadn’t. He never knew the necessity of inflicting death or the pain that it caused. He never knew who it hurt the most or what he would have done in the same circumstances.

No blinking at all now.
I said, “As a doctor, does it really matter to you?” He scowled at me. “Would you keep a patient healthy so he could be executed?”

“Tough question, kid.”

“Would you?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I took an oath.”

“Horse manure.” I started to breathe a little hard and let myself fall back on the pillow. He just let me lie there until I had settled down, then wiped my face with a wet towel. There was a hotness under my skin and a tingling sensation was beginning to run up my arms. Suddenly I could feel the sweat starting and there was that short prick in my upper arm from a needle and I relaxed into another sleep.

 

I was his project. There was nothing I could do on my own except stay alive and let all the pieces come back together. If it happened, then he would become whole again.

Years ago he had bought a place on the Florida Keys, a little south of Marathon on the west side, a concrete block building on a peninsula of land fronting on the Gulf with a thirty-foot-deep channel running along one side, a relic from when the state had needed the coquina to lay a roadbed to Key West.

It was quiet. I was alone. I had the papers, a TV, a radio with AM and FM, and if I wanted to listen to the boat traffic, a VHF because we bordered on the Gulf and it was allowed. There was a base station for CB traffic if I wanted to hear the truckers on Route 1 or the kids making dates for some key-hopping.

The papers were delivered every morning with the daily groceries and each day I faded from the news until I disappeared altogether. The doctor’s name was Ralph Morgan and I wondered how he was handling all the details of the situation until I realized that death was a complete wipe-out and there was nothing to consider anymore.

Wednesday he drove up to the door. He was even thinner now, a new seriousness to him. He sat down and had a cold Miller Lite beer before he leaned back in the old chair and stared at me hard. “How do you feel?”

“I phone you the details every day.”

“That’s crap. How do you feel?”

“Physically?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll make it,” I said.

“Don’t give me that.”

“You mean how is my psychological makeup?”

“Something like that.”

“Lousy.”

“Why?”

“Doctor,” I said, “I’m alive, but out of life. It’s something I have to get back into.”

“Why?”

“How long can a person stay dead?” I asked him.

“If you go back, they’ll kill you,” he told me.

“You’ve been doing research, doctor.”

“Not only on you, kiddo, but on me, too. I went down just as deep as you did. I’m absolutely scared out of my head. I’m a doctor, I want to
be
a doctor, and for the first time in years I know I
can be
a doctor. I pulled off the big surgical plus on you, but nobody will ever hear about it and if they do I’m a real shot-down MD.”

“So what happens to me, doc?”

“You read the papers, didn’t you?”

“Sure. It was one hell of a shootout. Two of the New York families decided to gun it when the big don was coming off the ship from a trip to the old country. It was completely idiotic. Everything was going smooth, no heat was on, the politicians were all in their pockets with the judges and the DA’s, the press was quiet, then everything blew up in their faces.”

“Why, Mike? You knew. You were there.”

“My squeal was nothing. He heard the word and knew that I had that run-in with the don two months ago. Somebody was getting ready to knock him off as soon as he got back into this country and I was going to be set up for it.”

“Then what were you doing there anyway?”

“It may sound pretty stupid, but I wanted to let the old man know he was going to be hit. I didn’t want any contracts going out on me. That damn mob might be going nice and legitimate, but they have a long memory and longer arms. They got contacts and a communications web almost as good as the feds.”

“What happened?”

“Don’t ask me. Something went all out of focus.

That old cargo ship was four hours late getting into port and the Gaetano bunch was waiting for them. When I drove up I didn’t see any sign of an ambush at all and when it happened it was like they came out of the woodwork. Or the concrete. Very professional. Damn near military style.”

“It was over in three minutes,” Dr. Morgan blurted. “Both sides started shooting at the same time.”

“You can bet the don kept himself covered. He would have his own guys on board and some others meeting the ship, too. He probably had them in place even before the others showed up.”

“Come on, Mike, can you pull off a situation like that in a public place?”

I shook my head at his naïveté. “Two a.m. at the piers in New York City isn’t exactly a public place these days. The don still has a heavy hand in union affairs around there and handpicking his guys for work duty as a cover would be no trouble at all.”

“This . . . this
squeal
of yours say the don was coming out the office door instead of the main exit?”

“A few would come out first, then the don, and they’d hop into a car that was waiting for them. I had pulled up behind their limo and was getting out when the first shots went off. As far as I could tell, they came from the other area.”

The doctor took a long pull of the beer and set the empty can down. For a few seconds he squinted, then ran his fingers through his thinning hair. “Did the Ponti kid see you . . . or recognize you before you shot him?”

“Are you kidding, doc? Sure he saw me, he was looking straight at me then
he shot me
. Oh, he knew what he was doing, all right. He caught me coming head-on and nailed me with that .357 he always packs. I went down on my back and half rolled over when he came up and pointed that rod right at my face, hating me so much he never saw the .45 I had in my fist and that was the end of Azi Ponti right there. I remembered hearing some of the firefight and being dragged along the street, but that was all.”

Idly, Dr. Morgan reached over for the beer can and squashed it with his fingertips. “They used to make them stronger,” he said.

“They were steel then. They didn’t pollute. They’d rust away to nothing.”

“Why do they use aluminum, then?”

“Because it’s scarcer, it costs more and pollutes better.”

“You can recycle aluminum.”

“Only a fraction goes in the collection bins. Who wants to kill me?”