The Killing Man (28 page)

“Amateur psychologist?”

“I have to be.”

“And I don’t look the type?”

Red’s eyes danced. “Big mugs like you never have to pay, mister. With you it’s the woman who pays.”

I pulled out a deck of Luckies and offered her one. When we lit up I said, “I wish all the babes I met thought that way.”

She blew a stream of smoke toward the ceiling and looked at me as if she were going back a long way. “They do, mister. Maybe you don’t know it, but they do.”

I don’t know why I liked the kid. Maybe it was because she had eyes that were hard but could still cry a little. Maybe it was because she handed me some words that were nice to listen to. Maybe it was because I was tired and my cave was a cold, empty place, while here I had a redhead to talk to. Whatever it was, I liked her and she knew it and smiled at me in a way I knew she hadn’t smiled in a long time. Like I was her friend.

“What’s your name, mister?”

“Mike. Mike Hammer. Native-born son of ye old city presently at loose ends and dead tired. Free, white, and over twenty-one. That do it?”

“Well, what do you know! Here I’ve been thinking all males were named Smith or Jones. What happened?”

“No wife to report to, kid,” I grinned. “That tag’s my own. What do they call you besides Red?”

“They don’t.”

I saw her eyes crinkle a little as she sipped the last of her coffee. Shorty was casting nervous glances between us and the steamed-up window, probably hoping a cop wouldn’t pass by and nail a hustler trying to make time. He gave me a pain.

“Want more coffee?”

She shook her head. “No, that did it fine. If Shorty wasn’t so touchy about extending a little credit I wouldn’t have to be smiling for my midnight snacks.”

From the way I turned and looked at her, Red knew there was more than casual curiosity back of the remark when I asked, “I didn’t think your line of business could ever be that slow.”

For a brief second she glared into the mirror. “Is isn’t.” She was plenty mad about something.

I threw a buck on the counter and Shorty rang it up, then passed the change back. When I pocketed it I said to Red, “Did you ever stop to think that you’re a pretty nice girl? I’ve met all kinds, but I think you could get along pretty well ... any way you tried.”

Her smile even brought out a dimple that had been buried a long while ago. She kissed her finger, then touched the finger to my cheek. “I like that Mike. There are times when I think I’ve lost the power to like anyone, but I like you.”

An el went by overhead just then and muffled the sound of the door opening. I felt the guy standing behind us before I saw him in the mirror. He was tall, dark and greasy-looking, with a built-in sneer that passed for knowhow, and he smelled of cheap hair oil. His suit would have been snappy in Harlem, edged with sharp pleats and creases.

He wasn’t speaking to me when he said, “Hello, kid.”

The redhead half turned and her lips went tight. “What do you want?” Her tone was dull, flat. The skin across her cheeks was drawn taut.

“Are you kidding?”

“I’m busy. Get lost.”

The guy’s hand shot out and grabbed her arm, swinging her around on the stool to face him. “I don’t like them snotty remarks, Red.”

As soon as I slid off the stool Shorty hustled down to our end, his hand reaching for something under the counter. When he saw my face he put it back and stopped short. The guy saw the same thing, but he was wise about it. His lip curled up and he snarled, “Get the hell out of here before I bust ya one.”

He was going to make a pass at me, but I jammed four big, stiff fingers into his gut right above the navel and he snapped shut like a jack-knife. I opened him up again with an open-handed slap that left a blush across his mouth that was going to stay for a while.

Usually a guy will let it go right there. This one didn’t. He could hardly breathe, but he was cursing me with his lips and his hand reached for his armpit in uncontrollable jerks. Red stood with her hand pressed against her mouth, while Shorty was croaking for us to cut it out, but too scared to move.

I let him almost reach it, then I slid my own .45 out where everybody could get a look at it. Just for effect I stuck it up against his forehead and thumbed back the hammer. It made a sharp click in the silence. “Just touch that rod you got and I’ll blow your damned greasy head off. Go ahead, just make one lousy move toward it,” I said.

He moved, all right. He fainted. Red was looking down at him, still too terrified to say anything. Shorty had a twitch in his shoulder. Finally she said, “You ... didn’t have to do that for me. Please, get out of here before he wakes up. He’ll ... kill you!”

I touched her arm, gently. “Tell me something, Red. Do you really think he could?”

 

 

© 1950 by E. P. Dutton, a division of Penguin USA, Inc.

 

 

 

 

Look for
My Gun Is Quick
in its special Fortieth Anniversary edition, along with five other classic Mike Hammer novels by Mickey Spillane.

 

is blockbusting Spillane in which Mike Hammer slugs it out with a vicious killer. The victim
—
areformed ex-con who lost his chance to go straight once and for all....

 

 

 

It was one of those nights when the sky came down and wrapped itself around the world. The rain clawed at the windows of the bar like an angry cat and tried to sneak in every time some drunk lurched in the door. The place reeked of stale beer and soggy men with enough cheap perfume thrown in to make you sick.

Two drunks with a nickel between them were arguing over what to play on the jukebox until a tomato in a dress that was too tight a year ago pushed the key that started off something noisy and hot. One of the drunks wanted to dance and she gave him a shove. So he danced with the other drunk.

She saw me sitting there with my stool tipped back against the cigarette machine and change of a fin on the bar, decided I could afford a wet evening for two, and walked over with her hips waving hello.

“You’re new around here, ain’t ya?”

“Nah. I’ve been here since six o‘clock.”

“Buy me a drink?” She crowded in next to me, seeing how much of herself she could plaster against my legs.

“No.” It caught her by surprise and she quit rubbing.

“Don’t gentlemen usually buy ladies a drink?” she said. She tried to lower her eyelids seductively, but one came down farther than the other and made her look stupid.

“I’m not a gentleman, kid.”

“I ain’t a lady either so buy me a drink.”

So I bought her a drink. A jerk in a discarded army overcoat down at the end of the bar was getting the eye from the bartender because he was nursing the last drop in his glass, hating to go outside in the rain, so I bought him a drink too.

The bartender took my change with a frown. “Them bums’ll bleed you to death, feller.”

“I don’t have any blood left,” I told him. The dame grinned and rubbed herself against my knees some more.

“I bet you got plenty of everything for me.”

“Yeah, but what I got you ain’t getting because you probably got more than me.”

“What?”

“Forget it.”

She looked at my face a second, then edged away. “You ain’t very sociable, mister.”

“I know it. I don’t want to be sociable. I haven’t been sociable the last six months and I won’t be for the next six if I can help it.”

“Say, what’s eatin’ you? You having dame trouble?”

“I never have dame trouble. I’m a misanthropist.”

“You
are?”
Her eyes widened as if I had something contagious. She finished her drink and was going to stick it out anyway, no matter what I said.

I said, “Scram.”

This time she scowled a little bit. “Say, what the hell’s eatin’ you? I never—”

“I don’t like people. I don’t like any kind of people. When you get them together in a big lump they all get nasty and dirty and full of trouble. So I don’t like people, including you. That’s what a misanthropist is.”

“I coulda sworn you was a nice feller,” she said.

“So could a lot of people. I’m not. Blow, sister.”

She gave me a look she kept in reserve for special occasions and got the hell out of there so I could drink by myself. It was a stinking place to have to spend the night, but that’s all there was on the block. The East Side doesn’t cater to the uptown trade. I sat there and watched the clock go around, waiting for the rain to stop, but it was as patient as I was. It was almost malicious the way it came down, a million fingers that drummed a constant, maddening tattoo on the windows until its steady insistence rose above the bawdy talk and raucous screams of the jukebox.

It got to everybody after a while, that and the smell of the damp. A fight started down at the other end and spread along the bar. It quit when the bartender rapped one guy over the head with an ice stick. One bum dropped his glass and got tossed out. The tomato who liked to rub herself had enough of it and picked up a guy who had enough left of his change to make the evening profitable and took him home in the rain. The guy didn’t like it, but biology got the better of common sense again.

And I got a little bit drunk. Not much, just a little bit.

But enough so that in about five minutes I knew damn well I was going to get sick of the whole mess and start tossing them the hell out the door. Maybe the bartender too if he tried to use the stick on me. Then I could drink in peace and the hell with the rain.

Oh, I felt swell, just great.

I kept looking around to see where I’d start first, then the door opened and shut behind a guy who stood there in his shirtsleeves, wet and shivering. He had a bundle in his arms with his coat over it, and when he quit looking around the place like a scared rabbit he shuffled over to one of the booths and dropped the bundle on the seat.

Nobody but me had paid any attention to him. He threw a buck on the bar, had a shot, then brought the other shot over to his table. Still nobody paid any attention to him. Maybe they were used to seeing guys who could cry.

He set the drink down and took the coat off the bundle. It was quite a bundle, all right. It was a little kid about a year old who was sound asleep. I said something dirty to myself and felt my shoulders hunch up in disgust. The rain, the bar, a kid, and a guy who cried. It made me sicker than I was.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the guy. He was only a little squirt who looked as if he had never had enough to eat. His clothes were damp and ragged, clinging to him like skin. He couldn’t have been any older than me, but his face was seamed around the mouth and eyes and his shoulders hung limply. Whatever had been his purpose in life, he had given up long ago.

But damn it, he kept crying. I could see the tears running down his cheeks as he patted the kid and talked too low to be heard. His chest heaved with a sob and his hands went up to cover his face. When they came away he bent his head and kissed the kid on top of his head.

All of a sudden my drink tasted lousy.

I turned around to put a quarter in the cigarette machine so I wouldn’t have to look at him again when I heard his chair kick back and saw him run to the door. This time he had nothing in his arms.

For about ten seconds I stood there, my fingers curled around the deck of Luckies. Something crawled up my spine and made my teeth grind together, snapping off a sound that was a curse at the whole damn world. I knocked a drunk down getting around the corner of the bar and ripped the door open so the rain could lash at my face the way it had been wanting to. Behind me somebody yelled to shut the door.

I didn’t have time to because I saw the guy halfway down the street, a vague silhouette under the overhead light, a dejected figure of a man too far gone to care anymore. But he was worth caring about to somebody in the Buick sedan that pulled away from the curb. The car slithered out into the light with a roar, and I heard the sharp cough of the gun over the slapping of my own feet on the sidewalk.

It only took two of them and the guy slammed forward on his face. The back door flew open and another shadow ran under the light, and from where I was I could see him bend over and frisk the guy with a blurred motion of his hands.

I should have waited, damn it. I shouldn’t have tried a shot from where I was. A .45 isn’t built for range and the slug ripped a groove in the pavement and screamed off down the block. The guy let out a startled yell and tore back toward the car with the other guy yelling for him to hurry. He damn near made it, then one of the ricochets took him through the legs and he went down with a scream.

The other guy didn’t wait. He jammed the gas down and wrenched the wheel over as hard as he could, and the guy shrieking his lungs out in the gutter forgot the pain in his legs long enough to let out one final, terrified yell before the wheels of the car made a pulpy mess of his body. My hand kept squeezing the trigger until there were only the flat echoes of the blasts that were drowned out by the noise of the car’s exhaust and the futile gesture as the gun held opened, empty.

And there I was standing over a dead little guy who had two holes in his back and the dried steaks of tears on his face. He didn’t look tired anymore. He seemed to be smiling. What was left of the one in the gutter was too sickening to look at.

I opened the cigarettes and stuck one in my mouth. I lit it and breathed out the smoke, watching it sift through the rain. The guy couldn’t hear me, but I said, “It’s a hell of a city, isn’t it, feller?”

 

 

© 1951 by E.P. Dutton, a division of Penguin USA, Inc.