The Girl Hunters

by Mickey Spillane

  “Something’s missing. Something big.”

  “Please don’t talk any more.”

  “It’s not that. I’m just tired, I guess. It’s hard to come back to normal this fast.”

  “If we took a swim it might help.”

  I opened my eyes and looked at her and grinned. “Sick of hearing hard luck stories?”

  “No.”

  “Any questions?”

  She nodded. “Leo. Who shot him?”

  I said, “In this business guns can be found anywhere. I’m never surprised to see guns with the same ballistics used in different kills. Did you know the same gun that shot your husband and Richie Cole was used in some small kill out West?”

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “There seemed to be a connection through the jewels. Richie’s cover was that of a sailor and smuggler. Your jewels were missing. Pat made that a common factor. I don’t believe it.”

  “Could Leo’s position in government—well, as you intimated—”

  “There is a friend of mine who says no. He has reason to know the facts. I’ll stick with him.”

  “Then Leo’s death is no part of what you are looking for?”

  “I don’t think so. In a way I’m sorry. I wish I could help avenge him too. He was a great man.”

  “Yes, he was.”

  “I’ll take you up on that swim.”

  “The suits are in the bathhouse.”

  “That should be fun,” I said.

  In the dim light that came through the ivy-screened windows we turned our backs and took off our clothes. When you do that deliberately with a woman, it’s hard to talk and you are conscious only of the strange warmth and the brief, fiery contact when skin meets skin and a crazy desire to turn around and watch or to grab and hold or do anything except what you said you’d do when the modest moment was in reality a joke—but you didn’t quite want it to be a joke at all.

  Then before we could turn it into something else and while we could still treat it as a joke, we had the bathing suits on and she grinned as she passed by me. I reached for her, stopped her, then turned because I saw something else that left me cold for little ticks of time.

  Laura said, “What is it, Mike?”

  I picked the shotgun out of the corner of the room. The building had been laid up on an extension of the tennis court outside and the temporary floor was clay. Where the gun rested by the door water from the outside shower had seeped in and wet it down until it was a semi-firm substance, a blue putty you could mold in your hand.

  She had put the shotgun down muzzle first and both barrels were plugged with clay and when I picked it up it was like somebody had taken a bite out of the blue glop with a cookie cutter two inches deep!

  Before I opened it I asked her, “Loaded?”

  “Yes.”

  I thumbed the lever and broke the gun. It fell open and I picked out the two twelve-gauge Double O shells, then slapped the barrels against my palm until the cores of clay emerged far enough for me to pull them out like the deadly plugs they were.

  She saw the look on my face and frowned, not knowing what to say. So I said it instead. “Who put the gun here?”

  “I did.”

  “I thought you knew how to handle it?” There was a rasp in my voice you could cut with a knife.

  “Leo—showed me how to shoot it.”

  “He didn’t show you how to handle it, apparently.”

  “Mike—”

  “Listen, Laura, and you listen good. You play with guns and you damn well better know how to handle them. You went and stuck this baby’s nose down in the muck and do you know what would happen if you ever tried to shoot it?”

  Her eyes were frightened at what she saw in my face and she shook her head. “Well, damn it, you listen then. Without even thinking you stuck this gun in heavy clay and plugged both barrels. It’s loaded with high-grade sporting ammunition of the best quality and if you ever pulled the trigger you would have had one infinitesimal span of life between the big then and the big now because when you did the back blast in that gun would have wiped you right off the face of the earth.”

  “Mike—”

  “No—keep quiet and listen. It’ll do you good. You won’t make the mistake again. That barrel would unpeel like a tangerine and you’d get that whole charge right down your lovely throat and if ever you want to give a police medical examiner a job to gag a maggot, that’s the way to do it. They’d have to go in and scrape your brains up with a silent butler and pick pieces of your skull out of the woodwork with needle-nosed pliers. I saw eyeballs stuck to a wall one time and if you want to really see a disgusting sight, try that. They’re bigger than you would expect them to be and they leak fluid all the time they look at you trying to lift them off the boards and then you have no place to put them except in your hand and drop them in the bucket with the rest of the pieces. They float on top and keep watching you until you put on the lid.”

  “Mike!”

  “Damn it, shut up! Don’t play guns stupidly around me! You did it, now listen!”

  Both hands covered her mouth and she was almost ready to vomit.

  “The worst of all is the neck because the head is gone and the neck spurts blood for a little bit while the heart doesn’t know its vital nerve center is gone—and do you know how high the blood can squirt? No? Then let me tell you. It doesn’t just ooze. It goes up under pressure for a couple of feet and covers everything in the area and you wouldn’t believe just how much blood the body has in it until you see a person suddenly become headless and watch what happens. I’ve been there. I’ve had it happen. Don’t let it happen to you!”

  She let her coffee go on the other side of the door and I didn’t give a damn because anybody that careless with a shotgun or any other kind of a gun needs it like that to make them remember. I wiped the barrels clean, reloaded the gun and put it down in place, butt first.

  When I came out Laura said, “Man, are you mean.”

  “It’s not a new saying.” I still wasn’t over my mad.

  Her smile was a little cockeyed, but a smile nevertheless. “Mike—I understand. Please?”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you watch it. I play guns too much. It’s my business. I hate to see them abused.”

  “Please, Mike?”

  “Okay. I made my point.”

  “Nobly, to say the least. I usually have a strong stomach.”

  “Go have some coffee.”

  “Oh, Mike.”

  “So take a swim,” I told her and grinned. It was the way I felt and the grin was the best I could do. She took a run and a dive and hit the water, came up stroking for the other side, then draped her arms on the edge of the drain and waited for me.

  I went in slowly, walking up to the edge, then I dove in and stayed on the bottom until I got to the other side. The water made her legs fuzzy, distorting them to Amazonian proportions, enlarging the cleft and swells and declivities of her belly, then I came up to where all was real and shoved myself to concrete surface and reached down for Laura.

  She said, “Better?” when I pulled her to the top.

  I was looking past her absently. “Yes. I just remembered something.”

  “Not about the gun, Mike.”

  “No, not about the gun.”

  “Should I know?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I don’t really know myself yet. It’s just a point.”

  “Your eyes look terribly funny.”

  “I know.”

  “Mike—”

  “What?”

  “Can I help?”

  “No.”

  “You’re going to leave me now, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Will you come back?”

  I couldn’t answer her.

  “It’s between the two of us, isn’t it?”

  “The girl hunters are out,” I said.

  “But will you come back?”


  My mind was far away, exploring the missing point. “Yes,” I said, “I have to come back.”

  “You loved her.”

  “I did.”

  “Do you love me at all?”

  I turned around and looked at this woman. She was mine now, beautiful, wise, the way a woman should be formed for a man like I was, lovely, always naked in my sight, always incredibly blonde and incredibly tanned, the difference in color—or was it comparison—a shocking, sensual thing. I said, “I love you, Laura. Can I be mistaken?”

  She said, “No, you can’t be mistaken.”

  “I have to find her first. She’s being hunted. Everybody is hunting her. I loved her a long time ago so I owe her that much. She asked for me.”

  “Find her, Mike.”

  I nodded. I had the other key now. “I’ll find her. She’s the most important thing in this old world today. What she knows will decide the fate of nations. Yes, I’ll find her.”

  “Then will you come back?”

  “Then I’ll come back,” I said.

  Her arms reached out and encircled me, her hands holding my head, her fingers tight in my hair. I could feel every inch of her body pressed hard against mine, forcing itself to meet me, refusing to give at all.

  “I’m going to fight her for you,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re mine now.”

  “Girl,” I said, “I’m no damn good to anybody. Look good and you’ll see a corn ear husked, you know?”

  “I know. So I eat husks.”

  “Damn it, don’t fool around!”

  “Mike!”

  “Laura—”

  “You say it nice, Mike—but there’s something in your voice that’s terrible and I can sense it. If you find her, what will you do?”

  “I can’t tell.”

  “Will you still come back?”

  “Damn it, I don’t know.”

  “Why don’t you know, Mike?”

  I looked down at her. “Because I don’t know what I’m really like any more. Look—do you know what I was? Do you know that a judge and jury took me down and the whole world once ripped me to little bits? It was only Velda who stayed with me then.”

  “That was then. How long ago was it?”

  “Nine years maybe.”

  “Were you married?”

  “No.”

  “Then I can claim part of you. I’ve had part of you.” She let go of me and stood back, her eyes calm as they looked into mine. “Find her, Mike. Make your decision. Find her and take her. Have you ever had her at all?”

  “No.”

  “You’ve had me. Maybe you’re more mine than hers.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Then find her.” She stepped back, her hands at her side. “If what you said was true then she deserves this much. You find her, Mike. I’m willing to fight you for anybody—but not somebody you think is dead. Not somebody you think you owe a debt to. Let me love you my own way. It’s enough for me at least. Do you understand that?”

  For a while we stood there. I looked at her. I looked away. I said, “Yes, I understand.”

  “Come back when you’ve decided.”

  “You have all of Washington to entertain.”

  Laura shook her head. Her hair was a golden swirl and she said, “The hell with Washington. I’ll be waiting for you.”

  Velda, Laura. The names were so similar. Which one? After seven years of nothingness, which one? Knowing what I did, which one? Yesterday was then. Today was now. Which one?

  I said, “All right, Laura, I’ll find out, then I’ll come back.”

  “Take my car.”

  “Thanks.”

  And now I had to take her. My fingers grabbed her arms and pulled her close to where I could kiss her and taste the inside of her mouth and feel the sensuous writhing of her tongue against mine because this was the woman I knew I was coming back to.

  The Girl Hunters. We all wanted the same one and for reasons of a long time ago. We would complete the hunt, but what would we do with the kill?

  She said, “After that you shouldn’t leave.”

  “I have to,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “She had to get in this country someway. I think I know how.”

  “You’ll find her then come back?”

  “Yes,” I said, and let my hands roam over her body so that she knew there could never be anybody else, and when I was done I held her off and made her stay there while I went inside to put on the gun and the coat and go back to the new Babylon that was the city.

  CHAPTER 11

  And once again it was night, the city coming into its nether life like a minion of Count Dracula. The bright light of day that could strip away the façade of sham and lay bare the coating of dirt was gone now, and to the onlooker the unreal became real, the dirt had changed into subtle colors under artificial lights and it was as if all of that vast pile of concrete and steel and glass had been built only to live at night.

  I left the car at the Sportsmen’s Parking Lot on the corner of Eighth and Fifty-second, called Hy Gardner and told him to meet me at the Blue Ribbon on Forty-fourth, then started my walk to the restaurant thinking of the little things I should have thought of earlier.

  The whole thing didn’t seem possible, all those years trapped in Europe. You could walk around the world half a dozen times in seven years. But you wouldn’t be trapped then. The thing was, they were trapped. Had Velda or Erlich been amateurs they would have been captured without much trouble, but being pros they edged out. Almost. That made Velda even better than he had been.

  Somehow, it didn’t seem possible.

  But it was.

  Hy had reached the Blue Ribbon before me and waited at a table sipping a stein of rich, dark beer. I nodded at the waiter and he went back for mine. We ordered, ate, and only then did Hy bother to give me his funny look over the cigar he lit up. “It’s over?”

  “It won’t be long now.”

  “Do we talk about it here?”

  “Here’s as good as any. It’s more than you can put in your column.”

  “You let me worry about space.”

  So he sat back and let me tell him what I had told Laura, making occasional notes, because now was the time to make notes. I told him what I knew and what I thought and where everybody stood, and every minute or so he’d glance up from his sheets with an expression of pure incredulity, shake his head and write some more. When the implications of the total picture began really to penetrate, his teeth clamped down on the cigar until it was half hanging out of his mouth unlit, then he threw it down on his plate and put a fresh one in its place.

  When I finished he said, “Mike—do you realize what you have hold of?”

  “I know.”

  “How can you stay so damn calm?”

  “Because the rough part has just started.”

  “Ye gods, man—”

  “You know what’s missing, don’t you?”

  “Sure. You’re missing something in the head. You’re trying to stand off a whole political scheme that comes at you with every force imaginable no matter where you are. Mike, you don’t fight these guys alone!”

  “Nuts. It looks like I have to. I’m not exactly an accredited type character. Who would listen to me?”

  “Couldn’t this Art Rickerby—”

  “He has one purpose in mind. He wants whoever killed Richie Cole.”

  “That doesn’t seem likely. He’s a trained Federal agent.”

  “So what? When something hits you personally, patriotism can go by the boards awhile. There are plenty of other agents. He wants a killer and knows I’ll eventually come up with him. Like Velda’s a key to one thing, I’m a key to another. They think that I’m going to stumble over whatever it was Richie Cole left for me. I know what it was now. So do you, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Hy said. “It was Velda’s location, wherever she is.”

  “That’s right. They don
’t know if I know or if I’ll find out. You can damn well bet that they know he stayed alive waiting for me to show. They can’t even be sure if he just clued me. They can’t be sure of anything, but they know that I have to stay alive if they want to find Velda too.”

  Hy’s eyes went deep in thought. “Alive? They tried to shoot you twice, didn’t they?”

  “Fine, but neither shot connected and I can’t see a top assassin missing a shot. Both times I was a perfect target.”

  “Why the attempt then?”

  “I’ll tell you why,” I said. I leaned on the table feeling my hands go open and shut wanting to squeeze the life out of somebody. “Both tries were deliberately sour. They were pushing me. They wanted me to move fast, and if anything can stir a guy up it’s getting shot at. If I had anything to hide or to work at, it would come out in a hurry.”

  “But you didn’t bring anything out?”

  I grinned at him and I could see my reflection in the glass facing of the autographed pictures behind his head. It wasn’t a pretty face at all, teeth and hate and some wildness hard to describe. “No, I didn’t. So now I’m a real target because I know too much. They know I don’t have Velda’s location and from now on I can only be trouble to them. I’ll bet you that right now a hunt is on for me.”

  “Mike—if you called Pat—”

  “Come off it. He’s no friend anymore. He’ll do anything to nail my ass down and don’t you forget it.”

  “Does he know the facts?”

  “No. The hell with him.”

  Hy pushed his glasses up on his head, frowning. “Well, what are you going to do?”

  “Do, old buddy? I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going after the missing piece. If I weren’t so damn slow after all those years I would have caught it before. I’m going after the facts that can wrap up the ball game and you’re going with me.”

  “But you said—”

  “Uh-uh. I didn’t say anything. I don’t know where she is, but I do know a few other things. Richie Cole came blasting back into this country when he shouldn’t have and ducked out to look for me. That had a big fat meaning and I muffed it. Damn it, I muffed it!”

  “But how?”

  “Come on, Hy—Richie was a sailor—he smuggled her on the ship he came in on. He never left her in Europe! He got her back in this country!”