The Erection Set

by Mickey Spillane

  I knew I let out a weak curse when the crash came and all I could think of was that it was the silliest noise I ever heard a gun make and dying wasn’t so bad after all if it could distort sounds like that and not even let you feel the agony of a bullet at all. No pain. Just a heavy, crushing weight that pressed down and down and down.

  When the light went on I blinked the tears out of my eyes and through the ringing in my ears I heard Lucy Longstreet say, “You okay, kid?”

  “Shit.”

  “Do that later. Right now get out from under that clown. He’s dripping blood all over you.”

  I heaved up on my knees and felt the body roll off my back, got to my feet and looked at the mess on the floor. They were all alive and breathing, but pretty damn sick, especially the one Lucy had damn near brained with the old-fashioned lamp that used to be the centerpiece of her whorehouse parlor table.

  I took a minute to catch my breath, then took a good look at the three of them. Two I had never seen before, but one was an old-time buddy. Now he had a broken wrist and one hell of a dent in his skull. Blackie Saunders, the wipeout boy from Trenton was going to have a hard time explaining all this to Chet Linden.

  Chet was going to have an even harder time explaining this to me.

  The cigar Lucy was trying to light had broken halfway down its length and didn’t want to take hold. She spat it out angrily and felt in her pocket for another one. When she got it fired she gave me a twisted grin. “Like the old days, kid. You know them?”

  “I know where they came from. What happened?”

  She gave a shrug as if it had been an everyday occurrence. “Came in about two hours ago. Scared the living crap out of Beth and the boys.”

  “What boys?”

  “Old Stanley Cramer and Stoney. Beth had ’em out hustlin’ for some dirt on your cousin. They come up with some goodies, too. He got to one of the girls who was scragged and she gave him a detailed letter.”

  “They all right?”

  “Sure. Tied up out in the kitchen.”

  “Look, Lucy ... don’t give it to me in episodes I havent got ...”

  “Relay, sonny. First tell me what we’re gonna do with these buckos. If you want I still got contacts who’ll. . . ”

  “Forget it.” I pushed past her and in five minutes I had all three of them wrapped up and gagged so tight they wouldn’t be going anywhere unless I let them. I found my own rod, tucked it away, then pushed Lucy down into a chair. “Okay, Lucy, now all of it.”

  She nodded toward Blackie and puffed on the cigar. “That one liked to talk. He had a mad on for you, Doggie boy. Seems like they been in town checking out every one of your acquaintances and didn’t have any luck until he heard old Juke telling Tod about seeing you and what a nice guy you was and how they had something to give you. Juke, he just rambled on and said they was coming here and then call you. Later, Stanley and Stoney came in, sent Juke somewhere on an errand and they followed the boys back.”

  “I didn’t get any call.”

  “Not like they didn’t try to get one through.”

  “I haven’t been in any one place very long.”

  “That’s what they figured too. So they decided to wait. Hell, after they put the others in the kitchen that one I busted over there even played some Scrabble with me. The dirty bastard used words that wasn’t in the rules and made me play ’em. I should’ve really laid it on. You know what that lamp cost me?”

  “Ten bucks.”

  “Yeah, but a dollar was a dollar then.”

  I threw her a disgusted smile and shook my head. “Let’s get them out of the kitchen.”

  Beth’s fright had turned to total indignation and she was all for throwing a pail of scalding water over the three of them. I talked her out of it and let her settle for kicking each one in the head and enjoying the muffled groans that seeped through the gags. Cramer and Stoney didn’t want any part of them and had to have a few belts of Lucy’s best Scotch before they could get the shake out of their hands. I had to prod Stoney into remembering where he put the letter he had and he finally dug it out of an old jacket that had been slung across the back of a chair.

  It was nicely detailed, giving places, dates and two other names who might go along with the big squeeze if no recriminations were guaranteed. As for herself, she’d even appear in court if she had to. And I now had Cousin Alfred’s ass in one hell of a sling.

  When I finished reading I put the letter in my pocket. Both the men were watching me closely and I said, “Thanks. You all have something coming for this.”

  “We don’t want anything, Mr. Kelly,” Cramer told me. “Unless it’s to see Barrin working full time.”

  “I wish I could promise you that, friend.”

  “You said you was going to try.”

  “All the way out. Trying doesn’t mean it can be done though.”

  “But you’re still gonna try?”

  I nodded.

  “Even with Cross McMillan on your back?”

  “I wish that was all I had on my back. Those three inside are only the front-runners.”

  “But when Cross hears what ...”

  “Cross didn’t send them,” I said.

  Their eyes met, then touched Lucy’s. The old madam said, “It goes deeper?”

  “You’d never believe, sugar. The funny part is”—I inclined my head toward the other room where the bloody three lay messing up Lucy’s rug—“this end of the action doesn’t bother me at all. It’s that fucking McMillan who’s got the power to hurt everybody and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. He’s got the money, the control and enough hate for the Barrins to enjoy pulling everything down into a pile of rubbish.”

  “Piss on him,” Lucy said.

  “Try telling that to a city full of people with brand-new stars in their eyes.”

  “What’ll we do with your pals inside?”

  I felt a grin tug at my mouth and ease the tension from my body. “Call Bennie Sachs to come collect them. All you know is that they broke in on you and did what they did. You have four reliable witnesses to go along with the story.”

  “What story?”

  “Why, it’s simple. Stanley here wiggled loose, untied Stoney and Beth and you overpowered the bums.”

  Cramer’s voice was weak with surprise. “Us?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Those guys aren’t going to deny it. Just do what I’m telling you.”

  Lucy had lived a long time. Her eyes had narrowed into the tired folds of fat and the pupils were little dark pinpoints reading my mind. I let her gauge me until she was satisfied, then she said, “Okay, Dog. That’s the way it’ll be.”

  I left Lucy making the call and Stanley Cramer walked me to the door. When I opened it he touched my arm. He was standing in the shadows and I couldn’t see his face, but there was something odd in his voice. “Don’t worry too much about that there Cross guy, Mr. Kelly.”

  “Why’s that, Stan?”

  “Because worrying don’t leave time for nothing else to get done. You’ll see.”

  “Glad to know there’s another optimist left,” I said.

  The night lights around the factory made dull little halos in the rain. On the west side of the main buildings the trucks and trailers had been buttoned up, the only sound of life coming from inside the portable watchman’s shack where a TV was blaring away and a couple of voices were loud in beery laughter.

  My collar was turned up against the downpour that slashed at my back and I edged through the shadows to the rows of bushes that shielded the front of the building, got behind them and felt my way to the old service door that led inside. It squeaked open on seldom-used hinges, the noise echoing in the empty corrider. It had been a long time since I had come in this way and the place had been renovated since, so I stood there a minute until I was oriented, then picked my way through the darkened offices until I reached the foyer.

  On the other side, in the area reserved for the S. C. Cable Produc
tions office, I saw the deliciously familiar back of a beautiful little blonde poring over a ledger, one hand fingering a stack of printed cards. I crossed to the door, stood there enjoying the light glinting through the carelessly swept-back hair and said, “Hello, pretty girl.”

  Sharon jumped, knocked half the cards off the desk and wung around to look at me with her breath caught in her throat. “Dog! Damn, don’t ever do that again.” Then she saw my face and her eyes opened wide before she was able to speak again. “What happened to you?”

  “Trouble. Nothing new. Nothing unexpected.”

  She got up and came into my arms, her fingers digging hard into my biceps. “Oh, Dog. Damn you, Dog!”

  “At ease, doll. I’m all right.” I pusher her away and tilted her head up with the palm of my hand. “A war’s made up of battles, kid. I just won this one.”

  She let out a short laugh and wiped the tears out of her eyes. “And I don’t suppose I get to know what happened, do I?”

  “You suppose right.” I pulled the door shut, locked it and checked to make sure the Venetian blinds were all shuttered tight. “You run down anything at all?”

  “All I should tell you is up your bucket,” she said.

  “What about those Social Security cards?”

  “Nothing.” Sharon hooked her arm under mine and led me to the desk. “I doubled back on everybody they hired through Cable and not one thing looked phony. I’m no detective, but I know how to run personnel and everybody here is as square as a pair of Los Vegas dice.”

  The disappointment went through me like liquid tar and she sensed it. There was only that black, sticky feeling that kept you from going any place at all, holding you right in the target area like a staked-out goat waiting for the tiger to come get him.

  “But I got another idea,” she said.

  I was so damned disgusted I almost didn’t hear her. It finally sunk in and I turned my head to look at her.

  “The factory is hiring too. I got the girl in their department to let me look at their records because I said we might need some character types in a hurry. There wasn’t much time so I only ran down those who were around the sixtyfive-year-old mark. Barrin doesn’t hire over that age. Took a lot of phone calls to cross-check their identities, but I came up with three nobody could vouch for at all. Each had given local businesses as references, but two of those places said they had never worked there and the third one gave a business that didn’t even exist at all.”

  “What business was that?”

  She told me and the black, sticky feeling went away. “You have his address?”

  Sharon picked up a card and handed it to me. “Nine-o-one Sherman. Know where it is?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know where it is.”

  “And don’t tell me I can’t go with you.”

  “No ... I won’t tell you that. You earned that much.”

  She stepped back and gave me a slant-eyed look. “You’re agreeing a little too easily. I don’t like that.”

  I could feel the tiredness in my voice. “It’ll make you a perfect escape clause, kitten.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. You’ll see what I mean.”

  I had played stickball on the street and fallen off the ice truck on the far corner. It was paved now, but then it had been hardpan, grooved by the iron-shod wheels of horse-drawn wagons and chain-driven Mack trucks. Once they had gaslights set between the curb and the sidewalks and we used to hang from the crossarms and scratch ourselves like apes to show off in front of the girls. It wasn’t much brighter now, the dirty glass streetlamps barely illuminating their own bases. I eased down the pavement, pulled in at the shabby old frame building with the 901 painted on the second step of the porch, cut the motor and got out. Sharon followed me, saying nothing, then her hand slipped into mine and squeezed. Her fingernails bit into my skin and her palm was sweaty. I pushed the doorbell and waited.

  Nobody answered. I pushed the button again. I tried the third time and was reaching for the doorknob when a voice came out of the blackness at one end of the porch and said, “What took you so long, Dog?”

  “Ferris,” I murmured softly. “You haven’t got a very elaborate factory here, friend.”

  “But the product is highly refined, easily packaged, the demand enormous and the profit tremendous. Shall we go inside?”

  He was old now, but the years had touched him lightly. If he shuffled in an elderly manner it was an artificial gesture and when he knew I realized it he smiled and let the cat in him take over. His hair was thin and gray, his clothes baggy and worn, but there was a muscular lankiness to his body that meant old habits didn’t die easily and he had kept himself in shape even though it wasn’t necessary any longer.

  When I introduced Sharon he rubbed the back of his neck while he said hello, the old signal that meant he had to be satisfied with her status before he’d go any further. If I was in a squeeze and she was part of it, he was ready to pull the trigger on his own booby trap and he was alerting me to be ready to cut and run out of the line of fire.

  I said, “Bravo, buddy,” remembering the answer signal and watched him relax. “She’s part of my new team now,” I explained.

  “Sure,” he told me. “Times have changed, but they really don’t change at all. What’s that French saying?”

  “The more things change the more they remain the same,” I said. “I thought you’d be dead by now, Ferris.”

  “Only the excitement died. I woke up one morning and decided the world was worth neither saving nor destroying. Even fine hatreds and the sheer love of pleasure become boring under the monotonous onslaught of time.”

  “Then why come back?”

  Ferris eased himself down into a chair and when he leaned back the worn tweed jacket hiked up a little bit over the bulge of the guns he wore on either side of his hip. A matched pair of German 9 mm. P-38s, I remembered.

  “A couple of reasons,” he answered, his brown berrylike eyes looking at me closely. “First, I owed you one for taking that bullet instead of me on that last job in Berlin. The second was sheer curiosity. I wanted to see how an old retired pro would react when the big one was dumped in his lap.”

  “Don’t shit me, Ferris.” There was a cold snap in my voice I couldn’t help.

  He nodded, the berry eyes laughing at me. “You’re still sharp, boy. You shouldn’t have retired. Yep, there’s another reason. The world is polluting itself to death. You can treat sewage, cap chimneys and go back to returnable bottles, but nobody stops the kind of pollution we were a part of. I thought maybe you could give it a try.”

  “When did you get interested in ecology?”

  “The day a young man I knew and trained told me he was escorting a multimillion-dollar shipment of H to the States and smelled an intercept. We arranged a switch, but he wasn’t careful enough and got himself killed in a restaurant in Marseilles.”

  “And I got tagged for the job.”

  “You were a natural for it; boy. I gave it all your earmarks, but since you got the name, I decided to give you the game and let you take it from there. I’m too damn old for the fun and games and money doesn’t mean a thing to me anymore. You’re still young enough to enjoy it all.” He glanced at Sharon, still smiling with his eyes. “Unless you’re really retired.”

  I could have shot the old bastard right then and there, but there still was some fun left in it and my face creased into a tight grin. “I’m retired, but let’s say I’m called back for a consultation. Just one other thing ... how’d you find me?”

  “You never bothered covering your tracks, son. Pretty stupid, wasn’t it?”

  “I never bothered thinking about it.”

  “You sure screwed everybody else up, though. The vultures took a while to locate you.” He let out a little chuckle. “Some job you did on Bridey-the-Greek and Markham.”

  “I didn’t kill them.”

  He chuckled again, his fingers rapping against the arm of the chai
r. “I know, but the others were all yours, weren’t they?”

  They was no use answering him. He knew the answers.

  “Who’s left, Dog?” He knew that answer too, but he wanted me to say it.

  “Arnold Bell,” I told him.

  “And he’s new, Dog. I hear tell he’s even better than you were at your very best. He was paid in advance and is one of those crazy people who are dedicated to their jobs. You’re his biggest challenge and after he kills you he’ll be the king in his business. There will be other Turks and other Le Fleurs and they’ll always be needing Arnold Bell to keep the raiders out of their empires. They laid everything on the line to have you wiped out because you are the biggest threat of them all. As long as you are alive they can never exist in security and safety. So the biggest gun of all comes out and the advantage is all his.”

  “You think he can nail me?” I asked him.

  “Certainly. You know the mortality rate in this business. It’s always the ones on the way up who knock off the ones on the way out.”

  “Then why bother setting me up?”

  “An old man needs a glimpse of the past to refresh his memories, occasionally. At my age, that’s all you have to live on. I’m just sorry I won’t be there to see it happen. It should be a bloody mess. Maybe if you had run me down a little sooner I would have called the odds pretty even, but you’ve slowed up, buddy. The reflexes are still there, but the old computer doesn’t send the messages out fast enough. They put old dogs to sleep, son. You’re ready for the pound.”

  “Can I have one last bark?” I asked him.

  Ferris nodded. “Maybe even a growl.”

  “Thanks a bunch. Where’s the stuff?”

  “In an old panel truck out back. Don’t bother asking me how I got it through or how I’m going to get back. One day they can read it all in my memoirs.” He reached in his pocket, took out an ignition key and tossed it to me. “Like you used to say, it’s your ball now, kid.”