“Say it, Mike.”
“I love you, kitten. I love you more than I’ve ever thought I could love anything.”
“I love you too, Mike.” I could feel her grin. “Tomorrow.”
I nodded and opened the door. I waited until she had gone down the steps and this time walked the other way. To where the light showed.
I pushed it open, leaned against the jamb and when the gray-haired man writing at the table across the room spun around I said, “Doctor Soberin, I presume.”
It caught him so far off base I had time to get halfway across to him before he dipped his hand in the drawer and I had his wrist before he could get the thing leveled. I let him keep the gun in his hand so I could bend it back and hear his fingers break and when he tried to yell I bottled the sound up by smashing my elbow into his mouth. The shattered teeth tore my arm and his mouth became a great hole welling blood. His fingers were broken stubs sticking at odd angles. I shoved him away from me, slashed the butt end of the rod across the side of his head and watched him drop into his chair.
“I got me a wheel,” I said. “The boy at the top.”
Dr. Soberin opened his mouth to speak and I shook my head.
“You’re dead, mister. Starting from now you’re dead. It took me a long time. It didn’t really have to.” I let out a dry laugh at myself. “I’m getting too old for the game. I’m not as fast as I used to be. One time I would have had it made as soon as I rolled it around a little bit.
“The gimmick, doc, there’s always that damned gimmick. The kind you can’t kick out of sight. This time the gimmick was on the bottom of that card your secretary made out on Berga Torn. She asked who sent her and she said William Mist. She signed the card, too. You pulled a cutie on that one. You couldn’t afford to let a respectable dame know your business, and you knew she wouldn’t put her name on a switch. You knew there might be an investigation and didn’t want any suspicious erasures on the card so you simply dug up a name that you could type over Mist to make the letters fit. Wieton comes out pretty well. Unless you looked hard you’d never pick it up.”
He had gone a deathly pale. His hand was up to his mouth trying to stop the blood. It was sickening him and he retched. All that came up was more blood. The hand with the broken fingers looked unreal on the end of his arm. Unreal and painful.
“You took a lot of trouble to get the information Berga had under her hat. A lot of clever thinking went into that deal at the sanitarium. You had it rigged pretty nicely, even to a spot where she could be worked over without anybody getting wise. Sorry I spoiled your plans. You shouldn’t have wrecked my heap.”
Something childish crept into his face. “You ... got ... another one.”
“I’ll keep it too. I didn’t go for the booby trap, doc. That was kid stuff.”
If his face screwed up any tighter he was going to cry. He sat there moaning softly, the complete certainty of it all making him rock in his chair.
I said, “This time I do it your way. I was the only one you were ever afraid of because I was like the men you give orders to. I’m not going to talk to you. Later I’ll go over the details. Later I’ll give my explanations and excuses to the police. Later I’ll get raked over the coals for what I’m going to do now, but what the hell, doc. Like I said, I’m getting old in the game. I don’t care any more.”
He was quiet in his chair. The quiet that terror brings and for once he was knowing the hand of terror himself.
I said, “Doc ...” and he looked at me. No, not me, the gun. The big hole in the end of the gun.
And while he was looking I let him see what came out of the gun.
Doctor Soberin only had one eye left.
I stepped across the body and picked up the phone. I called headquarters and tried to get Pat. He was still out. I had the call transferred to another department and the man I wanted said hello. I asked him for the identification on a dead blonde and he told me to wait.
A minute later he picked up the phone. “Think I got it. Death by drowning. Age, about ...”
“Skip the details. Just the name.”
“Sure, Lily Carver. Prints just came in from Washington. She had ‘em taken while she worked at a war plant.”
I said thanks, held the button down on the phone, let it go and when I heard the dial tone started working on my home number.
She said, “Don’t bother, Mike. I’m right here.”
And she was.
Beautiful Lily with hair as white as snow. Her mouth a scarlet curve that smiled. Differently, now, but still smiling. Her body a tight bundle of lush curves that swelled and moved under a light white terrycloth robe. Lovely Lily who brought the sharpness of an alcohol bath in with her so that it wet her robe until there was nothing there, no hill or valley, no shadow that didn’t come out.
Gorgeous Lily with my .45 in her hand from where she had found it on the dresser.
“You forgot about me, Mike.”
“I almost did, didn’t I.”
There was cold hate coming into her eyes now. Hate that grew as she looked again at the one eye in the body beside the table. “You shouldn’t have done that, Mike.”
“No?”
“He was the only one who knew about me.” The smile left her mouth. “I loved him. He knew about me and didn’t care. I loved him, you crumb you!” The words hissed out of her teeth.
I looked at her the way I did when she first held a gun on me. “Sure. You loved him so much you killed Lily Carver and took her place. You loved him so much you made sure there were no slips in his plan. You loved him so much you set Berga Torn up for the kill and damn near made sure Velda died. You loved him so much you never saw that all he loved was power and money and you were only something he could use.
“You fitted right into the racket. You were lucky once and smart the rest of the time. You reached Al after Velda left but you had time to catch up with her. By the way, did you ever find out why Al died? He was giving friend Billy Mist the needle. Billy knew what had happened when you called him down to tell him his girl friend wasn’t what she was cracked up to be. With Billy that didn’t go and he carved up his playmate. Nice people to have around.”
“Shut up.”
“Shut up hell. You stuck with me all the way. You ducked out because you thought the boys had me once, then came back when you found out I propped them up against a DEAD END sign. You passed the word right under my nose and had Billy packing to blow town. What a deal that was. I even showed you how to get out of my apartment without a tail picking you up. That’s why you’re here now. So what was supposed to happen? You go back to your real identity? Nuts. You’re part of it and you’ll die with it. You played me for a sucker up and down Broadway but it’s over. This isn’t the first time you’ve pointed a rod at me, sugar. The last time was a game, but I didn’t know it. I’m still going to take it away from you. What kind of a guy do you think I am anyway?”
Her face changed as if I had slapped her. For an instant the strangeness was back again. “You’re a deadly man, Mike.”
Then I saw it in her face and she was faster than I was. The rod belched flame and the slug tore into my side and spun me around. There was a crazy spinning sensation, a feeling of tumbling end over end through space, an urge to vomit, but no strength left to vomit with.
My eyes cleared and I pushed myself up on an elbow. There was a loose, empty feeling in my joints. The end was right there ahead of me and nothing I could do about it.
Lily smiled again, the end of the .45 drifting down to my stomach. She laughed at me, knowing I could raise myself to reach for it. My mouth was dry. I wanted a cigarette. It was all I could think about. It was something a guy about to die always got. My fingers found the deck of Luckies, fumbled one loose and got it into my mouth. I could barely feel it laying there on my lips.
“You shouldn’t have killed him,” Lily said again.
I reached for the lighter. It wasn’t going to be long now. I could feel things
start to loosen up. My mind was having trouble hearing her. One more shot. It would be quick.
“Mike ...”
I got my eyes open. She was a strong, pungent smell. Very strong. Still lovely though.
“I thought I almost loved you once. More than ... him. But I didn’t Mike. He would take me like I was. He was the one who gave me life, at least, after ... it happened. He was the doctor. I was the patient. I loved him. You would have been disgusted with me. I can see your eyes now, Mike. They would have been revolted.
“He was deadly too, Mike ... but not like you. You’re even worse. You’re the deadly one, but you would have been revolted. Look at me, Mike. How would you like to kiss me now? You wanted to before. Would you like to now? I wanted you to ... you know that, don’t you? I was afraid to even let you touch me. You wanted to kiss me ... so kiss me.”
Her fingers slipped through the belt of the robe, opened it. Her hands parted it slowly ... until I could see what she was really like. I wanted to vomit worse than before. I wanted to let my guts come up and felt my belly retching.
She was a horrible caricature of a human! There was no skin, just a disgusting mass of twisted, puckered flesh from her knees to her neck making a picture of gruesome freakishness that made you want to shut your eyes against it.
The cigarette almost fell out of my mouth. The lighter shook in my hand, but I got it open.
“Fire did it, Mike. Do you think I’m pretty now?”
She laughed and I heard the insanity in it. The gun pressed into my belt as she kneeled forward, bringing the revulsion with her. “You’re going to die now ... but first you can do it. Deadly ... deadly ... kiss me.”
The smile never left her mouth and before it was on me I thumbed the lighter and in the moment of time before the scream blossoms into the wild cry of terror she was a mass of flame tumbling on the floor with the blue flames of alcohol turning the white of her hair into black char and her body convulsing under the agony of it. The flames were teeth that ate, ripping and tearing, into scars of other flames and her voice the shrill sound of death on the loose.
I looked, looked away. The door was closed and maybe I had enough left to make it.
About the Author
A bartender’s son, Mickey Spillane was born in Brooklyn, New York, on March 9, 1918. An only child who swam and played football as a youth, Spillane got a taste for storytelling by scaring other kids around the campfire. After a truncated college career, Spillane—already selling stories to pulps and slicks under pseudonyms—became a writer in the burgeoning comic-book field, a career cut short by World War II. Spillane, who had learned to fly at air strips as a boy, became an instructor of fighter pilots.
After the war, Spillane converted an unsold comic-book project—“Mike Danger, Private Eye”—into a hard-hitting, sexy novel. The thousand-dollar advance was just what the writer needed to buy materials for a house he wanted to build for himself and his young wife on a patch of land in New Jersey.
The 1948 Signet reprint of his 1947 E.P. Dutton hardcover novel I, the Jury sold in the millions, as did the six tough mysteries that soon followed; all but one featured hard-as-nails PI. Mike Hammer. The Hammer thriller Kiss Me, Deadly (1952) was the first private eye novel to make the New York Times bestseller list.
Mike Hammer’s creator claims only to write when he needs the money, and in periods of little or no publishing, Spillane has been occupied with other pursuits: flying, traveling with the circus, appearing in motion pictures, and nearly twenty years spoofing himself and Hammer in a lucrative series of Miller Lite beer commercials.
The controversial Hammer has been the subject of a radio show, a comic strip, two television series, and numerous gritty movies, notably director Robert Aldrich’s seminal film noir Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and The Girl Hunters (1963), starring Spillane as his famous hero.
Spillane has been honored by the Mystery Writers of America with the Grand Master Award, and with the Private Eye Writers of America “Eye” Lifetime Achievement Award; he is also a Shamus Award winner. A major motion picture is in development of the science-fiction revival of his comic book character “Mike Danger” (cocreated by Max Allan Collins). Spillane lives with his wife, Jane, in South Carolina.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
ONE LONELY NIGHT
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
THE BIG KILL
CHAPTER 12
KISS ME, DEADLY
CHAPTER 13
About the Author
The Mike Hammer Collection, Volume 2 Page 64